Tj and The Haunted House Read online

  Ms. K. looked at him.

  “How did you know that, Seymour?”

  Seymour looked mysterious for a moment. Then he grinned and turned back to regular Seymour again. After all, this was Ms. K. Ms. K.’s powers of observation far exceed our own.

  “You told us last year that your sister was moving to Florida,” said Seymour. “And this year you’re teaching us a lot about hurricanes. I put the two ideas together. I learned to do things like that from you. You’re a good teacher.”

  “Thank you,” said Ms. K. “I think.”

  She walked down the hall. We’d put a large white paper circle on the floor where the cold spot was, and I’d hung a sign on the door of the spare room.

  Ghost in Residence. Enter if You Dare.

  “What’s this?” asked Ms. K. “Is this the project you were talking about, TJ?”

  Before I could answer, the doorbell rang. Our first guests had arrived.

  It didn’t take long for the screams and giggles to start, about an equal number of each. Everyone had a good time.

  Amanda was in charge of taking money. The box was so stuffed with bills she had to give some to Ms. K. for safekeeping. We did great business for about two hours and then it began to slow down. Just before eight thirty I heard Amanda call.

  “TJ — they’re here!”

  That meant Mom and Dad were driving up. We’d given them a special invitation. Neither Seymour nor I had told them the details about what our class was going to do to the house, just so we could surprise them. I had a surprise all my own; that’s why I stayed upstairs, but I crept to the landing so I could hear Amanda talking down below.

  “Front door or back?” she asked.

  “What’s the difference?” asked Dad.

  “The front is the scariest, but it costs more,” said Amanda, “except it’s free to you because you live here.”

  They chose the front door and insisted on paying. They said they’d be able to make a better judgment on whether or not they got their money’s worth that way.

  The front hall was dark and spooky. Eerie music played and jack-o-lanterns grinned.

  The living room was full of cobwebs and tombstones. Rats poked in and out of the curtains and crawled over the sofa. They were plastic, but in the dark they looked real. A bat swung across the room, brushing Mom’s hair. Mom screamed. Someone raced out from behind a tombstone, shouted “Boo!” and disappeared. Mom screamed again.

  “TJ!” she called. “You didn’t tell me it was going to be this scary!”

  I didn’t answer, but I could see her from the top of the stairs. Seymour and I were chuckling. Dad was laughing. He hadn’t been scared yet. He walked by the stairwell. The sheets grabbed him. He jumped about two feet. It was Mom’s turn to laugh.

  Up the stairs … knock … knock … knock.

  Seymour hurried off to wait for them in the séance room.

  “Come in, come in,” he called. “Let Seymour the Amazing tell your past, your present, your future.”

  Mom and Dad were in the séance room for at least ten minutes — I think Seymour gave them the special treatment. Next they visited the creepy bathroom.

  “From now on, whenever I climb in our tub I’ll think of eyeballs,” said Dad.

  “I still want to know how Seymour knew I’d lost my glasses,” said Mom.

  They stopped in the paper circle to feel the cold spot.

  “This was a good idea, using what’s already here,” said Mom.

  “I’ve tried and tried to figure out why this spot is cold and fix it, but I have never been able to,” said Dad. He pointed at the sign on the spare room door. “What’s that?”

  “Ghost in Residence. Enter if You Dare,” read Mom.

  “Shall we?”

  “I don’t know if my heart’s up to it,” said Mom.

  “We’ll be sorry if we don’t,” said Dad.

  Very, very slowly, Mom opened the door of the spare room. Very, very slowly …

  “Hey!” said Mom

  “Neat!” said Dad.

  The spare room wasn’t dark and spooky as they might have expected, but it had been changed from the way it usually was. A scratchy old blanket, a canvas rucksack and some work clothes lay across the bed. A pickaxe, shovel and the type of wide, shallow pan that prospectors use to pan for gold were leaning against the opposite wall. On top of the dresser were rock samples — quartz, lead, limestone, sandstone and fools’gold. Beside them were maps with mining claims marked on them. All those things, if Mom and Dad had looked closely, were things they would have seen somewhere else — our basement, Gran’s garage, Seymour’s attic.

  But what lay on the desk was something they hadn’t seen. It was a small book with a leather cover, yellowed pages and flowing writing.

  “The room’s done up like a prospector’s cabin,” said Dad. “And this looks like a journal or diary.”

  “Do you see the name?” asked Mom. “I don’t believe it — Charlie Smithers.”

  “That’s the name on this photograph too,” said Dad. It was an old-fashioned photograph, a tintype. The man in the image had sharp, questioning eyes, a handlebar moustache and a huge floppy hat.

  At that moment Charlie himself rose up from behind the desk — moustache, hat and all.

  “TJ?” asked Mom.

  “Rats,” I said. “I was hoping to fool you for a few minutes anyway.”

  Chapter 11

  Enough money to go camping in the mountains twice — that’s how much money we made from the haunted house.

  Seymour was really pleased.

  “It was my idea you know,” he said. “I’m probably a marketing genius or something and I don’t even know it!”

  “But we don’t need to go camping twice,” said Gabe. “Maybe we could buy a thousand bags of candy just to get us through the year.”

  Ms. K. didn’t bother to answer that one.

  “We could give the money to help kids who couldn’t come to the haunted house or even go out for Halloween,” I suggested. “Kids who have to stay in the hospital or visit it a lot.”

  “There’s an organization that does special events for kids like that,” offered Roddy. “We could give the money to them.”

  That’s what we decided to do.

  “Thanks, TJ,” said Amanda after school. I just nodded. I was glad I’d thought of it. Amanda turned to Seymour as he came out the door. “Thanks for the fun, Seymour. The haunted house really was a great idea.”

