Tales from the Haunted Mansion Vol. 1: The Fearsome Foursome Read online

  Willa softened. She assumed that they were in the wrong spot, and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her afternoon wandering around the flea market. “Enjoy your new hunk of junk,” she deadpanned. Then she quickly added, “And with the money you just saved, you can buy me an Italian ice. You can even tell me all about this Lefty what’s-his-face.”

  And that’s pretty much what happened. Over perfect Italian ices, Tim told Willa everything he knew about Lefty Lonegan. Not just his batting average, which was a hefty .425 the year he, um, moved on, but also facts about his exceptional fielding skills. Lefty was being scouted by—cue the heavenly choir—the New York Yankees. That is, until that fateful night when a car crash cost him his hand. “On the day of the All-Star game, July seventeenth, nineteen fifty-five, Lefty hung himself from the center field wall.” Tim bowed his head. “Baseball was his life. Without his hand, he couldn’t play. And without the game, he couldn’t go on.”

  “That’s the worst story ever,” said Willa. But there were worse things about Lefty, things even Tim didn’t know about. The stuff of true nightmares. Steady yourself, dear reader, for what is about to happen to young Timothy is the stuff of true nightmares. Perhaps even yours…

  That night, when Tim took the glove home, he didn’t say a word to his parents, which was unlike him. He went to bed early, hoping he could sleep off the bizarre events of the day.

  But he couldn’t.

  At first he blamed his sleeplessness on the heat. It was a muggy night and the ceiling fan just wasn’t cutting it. Tim flipped over his pillow to find a cold spot. And from his side, he caught sight of Lonegan’s glove. It was on the dresser next to his aquarium. In the dark, it looked like an overgrown human heart. Of course, it wasn’t long before Tim’s imagination went into extra innings and the giant heart started to beat.

  Thump…thump. Thump…thump.

  Tim did what most brave souls do when confronted with such dilemmas. He pulled the covers over his head and hoped it would stop. But the thumping continued, growing stronger. Thump…THUMP. Thump…THUMP!

  Tim lowered the sheet, just a smidge. Thump…THUMP. Thump…THUMP! The sound was still with him. Increasing. THUMP…THUMP! It was maddening. THUMP…THUMP! But it wasn’t the glove. Tim’s eyes darted across the room and focused on a small white circle rising and falling in quick succession against the nighttime sky. THUMP…THUMP! The sound was coming from Tim’s window. And then he saw it:

  A baseball was being thrown against the glass—faster than any other baseball has ever been thrown. Supernaturally fast. THUMP…THUMP! It was only a matter of seconds before—

  THUMP-CRACK! The ball cracked the windowpane, splintering the glass in the shape of a spiderweb.

  In one of those dopey moves somebody makes in every horror movie ever made, Tim climbed out of bed to investigate. You know, to check it out. A most excellent choice, Master Timothy. What could possibly go wrong?

  “Yee–ouch!” Almost instantly, a stinging pain shot through his foot. Tim looked down. Horror of horrors! He had stepped on…his social studies binder. Then he heard it again: THUMP-CRACK! Hopping on one foot, he made it to the window. Hunkering below the sill, he looked out into the yard. And that’s when it happened: THUMP-CRASH-SMASH! The ball blasted through the splintered pane. Tim ducked out of the way, and the ball silently rolled to a stop by his foot. He instinctively reached down to grab it. The ball was caked in mud and patches of what appeared to be green mold and moss. Still, he had to pick it up. Wouldn’t you?

  He rubbed the muck onto his pajama sleeve so he could make out a signature—not that he needed to. He had already guessed to whom it had belonged. And as much as he hoped otherwise, the ball was indeed signed…Lefty.

  No surprise, right? But what Tim saw next certainly was.

  Gazing through the splintered glass, he spotted a figure swaying, dangling from the highest branch of an old oak tree. At first it looked like a mannequin wearing an outdated baseball uniform. Its clothes were dripping with fresh mud, like it had just slid into home—or crawled out of a grave. There was a noose around its neck, and if that wasn’t enough, there was a stump where the left hand should have been.

