Kristy and the Haunted Mansion Page 2

Dawn’s position in the BSC is alternate officer. That means that she can take over the duties of any other officer who can’t come to a meeting.

  For example, if Stacey McGill couldn’t come one day, Dawn could fill in as treasurer. Stacey doesn’t miss many meetings, though. She loves her job as treasurer because: a) she’s a math whiz, so it’s easy and fun for her, and b) she loves to collect, count, and hoard money! Sometimes we practically have to beg her to “release the funds” for a pizza bash.

  To me, Stacey looks like a model. Honest! She has medium-length blonde hair, which is curly and wild. She gets it permed, I guess, though I never pay too much attention to beauty details like that. Stacey also dresses like a model, in outfits I couldn’t even begin to imagine wearing. Like lacy purple leggings with big floral tops, or black miniskirts with little cowboy shoes.

  Stacey grew up in New York City, which may explain why she is so sophisticated. She moved to Stoneybrook permanently after her parents got divorced. Stacey lives here with her mother, but she visits her father as often as possible. He still lives in New York. Stacey is an only child, and I think because of that the divorce has been especially hard on her. She often feels pulled back and forth between her mother and father. For example, recently her mother was very sick with pneumonia and Stacey felt she needed to be with her, but she had also promised to attend a special event with her father in New York. At times like those, Stacey tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing nobody. That can’t be easy.

  The other thing that makes Stacey’s life hard is that she has diabetes. That’s a life-long disease in which the body doesn’t process sugars correctly. What it means for Stacey is that she has to be very, very careful about what she eats (no sweets) and that she has to give herself shots of insulin (which her body doesn’t produce the way it should) every single day. If I had diabetes, I’d probably complain about it to anyone who would listen, but Stacey hardly ever complains. She just deals with it.

  Have I made Stacey sound like a hard luck case? She’s not. She’s full of fun and always ready to jump into whatever’s happening. She’s a little boy-crazy, wild about shopping, and a great baby-sitter.

  Those last three things would also describe Stacey’s best friend, Claudia Kishi. Claudia is Japanese-American, and really gorgeous. She has long black hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, and a beautiful complexion. Like Stacey, she’s a wild dresser. But while Stacey’s outfits tend to be trendy, Claudia’s are better described as — well, as creative, I guess. Claudia’s a terrific artist, and she applies her artistic ideas to her clothing. She might wear a hand-painted silk scarf to top off a polka-dotted jumpsuit, for example. Or two handmade papier-mâché earrings that look like little donuts, with a third that looks like a cup of coffee. (Claud has two holes pierced in one ear, and one in the other.)

  Claudia is vice-president of the BSC, but just like the vice-president of the country, she doesn’t have a lot of official duties. She’s vice-president mainly because we use her room — and her phone — for our meetings. Claud has a private line, and without it we wouldn’t have a club. We could never tie up anyone else’s line the way we do hers. She does have one official duty: answering the phone when clients call outside of meeting hours. And she has one unofficial duty: supplying the refreshments for our meetings.

  Claud’s unofficial duty is a labor of love, since she is the Junk Food Queen of Stoneybrook. And although Claud isn’t very good at memorizing things or taking tests (which is why she doesn’t get such great marks at school, unlike her older sister, Janine, who is a true genius), she knows her junk food. She can tell you the ingredients and special properties of every candy bar on the market. She can compare and contrast Doritos and Ruffles. And she could pass a cola taste test with flying colors. She just loves junk food, and she always has plenty of it on hand.

  You wouldn’t see any of the stuff at first if you walked into her room, though. Why? Because she hides it, since her parents don’t approve of it. They don’t approve of her taste in reading, either; Claud loves Nancy Drew books, and her parents would rather see her read books that are a little more challenging. So the Snickers bars can often be found nestled in a sock drawer, next to a well-thumbed mystery.

  The other club members serve as our junior officers. While the rest of us are thirteen and in the eighth grade, Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike are eleven and in the sixth grade. They are both great sitters, but neither of them is allowed to sit at night unless she’s sitting for her own family. That’s why we call them junior officers, and that’s why they take a lot of the afternoon jobs.

