hissingscrabbling-muttering noise that she had heard last night in her
bedroom.
She whirled.
As far as she could see, she was alone.
The problem was that she couldn’t see everywhere.
Deep shadows coiled under the stairs. In one corner of the room, over
by the fire door, a ceiling light was burned out. Shadows had claimed
that area. Furthermore, each unit of metal shelving stood on six-inch
legs, and the gap between the lowest shelf and the floor was untouched
by light. There were a lot of places where something small and quick
could hide.
She waited, frozen, listening, and ten long seconds elapsed, then
fifteen, twenty, and the sound didn’t come again, so she wondered if
she’d really heard it or only imagined it, and another few seconds
ticked away as slowly as minutes, but then something thumped overhead,
at the top of the stairs: the cellar door.
She had left the door standing open.
Someone or something had just pulled it shut.
With the basket of books and supplies in one hand, Penny started toward
the foot of the stairs but stopped abruptly when she heard other noises
up there on the landing. Hissing. Growling. Murmuring. The tick and
scrape of movement.
Last night, she had tried to convince herself that the thing in her room
hadn’t actually been there, that it had been only a remnant of a dream.
Now she knew it was more than that. But just what was it? A ghost?
Whose ghost? Not her mother’s ghost. She maybe wouldn’t have minded if
her mother had been hanging around, sort of watching over her. Yeah,
that would have been okay. But, at best, this was a malicious spirit;
at worst, a dangerous spirit. Her mother’s ghost would never be
malicious like this, not in a million years. Besides, a ghost didn’t
follow you around from place to place. No, that wasn’t how it worked.
People weren’t haunted.
Houses were haunted, and the ghosts doing the haunting were bound to one
place until their souls were finally at rest; they couldn’t leave that
special place they haunted, couldn’t just roam all over the city,
following one particular young girl.
Yet the cellar door had been drawn shut.
Maybe a draft had closed it.
Maybe. But something was moving around on the landing up there where
she couldn’t see it. Not a draft.
Something strange.
Imagination.
Oh, yeah?
She stood by the stairs, looking up, trying to figure it out, trying to
calm herself, carrying on an urgent conversation with herself: -Well, if
it’s not a ghost, what is it? -Something bad. -Not necessarily.
-Something very, very bad. -Stop it! Stop scaring yourself. It didn’t
try to hurt you last night, did it? -No. -So there. You ‘re safe. -But
now it’s back.
A new sound jolted her out of her interior dialogue.
Another thump. But this was different from the sound the door had made
when it had been pushed shut. And again: thump! Again. It sounded as
if something was throwing itself against the wall at the head of the
stairs, bumping mindlessly like a summer moth battering against a
window.
Thump!
The lights went out.
Penny gasped.
The thumping stopped.
In the sudden darkness, the weird and unsettlingly eager animal sounds
rose on all sides of Penny, not just from the landing overhead, and she
detected movement in the claustrophobic blackness. There wasn’t merely
one unseen, unknown creature in the cellar with her; there were many of
them.
But what were they?
Something brushed her foot, then darted away into the subterranean
gloom.
She screamed. She was loud but not loud enough. Her cry hadn’t carried
beyond the cellar.
At the same moment, Mrs. March, the music teacher, began pounding on
the piano in the music room directly overhead. Kids began to sing up
there. Frosty the Snowman. They were rehearsing for a Christmas show
which the entire school would perform for parents just prior to the
start of the holiday vacation.
Now, even if Penny could manage a louder scream, no one would hear her,
anyway.
Likewise, because of the music and singing, she could no longer hear the
things moving in the darkness around her. But they were still there.