The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House Read online

  “Cleo,” Maureen said out loud, “that’s silly.”

  Constance was the next one. Her cheeks were pink and her hair was brown. A black cape fell from her shoulders to the floor. It was lined with red over a long red dress. In one hand she held a white rose. Her other hand and arm were behind her back.

  Next was Lucrece. What a funny name! When Maureen said that one aloud, she said, “Lucreaky.”

  Her dress was purple with tiny silver stars. She was holding nothing. The fingers of one hand touched the stones of a necklace at her throat. The other arm was behind her back. Maureen did not like her much.

  “Fooey to you,” she said, and moved on.

  The next one wore a long white cloak. One small hand, gloved in red, held the cloak together. You couldn’t see the other arm. It was inside the cloak. Her hair was silvery blond and her eyes black. She was Maude.

  “You stink,” Maureen told her.

  The next one was the most beautiful. Her gown was silver and gold, with a gold sash. Her hair was gold, too. One bare arm hung down by her side. The other was behind her back. This was Sylvia.

  “You’re the best,” Maureen told her.

  At the last one she said “ugh” and made a face. This was the seventh one. She was Ingrid and she was so ugly. Her nose was crooked and her mouth big. Her eyes were small and green and her hair was pale yellow. But the dress was the prettiest yet. It was all silvery and cloudy and billowing and soft green. She wore a green glove on the hand that held the side of her skirt. The other arm, like all the rest of them, was behind her back—almost. It looked like the painter had painted her just as she was about to put her arm behind her back.

  What a funny bracelet! Hanging from Ingrid’s wrist, on a little gold chain, were pigeon feathers!

  Maureen looked at her the longest. She didn’t know why. As she turned to go back down the stairs, she stopped and wondered. The pictures!

  The one holding the teacup, for instance. A minute ago she had held it up high. Now the teacup was close to her mouth. Maureen was sure the lady with the fan had been holding it under her eyes. Now it was held against her chin, and her mouth was slightly open, showing little white teeth between a pair of red lips. The one in purple, too. Her fingers had been touching the necklace. Now they were at a buckle at her waist.

  Moving pictures!

  She waited quite a while before she gently touched Mavis’s skirt with her finger to feel the paint—to make sure.

  She didn’t step forward then. She ran down the stairs as fast as she could, kicking up the dust as she flew out of the front door, down the crumbling steps into the garden.

  She had touched—silk!

  THE FACE IN THE WATER

  Maureen was running so fast across the garden she didn’t see anyone until she heard a boy’s voice saying hatefully, “Hey, Stinky, your mother wants you and so does my mother.”

  This was Delbert Moody, the boy next door, standing in the weeds by the pool. With him were Junior Boggs, who lived across the street, and his young sister, Beverly, who was called Baby. They had come into the garden through the opening in the boards. The boys were looking around curiously, inside the Old Messerman Place for the first time.

  Baby Boggs pointed a finger at Maureen. “You better not be in here, Maureen Swanson. They’ll put you in jail.”

  She had been so frightened she was glad to see even them, her worst enemies. She wasn’t frightened now. So she said, “They will not put me in jail. I play here lots.”

  How they laughed.

  “You’re a liar,” said Delbert, “a big fat liar.”

  “I am not,” she shouted. Then, looking nervously back at the house, she stepped closer to them, lowered her voice, and said, “And I saw something you never did see—a real leppercon.”

  “A real—what?” Junior was puzzled.

  “That’s crazy. There’s no such thing.” Delbert’s voice was jeering and sneering.

  Junior Boggs held up one finger. “Hey, listen,” he whispered, “what’s that?”

  From someplace in the garden came again the sound of tap-tap-tapping.

  “That’s him,” Maureen whispered.

  “That’s a woodpecker,” said Delbert.

  Maureen waded through the weeds toward the summerhouse.

  “In here.” She crooked her finger. “I’ll show you.”

  The children looked all around the summerhouse, at the peeling hose, the broken lawn mower, the birdbath with the cup side down, and the pile of rotting canvas in the corner. Then they laughed. “Old Stinky, she’s always lying.” And they ran to play by the pool with the iron boy.