  I can see Jessi and Mallory being friends at eighty-five, just like Mary Anne and me. There they’ll be, on the porch. Mal will be sitting in a rocker, writing in her journal. (She wants to be an author-illustrator of children’s books, so she’s always writing.) And Jessi will be standing near the porch railing with her foot stretched out on top of it, still limber despite her advanced years. (She’s a dedicated ballet student, and never seems to stop stretching and practicing.)

  Mallory has curly red hair, glasses, and braces. She sometimes refers to her glasses and braces as “the bane of her existence,” a phrase she picked up somewhere which means, basically, that she hates them. She’d like to get contacts, but her parents say she’s too young. Fortunately, her braces are the clear kind, so they don’t even show much — a fact she has a hard time believing. Mal comes from a gigantic family. She has seven younger brothers and sisters! (I’ve already told you about two of them; Nicky, who’s a Krasher, and Vanessa, who’s a cheerleader for the team.)

  Jessi’s family is much smaller. She has a younger sister and a baby brother. Also, her aunt lives with the family, just to help out. Jessi is black, with beautiful cocoa-colored skin and these long, long ballet-dancer legs. I’m really glad that both she and Mallory are in the club.

  Finally, the BSC has two associate members. They don’t usually come to meetings, but they’re ready to help out whenever we’re swamped with too much work. One of them is a girl named Shannon Kilbourne, who lives in my new neighborhood, and the other is Logan Bruno, who happens to be Mary Anne’s boyfriend!

  There. Now you know everything there is to know about the BSC. And now I can finish telling you about what happened after the game that day. That fateful day, as Mallory might say, if she were writing one of her stories.

  At the ball field, the rain began to fall harder, and the clouds were growing darker by the minute. The air was heavy, and the sky was turning a funny greenish color. My friends ran for their parents’ cars, yelling good-bye as they dashed through the rain. Nicky Pike pulled on my arm. “Kristy,” he said, “I’m going to ride home with my parents, okay?”

  “Sure, Nicky,” I replied. “That van was pretty crowded, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “Got your glove?” I asked.

  He held it up. “Okay, then,” I said. “See you soon. Congratulations on a great game!” I gave him a high five, and he ran off toward the Pike station wagon.

  Soon only Bart and Charlie and I, plus the rest of the Krashers, were left on the field. “Let’s get our stuff together,” I said. “Looks like it’s going to start pouring any minute now.” Charlie left to pull the van around so that we could load it up, and Bart and I started to gather the equipment. The kids ran around pretending to help, but I noticed that most of them were playing, instead. Karen was trying to catch raindrops on her tongue. David Michael, Buddy, and Jerry were running and sliding on the wet grass. Jackie was practicing his batting stance, and Chris and Patty and Joey were playing “monkey in the middle” with one of our softballs.

  Bart and I looked at each other, shrugged, and started to load up the van. “Okay,” I said, when we were finished. “Let’s get going!” Nobody paid attention. The rain was falling more heavily. Bart cupped his hands around his mouth. “Last one in the van is a rotten egg!” he yelled. That got them going. The kids piled into the van, jostling each other and calling out dibs
on the window seats. Bart and I climbed in last, and as soon as we’d taken a quick head count, Charlie started the van and we were on our way.

  Just as we reached the main intersection in Redfield, the storm let loose. I heard a tremendous clap of thunder and saw the sky flash with lightning. Rain poured down, making it hard to see through the windshield. Charlie peered ahead, then slowed down, watching for road signs.

