My Haunted House (2 page)

T
he next morning I was up early. I knew Aunt Tabby was not going to give up easily and I wanted to keep an eye on her, so after breakfast I hung around the hall, pretending to count the spiders. Everything (even Aunt Tabby) was suspiciously quiet—until there was a knock on the door.

I rushed to open it, but Aunt Tabby, who had been lurking behind the clock, got there
first. She elbowed me out of the way (Aunt Tabby has really sharp elbows) and opened the door.

Standing on the doorstep was a very stylish woman carrying a briefcase. I did not like the look of her one bit, so I did my best Fiendish Stare. I could tell it worked—she suddenly went very pale and gulped a bit like Brian used to. She opened and closed her mouth as though she had forgotten how to talk, and then she said in a squeaky voice, “I—I've come to see the house. On behalf of Huge Hotels Incorporated.”

Aunt Tabby looked thrilled.

Drat, I thought. It was just my luck that this Huge Hotels person couldn't read. I stomped outside to check the sign, but it now said:

Hmm…Aunt Tabby was proving more tricky than I had expected.

She was busy showing Huge Hotels around the hall when I clomped back inside.

“It's very odd, dear,” Aunt Tabby said with a funny kind of smile. “Someone changed the sign last night. I noticed it when Uncle Drac went to work. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those estate agents. Anyway, I've fixed it now, don't you think?”

I didn't reply—there was no time to lose. I tore upstairs to my Friday bedroom and grabbed my Ghost Kit. I threw open the box and pulled out my white ghost sheet and emptied a bag of flour over it. Then I blew up a big balloon and put in one of my surprise-your-friends-with-a-strangled-ghost squealers. I held on to the neck of the balloon really tightly to stop the air escaping, then I put the floury sheet over my head so that it covered me and the balloon.

I was ready.

Soon I could hear Aunt Tabby clumping up the stairs in her big boots, followed by Huge Hotels's scared little clip-clop sounds.

It was time to go.

I opened my bedroom door, and in the old mirror on the landing I could see a small, fat,
dusty ghost shuffling out. I didn't look as scary as I had hoped, but it was pretty good. It was very difficult going down the attic stairs, but I managed to reach the bottom. Then I climbed onto the old chest by the landing window and hid behind the curtains.

Yes! The ambush was set.

I could hear Aunt Tabby and Huge Hotels Incorporated just along the corridor. Aunt Tabby was rattling on about how she personally
liked
the dripping taps in the bathroom, and Huge Hotels was muttering stuff to herself: “Great potential…Old world charm…Theme hotel…”

We'll see about
that
, I thought. I jumped off the chest and let go of the squealer.

Aiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
!

It was great. Huge Hotels went totally
pale. I could tell that she knew she had made a Big Mistake. She spun around and screamed.
Really
screamed. While she was screaming, I hung on to the curtains and waved my arms a
lot so that the flour flew all over the place like a thick white mist. The strangled-ghost squealer was great—it kept on squealing and squealing—but just to make sure of things, I made some really horrible groans, too.

Huge Hotels was not giving up easily. Her screams were amazing—really piercing—and she didn't stop, not even to breathe. Aunt Tabby grabbed hold of Huge Hotels to try and calm her down, but Huge Hotels didn't want to calm down. No way.

Just then some flour got stuck in my throat and made me choke a bit—well, quite a lot, actually—and that was when Huge Hotels stopped screaming and just stared at me, although she still had her mouth open like she wanted to scream.

She started inching slowly backward along
the corridor and went straight through one of the oldest cobwebs, where the biggest, hairiest spiders live—and I saw the biggest, hairiest spider of them all fall down her front. Huge Hotels let out a piercing shriek that made my ears ring. She tore down the stairs and was out of the front door in two seconds flat.

I was impressed. “That was fast,” I said, throwing off my sheet and taking a breath of flour-free air.

Aunt Tabby looked cross. “Really, Araminta, what
are
you doing?” she said. “I don't know what's gotten into you. Is that my best self-rising flour you've been using?”

“Yes,” I told her. “But it didn't work. My feet didn't leave the ground once.”

Aunt Tabby tut-tutted and scooped up the
spiders that had fallen off their cobwebs and gotten covered with flour. Then she carried them down to the kitchens to dust them off.

I sat by the moldy curtains in the middle of a pile of flour and unwrapped my ghost sheet. Things were going well, I thought, but I knew Aunt Tabby was not going to give up that easily.

 

That evening, after Aunt Tabby had read me a story from
The Bedtime Ghouls and Ghosties Pink Storybook
and gone downstairs to feed the boiler, I got up. I crept down the attic stairs and waited in the shadows outside Uncle Drac's turret.

When the moon rose, the red door creaked open and Uncle Drac shuffled out. I watched him walk slowly down the stairs to the hall,
where Aunt Tabby was waiting with his thermos and sandwiches. She kissed him good-bye and waved him off to work. The front door closed quietly behind him, and Aunt Tabby disappeared back down to the basement.

I slipped outside and changed the sign again. Now it said:

That was sure to do it. Who would want to buy a haunted house?

