Philip and the Haunted House (9781619500020) Read online

  Philip and the Haunted House

  by

  John Paulits

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © September 2011, John Paulits

  Cover Art Copyright © 2011, Charlotte Holley

  Gypsy Shadow Publishing

  Lockhart, TX

  www.gypsyshadow.com

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

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  DEDICATION

  For Aunt Marie

  Chapter One

  The rumble of a heavy truck caused Philip to turn in his bed and open his eyes. He felt his heart pounding. He had been trapped in some dark, awful house. He immediately recognized his own bedroom and sighed in relief. Only a dream! The sound of the truck stopped briefly and started up again. Turning a corner, thought Philip. As he listened, the truck noise ended suddenly, instead of fading little by little. Philip guessed the truck had stopped somewhere in his neighborhood.

  He sat up in bed, turned, put his feet on the floor, and stretched. A long Saturday loomed ahead of him. No school. What a great feeling! Philip thought of his dream again. Yesterday, his teacher Mr. Ware read the class the part of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom and Huck look for treasure in the haunted house. While they’re looking, they hear someone coming and run upstairs to hide. One of the two men who enter the haunted house turns out to be Injun Joe, who wants to kill Tom for identifying him as Doc Robinson’s murderer at Muff Potter’s trial. Injun Joe gets suspicious, takes out his knife, and starts to climb the stairs. Tom and Huck lie frozen in fear on the floor, peeking through a chink in the wood as Injun Joe, step by step, gets nearer and nearer. Then, CRASH! The old, rotten stairway collapses and tumbles Injun Joe to the floor.

  When Mr. Ware read it, he’d shouted the word “crash” as loud as he could. Everyone, including Philip, jumped out of their chairs. For once he’d been paying close attention, and the teacher rewarded him by almost giving him a heart attack. Philip blamed Mr. Ware for his frightful dream.

  How could Tom and Huck even want to go inside a haunted house, Philip wondered, even if they thought they’d find some buried treasure? Buried treasure. Philip thought he might go into a haunted house to get rich, but not for fun. No way. He decided he’d go back to daydreaming in school next week and stop listening to the teacher’s heart-attack reading lessons.

  Philip dressed and went downstairs. His father lay on the sofa reading the newspaper.

  “Well, look who’s awake,” his father said, sitting up. “Your mother went to the supermarket. Becky’s still sleeping.” Becky was Philip’s baby sister. “Emery called twice already.”

  “What time is it, Dad?”

  “A little after ten.”

  He had slept a long time. Maybe if he’d gotten up earlier he wouldn’t have had the dream about the haunted house. Stupid reading lesson.

  “Give Emery a call, and I’ll get your cereal.”

  Philip called Emery, who said he’d be right over.

  As Philip dropped his cereal bowl into the sink, Emery walked into the kitchen.

  “Are you sick?” said Emery.

  “No, I’m not sick. Why?”

  “You slept so long. I only sleep long if I’m sick. My two baby sisters cry so much I can’t sleep late anyway.”

  “No, I’m not sick. I had this weird dream, though.” Philip led Emery into the living room.

  “You, too, eh?”

  “Me, too? You had a dream?” Philip asked in alarm. Maybe something’s going around, he thought.

  “No, I mean putting the dishes in the sink.”

  “Oh. Yeah, something new.”

  “My mother, too. She must have talked to your mother. They do these things together sometimes. What did you dream about?”

  “The haunted house Mr. Ware read about yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah. When the stairs crashed, and he made everybody jump. Cool!”

  “I didn’t jump,” Philip lied.

  “Well, everybody else did. Haunted houses are spooky.”

  “Only around Halloween,” Philip said boldly.

  “All the time,” Emery replied with a sharp nod.

  Philip felt he’d established his bravery, so he dropped the topic.

  “Weird, though,” said Emery.

  “What’s weird?”

  “A big truck pulled up around the corner, and they’re taking everything out of the junky, empty house.”

  “The one with all the grass growing around it?”

  “Yeah. It’s still got a “Sale” sign on it so I guess nobody bought it yet. That’ll be an empty house now and look even more haunted.”

  Philip pictured the house—dark, empty, and surrounded by tall weeds. It could be haunted for all he and Emery knew; and there it sat—right around the corner from where they lived.

  “Want to go watch them take stuff out?” Emery asked.

  “They’re still there?”

  “Yeah. They only got there a little while ago.”

  Philip thought of the truck that woke him up.

  “Okay,” Philip said. He’d go now, but once they’d emptied the house and left it empty and lonely and scary looking, he planned to stay away from it. Far away.

  Chapter Two

  “What a boring morning,” Philip said as he got behind Emery in the lunchroom line to get his milk on Monday.

