My Dog's a Scaredy-Cat (8 page)

Can you guess who came up with these plans for our haunted house? Try to figure it out as you read each one. Good luck. I hope you get all ten right.

1. We hung the black light on the skeleton's ribs, so the entire bony dude glowed a creepy whitish, purplish color.

2. We tied all the rubber spiders onto Ashley's dad's fishing pole and hung it in the corner, so when people walked by, we could drop the spiders into their hair. That would make the hair on their necks stand at attention.

3. We recorded Frankie's scary howl into a tape recorder. Then we slowed the tape recorder down so when we played it back, the howls turned into spine-chilling shrieks.

4. We peeled grapes so they had the perfect texture for eyeballs and put them in a bowl of slimy egg whites as if the eyeballs had just spewed their gooey insides into the bowl.

5. We made a human brain by boiling spaghetti noodles until they were mushy and mixing them with Marshmallow Fluff so the brain would stick to kids' fingers when they touched it. Nobody wants to walk around with gray matter stuck to their fingers.

6. We lined my old Mets hat with Saran Wrap and put the brain mixture in it. When kids stuck their hands in that hat, they would think someone took their hat off and their brain came with it. (I'm even grossing myself out now.)

7. We made a ghost out of Emily's bedsheet, and then we put a fan under it, so it would billow out and look like it was about to take off and fly around the room.

8. We went through three large economy-size bottles of ketchup, covering most anything you can think of with fake ketchup blood—including a roasting fork, gauze bandages, and an old undershirt of my dad's.

9. We saved the last bottle of ketchup to add a bloody spot to the ghost's chest area, where its heart would have been.

10. We put Ashley's head through the cardboard from my Italian table costume. Then we squirted Ashley's cheeks with ketchup and threw a napkin over her head. We gave her a flashlight to light up under her chin whenever someone uncovered her head.

1. Hank***

2. Hank***

3. Hank***

4. Hank*** (although Ashley peeled the grapes)

5. Hank***

6. Hank***

7. Hank*** (Frankie pulled the sheet off the bed)

8. Hank***

9. Hank***

10. Hank***

*** I hope it doesn't seem like bragging for me to take the credit for all the ideas, but I felt really proud of them. It's not every day that I actually get to say I'm proud of my brain. So excuse me for getting a little excited.

WHEN WE FINISHED, it was six-forty-eight, according to Frankie's watch. Boy, when you're inspired, you work fast. It's like your hands and feet are attached to a million bodies all working together.

We were so focused on putting the haunted house together that we didn't even see Emily and Robert leave. They just shouted good-bye, and not one of us even popped our heads outside the sheets to see them in their costumes or to find out which costumes they were wearing. The best news was that I thought I heard my dad shout good-bye along with them. That meant that either I wasn't going to get grounded at all, or at least not until he came back. I had a feeling Emily talked him into letting us make the haunted house. She becomes a great sister sometimes when I least expect it. I can't figure out girls.

As we looked at what we had built, we felt really proud. The haunted house took up almost half of our living room. True, it didn't look like much on the outside, just a bunch of sheets and bedspreads strung together. The inside, though, was full of scary, fun things. Ashley made a sign that said: “ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.” We hung it up over the door flap. Then we turned on the black light inside the skeleton dude. It made the sheets glow like those iridescent fish that live at the bottom of the ocean. When we dimmed the living-room lights, our little haunted house looked like it was a floating alien spaceship. Or at least, that's what it looked like to us.

“McKelty is going to be scared out of his mind,” I said.

“That's if everything works right,” Frankie said. “Don't forget, Zip, it's never been tested.”

“We should have some kids test it out before McKelty gets here,” Ashley said.

“There's not much time for that now,” I said. “Who lives close?”

“Heather Payne lives on 78th Street and West End Avenue,” Frankie said.

Ashley and I both shot him a look that said “Since When Are You Hanging Out with Heather Payne, the Girl Who Cries if She Doesn't Get an A-Plus on Every Extra-Credit Project She Does?” (Which, by the way, is all of them.)

Frankie could read our minds, because he added quickly, “Hey, don't even go there, guys. We did a science project together. That's all. Remember, we created an earthworm farm?”

“Right. I remember now.” I snickered. “The Biggle Wiggle Worm Wigwam.”

Ashley and I both cracked up. Frankie wasn't so amused.

“Listen, man, the name was
her
idea,” he said. “I wanted to call it something cool like the Worm Crib. But she flat out refused.”

“Well, since you and Heather are such close personal Biggle Wiggle Worm Wigwam buddies, why don't you call her and tell her to come here as soon as possible?” I suggested.

“Don't say I never did anything for you, Zip,” Frankie said, getting up and heading toward the kitchen.

