The Haunting Hour (3 page)

“Good work,” Lulu said, clapping her hands. “Very good work.”

“What do we do with them now?” I asked.

“You keep them somewhere safe, and then you use them,” Lulu answered.

“Huh?” I stared hard at her. “Use them? What do you mean?”

Suddenly the kitchen door swung open and Mom and Dad came rushing in, shaking out their umbrellas. Rainwater rolled off their raincoats. “Wow! What a night!” Dad said. His glasses were completely fogged.

Mom squinted at our cookie trays. “What on earth!”

“We made mud cookies,” Lulu told her. “Sort of an arts-and-crafts project to pass the time.”

“Ugh. They smell horrible!” Mom said, holding her nose. She turned to Courtney and me. “They're very cute. But do you think you could take them out of the kitchen?”

My sister and I carefully picked up our cookies. Then we said good night to Lulu, who was pulling on her raincoat.

“Remember, hide them away someplace safe,” she whispered. “I'll see you again, real soon.”

“You're wonderful! I can't believe you got them to do an art project,” Mom told Lulu, leading her to the door. “They
hate
art projects.”

I carried the Larry cookie up the stairs in both hands. I looked around my room and decided to put it on my dresser top. I'll show it to Larry the next time he's here, I decided. And I'll tell him it looks just like him.

I bumped the cookie against one of the dresser-drawer knobs. “Oh no!” I cried. The right hand broke off and fell to the floor.

I set the cookie down. Then I picked up the little pink hand and tried to press it back onto the arm. But the mud had dried. The hand wouldn't stay on.

Maybe I can Krazy Glue it, I thought.

“Time for bed, guys!” Dad shouted from downstairs.

I dropped the hand onto the dresser top next to the rest of the cookie and forgot about it.

Until the next morning at school.

Larry showed up in class an hour late. When he took his seat next to mine, he shook his head unhappily and held up his right hand.

I gasped when I saw the white plaster cast on it. “Larry—what happened?” I cried.

“Broke my hand,” he muttered.

I stared at it. “How?”

He shrugged. “Beats me. I was changing into my pajamas last night, and suddenly my hand felt like it cracked. Dr. Owens couldn't understand it. I've been at his office all morning.”

“Did you slam it in a door?” I asked. “Did you bang it on something?”

Larry shook his head. “No. It just broke.”

I pictured the broken mud cookie on my dresser and felt a chill run down my back. I couldn't wait to tell Courtney about Larry's hand.

“It's just a coincidence,” she said when I met her after school. “That mud cookie had nothing to do with it.” She laughed. “Poor Larry. How is he going to eat left-handed? He always uses
both
hands!”

We walked home. It was a sunny, cold day. Fat brown leaves danced around us on the sidewalk. “What if the cookies have powers?” I asked. “What if I broke Larry's hand?”

“No way,” Courtney replied. “The cookies are just mud. I'll prove it to you. I'll do something to Maryjo's cookie. Nothing will happen. You'll see.”

Courtney and I hurried up to her room. She pulled the Maryjo cookie from its hiding place in the dresser drawer. She set it down on her desk. “Let's see. What should we do to it?” she asked.

She didn't wait for me to answer. She picked up a pair of scissors, and
—snip snip—
cut off all the yellow hair.

I gazed at the cookie with its ragged, bald head. Then I shoved the phone into my sister's hand. “Go ahead. Call her.”

Courtney's eyes went wide. “Call Maryjo?”

“Yes. Call her,” I insisted. “See if anything happened.”

Courtney punched in Maryjo's number. “Hi, Mrs. Rawlins. It's Courtney. Is Maryjo there?” she asked.

Courtney's mouth dropped open. She suddenly turned pale. “Oh. I see,” she said. “Well…no problem. It wasn't important. Hope Maryjo is okay.” She clicked off the phone.

“What?
What?
” I asked.

