Dudes, the School Is Haunted! by R. L. Stine Read Free Book Online

how to get to the gym,” Ben insisted. “Make it short—okay?”
    “You’ve come to the other side,” Seth said.
    Ben rolled his eyes. “The other side of what ?” he asked impatiently.
    “The other side of the wall,” Seth replied.
    Eloise sneezed. She pulled a wad of tissues from the bag at her side. “I can’t get rid of this cold,” she sighed. “I think
it’s because there’s no sunlight.”
    “No sunlight?” I cried. “The other side of the wall?” I let out a loud groan.
“Will you all please stop talking in mysteries?”
    Mona turned to Seth. “Start at the beginning,” she said. “Maybe that will
help them.”
    Eloise fumbled around in her gray bag. Finally, she pulled out a pack of
tissues and placed them on the desk in front of her.
    “Well, okay,” Seth agreed. “The beginning.”
    Ben and I exchanged glances. Then we leaned forward to listen.
    “The five of us were in the very first class at Bell Valley School,” Seth
began. “The school opened about fifty years ago, and—”
    “Whoa! Wait a minute!” Ben jumped to his feet. “Tommy and I aren’t morons!”
he declared. “If you went to school fifty years ago, you’d be at least sixty
years old!”
    Seth nodded. “Guess you’re good at math, huh?” It was a joke, but it sounded
bitter.
    “We haven’t aged,” Mary explained, straightening her black bangs with one
hand. “We’ve stayed exactly the same age for fifty years!”
    Ben rolled his eyes. “I think that elevator took us to Mars!” he whispered to
me.
    “It’s all true,” Eddie said, shifting his weight. “We’re frozen here. Frozen
in time.”
    “The elevator must move between your world and ours,” Mona said, gazing back
at it. “No one else has ever come here by elevator. It’s not how we arrived.”
    “I don’t understand,” I confessed. “None of this makes sense to me. The
elevator was boarded up. Hidden. Why did it bring us here?”
    “It must be the only connection between our worlds,” Mona said mysteriously.
    � “This is all crazy. We’re missing the dance,” Ben whispered.
    “Let them finish the story,” I told him. “Then we’ll go.”
    Seth stood up and began pacing back and forth. “The first class at Bell
Valley School was pretty small,” he told us. “There were only twenty-five of us.
It was a brand-new school, and we were kind of happy to be the first ones in
it.”
    Eloise sneezed. Mona said, “Bless you.”
    “One day, our principal announced it was Class Photo Day,” Seth continued. “A
photographer came to take a group photo of our class.”
    “Was it a color photo?” Ben broke in. He laughed. But no one else did.
    “School photos weren’t in color in the nineteen forties,” Mary told Ben.
“They were in black and white.”
    “We all gathered in the library to take the photo,” Seth continued. “All
twenty-five of us. The photographer lined us up.”
    “I recognized him right away,” Eddie broke in. “He was an angry man. An evil
man. He hated kids.”
    “We were all in a crazy mood,” Mona added. “We were laughing and joking
around a lot and pretending to wrestle. And the photographer became furious
because we wouldn’t stand still for him.”
    “We all hated him,” Eddie chimed in. “The whole town knew he was evil. But he
was the only photographer around.”
    “I’ll never forget his name,” Eloise said sadly. “Mr. Chameleon. I’ll never
forget it. Because… because a chameleon changes colors—and we can’t.”
    “Mr. Chameleon?” Ben snickered. “Didn’t he used to hang out with Mr. Lizard?”
    “Ben, stop—” I pleaded.
    I could see that Ben didn’t believe a word of Seth’s story. He kept making
jokes. But Seth and the others looked so solemn, so bitter.
    Staring at their old-fashioned clothes and haircuts, at their sad, gray
faces, I believed them. They were the vanished kids, I realized. The lost class
of 1947.
    “The photographer lined us up in three