* * *
It was almost ten o’clock when Pete Crenshaw heard the footsteps. He and Marilyn Pilcher were in the living room of the Pilcher house. They had eaten fried chicken from the Cheerful Chicken carry-out place on the highway, and they had a fire going in the fireplace. The room was almost too warm, but the fire cast a nice glow and drove the shadows back to the corners.
Then the pacing began.
They were playing Trivial Pursuit and Marilyn was winning when the first steps came from above. Pete knew instantly that someone was moving about in the attic. In the silent house, the sound penetrated all the way to the first floor.
Pete’s heart sank. He did not want to go upstairs. He disliked the Pilcher house. He disliked everything about it. It was cold and damp. It needed cleaning and airing out, and it had the sort of attic nobody needed — an attic where some unseen being had walked last night. True, Pete had not been on watch last night. He had not heard the restless pacing, but Bob and Jupe had told him about it.
And now it was starting again.
Marilyn looked up. “Did you hear it?” she said. She was whispering.
Pete wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. He looked away from Marilyn and said nothing.
“Did you lock the back door?” Marilyn asked.
“I–I thought you did,” he countered.
She stood up, looking toward the kitchen. “Someone could have come in.”
“We’d have heard them,” said Pete. “We’d have known it if the door opened.”
But he went to the kitchen. The door was locked. The dead bolt was on. No one had come in.
Or had an intruder come in, then turned the dead bolt from the inside? Marilyn came into the kitchen and stared at the door. She frowned, then went back out. Pete followed her to the hall, where she stared up the stairs. “Listen!” she said.
The footsteps were louder now. They made a hollow sound on the bare boards of the attic floor.
“Blast!” Marilyn went to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed 911. “I want to report a prowler,” she said.
But was it a prowler? Pete wondered. Jupe said that last night no one came up the stairs and no one went down. Yet someone had walked in the attic, and walked and walked. “Creepy!” said Pete out loud. Marilyn ignored him. She was giving the address to the dispatcher on the other end of the line.
Pete started up the stairs. He was trembling and his throat was so dry that he couldn’t swallow, but he went up anyway, step by step.
The pacing in the attic continued. A ghost? Or something more dangerous than a ghost?
Marilyn hung up the phone and followed Pete. She was no longer the arrogant rich girl. She was afraid, and she kept close to the big, athletic boy.
“When I was little,” she said, “we had a cook who got her jollies scaring kids. She told me this house was haunted.”