07 - Fright Knight

  FRIGHT KNIGHT

  Ghosts of Fear Street - 07

  R.L. Stine

  (An Undead Scan v1.5)

  1

  “More blood!” I ordered. I slowly stepped back from the guillotine.

  I gazed down at the body kneeling at the bottom of the guillotine. His hands were tied behind his back. I spotted the head on the floor, a few feet away.

  The blank eyes stared up at me. The mouth gaped open, frozen in a scream of terror.

  I walked over and nudged it with the toe of my sneaker.

  “This is nowhere near scary enough,” I said.

  “Right you are, Mike.” Mr. Spellman squirted more fake blood on the wax dummy. A long stream of the sticky red stuff dribbled over the gleaming steel blade of the guillotine.

  It looked great—just right for the Museum of History’s Mysteries.

  “Yu-u-uck!” My sister, Carly, let out one of her earsplitting squeals. She’d been so quiet I had almost forgotten she existed.

  No such luck.

  She started to jump down from her seat on the old mummy case. Salem, our big black cat, leaped off her lap with an angry meow. Then Carly’s feet hit the floor.

  “You guys are gross!” She gave us the famous Carly look and rolled her eyes.

  Carly has the same blue eyes as me. Her hair is shoulder length and mine is buzzed short for the summer. But it’s the same hair. Red. We even have the same freckles all over our noses and cheeks.

  My dad has red hair, too. In the pictures I’ve seen, my mother had brown hair and was kind of small, like me. I don’t remember our mom at all. She died when we were really little. For as long as I can remember there’s just been Dad, Carly, and me.

  I’m twelve and Carly is eleven. We’re practically the same height, too. A lot of people think we’re twins.

  It’s enough to make a guy hurl.

  My dad says not to worry. Girls grow faster than boys. He promised that someday I’ll tower over her.

  I dream of that day.

  “How can you get so excited over something so gross?” Carly shivered. “All that phony blood. It’s… it’s—”

  “Terrific!” Dad ran into the room. I could tell that he had been dusting the mummies again. Big gunky cobwebs trailed from his clothes. Clouds of dust puffed out of his red hair.

  Dad dashed over to the guillotine. He checked it from every angle. His grin grew wider and wider. “Excellent work!”

  Mr. Spellman smiled proudly. He took his job as museum caretaker very seriously. Dad gave me and Mr. Spellman the thumbs-up. “But maybe just a little more blood…” he added.

  Dad took the plastic bottle and squirted a red puddle all around the head. When he was done, he nodded. “Perfect! It’s really horrible now.”

  “Way to go, Dad,” I said.

  Carly made a soft gagging sound.

  He looked right at her. “Don’t forget, scary is exactly why people come to Fear Street.” Dad’s hands were covered with fake blood. He scratched his ear, and a red glob smeared across his face.

  Cool! The blood looked even creepier on a live person than it did on a wax dummy. And it will look totally awesome smeared all over me on Halloween.

  “That’s why the Museum of History’s Mysteries is such a stroke of genius.” Dad glanced around the old place and smiled.

  “I can’t fail. Not this time,” Dad vowed. “This is the perfect business for Fear Street. It’s why we decided to move here to Shadyside in the first place.”

  I thought back and remembered—remembered the very night Dad got his great brainstorm to move here and open the museum.

  So many weird things happen in Shadyside that the town was on the news almost every night. Dad figured people would want to come here and find out for themselves if the stories were true. Which made it the perfect place for a scary museum.

  “Where else could you find ghosts playing hide-and-seek in the cemetery?” Dad asked, thinking back to a recent ghost sighting.

  “And don’t forget that haunted tree house in the woods,” Mr. Spellman added.

  Dad sighed. “How could I ever forget that?”

  I know Mr. Spellman tries to be helpful. But reminding Dad about my friend Dylan and his haunted tree house only made Dad sad. He had missed out on meeting any of the ghosts and was still sort of bummed out about it.

  “All we need is something special that people will be… well, dying to see.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Then people will come. And the Museum of History’s Mysteries will be a big success.”

