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he had a real chainsaw. Rodrick told me the chainsaw has a rubber blade, but I wasn't taking any chances. Right when it looked like the chainsaw guy was going to catch us, Mom stepped in and bailed us out. THAT'S NOT NICE! I'M SORRY, MA'AM! Mom made the chainsaw guy show us where the exit was, and that was the end of our haunted house experience right there. I guess it was a little

embarrassing when Mom did that, but I'm willing to let it go this one time. Saturday The Crossland haunted house really got me thinking. Those guys were charging five bucks a pop, and the line stretched halfway around the school. I decided to make a haunted house of my own. Actually, I had to bring Rowley in on the deal, because Mom wouldn't let me convert our first floor into a full-out haunted mansion. I knew Rowley's dad wouldn't be crazy about the idea, either, so we decided to build the haunted house in his basement and just not mention it to his parents. Me and Rowley spent most of the day coming up with an awesome plan for our haunted house. Here was our final plan:

HALL OF SCREAMS. LAKE OF BLOOD. BOTTOMLESS PIT. RAT TUNNEL. MAZE OF 1,000 SKULLS. KNIFE ALLEY. HAND HALL. DEATH SLIDE. ACID LAKE. I don't mean to brag or anything, but what we came up with was way better than the Crossland High School haunted house. We realized we were gonna need to get the word out that we were doing this thing, so we got some paper and made up a bunch of flyers. I'll admit maybe we stretched the truth a little in our advertisement, but we had to make sure people actually showed up.

By the time we finished putting the flyers up around the neighborhood and got back to Rowley's basement, it was already 2:30, and we hadn't even started putting the actual haunted house together yet. So we had to cut some corners from our original plan. When 3:00 rolled around, we looked outside to see if anyone had showed up. And sure enough, there were about twenty neighborhood kids waiting in line outside Rowley's basement.

Now, I know our flyers said admission was fifty cents, but I could see that we had a chance to make a killing here. So I told the kids that admission was two bucks, and the fifty-cent thing was just a typo. The first kid to cough up his two bucks was Shane Snella. He paid his money and we let him inside, and me and Rowley took our positions in the Hall of Screams. The Hall of Screams was basically a bed with me and Rowley on either side of it.

I guess maybe we made the Hall of Screams a little too scary, because halfway through, Shane curled up in a ball underneath the bed. We tried to get him to crawl out from under there, but he wouldn't budge. I started thinking about all the money we were losing with this kid clogging up the Hall of Screams, and I knew we had to get him out of there, quick. Eventually, Rowley's dad came downstairs. At first I was happy to see him, because I thought he could help us drag Shane out from under the bed and get our haunted house cranking again. But Rowley's dad wasn't really in a helpful mood. Rowley's dad wanted to know what we were doing, and why Shane Snella was curled up under the bed.