Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Obviously I wasn’t going to get any answers by standing on the sidewalk, so when Casey says, “There’s another guy in jeans,” and starts toward the entrance, I pull him back and say, “If we’re going to do this, we need to split up.”

  He looks at me. “And then … ?”

  Through my mind flashes something Holly had told me about the way she dealt with things when she was homeless. “And then we attach ourselves to our own little group of adults as we go in. We look solemn, avoid eye contact, and once we’re inside, we don’t hang out together or act like we know each other.”

  Casey thinks a minute. “I can do that.”

  I eye Billy. “I don’t know if he can.”

  “Hey!” Billy says. “I can be as solemn as the next guy. I can be more solemn than the next guy! No, wait! I can be as solemn as the dead guy.”

  I look at Casey and say, “That’s pretty solemn,” and Casey agrees. “Very solemn.”

  So we watch the people filing into the funeral home for a minute, and then Casey says, “It was my idea, so I guess I’m going first.”

  He’s quick, sly, and never looks back.

  “Okay,” I tell Billy. “My turn.”

  I sidle up behind a middle-aged couple helping along an old lady. It’s slow going, but I hold back a little, trying to seem like I’m just patiently walking with Grandma to a sad, sad day at the funeral parlor.

  But as we’re approaching the doorway, the middle-aged woman looks back at me and says, “You can go ahead.”

  “No, no. I’m fine,” I tell her, and I back off a little until they’re right up to the door.

  Then in we go.

  There’s a little sign on a post with movable white letters that spell out CHAPEL with an arrow pointing to the left, and VIEWING with an arrow pointing to the right. And standing beside the sign is a short, pear-shaped woman wearing a dark purple dress and a dark green and purple hat. To me she looks like a giant, smiling eggplant.

  “Cynthia! Roscoe!” she says to the people I’m with. “And Mrs. Kennedy! Thank you so much for coming.”

  There’s a bunch of people milling around, blocking the entrance to the chapel, so before she can even think about saying something like, “And who is this darling ragamuffin?” I ditch it to the right.

  Now, I’m trying to remind myself that the whole reason we’re infiltrating a funeral parlor is to find out more about the Vampire. Stuff like, does he work there? And if he does, what does he do? Maybe it’s his job to check out the gravesite for a next-day burial. Maybe he’s really just a normal guy with a rundown car and unfortunate teeth.

  But as I’m looking around for the Vampire, I keep getting distracted by the whole parlor part of the place. Seriously, there’s a main room with a fireplace that’s all decked out like an old Victorian living room. It has little flowered couches and oval-framed pictures on the wall and an Oriental rug under a sideboard with a silver tea service and a plate of crunchy-looking cookies. And really, it looks more like a fancy tea parlor than anything to do with death.

  I try to mosey through the people like I belong, which isn’t easy because I sure don’t feel like I belong. The jeans I’m wearing are bad enough, but my shoes? I feel like I’m wearing muddy army boots to a prom. And even though the adults don’t seem to notice me, there are a few other kids, and they do. Especially this one girl with a perfect little blond bob. She’s about ten and she’s wearing a blue velvet dress over black tights, and her shoes are definitely shiny.

  I try to ignore her as I move around, casually looking inside a room that has a little conference table, and another room that’s obviously an office, and then a kind of oversized closet that has display cases of urns and a wall filled with coffin samples. They’re each about six inches deep and a foot across, and there are dozens of them mounted in a giant grid on the wall. It’s like coffin corners as art.

  There are more rooms farther back, and I’m thinking about taking a quick little tour through them, but no one else is even as far back as the coffin room. Plus when I look over my shoulder, there’s that girl again, glaring at me.

  So I move back into the “parlor” room, and I try smiling at Little Miss Nosy Bob, but she just keeps on glaring. It crosses my mind that maybe I should snag a cookie and deliver it to her, but she’s definitely not the kind of girl who’d take cookies from a stranger. So instead, I start to mosey on back to the chapel side of things. But the Oversized Eggplant is coming toward me, and when I look over my shoulder, I see that Little Miss Nosy Bob has gotten her mother’s attention and is pointing right at me.

  So to ditch all of them I take a quick right turn through two open French doors into another room.

  Trouble is, the room happens to have a big, open rosewood coffin perched on a thick, wide pedestal, and standing looking in the coffin are Billy and Casey.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper as I hurry up to them. “You’re supposed to stay separated!”

  “And who, pray tell, are you?” Billy asks, looking at me like he’s never seen me before.

  “Knock it off!” Then I ask, “Did you see him?”

  “Who?” Billy asks.

  “The Vampire!”

  “No … but it looks like he’s been here,” Billy says, wiggling his eyebrows at the coffin.

  So okay. I can’t help it. I look. And there, laid out in a dark blue suit, is … some old dead guy.