S
aturday morning was not a great morning. Aunt Tabby was cleaning the boiler—again. Usually I stay out of the way when Aunt Tabby goes anywhere near the boiler, but today was different. I wanted to collect new supplies of flour for my ghost box, as I thought I might be needing it soon, and Aunt Tabby keeps all her flour in the third-pantry-on-the-left-just-past-the-boiler-room.

I had nearly passed the boiler room safely when Aunt Tabby looked up and saw me. Drat. I could see she was going to be trouble. She had a big sooty scrubbing brush in her hand, and she had just kicked over a bucket of water.

I was right; she
was
trouble.

“Araminta
dear
,” said Aunt Tabby, “will you
please
go and put Sir Horace back together. He has spent two whole days in pieces now.”

Sir Horace? Since when has Aunt Tabby bothered about
Sir Horace
?

“Do I
have
to?” I asked, annoyed. I had better things to do than put a heap of rusty junk back together. Why was Aunt Tabby always popping up when you least wanted to see her?

“Yes, you
do
have to.” Aunt Tabby kicked
the grate. “There are some people coming who want to buy the house, and I think a nice suit of armor in the hall will make a good impression. People like suits of armor. And Araminta—”

“What?”
I said.

“I want everything left nice and tidy,
please
! The people are coming this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” I gasped. “But that doesn't give me nearly enough time to—” Oops.

“To what?” asked Aunt Tabby suspiciously, peering at me through her sooty spectacles.

“To…er…clean up my room,” I told her in my nicest voice.

“Well, you had better get a move on then, hadn't you, dear?” said Aunt Tabby. “And take that awful old helmet back up with you.”

I picked up Sir Horace's helmet and got
out of Aunt Tabby's way. Not
more
people coming to see the house, I thought. Couldn't they read the sign outside?

I went out into the garden to see if Aunt Tabby had changed the sign, but she hadn't. It still said:

I didn't understand it. Why would anyone want to buy a haunted house? But just to make sure, I added a bit more to the sign:

I dumped Sir Horace's helmet on the floor in my Saturday bedroom—which is my favorite, as you can only get to it by climbing up a rope ladder and then squeezing through a small door, which keeps Aunt Tabby out. The trouble was, the rest of Sir Horace still lay all over the floor of my Thursday bedroom, so it took forever to bring all the pieces down the corridor and then throw them up through the door. I am a pretty good
shot, but I have to admit that not all the pieces got through the door the first time.

I started to put Sir Horace back together and, while I was working out which arm went where, I thought about my Plans for the afternoon. I thought that maybe I would try the Molasses on the Doorknob with the Invisible Tripwire Plan, although it might
need the Slimebucket Surprise, too, just to make sure. But whatever I was going to do, I had to get Sir Horace finished quickly, as Aunt Tabby was sure to come and check.

Sir Horace was really difficult to put back together. There were even more dents in him now, and lots of the pieces wouldn't go back where they were meant to, no matter how hard I pounded them. It was
very
irritating.

It was nearly lunchtime by the time I had put Sir Horace back together—all, that is, except for his left foot. His left foot was just about the most stupid left foot I have ever known.

I was feeling very annoyed, so I told Sir Horace exactly what was what.

“It's all right for you, Sir Horace, you moldy old rust bucket,” I said, “but I've got
much more important things to do. If I don't get my Plans ready, then some really
stupid
people who can't even read a perfectly
obvious
sign are going to buy this house, and we will have to move out. And when we do, Aunt Tabby is going to throw
you
in the recycling bin. And then you'll be taken away and squashed flat like a pancake and melted down and made into hundreds of tins—which will probably be filled up with cat food. Ha-ha.”

By now I was
really
annoyed with his left foot. I banged it upside down on the floor and it rattled. I shook it again, and then something really exciting happened—a small brass key fell out.

I could tell it was a very old key, as it was worn quite smooth as if it had been in someone's pocket for hundreds of years. But the
best part was that it had an old brown label tied to it, and on the label was some faint spidery writing in very old-fashioned letters. I could just about read what it said:

“Balconie” was a funny word, and I wondered what it meant. It sounded like a faraway land or an ancient underground city. Maybe, I thought, the key belonged to a treasure chest on a desert island called Balconie. I said the word out loud to myself, imagining the palm trees swaying and the water lapping at my feet, and then I realized what Balconie was. It was only the boring old balcony above the hall. And who would want to go
there
?

Me! That's who. Suddenly I knew it was the
perfect
place. I could do my Awful Ambush from there. And I've always wanted to do an Awful Ambush. It has just about everything in it, and it would make the Slimebucket Surprise look like a Sunday school picnic. Anyone coming to buy the house wouldn't last five seconds.

I gave one last shove to Sir Horace's left foot and—yes!—it went back onto the end of his leg. So what if it was on back to front? It didn't seem to bother Sir Horace, and it certainly didn't bother me. I had more important things to think about. Like how to get to the balcony. Of course, I knew there was only one answer to that—through a secret passage.