Dudes, the School Is Haunted! Read Online Free PDF Page A

players pretending to have a duel with
guitars. The other band members were laughing and cheering them on.
    Greta had picked up one of the guitars. She and the other guy raised their
guitars high over their heads and came charging at each other.
    “No— stop !” I screamed.
    Too late.
    Greta’s guitar ripped right through the BELL VALLEY ROCKS! banner. Tore it in
two!
    I let out a loud groan as the two halves of the banner drooped to the floor.
I turned and saw the unhappy faces of Thalia and Ben.
    “Hey—sorry about that!” Greta called. Then she burst out laughing.
    I hurried over to the wrecked banner and picked up one end. Thalia and Ben
were right behind me.
    “What are we going to do?” I cried. “It’s ruined.”
    “We can’t just leave it here hanging over the floor,” Thalia said, shaking
her head.
    “We need it!” I declared.
    “Yeah. It’s our best banner,” Thalia agreed.
    “Maybe we can tape it back together,” I suggested.
    “No problem. We’ll tape it together,” Ben said. “Come on, Tommy.” He grabbed
my arm and started to pull me.
    I almost dropped Mrs. Borden’s Polaroid. “Where are we going?” I demanded.
    “Up to the art room, of course,” Ben replied. He started jogging to the
double gym doors, and I followed.
    It won’t take long to tape it together, I thought. Then I’ll get a ladder
from the janitor’s closet, and we’ll hang it back up.
    We stepped out into the hall—and I stopped. Kids were arriving for the
dance, hurrying to the gym.
    “We don’t have time to fix the banner!” I told Ben.
    “We’ll hurry,” he said. “No problem.”
    “But—but the art room is way up on the third floor!” I sputtered. “By the
time we get all the way back down to the gym…”
    “Relax,” Ben said. “It won’t take that long—if you’d stop complaining. Come
on. Let’s go!”
    Ben was right. I started running down the hall. Kids were pouring into the
gym. I knew we had to hurry.
    “Hey—not that way!” I heard him calling. “You’re going the wrong way,
Tommy!”
    “I know where I’m going!” I called back. “I went this way last time!”
    I ran to the end of the hall and turned a corner.
    “Tommy—stop!” Ben called.
    “It’s up this way!” I called back to him. “This way is faster. I know it.”
    But I was wrong. I should have listened to Ben. A few seconds later, the hall
ended at a boarded-up wall.
    “See?” Ben cried breathlessly. “What is your problem? The stairs are back
there.”
    “Okay. I made a mistake,” I told him. “I wanted to hurry, that’s all.”
    “But you don’t know where you’re going!” he said angrily. “Remember, Tommy?
You need a road map to find your toes!”
    “Very funny,” I muttered. I gazed around. “Where are we?”
    “I don’t know! I can’t believe I followed you!” Ben was annoyed. He banged
both fists against the boarded-up wall.
    “Hey—!”
    We both cried out as the rotted, old boards broke away. Startled, Ben
stumbled forward—and crashed right through the boards.
    They splintered and fell to the floor. And he fell on top of them.
    “Oh, wow.” I bent to help him up. “Check this out!” I said, peering down a
dark hall. “This must be the old school building. The building they closed off.”
    “Thrills and chills,” Ben muttered. He groaned and rubbed his knee. “I
scraped my knee on those boards. I think it’s bleeding.”
    I took a few steps into the dark hall. “This school has been closed off for
fifty years,” I told him. “We’re probably the first kids in here since then!”
    “Remind me to write that in my diary,” Ben growled, still rubbing his knee.
“Are we going to the art room or what?”
    I didn’t answer him. Something on the wall across from us caught my eye. I
walked over to it.
    “Hey, Ben. Look. An elevator.”
    “Huh?” He hobbled across the hall to me.
    “Do you believe it?” I asked. “They had an elevator in the old