11
Penny was suddenly recalling ever Halloween she had ever had growing up in Omaha. She had grown up on a farm in a very rural area almost three miles from the nearest neighbors where the closest structures to her home was an old barn and her father's old wood shed, and the next closest structures were an old outhouse her brothers had shot full of holes and an old barn tilting to one side in the woods said to be left over from before the Civil War. She was not doing a lot of trick-or-treating in that area, but her Aunt Gracie did drive her and her siblings back to her neighborhood in nearby Prescott to go trick or treating door-to-door as a little girl. One year, the local church had did up the old firehouse as a haunted house to raise money, but that place with its fake ghosts and plastic spiders was nothing like the Vannacutt's apartment. Being in their apartment to take care of Samantha and Nikki while they were out was bringing back every one of her old Halloween memories. The place looked exactly like what she expected a haunted house might look like with old period furniture, a number of portraits, candelabras with candles for ambience and shelves of dusty books and bric-a-brac, but it was the atmosphere the other objects gave the room that bothered her. The first thing she had seen when she arrived had been the electric chair against the wall, old rusted and derelict and referred to by Lizzie as her father's favorite chair. From there, interspersed amidst the old Victorian furniture were several pieces that defied rational logic. Every so often, something that looked like a crow peeked out from the cuckoo clock, noticed Penny then silently drew back inside. The coffee table in the conversation area looked like a large square coffin made of a darkly stained wood with drawers in it. Instead of a modern plasma TV, they had an old Sixties television inside a baroque wood cabinet with the tattered cloth covered speakers and an old heavily ornate pewter lamp up top that looked like a gnarled tree holding up a thin ceramic shade decorated with tiny black markings of runic symbols. A metal skull, the dusty leather-bound Vannacutt family bible, small statues of insane ceramic gargoyles around five inches tall danced around the top and an old wood box of Cuban cigars covered the top of the TV, but then it looked like Jesse had boxes of cigars all over the place. Over the TV looking over the room was a black and white photo in a large oval frame was Jesse's parents, Victor and Gwendolyn Vannacutt. Tall, haughty and proud with his head tipped back and his eyes solemnly narrowed with a monocle in his right eye and a thick back mustache and goatee, he looked like Count Dracula as a mortician, one hand perched mightily on a cane and his other arm passionately around the waist of his bride and Jesse's mother. Gwendolyn was tall and beautiful with piercing brown eyes, fair skin and incredibly long dark brunette hair waving down and around her like a cape. Her dress in the photo was an ornate gown resembling a spider web spreading around and shaping her impressive figure. The nameplate on the bottom in silver read simply, "Victor and Gwendolyn Vannacutt - 1933 to ?"
As powerfully haunting their portrait was, it had nothing on the rest of the portraits in the room. At eight years old, Jesse was already dressing like a mortician and standing by his tall powerful father, or held up by the man on his shoulder proudly beaming with Jesse's bald older brother standing by his side holding a wad of dynamite. In another photo, the other brother Horace accompanied Jesse and Chester. Also dressed in black, he had crazy dark hair, thick eyebrows, a crazy look to his eyes and was standing on a magician's trunk marked in lettering Penny couldn't read. There were many more photos of Lizzie as a girl in an old kitchen and as a little girl with her six sisters. Several photos of Samantha and Nikki adorned the shelves and hall of the apartment, but some of the pictures just looked… odd. As an adult, Horace stared out from one hysterically and psychotically ecstatic as if he had just received his greatest joy. Uncle Jacob Bathory in his portrait made a face as if he smelled something bad, and in another photo, Great Aunt Ingrid looked gruff and masculine. Penny was quite sure she was a man until she read the name in the frame. Cousins Myron and Taybert Vannacutt looked like little kids until Penny looked closer and saw they were middle-aged men in shorts and striped shirts with tam o'shanter caps standing side by side on a yard before a large dark edifice, but the creepiest period photo was the one in the kitchen over the table of Lizzie's late mother, Constance Victoria Whatsoever-Bathory. Proud, regal and beautiful, she had delicate features and wide impressive eyes like a young girl with the aspects of womanhood, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun with more long hair hanging loose. She was dressed in a high-collared 19th Century dress seen only from the waist up, but despite the fact the photo was in black and white, Penny could tell she had powerful green eyes as if the woman's spirit was watching her from the image and waiting to take over her body. Wherever Penny stood or sat, she felt that woman's face watching her. She tried covering it with a dishtowel, but it inexplicably got pulled off and returned back to the handle on the large electric stove. The worst part was that the entire place seemed to breath and creak and groan. Penny could hear the walls groaning around her as if there was a rainstorm outside, but despite the fact the night was cold and still, she thought she heard the patter of rain. As she prepared the drinks for the girls, Penny looked up to the glass eyes of a stuffed large black bird mounted to a block of wood. The Vannacutts liked their stuffed animals. They had a huge black grizzly bear in one corner of the living room, a white barn owl on the shelf by the door and a three foot long crocodile stuck to a piece over the window. The alcove over Leonard and Sheldon's front window had Jesse's desk covered in books with a crystal ball, a fake plastic skull filled with licorice, yet another box of cigars and another stuffed black raven perched on a model tin mausoleum with skeletons crawling out of its windows. Altogether, the apartment was an attack on Penny's eyes, ears and senses on her arrival, but for two thousand dollars, she would even stay the night.