  Tim froze in place. That’s rule number one: when something scares you witless, you freeze. That was unfortunate, because had he been able to move, he would have noticed his fish flittering around the aquarium. Because they were scared, too. And when fish get scared, they don’t freeze. They flitter.

  The thumping returned. Now it was Tim doing the work, for that was the sound of his own heart pounding from his chest. He had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t alone—like something else was there in the room.

  He was right.

  There was, in fact, something hideous on the floor. A human hand, lopped off at the wrist, hiding in plain sight. It was perfectly still, like a clay sculpture, with stalks of decaying bone protruding from its fleshy core. How had it gotten there? Had it come through the window with the ball? Had it been hiding inside the glove the whole time? Tim’s most rational thought was that it wasn’t really there at all. He must be dreaming. It was simply a nocturnal manifestation of the day’s events. He would wake himself up and everything would be fine. So Tim closed his eyes and silently counted to three. And when he opened his eyes…

  the hand was gone. Just like that.

  Tim sighed. He almost laughed, except his heart was still racing, that creeped-out feeling still with him, and with good reason. There was something else in the bedroom with him. He could hear it, even over the thumping of his own heart. It sounded like fingernails.

  Scratching.

  Tim looked around until he spotted it—there! A shape skittered across the floor. In the dark, you’d have sworn it was a giant spider, as big as a man’s hand. Only, this spider had six legs. Get the picture? It was a severed six-fingered hand, digging its razor-sharp nails into the floorboards to drag itself forward. But where was its body? At the moment, it was out in the yard, inconveniently hanging from a tree.

  The disembodied hand picked up speed, all six digits working in horrible harmony. Moving with purpose. The wretched thing had a destination in mind: it was heading toward a dresser where its terrible prize—Lonegan’s glove—was waiting to reunite with the appendage that had once given it life. Its bony fingertips reached for the knobs so it could climb.

  If the hand was real, Tim reasoned, he would need to get a closer look at that thing hanging out in the yard. He reached for a pair of “vintage” binoculars on his shelf. He panned across a section of gnarled branches until…

  a corpse’s face appeared in close-up. Tim could practically smell its rancid stench through the lenses. It was Lefty Lonegan’s mug, or what remained of it, now more bone than flesh. A thin layer of bleached-white skin had been crudely stitched in semicircles around the temples, rendering him a human baseball. The lower jaw was rattling up and down. At first Tim thought it was a reflex, for the thing hanging in the yard was clearly dead. But then he could see that its movement was deliberate. Lefty was trying to form words. Tim couldn’t hear what they were, and honestly, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to. The corpse struggled to raise its left arm. (More difficult than it sounds, after rigor mortis and decades spent buried underground.) The stump hovered in midair, pointing at Tim, as if it deemed him responsible for this night of horrors.

  But that wasn’t even the worst of Tim’s problems, because by then, the disembodied hand had ascended to the top of the dresser and was sliding all six of its bony digits into the glove. A perfect fit, one might add. After all, it was custom-made for Lonegan’s hand.

  Tim dropped the binoculars, because that’s rule number two: when you get scared, you drop things. Unaware of what was going on behind him, he backed up to the dresser, the last place he wanted to be. His hands clasped the ledge for support. And that’s when he felt it: the glove was behind him. And it was moving.

  Tim didn’t need to look, though he did soon enough. He snatched the glove, hold
ing it at bay like you would a disgustingly dirty diaper and hustling to the window, with plans of returning it to Lonegan’s corpse.

  As Tim cocked his arm to make the throw, the glove flew out of his hand, as if of its own accord. The oversize webbing attached itself to his face. He couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe! The glove was on the attack, smothering him like a leathery starfish. Tim tried everything: pulling, punching, pinching! The hand had an iron grip; they didn’t call Lefty “the six-fingered phenom” for nothing. Tim freed up his mouth long enough to manage a muffled cry for help, though it didn’t carry very far. Maybe the fish heard it. But honestly, what could they do?

  He had to figure out a way to alert his parents before he lost consciousness. As he felt around, his fingers found his iPhone. Tim blasted the first song on his favorites list. It wasn’t enough to scare off the glove, but it did bring Mom and Dad charging into the bedroom.