  In the back of the van, Patty burst into tears. “I’m scared of thunder!” she wailed. I reached my hand over the seat to grab hers.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re safe in the van. Safe and dry, in our cozy little van.” I was trying to sound soothing, but it wasn’t easy. I happen to be a little scared of thunder myself. Well, not thunder, but lightning. I’m old enough to know that thunder can’t hurt you, but lightning can. This fear of mine is a deep, dark secret. Everybody thinks I’m fearless, but the truth is that I never feel totally at ease during a thunderstorm. I’m always reading these articles about people being struck by lightning and having their zippers welded shut and stuff, and the idea just scares the daylights out of me. But, because I’m scared of lightning, I’ve also learned a lot about it. I know how to stay safe during a storm (don’t go under a tall tree, for example, since lightning is attracted to the tallest point in a landscape), and it just so happens that one of the safest places you can be is in a car. Because of the rubber tires, I think. So anyway, I felt pretty confident in telling Patty that we were safe.

  The rain poured down harder, and the thunder boomed even louder. I saw lightning flash to the ground up ahead, and I winced. Some of the other kids were beginning to whimper a little now, and I felt Karen’s hand sneak into mine. She was sitting on one side of me, and Bart was on the other. I turned to him. “Some storm, huh?” I said, trying to sound casual.

  He nodded, but he seemed distracted. He was looking ahead, through the windshield. “Charlie,” he said suddenly. “Weren’t we supposed to turn right at that light?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Charlie. “Our turn is near a big fence with vines climbing over it. Isn’t it? I’ve been watching for it.”

  “I saw that fence,” said Jackie, who was sitting in the front seat next to Charlie. “It was way back that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

  “Are you sure?” asked Charlie.

  “Pretty sure,” said Jackie.

  “Well, I’m just going to keep going for a mile or so,” said Charlie. “Maybe there’s another turn we can take.”

  By this time, we’d left the town of Redfield and were driving along a road with fewer houses. Big trees arched over the road, their branches tossing in the wind. We were practically crawling along, since Charlie could hardly see to drive. The windshield wipers just could not keep up with the rain that was washing down over the van. Charlie was hunched over the wheel with his face close to the windshield. “I think we can turn up here,” he said. He sounded kind of tense, the way he does before his team has a big football game.

  By this time, there was an odd silence in the van, broken only by Patty’s sniffles and the sound of gasps every time a bolt of lightning lit up the world outside the van. The kids needed to be distracted from the storm. “Hey, how about if we all sing?” I suggested, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Let’s do ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’ okay?” I launched right into it. “Take me out to the ballgame.” But nobody joined in. I looked around at the scared little faces. “Don’t like that song?” I asked. “Okay, how about another? Jackie, you choose.”

  “I can’t think of any songs,” said Jackie quietly. He was gazing out the window.

  I gave up, and decided just to sit quietly.

  “Hey, Charlie,” said Bart. “Maybe we should go back to that little general store we passed awhile ago. They might have a phone, or maybe we could ask for directions.”

  “Good idea,” said Charlie. He slowed down and turned the van around. “How far back was it?” he asked.

  “Not too far, I think,” said Bart. “It was near that big barn.”

  By this time we were really in the country. The woods were deep along the sides of the road, and I hadn’t seen another car pass us in quite awhile. I hadn’t seen many houses, either. At least the rain had let up a little, enough so we could see out the windows.

  “Take a right here!” said Bart, when we came to a crossroads. “I’m pretty sure the store was down this road.”

  “Okay,” said Charlie. “But I don’t remember —”

  The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a loud clap of thunder. Karen put her hands over her ears, and Patty wailed. Charlie just drove on.

  We crossed a little bridge that I didn’t remember seeing before, and everybody stared out the windows at the swollen stream that ran beneath it. The water ran up over the creek’s banks, wild and wavy and full of foam. I saw a couple of good-sized branches being carried along and realized that the water was moving very fast.

  “Wow,” said Chris. “Look at that!”

  “Forget the stream,” said Jackie. “Check out that house!”

  “Oooh,” said three or four of the kids. I peered out the window to see what they were looking at. A huge, imposing brick house stood high on a hillside. A long drive led to it, winding through clumps of tall trees. There were no flowers in the yard, no clothesline, no birdbath. I thought I saw a few lights on in the house, but somehow it still looked empty and abandoned. I felt a chill run down my spine. There was something creepy about the place.

