Dragonbreath: No Such Thing as Ghosts Read online

  “I’ve seen him breathe fire,” said Wendell staunchly.

  Any gratitude Danny might have been feeling to Christiana for coming with them was evaporating rapidly. He gritted his teeth and stomped up the steps onto the porch.

  “No doorbell,” said Wendell. “Nobody’s here. Can we go back now?”

  “I guess we could knock,” said Danny. “I mean…nobody’s gonna come, but as long as we knock, that ought to be enough…”

  He made a fist and rapped on the peeling paint of the door. The sound seemed to boom through the inside of the house, much more loudly than it should have. Wendell cringed.

  “Well,” said Christiana, “I guess that—”

  With a long wooden moan, the door swung open.

  Danny knew he should turn around right now and walk away, at least until he was off the porch, and then he should run like his tail was on fire.

  It was Halloween that made him do it, he decided later. On any other day of the year, he would have run away, but on Halloween, you went up to scary haunted houses and the doors creaked open and that was normal.

  He took a step forward, onto the threshold.

  “Danny, what are you doing?” squeaked Wendell.

  Christiana, however, stepped up beside him and poked her head around the edge of the door frame.

  “Must’ve been unlocked,” she said. “What a dump!”

  As if in a dream, Danny took another step forward, into the dark room. There was moonlight coming around the edges of the boarded windows, casting long, pale stripes across the floor.

  The door slammed shut. It knocked Wendell into Christiana, and both of them into the room, pinching Wendell’s tail cruelly in the door frame. He yelped. Danny jumped.

  “What happened?” yelled Wendell, scrambling to his feet. “Why’d it close!?”

  “It was just the wind,” said Christiana, grabbing for the doorknob. “Don’t freak out.”

  She turned the doorknob and pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  She shoved at it harder, twisting the knob back and forth, but the door didn’t budge.

  “Um,” she said.

  Danny pushed her aside and grabbed the doorknob himself.

  “It’s stuck!” he said.

  “We’re going to die…” Wendell moaned. “We’re trapped…”

  Danny slammed his shoulder against the door, which did more damage to his shoulder than the door. It didn’t budge.

  “We’re not stuck,” said Danny. “We just need to find another way out.” He peered around the room.

  There was a dark fireplace and a sofa covered by an old sheet, neither of which was any help at all. Most of the windows were still intact, but at least one was broken out, leaving a frame edged with daggers of glass that glittered in the moonlight. If they tried to go out through the window, they’d have to find a way to break the boards out, then crawl through without disemboweling themselves on the broken glass.

  This did not seem promising.

  “There’s got to be a back door,” said Christiana.

  A dark doorway led deeper into the house. While moonlight lit their room unevenly, the hallway beyond the door was pitch-black.

  “I’m not going in there!” said Wendell.

  Danny couldn’t blame him. The doorway looked like an open mouth. He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Do the lights work?”

  Christiana found a light switch and flicked it a few times. Nothing happened.

  “I was afraid of that,” said Danny. “Um. I don’t have a flashlight…”

  “Me neither.”

  Wendell coughed. “Err…wait. Mom made me bring one….” He dug around in his pillowcase of candy and eventually pulled out a flashlight. “She was worried that if it got dark I’d get hit by a car.”

  “I take back everything I’ve ever said about your mother,” said Danny, grabbing the flashlight.

  The flashlight didn’t work. Danny unscrewed the cap to check the batteries. Behind him, he heard Christiana say, “Periodic table bandages, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My dad gets the countries-of-the-world ones. I got a splinter in my hand last month and spent three days staring at the gross national product of Belgium.”

  Wendell laughed. It was a nervous, strangled sort of laugh, but it was still a laugh. Danny, whose knowledge of Belgium began and ended with waffles, poured the batteries into his hand, blew on them, and shoved them back in the flashlight. He smacked the flashlight into his palm a few times, and it lit up grudgingly.

  The little circle of light seemed very small against the darkness. Danny flicked the light down the hallway, over the dusty floorboards, revealing another open doorway.

  “I guess we have to go down there,” he said.

  He took a step forward.

  A shriek echoed through the house, a horrible keening noise that sank to a dull moan and finally died away. It sounded like somebody being tortured. A shriek from Wendell followed, although it wasn’t quite as loud. Danny jumped.

  “What was that?!” he said.

  “It’s the ghost,” said Wendell, arms over his head. “It knows we’re coming, it’s gonna get us, we’re gonna dieeeee….”

  “Ha!” said Christiana suddenly. She strode forward into the hallway and stomped on the floor.

  Another shriek rang out, shorter this time.

  “It’s not a ghost, it’s the floor,” she said. She bounced up and down on a particularly creaky board, producing a series of short groaning noises, like a donkey with hiccups. “I bet nobody’s walked on it in years.”

  Danny rolled his eyes, feeling embarrassed. He hadn’t been scared. Not exactly. Startled, maybe. It had been loud, that was all. He stepped onto the floorboard, which yelped again.

  “What if the ghost heard it?” asked Wendell.

