Read Online You Can't Come in Here! by P.J. Night - Free Book Online Page B

when she called up to them? And that’s when it hit her. She’d heard Mr. and Mrs. Strig say the same thing each time Drew or Vicky opened the front door. She closed the door, then opened it again.
    â€œDrew, Vicky? Is that you?”
    â€œWe’re upstairs.”
    â€œOkay,” Emily muttered. “What’s going on here?”
    She opened the door fully and stepped inside.
    Instead of walking straight down the hallway, as she always did to go to Drew and Vicky’s rec room, Emily turned left. She followed the narrow hallway around a curve and came to a large wooden staircase. It had obviously once been a grand stairway fit for a mansion. She could picture a bride walking down its long sweeping stairs, trailing the train of her wedding gown behind her.
    But, like everything in this house, the staircase had fallen into terrible disrepair. Emily carefully adjusted her weight as she took every step, making sure that each stairwould support her before she committed fully to moving up onto the next one. Every stair moaned as if it resented being used after so many years.
    Reaching the landing, Emily found another hallway, similar to the one on the first floor. This hallway also looked as if it had been thrown together quickly using some unpainted Sheetrock that someone had just found sitting around. At the end of the hallway, a single door stood closed.
    â€œMrs. Strig?” Emily called out in the direction of the closed door. “Mr. Strig?”
    No answer.
    Reaching the door, she knocked, her raps echoing into the room beyond.
    Emily psyched herself up. “Just do it, Em. Open the door.”
    She nodded to herself, then opened the door and stepped into the room.
    Somehow the fact that the room was practically empty did not surprise Emily. The walls had long ago crumbled. Pieces of plaster lay scattered on the floor, exposing the beams that held what was left of the house together. A single piece of furniture, a small table, sat inthe corner. But what was that on the table?
    Crossing the room carefully to avoid falling into one of the many holes in the floor, Emily reached the table. Inspecting the small, square device on it, she realized that it was an old-fashioned telephone answering machine, the kind people used before voice mail.
    A cassette tape sat inside the answering machine. Emily had seen these types of answering machines in movies from the 1980s. She pressed a button labeled OUTGOING MESSAGE . The cassette tape rolled, and two voices came out of the machine’s tiny speaker.
    â€œDrew, Vicky? Is that you?”
    â€œWe’re upstairs.”
    When the message finished, Emily saw the tape rewind so it was ready to play again when the next phone call came in—or in this case, the next time someone opened the front door.
    Emily walked completely around the table and discovered a wire coming out of the back of the answering machine. She followed the wire down to where the wall met the floor. From there it ran toward the door.
    Tracing the wire, she followed it out of the room, along the hall, and down the stairs. At the bottom of thestaircase, the wire crossed the floor and ran up to the door hinge, where it disappeared into a small plastic box. Emily pulled the cover off the box and found two batteries inside. The answering machine’s wire was wrapped around a metal post. A second wire led from the box to a small speaker mounted on the wall at the top of the stairs. This was obviously where the message came out when the door was opened.
    Emily sat down on the bottom step, trying to make sense of what she had just seen. For some reason, Mr. and Mrs. Strig had set up a phone answering machine to play their voices whenever anyone opened the door. But why? And where were they? They were supposed to be here, homeschooling Drew and Vicky.
    Drew and Vicky. Where were they ?
    Emily got up and walked down the hall. Reaching the rec room door, she paused, then