start living there too.”
Frank loaded a bed and a chair into the back of his pickup truck and moved them into the house. He slept in the house for one week. He’d go over to Chino’s house for breakfast each morning and tell his daughters how nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
But later, when Frank got on with the Highway Department, he did admit to other men on his crew that even that first week some strange things happened in the house. Charlie Cook’s dad told him and that’s how the rest of us learned about it.
He said that one time in the middle of the night when he was about half asleep, a cold wind came rushing through the room and blew the blanket right off his bed. He felt the cold air and was awake enough to feel the blanket flying away. When he woke up the rest of the way, he found his blanket in a pile on the floor about six or eight feet below the foot of his bed.
Another time when he woke up in the morning, one of his shoes was missing. He found the shoe in a different room, and he had put both of them right under the edge of the bed when he took them off to go to sleep.
Another time the light turned on in the room all by itself in the middle of the night.
But even when Frank told the other men, he kind of tried to explain all those things away. Maybe he had thrashed around in his sleep and thrown the blanket off the bed. Maybe some animal had gotten in there and dragged his shoe into the other room. Maybe there had been a short in the wiring in the light switch.
Probably the truth was that Frank was very low on money and really wanted to take advantage of the offer of six months without having to pay rent, ghost or no ghost. Or maybe he didn’t want to admit that his mother and his sister were right. Whatever the reason, by the end of the week, he was telling everyone, “There’s nothing wrong with that house.”
And after the whole week had gone by, he said he wanted Elena, his 14-year-old daughter, to start staying there too.
WHEN CHINO’S MOM heard what his Uncle Frank wanted to do, she hit the ceiling. “No, hermano!” she said. “It’s way too soon. You’ve barely been living in that house for a week. You don’t know it’s safe yet.”
Chino’s abuelita was sitting in the padded rocking chair in the corner embroidering and listening. You could tell by the way she was jabbing the needle through the cloth that she wasn’t happy. You could tell she didn’t like the idea one little bit, but she didn’t look up or say anything. She could probably tell her son had already made up his mind and she’d just be wasting her breath.
Chino’s grandma was a wise woman. She had lived most of her life in Mexico and she knew a lot of things other people didn’t know. She had a cure for just about every sickness that had ever been invented. They were cures Dr. Cartwright at the town clinic had never heard of. Chino said that a lot of times they worked better than the medicines the doctor prescribed. And Abuelita knew about brujería, which is witchcraft. Of course she knew all about ánimas and fantasmas—souls and ghosts.
Once when Chino and I were asking Abuelita about ghosts we asked her if she thought we’d ever see one. She told us that nine times out of ten a ghost will appear to a girl—a girl between the age of 11 and 17. She didn’t explain why that was true, but she told us she knew it was a fact. I’m sure that’s why she was working the needle so furiously as she listened to her son and daughter talking.
And that’s why Abuelita had a long talk with Elena before she went to stay in the house with her dad. “Óyeme, nieta,” she said, “if you see anything strange in that house, you’ll be the only one who can see it. Porque un fantasma sólo se le aparece a una persona a la vez. A ghost will only appear to one person at a time.”
Elena nodded her head. Her face was a little pale and she was listening intently to her grandma. Abuelita went on: “And the ghost can’t speak to you until you speak to it first. You have to say the right thing. You have to say, ‘En nombre de Dios, ¿eres de este mundo, o del otro? In God’s name, are you of this world, or the other one?’”
Elena repeated the words to herself, “En nombre de Dios, ¿eres de este mundo o del otro?”
“Eso,” Abuelita said, “that’s right,” and she shook her head in approval. “That’s what you need to say. And if it answers the other world, you say, ‘En nombre de Dios, ¿qué es lo que quieres? In God’s name, what do you want?’”
Once again Elena repeated her grandma’s words. Then Abuelita came to the most important part: “If it tells you what it wants, and if you want to do it, and you’re able to do it, you still have to be sure that you make the ghost say that once the request has been fulfilled, it won’t come back again.”
Elena said she’d remember everything and Abuelita hugged her granddaughter for a long time and recited a prayer for her protection.
Elena packed some clothes in a bag and got ready to go live in the old house with her father.
THE FIRST NIGHT that Elena spent in the old house, she had her mind made up she wasn’t going to sleep. She lay in the bed with her eyes wide open, watching and waiting, listening for every sound. But as it got later and later, her eyelids began to feel heavier and heavier. She started to drift away to sleep.
But then something made her open her eyes again. It was a sound up on the roof of the house—a pounding noise, like someone was up there driving nails with a hammer. The pounding went on for maybe two or three minutes, and then Elena heard a sound like slow, cautious steps walking across the roof. And then there came a loud thump! And heavy footsteps went running across the roof. And then Elena heard a long, loud scream: A a a a i i i i i i i i i !
She screamed too when she heard that. She jumped up in her bed. Her father came running into the room. He practically knocked the door off its hinges.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Why did you scream?”
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