37 - The Headless Ghost (4 page)

So I was stuck being the brave one.

We both had to be brave now. The Twin Terrors, on their way up the dark,
creaking stairway that led to the third floor.

A sign beside the stairs read: NO VISITORS.

We stepped right past it and began climbing the narrow staircase. Side by
side.

I couldn’t hear Otto’s voice anymore. Now I could only hear the creak and
squeak of the steps beneath our sneakers. And the steady
thud thud thud
of my heart.

The air grew hot and damp as we reached the top. I squinted down a long, dark
hallway. There were no lanterns. No candles.

The only light came from the window at the end of the hall. Pale light from
outside that cast everything in an eerie, ghostly blue.

“Let’s start in the first room,” Stephanie suggested, whispering. She brushed
her dark hair off her face.

It was so hot up here, I had sweat running down my forehead. I mopped it up
with my jacket sleeve and followed Stephanie to the first room on the right.

The heavy wooden door was half open. We slid in through the opening. Pale
blue light washed in through the dust-caked windows.

I waited for my eyes to adjust. Then I squinted around the large room.

Empty. Completely empty. No furniture. No sign of life.

Or ghosts.

“Steph—look.” I pointed to a narrow door against the far wall. “Let’s check
it out.”

We crept across the bare floor. Through the dusty window, I glimpsed the full
moon, high over the bare trees now.

The doorway led to another room. Smaller and even warmer. A steam radiator
clanked against one wall. Two old-fashioned-looking couches stood facing each
other in the center of the room. No other furniture.

“Let’s keep moving,” Stephanie whispered.

Another narrow door led to another dark room. “The rooms up here are all
connected,” I murmured. I sneezed. Sneezed again.

“Ssshhh. Quiet, Duane,” Stephanie scolded. “The ghosts will hear us coming.”

“I can’t help it,” I protested. “It’s so dusty up here.”

We were in some kind of sewing room. An old sewing machine stood on a table
in front of the window. A carton at my feet was filled with balls of black yarn.

I bent down and pawed quickly through the balls of yarn. No head hidden in
there.

We stepped into the next room before we realized it was completely dark.

The window was partly shuttered. Only a tiny square of gray light crept
through from outside.

“I-I can’t see anything,” Stephanie declared. I felt her hand grasp my arm.
“It’s too dark. Let’s get out of here, Duane.”

I started to reply. But a loud
thump
made my breath catch in my
throat.

Stephanie’s hand squeezed my hand. “Duane, did you make that
thump
?”

Another
thump.
Closer to us.

“No. Not m-me,” I stammered.

Another
thump
on the floor.

“We’re not alone in here,” Stephanie whispered.

I took a deep breath. “Who is it?” I called. “Who’s there?”

“Who’s there?” I choked out.

Stephanie squeezed my arm so hard, it hurt. But I made no attempt to move
away from her.

I heard soft footsteps. Ghostly footsteps.

A cold chill froze the back of my neck. I clamped my jaw shut to keep my
teeth from chattering.

And then yellow eyes floated toward us through the thick darkness.

Four yellow eyes.

The creature had
four
eyes!

A gurgling sound escaped my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.

I stared straight ahead. Listening.

Watching.

The eyes floated apart in pairs. Two eyes moved to the right, two to the
left.

“Noooo!” I cried out when I saw more eyes.

Yellow eyes in the corners of the room. Evil eyes glinting at us from against
the wall.

Yellow eyes all along the floor.

Yellow eyes all around us.

Catlike yellow eyes glaring in silence at Stephanie and me as we huddled
together in the center of the room.

Catlike eyes.

Cat’s eyes.

Because the room was filled with cats.

A shrill
yowl
gave them away. A long
meeeeyoww
from the
windowsill made Stephanie and me both sigh in relief.

A cat brushed against my leg. Startled, I jumped aside, bumping into
Stephanie.

She bumped me back.

More cats meowed. Another cat brushed the back of my jeans leg.

“I-I think these cats are lonely,” Stephanie stammered. “Do you think anyone
ever comes up here?”

