Ghosts Don't Wear Glasses Page 5

  She was nervous, too! That made me less nervous, so I said, “What?”

  “It’s about . . . Bryce.”

  Bryce? Why in the world was she calling me about him? He was my mortal enemy, who hated my guts more than . . .

  “You know, it’s not that he doesn’t like you,” she said. “It’s just that he’s jealous of you.”

  “Jealous?!” I almost dropped the phone. “He’s the one who tells me over and over how much cooler he is than me ’cause of all his brand-new cool stuff, and how lame and old my stuff is. What in the world do I have that would make him jealous of me?”

  “Your dad,” said Clementine.

  “All he does is make fun of my dad.”

  “I know. That’s because he’s jealous ’cause your dad is around. Your dad goes to your games and has dinner with you and teaches you stuff. Bryce’s dad is like my dad. He’s always working, so he’s not there a lot of the time.”

  “Oh,” I said. I realized Clementine had a point. My dad had been a Cub Scout leader when we were little, taught me everything I know about fixing stuff, and he coached Little League on every team I ever played. He barely even missed a practice.

  “I just wanted you to . . . um . . . know that,” she said. “Good luck and see you later, Fish.”

  “S’later, Clementine.”

  Back outside, I took a big bite of spaghetti. Bryce, jealous of me? It sure was hard to believe. I was about to say something to Roger, but the topic of dads was sort of sensitive for him, too.

  “It’s too bad about the old Royce place,” said Venus all of a sudden, looking right at me, like she knew about our plans. All thoughts about dads flew out of my head with her green eyes on me like laser beams.

  “Looks like we’re in for a new golf course and condos,” said my dad.

  “Yep,” said Uncle Norman. “Since the years of probate are almost up and there’s no will, it seems the house will go to the town. And Benedict Billings has done a good job convincing the town board that luxury condos are just what the town needs. Plus, the town will receive whatever millions the real estate king has promised them for the land.”

  “But probate doesn’t end till Friday,” said my dad. “So until then, it still belongs to the Royce family. You never know. An heir might pop up.”

  “That’s true,” said Uncle Norman. “It’s like fishing. You don’t get a bite all day—or all night—and then wham! You’ve got a big one on your line.”

  “I’m catching the biggest fish tonight. You watch me,” said my dad.

  “We’ll see about that, big brother.”

  “I heard runaway slaves stopped at that house on their way to freedom,” said Venus. “Imagine that? The Underground Railroad ran right through this town.”

  “That house is a landmark,” agreed my mom. “Plus, Hannibal Royce was one of the most famous whaling captains of his day.”

  Venus and my mom cleaned up while my dad and Uncle Norman stayed outside, talking about the moon and the tide and fishing. I was busy putting stuff back in the fridge and thinking about the dare and whether we had everything we needed when Venus said, “I feel sorry for the ghost. It’s stuck around this long probably to pass along one final message. If the house gets torn down and the ghost doesn’t get to take care of unfinished business, it will only be more unhappy.”

  “How do you know the ghost is unhappy?” asked Roger.

  “You can sense it when you drive by the place,” said Venus. “It feels so sad.”

  My mom was biting her lip the way she does when she’s not sure what to say.

  “You believe in ghosts?” I asked.

  “Well, I think some people can sense them and some can’t, so it depends on which kind of person you are,” said Venus, looking into my eyes again. “But if a ghost has come into your life, then it means it needs your help.”

  “Yeah?” said Roger. “That’s just what T. J. said when we went to the one-legged whaler’s—”

  I kicked Roger. Luckily my mom was busy washing the dishes and didn’t hear him.

  “Good luck, boys,” said Venus. “The full moon is an auspicious time for ghost hunting.”

  Roger and I looked at each other, eyes wide. How in the heck did she know?! I didn’t think astrologers were mind readers, too.

