CustardQuest I - The Real-Life, True Treasure-Hunt Game, Page 2

room, crossing the hallway, and walking down a long corridor. In front of me were no doors except for one at the very end, which lead to the garage.

  My fingers curled around the doorknob. It was times like these that made me wonder why I was in the paranormal business. It was dark at the end of the hallway, and hardly any light reached this far. My palms were sweating. In this business, I often find myself at these pivotal moments at which I can either turn and run or forge ahead toward uncertainty. Fear and courage commonly wage wars within me, and I can’t deny that most of the time I run to the nearest bathroom, where I have a close encounter with the second kind. For whatever reason, Windy seems able to understand these things about me, even though I don’t understand them myself.

  The hinges were smooth and silent, and I could hear my heavy breaths echoing inside the garage once I fully opened the door. I fumbled for the light switch, found it, and lit up the whole place.

  It was a typical three-car garage, but Mr. and Mrs. Furse parked only two cars in the bays furthest away. The bay directly in front of me was not a parking area for a third car but a warehouse for old stuff. Piles of Furse-family possessions past and preserved fully filled the confines of this section of the garage. I took the steps down to take a closer look at the collection.

  The first bay was so packed full of knickknacks and surplus possessions that the Furses had formed a path to navigate it. The path immediately forked left and right, but instead of taking either route, I split them and walked directly toward an old wooden wagon in the middle. The wagon had rotting wood and was not of recent vintage. I guessed it had been purchased from an antique store for purposes of future decoration, and this speculation was confirmed by the presence of a handwritten price tag dangling from its handle indicating a cost of $19.00 at Alva Hawk Antiques. In front of the wagon, an old stone statue of a man walking a horse had a similar tag hanging from it. I felt a minor power there, but this sensation definitely was not what was drawing me to this area. The books in my bedroom back home have taught me to heed these gut feelings I get, so I moved on, seeking something greater, yet still unknown.

  To the right of the old wagon was a small pile of Rolling Stones records, and next to them was a crib. Unlike the wagon, this crib was not a collector’s piece but was of modern manufacture. Because Ollie was two, it seemed safe to assume that he had recently been transitioned to a full-size bed, and the crib was hauled out to the garage until it could be disassembled. It was constructed of dark wood, and I knew it had been recently placed into the garage because it was not chock full of junk like everything else in the vicinity. Instead, inside the crib was a single object.

  Rosemary’s baby was not napping in the crib. Instead, on the wire webbing that once supported a mattress was a wooden box. A garage light was right above it and shone down on the lone box like it was a mystical isle inviting me to explore its uncharted secrets. Inexplicably, I walked directly to the crib without a pause of apprehension. Squatting, I pressed my forehead against its side slats. The box inside was old too, maybe purchased at the same time as the wagon and the statue, but lacking a similar price tag to make the connection more definitive. I would have said it was slightly larger than a breadbox, if I knew what a breadbox was, but I’m only eleven years old, so that antiquated term means nothing to me. I can say that 20 iPads would have fit nicely, if that makes things clearer. My detailed study of it through the crib slats revealed the box was made of individual wooden pieces, stacked in crisscrossing layers that alternated like a log-cabin. My eyes climbed seven of these wooden cross-members until they stopped cold at an unfastened metal clasp on the lid.

  Standing now, I reached over the left crib post. The lid opened under my guidance, and it took a second for me to determine whether the squeal that followed was from my own throat or the box. In fact, it had come from the rusty hinges.

  All of the garage light bulbs popped at once, flashing a blue light onto the floor of the box that revealed it to be empty. Complete darkness followed.

  I concluded I had discovered a real-life, true, unexplained phenomenon and decided it was time to suspend my investigation. I headed straight back toward the door through which I had entered the garage, using my laser-tag pistol to light my way.

  But before I could reach the steps, I fell. I don’t know what tripped me, but when I hurried back up, every inch of skin from my scalp to my bare feet was covered with an icy web of goose bumps. The best-selling ghost reference book, Shriekanomics, warned that goose bumps indicate a ghost has brushed against you. I looked around in the red light cast by my laser-tag gun, but I saw no specters, although invisibility is the most basic ghost power.