  “Are you getting chocolate or white milk?” asked Emery.

  “You know I never get white milk,” Philip said, bending into the refrigerated bin to take a milk carton.

  “My mother makes me get white milk,” Emery reported sadly.

  “How’ll she know?”

  Emery shrugged. “She finds out everything.”

  Philip ignored Emery’s complaint and slid next to him on the bench of their lunch table. “We’re partners in the project, right?”

  “Yeah, but what are we going to do? It doesn’t sound very interesting. I have the list. We’ll look at it after we eat.” Emery opened his lunch box. “Peanut butter and jelly again. I wish my mother wasn’t so busy in the morning with the two babies.”

  “Why don’t you pack your own lunch?” Philip asked as he opened his. “Hey! Where’s my sandwich?” He emptied his lunch box onto the cardboard tray the lunch ladies had given him with his milk.

  “All you have is an apple and two fig bars?” said Emery, biting into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and moaning. “Grape jelly, as usual.”

  “Where’s my sandwich?” Philip said, louder than before.

  “You sure you had one?”

  “Of course I had one.” Philip remembered watching his mother make the sandwich. She wrapped it up and handed it to him. He put it into his metal lunch box himself. He left the house and walked to Emery’s. He
went inside to wait for Emery and left his heavy book bag and the lunch box next to the big bush near the sidewalk. It took about five minutes for Emery and him to come out. He picked up his lunch box and book bag and went to school. He put his lunch box on the shelf in the coat closet, along with everybody else’s. Mr. Ware never let anybody go to the closet until lunchtime, and now his sandwich was gone.

  “You know,” said Emery, “I can see the empty house, a little of it, from my bedroom window.”

  Hmmmm, Philip mused. The haunted house.

  “Emery, I put my lunch box down outside your house today when I went in to get you, and now my sandwich is gone. I never lost a sandwich when people lived in the house.”

  “How could an empty house steal your sandwich?”

  “Then you tell me where it went.”

  “It’s probably still at home on your kitchen table. Want half of this?” Emery held out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You can have it for your fig bars.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Well. Okay, one. I don’t like it much anyway.” They made the exchange and finished their lunches in silence, Philip trying in vain to figure out what happened to his cracked pepper turkey sandwich.

  The two boys found a spot in the schoolyard out of the chilly November wind, and Emery took the project list from his back pocket. He unfolded the wrinkled paper.

  “So what’ll we do?”

  Philip still had his mind on his missing sandwich. Thinking about it made him hungry again. Half of Emery’s sandwich didn’t fill him up. He’d make another sandwich when he got home if he could find any cracked pepper turkey in the refrigerator.

  “Mr. Ware said this Community Service project is half our social studies mark, and he spent an awful long time talking about it,” said Emery. “My mother’s fussy about marks.”

  “Of course. So’s mine. So’s everybody’s.” Philip had sunk into a bad mood because of his missing sandwich. “What’s on the list?”

  “Okay, listen. Visit sick people in the hospital.”

  “Yuck. We might catch something, and besides, they didn’t even let me in once when my mom and dad went to visit somebody. I had to sit in the lobby and look at a hundred-year-old magazine about furniture.”

  “All right. Skip the hospital. Hospitals are scary anyway. Visit a homebound elderly.”

  “A what?”

  “A homebound elderly.”

  They looked at one another in silence.

  “Did Mr. Ware explain this one?” Philip wanted to know.

  “I think he did. I think it’s like some old person who lives alone and never goes out of the house.”

  “Never?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So what do they do all day?”

  Emery shrugged. “Look out the window, I guess.”

  Philip paused. “You want to sit and look out a window for social studies?”

  “Not much. Sounds pretty easy, but I guess it’d be boring.”

  “Way boring. I don’t want to sit and look out a window. What else is there?”

  “Raise money for a charity.”

  “You mean like sell cupcakes or candy.”

  “I guess.”

  “Do they give us the candy?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have you sell candy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Remember you got in trouble before when you sold the candy and kept it after it came. You didn’t give it to the people who bought it. You hid it and wanted to eat it all.”

  “What else is there?” said Philip impatiently, not wanting to be reminded. He hated to eliminate something so promising, though.

  “Beautify the neighborhood.”

  “Go on. What else?

  “That’s it.”

  “Only four things?”

  “I read the whole list,” said Emery, folding up the paper and stuffing it back into his pocket.

  “An awful short list,” said Philip. “What’ll we do?”

  “The only thing we didn’t cross off was beautifying the neighborhood.”

  “How do we beautify the neighborhood?”

  Emery shrugged. “Maybe you could cover your face.”

  Philip stared at Emery.

