The Haunting of Heck House Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked.
    â€œErm … I’m not sure. I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
    â€œHow do you know who Dudley is?” Cheryl said in a menacing tone. The whole carnival thing was still something of a sore spot for her, and the mere mention of Winchester P.Q. Dudley’s name was generally enough to light her up like a stick of dynamite with a too-short fuse.
    The speaker seemed to sense that he’d just set foot, so to speak, on dangerous ground and backpedalled furiously. “Er … who?” he asked.
    â€œYou said his name a few seconds ago.”
    â€œNever heard of the colonel.”
    â€œExcept you know he’s a colonel.”
    â€œOops.”
    â€œSpill it, Speakie.”
    â€œShutting up now.”
    Cheryl reached out with both hands as if she was about to grab the speaker by the throat before she realized what she was doing.
    â€œWait a minute …” Tweed frowned fiercely, suddenly reminded of something. “Did he say something about a ‘mystic’s turban’ …?”
    â€œI think so.” Cheryl shrugged one shoulder.
    â€œHang on,” Tweed muttered and jogged over to a corner of the barn stacked with an assortment of seemingly random objects the girls had collected from the field across the road after the carnival had so hastily cleared out.
    The girls had mostly done their trash collection out of a sense of duty—keeping the field tidy and all, town pride, don’t be a litterbug, that sort of thing—but they discovered it was a treasure trove of useful stuff. Things like an enormous Styrofoam mini-donut that must have fallen off the top of one of the food shacks, a jumbo bag of unused industrial-strength glitter and a “You Must Be This Tall to Ride this Ride!” sign.
    Who knew when such awesome oddments might come in handy?
    Tweed shifted over the height requirement sign so she could get at the contents of a plastic bin they’d filled with the smaller bits of carnival detritus and, after a moment’s digging, found what she was looking for: a bunch of note cards from the curiosities tent that had been left behind, scattered amongst the empty display cases (empty because Cheryl and Tweed and Pilot and Artie had loaded most of the assortment of stuff into Pilot’s plane so they could send the mummy princess into the Great Beyond, accompanied by her worldly goods). The cards had been printed with paragraphs that described individual items on display and the words jewel and mystic turban had twigged something in her memory. Tweed shuffled through the little stack of typewritten cards until she found the one she was looking for.
    â€œAha!” she exclaimed in a triumphantly deadpan monotone. “I thought I remembered something about that …”
    â€œRemembered something about what?” Cheryl asked.
    â€œOne of the artifact note cards the carnies left behind had a description on it for something called ‘The Spirit Stone of Simon Omar, World-famous Wizard of the West End,’” she said.
    â€œWhat?” Cheryl blinked. “Who?”
    Tweed handed the card over to Cheryl, who held itup in front of her face and read the faded, typewritten words out loud.
    â€œâ€˜Once thought to be a … uh … a charl-a-tan and a sham’—”
    â€œLies!” the speaker blurted.
    â€œShh!” Cheryl silenced him and kept reading.
    â€œâ€˜Simon Omar, mystic and stage magician who claimed an ability to commune with spirits in the beyond, shocked and surprised his West End audience during one evening’s performance in 1917 when he proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he possessed real magic powers’—”
    â€œSeriously?” Tweed asked, a shadow of skepticism darkening her gaze.
    Cheryl shrugged and kept reading. “‘The magician’s arcane talents were fully demonstrated when he quite unexpectedly’—aw, holy moly, Tweed! listen