  The sky was streaked pink and orange as the sun started to set. Sixty minutes till go time. I let myself in the back door of Roger’s house and ran down the steps to the basement. T. J. was already there, laying out his sleeping bag. We had planned to sleep over at Roger’s since Mrs. Huckleton was going to a late yoga class. That meant we wouldn’t have to be home till 9:25. Our curfews are nine o’clock, but when Summer is in charge, so long as we don’t bug her, we can pretty much do what we want.

  “Let’s do an equipment check,” said T. J.

  “Don’t tell me you brought all that crazy Dr. Ghost B. Gone stuff,” I said.

  T. J. ignored me. “I have the princess recorder and the thermometer. Did you bring the EMF detector?”

  I nodded and pulled it out, along with the other much more useful stuff I had in my pockets. “I have my pocketknife, a compass, a flashlight with brand-new batteries, string, a notebook, a pen, and a mini screwdriver.”

  “So long as you have the EMF detector, we’re okay. It could save our lives.”

  “Not another matter of life and death,” I groaned.

  “It’s death and death,” said Roger, grinning. “And it’s the only way I’m gonna know when my subject arrives on the scene so I can start my SPOOKtacular interview.”

  I shook my head, but I had to laugh. “You know that’s ridiculous. No matter what Venus says, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “What did Venus say?” asked T. J.

  Roger started telling T. J. about the ghost’s unfinished business when he stuck his hand in his big cargo shorts pocket and it went right through. “Hey, where’s my camera? I know I put it in my pocket.”

  We looked all over, but we couldn’t find it. Stuff like that never bothers Roger, but it was a gift from his dad. No matter what he says, I know that makes it extra special for him.

  “It must have fallen out when we ran out of the one-legged whaler’s house,” said T. J.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll find it tonight.”

  “Hey, did you leave it turned on?”

  “Yup,” said Roger. “It’ll be dead as a doornail now.”

  “Doornails were never alive, so they can’t die,” I said.

  “Will you guys please stop talking about dying?” said T. J. “What is important is that the camera recorded everything. Dr. Ghost B. Gone’s team always leaves an IR camera running during a preliminary investigation, to monitor the entity.”

  My stomach turned over again in that weird roller-coaster way. Maybe that third helping of spaghetti and meatballs wasn’t such a good idea.

  “We have to go,” I said, pushing all ghostly thoughts out of my mind.

  It was almost eight o’clock by the time we got to the one-legged whaler’s house. The whole place was filled with shadows. The sky was a dark pinky red. At least it was still light out, because the sun didn’t set till 8:18.

  There was a group of kids gathered in front of the fence, waiting for us. We biked slowly down the road toward them.

  “Thought you were going to chicken out,” said Bryce, who sat on a brand-new neon-yellow electric scooter.

  “Bawk! Bawk!” said Trippy and True.

  I was about to get mad at Bryce, but I remembered my conversation with Clementine. It was hard to believe he was jealous of me, sitting on top of that cool new scooter.

  Clementine stepped out from behind them. She leaned toward me and whispered, “Good luck!”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Good luck, dudes!” Mi and Si fist-bumped us.

  Two O said, “Hope you make it out alive, guys. I said a prayer for you.”

  We stared up at the house and all those overgrown trees.
Even Bryce looked uneasy, his eyes darting all over the place.

  “So, you losers ready?”

  Jealous or not, Bryce was still mean. And that made me forget all about being scared.

  “We’re not losers, we’re ghost hunters,” I said.

  A murmur went through the crowd.

  “You mean paranormal investigators,” said T. J.

  “Just call us Spooky, Kooky, and Ooky,” said Roger.

  “And we were born ready,” I added, to get into the spirit of things.

  The crowd started to cheer. OK, it was the quietest cheer you ever heard, but it was still a cheer.

  Then the three of us did our secret handshake and walked through the opened gate and into the trees. . . .

  THE GAMMA-RAY GHOST

  “Kooky, Spooky, and Ooky?” I said as we made our way along the winding driveway.

  “Yeah,” said Roger. “T. J. is Spooky because of his paranormal know-how, I’m Kooky ’cause of my crazy and brilliant ideas, and you’re Ooky.”

  “Why am I Ooky?”