  “There are no ghosts,” said Christiana. “Nobody’s ever proved ghosts exist, anyway.”

  Wendell was generally pretty scientifically minded, but he’d seen too many weird things while hanging around with Danny. Also, he’d checked out a book of ghost stories from the library a week ago, and it had some pretty alarming stuff in it. There had been one about a hitchhiker who turned out to be a ghost who always came back on the anniversary of her death. It made his scales crawl.

  Danny took another few steps down the hallway and reached an open doorway on the left wall. He shone the light into it. Christiana and Wendell came up behind him, the iguana taking big steps to avoid the creaky floorboard.

  The room was a bathroom, and it was nasty.

  The toilet was missing a lid, and the water was rust-brown and slimy. The paint was peeling and had formed big blisters, and some of the blisters had burst. Mold crept up the walls.

  There was a picture of a clown over the toilet tank. The clown was crying, which was probably meant to be tragic, but was mostly just creepy.

  “If there’s a ghost here, they’re a real slob,” said Danny.

  “How long did you leave that sandwich in your locker that one time?” asked Wendell. “Purely as a matter of curiosity…”

  “Yeah, but it was a sandwich. Not a whole bathroom.” (The sandwich in question had turned a variety of interesting colors and then grown fur. He’d thrown it away eventually, although Wendell claimed that it was alive and trying to communicate.)

  They retreated from the bathroom. Wendell said under his breath, “I hear clown attacks are up this year…”

  “I’m pretty sure I can kick your tail, Wendell,” said Christiana through gritted teeth. Danny snickered.

  The young crested lizard shut the bathroom door behind them. When the boys looked at her, she said, “What?”

  “Afraid the clown will sneak up on us?” asked Danny.

  “Look,” said Christiana, sounding annoyed, “I just don’t—”

  The bathroom door swung slowly open. The three of them stared at it. “Maybe it didn’t latch,” said Danny, because somebody had to say something.
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br />   “The door frame’s probably warped,” said Christiana nervously. She wiped her hands on the sides of her bacteria suit.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “Still…” He took a deep breath and shone the flashlight back into the bathroom.

  Nothing. The paint was still peeling, the toilet was still disgusting, the painting of flowers over the toilet was still—

  “Didn’t that used to be a clown?” asked Danny.

  Christiana actually took the flashlight away from him and shone it on the painting, which was of a vase full of flowers.

  “Well,” she said, after a minute, and then stopped. She looked up and down the hall, as if expecting there to be another bathroom, possibly with a clown painting in it.

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. “I suppose we might not have seen it clearly the first time, but I sure thought it was a clown…”

  Danny didn’t know what to think. It had definitely been a clown, and it was definitely not a clown now. At the same time, it seemed like a weird thing for a ghost to do. Ghosts were supposed to rattle chains and moan, not switch around the artwork.

  “Anyway,” said Christiana, sounding a little more confident, “just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation. It just means that we don’t know what it is right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Wendell. “This sounds like a great philosophical discussion. Maybe we could have it sometime. You know, maybe when we’re not standing in the hallway of a haunted house?!”

  Christiana looked at Danny. Danny looked at Christiana.

  “Right!” said Danny. “Back door. Let’s find it.”

  The kitchen lay at the end of the hallway. Danny felt for a light switch and flicked it hopefully, even though he was pretty sure it wouldn’t work.

  It didn’t. Wendell sighed.

  In the beam of the flashlight, they saw stairs leading up to the second story. All three of them moved away from the stairs. The rest of the kitchen looked ordinary, if dusty—stove, sink, refrigerator, all dark and dim and silent. The linoleum was peeling up in the corners and the window over the sink was boarded up.

  “We don’t know that anybody died here,” said Christiana. “They might have just moved out.”

  “They could have moved out because it was haunted!” Wendell waved his pie plate in the air. “I read a book about this one haunted house where they had poltergeists and they tried everything to get them out and the poltergeists kept making weird noises and turning on the faucets and the people had to move.”

  Danny had an urge to borrow this book from Wendell, which did not happen often. Christiana was less impressed.

  “You’re being irrational,” she said, folding her arms. “None of that stuff is real.”

  Wendell opened his mouth to say that after several years of running around with Danny, he’d seen giant squid and ninja frogs, were-hot-dogs and ancient bat gods, and his notion of what was possible had expanded quite a bit as a result. But then he closed it again, without saying anything. Christiana would demand that he prove it, and he couldn’t prove anything standing in a dark kitchen in an abandoned and probably haunted house.

  He wished he could. A few years ago, he would have agreed with her. Now she just thought he was stupid, and Wendell really hated it when people thought he was stupid.

  “I think there’s a door through here,” said Danny, pointing the flashlight through another doorway.

  They walked as quietly as they could, practically sneaking. Even Christiana was doing it. There was something about the empty house that made you not want to make loud noises.

  On the far wall of the new room was a closed door with a window in it. The window was boarded over, but it looked like it might lead to the outside.

  Wendell rushed forward and grabbed the handle. All three kids held their breath.

  The handle turned. The deadbolt did not. Wendell threw himself back, clinging to the handle, and only succeeded in making the door rattle in its frame.

