My Haunted House by Angie Sage Page A

in soot isone of the worst signs. It means she has had a fight with the boiler and the boiler has won.
    I sat down in my seat in a thoughtful and caring way. Uncle Drac looked really relieved to see me. You see, I live with my aunt and uncle because my parents went vampire hunting in Transylvania when I was little and they never came back.
    Uncle Drac was busy scraping out the last bit of his boiled egg, and he had soot all around his mouth from the sooty toast that Aunt Tabby had buttered for him. “Hello, Minty,” he said.
    â€œHello, Uncle Drac,” I said. I tried to think of something nice to say to Aunt Tabby, but it was difficult to think of anything at all with Sir Horace’s helmet staring at me with its little beady eyes. It doesn’t really have eyes, ofcourse, but I often used to think it was looking at me, even though I was sure it was nothing more than an empty tin can.
    Aunt Tabby plonked my bowl of oatmeal down in front of me, so I said, “Thank you, Aunt Tabby.” And then, because Aunt Tabby likes polite conversation at breakfast, I said, “Have you been having trouble with the boiler again, Aunt Tabby?”
    â€œYes, dear—but not for very much longer,” Aunt Tabby said, hardly moving her lips. I used to think that when Aunt Tabby spoke likethat she was practicing to be a ventriloquist, but now I know it means she has made her mind up about something and she doesn’t care whether you agree with her or not.

    â€œOh, why is that, Aunt Tabby?” I asked especially nicely, while I covered my oatmeal with brown sugar and stirred it all in really fast so that the oatmeal went a nice muddy color.
    Aunt Tabby sort of gritted her teeth and said, “ Don’t do that with the sugar dear. Because we’re moving , that’s why.”
    Not much stops me digging mud ditches in my oatmeal—you know, the ones where you scrape a channel through it andit fills up with runny brown sugar, which I think looks just like mud—but that did.
    Moving ? What was she talking about? We couldn’t possibly move, not before I’d found at least one ghost. And I wanted to find a vampire and a werewolf, too. I was sure there must be some in the cellar.
    â€œDon’t leave your mouth open when it is full, dear,” said Aunt Tabby, which I didn’t think was fair as Uncle Drac had his mouth open too, and it was full of sooty toast, which looked disgusting.
    Then Aunt Tabby fixed Uncle Drac with her Fiendish Stare (which is nearly as good as mine) and said, “Drac, this house is far too big for us. It is dusty and it is dirty , it is freezing cold and full of spiders . The boiler is a menace . We are moving to a nice, small, clean, modernapartment without a boiler .”
    â€œ But— ” I tried to interrupt, but it was no use. Aunt Tabby just kept on going.
    â€œAnd when we have moved to an apartment, helmets from rusty old suits of armor won’t keep landing on my toes, because we won’t have any rusty old suits of armor. Sir Horace can go to the recycling bin. You can take him, Drac.”
    â€œWhat?” said Uncle Drac, looking a bit like one of my old goldfish used to look when the water in the fish bowl got very low.
    At last I got a word in, even though I still had a mouthful of oatmeal, which I had been too shocked to swallow. “But we can’t leave this house,” I told Aunt Tabby. “ Nowhere would ever be the same as this!”
    â€œExactly,” said Aunt Tabby, like I’d agreedwith her or something. “Nowhere could possibly be like this.”
    I looked at Uncle Drac—I needed some help here. Uncle Drac took the hint.
    â€œNow, now, Tabby dear,” he murmured in his calm-down-Aunt-Tabby voice, “you know you don’t mean it.”
    â€œI do mean it, Drac,” Aunt Tabby told him. Then she tried to get me on her side. “And, Araminta dear, you often say you’re lonely