The Great Attic Dare

The Physics of Nonsense

The house smelled like old tea and forgotten wet wool, a heavy, historical odor that Ryder’s best friend, Callum, insisted was the scent of "sixteen different ghosts digesting each other."

"It’s not ghosts, Callum," Ryder said, his voice dropping into the flat, nasal monotone he reserved for museum guides and people who tried to tell him that lightning never struck the same place twice. "It’s oak tannin reacting with lime plaster from eighteen-forty. If you took a chemistry set up to the third floor, you’d find sixty percent of your ‘haunting’ is just sulfur off-gassing from the floorboards."

Callum, whose knees were knocking against each other like two loose tent poles in a gale, pointed a trembling finger at the steep, narrow staircase that vanished into the gloomy rafters above the kitchen. "Right. Then go up there."

"For ten minutes?" Ryder adjusted his glasses, which were slightly greasy from potato chips. "Easy. What’s the wager?"

"Your blue-raspberry slushie machine for the rest of the summer," Harper said from the bottom of the landing. She was sitting cross-legged on a hooked rug, hugging a throw pillow so hard her knuckles were white. "And you have to wear the stupid green wizard hat to school on Monday if you come out screaming."

"I won't scream," Ryder said, taking the heavy brass pocket-watch Callum offered like a religious relic. "Because screaming requires a sudden surge of adrenaline caused by perceived mortal danger. Since supernatural entities violate the laws of thermodynamics—specifically the conservation of energy, which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed without an external input—there is nothing up those stairs except dust mites and possibly a family of raccoons."

"Ten minutes," Callum whispered, clicking the heavy lid of the pocket-watch. "Starting... now."

Ryder didn't bother to wait for them to count down. He pushed past the lopsided door with its iron thumb-latch and started up.

The steps groaned beneath his sneakers—creak, wheeze, snap.

"Thermal expansion!" Ryder called back down through the stairwell, his voice echoing off the horsehair plaster. "The joists are cooling down now that the sun’s gone down! It’s entirely predictable!"

No one answered him from the kitchen. The silence that rushed in to fill the space behind him wasn't the normal, breathable silence of an empty house. It was heavy, like sinking underwater in a public pool where nobody else was allowed to swim.

At the top of the stairs, Ryder flicked on his flashlight. The beam cut through the dim air, illuminating columns of dust that hung suspended like tiny, shining islands of gray grease. He clicked his tongue, checking the face of the pocket-watch by the LED beam. 8:14 PM. Ten minutes meant he just had to stand here until 8:24, read a chapter of his internal monologue about how stupid superstitions were, and then go collect his slushie machine.

He took three steps into the attic space.

The room was vast, smelling faintly of dried lavender and stale tallow candles. Beneath the eaves, the roof timbers sloped down like the ribs of an ancient, stranded whale. Trunks with rusted iron clasps were stacked against the brick chimney stack. Dressers with missing mirror glass leaned drunkenly against the knee-wall.

Ryder swung his flashlight around, his boots kicking up little puffs of gray lint.

"Dead silent," he muttered. "Too silent."

He checked his watch again. 8:15. One minute down. Nine to go.

Then, behind him, a floorboard didn't creak—it slid.

Ryder spun around, his light cutting across a row of empty rocking chairs. One of them, a small child-sized rocker with a faded red velvet seat, was leaning slightly to the left. As Ryder watched, the chair tilted back, balanced on its curved wooden runners for a second, and then rocked forward. Once. Twice.

Creak. Squeak.

Ryder walked over, crouched down, and put a hand near the base. There was no breeze coming from the floor vents. The windows were shut tight, their old wavy glass sealed with decades of black paint and cobwebs.

"Air currents," Ryder announced to the empty rafters, though his voice sounded smaller now, muffled by the thick insulation of dust. "A localized convection cell driven by the heat of my body rising toward the peak of the roof. Basic thermodynamics. Warm air goes up, pushes against the ceiling, creates a downdraft behind me."

The rocking chair gave a single, sharp rock, right as Ryder took a step to the left.