  Danny said a word that his mother said occasionally when somebody cut her off in traffic.

  Wendell slumped against the door frame. “Do you think your dad will find us? It’s been hours.”

  “It’s been about twenty minutes,” said Christiana. “And he’d have to figure out what house we went to. Unless Big Eddy tells him, he won’t know.”

  “Maybe we could break a window,” said Danny. “Like…with a chair or something.” He hated the thought of breaking a window—mostly because he knew it was going to come out of his allowance—but if there wasn’t any other way out…

  “It occurs to me—” began Christiana.

  Wendell said, “…Eep.”

  Danny followed the iguana’s gaze and felt his stomach do an unpleasant sort of flop.

  An enormous white shape was looming up behind Christiana, nearly twice as tall as she was. Pale lumps, like arms or wings, flared out to either side.

  “Oh,” said Wendell, “oh, oh—”

  “Christiana,” hissed Danny, “behind you!” He lifted the flashlight with nerveless fingers. The vast shape seemed to rise even higher.

  Christiana spun around, blinked, and then made an exasperated noise.

  “Come on, you guys…”

  She reached out, caught a corner of the shape, and yanked.

  The sheet came off the ancient wingback chair in a cloud of dust.

  “It’s a chair,” she said. “It’s not scary.”

  “I find that upholstery rather alarming,” said Wendell, eyeing the garish floral pattern.

  “I can’t believe you guys. Every little noise and it’s ‘Oh, help, it’s a ghost, it’s a poltergeist!’”

  “It’s dark,” said Danny indignantly, “and the white sheet, it really did look like a ghost.”

  “I keep telling you, there’s no such thing as—”

  She was cut off by the sound of footsteps. Loud, heavy footsteps, coming from upstairs. All three kids froze, listening as someone—or something—walked overhead.

  A door opened and shut. Then silence…

  …or not quite silence.

  “Hungry…” whispered a soft, hissing voice. It didn’t sound very close, but it wasn’t exactly far away, either. “I’m hungry…”

  “I don’t know if that was a ghost,” whispered Danny, “but there’s definitely somebody up there.”

  Danny looked at Wendell. Wendell looked at Danny. Christiana looked at both of them.

  Wendell opened his mouth to say something—probably “We’re all going to die,” or something equally upbeat—but never got the words out.

  Something began hammering violently on the back door. It sounded like thunder, like drums, like a herd of horses running up the side of the building.

  Most of all, it sounded like something wanted in. Bad.

  Wendell shrieked, dropped his candy, and bolted. Danny took off after him—to make sure he didn’t trip in the dark. Yeah. Absolutely. Not because he was terrified. Definitely not.

  They skidded into the front room. Danny thought for a second that Wendell might run right through the front door, leaving a cut-out opening behind him, like a cartoon. They hoped the footsteps behind them were Christiana’s. (If they weren’t Christiana’s, Danny didn’t want to know.)

  Another flurry of pounding shook the house, this time on the front door. Wendell let out another ear-splitting shriek and stopped so fast that Danny ran into his back. More hammering hit the boarded windows, making the glass rattle in the frames.

  “We’re surrounded,” moaned Wendell, backing toward the hallway. “There’s no way out…”

  Danny didn’t know what was going on, but he was pretty sure he didn’t like it.

  He inhaled, feeling smoke roil at the bottom of his lungs. He didn’t know if there was anything there to breathe fire on, or whether he’d just burn the house down, but he was going to be prepared.

  “It’s the ghost!” said Wendell.

  “Maybe it’s vampires!” sai
d Danny.

  “Maybe it’s your dad trying to find us,” said Christiana.

  Hammer-blows struck both the front and back doors. It sounded like the doors would fall down at any second.

  “Hungry…” hissed the spectral voice, practically in their ears.

  It was kind of ironic, Danny thought—just a minute ago, he’d wanted the doors to open, and now he wanted them to stay closed.

  “Here!” whispered Christiana beside him. “Get the other end!” She grabbed one side of the couch and tried to drag it toward the door.

  Danny tossed the flashlight to Wendell, who promptly dropped it. (Wendell always did catch like a nerd.) The light spun crazily over the ceiling as Danny threw himself at the other end of the couch.

  Between the two of them, they managed to drag the couch so that the end was in front of the door.

  “I don’t know how long that’ll hold,” Danny panted, watching the couch vibrate with every blow.

  “We’ve got to hide,” gasped Wendell, clutching his pie plate to his chest.

  “We should—um—retreat and gather more data,” said Christiana.

  They fled down the hallway.

  Danny didn’t know who “they” were, and didn’t feel like finding out. He grabbed for the door to his right and yanked it open.

  Stairs led down into the dark. Danny hesitated and shot another look at the front door.

  The pounding started up again, from both the front and back. Christiana spread her hands and shook her head, clearly out of ideas.

  “Do something…” moaned Wendell.

  Gulping, Danny pulled Wendell down onto the first step and waited for Christiana to follow. He reached past the crested lizard and closed the door behind them.