Ghost Stories (7 page)

“We'll get done a lot faster if we split up,” Frank suggested. “The place is so small that we can holler if we get attacked by anyone.”

“Ah, yes.” Joe hesitated. “Meet you here in half an hour?”

Frank nodded and walked to the right. Joe took the left, feeling much less brave than his brother, but not wanting to admit it. He went through several houses, finding what seemed to be the usual for Flaming Rock. Fires in the stoves. Food still on tables. Apparently, whatever had happened here had happened at dinnertime, he thought wryly.

Then he came to the schoolhouse. It was the most eerie of all the buildings. There were little desks in neat rows. On top lay open books, inkwells, and
quill pens. As the boy gazed around the room, a breeze ruffled some of the pages.

There was chalk and an eraser on the blackboard and the teacher's last message was written on it: “Tuesday, September 23rd. Vocabulary drill.” Underneath were the words assigned for that day. One of them was “ghost.” Very appropriate, considering what happened to the town, Joe thought.

When he left the school, he passed several more houses and then decided to investigate a bigger building which was the general store. Perhaps something in there would give him a clue as to Flaming Rock's fate!

As he pushed open the door, which squeaked on its hinges, something told him to pull back. But he did not yield to his intuition. The next thing he felt was a hard blow and he crashed to the floor.

Everything went black in front of Joe's eyes. When he came to, his head hurt. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. He sat up and rubbed his forehead. Suddenly he had the feeling that he was not alone in the room.

His heart beat wildly. He felt a bump swelling on the back of his head, covered with something sticky in one spot. Blood, no doubt.

Joe lay back again and closed his eyes. He still sensed another presence. Was it the man who had struck him down? Was his assailant approaching him, ready to finish him off if he showed any signs of life?

Joe was frightened, but finally his curiosity won out. He opened one eye. His flashlight, which he had
dropped on the floor, was still on and cast a dim light across the room. Joe's eye swiveled across a row of merchandise stacked neatly along the wall, but with a layer of dust on top. Then he saw him.

He was standing near the great glass candy case. He was an Indian warrior, almost naked except for a loincloth and several strands of beads around his neck. He held a tomahawk in his hand, but it was not raised. Then he began to heft it playfully.

Oh, let this be a dream, Joe moaned inwardly. Please, let it be a dream!

The Indian was dark and had a strong and handsome face. Around his forehead he wore a headband studded with turquoise. Actually, he was a grand sight. But Joe was too frightened to realize that there was nothing hostile in the man's expression.

He stared at the loosely held tomahawk in the Indian's hand and kept silently praying that the brave would put it down far away from him. He also tried to convince himself that the Indian was nothing but a symptom of his own overactive imagination.

Just then the Indian began to speak. His voice was very deep and controlled, yet there was something ghostly about it.

“You are trespassing on sacred ground!” the apparition intoned. “Ever since the land was stolen, it has been cursed for as long as the grass grows. Because of the atrocities committed against my tribe by the drunken miners, the people of Flaming Rock are doomed to wander, homeless, for all eternity!”

Joe sat up and stared at the man, who seemed real
and unreal at the same time. “Wh-what happened?” he managed to mumble.

The Indian paid no attention to his question, but went on in the same, even tone.

“You and your brother will be spared. But only if you go back and tell what you have seen. Now, leave this place at once!”

Joe shivered. If you only knew how much I want to leave, he thought. But he said nothing.

The Indian took off his headband and folded it up carefully. Then he stepped forward and placed it on the counter.

“Take this!” he said. Then, suddenly, he was gone.

Joe sat, too stunned to move. I wonder where Frank is, he thought dully. Why isn't he here when I need him? Suddenly it occurred to him that his brother might be needing him even more. He may be in worse shape than I, Joe figured and stood up. His limbs still ached from his fall, but apparently he was not injured seriously.

Gingerly he touched his bruise again, relieved that he felt no nausea, which might have indicated a concussion or a fractured skull.