He stopped. The chair stopped.

He took a step to the right.

The chair tilted to the right, matching his stride with the sluggish, deliberate grace of a mechanical metronome.

Ryder stared at it. His brow furrowed, not with fear, but with that particular brand of irritated curiosity he usually reserved for math problems that didn't factor out evenly. He reached out and put his hand flat on the top rail of the red velvet backrest. It felt cold—not refrigerator-cold, but the neutral, damp coolness of a cellar floor in late October.

"You're not a convection cell," Ryder said to the empty room. "You're just poorly balanced."

He gave the chair a firm shove. It swung back, hit the limit of its arc, and came back three times faster than it should have, stopping dead with its nose touching the toe of Ryder's sneaker.

Tap.

Ryder didn't jump. He pulled his foot back, crossed his arms, and blew a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. "Okay. If you're going to try to freak me out, you need to work on your vector calculations. Friction would have stopped that swing half a second ago."

A sudden, sharp scratch sound came from the far corner of the attic, near a stack of old school desks with cast-iron legs.

Ryder turned his flashlight beam toward the sound.

There was a tall, slate-framed chalkboard propped up against a pile of rolled-up oilcloth maps. At the top of the slate, written in jerky, uneven white letters that looked like they’d been scratched by someone using a broken piece of sidewalk chalk, was a line of text:

IF RYDER IS SO SMART, WHY CAN'T HE SEE US?

Ryder blinked. He lowered the flashlight, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, and looked again.

The chalk wasn't in anyone's hand. In fact, as he watched, the small white nub—about the size of a peanut—lifted itself off the wooden chalk ledge at the bottom of the frame. It hovered there in mid-air, about two inches above the slate, held up by nothing at all.

Then, with a screeching scrape that set Ryder's teeth on edge, the chalk began to move across the black surface, carving out a row of numbers and symbols:

14 x 3 = ?

The Arithmetic of the Dead

Ryder stood completely still for three seconds. His brain, usually a high-speed processor of trivia about dinosaur bone densities and the orbital velocity of Mars, stalled entirely.

"Fourteen times three," he repeated out loud.

The floating piece of chalk dropped an inch, waiting.

"That's insulting," Ryder said, his voice rising in pitch. "That’s basic middle-school distributive property. Fourteen times three is ten times three plus four times three. Thirty plus twelve is forty-two. Everyone knows that."

The chalk remained suspended.

Ryder looked around the attic. The shadows seemed a little thinner now, less like empty spaces and more like curtains made of dark, dusty gauze. From somewhere behind a row of upright dressers came a sound that definitely wasn't the wind: a muffled, high-pitched giggle that sounded like two kids trying not to laugh during a really boring church sermon.

"Oh, come on," Ryder said, unzipping his backpack. He rummaged through a collection of half-eaten granola bar wrappers and gum until he found a stubby yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil.

He marched right up to the chalkboard, ignoring the way the floorboards seemed to dip slightly beneath his shoes as if someone was walking right behind him. He reached out, grabbed the floating piece of chalk out of the air—it felt like holding a frozen fish finger, cold and dry—and deliberately wrote the answer in the lower right corner:

42

The moment the last digit was finished, the chalk jerked out of his fingers with a sudden snip of air pressure and zipped back to its wooden ledge.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then, the slate chalkboard let out a sound like a wet sigh. The black surface began to ripple, like water in a bucket when someone drops a pebble into it. The white lettering faded into grayish mist, and the wood frame began to shrink inward until it didn't look like a chalkboard anymore—it looked like the back of an old coat.

Two figures stepped out from behind the oilcloth maps.

They weren't glowing. They didn't have chains rattling around their ankles, nor were they dripping with seaweed or blood. In fact, they looked remarkably ordinary, except for the fact that they were almost entirely transparent, tinted the pale, watery blue of skim milk seen through a clean glass.