  “You mean like the alien tracking station you set up in Grandpa Conway’s backyard, Dad?” Carly whined. She didn’t give Dad time to answer. She went right on whining.

  “Or that freaky petting farm you bought? Let’s see—there was the two-headed llama and that stupid unicorn. Couldn’t you tell it was a goat with a cardboard horn tied to its head?”

  Dad cringed. “I almost forgot about that one,” he admitted. “Hey, I thought it was real. Everybody did. It looked real, didn’t it, Mike?”

  “It looked real to me,” I agreed.

  Carly made a really mean face at me. I call it her rodent face. It was one of the things she did best.

  But I made a better face back at her.

  “I think it’s going to be great,” I said. “All my friends say this place is totally awesome.”

  “Totally awesome—” Carly imitated me in a squeaky little voice. “Bunch of nerds,” she mumbled to herself.

  I glared at her. But before I could answer, she turned to my dad again.

  “Come on, Dad. What normal kid wants to live in a place that has mummies in the living room and coffins in the dining room and catapults and swords in the kitchen?” she complained.

  “How would you know what normal kids like, Carly?” I asked.

  Besides, she wasn’t even right. Well, not exactly. All those things were in what used to be the living room and the dining room and the kitchen. That was before Dad turned the downstairs of the big old house into the museum.

  We lived upstairs. Our living room, dining room, and kitchen were pretty ordinary compared to down here.

  “All right, you two.” Dad stepped between us. “No time to fight. Halloween is only two short weeks away. And Shadyside will be crawling with tourists. We’ve got to be ready for them. We haven’t had many customers yet. But Halloween’s the perfect time to improve our business.” Behind his black-framed glasses Dad’s eyes grew serious. I knew what the look meant. He was worried. “They’d better come,” he added very quietly. “Or I will have to close.”

  I knew the thought of closing the museum made Dad sad. It made Mr. Spellman and me sad, too. The Museum of History’s Mysteries was a one-and-only kind of place. A place where people could see all sorts of great, spooky stuff. Wax dummies lurked in the basement in the Hall of Wax. Terrifying instruments of torture hung on the back porch. A totally awesome bunch of medieval weapons decorated the front hall. There was no place like it in the whole world.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I said. “People will line up and down the street when that special exhibit gets here from England.”

  Dad cheered up in a flash. “That’s right! Uncle Basil sent it weeks ago. It should be here any day. I can’t wait. Imagine how lucky we are! Owning our very own suit of armor!”

  I couldn’t wait, either. I’m crazy about knights in armor. That was one of the main reasons Mr. Spellman and I were such good friends. He could hardly stop talking about them.

  Mr. Spellman worked as the caretaker of the museum since it opened. We have been real close ever since. I couldn’t guess his age, but he looked way older than Dad. He was tall and thin. He wore his white hair long, and he had a bushy white mustache. His bright blue
eyes lit up whenever he talked about his favorite subjects. Like guillotines or how mummies were made.

  He knew everything about really important stuff like that.

  Most important, he knew all about knights and swords and castles and dragons.

  We talked about knights for hours. He taught me the names of all the weapons—and all about the rules of chivalry. The rules of chivalry told a knight how to behave. How to fight fair. How to be a brave knight.

  Mr. Spellman walked over to me and smiled. “And don’t forget,” he reminded us, “in his letter, Basil said he was sending along something extra special just for Mike.”

  Carly didn’t need to be reminded. Uncle Basil wasn’t sending a present for her.

  Her face got all puckery. Like the time we had a contest to see who could eat a whole lemon.

  Carly won.

  “Aren’t you guys forgetting what else Uncle Basil said? That suit of armor is supposed to be haunted!”

  “I sure hope so. That’s the best thing about it, Carly.” Dad wiped the fake blood from his hands with an old rag. “If it is haunted, we’re sitting on a gold mine!”

  A shiver skipped up my back. The kind of trembly feeling I always felt waiting for something great. My birthday. Or the last day of school.

