Spackled and Spooked Read Online Free PDF Page A

though. Instead, I focused on what I was doing, running my scorer up and down the walls, its tiny serrated wheel punching long lines of tiny holes in the wallpaper, making a soft scratching noise as it went. Tomorrow I’d bring a radio to keep me company while I worked. Without Derek here, the place was eerily quiet. I started humming but stopped when I realized I was singing the theme song from the Twilight Zone .
    I’d been at it for maybe ten minutes when I heard a sound. And then another. Footsteps. I stopped, holding my breath. What the hell?
    “Derek?” I tried. “Is that you?”
    But no, how could it be? I’d put the security chain on the door; he couldn’t have gotten in. So who was coming down the hallway toward the bathroom?
    Maybe he came through the back door , I thought, grabbing at the possibility like a drowning woman grabs at a life raft. Yeah, he could have come through the back door. I’d watched him lock it after he came in from investigating the crawlspace, but there was no security chain on that door, just a dead bolt. That must be it.
    “Derek? If you don’t stop scaring me right now, I’ll kill you!”
    A little ribbing is OK—I’d come to expect that from him—but this was going too far.
    “Derek? Dammit, say something, OK?”
    Nothing. And yet the steps kept coming closer. Soft, inexorable steps on the fluffy carpet in the long hallway. Any second now, whoever was outside would be visible through the open door. I turned to face the opening, my legs stiff. The last time this had happened to me, in Aunt Inga’s house, the footsteps belonged to a man who had come to kill me. He had done his best, and might even have succeeded if Inky hadn’t tripped him as we struggled at the top of the stairs. With that fairly recent memory in mind, I could be excused for expecting the worst. I gripped my wallpaper scorer so tightly that my fingers hurt, and prepared for battle.
    The steps reached the door and kept going. I stared at the doorway, but didn’t see a thing. No shimmer in the air, no shadow on the opposite wall, nothing. Yet the steps continued, toward the back bedrooms. I held my breath. Goose bumps popped out all over my body. I wondered insanely if I’d hear shots. Phantom shots, from a gun fired seventeen years ago. And then the screams of the victims.
    Nothing happened. The steps stopped, as if they were shut off, and everything was quiet.
    I admit it, I had to force myself to move. All I wanted to do was stay where I was and pretend that nothing had happened. My knees were shaking when I scrambled off the step stool and into the hallway, cautiously looking both ways before stepping from the bathroom onto the worn carpet of the hall. There was nothing to see in either direction.
    I made myself walk down the hallway to the empty rooms at the end. There was no one there, either, not that I had expected anyone. I’d been looking straight at the doorway when the steps went past, and they weren’t made by a living person. Which left me with four options:
I’d heard the steps of a ghost,
someone was trying to freak me out,
my ears were playing tricks on me, or
I was losing my mind.
    All right, so between us, I’ll admit to a certain shamefaced fascination with ghost stories. I’m a rational woman, so I know they’re not true—can’t possibly be true—but I enjoy them. As entertainment, I mean. I certainly wouldn’t want to ever come up against an actual, real-live ghost. (Which I hadn’t just done, because there’s no such thing.) And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to scare me like this. Derek has a sense of humor, true, and one that often extended to making fun of yours truly, but in a sweet manner, that said that deep down he really likes me and just enjoys tweaking my tail. He’s not malicious. So whereas he might have enjoyed making me think he was a ghost for a minute, the joke would have ended with him appearing in the doorway with a “Boo!” and a kiss. He