Why I'm Not Afraid of Ghosts (3 page)

Dora hovered near the ceiling, smirking. She must have moved fast enough to get out of the way of the dog's charge.

“Smooth moves,” Dora taunted.

“The dog surprised me,” Robbie protested. Yeah. That was it. The dog surprised him.

That wasn't the same as scaring him.

“Look out, Robbie!” Dora teased. “I'm coming down. I don't want to
surprise
you!” She began laughing.

Robbie glared at her as she drifted down from the ceiling to the floor. She was laughing so hard, tears came out of her eyes.

“Oh, you're so good. You're so
scary!”
she yelped. She laughed so hard, she drummed her feet on the floor. “Oh, you're—you're such a
ghoul!”
She floated out of Oliver's room into the hallway, giggling the whole time.

“Shut up! Just shut up!” Robbie charged up the hall, so mad, he forgot his stomachache.

He ran right through Dora! Which he immediately regretted. Their ghost energies got all stirred and snarled up.

Dora lay on the floor and moaned.

Oh, well.

At least she wasn't laughing anymore.

* * *

“Here's what I'm going to do,” Robbie announced. They were back up in the attic and feeling better. “I'll groan and howl after he's asleep. He'll wake up with nightmares!”

“You groan like a sick cow,” Dora commented.

Robbie bristled. Of all ghost tricks, he was best at sound effects. “Oh, yeah?
You
sound like a dying cat.”

“Oh, yeah? We'll just
see
who's the best groaner.” Dora stood up straighter, took a huge breath, and let out a series of truly awful groans.

It sounded to Robbie as if she were lying deep inside a dark, dank cave. She even got her groans to echo.

Robbie had to admit, she was good.

But he couldn't let her know she had impressed him. She was bossy enough already!

“That's nothing,” he said. He was determined to do a better groan. Then she would
have
to say something nice. “Listen to this!”

He started with the low, terrified moan of a person
who's going home after dark and sees a big shadow coming after him. Then he raised it to the shivery mid-moan of someone who can't run any faster. Finally, he lifted it into the shriek of horror as the shadow catches up to the person.

For a second Dora looked like she might say something nice. Then she said, “Not even a sick cow. Sick calf!”

“Oh, come on!” Robbie flopped to the floor in frustration.

Dora took another turn moaning. It sounded to Robbie like the moan of someone whose body was covered with giant squirming, slimy slugs.

She cut off the moan with a slippery gurgle. As though one of the slugs had crawled into her mouth!

“Pathetic,” Robbie sneered. He groaned and moaned the way he imagined someone would whose toes and fingers were being nibbled off by rats.

Then he groaned louder, as if the rats were eating their way up his legs and arms.

He ended with one of his trademark hair-raising shrieks.

Dora started moaning again before Robbie even finished.

Pretty soon they were both howling so loudly, they couldn't even hear each other.

Robbie didn't care. It felt good to moan and groan and howl, even if no one was listening. It was fun. Sometimes it got very boring being a ghost.

He and Dora stopped groaning. They grinned at each other.

“I don't know about you,” Robbie declared, “but I'm ready for tonight!”

* * *

Robbie wished bedtime would hurry up. He couldn't wait to put his plan into action. But the evening seemed to drag on forever. After dinner Oliver and Shawn watched horror movies on TV. So Robbie and Dora watched them too—invisibly.

On the TV set Frankenstein's monster lurched toward terrified villagers in Transylvania.

“How come you like horror movies so much, when you don't even believe in ghosts?” Shawn asked Oliver.

Oliver shrugged. “They're cool.”

“I like pretending I'm the monster,” Shawn said. He hunched his shoulders, lifted his arms, let his hands flop down at the ends. Then he moaned.

Robbie stared at the back of Shawn's head. What an eerie sound the kid made! It was the sound of someone alone, scared, and in pain. The kid could go pro!

Robbie sneaked around and peered at Shawn's face.

Shawn's eyes glowed behind his red-framed glasses, and his jaw had dropped. He looked brainless and scary. And somehow bigger.

Weird.

Oliver studied his friend. “Awesome,” he murmured. Shawn looked pleased.

The next movie, about a giant crawling eye, scared Robbie. He hid in the wall so Dora couldn't see his knees knocking.

“Buck-buck-buck-buck-buck,” Dora squawked.

What is she doing? Robbie wondered. He peeked out from his hiding place.

“Buck-buck!” Dora flapped her elbows like chicken wings. “You are such a chicken, Robbie! Look at these guys. They're not scared at all!”

Robbie glanced over at Oliver and Shawn. Oliver wolfed down microwave popcorn. Shawn snuck pieces of popcorn to Spooky, who was pretty sneaky about eating it.

They all stared at the screen. Even Spooky.

Occasionally Oliver or Shawn said, “That's so dumb.” “That's so stupid!” “No one would do that!” “This is the lamest movie on the planet!”

But they didn't turn off the TV until the very end of the movie.

Shawn left after the eyeball movie. Then Oliver went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and climbed into bed.

Robbie waited until Oliver's breathing slowed into sleep.

It was time to put his plan into action. He would use all his classics!

First he tuned his voice so lifers could hear him.

He coughed a couple of times to clear his throat. Then he launched into the groan of a man seeing a dead, rotting body for the first time. Kind of a this-is-so-horrible-I'm-going-to-barf groan.

