Horror at the Haunted House Read Online Free PDF Page B

dining room to show him the face in the mirror. She didn’t tell him about it; she wanted it to surprise him, the way it had surprised her.
    She led him in, pretending she wanted to show him a fairy scene on one of the dishes. “See the mushrooms?” she said. “And the toadstools? I think the fairies use them for chairs.”
    Corey glanced at the Fairylustre without really looking. “Mighty Mike is going to the Rose Bowl game this year,” he said, “and he’s going to ride a horse in the parade. He gets to go the week before and see how they make the floats for the parade. He says they make whole scenes out of flowers. I have to watch the Rose Bowl parade on television because I might see him and if the camera is pointed at him, he’ll wave to me.”
    Ellen turned away from the Fairylustre and started toward the door. There she was again. The sad woman in the mirror was behind her, arms outstretched, beseeching. Ellen waited for Corey to notice but he just kept chattering about Mighty Mike’s visit to the Rose Bowl parade.
    Ellen stopped walking and pointed at the mirror. “Look,” she said.
    Corey looked up. “What?” he said.
    “See the woman? I wonder how they do that.”
    “What woman?”
    “The woman in the mirror.”
    “I don’t see any woman in the mirror.”
    Ellen looked at Corey to see if he might be teasing her. Then she looked at the mirror again. She saw her own face. Tothe left, and not quite as tall, was Corey’s face. And in between them, taller than both, was the woman in the nightgown.
    “You don’t see her, standing between us?” Ellen said.
    Corey shook his head. “All I see is you and me. Is it supposed to be a trick mirror?”
    “Change places with me,” Ellen said. “Stand where I’m standing and then look.”
    They traded places. Ellen could still see three faces in the mirror. “Do you see her now?” she asked.
    “Nope. They’ve probably turned it off for tonight.”
    Ellen stared at her brother. Why couldn’t Corey see the face? Ellen saw the curls and the nightgown and the sad eyes just as clearly as if the woman had been standing directly beside her. She saw the hands, stretching toward Ellen, as if begging her to grab hold.
    “Let’s go,” Corey said. “Mom will be waiting for us and I’m hungry and I want to tell her about the Rose Bowl parade.”
    Silently, Ellen followed her brother out of the room. It was not, she knew, a trick mirror. A trick mirror would work for everyone, not just for one person.
    Mrs. Whittacker stood by the front door when Ellen and Corey went down the stairs. “You’re the last to leave tonight,” she told them.
    “We were in the dining room,” Corey said. “Ellen wanted to show me the trick mirror but it was already shut off.”
    “What trick mirror?” said Mrs. Whittacker. “There isn’t any trick mirror in the dining room. We didn’t put any haunted house scenes in the dining room because we don’t want to distract attention away from the displays.”
    “I was only kidding,” Ellen said.
    Mrs. Whittacker went out with them and, using a key,locked the door. “We had a special deadbolt installed,” she said, “so it takes a key to unlock the door, even from the inside. With so many people coming through the mansion, we thought it best to take some security precautions.”
    “Aren’t you going to turn off the lights?” asked Corey. “It would waste energy to leave them on all night.”
    “They’re on a timer. They all go out automatically in half an hour.”
    “There’s Mom,” Ellen said.
    Corey dashed to the car and began telling his mother about Mighty Mike’s trip to the Rose Bowl.
    Ellen rode home in silence. Twice, she had seen a woman in the mirror. Who? Lydia Clayton? That was the most sensible explanation, if you could call it sensible to see a ghost. Was it possible for a ghost’s image to show up in a mirror even when the ghost itself was invisible? Why couldn’t Corey see it? Why didn’t the