  She followed them. “He was here a minute ago. Sitting in there, pounding a nail in his shoe.”

  “Get lost,” cried Junior as he jumped on the back of the iron boy and beat his feet against the sides, yelling, “giddyap.”

  “I did see him.” Maureen’s face was red. “And in there in the house there’s magic pictures. They move when you’re not looking.”

  “Magic pictures?” Baby Boggs was impressed. “Where?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” she said, and she ran up the steps of the porch.

  The children stood in the big dusty hallway and looked around. Everything was still.

  “It’s scary,” whispered Baby Boggs. “Let’s go home.”

  Suddenly Maureen wanted to say, “Yes, let’s go home.”

  But Delbert Moody demanded, “You chicken? So, Stinky, where’s the magic pictures?”

  Junior Boggs pointed to the dining room across the hall. “There’s pictures,” he said as he ran into a room Maureen hadn’t seen.

  It was paneled in brown wood, once beautiful, perhaps, now warped and split with time. Above the wood, halfway up the walls, was a wall covering of woven tapestry with scenes of castles, rivers, bridges, and girls sitting with lambs.

  “Where’s the magic?” Delbert slapped the walls and thick clouds of dust flew out.

  “They’re upstairs,” Maureen answered slowly.

  “Show us, you creepy creep.” Delbert was coughing from the dust.

  She was glad when Junior called from the kitchen, “Hey, look at this crazy kitchen.”

  There was an old-fashioned black stove, with six round iron lids and a chimney pipe going up to and through the ceiling. The sink was tin, now blackened with age, and there was a ridged wooden drainboard. Through a big hole in the rotting linoleum on the floor you could see to the cellar below. Things were piled high down there, wooden boxes with old musty, mildewed dresses and hats spilling out, funny trunks with strips of tin and brass on top and leather handles on the sides.

  They heard a slam-bang noise and everybody jumped.

  A black cat with four white feet sprang up through the hole in the floor, jumped on the drainboard of the sink, and looked at them through yellow eyes. He was crouching like a tiger. Baby Boggs moved closer to her brother, Junior.

  “I’ll shoot him dead,” Delbert bragged, “when I get my tiger gun next Christmas.”

  “I’ll shoot you,” Maureen shouted, “with my tiger gun.” She liked cats and dogs.

  Suddenly the cat’s ears flattened against his head as though he were listening to something, somewhere in the house. His hair stood up on the back of his neck. He sprang off the drainboard, leaped over the boxes piled high on the back porch, went through a hole in the screen, and disappeared.

  They all stood very still, and then Delbert motioned to them to follow him and they tiptoed into the hallway and looked around.

  “Anybody home?” called Delbert bravely, when he was sure nobody was. “Anybody home?”

  “He’s a crazy cat,” Delbert told the others. “He is real mixed up. So watch me.”

  He ran up the stairs, got astride the dusty banister, and slid down, slipping off the newel post. Streaks of dust now soiled his white corduroy pants.

  They all slid down the banister, laughing and yelling. Then Delbert raced all the way upstairs, and the
y heard him calling, “Come on up. I can see our school from here.”

  In the upstairs hallway, Maureen and Baby Boggs stopped and stared at the framed pictures of the ladies.

  Delbert had thrown open one of the bedroom doors and was now standing outside on one of the little balconies.

  “That’s our school.” He was pointing to a flagpole in the distance, the flag waving against the deep blue of a range of mountains.

  “Look. I can see our house, too.”

  The bedroom, Maureen noticed walking in, was papered in a design of faded pink roses, so old-fashioned and yet, she thought, somehow so sweet. There was a small fireplace with a marble mantel.

  They all stood now and looked up at the tall, gilt-framed pictures of the ladies in the hall.

  “Maude,” Delbert read the nameplate. “She’s Maude.”

  Maude’s eyes looked back at him steadily.

  Maureen whispered to them, “Shh! Come here.”

  When they were down the hall, away from the pictures, she made her voice so low they had to lean over to hear her. “They’re magic. When you’re not lookin’—they move.”

  “Move?” Junior’s eyes were wide.