“I don’t care,” I snapped. “All these yellow eyes floating around. I
thought… I thought… well… I don’t know
what
I thought! It’s
creepy. Let’s get out of here.”

For once, Stephanie didn’t argue.

She led the way to the door at the back of the room. All around us, cats were
howling and yowling.

Another one brushed my leg.

Stephanie tripped over a cat. In the darkness, I saw her fall. She landed on
her knees with a hard
thud.

The cats all began to screech.

“Are you okay?” I cried, hurrying to help pull her up.

The cats were howling so loud, I couldn’t hear her reply.

We jogged to the door, pulled it open, and escaped.

I closed the door behind us. Silence now. “Where are we?” I whispered.

“I-I don’t know,” Stephanie stammered, keeping close to the wall.

I moved to a tall, narrow window and peered through the dusty glass. The
window led out to a small balcony. The balcony jutted out from the gray shingled
roof.

Pale white moonlight washed in through the window.

I turned back to Stephanie. “We’re in some kind of back hallway,” I guessed.
The long, narrow hallway seemed to stretch on forever. “Maybe these rooms are
used by the workers. You know. Manny, the night watchman. The house cleaners.
And the tour guides.”

Stephanie sighed. She stared down the long hallway. “Let’s go downstairs and
find Otto and the tour group. I think we’ve done enough exploring for tonight.”

I agreed. “There must be stairs at the end of this hall. Let’s go.”

I took four or five steps. Then I felt the ghostly hands.

They brushed over my face. My neck. My body.

Sticky, dry, invisible hands.

The hands pushed me back as they clung to my skin.

“Ohhhh, help!” Stephanie moaned.

The ghosts had her in their grasp, too.

The ghost’s filmy hands brushed over me. I could feel the soft fingers—dry
and soft as air—tighten around my skin.

Stephanie’s hands thrashed wildly. Beside me in the dark hall, she struggled
to free herself.

“It-it’s like a net!” she choked out.

I swiped at my face. My hair.

I spun away. But the dry fingers clung to me. Tightening. Tightening.

And I realized we hadn’t walked into a ghost’s grasp.

Tugging and tearing frantically with both hands, I realized we had walked
into cobwebs.

A thick curtain of cobwebs.

The blanket of sticky threads had fallen over us like a fisherman’s net. The
more we struggled, the tighter it wrapped itself around us.

“Stephanie—it’s
cobwebs
!” I cried. I tugged a thick, stringy wad of
them off my face.

“Of course it’s cobwebs!” she shot back, squirming and thrashing. “What did
you
think it was?”

“Uh… a ghost,” I muttered.

Stephanie snickered. “Duane, I know you have a good imagination. But if you
start seeing ghosts
everywhere,
we’ll never get out of here.”

“I… I… I…” I didn’t know what to say.

Stephanie thought the same thing I did. She thought she’d been grabbed by a
ghost. But now she was pretending she knew all along.

We stood there in the darkness, tearing the sticky threads off our faces and
arms and bodies. I let out an angry groan. I couldn’t brush the stuff from my
hair!

“I’m going to
itch forever
!” I wailed.

“I’ve got more bad news for you,” Stephanie murmured.

I pulled a thick wad off my ear. “Huh?”

“Who do you think made these cobwebs?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “Spiders?”

My arms and legs started to tingle. My back began to itch. I felt a light
tingling on the back of my neck.

Were there spiders crawling up and down my body? Hundreds and hundreds of
them?

Forgetting the wispy strings of cobweb, I started to run. Stephanie had the
same idea. We both ran down the long hall, scratching and slapping at ourselves.

“Steph—the next time you have a great idea,
don’t
have a great
idea!” I warned her.

“Let’s just get out of here!” she groaned.

We reached the end of the hall, still scratching as we ran.

No stairway.

How do we get back downstairs?

Another hall twisted to the left. Low candles over the doorways flickered and
danced. Shadows darted over the worn carpet like slithering animals.

“Come on.” I pulled Stephanie’s arm. We had no choice. We had to follow this
hallway, too.

We jogged side by side. The rooms were all dark and silent.

