Excerpt from Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

“Now beat it, Bug. For real.”

In the elevator, Minnie blinks and blinks but she can’t see anything except bruises reflected to infinity.

When the doors open, she bolts into the hallway and feels afraid. This is the biggest hotel she’s ever been in. Not that the Holiday Inn where they stayed when they visited Hershey Park was much competition for anything, but the Bellweather is so big, so in the middle of nowhere, it’s scary. She knows she’s in the tallest part, the tower, but there are hundreds of rooms and empty ballrooms and swimming pools (more than one!) and long dark halls with dark doors.

Stepping into the Bellweather for the first time was like being swallowed. A nice old man with a bow tie gave her a piece of candy and leaned down to say “Welcome to the Bellweather!” while her parents checked in, but it didn’t really help. He offered to take her and Mike on a tour, to the auditorium, the library, the shops, and the indoor squash courts, whatever those were; he was super-excited about showing off but Minnie didn’t want to go. She still can’t shake the awful feeling that the lobby, with its brick-red and gold and white curlicue carpet and red and gold fabric on the walls, is the stomach of some giant animal, that the old crooked chairs facing each other in half circles are rows and rows of teeth.

And it smells. It smells like Pledge and broccoli and Grandpa, and the first thing Mike said when they got to their room was “Come play with us, Danny!” And she really did haul off and punch him then, because he knows how scared she is of that movie. He went to see it last Halloween at the drive-in. It’s her own fault, she realizes; she asked him to tell her about it. “It’s the scariest thing you’ll ever see,” Mike said, wiggling his eyebrows. “There are these two little twin girls, about your age, and their dad chops them up with an ax and you see them, like, all bloody, with their parts strewn all over the hall. And they haunt the hotel and they’re really lonely, so when this kid Danny shows up on his Big Wheel—well, they just want to play with him. But ghosts don’t play very well with the living.”

She didn’t know which was scarier, getting chopped up with an ax or having no one to play with for eternity but your sister.

She shivers and looks down the hallway. It stretches on and on in either direction, the lights on the walls low and flickery. Minnie realizes she is holding her shoes, one in each hand, and thinks they’re the only weapons she has.

Against what? A little boy on a Big Wheel? Two little girls, hacked to pieces with an ax?

   No, she tells herself. Don’t think about that. That’s just a movie. It’s not real. It didn’t happen.

She calms down for a second, but only for a second, because now that she’s not afraid of little girl ghosts she’s remembering that her sister just married a jerk. “Theo is an asshole,” she tells the hallway.

She smiles a real smile for the first time all day.

“Theo is a total asshole,” she says, a little louder.

Something thumps nearby and she starts, giggles.

“Theo is an asshole!” she shouts.

A door in front of her explodes and a man, his chest a bursting red balloon, flies out and crumples against the opposite wall.

Excerpted from Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia. Copyright © 2014 by Kate Racculia. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.