No kid. No boy at the window. Nobody at all.
“You think I’m crazy, right?” I said.
Dad smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “I think you’ve been reading so many of those scary books that your imagination has gotten the best of you. Think about it, Jason—you know there’s no such thing as a haunted house.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. But in my heart I wasn’t so sure. I’d seen the boy with the sad-looking eyes and the skin as pale as death. Like he’d just got up out of a coffin.
“Come on,” Dad said, turning to leave. “You can give me a hand fixing that old clock in the hallway.”
As we started back down the stairs, a door somewhere in the house slammed violently—BANG!—making us both jump.
Dad chuckled. “Now you’ve got me doing it,” he said. “It’s just the wind, Jason.”
But I knew it wasn’t the wind. There wasn’t any wind at all. The air was as still as the grave.
8
The grandfather clock was as tall as my father—six feet. It stood beside the stairway in the hall between the living and dining rooms.
Dad knelt on the floor shining a flashlight into the works. I stood nearby so I could hand him stuff from his toolbox.
Helping my father is usually pretty cool because he knows what he’s doing and he doesn’t mind explaining. My mom says if he hadn’t been an architect, he’d probably have been a teacher.
Normally I like giving him a hand. So how come I wanted to get away as fast as I could?
For some reason being near that big old grandfather clock made me feel out of breath. I didn’t dare say so, not after what had happened in the attic. My dad would think I was losing my mind or letting my imagination run wild.
But it wasn’t my imagination. The thing really did give me the creeps. For one thing the clock face looked way too much like a real face. A cold, unfriendly face that watched me with some secret knowledge.
As if the clock could read my thoughts.
“I don’t understand it,” said Dad. He rocked back on his heels and frowned. “There’s nothing wrong with the works or the springs. And I’m sure I’ve wound it correctly. But it just doesn’t want to go.” He clapped his hands on his knees and stood. “I give up. How about you put these tools away, buddy, while I wash up?”
“Sure, Dad.” I gathered up his things and slipped each tool into its proper slot.
My eyes avoided the clock. But when I was finished putting the tools away, something made me whirl around to look at its face.
The hands of the clock had moved. And it had never even ticked. I felt a change in the air. The clock was definitely watching me. And waiting.
Something was about to happen, I could feel it.
Footsteps. I heard footsteps!
In the hall above me, running hard. A child’s footsteps, hurtling headlong down the hallway.
And something larger in pursuit. Something gaining on the child, something big and bad.
I found myself silently rooting for the running child. “Come on, come on! Don’t let whatever it is catch you!”
The running footsteps were coming closer, heading for the stairway landing. I ducked under the stairs and looked up at the landing. I wanted to yell for my dad but my breath was stuck in my chest.
I stared up at the landing, unable to blink as the pounding footsteps came closer, closer.
Then it screamed.
A loud, piercing shriek. I heard a small body hit the stair railing, hurtle over the top, and crash to the floor with a sickening thud.
Then came a silence. A terrible silence. A deadly, deadly silence.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I jumped out from under the stairs, expecting to see a dead body crumpled on the floor.
There was nothing.
No dead body. Nothing. There was nothing there at all.
Except for the shadows closing in. And the clock watching me. Watching and waiting.
9
That night I couldn’t get to sleep.
The old house kept making noises in the dark. The walls creaked, the pipes moaned, the floorboards groaned.
Small animals scratched and scrabbled inside the walls. Or that’s what it sounded like. Maybe it was just leaves brushing against the outside of the house.
Maybe.
While tossing and turning I worked out what had been happening to me all day. The thing was, I just wasn’t used to old houses. In my neighborhood at home, normal sounds were stuff like cars going by, horns tooting sometimes, birds in the trees, people running lawn mowers and power tools.
Here you heard all kinds of stuff I wasn’t familiar with. Probably I’d heard mice chasing each other in the walls and imagined a child running. Then some old plumbing pipe hissed an air bubble and it sounded to me like a scream.
That must have been what happened.
That time when I thought Sally was crying? It was probably some neighbor’s yowling cat or maybe the pipes again.
And the weird laughter in the attic? Obviously the wind moved through all those little rooms and gables in some odd way I wasn’t used to.
It was a good thing my parents didn’t know the half of it. They’d think I was acting like a two-year-old.
Anyhow, that’s the kind of stuff I was thinking about. Instead of counting sheep, or whatever it is you do when you can’t fall asleep, I was counting all the weird things that had happened the very first day in the house. The noises, the child crying, the strange little rooms in the attic, the shaking, the crazy laughter, the watching clock, the sound of a body falling …
Slowly I dozed off.
Hours later I woke up suddenly, my muscles rigid.
Where was I? It was dark, pitch-black. Then slowly it came back to me.
I was on summer vacation. This was my new room, my new bed. My first night in a strange house. Nothing to be afraid
