Free The Elevator Ghost by Glen Huser Page A

candles.
    Benjamin sighed. “I bet it was something. Too bad she lost it.”
    â€œShe didn’t,” Carolina Giddle said. “She gave it to me.” Reaching into her handbag, she pulled out a box.
    Emma and Lucy leaned forward.
    Benjamin reached out, his fingers shaking as they brushed the lid of the box.
    â€œGo ahead,” Carolina Giddle said. “Open it.”
    Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was the model.
    It looked a little like a hot dog, with a double row of tiny windows where the wiener would go.
    Later, Carolina Giddle ran into Herman Spiegelman as she was getting out of the elevator on the main floor.
    He clicked off the vacuum cleaner. “You like to come down here to the sunroom at the end of a day, don’t you? If you got any tea left over you can always tip it into the aspidistra pot. That plant thrives on tea.”
    It wasn’t until the caretaker had finished and headed to his suite that her friends appeared.
    â€œHave you heard any more?” Grace was barely visible this evening. “You know, from the rhyming man?”
    â€œNot heard, but I have a feeling I should —”
    â€œYour mama always said no one had itchier feet than you.” Aunt Beulah shook her head. “Me, I was never one to travel much farther than a frog can spit.”
    Carolina Giddle sighed. “If I’d known he stayed right there all these years…” With a finger she stroked the crystal in her left earring. “But let’s not talk about that. Tell me, Grace, about that Halloween just after you died.”
    â€œOh, yes, that Halloween. But you should tell it, Beulah.”
    â€œI’ll never forget it.” The old woman took a deep breath. “That night of Ada’s party…”



SEVEN
    The Elevator Ghost
    It was Halloween night, and Carolina Giddle was giving a party.
    â€œShe’s having it in the sunroom,” Corrina Bellini said to Hetty Croop as they compared their invitations.
    Each invitation was shaped like an eye-mask. Corrina’s had a tiny black cat on each corner and was dusted with gold sparkles. Hetty’s had a small jack-o’-lantern between the eyes.
    â€œShe told me her apartment was too small for everyone,” said Hetty, who was dressed as a ballerina. Red sequins spotted the nylon net of her tutu like a glittery rash of measles.
    â€œAre you guys going to tell a ghost story?” Benjamin Hooper asked. All of the mask-shaped cards invited the guest to tell a ghost story — if they wanted to. “I’m calling mine ‘The Ghost Spaceship.’” Ben was dressed as a UFO. He looked out at the girls through his space goggles.
    â€œI’m telling a story about a vampire dog that loves to drink cat blood,” Corrina said.
    â€œI just want to listen,” Hetty said shyly.
    The three joined a parade of children streaming through the sunroom door. Awful-looking spiderwebs drooped from its upper corners. Hubert Croop shuddered and smoothed the cardboard feathers of his owl costume.
    The room was decorated with items the children had helped make the day before. Dwayne Fergus’s jack-o’-lantern, with its Dracula teeth and slitty eyes, grinned from the snack table.
    Dwight had constructed a swamp ­monster out of milk jugs and ice-cream containers taped together with duct tape and painted green. It was covered with drips of snotty slime he’d made by mixing mint toothpaste with engine oil. Eerie lights gleamed through its eyes and mouth.
    One of Galina Lubinitsky’s drawings of a scaly bat monster was tacked on the wall above the aspidistra. The monster wore a mask over its eyes.
    â€œShe puts masks on all her monsters now,” Luba explained.
    Luba and Elsa had made funny Mix ’n’ Match creatures. One had a head like a fairy-tale princess, a middle like an overweight heavy-metal rock star, and legs like Sasquatch.
    The older Lubinitsky sisters wore