The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(15)

On the second story, all I needed to see was a room full of tombstones and the ghostly apparition of a weeping woman in old-fashioned clothes before I felt my blood turn to needles. She looked up. Her voice sounded as though she were whispering in my ear. “Are you my baby? Are you my sweet boy? Won’t you come to me, sweetling? Your mama loves you dearly—”

Somehow, there were clouds floating above her. Somehow, those clouds opened with thunderous, bloody rain.

I spun toward the stairs, but Nell was there, standing in my path. When I tried to get past her, she blocked me, laughing. “It’s not real, brainiac. Look.”

She held a hand out into the room, and though it looked like—it sounded like—blood was splattering over the graves and the ghost, none of it coated her hand. It was all an illusion.

But I could have sworn that, when I finally pushed past her and continued down the stairs, she quickly leaned forward into the room and drew a hand across her throat, and there was an annoyed “Harrumph” in response.

Keeping one hand gripped tight to the banister, I forced my eyes to stay on my feet, not on whatever was waiting on the second floor.

“What is this place?” I muttered when we got to the first floor. In the place of a living room set, a TV, or a kitchen, there were walls covered in smears of fake blood. The words THERE IS NO ESCAPE were scratched into the biggest patch of it with what probably were fingernails. Propped up two feet away was a dead body—fake dead body, I thought, when the buzzing in my ears got too bad—on a stainless-steel gurney, its mouth open, its plastic intestines dangling over the ground. They looked like they were soft to the touch. Even the mannequin’s skin bristled with wiry, lifelike hair.

My stomach squirmed uncomfortably as Nell jumped up and sat on the gurney beside him, idly twirling the fake large intestine like a lasso.

“You’re in the prime destination for nights of fright and magical mayhem!” Nell said, throwing her arms out wide. Behind her, a zombie-nurse puppet shot out of a hidden panel in the wall with a screech that, unfortunately, didn’t drown out my own.

“Will you chill out?” Nell said, laughing. “Wow. You really are not okay, are you? It’s alllll fake—okay, at least ninety percent is fake, and the other ten percent isn’t going to bite you. We would never put you in real danger.” Her voice dropped as she said, with what I had to admit was a pretty great dramatic flourish, “Unlike the true monsters in your life.”

She hopped off the gurney and held out a hand toward the stairs. Toad (The cat? Bat? CatBat?) came fluttering down the steps, as light and airy as a stray feather. It caught her hand and crawled up her arm to perch on her shoulder. I backed up toward the wall, fingers touching the holes the creature had already torn in my shirt, eyeing Nell.

I thought of the Impressionist paintings I’d seen in museums with my dad. From a distance, they looked like a typical scene of people or landscapes. But, up close, you could see the thousands of tiny strokes of paint that made up the image. Nell was like that in a way. Up close, she was like a kaleidoscope of color and motion. Her skin was a warm bronze, a shade or two lighter than her black hair, which I saw now she’d pinned into two high buns. It looked as if she’d reached up and plucked the stars out of the sky, scattering them in her hair. They twinkled as she moved, as iridescent as the many colors of her sweater.

There was nothing stiff or cold about her. You could never paint her the way artists had done with my ancestors, all flat, pale, sickly, and glowering. Nell was about my height, and I’d guess my age, but that was where the similarities ended.

“This is Toad,” Nell said, bringing it closer. “I think you need to meet again on better terms.”

“You named your mutant kitten Toad?”

The creature sniffed, adjusting its position so that its legs dangled over Nell’s shoulder and it could cross its furry little arms, the way a human would. Panic began skittering around my brain again at the unreal sight. I was hallucinating. Clearly.

“How rude,” Nell said, pulling a small piece of carrot out of her pocket. The creature snatched it between its paws and fluttered off to devour it on the dummy corpse. “Toad is over a hundred years old. And he’s not a kitten. He’s a changeling. This is the form he’s decided on for now. I just enchanted him so any human would see him as a plain black cat—including B, so don’t tell him, you hear me? Toad has been known to turn into chain saws when angry.”

I slid down the wall, narrowly avoiding the zombie nurse as she swung out with a handful of syringes filled with bubbling crimson syrup. Pressing my face into my hands, I tried counting backward from ten to keep from throwing up. Or worse.

But when I opened my eyes, Nell, the CatBat, and the zombies were all still there.

“Okay, seriously—where am I, who are we waiting for, and why is the skeleton in the corner doing the Macarena?”

“The Macarena?” Nell spun round. “I said the Danse Macabre! Listen to my voice as I say to thee—Oh, never mind, I’ll fix it later.”

She snapped her fingers and the fake skeleton’s shoulder seemed to slump a bit as its bones clattered back into an open, waiting coffin.

“What is happening?” I moaned. “What is my life right now?”

Nell cocked a dark, unimpressed eyebrow. “You’re more dramatic than I am, and that’s saying something. You’re in Salem. In the House of Seven Terrors, a haunted house show. And it’s all going to be okay.”