Ghost Fever Read online

  Ghost Fever. Copyright © 2004 by Joe Hayes.

  Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Mona Pennypacker.

  Translation copyright © 2004 by Joe Hayes.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.

  FIRST EDITION

  109876543

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hayes, Joe.

  Ghost fever / by Joe Hayes—1st ed.

  p.cm.

  Summary: In the 1950s, fourteen-year-old Elena Padilla and her father move into a haunted house in Duston, Arizona, where only Elena can see and help the ghost of the young girl who died there. ISBN 978-1-9336-9332-3

  [1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Haunted houses—Fiction. 3. Mexican Americans—Fiction. 4. Arizona—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.H31474GH2004

  [Fic]—dc22

  2004004266

  Jacket illustration and book design by Vicki Trego Hill.

  Illustrations by her daughter, Mona Pennypacker—

  the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You guys are good!

  Many thanks to Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

  for his edit of the Spanish text; to Sharon Franco,

  for adding her two cents (we know you’re there);

  and to Johnny Byrd, home at last!

  Contents

  Read in English

  1. Across the Tracks

  2. The Abandoned House

  3. A Renter

  4. The First Week

  5. Abuelita’s Advice

  6. The Noise on the Roof

  7. The Ghost

  8. The Ghost Girl’s Story

  9. The Metal Box

  10. Ghost Fever

  11. The Box Again

  12. The Story that Stayed Behind

  13. Proof in Print?

  Leer en Español

  1. Más allá del tren

  2. La casa abandonada

  3. Un inquilino

  4. La primera semana

  5. Los consejos de abuelita

  6. El ruido en el techo

  7. El fantasma

  8. El relato del fantasma

  9. La caja metálica

  10. Mal de fantasma

  11. Otra vez la caja

  12. La historia que permaneció

  13. ¿Pruebas impresas?

  Chapter 1

  Across the Tracks

  IT SEEMS LIKE most people these days don’t believe in ghosts. But almost everyone knows somebody who says they’ve seen one. I know a lot of people who swear they have, and I’m not about to tell them they’re lying. I just listen and enjoy the story. This one happened way back in the 1950s in Duston, Arizona, which is the town I grew up in.

  Duston was a railroad town. The tracks ran right through the middle, maybe 100 feet north of Highway 75, which was called Main Street while it was inside the city limits. The south side of Main Street is where the town’s few stores were located: a drug store, a couple of variety stores, two cafés, a clothing store—a pool hall, of course—and a strange, dumpy business called The Cole Cash Store. South, behind Main Street, the land rose gently and the streets up there were paved and shaded with big elm and cottonwood and cyprus trees.

  Between Main Street and the tracks, a strip of open land covered with sharp black cinders ran the length of the town. It belonged to the railroad company. In the middle of town, the train station interrupted the continuous stretch of barren cinders.

  If you had grown up in a small western town back in those days, you’d know what the station looked like: a pitched-roofed wooden building painted yellow with brown trim. On the side of the station next to the tracks, there was a concrete platform for freight and passengers and, on the other side, a small parking lot.

  North, beyond the tracks, the town extended for another six or seven blocks in a crooked grid of dirt streets lined with run-down houses made of adobe or weathered lumber. Everyone called that part of town “across the tracks” and no one lived there unless they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. If you did live there, the chances were you rented your house from a man named Mr. Cole.

  Mr. Cole was the owner of The Cole Cash Store I mentioned. He must have gotten the name for his store from the expression “cold cash,” which people used to use back then. It meant money right there on the spot. His name was Cole, not cold, but he was trying to be clever and named his business The Cole Cash Store.

  No one seemed to know what Mr. Cole’s first name was. They just called him Cole Cash, like the name of his store.

  And everyone knew he wasn’t making much “cold cash” from that store because no one went in there. It was dirty! Once a kid named David Acosta went into the store and bought a candy bar. When he unwrapped it, he found a fat, white worm curled up in the chocolate. He took the candy bar to school and showed it to all the other kids. We stayed away from that dirty store.

  If kids wouldn’t even go into the store, you can bet adults didn’t go there, so that’s how we knew Cole Cash didn’t make money from the store. We knew he made it by renting houses. He would buy up any old, tumbled-down house that was offered for sale. He’d rent those houses to families that were poor and couldn’t afford anything nicer. Cole Cash’s houses were all across the tracks.

  Chapter 2

  The Abandoned House

  COLE CASH was a sharp operator. He made a lot of money renting houses across the tracks. But he made a big mistake on one house he bought. No one had lived in that old house for a long time—and for a reason. You could ask anyone in that part of town about the house and they would tell you, “Es una casa embrujada. Hay un ánima que anda penando en esa casa.” They would tell you it was haunted, that there was a soul suffering in that house.

  But Cole Cash didn’t ask why the house had been empty for so long and so no one told him. Or maybe they did and he just didn’t believe in such things.

