The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

stay with me.”
    I had the perfect person—Howard—but before I could hand him off to Joanne, we heard somebody yelling, above all the other noise.
    “It’s alive! The whole cauldron is alive with worms!” The somebody was my mother.

11
    W hen we got to her, Mother had calmed down. By now some people had flashlights so I could see that her witch hat was bent in the middle and hanging down over her face. She looked a little cross-eyed, especially up close when she hugged me.
    “It isn’t worms,” she said. “At least, it isn’t all worms. I think it’s
some
worms and a lot of cold spaghetti. I don’t know how it all got into the boiling cauldron… . Boiling cauldron, hah! Boiling with squirmy worms!
    Anyway,” she went on, “I only left for a minute, to see if I could find you and Charlie, and when I came back … ughgh!”
    “I thought you were in charge of the Mystery Maze,” I said.
    “Not after some cat showed up and all but tore the whole thing down—scratching and squalling and leaving its fur everywhere … and not even its own fur. Somebody had painted it black, for Halloween, I guess.”
    She leaned closer. “Goodness, I wish they would get the lights back on. I can’t quite see who’s with you.”
    “Well,” I said, “Howard’s with me, and Louella, Boomer, and Maxine … “
    “Not Charlie?” Mother said. “Or Cecil? Have you seen them … him … it?”
    She was pretty upset, so I just said yes, which wasn’t really a lie, because I had seen “it”—the lion costume.
    Then Mother said I should go get them, since I knew where they were.
    “They may not still be there,” I said.
    “Oh, they won’t go roaming around in the dark,” she said, “especially not in a slipcover and a floor mop.”
    “You don’t know where they are,” Louella said as we left.
    This was true, but I knew where the slipcover and floor mop were—in the downstairs hall by the teachers’ room, which is where we all went, leaving my mother to deal with her wormy spaghetti.
    By now our eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, but … “Even so,” Joanne said, “everything is too spooky.”
    The hall to the teachers’ room was more than spooky. It was deserted.
    “That’s because there’s nothing special set up here,” Stewart said. “No Haunted Hall or Monster’s Mansion … just the teachers’ room. I’ve never been in the teachers’ room,” he added. “What do they keep in there?”
    “Kids,” I said, “according to Imogene Herdman.”
    That was what Imogene told Charlie—that if kids went in the teachers’ room they never got out again. “The teachers keep them in there,” Imogene said, “with little bowls of water and old bologna sandwiches.”
    “Come on,” Stewart said. “What do they do in there?”
    “Ask Leroy,” Louella said. “According to him they hang out, watch TV, drink beer, order in pizza. I don’t know what they do. I’ve never been in there.”
    “Me, either,” Albert said. “I never got invited.”
    “Albert,” I said, “nobody gets invited to the teachers’ room. Sometimes you get sent there with a note for someone, but even then they don’t let you in.”
    “I got sent there once in the second grade,” Maxine said, “with a note for Mrs. Campbell. I didn’t even know who Mrs. Campbell was, and I was so nervous I got a nosebleed.” She stopped at the door. “I’m not even sure I want to go in there now.”
    I didn’t know whether Maxine was scared—in case Imogene was right and there was something in the teachers’ room to be scared
of—
or whether she was just remembering her nosebleed and wondering if it would always happen when she went to the teachers’ room.
    “There’s just tables and chairs,” Boomer reported from inside the room. “No TV or anything good. But there’s somebody in here-re… . “ His voice faded out, or down, or away.
    “Sounds like he fell in a hole,” Louella said.
    Then I remembered what Alice had