He? The stranger?
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, backing up. I cast a quick look around. There were windows at either end of the narrow hallway, but we had to be at least one or two stories up. I would definitely be the Redding Who Broke His Neck in a Pumpkin Shirt. The wood floor dipped at the center of the hall, buckling slightly. There were two doors—the one I’d come out of and another, blocked by her skeleton. Both were cut at a crooked angle in the bare, dark wood wall. “I don’t even know who you are!”
“My name is Nell Bishop,” she said, hands on her hips. Her sweater had been sewn together from three different floral patterns and was big enough to droop over her jeans. “I’m your…I’m your cousin, I guess.”
Awesome. Just what I never wanted: another cousin to hate me.
“You guess…” I repeated. “Can you not guess? And just tell me?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re as annoying as I thought you’d be. Fine. Stay up here for all I care, and stew in your questions. I need to start setting up for the show tonight.”
Nell spun toward the stairs, unclipping a small chain with the sign PRIVATE, and thundered down them. The whole roof rattled with the force of it. And rather than sit there and be the Redding Who Had a Ceiling Dropped on Him, or the Redding Who Got Mauled by a Mutant Kitten, I followed.
If I had sat down at my desk at home, opened my spiral-bound notebook, and tried to draw my perfect nightmare…it would have been adorable compared to this house.
It turned out that I wasn’t on the second floor—I was on the fourth floor. The attic. The stairs wound down the center of the old house like a rickety spine, revealing one terror after the other.
There were three open doors on the third landing. The one to the left was completely pitch-black, save for an amazing light show that made it seem like thousands of ghosts were fluttering around, swirling like a tornado at the center. The air it breathed out frosted my skin with flecks of snow and ice. The center room looked to be a dark forest filled with nightmares, where the trees were crawling with spiders and draped with mirrors of all sizes.
My feet came to a crashing halt when I caught a glimpse of me—but not me, not really—in the largest one. An ancient man, a hundred years old, who had my eyes and mouth, stared back at me, screaming—banging on the glass, as if begging to be let out.
Bam! I all but leaped over the banister to get away from the door on the right, where something was bumping around behind the gleaming wood like a frantic heartbeat.
On the second story, all I needed to see was a room full of tombstones and the ghostly apparition of a weeping woman in old-fashioned clothes before I felt my blood turn to needles. She looked up. Her voice sounded as though she were whispering in my ear. “Are you my baby? Are you my sweet boy? Won’t you come to me, sweetling? Your mama loves you dearly—”
Somehow, there were clouds floating above her. Somehow, those clouds opened with thunderous, bloody rain.
I spun toward the stairs, but Nell was there, standing in my path. When I tried to get past her, she blocked me, laughing. “It’s not real, brainiac. Look.”
She held a hand out into the room, and though it looked like—it sounded like—blood was splattering over the graves and the ghost, none of it coated her hand. It was all an illusion.
But I could have sworn that, when I finally pushed past her and continued down the stairs, she quickly leaned forward into the room and drew a hand across her throat, and there was an annoyed “Harrumph” in response.
Keeping one hand gripped tight to the banister, I forced my eyes to stay on my feet, not on whatever was waiting on the second floor.
“What is this place?” I muttered when we got to the first floor. In the place of a living room set, a TV, or a kitchen, there were walls covered in smears of fake blood. The words THERE IS NO ESCAPE were scratched into the biggest patch of it with what probably were fingernails. Propped up two feet away was a dead body—fake dead body, I thought, when the buzzing in my ears got too bad—on a stainless-steel gurney, its mouth open, its plastic intestines dangling over the ground. They looked like they were soft to the touch. Even the mannequin’s skin bristled with wiry, lifelike hair.
My stomach squirmed uncomfortably as Nell jumped up and sat on the gurney beside him, idly twirling the fake large intestine like a lasso.
“You’re in the prime destination for nights of fright and magical mayhem!” Nell said, throwing her arms out wide. Behind her, a zombie-nurse puppet shot out of a hidden panel in the wall with a screech that, unfortunately, didn’t drown out my own.
“Will you chill out?” Nell said, laughing. “Wow. You really are not okay, are you? It’s alllll fake—okay, at least ninety percent is fake, and the other ten percent isn’t going to bite you. We would never put you in real danger.” Her voice dropped as she said, with what I had to admit was a pretty great dramatic flourish, “Unlike the true monsters in your life.”
She hopped off the gurney and held out a hand toward the stairs. Toad (The cat? Bat? CatBat?) came fluttering down the steps, as light and airy as a stray feather. It caught her hand and crawled up her arm to perch on her shoulder. I backed up toward the wall, fingers touching the holes the creature had already torn in my shirt, eyeing Nell.
I thought of the Impressionist paintings I’d seen in museums with my dad. From a distance, they looked like a typical scene of people or landscapes. But, up close, you could see the thousands of tiny strokes of paint that made up the image. Nell was like that in a way. Up close, she was like a kaleidoscope of color and motion. Her skin was a warm bronze, a shade or two lighter than her black hair, which I saw now she’d pinned into two high buns. It looked as if she’d reached up and plucked the stars out of the sky, scattering them in her hair. They twinkled as she moved, as iridescent as the many colors of her sweater.
There was nothing stiff or cold about her. You could never paint her the way artists had done with my ancestors, all flat, pale, sickly, and glowering. Nell was about my height, and I’d guess my age, but that was where the similarities ended.
“This is Toad,” Nell said, bringing it closer. “I think you need to meet again on better terms.”
“You named your mutant kitten Toad?”