He thought about Spooky jumping right through him and groaned some more, remembering how much his stomach hurt.

Oliver didn't stir. His breathing stayed steady.

Robbie moved closer to the bed.

He moaned the moan of somebody in a haunted house, faced with dozens of ghostly skeletons and rotting corpses, waving loose arms and legs and bones.
Wooooaaaagggghhhhh!

No reaction from Oliver.

Robbie shook his head. This kid could sleep through a train wreck!

Robbie imagined something huge and scary appearing in front of him out of the darkness. When he had cranked his fear up to maximum, he shrieked.

A beautiful, high-pitched shriek. Sharp as a knife.

Oliver never even twitched!

Robbie took a huge breath, then let out his best wall-shaking, floor-rumbling, black-cat-screeching groan, driving it up and up into a howl that ended in a shuddering scream of terror.

Oliver sat up straight in bed.

Robbie smiled.

Finally! It was working! Nobody could ignore Robbie's best groan!

Wait a second.

Oliver was just sitting there. His eyes were still closed.

Was he sleepwalking? Robbie wondered. Or sleep-
sitting?
Was he even scared at all?

Better make sure. Robbie started another groan.

Oliver's eyes opened. Wide.

Yes!

“I did it!” Robbie yelled. “I scared him. I win!”

Y
es! Robbie cheered silently. Dora couldn't scare Oliver. But I sure did!

He watched gleefully as Oliver jumped out of bed and ran into the hallway.

Robbie followed, grinning. For years and years Dora had been dancing around in her bones, taunting him with all the scares she could do that he couldn't.

This was so sweet!

Robbie scampered down the hall after Oliver, posing like a muscle man, flexing first his right bicep, then his left.

Oliver dashed to the master bedroom. He threw open the door.

“Mom? Dad?” Oliver called from the doorway. “Dad?”

No doubt about it. Robbie had won the contest!

“What is it, son?” a grumpy voice mumbled from the bed.

“Dad, Nell's having one of her nightmares again,” Oliver explained. “She's moaning and groaning.”

“What?” Robbie cried.

Nell? Nightmares?

What was Oliver talking about?

“Poor kid,” Mrs. Bowen murmured.

“Guess we'd better check on her,” Mr. Bowen said.

With yawns and groans, Oliver's parents got out of bed. They followed Oliver back down the hall to Nell's room. Robbie drifted along behind them, all his triumph washing out of him.

Mr. Bowen listened at the door. “I don't hear anything.”

“Maybe she woke up,” Oliver suggested. “The moaning was real loud just a couple of minutes ago.”

Mrs. Bowen turned the door handle, and they all crept into Nell's room.

Robbie hung his head in despair. He felt terrible!

Robbie's classic moans, his awful groans, his piercing shrieks—Oliver thought they came from a little whimpering kid with nightmares?

What a big fat failure!

“I thought she grew out of those nightmares,” Mrs. Bowen said, sitting on the bed next to Nell. She touched Nell's cheek. “Honey? You okay?”

“I'm fine,” Nell murmured in a sleepy voice. “What's wrong?”

“Were you having a nightmare?” Mrs. Bowen brushed Nell's hair out of her face.

“Kind of. There were weird noises in my dream.”

“Are you okay now?” Mr. Bowen asked.

“Sure.” Nell yawned behind her hand.

“You sure showed me.” Dora's voice behind him made Robbie jump.

He
wished
she would stop doing that!

Dora hovered right behind him and giggled. “That was so scary, Oliver thought he was hearing his ittybitty little sister!” she gloated. Then she burst out laughing.

“Oh shut up,” Robbie muttered.

He dragged himself back up to the attic, feeling miserable.

“You are such a loser,” Dora teased. She danced across the floor, up the wall, and all over the ceiling. “Loser!”

She wore a totally smug grin. She hung upside down, which made her smile even worse. “The tiniest of the whiny! The whimpiest of the impy!”

Holding her skirts, she skipped back and forth on the attic ceiling. “You'll feel even stupider when
my
plan works!” she announced.

Oh, no! What if Dora came up with something really cool?

“What are
you
going to do?” Robbie asked.

If
her
scare worked, she would be impossible to live with! She would gloat. And call him names. And laugh at him.

And there was no way he could get away from her. They were stuck here in this house with each other. Forever!

Her next plan better not work.

What could it be?

Maybe he could sabotage it.

No! He wasn't supposed to think like that.

They haunted the house
together.

They might insult each other for decades, but they weren't supposed to get in each other's way. Not when the goal was to scare a lifer! Ghosts were supposed to work together on hauntings.

“What's your plan?” Robbie asked again.

Dora smiled her killer grin.

“You'll see,” she promised. “And watch out. It will scare the afterlife out of you!”

O
liver and Mike Conway strolled down the school steps together after their last class. Mike's all right, Oliver thought. But he sure talks nonstop.

“I'm not kidding, Oliver,” Mike was saying. He shoved a clump of red hair out of his eyes. “I've definitely met one ghost, and I've heard about some others.”

Oliver shook his head. All the kids in this town were like Shawn, he thought. Obsessed with ghosts!

“I've lived in a lot of different towns,” Oliver remarked. “But I've
never
met so many kids who believe in ghosts.”