  “Let’s see if Maude moved.”

  Maude hadn’t moved. She was looking straight ahead, her dark eyes motionless, her dress still as air.

  “Touch,” Maureen urged. “Go on—touch her dress. I dare you.”

  Delbert put a grimy hand on the dress.

  “So what?” he now scoffed. “What’s magic?”

  Maureen saw his fingers touch a painted surface. She must have thought she touched silk. She knew they hated her more than ever, but she felt better.

  “Maude stinks,” she told them, “and look at these other ones, too.”

  “This one’s Mavis.” Delbert was examining the next one. “What’s that she’s got in her hand?”

  “A fan, stupid.” Maureen laughed. “Lookit me.” She spread her fingers apart like a fan and stood like Mavis, trying to look silly. Not afraid now, she made a face at Mavis and said, “She’s too skinny.”

  “Don’t,” said Baby Boggs, for some reason stepping back.

  “I will, too,” Maureen answered. “She’s only a picture. There’s one more, and is she ugly—ugh.”

  In the seventh frame, there was no picture!

  “Ingrid’s gone.” And she was so surprised. “There were seven—I counted.”

  “You can’t count,” said Delbert, who was now racing down the back stairs at the other end of the big hall. This was not wide like the front staircase, but only a narrow winding hall with strips of dirty brown wallpaper hanging down like the branches of a weeping willow tree.

  Maureen was telling herself, “I did count seven—didn’t I?” when she heard Delbert cry out and saw him pick up something he’d found on a step.

  It was a bracelet kind of thing—a circlet of a gold chain with little loops, and from each loop was hanging—a pigeon feather!

  Delbert wouldn’t let them hold it, but only feel it.

  “Finders keepers,” he warned, putting it into his pants pocket.

  In the kitchen again, they poured water into the tin sink, water which Delbert found in a can outside the back porch.

  The drain in the sink didn’t work. The water lay like water in a dishpan. A few black beetle-looking bugs welled up from the drain and flapped frantically in the water.

  “Bugs.” Baby Boggs made a face. “I hate bugs.”

  “Boggs hates bugs,” Maureen said, and laughed loudly.

  “That’s not funny.” Junior Boggs pushed her. “You’re a creep.”

  “You’re a creep,” she shouted, and gave him a hard slap.

  “I’ll show you.” He charged at her but she ran out of the front door and into the garden.

  She could hear them calling after her. “Go home, Stinky. Magic—fooey,” and things like that.

  She was wading through the weeds toward the gate, feeling cross and unhappy, when she stopped and listened. There it was again, that tap-tapping. She turned back to the summerhouse.

  She looked behind a tree, but he wasn’t there. She saw Delbert and Junior and Baby come out of the house, cross the garden, and go out the gate. It was then she saw something fall out of Delbert’s pocket as he reached for his Scout scarf to tie around his neck.

  Running to it, bending over it, she saw it was the bracelet he had found on the stairs—the gold chain with the pigeon feathers. She put it into her pocket and went back to sit by the little pool and wait for the little man. There wasn’t a sound in the garden. She poked the slurpy masses of moss apart with a long dry weed. Now she got on her knees and looked over into the black water below. She could see her own face in it, like in a mirror. She tickled the surface of the water to make her face go rippling into pieces. As the water stilled again, she was lifting the weed to poke it when she saw in the water, next to her head—another head—a face looking down—a face with yellow hair, a big mouth, and a crooked nose—Ingrid!

  She ran and she didn’t look back or stop running until she turned into the back gate of her own yard. It took her a long time to get her breath.

  The pictures were magic!

  They moved—out of the frames!

  She would never, never go back to the Old Messerman Place again! That is what she thought. The wicked pigeon ladies had other thoughts—wicked thoughts!

  —

  The little old man was watching as the door of the house was flung open and six ladies in elegant long silk gowns, holding lighted candles, came out on the porch and peered across the garden, as though searching for someone. They moved gracefully from one end of the porch to the other, passing each other like dancers on a stage.

  It was Mavis who called out in a silvery voice, “Leaper! Leaper! Are you there?”