  “’Cause that’s all that’s left.”

  We reached the turn in the driveway at the willow tree. If the one-legged whaler’s place was dim and spooky during the day, those shadows were way longer and way darker at sunset, with the last of the light filtering through the leaves. It was hard not to imagine someone or something was hiding in the bushes ready to jump out at us.

  We were far from the crowd of kids, and their voices had faded away. Would they hear us if we called for help? I took a deep breath. It’s just an old house. There are no such things as ghosts. The trees are just trees, not shadowy beings with arms reaching out to grab us.

  SCRITCH! SCRATCH! TAP! TAP! SCRITCH! SCRATCH! TAP! TAP!

  “What was that?” whispered Roger.

  “Just the diurnals on their way to bed and the nocturnals getting ready for the night,” I said, rubbing my palms on my shorts.

  “Huh?” said T. J.

  “You know, the animals that are active during the day, like squirrels and rabbits, are going to bed, and the night animals, like raccoons, are—”

  “And bats,” said Roger. “I bet there are lots of bats. And you know there’s this bat called a vampire bat that sucks human blood and one time one got into this guy’s house and bit him in the toe and sucked out all his—”

  “Vampire bats only live in South America,” I said. “There are none in Whooping Hollow ’cause it’s way too cold here.”

  Our voices trailed off as we found ourselves facing the house. The sun had sunk below the trees and the sky was the deep purple of twilight, with a scattering of stars. Soon the moon would rise. Shadows stretched from where we stood to the house, inky black like long fingers of darkness. The windows with the broken shutters looked out at us like empty eyes.

  “It sure is dark,” said T. J.

  I pulled out my flashlight and turned it on. Somehow the little light it cast only made the dark all around us seem even darker. And that made the rustlings and creakings seem even louder.

  “Guys,” whispered T. J. in a quavering voice, his flashlight shaking in his hand. “You know entities feed off fear, so it’s important not to get scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” said Roger in a squeaky voice, turning on his light.

  I led the way up to the house. We stopped a few feet from the porch and we all looked up at the door.

  “Think the house has been bleeding since we left?” said Roger.

  “Knock it off, Roger. Those drip marks are exactly the same as they were before. And they’re dry.” I shined my flashlight on them to prove my point. “See? Let’s get going. We only have an hour before we need to get home. We should retrace our steps to the main hallway and then try the rooms across from the dining room. Maybe one of them is the study.”

  “You think someone would keep a harpoon in a study?” said Roger.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Hannibal Royce collected harpoons, besides inventing them. Lots of times people keep collections of old valuable stuff in a study, so it’s possible that’s what Admiral Royce did with his ancestor’s harpoons.”

  “It might be in the basement,” said T. J. “You know, where everyone says the ghost—I mean, the entity—put its victims.”

  “Think we’re going to find the skeleton of the paperboy down there?” said Roger. “Wonder if his ghost wanders around, too. . . .”

  BEEP! BEEP! We all jumped.

  “It’s just my watch, guys,” I said. “I set it to go off every fifteen minutes, so we won’t lose track of time.” None of us wanted to get home late and be grounded. “Let’s go. It’s eight o’clock on the dot.”

  “Don’t want to miss our deadline,” said Roger, glancing uneasily left and right. “Get it—DEADline?”

  T. J. shifted his shopping bag nervously.

  “Come on, guys. Whatever we thought we saw or heard last time, it wasn’t a ghost. There’s no mystery that science can’t explain. It’s like when Sir Isaac Newton saw the apple fall from the tree and said, ‘What goes up must come down.’ Then he went on to figure out the laws of motion and gravity. He was the founder of modern science because of—”

  “Okay, Great Brain, but I bet old Newton never went into a haunted house,” said Roger.

  “Maybe not, but he proved that everything in nature can be explained,” I said.

  I trained my light on the crumbling steps of the side porch and jumped over the missing one all the way to the top. T. J. came next, holding his flashlight out like a sword, and Roger was right behind him.

  I took a deep breath and slowly turned the knob. After all the pushing we did last time, now the door creaked right open. Boy, was it dark in there.

