The Haunting of Henry Davis Read online

  ALSO BY KATHRYN SIEBEL

  The Trouble with Twins

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Siebel

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Celia Krampien

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101932773 (trade) — ISBN 9781101932780 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781101932797

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kathryn Siebel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: The New Kid

  Chapter Two: The Ouija Board

  Chapter Three: The Famous Fox Sisters

  Chapter Four: The Night of the Play

  Chapter Five: The Trunk

  Chapter Six: Ghost Hunters

  Chapter Seven: Promise Not to Tell

  Chapter Eight: Hide-and-Seek

  Chapter Nine: The Costume Parade

  Chapter Ten: Trick or Treat?

  Chapter Eleven: Artifacts

  Chapter Twelve: Snapshots

  Chapter Thirteen: The Snowstorm

  Chapter Fourteen: The Journal

  Chapter Fifteen: The Awful Truth

  Chapter Sixteen: Questions

  Chapter Seventeen: Thanksgiving

  Chapter Eighteen: Long Ago and Far Away

  Chapter Nineteen: The Smudge Stick

  Chapter Twenty: The Hospital

  Chapter Twenty-one: A Turn for the Worse

  Chapter Twenty-two: Fortunes and Farewells

  Chapter Twenty-three: A Dark and Stormy Night

  Chapter Twenty-four: A New Year

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Gerry

  with love

  We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams.

  CHARLES DE LINT, Moonlight and Vines

  If you want my actual opinion, I’d have to say that it comes down to this: either you believe in them or you don’t. Ghosts, I mean. Sometimes that changes suddenly, of course. Usually, when one shows up in the middle of the night. But let’s just say you’re a skeptic, a doubter, like I was. I can respect that. Then, you have to start where I always do—with some research. And you have to be ready to uncover some things that you honestly can’t explain. So let me just tell you this one story. It’s about a woman in England who claimed her daughter was reincarnated and started to remember every bit of her past life.

  It seems they were driving in the country one day, and the little girl made her mother stop the car in front of this random house. She screamed at her mother until she did it. And then she hopped right out and pushed through the gate and ran toward this cottage—in the middle of nowhere. Her mother followed her, of course.

  “What is it?” the mother asked.

  “I think I used to live here,” the girl said. “I’m sure I did.”

  Creepy, right? And how would you have liked to be inside, sipping your tea or whatever, when the two of them showed up?

  And then there are the kids with the “invisible friends.” Pretty common, really. Nobody else can see them except the kid. But they’re all alone in their room just chattering away. What explains that?

  Or sometimes it’s an animal, maybe a dog. And it just stops in its tracks at a certain spot and starts barking like crazy. At nothing?

  But maybe it’s something less obvious, the way it was for me—with Henry. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that from the minute he walked into Ms. Biniam’s class on the first day of the fifth grade, there was something, well, familiar about Henry—which was impossible, really, because I’d never seen him before in my life. I guess you could call it déjà vu. You know, the feeling that you already recognize a place, or a person, from the first moment. It’s a real thing, and nobody understands exactly how it works—except some scientists say it’s your brain confusing the past and the present. Or maybe, like with that little girl in England, it’s one lifetime overlapping the next. I don’t pretend I can explain it all, even after everything that happened with Henry.

  All I know is that Henry appeared that first day of school in the doorway of our classroom. And he was late. Biniam was already taking attendance and telling us where to sit.

  “Henry Davis,” Ms. Biniam said, looking around.

  “Here,” said Henry.

  He took a step toward her, no doubt trying to ignore the fact that every kid in the room was staring at him. Even aside from being late, Henry didn’t make a great first impression. It almost seemed like he was trying hard not to. First off, there was the way he dressed. He could have made Guinness World Records for Biggest Nerd looking like that. His pants were much too short, his glasses were strapped onto his head with one of those elastic straps that should never leave the basketball court, and his T-shirt said Karsoff Chess Academy—Your Move!

  The rest of us were waiting in our pods—the little squares of desks that Ms. Biniam had assigned us. Across from me was Zack Martin, the biggest kid in class. He had a buzz cut, braces, and a fairly bad attitude. Kitty-corner was Renee Garcia, who had the longest hair and the darkest brown eyes I’d ever seen. Then, next to me, was an empty desk that I knew, somehow, belonged to Henry Davis.

  When Biniam sent Henry our way, Zack made a little grunting sound and said, “Figures.” Then he slumped even farther down in his seat and stuck one big foot out toward Henry, so that Henry tripped and crash-landed into the seat next to me. That’s how fifth grade started for Henry. Biniam gave Zack the first of about a thousand glares she would aim his way before the year was up.