"Okay girls…" Penny arrived at their bedroom door. "Are you getting in bed?"
"Yes…" Samantha tiredly echoed inside the room. Nikki hadn't said a thing all night, but Penny had seen her hovering near her sister and lying on the floor with her as they watched and laughed giggling and cheering through a showing of the movie "Poltergeist" on the Chiller Network.
"Are you coming to get your milk?"
"Just put it under the door…"
Penny looked down and saw what looked like a pet door in their bedroom door. It was labeled "Samantha, Monica and It." Looking away unnervingly, Penny gasped a bit and looked at the end of the hall. Whatever it was the family called Spot had been lying in the threshold of Jesse and Elizabeth's bedroom. It's head and forequarters hidden from view in the room, it looked like a small stegosaurus roughly twelve to fifteen feet long with a toy ball stuck on one spike in its tails, one leg curled up just outside the door under it and a plaid blanket perched over one back plate and hanging down the other side. It seemed to have been asleep during her stay; it's rhythmic reptilian purring in the room and an occasional scratching sound as it had a dream. Over it, Penny could see just the top of Jesse and Lizzie's canopy bed, which looked more like a funeral display. She just held the girl's little hatch open, slid the tray with their glasses of milk on it underneath then stood up as she heard the girls whispering and giggling as they took their drinks. She heard Nikki talking to her sister in a whisper through the door.
"Now, go on to bed…" She told them.
"That's what we're doing…" Samantha echoed back. As Penny turned away, she heard the creaking aching sounds of casket lids creaking closed and paused to look back.
"Holy crap on a cracker…" She mumbled and strided back out to the kitchen. Despite the creepy décor and haunted atmosphere, the room wasn't very bad. Lizzie kept it meticulous and immaculate with a series of cookbooks on the counter, a huge spice rack, a solid steel dishwasher and a large industrial refrigerator. She had been offered anything she wanted in the refrigerator, and as she looked into it, she saw numerous delicacies surrounded by soft mist and water vapor befitting a stay-at-home mom. Lizzie obviously cooked a lot and had leftovers from several meals. The door was full of jars of pickles, olives, bottles of wine and champagne, containers of exotic and typical ingredients such as small hot peppers and homemade jars of jams and jellies and two boxes of Chinese take-out, but Penny forgot where she was for the moment and took a shallow container of sushi and deviled eggs, a bowl of fried chicken and grabbed a can of generic soda from the bottom.
"Frankenstein Fizz…" She read the can. "I'll try it…" For all she knew, it had been a promotional Halloween thing. Popping it open, she sat at the sofa, briefly looked up at the portrait of Grandma Constance watching her and flared her eyes a bit spooked as she took the remote to watch television.
"Submitted for your approval…" Red Serling appeared on the set. "A young blonde attractive girl from Nebraska fighting to make an acting career in California…"
Penny switched the channel.
"…alone in a creepy apartment…"
She switched the channel again as she bit into a drumstick.
"…and watching over two adorable…"
She switched again.
"…brunette girls with an interest…"
She switched again.
"…in the macabre."
"What the hell?" Penny scowled confusingly. "Their cable is suddenly screwed up. They get "The Twilight Zone" on every channel."
"Little does she know…" Serling continued as Penny started shooting through channels.
"That her evening…"
"Is about to take…"
"A weird new…"
"Direction into…"
"Leonard, please help me baby-sit!" A girl's familiar voice briefly popped forth.
"The slippery slopes into…"
"Up next…" A new voice called out from the TV. "Back to back episodes of "Eight Simple Rules," "According to Jim" and "Grounded for Life."
"Finally…" Penny dropped the remote now that she had fixed it. She sipped her soda, dropped her drumstick and bit into a chicken breast.
