Horror at the Haunted House

  “We were in the dining room,” Corey said. “Ellen wanted to show me the trick mirror but it was already shut off.”

  “What trick mirror?” said Mrs. Whittacker. “There isn’t any trick mirror in the dining room. We didn’t put any haunted house scenes in the dining room because we don’t want to distract attention away from the displays.”

  “I was only kidding,” Ellen said.

  Mrs. Whittacker went out with them and, using a key, locked the door. “We had a special deadbolt installed,” she said, “so it takes a key to unlock the door, even from the inside. With so many people coming through the mansion, we thought it best to take some security precautions.”

  “Aren’t you going to turn off the lights?” asked Corey. “It would waste energy to leave them on all night.”

  “They’re on a timer. They all go out automatically in half an hour.”

  “There’s Mom,” Ellen said.

  Corey dashed to the car and began telling his mother about Mighty Mike’s trip to the Rose Bowl.

  Ellen rode home in silence. Twice, she had seen a woman in the mirror. Who? Lydia Clayton? That was the most sensible explanation, if you could call it sensible to see a ghost. Was it possible for a ghost’s image to show up in a mirror even when the ghost itself was invisible? Why couldn’t Corey see it? Why didn’t the bowl feel cold to him when he touched it?

  Until she got involved in the haunted house, Ellen had never thought much about ghosts. She wasn’t sure if she believed in them or not. She didn’t know anything about them, really.

  But she knew one thing: the face she saw in the mirror was not her imagination. It was real.

  Chapter

  5

  Ellen had a plan.

  The second night of the haunted house, she headed straight for the dining room. If she saw the woman in the mirror again, she would ask Mrs. Whittacker to look at the mirror. Surely Mrs. Whittacker would see the woman’s reflection, too.

  If Mrs. Whittacker didn’t see it, Ellen wasn’t sure what she would do. She didn’t have to decide, because when she looked in the mirror, she saw only herself. She waited a moment but nothing happened. She walked away and came back to the mirror. She still saw only her own reflection. She didn’t have to show Mrs. Whittacker, after all. With relief, she turned her attention to the Fairylustre.

  Again, she was drawn to the octagonal bowl with the paintings of the fairies. She remembered how, as a little girl, she had read her fairy books over and over, unable to get enough of them. She felt the same way now; she wanted to hold the bowl and to examine the fairies up close.

  As she looked at the bowl, the room seemed suddenly cold and damp. Ellen shivered and hugged herself for warmth. The cold air intensified but it was all on her face, not her back, and she realized it came from the shelves of Wedgwood.

  She squinted at the shelves, trying to figure out exactly where the icy blast originated.

  Then she gasped. Her hands flew to her mouth and she stepped backward.

  Two transparent hands floated up from inside the large black urn that was the oldest piece of Wedgwood in the Clayton collection. They were a woman’s hands with tapered fingernails and they looked absolutely real, except that Ellen could see right through them.

  Slowly the hands drifted toward Ellen. The fingers were outstretched, the way the hands of the woman in the mirror had been, as if the owner of the hands was begging.

  Ellen took another step backward. The hands followed. They floated toward Ellen, the fingers rippling slowly, as if they were somehow pulling themselves through the air.

  With a shock, Ellen realized that the hands were the source of the icy air. The chill wind blew out of them, straight toward her. Instead of blowing past her, as an ordinary breeze would, it doubled back, swirling around her face and shoulders, lifting her hair and then letting it fall again.

  Ellen tried to speak, to tell the hands to go away, but her mouth felt glued shut. She wanted to scream for help but she couldn’t. She was unable to utter a sound. She felt like a statue, fastened in concrete to that spot in the floor, unable to move or speak.

  The hands came closer. The air grew colder.

  One of the hands reached toward Ellen’s face, as if to touch her. When the fingers were almost to her cheek, Mrs. Whittacker’s voice announced, “Ten minutes until we open. All actors in place, please.”