  “This way.” I walked around the table, past the refrigerator, and through the swinging door into the dining room.

  It was darker in there and our eyes had to blink to adjust, even with the flashlights. One sweep around the room and I found the door. We edged our way past the long wooden table. Suddenly, a light appeared right in front of us.

  “Aaahhh!”

  “An orb.” T. J.’s breath was in my ear as he grabbed my arm so hard it hurt.

  “Um . . . Hello . . . um . . . Your . . . um . . . Ghostly . . .”

  I swept my light around again and the light ahead of us moved, too.

  “Guys,” I said. “That’s not an orb. It’s my flashlight being reflected in the mirror on top of that cabinet with the dishes.”

  All three of us exhaled as we walked past the cabinet and through the door into the hallway. This room was brighter, as the rising moon shone through the tall windows.

  We looked up the stairs. Even though I knew the ghost was just an illusion, it was hard not to remember that shadow moving and the creepy tap-tapping that sounded an awful lot like a peg leg hitting wood.

  I aimed my flashlight up and down the stairs. T. J. and Roger pointed theirs, too.

  “See. Nothing here.”

  CLINK! PLINK! CLINK! PLINK!

  “What’s that?”

  I pointed the beam of my flashlight up. There was nothing on the stairs. I aimed the light up higher. The chandelier crystals were moving ever so slightly in the wind.

  “You know that paranormal activity is heightened during the full moon,” said T. J. “On account of increased magnetism on the earth plane.”

  “Well, that was just the chandelier,” I said. “Not some ghostly manifestation. So don’t take out your thermometer, Teej. We already know there is a draft in here that makes the temperature rise and fall. Now let’s go.”

  We moved across the hall to the two facing doors. The one on the left was closed, and the one on the right was open. I could have sworn both doors were closed the last time we were here.

  OOMPH! T. J. fell. Roger and I whipped around, flashlights blazing.

  “What happened?”

  T. J. stood up, holding a dark rectangular object: Roger’s camera. “Look, Rog. It’s not even dead. That mean
s it probably picked up some footage of the entity.”

  “Thank you, Teej!” said Roger, taking the camera with a big grin on his face.

  “T. J., how many times do I have to tell you? There are no such things as ghosts or entities or orbs or streaks or whatever. We have to find the harpoon.”

  “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” Roger pointed from the closed door to the open door. “Catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go—”

  “Come on, Rog,” I said. “We’ll be here all night.”

  There was no logical reason to be nervous, but my heart started beating fast as I moved toward the closed door. I wasn’t afraid of the ghost, but I had this creepy feeling we were being watched. I remembered what Venus had said about the ghost hanging around because it was unhappy.

  I turned the knob and walked into the room. There was a fireplace at one end and a bunch of furniture covered with old sheets. Dust lined the floor, thick as a carpet. Over the fireplace hung a big gold-framed painting of a whaling ship chasing a whale that had been harpooned.

  “Wow!” I said, moving closer and pushing the cobwebs away. “Look at that ship!”

  “Look at all that blood,” said Roger. “That whale’s a goner.”

  “Please don’t talk about blood,” said T. J., looking green in the light of our flashlights.

  “Hey, check out this ship in a bottle,” said Roger, shining his flashlight on a small table in the middle of the room. “Cool.”

  “Look at this,” said T. J., moving over to a glass-fronted cabinet filled with scrimshaw, carvings on whalebone sailors made when they were bored at sea.

  BEEP! BEEP!

  It was 8:15 already. We had to hurry.

  “Bingo!” said Roger, standing in front of a closet. “I think it’s our lucky day—I mean night.”

  “You found a harpoon?”

  Roger pulled something long, skinny, and pointy out of the closet.

  “TA-DA!”

  “That’s a curtain rod, Sherlock,” I said.

  “There’s lots more stuff in here,” said Roger, walking deeper into the closet. “A croquet set, a trunk, a vacuum cleaner, something longish and skinnyish made of metal. Could it be a har—”