Courtney slumped onto the edge of her bed. Her voice came out in a whisper. “I—I could hear Maryjo screaming. Her mom said she couldn't come to the phone. She was having some kind of trouble with her hair.”

I gulped. “You could hear her screaming?”

Courtney nodded. “She was yelling, ‘My hair—it's falling out! Help me! It's all falling out!'”

I stared at the bald cookie on the desk. I suddenly felt sick. My legs were trembling. “We—we have to tell Mom,” I said.

I turned and started toward the bedroom doorway. Mom's voice floated up from downstairs. “I'm going, kids. I'm meeting your dad for dinner in town. Lulu is here. Come down and say hi.”

Lulu?

Courtney and I both froze. “I'm not going down there,” Courtney whispered. “She's too scary. She has powers. She made us do horrible things.”

“We have to go down,” I said. “We have to tell Lulu the truth. That we don't want to hurt our friends.”

“I can hear you up there!” Lulu shouted. “Come down, you two.”

Courtney and I made our way down the stairs, clinging to the banister as if it were a life raft. Lulu stood in the living room, arms crossed, waiting for us.

She was dressed in black again, a black sweater pulled down over a short black skirt. A long purple scarf that matched her lipstick was curled around her neck.

“There you are!” she exclaimed, smiling.

“We know the truth about the mud cookies,” I blurted out in a trembling voice. “We don't think it's right to hurt people.”

A smile spread over Lulu's face. “It's not right—but it sure is fun, isn't it?”

“No,” Courtney said. “It's not fun. We're telling. We're telling my parents about it as soon as they get home.”

“No, you're not,” Lulu replied softly. Her smile faded slowly. “You're not telling anyone. Let me show you why.”

She lifted the lid off a square white box beside her on the coffee table. She pulled out two mud cookies and held them up, one in each hand.

Her eyes lit up. “See? I made Matthew and Courtney cookies!”

“Oh no!” I gasped. The Matthew cookie had black hair and a skinny body, just like me. The Courtney cookie was thin and wiry, like Courtney.

“No more talk about telling on me. Let's get busy,” Lulu said, holding the cookies in front of her. “We need mud, guys. We're going to bake some more special cookies today.”

“No way!” I cried. “You can't force us—”

Lulu plucked a white feather from a couch pillow. A grin spread over her face as she slowly raised the quill of the feather to the Matthew cookie—and plunged it into the center.

“
OW!
” I screamed, and doubled over with a sharp pain in my stomach. “Lulu—stop!” I gasped.

She twirled the feather in the cookie.

Pain shot through my whole body. I crumpled to the floor. “Please,” I whispered. “Please—take it out.”

She pulled the feather out of the cookie and, little by little, the pain faded away.

Lulu picked up my sister's cookie. “Do I have to teach you a
lesson too?” she asked Courtney.

“No. No. I get it,” Courtney said, her voice trembling.

“Then let's get to work,” Lulu said. “And do exactly as I say. Unless you'd like to see what happens when I dip your mud cookies in boiling water.”

Courtney and I had no choice. I climbed shakily to my feet. My stomach still ached. I couldn't catch my breath.

To my surprise Courtney did a cartwheel. She flipped over to the couch, forcing Lulu to jump back. Then Courtney climbed to her feet and brushed herself off.

“No tricks,” Lulu warned. She had the two cookies gripped tightly in her hands. “I like torturing kids.” Lulu's mouth broke into a crooked smile. “But I love to torture adults even more! Get moving. Today we will make mud cookies of your parents.”

Courtney and I trudged out to the backyard to dig up mud. We squatted by the vegetable garden and started to shovel.

“What was that cartwheel about?” I whispered. “Did you go totally nuts for a moment?”

Courtney glanced back at the kitchen window. Then she dug her hand into her shirt pocket. “Check this out,” she whispered.

She held up a long black hair. “I spotted it on the rug. I picked it up when I did my cartwheel.”

I began to see my sister's plan. “You're going to use it in a mud cookie?”

