“Good,” Mom said with a smile. “That’s exactly what you need. You’ve been exhausted lately, overdoing it. And you know what happens when you overdo it.”
“Right,” I said. “My imagination gets out of control.”
She was wrong about my imagination getting out of control, but I’d given up trying to convince her the house was haunted. The ghosts didn’t show themselves to adults, so adults thought they didn’t exist.
A pretty neat trick, if you happened to be a ghost.
The warm milk trick seemed to work. As soon as my head hit the pillow I started to doze off. Dreaming about baseball, and swimming, and how I couldn’t wait to get back to our own house …
I woke up with a jolt, every nerve tingling. I gripped the sides of the bed, my eyes wide.
There was some kind of vibration in the air.
BONNNG!
The grandfather clock! It must have already chimed at least once and woke me up. I lay rigid, waiting for it to strike again.
The broken grandfather clock in the hall only chimed when a haunting was about to happen.
Dread sat on my chest, making it hard to breathe. I hated the waiting. I hated lying helpless, straining my ears for the first sound of a little kid’s scared footsteps. I knew what was coming—and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The haunting had started.
Outside my bedroom door Bobby’s ghost was crying. Then I heard his small feet hitting the floor as he ran.
He was running in fear. Crying so hard he was hiccuping.
Running and running, the thud of heavier footsteps chasing him, getting louder and louder as the sound of his crying went higher and higher.
Then I heard the witch’s voice screaming at him.
“Come back here, you little brat! Give me that jewel!”
The little boy kept running. His feet went right by my door. Followed a heartbeat later by the thudding of the witch-thing, screaming, “It’s mine! Mine!”
I tensed up, waiting. Because I knew what was going to happen. It was always the same, whenever the haunting started.
The little boy kept running. The witch-thing kept chasing him.
And then—
CRUNCH!
The little boy smashed through the railing at the end of the hallway and fell to the floor below.
“Heellllllllllllpppp meeeeeeeeee!”
His awful, falling scream cut through me like a knife.
If I lived here fifty years—which I wouldn’t—I would never get used to that terrible sound.
The house fell silent. Sometimes that was the end of the haunting and after a while I could turn over and go back to sleep.
But sometimes it was just the beginning of something even more terrifying.
I lay with my hands at my sides staring straight up into the darkness, Bobby’s dying cry banging around inside my head.
No way had Bobby died in a fall from the cherry tree, like it said in the paper. He died the way I heard him die night after night. Hurtling over the stairway while someone chased him!
It had to be the nanny, Alice Everett. Bobby’s nanny was the witch-thing, the old lady who’d stayed on in the empty house until she died. The old witch whose body had never been found.
She was the one who had moved Bobby’s body from the house to under the cherry tree, so no one would know it was her fault that he’d died.
Boys fall out of trees, right? Accidents happen. Everybody believed her at the time.
But why had she been chasing the little boy? Was it Bobby who had stolen the jewel from his mother? Was the old witch-thing still trying to get it back, even when she was a ghost haunting the same house as Bobby?
Suddenly a sound outside the room blotted out my thoughts.
Something was scratching at my door.
I held my breath and concentrated on seeing in the dark. Fear was all around me—a cold tingling all over my body.
The knob was turning! The door began to open.
Maybe it’s my mom, checking up on me, I thought hopefully.
A foul smell invaded the room.
Not Mom.
I dove out of bed and rolled underneath.
24
I peeked out and couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear it. Something had come into my room. I could hear it wheezing.
Under the bed probably wasn’t the best place to hide. Too obvious. But too late now—I couldn’t move without giving myself away.
Heavy breathing. The rustle of old clothing. The invisible thing was coming closer.
Peering into the darkness, I tried to follow the sounds. Who was it and what did they want with me?
Then I got another whiff of that foul stench. Only the witch-thing smelled like that.
The ghost of a child killer was in the room with me!
I peeked out from under the bed and saw the bottom part of her black cloak trailing along the floor. That was the rustling noise.
The cloak moved back and forth across the room.
Suddenly I knew what it wanted. The trunk. The dead creature had come to take back the trunk!
The old trunk was stored in my closet. But the papers and letters I’d found inside it were someplace even safer.
Under my pillow.
What a goon! What had I been thinking—that was the most obvious place. And if the foul creature found the letters, she’d find me hiding under the bed!
I had to do something, and fast.
The door to my closet creaked open.
The witch cackled with satisfaction as she fumbled with the trunk latch. The lid creaked open.
This was it! The only chance I’d have.
I slid out from under the bed and snaked my hand up over the side, feeling for my pillow. My hand found the letters. I snatched them and quickly ducked back under the bed.
“Nooooo!”
The witch hissed with fury. Had she seen me?
Her black cloak crackled. Her breath rattled, filling the room with its putrid stink. Her sticklike arm shot out angrily, sweeping across the top of my bureau. Books and airplane models clattered to the floor.
“I’ll get you, you little brat,” she croaked.
I scrambled farther under the bed until my back was