"But first…" The voice of the TV announcer responded. "Let's return to another classic episode of… "The Twilight Zone!""
Penny looked up with eyes flared and frustrated and turned it off entirely. Lizzie had a few cooking magazines around, and Jesse had a few hunting and antique magazines as well. Picking up a book on historical houses, Penny had another deviled egg, sipped her soda and thumbed through pages of historic old houses, deserted structures and abandoned hospitals and sanitariums. On the wall behind the electric chair, the cuckoo clock charmed once and the door popped open to reveal a raven revealing its head.
"11:45 and they're still not home yet!" It screeched in a scratchy and pitchy little voice, cawed loudly then pulled its head back inside its tiny house.
"No, they're not…" Penny remarked then lifted her head. She was talking to a live bird in a clock? If she didn't want the money so much to cover her debts, she would have called and paid another babysitter to do the job for her. Tired, she confessed she was creeped out. The eyes of the portraits and stuffed creatures were staring at her. Shadows creeped along the walls of the candles dripping in the room. The apartment groaned and creaked around her, and beyond that, she heard footsteps and clanking chains. Why was it those girls were not scared to live here? She was the babysitter, and she felt she was constantly being watched. The creaking footsteps were getting closer, dragging chains around from its ankles. Slowly turning her head to the door, Penny heard the doorknob turning, a key rattling and creaking open as Grandpa Bathory entered the room wearing his regal Transylvanian grand attire and long cape whose collar extended up around his head. He had a full round face with light pale skin and two sparking youthful brown eyes with only faint traces of age in his face. His lips were thin, but his chin was a round on large neck. His dark and silver hair was brushed backward on his head with twinges of white whiskers around his ears. Replacing his keys to his pocket, he looked to Penny catching her breath.
"Hi, Penny, how are you doing?" He responded to her jovially and effervescent, sincerely eager to be friends with her. "Were the girls good?"
"There were little angels…" Penny shined honestly. The apartment creaked and groaned a bit.
"Well, good…" Grandpa looked around a bit surprised. "I promised them a hundred bucks each if they behaved themselves."
"A hundred bucks?"
"They let me off easy!" Grandpa postured a bit surprised. "They must have liked you; they usually take me for $500 each!" He noticed the creaking sounds himself and looked around the room, reaching behind the Victrola wind-up record player from the Late Nineteenth Century and pulling out a CD player playing the noises. The creaking stopped once he turned it off.
"Those little scamps…" He pulled out a wad of bills from his pocket to pay her the two thousand Jesse had offered her. "Let me go ahead and pay you. Jesse and my daughter could be out another two to three hours…" He noticed Penny eating the leftovers from the refrigerator. "I'm glad you found something to eat. Like I always say, fried monitor lizard is always better the following day!"
Penny made a face, grabbed some Kleenex from the coffee table and started spitting out was in her mouth. Cringing and clutching her stomach, she placed her regurgitated chewed mess in the empty container that once had the sushi and deviled eggs.
"Did you try the piranha and deviled iguana eggs?"
Penny was still squirming and cringing in her seat as she held her stomach. Not thinking, she grabbed the soda and started drinking it then stopped. Having counted out twenty $100 bills, Grandpa handed it out to her as she showed him the can.
"What's Frankenstein Fizz?" She was scared to ask.
"Oh, just some sample drinks from a novelty place Jesse invested in, but I'm not crazy about it."
"Why not?"
"I don't like cranberry juice." He answered. Penny reacted relieved and drank it down after taking the money. "Well, there you go, sweetie…" Grandpa hung his cape behind the door with the others family coats on a coat rack. "The cavalry is here. I can take over from here…" He showed her to the door.
"So…" Penny looked back. "How was your costume party?" She looked at his Dracula costume.
"What costume party?"
"Never mind…" Penny stepped out and took a few steps before pausing halfway down the steps to her apartment. "Monitor lizard?" She prayed she had some Pepto Bismo in her bathroom. She was brushing her teeth and her tongue tonight. Descending downstairs, she started pulling her key from her pocket and heard the spectral elevator going through the building again once more. She was really starting to believe the building was haunted. When it opened in front of her, she looked at herself standing in it. Party girl Penny in the leather jacket and hot pants with the tiny t-shirt looked at babysitter Penny with the sweater and blue jeans, waved with a nervous surprised grin and stunned look then pounded the button again to close the door. Watching her clone vanish in the nonexistent elevator, Penny paused and tried to mentally dismiss it.