  The sound jarred Ellen free from her fear. With a great burst of energy, she turned and ran out of the room. As she passed the mirror, she saw a reflection of the hands. They were floating back toward the shelves. Ellen looked behind her. The hands disappeared inside the black urn.

  It was the ghost. Ellen had no doubt about that. Even the clever people who had designed the haunted house could not invent floating hands with cold air blowing out of them.

  Agnes was waiting to start the Joan of Arc sound effects when Ellen rushed into the room.

  Ellen stopped, her heart beating a rapid rhythm as she caught her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Agnes asked. “You’re white as a ghost.”

  “The ghost isn’t white; she’s transparent,” Ellen said. “I saw her—the real ghost—over there, in the dining room. I was looking at the Fairylustre and two hands came floating up out of a big urn. I felt cold air and I could see right through the hands. She tried to touch me. The hands reached for my face.” The memory of it made Ellen shudder.

  Agnes stared at Ellen for a long moment. “Let me be sure I understand,” she said. “You believe you saw a pair of hands come out of the Wedgwood?”

  “Yes! I swear it really happened.”

  “Where are the hands now?”

  “When I ran away, the hands went back inside the urn.”

  “I see.”

  Ellen could tell that Agnes was skeptical. “I saw the ghost last night, too,” Ellen said. “Only last night it was a whole person, not just hands, and I saw her in the mirror by the dining-room door.”

  “You saw a woman’s reflection?”

  “Yes, but when I turned around, no one was there.”

  Agnes was silent for a moment, as if trying to decide what she should say. Finally she said, “Why do you keep going back to the dining room, if it scares you?”

  “I like to look at the fairy scenes. The dining room doesn’t scare me; it’s the ghost that scared me. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “I just spent five minutes listening to your brother insist that purple people from Jupiter will land on the balcony outside the parlor tonight. Now you tell tales of ghost hands in the Wedgwood.”

  “Corey’s always making up stories. This really happened.”

  “I told Mrs. Whittacker it was a mistake to have children in the haunted house, but she was determined to use the two of you. I can still find someone else to be Joan of Arc, if you’re upset. Should I?”

  Ellen hesitated. She knew Agnes hoped she would say yes, and she was tempted. It would be comforting to go home tonight and not come back—but she had told all of her friends to come and see her be Joan of Arc. She couldn’t tell Caitlin that she was dropping out and she couldn’t let Mrs. Whittacker down; Mrs. Whittacker was counting on her. Besides, she could just hear Corey if she quit doing the Historical Haunted House because she was afraid of a ghost. Everyone in three counties would hear all about it and, since nobody else had seen the ghost, they would think Ellen was just jittery.

  “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t want to quit; I want to be Joan.”

  “Well, stay away from the dining room, since you don’t seem to have a problem anywhere else. Now let’s get your hands tied so I can turn things on in here. It’s almost seven o’clock and people are lined up waiting to get in.”

  Ellen stood with her back against the stake and crossed her arms against her chest. She felt the rope as Agnes loosely tied it around her shoulders.

  “Staying out of the dining room won’t make the ghost go away,” Ellen said.

  “Nearly three hundred peop
le went through the haunted house last night,” Agnes said. “Most of them stopped in the dining room and not a single person said anything about any ghost.”

  “Then why have I seen it twice?”

  “If you’ve seen it twice, both times in the dining room, I should think you would stay out of there. You know what the Wedgwood collection looks like; don’t look at it anymore.”

  It seemed an odd remark from the woman who was curator of the new museum. Shouldn’t she encourage people to look at the Wedgwood—to study it and appreciate it?

  “If you have any more problems,” Agnes continued, “I’ll speak to your parents about finding a replacement.”

  Agnes flipped the switches which started the Joan of Arc scene. The flames seemed to leap and dance around Ellen’s feet. The noise of fire crackling and voices shouting filled the room. Usually, the realistic sound track for the Joan of Arc scene transported Ellen backward in time. This time, she hardly heard it.

  When the first group of haunted house patrons entered, Ellen closed her eyes and tilted her head back, the way she always did, as if she were beseeching God to save her. But she wasn’t thinking about Joan or about burning at the stake.