  Or when I felt scared.

  But I wasn’t scared. I just felt excited. Yeah, that was it. That’s why I had a weird, jumpy feeling in my stomach. Sort of like I’d accidentally swallowed a live bug.

  “Mr. Conway?” someone called from the front porch. The guy sounded nervous. A lot of delivery and repair people did when they came to the Museum of History’s Mysteries. “It’s Stanley’s Moving and Storage. Got a delivery here for you!”

  We all raced out to the front porch. I spotted a giant moving van parked in front of our house. Two delivery men were pulling a huge crate out of the back. I skidded to a stop in the middle of the porch. Carly slammed into my back. She peered over my shoulder to see what was going on.

  The wooden crate had a long, rectangular shape. The rough, dark wood looked very old and knotty. A few of the planks were warped and cracked.

  I saw strange-looking stamps all over it. The printing on them looked weird, with strange, twisted letters that I could hardly read. But one big stamp that I could read said fragile in bold red letters.

  The delivery men tipped the crate on its side to stand it up. It towered over them.

  Dad and Mr. Spellman walked all around it. I scrambled over to them. Carly followed me.

  The two delivery guys grunted as they hoisted the crate up on their shoulders. From down where I stood, it looked bigger than ever.

  “It’s the armor, isn’t it?” I asked. I peered through the cracks between the planks of wood, but I couldn’t see a thing. I hopped up and down. I couldn’t help it. Dad didn’t have to answer. I knew his answer from the smile on his face.

  “Now be careful. Not too fast. Easy does it, fellas,” Dad directed them. “Carry it over to the front porch. We’ll drag it inside from there. Carly, out of the way. Mike, you’d better be careful. Not so close. You’ll—”

  Dad’s last words vanished in a kind of choking sound as something sliced through the crate. It gleamed in the sunlight.

  It was a giant ax. A knight’s battle-ax.

  And it came right at me.

  The huge blade zipped through the air. As if an invisible hand had taken aim. The blade fell down.

  I screamed and jumped out of the way.

  But not far enough.

  2

  “My foot! My foot!”

  I took a deep breath. I felt like I was going to hurl.

  Then I moved my foot. I wiggled my toes.

  My toes?

  I forced myself to look down.

  The ax blade stuck into the ground. On one side I saw the white rubber toe of my sneaker. On the other side, I saw the rest of my foot.

  “Heh, look—” I moved my foot away from the ax. I poked my toes through the hole in my sneaker and wiggled them wildly. They were still attached. All five of them.

  My father sighed. A long sigh of relief. I grinned at him.

  “It’s just the rubber from the shoe, Dad. My toes are fine.”

  The battle-ax had sliced off the front of my shoe, but I had pulled back my toes just in time. Lucky break for me.

  “You’ve got to be more careful, Mike.” Dad slapped my back in that friendly sort of way he always did when he was worried and he didn’t want me to know it. “Why don’t you go inside and change your shoes.”

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to miss a second of the excitement. Before I had a chance to start griping, Mr. Spellman put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said. “Race you to the house.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I hurried up the steps to the house. I shot under the sign above the door that said Museum of History’s Mysteries in creepy-looking red letters on a black background. I shoved open the front door and skidded to the right, all set to bolt up the stairs.

  I didn’t need to. My old sneakers sat on the landing at the bottom of the steps. Right where I was never supposed to leave them.

  Mr. Spellman came huffing and puffing into the house. I already had my chopped-up shoes off. I slipped on my old ones.

  “Slower than a snail!”

  I always said that to Mr. Spellman when I beat him in a race. He usually laughed.

  He didn’t this time. I don’t think he even heard me.

  Mr. Spellman looked really excited. His blue eyes lit up. His smile made his bushy white mustache twitch. He plunked down on the step next to me. “Did you see what I saw?” he asked.

  He glanced over at the front door. Through the open door we saw Stanley and the other delivery guy coming up the steps with the crate. “Did you read the shipping labels on that crate?”

  “Uh, no,” I told Mr. Spellman.

