“Look at us,” I said, pushing away my cup of yogurt even though I’d only had a few bites. “We both did hard, scary things, and they ended up not being that hard or that scary.”
“Once you’ve spent time cleaning a carnivorous house, I guess most things are easy and not scary,” Ruby said, and then she leaned forward in her seat, folding her arms on the sticky plastic table.
“If I say something that sounds kind of crazy, do you promise not to judge me?”
I sat back in my chair, the plastic squeaking a little, and gave Ruby my best version of her own “are you kidding me?” look.
“Rube,” I said. “Ruby Tuesday. Rubik’s Cube.”
Her eyes lit up. “Omigosh, that’s a good one,” she said, dimples appearing in her cheeks. “Please call me that forever, I love it.” Then she shook her head. “Okay, stupid question, I know. We’re deep into Crazy Town these days, so what’s a little extra weird?”
With that, she turned around and got the bag that had been hanging off the back of her chair, fishing around in it until she pulled out an envelope.
“Here.”
She handed it to me, and as soon as I saw the pretty handwriting on the front, I looked up at her, eyebrows raised. “Is this—”
“From my grammy, yeah. Read it.”
I did. I was sad then that I’d never gotten to know Ruby’s grammy, because from this letter she seemed pretty great, and it was clear she had loved Ruby a lot.
“She was awesome,” I said quietly, and one corner of Ruby’s mouth kicked up slightly.
“She was, but that’s not why I wanted you to read it. Check item five.”
“‘Check the root cellar,’” I read, then looked up at Ruby, frowning. “What does that mean?”
Ruby nodded at the letter in my hand. “Grammy always swore she was a little bit psychic. Not for big things, just the little stuff, but still. It has to mean the house, right?”
Chewing my lower lip, I looked up at the giant TV over us. The lady was adding a bunch of flour to a giant glass bowl now, talking happily about something, her mouth moving but no sound coming out. “Is there a root cellar?” I asked at last, and Ruby shrugged.
“It’s a big house,” she reminded me. “Not too hard to believe it might have one of those.”
We sat there for a while, thinking.
“Sooo,” I said slowly. “We could go back to Live Oak House tomorrow and check out this root cellar, and possibly get caught by Mrs. Freely again.”
Ruby shrugged. “A risk, yes.”
I bit my lower lip, still tasting a little bit of caramel there, thinking it over.
If I said no, it might hurt her feelings. This was a letter from her grammy, after all, and we had just made up from the last fight. What if turning this down made Ruby decide she didn’t want to be friends after all?
But then I remembered talking to Emma on the Fourth of July, Emma saying that she’d thought everything was fine because I never said what I really wanted, and I went along with it.
Pushing back my shoulders, I looked Ruby in the eye. “I really don’t want to,” I told her. “Because I’m worried about getting in trouble at school.”
Other words were right there on the tip of my tongue, stuff about how I knew that was dumb, or that if she wanted to do it, I understood, but I kept them back. I was done explaining or talking myself down.
I didn’t want to go into the root cellar, and I wasn’t going to.
And Ruby smiled. “Fair enough!” she said cheerfully, gathering up her yogurt stuff.
“Just like that?” I said, blinking.
She gave another shrug, sitting back in her chair. “You don’t want to. People shouldn’t have to do things they don’t want to do, and hey, it’s probably the smartest idea.”
Balling up her napkin, Ruby tossed it to the trash. “We’re hanging up our ghost-hunting shoes.”
CHAPTER 30
RUBY
“Look at us,” I said to Olivia the next day as we clambered out of the van at the road in front of Live Oak House. “Turning over a new leaf, being responsible campers at Camp Chrysalis.”
“It actually feels kind of strange,” Liv said once her feet hit the hard-packed dirt. “Coming here to . . . do what we’re supposed to.”
I nodded and dusted my hands off on the back of my pants. “Our ghost-hunting days are over.”