He still wondered if the Indian had socked him with the tomahawk. No, he finally decided. That would have cracked my head for sure. Those things are deadly weapons!

He picked up his flashlight. On the floor, he noticed an old-fashioned coal scuttle turned on its side. It was a peculiarly shaped pail in which people
used to carry the coal they burned in their fireplaces and stoves.

Joe beamed his light around. At least a dozen such coal scuttles were hanging over the door, and he saw that one of them had simply fallen from its nail. “That's what clouted me!” he cried out aloud. “It wasn't the Indian at all, just another of those weird accidents that make it such fun to walk around Flaming Rock!”

Then he stepped to the counter. The headband was still there. He reached out and took it. It felt real. Joe stared at it for a moment, then put it in his pocket. Finally he went out of the general store.

He stumbled a little, still dizzy from his ordeal, and tried to breathe deeply in the cool night air. His head pounded with pain. He called out for his brother, but his voice sounded weak, and there was no reply.

He called again and felt even dizzier. He started to hallucinate and imagined seeing eyes glowing in the dark and hearing people talking, shuffling, walking around him.

He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. Then he realized there were desert animals and other nocturnal creatures around, trying to find acorns or other food. Strange, Joe thought. Earlier there had been no sign of life at all, now I see squirrels and mice. And they were real, he knew.

He moved on again, and went through the house next to the general store. He beamed his light around, but found nothing unusual. Afterward he called his brother again, but received no reply. I just
have to keep looking in all the houses, Joe thought. I hope I'll find him!

The next place had a cellar with two big doors opening out from it. Joe decided to explore it. He opened the doors with some difficulty. They were very heavy and the hinges had rusted. The basement was filled with tools, old pieces of timber, and some broken furniture. Joe walked inside. Suddenly he froze. He realized that he had stepped right over a snake that was just as surprised as he.

Now it coiled between him and the door, and he could see in the beam of his light that it was a diamondback rattler!

Joe had no doubt that the snake was real. He stood stock-still, beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. Then he heard a noise. A little pack rat, who apparently had been sharing this part of the cellar with the rattler and had managed to survive, appeared off to one side, staring at both Joe and the snake. Then it jumped straight up in the air and ran for the corner. The rattler struck instinctively in that direction, but missed by a good foot.

But the strike had carried it far enough away from the door so Joe could jump past it and rush out of the basement.

Frank, meanwhile, had been exploring several homes and had arrived at the town jail. It consisted of a waiting room/office and two cells. Frank beamed his light along the walls and found that things were written on them.

“Graffiti, 1870 style!” the boy exclaimed.

Most of it were drawings and Indian words. Frank chuckled to himself. Probably curses called down on the heads of white men, he thought. He assumed that the jail had been used mainly to house Indians, whom the white men had at first made drunk with cheap whiskey and then had cheated out of their property before imprisoning them until they sobered up.

He wandered inside the first cell. Suddenly he heard the door click behind him. He whirled around and tried to push it open, but it would not budge. He was locked in!

Yet there was not a soul in sight, and not even the slightest breeze was blowing. Who had shut the door?

A chill went down Frank's spine. “Joe!” he cried out as loudly as he could. “Joe, help!”

But his brother did not answer. He's probably at the other end of town, doing his own exploring, Frank reasoned. I just hope
he
doesn't get trapped anywhere! The thought frightened him even more. Would the Hardys be locked up forever in a town that didn't even exist?

Joe, meanwhile, was making his way closer to the prison, and every time he finished investigating another building, he called out for his brother. Finally he heard a faint reply.

“Here, Joe! I'm in jail!”

Joe rushed toward the low structure as fast as he could and dashed inside. When he saw Frank's face behind the bars, he couldn't help but laugh.

“It's not funny!” Frank grated. “Now, let me out,
will you? I noticed a key on the wall right over your head.”

Joe took the key from a nail and put it in the door. But it would not turn! He pushed the door open. “It wasn't locked, dummy!” he declared.