  Whatever the case, he bought that old house. All he did was hire old Louie Samaniego to slap a coat of white paint on the outside of the house, and then he tried to rent it out to some family.

  No one would take the house. He started lowering and lowering the rent he was asking, but still no one wanted it. When the neighbors saw the FOR RENT sign in the front yard, they just shook their heads and said to one another, “Ni dada querría vivir en esa casa. I wouldn’t want to live in that house even if it was given to me for free.”

  And free rent is exactly the offer Cole Cash made. He tacked a little card to the stick that held up the FOR RENT sign. It said: Seis meses gratis…Llama a 4948. Six Months for Free…Call 4948. And he hung up notices at a few other strategic places around town, like the pool hall and the barber shop.

  The notices said that if a family would sign a lease for one year and move into the old house, he would give them the first six months rent free. He probably figured that as soon as a family started to live in the house, all the talk in the neighborhood about souls and spirits and ghosts—ánimas, espíritus, fantasmas—would just sort of dry up and disappear.

  But still no one would take the house. When they said they didn’t even want it for free, they meant it.

  Chapter 3

  A Renter

  IT BEGAN to look like Cole Cash was never going to find a renter for that old house, but then a man named Frank Padilla moved to town. Frank was the uncle of my friend Chino Gutiérrez. Chino’s real name was Refugio, but when your name’s that long, you’re bound to end up with a nickname.

  Refugio’s head was covered with black curls and even his own famil
y called him Chino, because chino was what everyone called curly hair—pelo chino.

  Chino told me his Uncle Frank had had a lot of bad luck in his life. He had a wife and two daughters and a good job in the mines up north, but then one day he came home from work and his wife was gone—not just gone from the house, but really gone, gone from town, gone from his life. She left him to raise his two daughters all by himself. And then he came down with some strange sickness and couldn’t work for a long time. He lost his job in the mine in the town up north, so he moved to our little town because he wanted to start life all over again.

  When Frank and his two daughters first moved to town they lived with my friend Chino and his family. But Frank got busy right away, looking for a job and for a house he could afford to rent. Chino’s dad told him sort of half jokingly about the offer Cole Cash was making, and Frank was interested. “Six months for free!” he said. “Now, that’s rent I can afford to pay.”

  Chino’s Uncle Frank went and talked to Cole Cash at the store and he came back saying he was going to move into the old house. Everyone tried to talk him out of it.

  Chino’s mom, who was Frank’s sister, told him, “Don’t take your daughters to live in that house. Everyone knows that something terrible must have happened there—a murder, or even worse. Nobody’s been able to stay there in that house for as long as anyone can remember. People have tried, and after one night, two at the most, they get out of there! They say one lady even went crazy after she spent a night there. And the neighbors talk about screams in the night and strange lights glowing in the house. You can’t make the girls live in a house like that.”

  Chino’s grandma lived there with his family and she was on her daughter’s side. “Hay casas así en México. He conocido muchas,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve known a lot of houses like that in Mexico. They’re dangerous. No lleves a mis nietas a vivir en esa casa.”

  Frank just smiled at his sister and his mother. “That’s all superstition,” he told them. “Next you’ll be saying that la mano peluda will reach in through the window and get the girls, or that the Devil’s going to want to dance with them at the Candilejas Club on Saturday night. I love my daughters and I wouldn’t put them in a dangerous situation. You’ll see. All the talk about the house is nonsense. I’m going to rent it.”

  Chapter 4

  The First Week

  FRANK PADILLA’S DAUGHTERS hadn’t said anything during the discussion about the house. They probably didn’t want to cause their dad any more trouble than he had on his hands already. But they were pretty upset about the idea of moving into a house like that.

  Finally, the evening after Frank signed the year’s lease on the house, his younger daughter, Beatriz, broke down and told him, “Dad, I’m scared. I’m scared by what people say about that house. I don’t want to move in there.” Beatriz was only 10 years old.

  Frank hugged her. “Oh,” he said, “your auntie and your abuelita have got you all upset.” He turned to his older daughter. “What about you, Elena?” he asked.

  Elena was 14 and she tried to appear in control. She shrugged. “I guess I’m a little nervous,” she said.

  “Let me think about it,” their dad told them, and Frank thought about it all evening.

  “Listen,” he told the girls when he woke them up the next morning, “I know your tía and your abuelita have got you all scared about the house we’re going to move into. There’s no reason for it, but I don’t want you to worry. Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll go live in the house by myself for a while, just to make sure there’s nothing wrong. You can stay here. After a week or so, when you see there’s nothing wrong, you can 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.

  Chapter 5

  Abuelita’s Advice

  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.

  Chapter 6

  The Noise on the Roof

  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?”

  Elena’s face was white. For a minute she couldn’t speak. Then she sputtered, “There was all that noise on the roof.” She pointed toward the ceiling. “A-a-and then that person screamed outside.”

  Her father shook his head. “There was no noise on the roof,” he told her. “I was awake. I would have heard it. And no one screamed but you!”