Every House Is Haunted Read Online Free Page B

down again, lower this time, and I could make out what it was.
    Soelle.
    She was wearing a black dress and black shoes (part of her witch’s wardrobe, I assumed). As I watched her descend lower, one of the shoes slipped off her foot and fell into the park fountain with a splash.
    “Heads up!” she called down in a giggling voice.
    “Soelle!” I shouted. “Come down from there!”
    I felt absurd saying those words. Like I was only asking her to come down off the roof.
    “Are you kidding?” she hollered back. “Do you know how long it took me to get up here? I’ve been working on this for weeks!”
    “Get down right
now
!”
    “Don’t be such a drag.” She swung around in a lazy turn and started coming down lower. She brushed the top of one of the tall elms and called out: “Oh, wow!”
    “Be careful!”
    She came floating down to the ground, looking like a gothy version of Mary Poppins (
sans
umbrella). The people in the park ran away, some of them screaming.
    “This can only end well,” I said, watching them scatter.
    Soelle waved a dismissive hand. “They’re just jealous,” she said. “Forget them. Look what I found at the top of that tree!”
    She passed it to me.
    The ace of spades.

    The van showed up the day after the levitation incident.
    I knew something was coming. There was a tension in the air, the kind that reminded me of the wet-battery smell before a powerful thunderstorm.
    I was in Soelle’s room changing her sheets. Not that there was any sign she actually slept in her bed those days. I was just going through the motions of a normal life. I was putting on the pillowcases and staring at the spider that built a web outside Soelle’s window every spring. The web it had made this year was bizarre to say the least. It was all over the place, for one. It was coming apart in places and in others the webbing had been spun into strange, almost geometric shapes.
    I was watching the spider running madly back and forth when the van pulled up: a white van with no markings on it except a plus sign on the side. Sort of like the Red Cross only black.
    A man and a woman got out, both dressed conservatively—the man in a dark suit, the woman in a skirt and jacket ensemble. They looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses. The man was carrying a briefcase, but I didn’t think there were copies of
The Watchtower
inside.
    I reached the front door just as they were knocking on it.
    “Hello,” the man said. “My name is Waldo Rand. This is my partner, Leah.” He motioned to the woman behind him without taking his eyes off me. “May we speak with you?”
    “About what?”
    “You have a sister.” It wasn’t a question. “May we see her?”
    I turned my head and looked into the living room. Soelle was sitting on the floor amid a drift of our father’s old
National Geographics
.
    “What for?” she asked gruffly.
    “This won’t take very long,” Waldo assured me. “And it won’t hurt,” he added to Soelle, who didn’t look convinced. “Just have a seat here.” He gestured to the table in the dining room. Reluctantly Soelle came over and took a seat across from Waldo. His partner, Leah, stood in the doorway, one hand resting on her hip, fingers tapping against a bulge under her jacket.
    “Do you have a lot of friends, Soelle?”
    Soelle stared at him for a moment before answering. “No. I don’t need any.”
    “Not even an imaginary one? Someone only you can see? Do you have one of those?”
    “Yesss,” Soelle said slowly.
    “Is he or she in this room right now?”
    Soelle made an effort of looking all around her, then she shook her head.
    “She’s burning hot,” Leah mentioned in a strangely casual voice.
    Waldo took out a folded piece of paper, unfolded it, and put it down with a pen in front of Soelle. “Can you draw me a picture of him?”
    Soelle stared at the paper, then raised her eyes up to Waldo.
    “The Haxanpaxan doesn’t like to be drawn, does he?” he said.
    Soelle shook her