“Your what?” Garrett asked. I hadn’t noticed him coming up to stand behind us, and I jumped a little. We hadn’t talked much since the whole bite thing—I think it had really freaked him out—and my face burned hot all of a sudden.
“Just. You know. How me and Olivia were goofing off,” I told him. “Acting like there were ghosts in this place. Like your vroom-vroom head.”
Garrett tilted his head to one side, then gave a little laugh. “You’re a weird kid,” he told me before jogging off to catch up with the others.
I could feel Olivia’s eyes on me, but I said, “Been called worse,” before trudging after everyone else to go up to the house.
Once we were all assembled in the front hallway, Mrs. Freely did her whole “daily giving out of assignments” thing, and I was so busy still thinking about what Garrett had said that I almost missed it when she said, “And Ruby and Olivia, the doll room.”
Jerking my head, I turned to face her more fully. “Excuse?”
Mrs. Freely looked at me over the top of her clipboard. “The doll room,” she repeated. “We’ve been putting that one off since you were all so funny about it.”
“Terrified,” I corrected her. “We were terrified because it’s a room filled with creepy dolls.”
“They’re not creepy, they’re antiques,” Mrs. Freely said. “And they have to be done. We’ve put it off long enough.”
This was it, I realized. Our punishment for sneaking into the office. We were getting off lightly, really—like Mrs. Freely had said, there were real consequences for screwing up at Camp Chrysalis, scary school consequences, and we weren’t getting those.
We were just getting fed to dolls.
Nope, nope, none of that, new leaf.
“Sounds good,” I made myself say, and once again, I could feel Olivia looking at me.
It had been cloudy that morning, and the day seemed even darker as we made our way over to the room full of dolls, notebooks in hand.
And when I opened the door, I realized that the room was even creepier than I’d remembered.
Still dolls everywhere, big ones, little ones, expensive porcelain ones, and plainer rag dolls.
Next to me, Olivia shuddered. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I’m really glad we’re not ghost-hunting anymore, by the way,” I told her, opening up my notebook. “Because if we were—”
“But we’re not,” Olivia replied firmly, and I nodded.
“But we’re not.”
I moved to the nearest display case of dolls, jotting down Redheaded doll, messed-up smile, lacy dress, and hoped that would be a good enough description. I wasn’t sure how specific they wanted us to be on the dolls, and since there were so many, I felt like I’d start running out of descriptions if I wasn’t careful.
Liv was on the other side of the room, writing a lot on her notebook, and I smiled at her. “You actually like this, don’t you?”
Lifting her head, she wrinkled her nose at me. “Not the dolls themselves, really, but working with you is nice. Especially since we’re being normal.”
“Noooorrrrmaaaaal,” I echoed, tapping my pen against my notebook. “That is us. Responsible humans, doing the job we were assigned like bosses.”
“Total bosses,” Liv confirmed, and I turned back to my work with a smile.
Trying to figure out The Spooky at Live Oak House had been fun, but this was nice, too, just hanging out with Liv.
&
nbsp; Putting down my notebook, I picked up the doll nearest to me, a smaller one that wasn’t nearly as fancy as some of the others, dressed in a simple blue calico dress. Its hair was made from yellow yarn, and it had a bright smile painted on its porcelain face. She was still a little unsettling—she was a doll, after all—but not as bad as some of the others. Maybe because there wasn’t any rouge painted on her cheeks.
“Hi, Olivia!” I said in a high voice. “I’m Sally, the one non-nightmare doll, saaaaave meeeee!”
Giggling, Olivia put her own notebook down and folded her arms over her chest. “Sorry, Sally, it’s your destiny to remain in the creepy doll room forever.”
I lifted both of Sally’s arms in the air. “Nooooo!” I cried in the high voice. “Curse you, fates!”
“Wish I could help, Sal, but them’s the breaks,” Liv answered, shrugging, and I grinned at her, going to set Sally down.
“Help us,” Sally said.
