Chapter 19 The Invisible Intruder by Carolyn Keene
The Weird Room
THE hidden passengers in the truck waited anxiously to see what was going to happen. To their amazement they heard Mr. Warfield call an affable greeting.
“What are you doing here, Officer?” he asked.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Warfield,” said a man’s voice. “I might ask you the same thing.”
Then he went on, “Police headquarters was notified about a stolen truck that was headed in this direction. When you raced along so fast and then turned in here as if you were trying to hide, we thought sure we’d located the thief.”
Mr. Warfield laughed. “I was hiding all right.”
“But why?” another officer queried.
“I have four young people inside the truck who didn’t want their identity known.”
The first officer said, “Suppose you tell us what it’s all about.”
Mr. Warfield called, “Come on out, everybody!”
Ned unlocked the door, swung it open, and the two couples jumped down. Mr. Warfield introduced them to Officers Canfield and Sumter, whom he knew from town. The men asked for an explanation of the young people’s trip.
“You tell them, Nancy,” urged Helen. She said to the officers, “Nancy Drew is an amateur detective. A group of us formed a ghost hunters’ club and invited her and her special friends to come along.”
In as few words as possible Nancy told of their adventures of the past several days. “We ghost hunters are suspicious that all the mysterious happenings are the work of a group of swindlers trying to defraud people in one way or another.”
“So you’re the folks who have been giving clues to the police?” Officer Canfield said with a smile. “The authorities in every town are looking for a couple named Wilbur and Beatrice Prizer, a Madame Tarantella, and also a kidnapped boy named Steve Rover. We haven’t found out a thing about any of them.”
Mr. Warfield chuckled. “You men and the rest of the police had better get on the job pretty quick or this case is going to be solved by these ghost hunters.”
The officers smiled and the one named Sumter said, “More power to you. Well, we’ll be on our way after that stolen truck.” The two men left.
The four young people hid once more in the truck, and Mr. Warfield drove off. Nancy had arranged ahead of time for him to stop some distance from Mr. Cranshaw’s home. He was to drive on alone, while the ghost hunters vanished among the trees.
“Come back for us in two hours, please,” Nancy requested as they hopped out.
“I’ll do that.”
He had not gone far when a voice behind him said, “You will not be back here in two hours!”
Startled, Mr. Warfield realized that a young man wearing a mask had hidden in the truck after Nancy and the others had left. He climbed to the front and seated himself alongside the driver. He was holding something under a bandanna that looked ominously like a weapon.
As soon as Mr. Warfield collected his wits, he asked, “Who are you?”
“Don’t ask questions,” the young man replied. “Just keep driving, and whenever I tell you to make a turn, do so. You’d better not cry for help or you’ll get hurt!”
While this little drama had been going on, Nancy, Ned, and the Archers were getting closer to the Cranshaw house, which stood far back from the road. Only a few lights were on.
“Let’s walk all the way around the house before we ring the bell,” Nancy suggested.
“You and Ned go,” Jim suggested. “Helen and I will stay near the driveway in case anyone comes in.”
The windows of the old mansion were close enough to the ground so that Nancy and Ned could peer into the house easily. Nothing looked unusual until they came to a large window on the south side. Then both caught their breath in amazement. The place was filled with lighted human skulls!
“Weird!” Ned muttered. “And see what’s on the wall above the fireplace!”
In the center hung a large sting ray which looked like a devil’s face. Its glowing eyes flickered on and off. Stretched along the mantel on both sides of a starfish were skulls.
As the couple stood there, mesmerized by the sight, they could hear a low voice. The words were indistinguishable. They could see no one in the room but wondered if someone might be talking softly over a telephone which they could not see.
“I’d like to go into that room,” Nancy whispered. “Let’s walk around to the front now and ring the bell.”
Nancy and Ned returned to where Helen and Jim were waiting. Together they walked up the front-porch steps. Ned turned the big old-fashioned handle of the bell. It rang loudly, reverberating throughout the house.
Several minutes went by before they heard footsteps. Then a tall, slender, sour-faced man in a butler’s uniform opened the door. A puzzled frown crossed his face and he looked over their heads at the driveway.
Seeing no car, he said, “How did you folks get here?”
The callers smiled and Nancy said, “We were out strolling. We’re staying close by and heard that Mr. Cranshaw has a wonderful collection of skulls and shells. Do you think he’d let us see them?”
“I’m Jeffers,” the man replied. “I’ll go ask the old gentleman if it’s all right.” The butler closed the door.