"Must be the piranha sushi…" She tried to convince herself it was a hallucination, but eventually, she wasn't so sure. Apparently, the sounds of the working elevator had got through the building and everyone was asking the landlord why they had not been informed it had been fixed and restored. If it was working, maybe there really was another Penny in the building. Unfortunately, the building superintendent denied the claims about so long before he too heard it himself and called a structural engineer from the city to come look at it and see if it had been covertly restored. Penny, Leonard, Sheldon, Jason from the fifth floor, Miss Gunderson from the third floor and Marshall Moseby and his girlfriend, Chloe Bluth, from the second floor then stood by and watched as the guy from the city opened the doors on the first floor to inspect the shaft from below, from the middle on the third floor and from the fifth floor. He also investigated the electronics and the generator system which were oddly clear of dust and full of old degraded oil, but he also found the ruins of the lift, the counterweights and strewn cables in the bottom of the shaft and the twisted and warped guide rails left over from the mysterious explosion that had claimed it several years ago. During the inspection, Leonard hemmed and swayed nervously, but then the report came out. The mechanism and electronics were okay, but the shaft was a lost cause. It would require stripping the shaft apart, replacing the guide rails, re-inforcing them and rebuilding the elevator from scratch within the building to repair it, and that wasn't going to happen. Elevators were built by the inside out, not from the outside in. A collapsed lift could be fixed; one alleged to have been used as a missile silo was a lost cause. When Jesse entered the building in front of all those people that morning, he paused to look at their faces, drew his breath back on his cigar and suspiciously made a sudden detour up to the fifth floor as everyone watched.
At the Cheesecake Factory, Penny tried to rationalize what she had seen. Did she hallucinate it? Did it really happen, and was Britney Spears were even there. Could it have been Britney Spears? She was supposedly supposed to be in Canada making a movie with Mark Ruffalo. Meanwhile, her missing shoes had returned under her bed as she predicted, but now she was missing a top, two pairs of shorts, a pair of sandals, a brand new pair of stockings and a pair of jeans. Were those little girls sneaking in, playing dress up, eating her food then sneaking back out of the place? She had just been shopping for groceries just the other day, and now she had to go again! Taking home leftovers from work was going to have to hold her another few days. As lunch rolled around again, the guys came by the Cheesecake Factory again. Sheldon was using his laptop computer to communicate.
"What's wrong with Sheldon?"
"Besides what psychiatrists are trying to figure out?" Howard commented. Sheldon scowled at him.
"Oh…" Leonard looked up grinning. "Oh, he kind of lost a bet, and now he can't talk for a week." He sighed happily. "It's been like heaven!"
Sheldon looked at him annoyed.
"Really?" Penny grinned ear to ear. "So he can't talk at all?"
"Nope!"
"One word?"
"Nada!" Howard shined happily.
"So wishes do come true!" Penny looked at Sheldon glaring back. He was miserable. They were so happy. Why were they so ecstatic not to hear his voice? Was there something really wrong with his personality?
"Just, wait, when this week is over…"
"Sheldon…"
"Drat!"
"Oh, hey…" Leonard remembered something. "How did your babysitting job go last night?"
"It wasn't as bad as I thought." Penny confessed. "Those little girls were so sweet! I mean - they were a little spooky…"
"A little creepy, a little ooky…" Howard added.
"Yeah," Penny continued. "Their apartment is a lot like my grandma's - if my grandmother lived in a haunted house! It's dark with a lot of antiques and bric-a-brac not to mention dusty and cobwebby, but did you know that Lizzie is a trained chef? She's authored several books on cooking and design based on her Wiccan ancestry."
Raj was whispering a question in Howard's ear.
"Wiccan?" Howard looked at him. "It means her ancestors were witches…"
"Oh Lord…" Sheldon rolled his eyes.
"Sheldon…" Penny reminded him of the bet.
"Drat…"
"Where did you get all this?" Leonard asked.
"I met Lizzie's father…" Penny confessed. "He was a famous magician in the Thirties and the Forties, and has been married thirteen times until death and beyond… Not sure what he meant by that."
Howard and Leonard shared a nervous look at each other.
"What does he look like?" Howard asked.
"Like a fat Jack The Ripper… but distinguished." Penny remarked. "Oh, and Dracula's Pie is a minty dark chocolate pudding pie with licorice and thick strawberry gelatin, and like she said, it is to die for. I'm going to see if the restaurant can include it."
"You tried it?" Leonard asked.
"Yes, I did." Penny went on. "And I didn't feel sick or nauseous afterward, even after the piranha and monitor lizard…. Although, I did have that dream I was fifty feet tall and wearing a cape…"