“We could always do this tomorrow,” Steve said suddenly. “Yeah, tomorrow would be perfect.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “Let’s get it over with.”
I peered cautiously into the basement. It sure was dark down there—I couldn’t see anything but dim shadows and formless shapes.
“Well,” said Steve, trying to sound tough. “What are we waiting for?”
I propped a kitchen chair against the basement door. “So the door can’t lock behind us,” I explained.
“Excellent,” said Steve. But he didn’t sound convinced.
We turned to face the darkness at the top of the stairs.
From down in the basement I heard a PLOP, like something diving below the surface of a thick liquid. Which was ridiculous. There was no water down there, not even a puddle.
“Did you hear that?” Steve whispered. “Sounds like dripping blood.”
Lucy groaned. “You guys are being stupid,” she said. “Let just do it.”
So we did.
I flipped on the light switch.
The only light came from a bare bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs.
Lucy and Steve crowded behind me to look. The light was so dim we could barely make out the stairs. They were dusty and sagged in the middle.
“What’s that smell?” asked Lucy in a hushed voice.
A peculiar odor rose up at us. It smelled like dirty socks and moldy bread and wet garbage. It smelled like air that had been shut up with dead things for a long time.
“Rat turds,” said Steve. “There are definitely rats down there.”
I scowled at him. “It’s just the dirt floor,” I told Lucy. “The house is so old the basement doesn’t have a cement floor.”
“It smells old all right,” said Lucy. “Like a mummy might come lurching up the stairs at us any second.”
“What’s that dripping noise?” asked Steve.
“Dripping?” I echoed, stalling. “I didn’t hear any dripping.” It wasn’t a lie, really. What I’d heard sounded more like some scaly finned creature dropping into slimy depths.
I started down.
PLOP!
“I hear it!” said Lucy breathlessly.
“Must be a leaky pipe,” I said, but I didn’t move. “No big deal.”
“Did you ever see Alien?” Steve said. “The part where the creature is hiding up in the shadows and all they can hear is the drip-drip-drip of its slimy saliva?”
My determination was slipping away. My stomach felt queasy.
“That was just a movie!” scoffed Lucy. “It’s probably just a leaky pipe or something.”
She nudged my back. “We’d better check it out,” she insisted. “A leaky pipe could make a big mess and you said there’s lots of valuable old stuff down there.”
So I took a deep breath and started down the stairs with my friends close behind. My ankles tingled as if something under the stairs was itching to grab them. Every time I set my foot down on a tread I half expected claws to sink into my ankles.
When I couldn’t stand it another second, I crouched down and swept my flashlight beam over the dark space under the stairs.
Steve jumped. Shadows shrank from the light.
“What?” cried Lucy.
There was nothing there.
I let out a breath. “Just being careful,” I said, my voice sounding too loud, as if something was listening down below.
I went down a couple more steps. We were more than halfway.
The light from the bare bulb stuck close to the stairs, like it was afraid to venture out into the basement. I strained my eyes to see beyond it but the blackness was like a solid thing.
Anything could be watching us, cloaked in the dark, invisible.
All I could see were humped shapes. Was something lurking among the stacks of boxes and broken furniture? Waiting for us?
Then it happened.
“Screeee-screee-screeeeee!”
Something hurtled up out of the dark. A blur of motion, it flew flapping and screaming straight at us.
Steve screamed as it hit his face. He fell, giving the rope a sharp tug.
Lucy’s arms pinwheeled as she struggled to keep her balance and failed.
The rope yanked me.
I grabbed for the railing but the flapping thing blinded me. It beat at my face, trying to get at my eyes. I threw my hands up in front of me and lost my balance.
I went down hard in the dark, the creature shrieking above me.
9
We were a tangle of legs and rope.
I kicked the coils of rope off me, rubbing my back where I’d fallen.
“I hate bats,” said Steve, hunching his shoulders around his ears and darting his eyes around, looking for it.
“It wasn’t a bat, silly,” said Lucy. “It was just a poor terrified bird. A robin, I think.”
My heart whacked against my ribs.
A bird, that was all. And I’d thought it was going to pop out my eyeballs and slurp them down whole.
The three of us got shakily to our feet.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“It think it flew upstairs,” said Lucy. “How did it get in?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “All the basement windows are boarded up.”
I shrugged. “One of the boards must have come loose.”
“Yeah?” said Steve. “Maybe something pried the boards loose, you ever think of that?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “That’s why we’re down here, remember? To end the haunting, one way or another.”
PLOP! PING!
“What’s that?” Lucy said in a hushed voice.
It was the sound of fat, slimy worms dropping from the ceiling into a pit of goo.
We looked at each other. Steve was clutching the banister tightly. Lucy’s brown eyes looked like black holes.
We started down again.
At the bottom Lucy switched her flashlight on. Big humps rose up out of the dark and settled into the light beam as torn sofas, stacks of boxes, broken chairs.
“Sure is dark down here,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve seen so much junk all in one place. I bet there’s a lot of great stuff here.”
“You could hide a body down here and no one would find it for a hundred years,” said Steve, his voice cracking.
I shivered. “Let’s start over there,” I said, pointing with my flashlight.
“And what if we find the body?” asked Lucy, the beam wavering