“Nice reception,” Jim remarked with a chuckle.
Ned laughed. “I don’t blame him. These days one can’t be too careful whom he lets in. Why, we could be a bunch of thieves!”
A moment later the door opened again. Jeffers said, “Mr. Cranshaw will want to know who you are. What are your names?”
Ned told him. Once more the door was closed and the butler went off.
This time he was gone a long while and the two couples were beginning to think they would surely be turned away. But in about ten minutes Jeffers returned. This time he seemed to be in a better mood and opened the door with a smile.
“Come in,” he said. “Unfortunately Mr. Cranshaw isn’t feeling well, but he said it would be all right for you to look at his collection. You’ll find this place is more like a city museum than a house way out in the country.”
He led them into the weird room Nancy and Ned had seen from outside. At close hand, it was even more fantastic, although the sting ray had stopped blinking.
One wall was lined with locked glass cabinets, containing beautiful shells. Each had a card with the generic name and popular name, and a legend.
Nancy was particularly intrigued by one called the Xenophora. The sign said that this little snail was unable to protect itself and therefore collected other shells to wear on its back for protection.
It attached them by means of a gluey substance from its mantle. On a sandy beach or in the water the strange-looking shell was not appealing to other sea creatures’ appetites.
“Funny-looking thing!” she thought, and smiled. “He’s the original shell collector!”
Helen was interested in a shell called Conus Gloria-mario. The sign said that there were only twenty-five specimens of this cone-shaped shell known to be in existence. One which had sold for twelve thousand dollars was now worth twenty-five thousand.
“Listen to this!” Helen said. “Several of the Cone family have a poisonous sting more lethal than the bite of a poisonous snake. I had no idea that innocent-looking shells could harbor dangerous snails.”
The two girls walked over to the boys who were reading the card below the starfish. It said starfish come in many sizes and colors. This one from the Pacific, near the Fiji Islands, was called the blue starfish and measured twenty inches across.
“Starfish have many pointed rays, ranging from five to forty,” they read. “They have an amazing ability to restore one of the rays if it is damaged or broken off. Also, a five-ray starfish may break into five separate rays and as long as it has a portion of the center of the body it may regenerate. In this way each ray can become a whole new starfish.”
There was no card by the sting ray, but the ghost hunters knew it was called the rattlesnake of the sea and that its spinelike tail can inflict a deep, jagged wound, hard to heal.
“This is a small one,” Ned remarked. “I understand they grow as long as twelve feet.”
At that moment Jeffers, who had left the callers in the room, returned.
“I’m sorry to have been gone so long,” he apologized. “Mr. Cranshaw needed a little attention. The old gentleman told me to show you around the house, particularly the basement. He used to be a big-game hunter and has some interesting specimens down there.”
As they proceeded from room to room, each one cluttered with skulls, Nancy thought how glad she was Bess had not come along. “The poor girl would have had one continuous shiver.”
Nancy said to Jeffers, “With all these skulls around, it makes one think of ghosts. Have you ever seen any here?”
The butler gave a hollow laugh. “To me all these skulls are ghosts. Now I’ll take you to the basement. That’s where the zoo is.”
On the way down the stairs the visitors passed skeleton after skeleton. Most of them hung loose from brackets on the wall, but at the foot of the stairs there were several in glass cases.
“We keep the real prizes locked up,” Jeffers remarked. “You’ll see a dinosaur and other prehistoric specimens. They’re in cages, but I’ll let you in to get a close look at a fossil.”
The visitors glanced at one another. What was the purpose of keeping the dinosaur fossil in a cage?
“I should think it would be pretty hard to steal,” Nancy thought, “but, as Jeffers said, it’s probably one of Mr. Cranshaw’s prizes so he doesn’t want to take any chances.”
Along the walls of the dimly lighted corridor were several enormous cages and in each was a monster skeleton. They passed the dinosaur and went on to another cage in which there was a diplodocus. Jeffers unlocked the door and urged his callers to go in and inspect the restored skeleton.
Helen and Jim walked in, followed by Ned. Instinct warned Nancy not to go, and to get the others out as quickly as possible.
She grabbed Ned’s coat. “Don’t go in there!” she whispered.
But her warning came too late. With a violent push Jeffers sent her reeling into the cage, nearly knocking Ned over. The butler slammed the cage door and quickly locked it.
He stood staring at the four visitors, then burst into maniacal laughter. The next moment the butler started to walk up the corridor toward the stairway, leaving his prisoners helpless.