  Behind her closed eyelids, she saw a pair of ghostly hands, moving slowly toward her face, trying to touch her.

  Ellen pondered what to do. If she told her parents, she knew they would insist that both she and Corey drop out of the haunted house. If they believed she had seen the ghost, they would want to protect her from any further encounters. If they didn’t believe her, they would want to protect her from her own imagination. Either way, Ellen would feel like a baby. And Corey would be outraged if he had to give up his chance to scream with Mighty Mike.

  She knew her parents loved her and they always tried to do what was best for her. She also knew that sometimes she had to solve her own problems. She had been terrified when she saw the hands. If she ran away now, she would feel cowardly and defeated. She would always wonder if she gave in too easily.

  But how does one stand up to a ghost? How could she conquer her fear?

  Knowledge.

  The word popped into her mind as if it had been caught behind a trapdoor and had just sprung loose. Knowledge. Grandma always said that people fear the unknown. They are afraid of different cultures, of new ideas, of religions that depart from the safety of what they have been taught.

  I will learn about ghosts, Ellen decided. I will learn about Lydia Clayton. If I see those hands again, I’ll be prepared. I’ll pay close attention to exactly how they look and what they do. Maybe I should start a journal, the way I kept track of my experiments in animal communication. She could imagine what the Science Fair judges would think of an experiment in human/ghost communication.

  At closing time, Ellen asked Mrs. Whittacker how she could learn more about the Clayton family.

  “There are some old diaries,” Mrs. Whittacker said.

  “Could I read them?”

  “Of course. But you’ll have to do it at the Historical Society’s library. We don’t allow any one-of-a-kind volume to leave.”

  She gave Ellen the address and told her the library was open on Saturdays from noon until four.

  Ellen looked to see if Corey was ready to leave. He was still helping Mighty Mike clean up their scene and prepare the fake blood for the next day.

  She glanced across the hall toward the dining room. What would happen if she waited for Corey in there? Would the ghost appear? She inched toward the door. The dining room was empty.

  Actors from other scenes chatted as they left for the night. Ellen heard Mighty Mike’s booming laugh. There are people nearby, she thought. They would hear me if I had to yell for help.

  She threw back her shoulders and walked toward the shelves of Wedgwood. She stopped in front of the Fairylustre display.

  Almost immediately, she felt the icy air. It swirled toward her, surrounded her, and then seemed to condense, to draw into itself. Ellen felt as if she were being sucked into the center of a small hurricane.

  The wind stopped as quickly as it had begun. At the same moment, Ellen felt an icy hand on her shoulder. The individual fingers gripped her through her blouse but when she looked, she saw nothing.

  “What do you want?” Ellen whispered.

  A second hand touched her other shoulder. Together they pushed Ellen forward until she stopped at the rope which kept the public away from the Wedgwood.

  Ellen knew that the ghost of Lydia Clayton wanted her to look at the Wedgwood.

  The cold pressure increased, pushing on Ellen’s shoulders until she ducked under the rope and stood directly in front of one of the Fairylustre vases. She leaned down until her face was only a few inches from the shelf.

  Despite her closeness to the beautiful vase, Ellen hardly saw the lustrous colors or the golden spider webs. She could think only of the cold fingers on her back.

  “Get away from there!”

  At the sound of Agnes’s voice, the cold hands evaporated, leaving a tingly feeling on Ellen’s shoulders.

  Ellen clutched the rope, feeling unsteady, as she turned to face Agnes.

  “You have no business being inside that rope,” Agnes said. “That’s how things get broken.”

  Ellen nodded and ducked under the rope, away from the Wedgwood.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Waiting for my brother.”

  “You can wait for him in the conservatory. I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t come in the dining room anymore.”

  “I wasn’t scared this time.”

  “Well, it’s after ten; this room is closed. And even if it weren’t, I don’t ever want you to go behind the rope again. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean it, Ellen. If I find you in here again, you’ll be replaced as Joan of Arc. I will tell Mrs. Whittacker that you can’t be trusted to stay away from the Wedgwood.”