  “That was a joke,” Emery explained.

  “So why didn’t you laugh?”

  “I’m not supposed to laugh. I made the joke. You’re supposed to laugh.”

  “Ha,” Philip burst out, his stare boring into Emery.

  “Never mind. You have no sense of humor. Look, let’s ask our parents tonight and see what they say.”

  Philip knew his dad could always come up with something when he got stuck with a school project. He recalled the prize his dad helped him win in the Walk-Mor Shoe Store poster contest. “Good idea. Oh,” Philip moaned. “There’s the bell already.”

  Emery and Philip left the sheltered corner of the school building and stepped out into the chilly wind. They ran to where Mr. Ware waited for the class to line up.

  Chapter Three

  After dinner Philip worked on his homework in his bedroom. He paused when he smelled something funny. He sniffed five, six, seven times. He left his room and went downstairs. His father sat contentedly by the open window in the living room with a big cigar in his mouth! A small fan Philip hadn’t seen since the summertime went back and forth on a table blowing air toward his father. Philip watched as his father blew out a straight line of smoke, and the air from the fan caught it and sent it toward the window. Philip watched in fascination as the smoke appeared to melt through the screen.

  “Mom’s going to be mad,” Philip warned. He’d heard his mother and father’s cigar conversations before.

  “No, she’s not,” his father answered.

  “Why not?”

  “She isn’t here. She went down to Mrs. Moriarty’s for an hour. On purpose.”

  “She’ll smell it when she gets back. She’ll be mad.”

  “She bought it for me.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  His father laughed. “I received news at work today. I was selected to be in charge of a very special project. Everyone wanted to be chosen, but they picked me. This…” His father held up the cigar. “…is what your mother gave me as a reward before she left the house.”

  “Will you get a promotion if you do okay?”

  “It is highly likely, Flipster.”

  “Well, I want one, too,” Philip said.

  “A cigar?”

  “Not a cigar. Blecch! A promotion. To fifth grade. Emery and I have to do a project together.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Philip went to sit on the sofa far away from his father. “I smelled it upstairs, but I can hardly smell it from here.”

  “Must be going up to your bedroom window. Better run up and close it, or you’ll be smelling it all night.”

  Philip ran up, closed his window, and hustled back down to the sofa.

  “So,” said his father. “Your project?”

  “Emery and I have to do something helpful for the community. The teacher gave us a list...”

  “Say no more. I know exactly what you can do. You’re looking for a project idea, right?”

  “Yeah, for me and Emery.”

  “The empty house around the corner is an eyesore. I have to drive past it twice a day, to and from work. If you and Emery cut the grass, it would be a great boon not only to the neighborhood but to mankind in general.”

  “Cut the grass? I don’t think...”

  “Call Emery. Tell him you’ve got the most absolutely A+ idea.”

  “But nobody lives there. We can’t get permission. We can’t…”

  “No problem. I’ll call the real estate agent tomorrow and explain the circumstances. He’d be positively delirious if someone made that place look better. He’s trying to sell the place, Philip. The better it looks; the better for him.”

  “But I don’t think cutting grass…”<
br />
  “You can use my mower, my clippers. Emery’s family has a mower, too. You and Emery’ve helped me with the lawn before. You’re both experienced clip-masters. Flipster, you’re in for an exciting Saturday. We’ll take before and after pictures, and you can write up a report. Your teacher will be astonished at your fine work.”

  Philip frowned. He couldn’t even get an argument going with his father. He didn’t want anything to do with the empty house. More than his sandwich might disappear if he started hanging around there.

  “So, it’s settled. Now scoot. You’re interrupting my reward. Go. Go, call Emery. Give him the good news.”

  Philip shuffled into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  When Emery answered, Philip could hear babies crying in the background.

  “Oh, hi, Philip.”

  “Your parents have any good ideas for the project?”

  “I didn’t ask yet. I’m waiting till my sisters go to sleep. Did you ask?”

  “My dad wants us to cut the grass in front of the haunted house and make it look less haunted.”

  “He called it a haunted house?”

  “Not those exact words, but same idea.”

  The conversation halted while Emery thought the suggestion over. “Well, I guess it’s better than all those other things.”

  “But the place is so scary,” said Philip.

  “Not when it’s light out, and it’ll be a Saturday afternoon when people are walking around. You know… it sounds easy. You don’t want to visit a hospital or sit next to an old person and look out the window, do you?”

  “No. You sure the candy sale’s no good?”

  “You think your parents would let you?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I guess it’ll be all right. I’ll see if I can get my dad to stay with us while we work. Hey! Maybe the real estate guy will say no, and we won’t even have to do it. It’s not our property, you know.”