  “Here.” He stood up and brushed the twigs off his old canvas pants. She led the way over to him and lowered her candle to look into his face. He made a low bow. The ladies waited for him to stand up straight again. He didn’t.

  After a minute, it was Cleo who knocked on the back of his bowed neck with her fist. “Stand up straight, Leaper. Never do a bow—by half.”

  He stood up. “Excuse me, ladies. I got sidetracked watching this ant fellow down in the grass, forgetting, God forgive me, the glory of yer presence and the shimmer of yer shine.”

  The six ladies, surrounding him in the dark garden in their old-fashioned long silk dresses, all smiled proudly.

  “Thank you, Leaper,” Maude said, and inclined her head. “Well-dressed you are not, style you do not have—but good manners—with your betters—ah, yes. Please nail up the board in the fence so those detestable children cannot return.”

  “Children?” he asked. “Was there children—where?”

  “One vile child especially,” said Maude. “The one who calls herself Messerman. She looked at me and said, ‘You stink.’ ”

  “She said what?”

  Maude began again. “She said…”

  Here Constance laid a gentle hand on Maude’s wrist. “Sister, please, do not use such vulgar language.”

  Lucrece, or Lucreaky, as Maureen had said it, was pouting. “She looked at me and said—‘fooey.’ ”

  “She called me skinny,” said Mavis.

  “She said I was the best,” smiled Sylvia.

  Maude frowned. “Nevertheless she is a vile child and you will please nail up the board so she cannot return.”

  “Not yet,” said a voice. The sisters whirled around. Who was this coming toward them, wearing a wide black hat with a yellow plume, once curling surely, now drooping down sadly? Her skirt was long and the jacket of the suit came down almost to her knees.

  “Ingrid,” cried the sisters, horrified, in one voice. “Street clothes, after six in the evening! How unfashionable!”

  Ingrid’s face was terrible to behold as she lifted her arm and showed a bare left wrist. “My bracelet fell off somehow. I saw that vile child p
ick it up and put it in her pocket.”

  The sisters moaned in anguish. “Dearest, dearest Ingrid.” And they fluttered around her, cooing like pigeons. She was past sympathy.

  “Less gush,” she said as she pushed them away, “and more action. I’ll need your help to retrieve it. Follow her by air and I’ll follow you on foot.”

  When she said “on foot,” she spat it out as the Leaper spat nails. She yelped in pain as she was pinched by the boards and the iron posts, but she did manage to squeeze herself through and walked rapidly up the street. In a minute the Leaper watched six pigeons come up from the chimneys and fly across the garden.

  The pigeon ladies were fancy dressers, high flyers, smooth talkers, and hard haters. He hoped the child could lose them. How good a loser was she? And that, he knew, was the whole thing, in a nutshell.

  THE LADIES IN THE PICTURES

  When Waldo P. Messerman, the railroad millionaire, built his mansion and planted his garden and brought his bride, Augusta, there to live, it was so long ago there was neither an automobile on the streets nor an airplane in the sky. Horses went clop-clopping down the dirt roads, pulling grocery wagons, coal wagons, and ice wagons, too, for the refrigerator had not been invented and there was nothing electric in houses.

  When you looked into windows at night, through lace curtains, you could see a family sitting around a table which held a kerosene lamp or sitting in a room with gas lamps on the walls. These gas lamps burned with a blue kind of flame and made a little sputtering sound. The very poor and the very rich used candlelight; the poor always, because candles were cheap, the rich sometimes, because the flames of a dozen candles on the dinner tables flickered so beautifully across polished wood or linen and reflected tiny lights from jeweled necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.

  There was no central heating. The rich warmed their houses with firewood laid by servants in fireplaces built in every room, the not-so-rich with small potbellied stoves, and the very poor with only a stove in the kitchen, around which the families would sit on cold winter nights and around which the children would dress themselves, shivering, on cold winter mornings. Sometimes, if there were no little potbellied stoves in the bedrooms, the children would carry heated bricks, wrapped in flannel, into the icy bedrooms, lay them between the icy sheets on the bed, and hold their feet against them to keep warm until they went to sleep.