  “Are you going to tell me where you got all the neat scary ideas?” asked Seymour.

  “My grandfather used to do those things on Halloween,” said Amanda. “Every year when we went to his house there’d be something special set up. It got scarier the older we got. It was great. He was a real character.”

  Those were about the same words Mom and Dad used when we talked about Charlie Smithers after supper that evening.

  “I still can’t believe he fixed up a hiding space in the wall above the window and no one knew about it,” said Mom. “If Alaska wasn’t so snoopy it might have been another hundred years before anyone found Mr. Smithers’ journal, if ever. Maybe a little kitten wildness isn’t so bad after all.”

  “The journal and the photograph,” said Dad. “You can guess just from the look in his eyes what an interesting character he must have been.”

  “Have you read very much of the journal, TJ?” asked Mom.

  “I’m working on it,” I said. “I’ve been trying to follow Charlie’s travels on the maps Gran brought over. It’s really neat to see where he went and what areas are actually being mined today — copper, magnesium, coal. I’m trying to find out what those two rocks he kept might be.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing, TJ,” said Dad.

  What happened next is kind of hard to explain. I scooped up the kittens and set them in my lap and started talking to them. The words just kept pouring out.

  “I’m interested in all sorts of thi
ngs,” I said. “I’m interested in cats and dogs and pets and maybe veterinarians and animal training and circus acts. I’m interested in gold mines and diamond mines and all sorts of minerals and old photographs. I’m interested in how to prove whether or not there are ghosts or even if you can prove them or disprove them. I’m interested in more things than I even know about. I might even be interested in hardware stores and paint and advertising and business, but how can I know what I’m really interested in until I get there because there’s so much along the way? I mean, I might even turn out to be a character myself.”

  A great silence followed. I was looking at the kittens. Dad was looking at me. Mom was looking at both of us.

  “Is there something going on here that I don’t know about?” she asked softly.

  “I guess there is,” said Dad.

  He sighed. It was a big sigh. I looked up. He was shaking his head. And then he smiled. It wasn’t the hardware store dad that was smiling either. It was the real dad, the one that’s there underneath, only sometimes I worry he isn’t there even though I should know he really is.

  “I guess I went a little overboard about teaching you things,” said the real dad. “I guess I forgot that running a business is our dream, not yours.”

  I got even more worried then. I didn’t want Dad to misunderstand or Mom either.

  “It’s not that I don’t think it’s neat,” I told them. “It’s just that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I mean, I don’t even know if I could do what you do.”

  “Oh you could do it, TJ,” said my dad, “but you don’t have to. You really don’t. I mean that. And if I ever forget, I want you to jump in and remind me again.”

  I nodded. I especially liked the “jump in and remind me” part. I know what hardware store parents are like. I could see something weird happening again in the future, but at least now I felt like I might have some way out.

  “Why don’t you just be TJ Barnes for now,” said Mom. “You’re pretty good at it.”

  “Pretty good,” said Dad. “But if you’re going to be an independent character like Charlie Smithers, you should probably find out the scientific reason why we put black pigment into white paint in order to make it blue because I don’t understand it no matter what the charts say.”

  He really did understand … at least sort of!

  I put Alaska on one shoulder and T -Rex on the other shoulder and went upstairs and stood in the cold spot.

  Some of the mysteries of life aren’t really so mysterious — Seymour and his séance showed me that.

  On the other hand, there are things in life that aren’t easy to explain.

  I’ll never know whether the figure that my great-grandmother saw was real or dreamed. I’ll never know whether I found the journal because a ghost wanted me to or because a kitten was a little too adventurous.

  All I know is that someone I’ve never met, a prospector named Charlie Smithers, feels like a friend of mine.

  Maybe, just maybe, I believe in ghosts … some types of ghosts … after all.

  Seymour’s bag of books held the following titles.

  Broughton, Richard S., PhD. Parapsychology: The Controversial Science. New York: Random House, 1991.

  Fraser, Sylvia. The Book of Strange. Toronto: Doubleday, 1992.

  Gardner, Robert. What’s So Super about the Supernatural? Brookfield: Twenty-First Century Books, 1998.

  Gordon, Henry. Extra Sensory Deception. Toronto: Macmillan, 1988.

  Inglis, Kim and Tony Whitehorn, Editors. Ghosts and Hauntings. New York: Readers Digest, 1993.

  O’Neil, Terry and Stacey L. Tipp, Editors. Paranormal Phenomena: Opposing Viewpoints Series. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1990.

  Smith, Barbara. Ghost Stories of Alberta. Willowdale: Hounslow Press, 1993.

  Hazel Hutchins has always loved ghosts. She is the author of many beloved books for children of all ages. A master storyteller, Hazel weaves together humor, suspense and characters who live on the page. TJ and the Haunted House is Hazel’s second book for Orca Book Publishers. Her first, TJ and the Cats, was shortlisted for the 2003 Silver Birch Young Readers’ Choice Award and is on the 2002 list of Best Books from the Canadian Toy Testing Council.

  More titles about TJ include:

  TJ and the Quiz Kids

  TJ and the Rockets

  TJ and the Sports Fanatic

  TJ and the Cats

  Praise for TJ and the Cats:

  “Charmingly written and genuinely funny in a gentle, sophisticated way, this is a delightful short novel for readers ages 7 to 11.” Quill & Quire

  “Hutchins’ wonderful lilting style is refreshing and enjoyable. Highly recommended.” Resource Links

  TJ and the Cats

  1-55143-205-6

  $6.95 CAN; $4.99 US

  paperback, 108 pages