  “Whoa!” said Charlie, breaking into my thoughts. The van came to a sudden stop. “Oh, man, now what are we going to do?” he asked. I looked through the windshield and saw what he was talking about. Another stream and another bridge were in front of us. But this stream was out of control, and the bridge was almost completely washed away!

  “Go back,” said Bart. “Quick! Go back to the other bridge.”

  But guess what happened when we got back to the other bridge? It wasn’t there. We looked silently at the few posts that still stood. It didn’t take long to figure out that we were stuck. I tried not to panic. “Okay,” I said. “There’s no way off this road right now, so we’re just going to have to knock on somebody’s door and ask to use the phone.” I thought of the washed-out bridges. “We might even have to ask if we can spend the night,” I went on.

  “At the haunted house?” yelped Jackie.

  “What haunted house?” I asked.

  “The creepy brick one,” he said. “That’s the only house on this whole road.”

  “I’m sure it’s not haunted,” I said, even though I thought it looked creepy, too. “Anyway, it’s our only choice.” Charlie had already turned the van around, and within minutes we were driving up that long, twisty driveway.

  “Weren’t the lights on before?” asked Bart, as we approached the house. It was completely dark.

  “I think so,” I said. “Hey, look,” I added. “There’s a little cottage. Maybe we can ask there instead of at the big house.” I felt relieved at the sight of the cottage, which was hidden in a grove of pines. It looked much homier than the brick house, although no lights were on.

  “Must be the caretaker’s house,” said Charlie, unfastening his seatbelt. “Coming, Kristy?” he said. “Let’s go see who’s home.”

  I followed Charlie to the door of the cottage, and stood aside while he knocked. I was getting soaked by the rain, which was still pouring down, but I was beginning to feel hopeful that soon we’d all be warm and dry. Maybe the owner of the cottage would even give us some hot tea.

  Then the door opened.

  A man stood in the doorway, looking down at us. He was tall and thin and a little stooped, and he had scraggly gray hair. It was still light enough for me to see that his face was gaunt and his gray eyes had no sparkle. The weird thing was that he just stood there looking at us. He didn’t say a word.

  I didn’t say a word, either. I couldn’t. I was speechless.

  Luckily, Charlie
pulled himself together. “Hello, sir,” he said. “We were driving on the road down there,” he pointed vaguely across the lawn, “and we got stuck when both of the bridges washed out.”

  Now, if I had been the man answering the door, I probably would have said, “Oh, dear, that’s terrible. Why don’t you come in and dry off?” But the tall man? He didn’t say a word. He just kept looking at us. I felt the hairs at the back of my neck begin to prickle.

  “I wonder if we could use your phone?” Charlie asked politely.

  “No phone here,” said the man. “Nor up at the big house. And even if we did have those confounded contraptions, they wouldn’t work anyway. Power’s out.”

  Well! He could talk, after all. He wasn’t exactly friendly, but at least he had finally spoken. Then his words sunk in. No phone! We were stuck there — probably for the night — and we wouldn’t even be able to call our families. My stomach did a flip-flop. This was not a good situation.

  “Is there a phone anywhere around?” asked Charlie. “Maybe we could walk to one.”

  “Impossible, with the bridges out,” said the man shortly.

  Charlie glanced at me and grimaced. I knew how he felt. We were in big trouble, and we weren’t going to get any help out of this strange old man.

  Then he surprised both of us.

  “You can stay up at the big house,” he said. “I’d have you here, but I see you’ve got a passel of kids with you, and I don’t have the space.” He nodded toward the van. I looked over at it and saw eight small faces, plus Bart’s, peering out at us.

  Maybe the old man wasn’t so bad after all. “That’s very nice of you, sir,” I said. “Does that house belong to you?” I didn’t mean to be nosy, but I was awfully curious about why he was able to offer it to us.

  “I’m the caretaker,” he explained. “Nobody’s lived there for ages. I’ve been taking care of it for — for more years than you’ve been alive, I’d say.” He peered at me, and just then I heard a roll of thunder and the sky lit up for a second. I saw the man’s hard, gray eyes looking into mine, and I felt a chill. I shook it off.