One was a girl with two long braids tied with yellow ribbon that looked startlingly new despite the dust; she wore a high-collared dress with mutton-leg sleeves that made her look like she’d stepped off the cover of a Victorian seed catalog. The other was a boy about Ryder’s age, wearing wool knickerbockers, high wool socks with stripes at the top, and a flat cap pushed back on his head so far it looked like it was stuck to his hair with dried glue.

The boy was holding Ryder's yellow pencil. He was examining the pink eraser at the top with an expression of intense, scientific scrutiny, turning it over and over in his pale, see-through fingers.

"It’s rubber," the boy said. His voice sounded like it was coming from inside an empty tin can—tinny, distant, but remarkably clear. "Real rubber. Not that hard stuff they put on the heels of father’s work boots."

"It’s vulcanized rubber," Ryder corrected automatically, his hands stuffed deep into his jacket pockets. "Mixed with pumice so it actually abrades the graphite instead of just smearing it across the page. Where did you get that?"

"You dropped it when you were digging for your snack garbage," the girl said. She had a sharp little chin and eyes that looked like two dark buttons pressed into dough. "You’ve got crumbs in the bottom of that bag, by the way. Salt and vinegar. Nasty stuff. My brother Chase likes them, though. He’ll eat anything that smells like salt."

"I'm Ryder," Ryder said, because it seemed rude not to introduce himself after they’d gone to the trouble of doing basic arithmetic with him. "And you're... what? Eighteen-something?"

"Eighteen-ninety-four," the boy—Chase—said, pointing the yellow pencil at Ryder’s chest like a wand. "And you’re from the future. Because your trousers have words written on the back pocket that don't make any sense."

"That's just the brand," Ryder said, turning around so they could read the embroidered Levis on his jeans. "My mom bought them at the outlet mall in Hagerstown. They're denim."

"Denim," Chase repeated, tasting the word like it was a particularly sour piece of candy. "Sounds French. Everything bad for you comes from France. Father says."

The girl—her name, she announced with a curtsey that made her entire skirt shimmer like a soap bubble, was Brooklynn—walked over to Ryder and peered closely at his wrist.

"What’s that glowing?" she asked, her nose nearly touching the face of Ryder’s digital watch.

"It's a Casio F-91W," Ryder said, holding out his arm so she could see the liquid crystal display. "It tells time using a quartz crystal oscillator that vibrates thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight times every second. It’s accurate to within thirty seconds a month."

Brooklynn reached out a finger to poke the little amber light button on the side. Her finger passed right through the resin case, leaving a tiny swirl of cold air against Ryder’s skin that made him shiver despite himself.

"Thirty-two thousand," Brooklynn whispered, her eyes wide. "That’s a lot of ticks. Our grandfather clock in the hall only ticks once a second, and it sounds like a horse dying in the mud."

"Your grandfather clock has a mechanical escapement," Ryder said, slipping back into his favorite lecture-hall cadence. "The gear train is probably gummed up with whale oil. If you cleaned the pallets with some mineral spirits and applied a little synthetic watch oil—"

"We can't touch anything downstairs," Chase interrupted, dropping Ryder's pencil onto the floorboards, where it rolled three inches and stopped. "The big people don't like it when we rattle the dishes. They think it's the mice."

"Mice don't write arithmetic problems," Ryder pointed out.

"That's what I told them," Chase grinned. His teeth were startlingly white against his blue-gray face. "Brooklynn wanted to write 'Help, we are trapped by bad plumbing,' but I told her you'd never believe it. You're too logical. You'd just start talking about pipes."

"Well, obviously," Ryder said. "Lead solder was standard until the nineteen-fifties. If your water tastes sweet, that's why."

For the next hour and a half, the ghost kids and the ten-year-old skeptic sat on a dusty steamer trunk that smelled of mothballs and talked about the relative merits of twenty-first-century sneakers versus nineteenth-century leather boots. Chase was intensely fascinated by the concept of plastic—a material that didn't rot, didn't rust, and could be melted down into little colored bricks. Brooklynn, meanwhile, was deeply offended by the idea of modern television.

"You mean you just sit there and look at a glass box?" she asked, her braids swinging as she shook her head. "You don't play hoop-and-stick? You don't build forts out of old hay bales until the farmer chases you with a pitchfork?"

