The Haunted House by Paul Hutchens

Author:Paul Hutchens [Hutchens, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57567-750-7
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 1998-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Our gang had acted out a lot of stories, each one of us taking the part of one of the characters and having what our parents called “innocent fun.” In fact, it seemed that I was pretending to be someone or something else nearly all the time. Sometimes I was a bear that growled and crawled around on the floor of our house. Once, when I was smaller, I was a fire engine and raced from one room of our house to another and up and down the stairs, making a fire-engine noise that must have sounded awful to Mom, because she stopped me and let me go outdoors.

Well, next week finally came, and the gang started out to finish playing Old Tom the Trapper. First, we stopped at the North Road bridge, and I got shot through the chest again. Then, because it would be too far for the gang to carry my dead body all the way to Old Tom’s stone house, I came to life until we got there.

Old Man Paddler had drawn a map for us so that we wouldn’t get lost, and after about an hour of walking we finally arrived. It certainly was a spooky-looking place. It was way up on a bluff above Sugar Creek and had a lot of maple and ash and elm and other kinds of trees all around it and ivy clinging to one of the walls. The heavy wooden door looked strong enough to keep out Indians or wild animals. The barn, about a hundred feet away from the house, was twisted into a very ugly shape and was half lying down. There was an old windmill near the house that didn’t have any wheel at the top. The wheel was lying twisted up and partly buried in the dirt at the bottom of the tower.

We walked all around, listening and imagining different things, and then the gang decided to bury me out under the great big maple tree, which was almost two feet thick at the base and had wide-spreading branches covered with large green heart-shaped leaves about the size of Dad’s hand when it’s spread out.

“All right,” Big Jim, who was the director of our play, said. “Lay the poor old man right there till we have his grave ready.”

I plopped my body down on the ground right where I was, made myself limp, and made the gang carry me to where they wanted me. They half dragged me to the base of the tree and left me lying alone, while they took some sticks and pretended to dig a grave. I was lying on maybe a hundred and fifty two-winged maple seeds that looked like the brass key we use to wind the eight-day clock in the kitchen. I was also lying on a root that felt awfully hard in the small of my back. So I rolled over once and then lay very quiet.

I watched what was going on out of the corner of my eye.

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