“And Luke Whitman lives around the corner on Amsterdam Avenue!” I shouted out. “While you're at it, call him, too.”

“Eeww, he's so gross,” Ashley moaned. “The other day, I saw him take a used piece of American cheese out of the trash, smell it, and then eat it.”

Frankie disappeared into the kitchen to use the phone.

“Do you think two kids are enough to test everything out?” I asked Ashley.

“It better be,” she said. “It's what we have.”

At exactly six-fifty-three, the front door flew open. I was hoping it was Heather or Luke, but no, it was just my mom.

“I didn't miss any of the trick-or-treaters yet, did I?” she said, flinging off her jacket with the big, green pickle embroidered on the back. She had those jackets made last year as a holiday present for all the people who work at the Crunchy Pickle. “I made a special batch of prune taffy to give out tonight.”

“Wow, Mrs. Z.,” Frankie said. “Don't let that out or every kid on the Upper West Side will be lined up around the block.”

“Do you really think so?” my mom asked.

“Prune taffy. The name alone has my mouth watering,” Ashley said.

“I knew it'd be a crowd-pleaser,” my mom said. She just doesn't get it that not everyone is as thrilled with prunes as she is. “And I wrapped each one individually in cellophane with a little orange-and-black ribbon. Don't they look sweet?”

I was waiting for her to notice the living room. It took her a minute, I guess because her head was still in her prune-taffy ribbons, but when she finally looked around, her eyes almost fell out of her head.

“Hank, where did you put our living room?”

“It doesn't exist any longer, Mom. You have entered the chamber of horrors.”

“That's my bedspread,” she said, pointing to the wall we had made for the haunted house.

“Your bedspread had the honor of being selected from all the bedspreads in the house to form the front wall of the scariest place on the planet,” I told her.

“Hank, honey,” she said, “this is so creative.”

You have to meet my mom someday. She is really a lot of fun. She almost never gets mad when I make a mess, because she says creativity and neatness don't go together. It's like she can see deep inside me.

“Vlady,” she called out, running into the entry hall. “Bring the platters of prune taffy and come see what Hank and his friends have made!”

Vladimir Olefski has worked for my mom at the Crunchy Pickle ever since he came to New York from his home in Russia. He is known for making the best sandwiches on all of the West Side because he stacks them really high with meat and then adds a special zingy red sauce that the customers love so much, they write my mom letters about it.

Vlady came into the living room. He was carrying two big trays of the prune taffy. It looked like hunks of dark brown shoe leather topped with little pieces of yellow fuzz. You don't even want to know what the yellow fuzz was, because it was probably something weird like dandelion pollen. From looking at that platter, I had a pretty strong feeling that we were going to have plenty of prune taffy left over.

“Hello, little ones,” Vlady said in his thick Russian accent.

You have to understand that everyone is a “little one” compared to Vlady. He's so big, I didn't think he was going to fit through the haunted house flap door. But he didn't have to, because he looked right over the top of the sheets and stared down at what we had created.

“This look like Babushka's place back home in Poltava,” he said.

“What's a babushka?” Ashley asked him.

“Not what. Who.
Babushka
is Russian word for ‘grandmother.' ”

“Your grandma lives in a haunted house?” Frankie said. “Wow. She must cool.”

“That stuff,” Vlady said, pointing to the mushy brains in the baseball cap. “That look like Babushka's breakfast porridge,” he said.

I could see Ashley trying not to laugh.

“And that guy,” he said, pointing to the skeleton, “remind me of Olga, our cow back in Poltava. There was no grass in our meadow so she was . . . how you say . . . skinny like a toothpick. Maybe two toothpicks.”

That did it. We cracked up. Vlady didn't laugh, though. I guess he was still thinking about Olga the Cow.

“What you need is vampire,” Vlady said. “There are many vampires in my country. My grandfather Boris, for example.”

“You're kidding! Your grandfather was a real vampire?” I asked him.

“We didn't know for sure,” Vlady said. “But we never let him kiss us on neck, just in case.”

Vlady's bright blue eyes were twinkling. I wasn't sure if he was kidding us or if he was just misty, thinking of his grandpa.

“Well, much as we'd love to have a vampire, there's no time for that now,” Ashley said. “We're expecting the first visitors to the haunted house here any second.”

Vlady dropped off the platters of prune taffy in the kitchen and said good-bye.

Ashley, Frankie, and I waited by the door. Where was that Heather Payne? It was only a half hour until McKelty was supposed to arrive. And we still had to check out the haunted house to see if it was ready for that one incredible moment when Nick the Tick would wet his pants and never show his face in public again.

The doorbell rang.

“It's showtime,” I said. “Ditch the lights.”

Ashley and Frankie took their places inside the haunted house. As I crept to the door, I could hear my own heart pounding.

I opened the door, and it was . . .