  I was in bed seconds later, huffing and puffing, and hiding under a comforter that was not living up to its name. Salty wells filled the corners of my eyes, but no tears actually fell – a small victory. Will and Windy would be laughing at me had they been there, and Windy would have concocted some unflattering nickname for me to mark the occasion, but this time was different. I had actually witnessed real paranormal activity for once.

  The morning seemed to have come quickly. I’m not sure if I even slept, and I felt sick all over as a result. My eyes were puffy, my nose was running, and my throat was scratchy and hurting. I had been as still as a granite slab all night, and I thought I might need a quarrier to free my joints, but I arose eventually and went downstairs when I heard others already up.

  The four Furses were downstairs at the kitchen table, and my parents were sitting on the couch drinking coffee, all of them dressed for the day already. I discovered it was considerably later than I had thought: noon, to be exact. Mr. Furse was the first to greet me. He asked, “So you must have done some of your investigative work last night, huh?” He had somehow busted me, and I confessed to it. When I inquired how he knew, he directed me to come with him. “I am quite an investigator too,” said Mr. Furse. He winked at my parents in the family room as we departed toward the garage. Jack and his smirk came along too.

  When we reached the door, he said, “There are two ways I knew. First, the garage lights are malfunctioning, and if you turn them on, the breaker always trips. And I saw the breaker was tripped this morning. Mrs. Furse said you had been up late, and I figured you’d been on one of your searches for truth.”

  That I had been caught conducting my undercover investigation was embarrassing enough, but that I now knew I had not actually witnessed a paranormal event when the lights had burned out in the garage last night deflated me. “So what was number two?” I asked Mr. Furse.

  He opened the door to the garage. Unlike last night, bright sunlight now shined in through large windows. Mr. Furse winked at Jack and then pointed to the cement floor in front of the baby crib. “I saw your footprints.”

  He smiled. I did not.

  “What is that wooden box in the crib?” I asked Mr. Furse.

  It seemed like an eternity before he answered, but he eventually did. I peppered him with follow-up questions and asked for clarification on several points.

  Without excusing myself, I bumped my way past Jack and his dad, hurrying back into the family room where my parents still sat chatting with Mrs. Furse. “You need to take me somewhere,” I told them, as I confirmed the time on my watch. “And now.”

  They saw the state I was in and had seen me act this way when I was working a hot case. My dad rolled his eyes, but my mom asked, “Are you sure?” I replied in the affirmative, and it took us sixty seconds to go from couch to car. My mom obliged, like she always did, either because she was proud of me or because she felt so sorry for her super-geek son who wore a laser-tag vest on his chest as proudly as if it were a red “S.”

  The car ride went fast, and we arrived at our destination quickly. My mom waited in the car, while I went and did what I had gone there to do.

  That wooden box in the crib in the Furses’ messy garage had belonged to Mr. Furse’s grandfather. Chucky Furse had been a coal miner, and the box was his prized possession:
an old blasting-cap crate he had kept as a memento from his days in the dark shafts. He had died in his home just a few months ago from pneumoconiosis – miners’ lung. The box had been in his family room and retrieved by the Furses after he passed away. They’d left it in the garage with his other junk.

  Chucky had not been ready to leave this world apparently. His spirit had stuck around, I concluded, hanging out in the wooden box, taking strolls to and from the garage through the Furses’ house late at night. He’d spent his whole mining life stuck under a low rock ceiling, and now he was stuck in a wooden box. Maybe he had just needed to stretch his legs. Or maybe all that coal dust made Chucky eager to soothe his throat with a beverage, and he thought he might find the company store just down the hallway.

  I’d had my mom drive me there so that his restless spirit could finally find some peace.

  As I walked at a brisk pace toward my ultimate destination, I sniffed and stifled a cough. The sickness I had felt when I woke up this morning was not an illness at all. It was Chucky. He was inside me, still gagging from the gray coal dust that had filled his body. I had read before about spirit possessions in the preeminent book on the subject, He’s Just