Description

After her grandmother passed away, Heather had come to live with her Uncle Reece, Aunt Pansy, and cousins Nicole and Teddy. Uncle Reece, her mother’s brother, felt that he had to take her in. But, Aunt Pansy and her cousins resented that she was upsetting their lives. Heather hoped that her mother Robin would somehow hear about her grandmother’s death and come to save her. One day when coming home from school, a strange old man caught her eye and carefully laid a package on the lawn for her.  When she opened it she found an old fortune teller’s pendulum. It was not long before she and her cousins experimented with it, and some of the predictions were frightening. Heather seemed to have a unique ability to make the pendulum move when she held a person’s hands and tried to tell their future, and sometimes the pendulum pointed at—DEATH, or UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS . Nicole encouraged Heather to host a fortune-teller booth at the upcoming Halloween carnival at school. Miss Clarice Upton, Heather’s sixth-grade teacher, was immediately supportive of the idea. In fact, Miss Upton seemed to be trying to get closer to Heather. Heather certainly did not want to be a teacher’s pet! After a very successful day at the carnival, Heather slowly became aware that persons were actually dying or disappearing—following exactly the pendulum’s predictions. At the same time, she was hearing weird noises in her house. Heather began to learn more about the house and its history, and she began to remember more about the day that she had followed some older kids out to the sand pits—the day that Antol had drowned. How did all of these things fit together?