by Dawn E. Garrott Illustrations by Luthando Mazibuko
Bellwood Press Evanston, Illinois
CONTENTS Chapter 1 / The New Old House ................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 / All Together Again ................................................................... 7 Chapter 3 / A Room of His Own ................................................................ 13 Chapter 4 / What Happened at Supper ................................................... 19 Chapter 5 / Alone in the Dark................................................................... 27 Chapter 6 / The Invisible Monster ........................................................... 37 Chapter 7 / It All Depends on How You Look at It .................................. 43 Chapter 8 / Spy Clones! ............................................................................. 51 Chapter 9 / The Surprise .......................................................................... 57
Chapter 1 THE NEW OLD HOUSE “Here we are,” said Dad as he stopped the car. He smiled at William, who sat beside him, and then at Riley, who was in the backseat. “This is our new home.” Riley looked up from the Brilliant Star magazine that he had been checking out while William played with their ClickOn Gamer. He stared at the house, wide-eyed with dismay. No one had told him it would be like this! The house stood among large, leafy trees and seemed huge— one, two, three stories high. Once it had been white, but now it was a dirty gray and some of the paint had fallen off. Wooden steps to the front porch sagged, and black shutters on the upper windows were broken, with pieces hanging down. A sudden breeze blew and rattled everything that was loose as dark clouds began to fill the sky. Riley was used to big buildings in Manhattan, New York City, New York, where they had lived all his life until this move to Hartland, Ohio, but he had never seen a house like this. Not 1
for real—only in books or cartoon shows about Halloween. Although it was July, the clouds that would soon shut out the sun made him think of Halloween even more. “This house isn’t new, it’s old!” he exclaimed. “Yeah,” said William. “Maybe a thousand years old!” William was almost seven, a year older than Riley, and sometimes he knew things Riley didn’t. “It’s new to us because we just bought it,” said Dad. “But you’re right. It is old. Someone built it more than 130 years ago.” “I hope it’s haunted,” said William. “It looks exactly like a haunted house, so it must be.” Dad laughed. Riley didn’t feel like laughing at all. William put down the Click-On Gamer, took off his seat belt, and turned around, getting up on his knees to look at Riley. When he saw his brother’s face, he said, “Riley’s scared.” “I am not,” said Riley. “Hang on,” Dad told William as he drove into the gravel driveway beside the house. He called back to Riley, “Think about it. Would Mom be unpacking our things in a haunted house?” 2
Then he gave two quick toots on the horn. “That’s to let her know we’re home.” “This isn’t home,” Riley said. But Dad didn’t hear him because William spoke at the same time. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked as Dad stopped the car in front of a small, twostory wooden building. It stood beside the house, but farther back from the street. “This is the carriage house,” Dad explained. “We’re going to fix it up to use as a garage. Whoever built the house kept horses and carriages in it.” He got out of the car and stretched a big stretch. Riley got out and stretched, too. Dad was tall and thin, and stretching made him seem even taller and thinner. William was like Dad, but people said that Riley was like Mom, who was short and heavy. Sometimes they said it as if that weren’t a good way to be, but Riley didn’t care. It was Mom who had shown him how to stretch, with his head and arms thrown back. “That makes us tall enough to reach the sky,” she explained, laughing. “And that’s tall enough for anybody.” 3
“Ahhh! That felt good,” Dad said. “We’ll leave your things in the car for now. Let’s go in the front door. I want to show you something.” The boys had to run to catch up with him because he walked so fast with his long legs. Riley wanted to explore, but there was something he wanted to do even more. He had seen Dad and now he wanted to see Mom. He and William had been visiting Granny and Grandpa for a whole week, by themselves, while their parents came here with the moving van to start unpacking boxes. The porch looked even shabbier up close, but that didn’t seem to bother their father, who usually liked things to be nice. Dad dug his hand into his pocket and pulled something out. Showing it to them, he said, “This is a skeleton key.” The boys looked at it. It was a tube of metal, like a straw, almost as long as Dad’s longest finger. At one end, it had a metal circle for a handle, and at the other, a thin piece of metal with notches. “Where’s the skeleton?” asked William. Dad chuckled. “I don’t know why it’s called that. But it unlocks these doors.” 4
In Manhattan, Riley had seen wooden doors like this. The two doors were, in a way, really one door. There were two knobs in the middle, as high as his shoulders and almost as far apart, one on each door. And, sure enough, after Dad turned the key in the keyhole under one knob, he could swing a door to each side, making a wide entrance. Yes, Riley had seen doors like this in Manhattan, but he had never, ever heard doors like this. First, the skeleton key scraped and snapped in the lock. Then the doors opened with a shrill c—r—e—a—k. Even though the day was warm, Riley shivered. Maybe the house was haunted. It looked like it, and it sure sounded like it, too.
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Chapter 3 A ROOM OF HIS OWN “William, where are you?” Riley called as he reached the top of the stairs. He found himself in another hall. This one ran from the front of the house to the back. Despite windows at each end, the coming storm made it look dim. In fact, the tree in the front yard was only a huge, blurry shape that scrabbled at the windowpanes with the tips of its waving branches. Each side of the hall had several closed doors. Suddenly, one of them was yanked open. William stuck out his head and said, “In here. Come see my room.” As Riley went in, he asked, “How do you know it’s yours?” He saw the answer to his question. His brother, kneeling in front of a toy chest, had already strewn many of his own things around the floor. Among them were a bag of little Snap-To-It building blocks, a fire truck with a ladder, a space shuttle, his collection of tiny motor vehicles, and several action figures. William grabbed Spaceman Sam by the waist and pressed the 13
“On” button. Sam’s helmet light flashed, his recorded voice said, “Take me to your leader,” and his stiff legs moved as if he were trying to walk on air. William laughed and turned him off. “Good old Sam,” he said. “This is great! We wanted rooms of our own. Now we have them.” He began to rummage in the toy chest for another toy. “Yeah,” said Riley in a small voice. As he looked around and saw William’s bed on one side of the toy chest, his bookcase on the other side, and a new chest of drawers near the closet, Riley realized something. He didn’t want a room of his own after all. Not here. Not in this big, new old house. He would rather share with his brother the way he always had. William didn’t look up when he said, “Why don’t you go see your own room now?” Riley went back out into the gloomy hall and looked at all the closed doors. Shutting his eyes, he held out his right pointer finger and spun in a circle where he stood. When he stopped, he opened his eyes and walked to the door where his finger pointed. He opened it cautiously and peeked in. 14
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