Olivia threw her hands up. “Sally, I told you—”
“Liv,” I said, and the word came out like a croak.
She immediately dropped her hands, a little V forming between her brows. “What?”
I stared down at the doll, my whole body suddenly freezing cold, my breath coming so fast, I was almost panting. “I didn’t,” I managed to get out. “I didn’t say that.”
Olivia stood up straighter, her face suddenly pale. “Ruby, come on,” she said, and I looked at her, widening my eyes.
“Liv, I know I like to joke, but I promise you, this is not a thing I would joke about. I didn’t say that.”
We stood there, staring at “Sally” where she lay on the little table, her painted face smiling up at the ceiling. It was bright in the doll room, the sun pouring in through the big windows, the light moving through the lace curtains to make fancy patterns on the floor, but Liv and I stood very still, almost holding our breath.
And then it came again, faint, but still clear. “Help me.”
I backed up from the doll so fast that I slammed into one of the other tables, knocking dolls off their stands and to the floor. Olivia stood in the middle of the room, her mouth open, and then it was like the sounds were all around us, a storm of whispers.
Help us help us help us slithered around the room, the words overlapping, and I couldn’t tell if it was more than one person talking or the same voice repeating and repeating.
Spinning in a circle, I looked at all the dolls, their blank smiles, their overly bright hair, the lace dresses, the linen nightgowns, some small enough to hold in one hand, some nearly as tall as an actual toddler. They weren’t moving, but it was like each of them was murmuring to us, and I fought the urge to cover my ears with my hands.
And then the words changed, but slowly. Some of the voices still seemed to be saying Help us, but there were other words sliding in and around them now.
The cellar the cellar the cellar.
My eyes met Liv’s across the room, and I saw my own shock reflected in her face. She was hearing it, too: The cellar.
Just like Grammy’s note had said.
And then the words started to slur so that cellar became almost more like a hiss, a sort of constant ssssssssss, rising and rising, and then I did put my hands over my ears, the notebook falling from my fingers.
Just when I thought I might snap and scream or start crying or something, the sounds suddenly stopped, leaving Liv and me standing on opposite sides of the room, breathing hard, nearly shaking.
“You guys okay?”
I did scream then—okay, to be honest, it was more like a yelp—and turned to see Wesley standing in the doorway, his hair, as usual, hanging over his eyes. I swallowed hard, walking closer to him.
“How long have you been standing there?”
He swung his head from one side to the other, and I realized that underneath his hair, he was looking from me to Olivia and back again. And then he shrugged.
Great. Back to the silent treatment.
“Wesley,” Olivia asked, coming to stand next to me. “Did you . . . did you hear anything?”
And while Wesley didn’t actually say anything, his headshake—no—was all the answer we needed.
RubyToozday: So we need to get back into Live Oak House, but we need to do it at a time when no one else will be there.
LivAndLetLiv: Hi to you, too, Ruby.
RubyToozday: We can’t have formalities when dealing with talking dolls, Liv.
LivAndLetLiv: I guess that’s a good point.
RubyToozday: Tomorrow night work for you?
LivAndLetLiv: WHAT???????
LivAndLetLiv: Ruby, we can’t sneak out of our houses and INTO a house at night. That’s a CRIMINAL THING. We TALKED about this.
RubyToozday: WE ARE KIDS. We can say it was a dare or something, that we’re dumb, whatever. I really want to get a look in that root cellar, okay?
RubyToozday: Grammy said to look in there. The dolls said to look in there.
RubyToozday: So we gotta look.
LivAndLetLiv: And how are we going to get in there at night?
RubyToozday: Garrett said he could get the key for us.
LivAndLetLiv: You told GARRETT?
RubyToozday: You gotta stop capslocking me, Liv. And yes, I did, because we’ll need HELP. (CAPSLOCKED YOU BACK.)
LivAndLetLiv: What did you tell him?
RubyToozday: The basics. Talking dolls, attic creepiness, possible killer tree.