Frank stared at him. “It was a minute ago. Don't you think I tried to get out?”

“How'd you get in?”

“I just walked in and the door shut behind me. There was no one around and no wind. Don't ask me how it happened.”

“I believe anything,” Joe murmured.

“Look at the stuff on the walls,” Frank said. “Some of it I can't decipher, but the drawings are interesting.”

“I'm not coming into that cell?” Joe protested. “What if the door locks when we're both inside?”

“You're right,” Frank said. “Anyway, there's more in the waiting room.” He walked out of the cell and the boys beamed their lights into every corner. Suddenly Joe stopped and started to read an inscription.

“Hey, Frank, listen to this! It says ‘On this day, in the white man's calendar March 6, 1871, six Indian braves were hanged for stealing horses they did not steal. Tomorrow, the rest of us go to join our brothers on the white man's gallows. Flaming Rock and all its people will be cursed for this crime. The Great Spirit will sweep down and take them from the good land, the land they ripped open with their mines and laid to waste with their carelessness. The Great Spirit will make Flaming Rock a hole in space. No more.' ”

“Fantastic!” Frank exclaimed. Quickly he pulled a pencil and a piece of paper out of his pocket and copied the inscription.

“Do you think that's what happened?” he asked when he was finished.

“I was told the same thing by an Indian brave a little while ago,” Joe said.

“You what?”

“You heard me. I went into the general store, got conked out by a coal scuttle, and when I came to this guy stood there with a tomahawk in his hand. He told me the town had been doomed because of what they did to his tribe, but that you and I would be spared if we left right away and told what we saw.”

“How—how do you know you weren't just seeing a ghost?” Frank asked.

“He may have been a ghost, but he had a real headband on.” Joe pulled the gift out of his pocket. “Here. He gave it to me.”

Frank fingered the headband in awe. “This is incredible!” he said finally. “Joe, what do you think we should do?”

“Leave,” Joe said simply.

“Maybe one of us should stay and wait for the other to bring the sheriff in the morning?”

“I don't think so,” Joe said. “By morning the town may be gone, and whoever stays right along with it!”

Frank nodded glumly. Then he brightened. “I tell you what. Why don't we return to the car and spend the night? If the town's still here in daylight, we'll
take pictures. At least we'll have some proof that Flaming Rock really existed.”

“Great! I'll go along with that,” Joe said. “And now, let's hurry away from here. This place gives me the creeps!”

The boys went back to their car and managed to catnap fitfully through the night. When the sun rose in the morning, they quite expected the village to have disappeared. But to their surprise, it was still there!

Frank took his 35mm camera from the glove compartment and shot almost a whole roll of film of the mysterious place. With the help of a telephoto lens, he got close-up pictures of the hotel, the store, the schoolhouse, and the jail.

“This should do it,” he said with satisfaction when he had snapped the last frame. “Now people will
have
to believe us.”

Joe was less confident. “The story has been told before, and the people who told it have vanished,” he said gloomily.

“Your Indian friend asked you to report what you saw,” Frank reminded him. “And I have a feeling he was a good sort. He'll watch over us.”

“I hope so,” Joe said and started the car.

They carefully drove back down the same rutted road they had taken the day before. When they got to the top of a rise, Frank turned to take one last look at Flaming Rock.

“Joe!” he cried hoarsely. “It's gone!”

“What?” Joe jumped on the brakes and, when the
car had stopped, turned around. The town was no longer there.

“Spooky!” Chet Morton declared when he heard the story a few days later. “Did you show the pictures to the closest police chief out there?”

“There were no pictures,” Frank said.

“What do you mean? You took them, didn't you?”

“Yes. But not a single one turned out. All were fogged.”

Biff Hooper, who sat next to Chet on the sofa, nodded. “Of course they didn't turn out, because the whole thing never really happened,” he declared. “It was something like autosuggestion on the Hardys' part. They were set off by the magazine article they read and imagined the whole thing.”