Courtney nodded. “Instead of Mom, I'm going to do Lulu.”

 

The plan worked. Courtney and I were a team. My sister made the Lulu cookie. And I kept Lulu busy on the other side of the kitchen. I pretended I had a splinter in my thumb. I made Lulu search and search for it.

Courtney slid the cookies into the oven to bake. When it was time for the cookies to cool, I got Lulu out of the kitchen. I took her upstairs to show her what we had done to the Larry and the Maryjo cookies.

“Nice work,” Lulu said, grinning. “You really paid them back for being so disgusting.”

When we returned to the kitchen, Courtney's surprise was ready. Lulu stared in horror at the mud cookie on the kitchen counter. It had bright-purple lips, a purple scarf at its throat, and Lulu's long black hair baked into its head.

“NOOOOOOO!” Lulu screamed. “You can't
do
this!” She dove for the cookie.

But Courtney grabbed the cookie out of Lulu's reach.

“Give it! Give it!” Lulu shouted. She made another frantic grab for it.

Courtney tossed the cookie to me. Startled, I caught it in one hand.

And its head fell off
.

Lulu screamed again. She grabbed for the cookie with both hands.

Too late. Her head rolled off her neck and bounced onto the kitchen floor.

The head kept right on screaming. Its eyes bulged with horror as it rolled to a stop against the kitchen counter. “Give me that cookie! Give it!” the head screeched.

Lulu's headless body lurched toward me, her arms outstretched. As she staggered forward, the purple scarf unraveled, revealing her open, cut neck.

Clawing the air, she took another step. Another.

Across the room her head screeched and cried, “Give it! Give it!”

Gripping the mud cookie, I backed against the wall.

The headless Lulu, her arms stretched in front of her, her hands grabbing, grabbing, closed in on me.

I was pressed against the wall. My heart thudded in terror.

I tried to duck away from her—and the cookie dropped out of my hand.

It hit the floor. I stared down at it, expecting it to be broken, but it wasn't.

I dodged to the side as Lulu's hands swiped the air in front of me. Now I was trapped. Trapped in the corner.

The headless girl swung her arms again.

Then…stopped. She froze.

I gaped in shock as her right shoulder crumbled away and vanished. Then the scarf disappeared. Then her arm crumbled away.

“Hey—Muttley!” I heard my sister's cry from across the room.

I turned and saw the big dog, his head down, his teeth chomping hard.

Muttley was gobbling up the Lulu cookie!

A few seconds later Lulu was gone. Her head too.

Shouting, screaming for joy, Courtney and I threw our arms around Muttley and gave him a hundred hugs. “You're a hero, boy! A real hero!” I cried.

“Thank goodness he eats anything!” Courtney exclaimed.

“We should give him a big steak dinner tonight!” I said. “He's a hero! A hero!” And I hugged him some more.

Courtney climbed to her feet. “Let's get the kitchen cleaned up before Mom and Dad get home,” she said.

“No. Leave it,” I replied. “Don't touch anything. We need to show it all to them. We have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Okay,” Courtney agreed. Her eyes searched the kitchen. “Where
are the two cookies Lulu brought? The cookies of you and me. Where did Lulu put them?”

“She brought them in here,” I said. “And then I think she put them—OH NO!”

Courtney and I began screaming together. “Muttley—no! Drop, boy! Drop! Muttley—DROP! PLEASE—DROP!”

INTRODUCTION

ILLUSTRATED BY
A
RT
S
PIEGELMAN

I
live in New York City. And when you live in such a crowded, noisy place, you overhear a lot of conversations.

One afternoon I was passing a junior high in my neighborhood, and I overheard two boys arguing. “You can be scared to death,” a tall boy in a Mets cap said. “It happens a lot.”

“No way!” his friend replied. “You can't just see something scary and drop dead.”

“Your heart can stop,” the first boy insisted. “It can just freeze. You get so scared, you just freeze—forever.”