  And Henry, well, poor Henry. He looked pale and exhausted. How else was he supposed to look? I didn’t know it yet, of course, but that morning Henry Davis had seen his very first ghost.

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t do anything about Ms. Biniam’s seating chart, but outside class, I didn’t spend much time with Henry at the beginning. My mother, like every mother since the dawn of time, always reminded me to be nice to the new kid. And it wasn’t that I was mean to Henry. I said hello to him when he sat down next to me each morning. I was friendly. But I didn’t exactly go out of my way to spend time with him. And that’s just how it is, mostly, with new kids. Especially at lunch.

  Well, apparently, teachers had noticed this too, which was why we all got stuck with this new program, twice a week, called Stir-It-Up Lunch, which is as horrible as it sounds. Everybody draws a colored slip
of paper, and that determines which lunch table you sit at twice a week FOR THE WHOLE YEAR. They don’t even sort you by grade. Henry and I landed at the Blue Table, with a bunch of little kids. The worst was this first-grade boy named Rodney, who still wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “Rodney,” I kept saying. “Do you want a Kleenex?”

  “No.”

  Henry looked at me and shook his head sadly. “So gross,” he said. Rodney could hear him too, but he didn’t even seem to mind.

  “I’m losing my appetite,” I said to Henry.

  Henry didn’t answer. He was busy arranging each part of his lunch on top of his lunch bag. Cheese sandwich, carrot sticks, granola bar. I didn’t know it yet, but that was Henry’s standard lunch. And by “standard,” I mean that he ate it every day for the whole school year as far as I could tell. Not only that, but he ate it in the same order every time and finished each item before he moved on to the next. He’s one of those kids who won’t let any of the food touch on his dinner plate.

  Somewhere between the last carrot stick and the granola bar, Rodney sniffed so loudly that it was really more of a snort. The littler kids at the table thought it was hilarious, but Henry and I had had enough.

  “We need to get out of here,” he told me.

  And that’s how it started. Henry and I would take a few bites, then hide the rest of our lunch in a jacket pocket and escape to the playground. Nobody else was outside yet, so we just started sitting together, sharing cookies under the slide. We didn’t even talk much, which is unusual for me. We just sat there chewing and staring at the wood chips. Once I had finished, I’d dust myself off and get up to go find someone I knew.

  “Bye, Henry,” I’d say.

  And he would nod and take out his sketchbook. That’s how it went for a few weeks. Henry and I left every Stir-It-Up Lunch early, and the rest of the Blue Table just watched us go.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, of course, somebody caught on. The somebody in this case was Mr. Simmonds, the new science teacher. It was his first year at Washington Carver too, which was probably why he had lunch duty all the time. Anyway, he stuck his head under the slide one Monday afternoon and demanded to know what Henry and I were doing. And the way he asked made it sound like we were doing something way worse than finishing a bologna sandwich.

  “If you aren’t done with lunch,” he told us, “you belong inside, where you can be properly supervised.”

  How much supervision do you need to eat a bologna sandwich? That is what I was thinking. What I said, luckily, was nothing. But what I did was sigh loudly and roll my eyes, and I’m pretty sure that’s what sank us.

  We got sent inside, but not back to the cafeteria. We had to go all the way down the hall to the principal’s office. We had to sit side by side waiting for him—Boris Borkowski, a huge bald man with a temper. More-fortunate kids were leaving the office with their parents—heading home with the stomach flu or on their way to have some painful dental procedure. I envied all of them.

  Simmonds went in ahead of us to describe our crime in private. Then he motioned us into the office and left us there to face Mr. Borkowski alone.

  “Do either of you know what the term ‘in loco parentis’ means?” Borkowski asked.

  Henry and I looked at each other, confused. Great. Now, on top of everything else, we were about to fail some pop quiz on weird vocabulary words.

  I got nervous, so I guessed. “Crazy parents?” I asked.

  “No!” said Borkowski. “What it means, in short, is that for the duration of the school day, we are responsible for you. Ethically, morally, legally responsible.”

  Henry and I just blinked and nodded.

  “And it is very difficult for us to live up to that responsibility if students take it upon themselves to vanish in the middle of the school day.”

  I was trying hard not to smile. It’s something that happens when I get really nervous. Even worse, I felt like I might laugh. Fortunately, I was able to turn it into a pretty convincing fake cough, and Borkowski let me go around the corner for a drink of water.

  When I got back, Henry was saying, “You really shouldn’t blame Barbara Anne. It was my idea. She was just being nice.”

