Every House Is Haunted Read Online Free PDF

to Soelle.
    “Take care of the Haxanpaxan for me,” she said.
    “He’s not going with you?”
    “Leah says there’s only room for me.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Yeah, but at least neither of you will be lonely.”
    I nodded. “Be good, Soelle.”
    She gave me her NutraSweet grin. “I’ll try.” Then she did something she hadn’t done since she was little: she kissed me on the cheek.
    Then she was gone.
    I watched the van drive away. The plus sign on the side was gone. In its place were three wavy lines. I didn’t know what that meant.
    One more thing to add to the list.

    After a while I went upstairs. As I was passing Soelle’s room, the door slammed shut. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
    The door still doesn’t open, and I haven’t been in her room since.

    No one ever questioned Soelle’s disappearance. I never called the police, and no one ever came around asking about her. I think it was more than just the town being glad she was gone. Maybe she really didn’t belong here.
    I heard from her only once. I got a letter. It was postmarked from a town in Mexico, some place I couldn’t even pronounce. It contained two items. One was a colour photograph of a Mayan pyramid. On the back she had written:
I found it, Toby. It was here all along.
    The other item was a playing card.
    The ace of diamonds.

A UTUMNOLOGY
    I never knew his real name. No one did. When I first started delivering his groceries, I told him mine, thinking he would do the same, but he shook his head.
    “Names aren’t important,” he said. “Only the work is important. There will be no names between us. You will be ‘the Boy’ and I will be ‘the Professor.’”
    I was sixteen at the time and didn’t particularly like being called a boy. But the Professor was so unusual, so different from any adult I’d ever known, that I didn’t give it much thought. Of course now all I can do is think about him.
    I started to ask him about his “work,” but he was already gone, out the back door. I watched him walk into the woods—a common sight, I would eventually discover.
    Most people thought he was odd from the moment he arrived in town. For one thing, he referred to himself as a “professor of autumnology”—which is where the nicknames came from—and for another he was from “Away,” which is what we say on Cape Breton Island to describe someone who wasn’t born here.
    He had moved into an old house on the outskirts of New Waterford. It was probably the best place for him. It made the townfolk comfortable with him in a way they might not have been otherwise. It’s one of the simple truths we live with out here on the East Coast. The clouds are in the sky, the fish are in the sea, and the weirdos are on the edge of town.
    People still wondered how he could live out there, with no electricity and no water except what he brought up from the well. I thought about these things too, but mostly I wondered about his “work,” and why it was so important.
    And it was important. I could see it in the Professor’s eyes when he spoke to me. I still see that look in my dreams. I feel it burning a hole through me, but I never turn away from it.

    It was on a day in November that he showed me the tree.
    I had gone out to deliver the week’s groceries, letting myself in through the front door since the Professor wasn’t always around to hear me knocking. If he was home, we’d talk for a little while, usually about the weather. If he wasn’t, I’d stick around for a bit anyway, unpacking the groceries and telling myself I was just being helpful, that I wasn’t being what my mother called a Nosey Ned.
    He wasn’t around that day, so I set to restocking the pantry from the two big paper bags I had carried from town. While I was reaching up to put a box of powdered milk on a high shelf, the back door suddenly opened with a loud screech. The box slipped out of my fingers and bonked me a good one on the head. I didn’t feel it,