Dan Poblocki - The Stone Child

“Where the heck is the basement?” said Harris. “I don’t see a door anywhere.”

“Check the floor,” said Eddie. “That’s where Gertie found the hatch.”

They continued to search. The house was bigger than it looked from outside. Eddie wondered if Nathaniel Olmstead would have disapproved of them. Two kids… breaking into his house, running from monsters, searching for answers… No, thought Eddie, Nathaniel Olmstead would not have had a problem with this. He probably would have written this story.

In the corner of the living room, Eddie discovered a doorway that led to a crooked stairway upstairs. He knocked the bottom step with the heel of his sneaker to see if it was hollow like the one Ronald Plimpton found in The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery . But the step seemed to be ordinary. He glanced at Harris, who nodded him forward. Eddie took each creaky step slowly, in case the wood had rotted. At the top of the stairs was a dark hallway. Anything might be hiding in the shadows. He stopped, afraid to move.

Harris scooted past him into the hallway. “Harris,” Eddie whispered, “wait!” But Harris turned into one of the bedrooms before Eddie could stop him.

“What’s wrong?” Harris said calmly from inside the room.

When Eddie followed hesitantly, he half expected to see the horrible face of the Wendigo hovering outside the window, watching through the dirty glass for trespassers such as themselves. But there was nothing except more furniture, shadows, and dust. He shook his head, convinced he’d officially read one scary story too many.

“This is so cool,” said Harris, rushing forward to the big bed. He bounced on it. Dust billowed up in clouds around him. “This must be where he slept.”

Reluctant, Eddie joined his friend, removing his bag and lying next to Harris for a few moments, staring at the ceiling, and listening to the creaking of the old house.

Something thumped downstairs. “What was that?” asked Eddie, sitting up and looking into the hallway. Harris sat up too. They listened for a moment.

Then Harris said, “It’s probably nothing… Right?”

Eddie hopped off the bed and clutched his bag, feeling the weight of his father’s hammer at the bottom. Suddenly, he felt foolish. What good would a hammer be against the gremlin they’d met last night… or against something worse?

They wandered back downstairs. In the long living room, a creak came from the wall near the chimney. Together, the boys stepped forward cautiously.

The mantel above the fireplace was dark wood, intricately carved with flowers and fat cherubs frozen in silent song. Underneath it, a pile of birch wood had been carefully arranged upon a pair of imp-shaped andirons. A squat ceramic vase filled with dead, colorless flowers was perched on the left side of the mantel. Eddie’s flashlight bounced off the mirror hanging on the wall above the hearth.

The vase crashed to the floor and Eddie jumped onto the nearest chair. His shout was interrupted by Harris’s apology.

“Sorry!” said Harris, standing next to the andirons. “My bag knocked it.” He bent down and examined the fireplace itself, carefully avoiding the shards of shattered ceramic. Crawling forward slowly, Harris stuck his head through the archway.

“What are you doing?” asked Eddie. He imagined hulking black dogs growling in the corners of the room. But this place wasn’t like the woods, Eddie told himself. This was only Nathaniel Olmstead’s house. There were no monsters here. Right?

“In Horror of the Changeling, Elise finds an envelope in the fireplace,” said Harris.

“Oh yeah,” said Eddie, leaning forward. He felt as if they were both peering into a gaping mouth. What if the fireplace decided to chomp? He frantically skittered backward, catching his coat sleeve on one of the andirons. Suddenly, the room shook. A loud scraping sound came from inside the chimney, like stone sliding against stone. Eddie yelped, thinking the house was about to collapse-but when he noticed Harris smiling by the glow of the flashlight, he realized that his friend had been right. The back wall of the fireplace had opened up. They had actually found a secret passage! How clever of Nathaniel. It was just like one of his books. Eddie had once thought these sorts of things existed only in books like Nathaniel’s.

“Nice job, Eddie,” said Harris as he quickly crawled all the way inside. The opening was about three and a half feet tall and nearly the same width. At the back of the fireplace, the tunnel bent like an elbow. Harris quickly disappeared around the corner. “You coming?” His voice echoed from the shadows.

Crawling on his hands and knees, Eddie felt the soot and grime clinging to his skin. The walls were made of large damp rocks. Moss grew in several places where water had seeped through the cracks. He followed the stone path past the andirons and to the right, where it stretched for a few feet before dropping off.

“Harris?” he called.

“Down here,” said Harris.

Eddie peered down to find a small ladder, about six feet high, bolted to the wall. At the bottom, Harris’s flashlight bobbed across a stone floor. Eddie gripped the cold metal rungs and lowered himself. The thought of Gertie crawling away from the Watchers at the end of The Witch’s Doom gave Eddie goose bumps, but he had to keep going.

Another archway greeted him at the bottom of the ladder. He ducked through it and followed Harris’s flashlight into a small cryptlike basement with a low ceiling. Spiderwebs draped from the rickety rafters like decaying curtains. Someone had piled a few boxes and stacks of newspapers along the walls. A dark, empty doorway gaped on each side of the room.

“Check it out!” said Harris from across the room. “It looks like some sort of… office or something.”

A desk with spindly legs sat along the far wall. Next to it stood a tall wooden filing cabinet. One drawer was open.

“Is this where he worked?” Eddie said, trying to calm his frazzled nerves. “How creepy.”

“Maybe this is just where he kept stuff he didn’t want anyone to find,” said Harris. He propped his flashlight on top of the filing cabinet, then reached inside the open drawer. He pulled out what appeared to be a hardcover notebook. He opened it. After looking it over for several seconds, he gasped. “Oh my gosh, Eddie, you have to see this!”

Eddie rushed over to the desk, and Harris showed him the notebook. On the first page, the words The Ghost in the Poet’s Mansion were written in scratchy penmanship. Underneath the title was the symbol Eddie had found in his copy of The Enigmatic Manuscript.

Harris flipped through the entire notebook, shaking his head. “It looks like a handwritten copy of a Nathaniel Olmstead book.”

“Someone wrote the whole thing out by hand?” said Eddie.

“That’s what it looks like. Just like The Enigmatic Manuscript. Only this one isn’t in code.”

Eddie glanced inside the open drawer. There were more notebooks, their spines facing up. He reached inside, took out another one, and opened the cover.

“Whoa,” Eddie whispered.

On the front page were the same scratchy handwriting and the weird symbol Harris had found in the other notebook, but this one was The Wrath of the Wendigo , Nathaniel Olmstead’s third book. Eddie put the notebook on the desk and picked up another one- The Revenge of the Nightmarys . And another-The Egyptian Game of the Dead. And another-The Cat, the Quill, and the Candle. “Are these notebooks all filled with his original stuff?”

“I guess so,” said Harris. He bent down and knocked on the stone floor.