  “You didn’t read them!” he exclaimed in disbelief.

  “Give me a break. It’s hard to start reading shipping labels when a great big battle-ax is about to split you in two.”

  “Okay, okay. Those labels say that the armor was shipped from Dreadbury Castle.” Mr. Spellman rubbed his hands together. “This is even better than I thought, Mike. Much better.”

  “It is?”

  “If I remember my history right…” Thinking really hard, Mr. Spellman squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes. That’s right. That’s it!” He hopped to his feet. “Dreadbury Castle was the home of Sir Thomas Barlayne!”

  He announced the name as if it was supposed to mean something to me.

  It didn’t.

  Mr. Spellman shook his head. “Don’t you remember the story of Sir Thomas Barlayne? Sir Thomas was an evil knight. A wicked knight. Some say he was the most wicked knight who ever lived. Finally a noble wizard cast a spell on Sir Thomas. He trapped the wicked knight inside his suit of armor forever.”

  I stood up. “But that’s good, isn’t it? That’s just what Dad wants. A haunted suit of armor for the museum.”

  “Yes, that’s what your dad wants.” Some of the excitement faded from Mr. Spellman’s eyes. His voice dropped low. “I wonder if he knows the rest of the story.”

  He might have been talking to himself, but he sure got my attention.

  I grabbed Mr. Spellman’s sleeve and tugged. “Rest of what story?”

  Mr. Spellman laughed. “Oh, nothing much,” he said. He waved away my question with one hand. “It’s just some silly old story. According to the legend, whoever owns Sir Thomas’ armor is cursed. He’s doomed to bad luck—or worse!”

  “Worse?” The word squeaked out of me. Bad luck, I could imagine. I could picture getting F’s on math tests even though I studied. I could imagine my friend Pete telling the whole world I had a crush on Sara Medlow. And I sure could picture being Carly’s brother.

  All that was bad luck.

  But worse?

  “But if the legend is true, won’t that be great for the
museum?”

  Mr. Spellman looked down at me. His eyes twinkled. His mustache twitched. “Maybe not so great for us, huh?”

  He bent down so that he could look right into my eyes. “I’ll tell you what, Mike. Let’s keep this our secret, okay? There’s no use worrying your dad. And we don’t want to scare Carly. If the armor is haunted…”

  He straightened up and looked out the window. “What do you say we play detective?”

  “You mean we’ll check it out together?”

  Mr. Spellman nodded.

  “Excellent!” He slapped me a high five. “And don’t worry, Mr. Spellman,” I told him. “I’ll watch out for you.”

  “And I”—Mr. Spellman ruffled my hair—“will watch out for you. Deal?”

  “Deal!”

  We walked outside onto the porch together. We both smiled about our secret pact. I saw the delivery guys climbing back into their truck. Then I saw the crate stretched out beside me.

  Dad didn’t waste any time. Holding a crowbar, he crouched down next to the crate. He slipped the edge of the bar under the crate’s lid and pushed. I heard a squeaking sound as the nails that held the lid in place came loose.

  As Dad pushed up with the crowbar, Mr. Spellman grabbed the edge of the lid and pulled. Carly stood to one side. She was pretending she didn’t care much. But I noticed that she was chewing on her lower lip. Her nervous habit.

  I sort of hopped around the crate in a circle. I felt so excited I couldn’t keep still.

  Finally Dad and Mr. Spellman lifted the lid off the crate. I scooted forward. I held my breath. Carly stood right next to me.

  We all leaned over and peered inside.

  All I saw were piles and piles of fluffy stuff. Shredded newspaper.

  “It’s paper.” Carly sounded as disappointed as I felt.

  Dad grinned. “Not just paper, Carly,” he said. “Go ahead. Reach in there and see what you can find.”

  “Me?” Carly squeaked.

  “Are you afraid?” Dad asked.

  “No way,” she said. I could tell she was scared silly. But acting like everything was cool.

  The long crate suddenly reminded me of a coffin. I wondered if Carly had the same idea, too.