Ann Martin - The Ghost At Dawn's House

I shivered.

"Well, we don't have to go alone," I said. "We can split up into teams, one with two people and the other with three."

Everyone agreed that that seemed safe.

"Kristy, why don't you and Stacey and Claudia take the first floor," I suggested, "and Mary Anne and I will look around up here."

"What about the basement and the attic?" asked Claudia.

We froze. They were bad enough on a nice, sunshiny day, but today . . .

"Maybe the five of us should search them together. Um, later," said Stacey.

"Or — or maybe not at all," I added.

"Why not?" asked Claudia. "Those would be great places for a secret passage."

"I know," I replied. "But, well, in this story

I read — it was called Things Unseen' — this man moves into a really old house — "

"As old as this one?" whispered Mary Anne. A gust of wind blew the curtains against her face and she shrieked.

"Just about," I said, closing the window. "And he hears all these spooky noises coming from the basement, and it turns out that years ago, a crazy lady buried her — "

"Aughh! Stop!" cried Mary Anne. "I don't want to hear the end of this."

"I do," said Kristy. "Leave the room for a minute, Mary Anne."

"I'm not leaving the room. Not by myself!"

Stacey shuddered. "I'll go with you."

They went out into the hall while I finished the story. When our screaming died down, they returned.

"Listen," said Kristy, "why don't you two scaredy-cats be a team, and Claudia and Dawn and I will be the other team?"

Stacey took offense. "Scaredy-cats?"

"And you can search downstairs," Kristy continued. "Jeff is there and the TV is on. It won't seem so spooky."

"I think that's a good idea," said Mary Anne hastily. "Come on. Let's go before they change their minds.

They clattered down the stairs.

"Let's search room by room/' I suggested. "I can tap walls. Claudia, you feel around for hidden springs and buttons and stuff. Kristy, you shine my flashlight everywhere to see if, like, the outline of a door or something shows up."

Kristy raised her eyebrows. She was used to being in charge. But this was my house and my search, so I thought I was entitled to give out a few instructions.

We set to work. We searched Jeff's room first.

"Boy," said Kristy. "My brothers would kill me if I ever searched their rooms."

"Well, Jeff might kill me, too, if he knew what we were doing," I replied. "But it's not as if we're searching his stuff. We're just looking at his walls."

"Oh, hey!" cried Claudia. "We should be checking the floors for trapdoors, too."

"On the second floor?" asked Kristy.

"You never know," Claud said.

Tap, tap, tap. I tapped and rapped every inch of Jeff's walls, but they all sounded pretty much the same.

Claudia followed me around, poking and feeling along the walls.

And Kristy crawled everywhere with her flashlight. She found two Space Creatures comics under Jeff's bed, but no trapdoor. We worked without speaking for a long time, and the only sounds we heard were our rappings and tappings, the pounding rain, and an occasional ominous rumble of thunder.

We didn't really find anything. There was an area near Jeff's bureau where the molding looked different than on the other walls, but no matter how much we poked and prodded, we couldn't find anything suspicious.

"Let's look in my room next," I said.

We started over again. I rapped, Claudia poked, and Kristy shined the flashlight.

"Nothing here!" said Kristy.

"Wait, I'm not finished," I said. "I've only done three walls."

Rap, rap, rap, rap, thud.

We all looked at each other.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered.

It was a definite hollow sound.

I was standing by my bed, next to the wall that separates my room from Mom's room. There was all this fancy molding on the wall — one of my favorite things about the room — and Claudia immediately began running her fingers over it.

The three of us were expecting something to spring open or fly out at any moment, but not a thing happened.

"False alarm," said Claudia at last.

I knew she and Kristy felt as disappointed as I did.

"Hey, you guys," said Kristy, forcing a smile. "Let's show those two cowards downstairs how brave we are. Let's explore the attic."

"The attic?" I squeaked.

KER-RASH. A clap of thunder shook the house.

. "I think that was a sign," I said. "A sign saying we'd be stupid to go in the attic."

"Oh, come on," said Kristy. "It's all this ghost stuff that's stupid."

Maybe to her. I couldn't stop thinking about "Things Unseen." Or another story I read where a man picks up a woman he finds hitchhiking one night. He decides to take her home, but when he gets to her house, she's disappeared — and the couple in the house say the woman was their daughter and had died ten years earlier.

Kristy grabbed my arm. "Come on."

I must have been crazy. I opened the door to the attic. We were greeted by stale, musty air, and the sound of the rain on the roof. We

started to tiptoe up the stairs. The light switch was at the top. Halfway up, the door slammed shut.

"Yikes!" I cried.

The three of us piled back down the steps.

"I hope the door didn't lock behind us!" I whispered. We were closed into total darkness.

I was reaching for the handle when the door began to open slowly, all by itself. We heard a low moan.

"Oh, no," I whimpered.

Then we heard a growl.

"You didn't get a dog, did you," said Kristy. It was a statement, not a question.

I shook my head, and looked at Kristy and Claudia with wide, terrified eyes.

Then the three of us let out eardrum-shattering screams.

"Gotcha!" Stacey and Mary Anne jumped out from behind the door. "Who are the scaredy-cats now?" asked Stacey.

"You guys nearly gave us heart attacks!" gasped Kristy.

Mary Anne and Stacey laughed hysterically. The three of us had to sit down to recover. We didn't think it was funny at all.

"Did you find anything?" I asked them, when I was able to speak.

They shook their heads. "But we haven't looked in the den yet/' said Mary Anne.

We split up again. As soon as Stacey and Mary Anne were gone, I turned to the others and said, "This is war. We've got to get back at them."

"How?" asked Claudia.

"There's a heating vent in Mom's room that goes down to the den. I have an idea."

The three of us sat on the floor and crowded around the vent.

"Ow-oooh," I moaned into it.

Kristy and Claudia caught on immediately.

"Heeeelp meeee," wailed Kristy.

"Wheeeere aaaaaaam IIIIIII?" whispered Claudia.

Then we moaned some more. The howling wind helped us along.

"Shhh," I said. "Listen."

Downstairs we could hear Stacey and Mary Anne shrieking.

I looked at Kristy and Claudia. We began to giggle. Then we took up the moaning again.

"Woooo. . . . Ow-ow-ooooh. . . . Oooooo-eeeeee. ..."

And then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I dared to look around. The hand was green.

"Kristy," I whispered. "Claudia."

We all looked up.

We were gazing into the green face of a deformed, one-eyed monster.

"BOO! Scared you!"

It was Jeff in a Hallo ween costume.

"Aughh! Aughh! Aughh!"

Kristy and Claudia and I were screaming upstairs. Mary Anne and Stacey were screaming downstairs.

Jeff fell over laughing.

That was the end of our search for a secret passage. We didn't find a thing.

Chapter 4.

I think I understand how Mary Anne feels about the Thomases and the house next door. Replacements can be hard to adjust to. Even if they're better than the original thing, sometimes you don't like them (at first) just because they're different.

Whatever Mary Anne's feelings, though, she had agreed to baby-sit at the Perkins home, so she showed up at ten-thirty on the dot on Wednesday morning.