  Ellen didn’t know what to say so she was silent. She let go of the rope and walked toward the door. As she passed Agnes, the woman put out a hand to detain her. “Why were you leaning so close just now? Why were you examining that vase?”

  Ellen was not about to tell her the real reason—that she was leaning toward the vase because she felt two icy invisible hands on her shoulders, pushing her that way. If she did, she knew there would be someone else playing Joan of Arc tomorrow.

  Instead, she said, “No particular reason. That’s just where I happened to be standing.”

  Agnes’s frown softened slightly. A flicker of emotion flashed across her face. Relief? But why did she care which piece of Fairylustre Ellen admired? There was something odd about this conversation, something that didn’t quite make sense. Maybe Agnes had seen the ghost, too, but didn’t want to admit it. Maybe she was afraid that Ellen would tell and that it would somehow have a bad effect on the museum.

  Ellen tried to think it through on the way home but it was hard to concentrate with Corey chattering from the back seat.

  “Mighty Mike says he’ll take me to the radio station someday when he isn’t working and take me in the studio and show me where he plays the Top Ten songs every Saturday. And he says he’ll show me where they broadcast the news. And he’s even going to buy me lunch at the cafeteria, where all the radio and TV guys eat.”

  “He must have taken quite a shine to you,” said Mrs. Streater.

  “He says I scream better than anyone and that if they ever do a mystery on the radio and they need someone to scream, he’s going to call me.”

  Lulled by the rhythm of the windshield wipers, Ellen began to relax. She tuned out Corey’s voice—something she had learned, from necessity, to do with ease—and replayed in her mind the scenes in the Clayton mansion.

  Lydia Clayton’s icy hands had pushed Ellen toward the Wedgwood collection because she wanted Ellen to look closely at it. Why?

  There’s something she wants me to see, Ellen decided. Some piece in particular? Maybe there is one piece
that was her favorite and she wants to make sure I notice it.

  Tomorrow, Ellen decided, I’ll go to the Historical Society and ask to read those old diaries.

  If she knew more about Lydia Clayton, she might be able to figure out what the ghost was trying to tell her.

  Chapter

  6

  What secrets would the diaries divulge? What would she learn about Lydia Clayton? Ellen arrived at the Historical Society’s office promptly at noon the next day, filled with anticipation. She asked to see the Clayton family diaries, hoping she might soon understand the strange events at Clayton House.

  The woman in charge hesitated, as if debating whether to trust Ellen with the diaries.

  “Mrs. Whittacker suggested that I read them,” Ellen said, “and I’ll be careful.”

  The woman nodded and brought the diaries to Ellen.

  There were three slim volumes, each with a soft leather cover embossed in gold. The pages inside were a thin parchment, yellowed with age. The writing had been done with brown ink, in a flowery script. The first letter of each paragraph was double size and full of curlicues.

  Ellen carried the diaries to a table and began to read. Some of the writing was difficult to read and the language was hard to understand. Ellen hadn’t known the English language had changed so much. After an hour of straining her eyes and her brain, Ellen closed the first volume and paged through the others, feeling discouraged.

  She had hoped that the diaries would be personal accounts of life at Clayton House, perhaps written by Lydia herself. Instead, most of the diary entries were about the interior of the house and the furniture. All were signed by someone named Franklin Haller. Since Mr. Haller included details of cost and shipping arrangements for the furniture, the diaries read more like a designer’s ledger than a personal history. Ellen wished she had gone for a bike ride with Caitlin instead of coming here.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the woman who worked in the library.

  Ellen shook her head. “I wanted to read about Lydia Clayton,” she said.

  The woman’s eyes twinkled. “Do you like ghost stories?” she said, and then laughed at Ellen’s surprised look. “You aren’t the first to be fascinated by the reports of Lydia’s antics,” she said. She walked to a shelf of books, reached up, and removed one. Handing it to Ellen, she said, “Try this. It’s a short biography of Lydia Clayton and includes the stories about her ghost.”