Frozen in fear, I thought, watching the boys run for a bus. Is it possible for someone to be frozen in fear?

And just as I had that thought, it started to snow.

By the time I walked home, the snow was swirling—and my brain was swirling too. I rushed to my computer to write this story.

M
y friend Billy
thinks he's real cool. He's always telling us how cool he is—which is only one of the things that annoy us about Billy.

Billy is an annoying dude. Why? I could make a list….

(1) He's stuck-up.

(2) He's a show-off.

(3) He's a loudmouth.

(4) He thinks he's an expert on everything.

(5) He thinks he's smarter and better than us.

By us I mean me—Rick Barker—and my other friends, Loren and Fred. The four of us all live on the same block, and we've hung out since kindergarten.

So we're stuck with Billy, even though we complain about him all the time. I guess our main problem with Billy is that he never stops talking.

And he always talks about
death
.

“Did you know you can tickle a person to death without even touching him?” Billy says.

He's so weird. It's like he's obsessed. He's always telling us disturbing ways people can die.

“Did you know you can itch to death in your sleep?”

“Did you know a tiny feather can kill you if it falls from an airplane?”

Listening to that stuff is not entertaining. I mean, it can mess up your mind—right?

So today the four of us were walking to the neighborhood park, and when we got there, Loren, Fred, and I decided to put one of Billy's wild death facts to the test.

It was a snow day—school had been canceled. And we were in a really good mood.

The snow was at least two feet deep. Some of the drifts came up to my shoulders! It was wild. The whole world looked white. Except for the sky, which was solid blue. A beautiful, cold, crisp day.

Our breath fogged up in front of us as our boots crunched through the thick snow. We thought maybe we could get some little kids to share their sleds in the park.

But what was Billy talking about?

Three guesses.

“Did you know you can be frozen in fear?” he said.

I let out a groan. “Give us a break, Billy.”

“No, it's true,” he said. “You can be so frightened, your body freezes—forever. You can't talk. You can't move. It's like being scared to death, only you're still alive!”

“Okay, let's try it!” I cried.

I grabbed Billy by the shoulders of his parka. “Let's test this one out!”

I think Loren and Fred and I had the exact same idea at the same time. Billy struggled, kicking and squirming. But the three of us picked him up—and heaved him, feet first, into the tallest snowdrift we could find.

Before he could move, we started packing the snow around him. It was perfect packing snow, wet and heavy.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Billy cried.

“We're turning you into a snowman!” Fred exclaimed.

We worked furiously. Heaving the snow over him. Shoveling heap after heap onto his shoulders, his head.

“Can we talk about this?” Billy screamed. “You know I can't
stand tight places, right? Hey—stop! This is not funny. I'm freezing in here. I'm catching a cold. I can feel it already! Come on! Let me out of here!”

The three of us laughed.

It was pretty funny seeing the guy in such a total panic over a harmless joke.

“It was
your
idea,” I said. “Don't you want to test it? Don't you want to see if you really can be frozen in fear?”

“No! No, I don't!” Billy cried.

“Any last words?” Fred asked him.

“Yeah. Get me
out
of here!” he screamed.

Then we covered his head.

We poked some holes near the top for air. Then Loren found two perfect round stones for eyes and a bent twig for a nose. Fred and I scraped and molded the snow to round it off like a real snowman. And we packed it even tighter. Loren finished the job by tying her scarf around the snowman's neck.

“Yo, Billy, how's the weather in there?” I called. “How's it going, big guy?”

He didn't answer.

The three of us stepped back to admire our work.

“Good job!” Loren cried. We slapped high fives with our wet, snowy gloves.

We expected Billy to come bursting out, roaring and flinging snow at us. He could break out easily, I thought. I mean, how hard is it to knock snow away?

But he didn't move.

He just stood there, still as a snowman. The two stone eyes stared out at us.

“Hey, Billy?” I called.

Silence.

