Secret of the Underground Room by John Bellairs

they just sat in the lounge of the boardinghouse and played chess. By now Johnny and Fergie were convinced that the professor would never find out anything, that they would never see Father Higgins again.
    One evening something odd happened.
    The boys met the professor outside the main door of the Bristol Library at five P.M., as they usually did. All three of them were hungry, so they went to the center of town to find a restaurant. When they were through eating, they decided to walk back to the boardinghouse. The easiest way was to climb the Christmas Steps, a winding stone staircase that led to the heights above the city. Halfway up the steps the professor paused to catch his breath on a stone landing where an old-fashioned streetlamp burned. As he stood panting, the boys looked around, and suddenly they froze. In a narrow, shadowy alley nearby a man was watching them. The light was poor, but the boys could see that the man was bearded, burly, and fairly tall. He wore a double-breasted navy-blue jacket.
    For several seconds the boys said nothing—they were too startled to speak. Finally Fergie found his voice.
    "Hey prof!" he exclaimed, tugging at the old man's sleeve. "There's somebody watchin' us in that alleyway there!"
    The professor whirled around and stared. There was no one there.
    "Byron," he said as he glowered at Fergie over the tops of his glasses, "have you been reading too many Hardy Boys adventures?"
    "I saw him too, professor," said Johnny timidly. "He really was there! Honest!"
    The professor snorted. "Well," he snapped, "it was probably some old bum, and he didn't have anything better to look at than the three of us. Now come on. We'd better keep climbing."
    The boys glanced at each other helplessly. When the professor was feeling stubborn, you couldn't make him see anything. They sighed and followed him up the steps.
    When they turned on the radio that night, the boys and the professor heard more reports about ghostly apparitions like the one that Johnny had seen days before. People all over the city had seen the hollow-cheeked floating faces, and panic was setting in. The Bristol Police Department was being flooded with phone calls. Local ghost experts gave the Bristol Post their opinions, which the professor felt were worthless. Psychiatrists said that it was a case of people infecting one another with fear. Everybody seemed to have a theory about what was happening, and this enraged the professor.
    "Why can't they all keep their traps shut or at least admit that they don't know anything?" he growled as he sat in the parlor one evening. "If all the so-called experts in the world were put on a barge and shoved out to sea, we'd all be better off!"
    Fergie and Johnny were sitting nearby eating cream cakes that they had bought at a local bakery.
    "Uh... prof?" said Fergie cautiously. "Have you figured out anything about those notes?"
    The professor glowered at Fergie over the top of his glasses. "If I had," he muttered, "don't you think I would have told you?" And giving his newspaper a shake, he went back to reading. For the time being he was not in a very conversational mood.
    The next evening the boys went out after dinner to look at the Clifton suspension bridge, which was a ten-minute walk from the boardinghouse. It was a beautiful old structure, built by the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunei. The bridge leaps across a two-hundred-foot-deep chasm, and far down below the Avon River flows. When the boys got to the park near the bridge, they saw a breathtaking sight: The setting sun shone in between the heavy gray clouds, bathing the stone towers and swooping steel cables of the old bridge in golden light. Johnny and Fergie just stood staring in amazement. As the sun began to sink and the sky darkened, the boys turned to go home. When they got back to the boardinghouse, they saw that a light was on in the parlor on their floor. The professor had gone back to the library after dinner, but the