"Mostly we play Minecraft," Ryder said. "Though sometimes Callum and I ride our bikes down to the drainage ditch and look for old beer cans."

"Boring," Brooklynn declared.

"It's efficient," Ryder countered.

By the time Ryder finally checked his watch and saw that it was 10:17 PM—two whole hours past his ten-minute limit—he had explained the basics of the internal combustion engine to a ghost from the Cleveland administration and learned that the attic used to be a nursery before "the winter with the scarlet fever."

"You have to go down now," Chase said, his translucent shoulders slumping. "The candle in the kitchen is almost out. Your friends are going to think you got et by a bear."

"There aren't bears in this county," Ryder said automatically. "Only white-tailed deer and the occasional stray coyote."

"Same difference if you're ten and scared of the dark," Chase said.

Ryder stood up, brushing a layer of historical gray dust off the knees of his jeans. He looked around the attic one last time. The rocking chair was still sitting by the eaves, silent now. The chalkboard had gone back to being an old piece of slate propped against the maps.

"Hey," Ryder said, adjusting his glasses. "If I come back tomorrow with some fresh batteries, can you show me how that old wind-up phonograph in the corner works? The needle looks like it's made of steel, and I want to see if it shreds the vinyl."

Brooklynn’s face lit up with a grin that made her look, for one brief second, like an ordinary kid who had snuck out of bed to eat cookies.

"Bring ginger snaps," she said. "The ones with the sugar on top. We can't taste them much, but Chase likes the crunch."

"Deal," Ryder said.

The Cost of a Slushie Machine

The kitchen was dark when Ryder pushed open the heavy wooden door at the bottom of the stairs.

A single yellow candle flickered on the dining table, casting long, wobbling shadows against the plastered walls. Callum and Harper were huddled together on the horsehair rug like two shipwreck survivors on a raft, their knees pulled up to their chins. They had a fireplace poker between them, held like a spear.

When the floorboard creaked, Harper shrieked and dropped the poker with a loud clang.

"Ryder?" Callum whispered, his voice cracking on the syllable. "Ryder? Are you... are you still alive? Did something touch you? Did you see the Lady in White?"

Ryder stepped out of the stairwell, his hands tucked into his pockets, his Casio watch glowing faintly in the dim room as it ticked off another second of its thirty-two-thousand-part journey.

He looked down at them with a look of supreme, unmitigated annoyance.

"The Lady in White?" Ryder scoffed, walking over to the kitchen counter to inspect a bowl of plastic fruit. "Please. There is no Lady in White. The entire third floor smells like vinegar because the previous owners stored five hundred jars of pickled beets up there in nineteen-thirty-two and half of them exploded."

Harper let out a long, shuddering breath, dropping her forehead against her knees. "You took two hours! We thought you were dead! Callum was about to call his mom on his cell phone, but there’s no service!"

"Cell towers operate on line-of-sight microwave frequencies," Ryder lectured, striding toward the front door where their sneakers were lined up. "And this house is built in a limestone bowl that blocks ninety percent of the signal. Honestly, you guys have zero understanding of basic telecommunications."

He grabbed his jacket, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and looked back at them with a scowl.

"And for your information," Ryder added, opening the front door and letting in a cool blast of night air that smelled of damp grass and distant cow manure, "those ghosts up there have terrible taste in board games. They tried to make me play checkers with wooden blocks they carved out of a fence post, and half the pieces were missing."

Callum scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide in the porch light. "Wait—you played with them?"

"Of course I played with them," Ryder said, stepping out onto the gravel driveway and turning back with a look of clinical exasperation. "They were bored. Now come on. You still owe me that slushie machine, Callum, and if we don't leave right now, I'm going to miss the eleven o'clock documentary on plate tectonics."

He started walking down the driveway, his sneakers crunching rhythmically against the gravel—crunch, squeak, crunch—leaving two very pale, very confused kids staring up at the dark, silent windows of the third-floor attic.