Crandalls' Castle (10 page)

Last night I told Lilly I was starting to enjoy it, and she was glad. No “I told you so,” nothing like that. She's a good person, and so are Ray and Rona Franz.

It still bothers me, though, that they all think I have to “let off steam.”

Charli was waiting in the backyard after breakfast this morning, and we cut across the field to the Castle together. She's waited there every day this week, and it's not because she loves my company. Today she wanted me to promise if that boy Jake came back, we wouldn't let him in.

“He won't be back,” I said. “He didn't like us very much, remember?”

She gave me that stubborn look. “He might come,” she said. “He might want to look for that woman again. The one in the living room.”

I told her there hadn't been any woman in the living room, but the closer we got to the Castle, the more jittery she was. One thing's sure, I'm not the only uptight kid living on Lincoln Street.

Will's truck was in front of the house, and when we went inside we could hear him banging away in the basement.

“Don't come down here,” he yelled (as if we wanted to!). “A pipe rusted out and there's two inches of water on the floor. You kids get started on the first-floor windows. Just the insides—I don't want you up on the ladder.”

Good! I thought. I'd been wondering what would happen when we got around to the windows. I'd climbed a tall ladder a couple of weeks ago, but that didn't mean I wanted to do it again.

Will had mixed vinegar and water in the two buckets, and there was a pile of rags waiting on the kitchen table. We picked up what we needed and went down the hall to the living room.

“We could surprise Uncle Will and do the outsides, too,” Charli said. She had stopped near the front door, and I could tell she was just itching to go through it. “I don't mind climbing ladders.”

“He doesn't want you to,” I told her. “He can reach the corners easier than you can.”

She didn't argue, but you could see how scared she was. The sun was shining and the living room was empty except for the chair, but she looked as if she was walking into a cave full of snakes.

I let her take the window closest to the door, and I started at the other end. She watched me at first—I don't think she'd ever washed windows before—but mostly she looked at the chair. She kept peeking over her shoulder at the wall across from the windows, too—I don't know why.

“That quilt on the chair used to be in a bedroom upstairs,” she said all of a sudden. “How do you think it got down here?”

Is that all that's bothering her? I wondered. “Maybe Will brought it down to cover stains in the chair,” I said. It sounded possible to me, but she shook her head.

“I hate this house,” she said, glaring at the chair as if it were a wild animal that might attack at any minute. “I really hate it!”

For once I was ready to agree with her, but I managed to keep still. She's thinking about ghosts, and I've never seen anything ghostly, here or anywhere else. I don't want her telling Rona and Ray that Sophia's as scared of ghosts as she is!

I concentrated on the windows, which were really dirty. The windows in my great-grandmother's apartment never had a chance to get dirty—she washed them every single Saturday. Once, when I could tell she was feeling sick, I offered to do them for her, and she let me. When I finished, they looked exactly the way they had when I started.

Washing the Castle windows was a lot more satisfying. As I wiped away the dust, it was like lifting a curtain. The sky got bluer, and the grass across the street looked greener. I picked out Jake in the bunch of kids playing kickball in the street, and I could see chickadees fluttering around a feeder between two of the little houses.

At least, I could for a while. Then the light began to change. Oh, I could still see the birds and the kids all right, but not as clearly. And the sky was gray blue, then all gray. The view began to fade as if the sun was setting—at ten o'clock in the morning.

Charli said something, or maybe it was just a groan. I supposed she was seeing the same thing I was. “Storm's coming,” I said, but I thought there had to be some other reason for the darkness. The trees weren't blowing. The kids in the street didn't stop playing to look up at the sky. The darkness came from inside the house, or inside our heads. It was as if a blanket had dropped over the Castle.

I stepped backward and bumped into the bucket, sloshing water across the floor. If Charli heard, she didn't even look in my direction. I could just make her out, standing like a statue in front of the window. I said, “Hey, are you okay?” I started toward her, and it was like walking through curtains of cobwebs. That, and the way she stood there, so still, scared me worse than the darkness.

