By Stan Berenstain, Jan Berenstain
Brother reads Sister a spooky mystery at bedtime, and then nobody in the cubs' room sleeps much for a week.
Brother and Sister are at the bookmobile. Sister picks a book about nature; Brother picks a mystery called The Case of the Crying Cave, and that night he reads it to her. It's about scouts who find a cave shaped like a face, and the cave moans at them, and they run. Sister loves it right up until the light goes off. Then the chair is a creature, and the lamp is a creature, and every shape in the bedroom has teeth. She yells, a parent comes, the light goes on, the parent leaves, Brother turns the light back off because he can't sleep with it on, and around it goes again. Brother being Brother, he adds a few ghost noises of his own. Finally Papa takes Sister up to the dark attic, and they have a talk about imagination and how it's hers to steer. He digs out a night light, and Sister sleeps. Brother, meanwhile, lies awake listening to the wind and an owl outside the window, and decides he's done with mysteries for a while.
If a story has ever gotten into your house at the wrong hour and wrecked bedtime, this book is about exactly that. Sister isn't scared of nothing; she's scared of something specific she just heard, and the book traces the fear right back to the mystery Brother read her. Then Papa does the part that makes it work: he doesn't tell Sister there's nothing there. He tells her that her imagination is real and powerful and hers, and that she can point it somewhere else, and he plugs in a night light because a good idea and a little hardware both help. For a lot of four- to seven-year-olds, seeing the shadow-creatures drawn on the page just as they'd look from the bed is the reassuring part. Someone else has seen them too.