  I stared at him and opened my mouth to say something, but Henry kicked me in the shin. And Borkowski’s desk was so big that he didn’t even see it. Henry got away with it and kept on going with his speech. “And really,” he said. “Isn’t that the whole purpose of this new program? To help students meet people and make new friends?”

  Wow. Henry was really laying it on thick. Borkowski stared at him for a minute. And during that pause, the phone rang. And whoever or whatever it was, it was more important than the two of us sneaking out of the cafeteria.

  “I don’t want to see the two of you in here again,” Borkowski said as he waved us out of the office. I’m not sure he even heard Henry promising that we’d stay in the cafeteria from now on.

  “Thanks,” I told Henry as we headed back down the hall. “That was really brave of you.”

  “No,” he said. “I was terrified.”

  “Of what he would do to us?” I asked.

  “No,” Henry said. “Of what you would say if I gave you a chance to talk again.”

  And that was the thing about Henry. Most of the time, he was so quiet that he seemed like this ordinary, almost boring kid, but then he would surprise you. I guess the same was true, in a way, about everyone in our pod. There was a lot I didn’t know about them at the start of the year. And each one of them was keeping a secret. I just happened to figure out Henry’s first.

  * * *

  —

  For weeks, Henry spent almost every recess off by himself, drawing. He wouldn’t show me what he was working on. But there he would be, every day, off in the same corner, knees drawn up, head bent over his sketchbook. Curiosity was killing me, of course, but I didn’t ask. I’m kind of proud of that. I’ve been working on “giving people space,” to use my mother’s words. She says my energy can overwhelm people. So I waited it out, and one day he just laid the sketchbook down in the open space between us. And there he was: Edgar. Henry’s ghost.

  I suppose you’re picturing some Ebenezer Scrooge sort of situation now. You know, some ancient guy in gauzy robes, hollow eyes, dragging chains. That sort of thing. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, this ghost was just a kid. If it weren’t for the weird, old-fashioned clothes, he could have walked right into Ms. Biniam’s fifth-grade class with the rest of us, and nobody would even have noticed.

  “Who is he?” I asked Henry when he showed me the drawing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Henry said. “He isn’t real.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean you just made him up?”

  “No,” Henry said. “I’ve seen him. But he isn’t real; he isn’t really there.”

  My first thought was that Henry had an imaginary friend, but, I mean, who has an imaginary friend in the fifth grade? “Henry,” I said. “You’re talking in riddles.”

  “I don’t know who he is,” Henry said. “Or who he was.” His voice got kind of shaky, and his chin began to wobble. “All I know,” Henry said, “is that he follows me. Everywhere.”

  The next day, as we were standing in line for gym class, Henry leaned forward and whispered in my ear. His breath tickled, and his voice was so low that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I shrugged at him and made a What? face, so he tried again.

  “That thing I told you yesterday,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “Oh,” I said, probably louder than I should have. Henry glared at me, so I started again, more quietly. “You mean about your gho—good friend?”

  “Yes,” said Henry. “Can you just pretend I never mentioned it?”

  Well, that would be impossible. As soon as I realized
that Henry was dealing with a ghost, I knew we had to do something. But Henry wasn’t too excited about my plan.

  “Henry,” I said. “You can trust me. We’re friends. And I know what I’m doing.”

  Henry still looked skeptical, so I added, “It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

  None of that was exactly, technically true. I had no idea what I was doing, and he had no reason to trust me. Henry and I didn’t even know each other all that well. We were friendly, sure. We sat next to each other all day. And I had gone over to his house once after school, but I’d pretty much invited myself. Still, I did know enough about Henry to understand why he wasn’t excited about my idea. Henry didn’t even like to talk to live people that much, so why would he want to speak to a dead one? But here’s the thing about me. Once I think I have the answer to something, nothing can stop me.

  * * *

  —

  Getting the Ouija board was easy. I knew there was one in my cousin Monica’s closet underneath a big pile of games like Candy Land that none of us played anymore. And Monica doesn’t care what you take from her closet as long as it isn’t her clothes. (She has made it very clear that I don’t get to borrow those—even though I know for a fact that some of them would fit, and most of them would look great on me.) The only hard part of holding our séance, or Ouija board thing, actually, was dealing with Alice—Henry’s younger sister. She’s a pain.

  Alice wants to be a ballerina. She goes around all the time in one of those tiny little ballerina buns; it’s like a little blond knob at the top of her head. Henry says she takes lessons twice a week, and she even has this tiny toy mouse with a tutu that she calls Miss Nibbles. It’s a big emergency every time she loses the thing, which, according to Henry, happens pretty often.