Free The Haunting by Rodman Philbrick Page A

the middle.
    The batter swung and hit a soft ground ball right at me. An easy out. All I had to do was throw to home. No problemo.
    I bent down to scoop up the ball and it went right through my legs.
    Unbelievable. One runner crossed home plate, and before I could make a move, Lucy came around from second and passed me in a blur to score the winning run.
    It was all my fault. After the game nobody said much. Steve just looked at me and shrugged.
    I should have felt terrible, losing the game like that, but I didn’t feel much of anything at all. A stupid baseball game, what did it matter?
    â€œHey, Jason, wait up!” It was Steve. “What happened to you? You looked like a zombie today. A real no-brainer.”
    â€œThanks, Steve. You’re a big help,” I said. “If you’d had the kind of night I had, you’d still be hiding under your bed.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” Steve’s eyes lit up. “More ghost stuff, huh?”
    â€œIt’s not funny,” I said. “I’m really worried.”
    â€œTell me,” begged Steve. “I won’t laugh. Maybe I can help. Two brains are better than one no-brainer.”
    Not that I expected him to believe me, but I told Steve everything that had happened. The noises, the things moving around downstairs, the voice outside my door. His eyes got bigger and bigger.
    â€œWhen the chandelier smashed, a piece of flying glass hit my leg.” I showed Steve the small cut. “I didn’t get this in a dream. I keep looking for rational explanations but this time I have to admit, there aren’t any. Broken lamps don’t fly up and put themselves back together.”
    â€œWow,” said Steve, looking at the scratch. “So what do you think? Is it an old lady ghost or a little kid?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s two of them. The voice was definitely not a child’s. It sounded like a witch’s voice. But I heard a little kid, too.”
    â€œTwo ghosts? How come there’d be two ghosts haunting the same house?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they’re connected somehow.”
    â€œYou mean like because of a murder or something? They say a ghost has to keep reliving the moment of its death. So if there’s a little kid ghost, maybe he had something to do with the old lady dying!”
    For some reason the very idea gave me the creeps. What if Steve was right? What if my little sister was playing with a ghost who had killed someone in real life?
    Suddenly Steve turned in the road and slapped my arm. “I’ve got it,” he said excitedly. “We can search for the old lady’s body. The way to get rid of a ghost is to find the body and lay it to rest. Once the old lady’s body is properly buried, maybe the child ghost will be at peace, too. Maybe that’s what it wants, for you to find the body and get it out of the house.”
    It was a gruesome idea, searching for a body. But we had to try something.
    â€œI’ll bet it’s in the basement,” Steve said. “That’s why nobody found it.”
    I didn’t want to go down into that basement, not after what happened with the slimy hand grabbing my ankle, but Steve would think I was a chicken if I didn’t. And besides, maybe I really had imagined that creepy hand.
    So we did it, we went down into the basement.
    My dad had fixed the broken step and the piece of wood was the only new and clean thing in the whole place.
    I tensed when I put my foot down on the new step, listening for noises from under the stairs. But with Steve chattering away like a real motormouth, I couldn’t hear a thing.
    â€œNow I see why you brought that flashlight,” said Steve. “It’s pretty dim and spooky down here. The perfect place for a dead body.”
    We stopped within the circle of light from the overhead bulb and I switched on the flashlight. The flashlight