When I was almost next to her, she whispered, “Go away—go away!” It made me mad for a second or two, until I realized she wasn't talking to me. She was talking to the window!

Chapter Sixteen

CHARLI

Charli stared at the
thing
in the window. It was a dark, shifting shape, about her own height, partly hidden by swirls of fog. And it was coming closer. There was no face, but when the shape flattened itself against the glass, she could feel its rage. The washrag slipped from her fingers as she ran.

Outside, the sun shone on Barker Street. The sky was a brilliant blue, without a trace of menacing gray. Charli darted through the ball game, ignoring the players, and kept going. She didn't slow down until she reached the front door of her bright blue house.

She pushed her key into the lock with trembling fingers and stumbled inside. No one was home, and the deadbolt on the door wasn't enough to make her feel safe. She ran down the hall to the bathroom and locked that door behind her, too.

Sunlight streamed through the window, filling the bathroom with warmth. She took deep breaths and looked around, grateful for familiar sights: her toothbrush in its rack, her mother's silver comb, the big bottle of bubble bath they had bought on sale at the drugstore. Ray's blue bathrobe hung behind the door.

Surely that thing, whatever it had been, couldn't follow her here. Still, the memory of the terrifying figure in the glass loomed so vividly in her head she thought she might be sick.

How could Uncle Will imagine guests would want to stay in a haunted house? If they tried it once, they would never come back. And they would tell all their friends to stay away—she had to make him believe that. Maybe her mother and Ray could help her convince him.…

No, not Ray. He hadn't listened before, when she tried to describe what she and Dan had heard upstairs in the Castle. Why would he listen now? He'd get angry. He'd be disappointed in her. Just when things were beginning to get better between them!

Think about that, she told herself. Think about the three afternoons this week when she and Ray had ridden their bikes to the lake as soon as he got home from work. The swimming lessons had turned out to be more fun than she'd expected. First she'd practiced floating on her back, not just for seconds but for long minutes, until she'd learned to relax and trust the water to hold her up. Then she started on a simple stroke, trying to move her arms and legs and lift her head out of the water in a steady rhythm.

It was hard work, but gradually she had begun to enjoy herself. She was a big nothing in sports at school, but with Ray's help swimming might be different. She could actually feel herself getting good at it. After the third lesson, Ray had told her she was a natural—a star pupil.

So how could the star pupil say she believed in ghosts and had seen one and never wanted to go near Crandalls' Castle again? For the first time she wondered about Sophia, who had been there when the ghost appeared. Had she seen it, too? If she had, maybe she would tell Ray. He might believe
her
.

She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her face was splotchy and her hair was limp with sweat. She felt hot but shivery at the same time.

“I really am sick,” she told the mirror. “I'm too sick to work.”

Being sick meant chicken soup and crackers in bed, instead of pork chops and mashed potatoes in the kitchen. It meant having your temperature taken and swallowing two oversized vitamin C capsules. It meant milk and buttered toast for breakfast instead of waffles with syrup, and, since she had finished all this week's library books, it meant being stuck with nothing new to read.

On the good side, it meant that her mother and Ray fussed over her, stopping at her bedroom door often to ask how she was feeling. It meant a whole plate of Aunt Lilly's chocolate chip cookies, in case she began to recover. Being sick meant having Uncle Will sit on the edge of the bed and tell her funny stories. It even meant having Sophia come to visit. She and Lilly appeared the next afternoon with flowers from the Crandalls' backyard and a dish of cinnamon-flavored custard.

“I can't stay,” Aunt Lilly said. “I left the boys out on your porch, because Gene has the sniffles. We don't want to add a cold to your problems, dear.” She gave Charli a kiss on the top of her head and hurried out, leaving the two girls in an uncomfortable silence.

“Sorry you're sick,” Sophia said, finally. “You should have said something yesterday.”

So that was how it was going to be. If she'd seen anything frightening at the Castle, she wasn't going to say so.