“Billy? Hello?”

A long, eerie silence.

“Billy?” I called.

No answer.

Fred laughed. “He's just trying to freak us out.” He pulled my arm. “Come on, Rick. There are some kids with sleds on that hill. Let's check 'em out!”

As we jogged over the snow, I glanced back. Billy still hadn't moved. What was he waiting for?

“Hey—American Flyers!” Fred shouted to some little kids. “Can we have a turn?”

 

How long did we sled? I'm really not sure. The afternoon sun was sinking in the sky. Long blue shadows stretched over the snow. We returned the sleds to the other kids and Loren and Fred went home.

Then I suddenly remembered Billy.

Rubbing my frozen cheeks, I made my way down the hill—and saw the snowman standing just as we'd left it.

Oh, no! I thought. Then I ran up to it and shouted, “Billy? Billy?”

We had forgotten all about him.

My breath caught in my throat. My whole body shuddered.

Was he frozen in there?

It was just a joke. Had we really done something horrible to the kid?

No! Please—no!

I grabbed the snowman's head. “Billy? Hey—answer me! Why don't you answer me?”

The snow was packed tight, like concrete. I dug my gloves in and began frantically pulling it off in big chunks.

“Billy? Can you hear me?”

Flinging snow everywhere, I quickly ripped away the front of the snowman. I clawed the packed snow loose and batted it to the ground.

“Billy? Hey—Billy?”

Furiously, I batted more snow off the round body.

There was no Billy inside.

I staggered back. Where is he? I asked myself, staring at the chunks of snow on the ground. He couldn't have climbed out. The snowman had been standing just as we left it.

A chill shook my body. I pulled my coat tighter but I couldn't stop shivering.

And then I heard a soft whisper from behind me. “
Rick—you froze me. You FROZE me!
”

“No!” I gasped.

I spun around. “Where are you?” I asked, my voice cracking. “I can't see you!”

Silence.

Just the sound of the wind, brushing snow off the tree branches.

Then the whisper again: “
You froze me, Rick
.”

And Billy stepped out from behind a tree.

Head down, he moved toward me, lurching, staggering in a strange slow motion.

And then slowly, slowly, he raised his head—and I saw his face. Crusted with ice. Patches of snow clung to his hair and eyebrows. Icicles hung from his cheeks, his chin.

I opened my mouth in a scream of horror.

Billy kept staggering across the snow toward me, his gloved hands outstretched as if ready to grab me. “
Rick, you froze me. You froze me to DEATH!
”

My teeth chattered. Chill after chill ran down my body. I stared at Billy, frozen in fear.

And then I felt something snap.

Something in my brain.

Just a soft
pop
.

I tried to move. I tried to cry out.

But I couldn't.

My legs, my arms—they wouldn't budge. I couldn't open my mouth to scream. I couldn't even blink my eyes!

I stared straight ahead.

Billy came closer. Closer. “Rick—what's your problem?” he asked.

I could see him and I could hear him clearly. But I couldn't answer. Couldn't move my lips or make a sound.

And then I remembered Billy's words…“
You can be so frightened, your body freezes—forever
.”

“Come on, Rick,” Billy said. “The joke is over. I'm okay. Really. Look. The ice and snow—I put it on my face to look scarier. See?”

He pulled a chunk of ice off his cheek.

“Rick—snap out of it,” he said. “I'm fine. I waited till you guys left. Then I smashed my way out of the snowman. No big deal. You were busy sledding. You didn't see me break out. You didn't see me rebuild the snowman.

“I put it back together,” he said. “Then I hid behind a tree and waited for you to come back.”

His hand squeezed my shoulder. I could feel it, but I couldn't move. He waved his hand in front of my face. But I couldn't blink. Couldn't move my eyes.

“Hey, Rick—you're kidding, right?” he asked. “Give me a break. Say something. Did you like my joke? It was good, right? Did I scare you? Come on, Rick—did I scare you?”