  One of them flipped on the light. It had to be Tim’s mom; his dad’s major goal in life was turning off every light he ever came across.

  They found Tim rolling on the floor, wrestling an empty glove. His dad pried it from his face. Tim looked up to see his parents standing over him, speechless. The mitt was once again a lifeless glob of brown leather. Yes, this required some explaining. Tim told them about the thing inside the glove, so they checked it out, and guess what they found? Go on, you can do this.

  That’s right. Nothing! Zero, zilch, nada. No evidence that a disembodied six-fingered hand had ever been there. Right away, Tim’s mom felt his head for fever. “I’m not imagining things!” Tim pointed to the window. “If I was, how do you explain that?”

  His parents turned. “Explain what?” Tim’s mother asked. The pane was in one piece. The window wasn’t broken and there were no signs of a moldy baseball or a severed hand (though Tim’s foot really had done a number on his social studies binder).

  Tim began to expound on the one-handed baseball player hanging from the tree, but when his parents looked outside, all they saw was the old tire swing swaying from a branch. His mom assured him it had been a nightmare. “You’re spending too much time with Club Spooky,” she said.

  “The Fearsome Foursome,” corrected Tim, “and this has nothing to do with them.”

  His dad sniffed the inside of the glove. He hadn’t followed the game since he was Tim’s age and couldn’t recall a Lefty Lonegan.

  “He played for the Red Devils. Triple-A ball, way back in the fifties. Before he, well…retired early.”

  “What was it? An injury?”

  “You might say that.”

  Tim’s mom shook her head. “Served him right. Baseball’s just a game. English and math skills pay bills.” She kissed Tim good night and headed off to her bedroom. His dad stayed behind, holding the glove a moment longer. Another whiff. “Is it valuable?”

  Tim shrugged. “Could be. I paid five bucks for it.”

  “See if you can sell it. Turn a profit. Say…six dollars. One for each finger.” His dad thought that was hilarious, adding his own laugh track as he turned out the lights. “Pleasant dreams, champ.” But Tim didn’t laugh. And he didn’t sleep. Not until the next day…during English and math.

  Later that afternoon, Tim planned on sleeping through baseball, as well. He might have taken a nap on the bench, where he spent most games, had Arty Caruthers not sprained his ankle kicking sand in some kid’s face. So what was Coach Anderson to do? Forfeit the game? Or send Tim to center field, where he could do minimal damage?

  His being in the starting lineup was a happy accident. But when Tim reached into his duffel bag, he inadvertently grabbed the wrong mitt. That’s right—Lonegan’s glove.

  He would have switched it, except that Coach Anderson was already yelling: “Get into center, Tom—Ted—Tim!” Tim jogged onto the field, which he could do in a relatively player-like manner. His hope was that he wouldn’t embarrass himself, and for the first four batters, he didn’t get the chance. There was a walk, a strikeout on three pitches, a pop-up to the catcher, and another strikeout on five. Tim was almost through the inning unscathed when Lena Toots stepped up to the plate. Lena was a big girl, and not just twelve-year-old Little League big. We’re talking thirty-eight-year-old truck driver big. She took a practice swing and the pitcher winced. Tim was playing shallow and the coach waved to him, calling: “Back! Back! Back!”

  Tim was still backing up when the ump shouted, “Ball’s in!”

  The pitcher kicked up his left leg to begin his windup, then fired a fastball straight down main street…which Lena proceeded to eat like it was her third churro. The clang of her aluminum bat echoed into the next field, and a fly ball went soaring two hundred feet into the sky, then made its descent toward center. Tim’s teammates watched, hoping for a miracle, because that’s what you did when you watched Tim cover the field. But Lonegan’s glove had other plans.

  Tim felt the sixth finger take root inside the mitt as the surly voice in his head instructed his legs to move, which they did. He got a perfect bead on the ball as it traveled toward the wall. Louis Crump, playing in right, ran at it, too. He’d been instructed to make any and all plays that came Tim’s way. But this was Tim’s moment. Tim’s and Lefty’s.

