The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(14)

The girl spun around with a yelp. Her hand lashed out and it was like a hundred invisible fists flew through the air and barreled into my chest. The spider-webbing tore away and I was flying, flying, flying—and then crashing, crashing, crashing through the plastic ghosts and blackout sheets. The pot rolled away, disappearing under enormous plastic spider legs.

“Don’t you know,” the girl fumed as she stormed over to me, “not to sneak up on a witch?”





“A what?”

For a second, I was sure she had said “witch.” The wind that came bursting through the open window behind her must have knocked my brain loose or something. I clutched my bandaged arm to my chest, counting the black stars floating in my eyes again. It screamed in pain as I untangled myself from the plastic pumpkins and black sheets, and I tried not to do the same. But before I could even stand up, a small streak of black zipped through the open door and came flying for my face. Claws out.

“Toad, no!” the girl cried.

I ducked, throwing myself onto the ground. The kitten hit the wall with a thwack!, hanging there for a moment by its razor nails. Its tiny bat wings fluttered in annoyance as it freed itself.

Its…tiny…bat…wings.

“Oh my God,” I said, backing up, tripping, falling. The girl was coming toward me, cooing at the furry demon, her cloud of curly dark hair threaded with a hundred little glow-in-the-dark star-shaped beads. “What is—what is that?”

It flew—literally flew—into her open, waiting arms.

“That’s a good Toad, who’s my good boy?” she said, bopping it on its small black nose. Ignoring me. “We talked about this. No attacking our guest, remember? Guests are friends, not fiends.”

The kitten licked its paw indignantly.

“What are you staring at?” she demanded. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen a cat before.”

“That’s not a cat, that’s a monster!” I said, trying not to meet its big eyes.

“Monster?” she shouted over Toad’s hissing. “The only monster I see around here is the Redding standing in front of me! Wait—” The girl held the small cat out in front of her, letting it extend its wings. “You can see these?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Oh.” All her anger seemed to deflate. She set the animal down and reached up to push her bejeweled rainbow glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “So you can see through glamours. I told him you probably could.”

“Told whom?”

“Told who,” she corrected.

“No, it’s whom,” I insisted. The one grammar lesson I actually remembered, thank you very much.

The girl and cat glared at me, eyes narrowed. “Come on, let’s go downstairs. Guess I’m stuck explaining things until he gets home.”

He? The stranger?

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, backing up. I cast a quick look around. There were windows at either end of the narrow hallway, but we had to be at least one or two stories up. I would definitely be the Redding Who Broke His Neck in a Pumpkin Shirt. The wood floor dipped at the center of the hall, buckling slightly. There were two doors—the one I’d come out of and another, blocked by her skeleton. Both were cut at a crooked angle in the bare, dark wood wall. “I don’t even know who you are!”

“My name is Nell Bishop,” she said, hands on her hips. Her sweater had been sewn together from three different floral patterns and was big enough to droop over her jeans. “I’m your…I’m your cousin, I guess.”

Awesome. Just what I never wanted: another cousin to hate me.

“You guess…” I repeated. “Can you not guess? And just tell me?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re as annoying as I thought you’d be. Fine. Stay up here for all I care, and stew in your questions. I need to start setting up for the show tonight.”

Nell spun toward the stairs, unclipping a small chain with the sign PRIVATE, and thundered down them. The whole roof rattled with the force of it. And rather than sit there and be the Redding Who Had a Ceiling Dropped on Him, or the Redding Who Got Mauled by a Mutant Kitten, I followed.


If I had sat down at my desk at home, opened my spiral-bound notebook, and tried to draw my perfect nightmare…it would have been adorable compared to this house.

It turned out that I wasn’t on the second floor—I was on the fourth floor. The attic. The stairs wound down the center of the old house like a rickety spine, revealing one terror after the other.

There were three open doors on the third landing. The one to the left was completely pitch-black, save for an amazing light show that made it seem like thousands of ghosts were fluttering around, swirling like a tornado at the center. The air it breathed out frosted my skin with flecks of snow and ice. The center room looked to be a dark forest filled with nightmares, where the trees were crawling with spiders and draped with mirrors of all sizes.

My feet came to a crashing halt when I caught a glimpse of me—but not me, not really—in the largest one. An ancient man, a hundred years old, who had my eyes and mouth, stared back at me, screaming—banging on the glass, as if begging to be let out.

Bam! I all but leaped over the banister to get away from the door on the right, where something was bumping around behind the gleaming wood like a frantic heartbeat.