RubyToozday: Told him to be PREPARED FOR ANYTHING.
LivAndLetLiv: This is crazy, Ruby.
RubyToozday: Not really! We’re gonna go in, have a little look around, see what’s what, then decide if we should burn down the house or not!
LivAndLetLiv: Ruby.
LivAndLetLiv: No.
LivAndLetLiv: We are NOT burning down the house.
RubyToozday: Even for TALKING DOLLS, LIV?
LivAndLetLiv: Even for that. Also, we need to stop typing all this out in case someone sees. Can you call me?
RubyToozday: On it!
CHAPTER 31
RUBY
Later, I would think about how it was kind of funny—ironic, I guess—that the things that had gotten me and Olivia sent to Camp Chrysalis for the summer were nowhere near as bad as the thing we did because we’d been sent to Camp Chrysalis for the summer.
Honestly, someone should tell Mrs. Freely.
Before Camp Chrysalis? I threw some glitter (okay, a lot of glitter) in a school hallway.
After Camp Chrysalis? Let’s break it down:
I rifled through someone else’s things in a sneaky manner.
I accused an adult of trying to feed us to a murder house.
I told multiple fibs to my mom.
The abovementioned sneaking-out thing.
Being out at night with a boy.
And as Garrett, Liv, and I stopped our bikes on the road at the base of Live Oak House, I reminded myself that if we got caught, we wouldn’t be looking at Camp Chrysalis but probably military school. Maybe juvie. Was that still a thing people got sent to?
We parked our bikes and got off, heading up toward the house. I had brought a bag even though there was nothing in it except a flashlight and a bag of Chex Mix.
Garrett had a bag, too, but Liv was empty-handed except for her own flashlight.
Once we were on the lawn, the three of us stood there, our flashlights in our hands but not turned on, staring at the house rising up in front of us. We’d been coming here for weeks, and we’d known how scary the house was almost that whole time, but it was still different being in the house in the daylight, lots of people around us, and being here at night, with Live Oak House looming out of the darkness, the branches of the oak out front making spooky shadows.
Or maybe I was freaked out because we were about to do somethin
g that would get us into a lot of trouble.
“Ready?” I whispered, and I clutched my flashlight harder, feeling it slip against my sweaty palm.
“Ready,” Olivia replied.
There was silence, and we both glanced over at Garrett, still standing between us, staring up at the house with wide eyes.
“Garrett?” I prompted, and I could actually see him swallow hard. We hadn’t talked about the whole bite thing, really, but maybe it had bothered him more than he’d said? And then he shook his head as he shoved his flashlight back into his bag and turned away.
“No way,” he muttered. “No way no way no way, this is not cool.”
And with that, he shoved his bag into my hands, nearly making me drop my flashlight. “Here,” he said. “The key is in the front pocket, and there’s some other stuff you might need, but I’m . . . yeah, no.”
He started backing away from the house, and I stared at him in shock. “Are you serious?” I whispered.
He just turned around and started running. I could hear his footsteps pounding away, and as he reached his bike at the bottom of the hill, he didn’t even bother to look at us. He slung his backpack over a shoulder, got on his bike, and pedaled off, leaving me and Ruby staring after him.
“Ugghhhhh,” I groaned. “Well, that crush is totally over.”
Olivia turned back to me, raising her eyebrows. “I thought you said you didn’t have a crush on him.”
I waved my hands as I turned to the house. “Um, of course I had a crush on him.”
“But you said—” she started, and I shot her a look over my shoulder.
“Liv, can we not right now? What with the monster house and all?”
“Right,” she agreed quickly, moving to stand closer to me. “Eyes on the prize.”
“Exactly.”
“And the prize is a terrifying house that might eat us.”
“You know it.”
We stood like that for a while, staring up at Live Oak House. I really think until that moment it hadn’t hit us what we were trying to do. We were walking into a house we knew was bad. Haunted. “It’s not going to get any less scary,” I finally said. “No matter how long we stand here.”