  The ball started to drop when, out of nowhere, Crump flew in, shouting, “I got it, loser!” Tim lowered his hands, as if giving Crump room to snag it. But as the right fielder came under the ball, Tim stuck out his foot and swept his legs. Crump went down, continuously tripping over his own two feet—one of those trips you can watch for about five minutes, wondering if the guy is ever going to land. Well, Crump landed. It looked like an accident, even to those who saw it: the ball going one way, Crump the other.

  Tim ran for the wall, watching with unnatural clarity as the ball spiraled over his shoulder. He felt lighter than air now. Coming into range, he lifted his feet, climbed the wall like an insect, and made the catch. There was a gasp from the stands but the play wasn’t over. Tim did a complete flip, like something you’d see in the Olympics, landing on two feet and, in the same motion, firing a rocket to home.

  By then, the runner on third had already tagged up. It should have been a close play, but Tim’s throw missed the cutoff man. It missed because Tim bypassed the cutoff man on purpose, sending the ball home on a fly. The catcher didn’t even have to move. The ball landed in the pocket of the glove like it had been born there. He dropped his arm and tagged the runner as he slid into home, a double play!

  Tim’s teammates went nuts. Even Crump, flat on his back, had to admit it was a spectacular play. For the record, he never called Tim “loser” again.

  As Tim trotted in from center, his team was waiting on the field to greet him. He’d never felt that way before. Sure, Tim had aced tests; he’d even placed third in the potato sack race on Field Day. But this was different. This was baseball, the sport he so adored but had never excelled at.

  This was power.

  Tim made three more plays that day, none as spectacular as the first, but all pretty nifty, especially for him. He shined at the plate, too, hitting a double and a triple and driving in four runs. That Monday, it was considered a fluke. On Wednesday, the fluke continued when Tim hit a three-run shot to win in a walk-off. By Friday, Tim had infiltrated the starting lineup. The following week, he batted leadoff. And the week after that, Coach Anderson moved him into the cleanup spot, batting fourth. It was some sort of miracle, a gift from the baseball gods.

  Or was it a curse?

  You see, Tim’s newfound skills came with a price, and an ugly one at that. His very nature had changed. He would now do anything to ensure a win: lie, cheat, brawl. Sling insults at the other team. Insult his own teammates, like he was better than them all. Like he really was Lefty Lonegan back in the day.

  And what was the benefit of all this ugliness? Oh, just that for the first time ever, Tim made the All-Star team. So typical, right? Don’t go tearing your eyes out of their sockets. He’ll get his.

  Sometimes
it takes someone on the outside to truly see what’s happening. Tim couldn’t see it. He had become intoxicated by his unnatural success. It was up to a friend, a real friend like Willa, to turn things around. She arrived at his house early on a Sunday with some important information, the kind that could save a soul. She found Tim in his room, staring out into the yard—where the tire swing swayed back and forth, back and forth. He was wearing Lonegan’s glove.

  “Timothy?” He barely looked up. Didn’t even notice that she was wearing makeup, that she looked pretty. All he could manage was “What’s with the skirt?”

  “It was in my closet.”

  “You can borrow some sweats.” He stood up to grab a pair from his drawer. “After today’s game, you can sell ’em online.”

  “Online’s for posers,” said Willa. “Isn’t that what you always say? A real collector needs to handle the merchandise.” She knew the old Tim was in there somewhere and she was trying to draw him out. “I came to ask you not to play today.”

  He looked her way and laughed. “Are you nuts? It’s the All-Star game. I’m an All-Star. I, Tim Maitland, made the team.”

  “No, Tim-bo. Lefty Lonegan made the team. It’s the glove. His glove. There’s something wrong with it.”

  “Guess you haven’t seen me on the field.”

  Willa’s fists tightened. “Oh, I’ve seen you on the field. And I’ve seen you off the field. You’re not you anymore.”

  “That’s right. The old me got permanently benched. The new me is a superstar!”

  “No! The old Tim was the superstar. The one who was awkward and kind and funny.” Boy, she really was sounding like a girl. “The new Tim’s a jerk. Everybody thinks so.”