“I felt funny,” Charli mumbled. “You know, like I might faint. Everything was getting dark so I … Did you stay all morning? Did you see how dark it got?”

Sophia ignored the last question. “I told Will you'd left, and he said I should go, too. The leak in the pipe is much worse than he thought, and he's going to have to talk to a man at the hardware store about how to fix it. Or maybe get a plumber. He thinks all the pipes might have to be replaced.”

“That's awful!” Charli exclaimed. “That would cost a ton of money.” She thought of Uncle Will, trying to make her feel better last night and keeping this big worry to himself.

“Will said to give you this,” Sophia said. “He said you wanted something to read.”

Charli groaned. The book was the autobiography of William Herndon that Uncle Will had been carrying around in his truck.

“I'd rather read about kings and queens and movie stars.” She hesitated, feeling childish again under Sophia's cool gaze. “Have you read it?”

Sophia shook her head. “Not yet. I forgot about it.”

“You can have it first,” Charli offered, but Sophia was already starting for the door.

“Maybe later,” she said over her shoulder. “I'm going to take care of the kids this afternoon while Lilly makes new curtains for the catchall room.”

“You mean your bedroom,” Charli said, but Sophia had already gone.

The book was called
The Story of a Life
. Couldn't William Herndon have thought up a more exciting title? Charli thought, bored already. If he was smart enough to become governor, he should have been able to do better than that. Yawning, she opened the book to the first page.

My life almost ended soon after it began.

She sat up straighter, startled by this unexpected first sentence.

To the eyes of others, I must have seemed a most fortunate child, and in many ways I was. My father was wealthy, and we lived in the largest house in the town of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. But there was a dangerous situation in our household of which my parents were unaware. My mother's younger sister Jennifer had moved in with them after she was left an orphan. She imagined herself in love with my father. He had courted her briefly before asking Dorothy, my mother, to marry him.

The three lived together in outward peace for two years, without any indication that my aunt was jealous, bitterly resentful, and becoming increasingly unstable. She believed people gossiped about her and pitied her, and perhaps she was right. Small towns can be cruel. Perhaps she dreamed that one day my father would realize he had married the wrong sister. After I was born, however, that secret hope died. According to all accounts, my mother and father were happier and more in love than ever.

When I was two years old, my parents invited friends for a Fourth of July picnic in our backyard, followed by fireworks. Nobody noticed Jennifer slip away as the fireworks began. I was upstairs asleep, but fortunately my mother decided to carry me outside to see the bright colors. When she reached the nursery, she saw an incredible sight. Jennifer was holding something—a pillow or a blanket—over my face. If my mother hadn't arrived when she did, I would certainly have suffocated. Jennifer shrieked in rage and attacked my mother viciously. She never spoke a sane word again.

I didn't hear this story until I was in my teens, and even then my mother couldn't tell it without crying. For nearly a year Jennifer was confined to a back bedroom, with nurses to care for her day and night. My mother said they could hear her sobbing for hours at a time, and, chillingly, she often begged to have the “dear baby” brought to her so she could hold it. When she died, it must have been a relief to everyone.

“We didn't dare let her near you,” my mother told me with tears in her eyes.

Soon after Jennifer's death, my parents, eager to escape painful memories, sold the house and moved to Appleton, where I grew up and they lived to celebrate their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Charli couldn't eat the soup her mother brought in for supper, and she turned down Ray's offer to drive into town for ice cream.

“Maybe you should see the doctor,” Rona said anxiously. “It scares me when you turn down ice cream, Charli. What are we going to do with you?”

“I'll be okay,” Charli said.

“Sure you will,” Ray agreed. “You'll be fine.”

She could tell by the way he looked at her that he had begun to suspect she wasn't really sick. But he's wrong, she thought miserably. If she'd been halfway pretending before, she wasn't now. Her head throbbed and her stomach churned every time she thought about the madwoman who had tried to kill little William Herndon and had died in a back bedroom of the Castle.