The candle flames dipped as we ran past. Our long shadows ran ahead of us, as
if eager to get downstairs first.

I stopped when I heard someone laughing.

“Whoa,” Stephanie murmured, breathing hard. Her dark eyes grew wide.

We both listened hard.

I heard voices. Inside the room at the end of the hall.

The door was closed. I couldn’t make out the words. I heard a man say
something. A woman laughed. Other people laughed.

“We caught up to the tour,” I whispered.

Stephanie scrunched up her face. “But the tour never comes up here to the top
floor,” she protested.

We stepped up close to the door and listened again.

More laughter on the other side. A lot of people talking cheerfully, all at
the same time. It sounded like a party.

I pressed my ear against the door. “I think the tour ended, and everyone is
just chatting,” I whispered.

Stephanie scratched the back of her neck. She pulled a stringy gob of cobweb
from her hair. “Well, hurry, Duane. Open the door. Let’s join them,” she urged.

“I hope Otto doesn’t ask us where we’ve been,” I replied.

I grabbed the doorknob and pushed open the door.

Stephanie and I took a step inside.

And gasped in shock at what we saw.

The room stood empty.

Empty, silent, and dark.

“What happened? Where is everyone?” Stephanie cried.

We took another step into the dark room. The floor creaked beneath us. The
only sound.

“I don’t get it,” Stephanie whispered. “Didn’t we just hear voices in here?”

“Lots,” I said. “They were laughing and talking. It really sounded like a
party.”

“A big party,” Stephanie added, her eyes darting around the empty room. “Tons
of people.”

A cold chill ran down the back of my neck. “I don’t think we heard people,” I
whispered.

Stephanie turned to me. “Huh?”

“They weren’t people,” I croaked. “They were ghosts.”

Her mouth dropped open. “And they all disappeared when we opened the door?”

I nodded. “I—I think I can still feel them in here. I can feel their
presence.”

Stephanie let out a frightened squeak. “Feel them? What do you mean?”

At that moment, a cold wind came whooshing through the room. It rushed over
me, cold and dry. And it chilled me down to my toes.

Stephanie must have felt it, too. She wrapped her arms around her chest.
“Brrr! Do you feel that breeze? Is the window open? How come it got so cold in
here all of a sudden?” she asked.

She shivered again. Her voice became tiny. “We’re not alone in here, are we?”

“I don’t think so,” I whispered. “I think we just crashed someone’s party.”

Stephanie and I stood there, feeling the cold of the room. I didn’t dare
move. Maybe a ghost stood right beside me. Maybe the ghosts we heard were all
around us, staring at us, preparing to swoop over us.

“Stephanie,” I whispered. “What if we really have crashed their party? What
if we’ve invaded the ghosts’ quarters?”

Stephanie swallowed hard. She didn’t reply.

Hadn’t Andrew, the ghost boy, lost his head when he stumbled into the ghost’s
living quarters? Were we standing in the same living quarters? The same room
where Andrew found the ghost of the old sea captain?

“Stephanie, I think we should get out of here,” I said softly. “Now.”

I wanted to run. I wanted to fly down the stairs. Fly out of Hill House. Fly
to my safe, warm home where there were no ghosts.

No ghosts.

We spun around and bolted for the door.

Were the ghosts going to try to stop us?

No. We made it back into the flickering orange light of the hallway. I pulled
the door shut behind us.

“The stairs. Where are the stairs?” Stephanie cried.

We stood at the end of the hall. Facing a solid wall. The flowers on the
wallpaper appeared to open and close, moving in the darting candlelight.

I banged both fists against the wall. “How do we get out of here? How?”

Stephanie had already pulled open a door across the hall. I followed her
inside.

“Oh, no!” Ghostly figures filled the room. It took me a few seconds to
realize that I was staring at sheets pulled over furniture. Chairs and couches
covered with sheets.

“M-maybe this is the ghosts’ living room,” I stammered.

Stephanie didn’t hear me. She had already burst through the open door against
the far wall.

I followed her into another room, cluttered with large crates. The crates were piled nearly to the ceiling.

Another room. Then another.