  I shiver, because, well, even though I don’t know him, and even though he is old, he’s also dead.

  Plus, he looks pasty.

  Sort of … waxed.

  “Did they put makeup on him?” I ask, leaning in a little.

  “Too much rouge, if you ask me,” Billy says.

  “I think we should get out of here,” Casey says, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t know where the Vampire is, but I did find out he’s not the funeral director.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I heard someone in the chapel ask who the funeral director was and the person they pointed to was a normal-looking guy in a suit.”

  And that’s when I see Little Miss Nosy Bob standing in the middle of the double French doors, tugging on her mother with one hand and pointing at me with the other. I let out an “Uh-oh,” and Casey asks, “You know her?”

  “Nope.”

  He looks her over. “I’m guessing her name’s Trouble.”

  Luckily Trouble’s mother is talking to the Oversized Eggplant and not focusing on her daughter, and since there’s a side door, I whisper, “This way!”

  So we duck through the side door and escape.

  And we wind up in a weird closet-like area with three other doors.

  “Now what?” Casey asks.

  Billy goes into announcer mode. “Behind door number one we have an old man in a coffin. Behind door number two?”

  “I think it’s the office,” I say, trying to get my bearings.

  “That leaves door number three or door number four. Samantha Keyes, what is your destiny?”

  I can hear Little Miss Nosy Bob out in the other room, whining, “There! They went in there!” and I know that if I don’t move quick, my destiny is to be busted.

  So I toss a mental coin and go through door number three.

  It was definitely not my lucky day.

  We find ourselves inside a sort of industrial alcove. There’s a stainless-steel counter and sink to our right, cabinets on our left, and the floor is just cement.

  It’s not a dead end, though. There’s a wide opening past the cabinets, and from the amount of light coming into the alcove, it seems like it must go to a much bigger room—one I’m hoping will lead us outside.

  I can hear an odd kind of whirring, ticking, running-water sound coming from around the corner. It’s like someone’s taking a shower with a metronome going. I also notice a smell. It’s not super strong or anything, but it does remind me of … I’m not sure what.

  Then we peek around the corner.

 
I choke down an “Aaah!” and right away I know what the smell reminds me of.

  Biology class.

  Only here, instead of frogs, there’s a human body.

  Actually, there are two bodies—a dead one, and an alive one working on the dead one.

  The alive guy is faced mostly away from us, and he’s wearing lots of clothes—blue scrubs that tie in back over a regular shirt and slacks, latex gloves, a hairnet, and a surgical mask.

  The dead guy, on the other hand, is face up and wearing no clothes.

  Well, except for a little white towel across his groin.

  The dead guy’s on a big steel tray on a wheeled stand near a sink, and the whirring-ticking-shower sound seems to be coming from a machine on a counter near the sink. It looks like a cross between a big stainless-steel blender and a glass cooking pot. It has knobs and a gauge on the base, and the glass part is about half full of a pinkish orange liquid. There’s also a long rubber tube that goes from the base, across the counter, and up to the neck of the dead guy.

  “Can we please go back and try door number four?” I whisper, because I’ve seen more than enough. Besides, I don’t know how we’ll ever make it past the scrubs guy to the door on the other side of the room without being seen.

  Billy and Casey are all for that, but just as we’re turning to go, the door we’d come through starts to open.

  Casey grabs me by the hand and hauls me around the corner and inside the corpse room, and out of reflex I grab Billy by the wrist and bungee him along. The next thing I know, Casey’s pulled us through the partial opening of a big steel door and is shutting us inside.

  It’s cold inside this big steel closet.

  And dark.

  And the room feels like it’s purring.

  Casey hadn’t closed the door all the way, and now he starts inching it back open so we can see what’s happening out in the room. The sliver of light that comes in through the crack makes it so we can see around us, too, and what I discover is that this closet is deep.

  And has shelves.

  Long, wide shelves that are stacked floor to ceiling on both sides, leaving an aisle down the middle.

  Shelves that are almost all full.

  “Are those bodies?” I whisper to Billy. I mean, they may be wrapped up, but from the shape and size, what else could they be?

  “I’m not feelin’ too good,” he whispers back.

  So I lean forward and whisper to Casey, “I think we’d rather be busted than stay in here!”

  But Casey doesn’t even answer me, and since he’s watching and listening so intently to what’s going on outside, I do what he’s doing.

  Through the crack I can see a woman with blond hair talking with the guy in scrubs, and I can barely hear her as she asks him, “So nobody came through here?”

  He shakes his head.

  She starts to leave, then asks, “How is it going with Mr. Orwell?”

  Scrubs pulls down his mask to speak. “Another half hour, forty-five minutes. I’ll have him ready in plenty of time.”

  Casey and I give each other bug eyes, because there’s no mistaking those teeth. “The Vampire!” we mouth at each other.

  “The Vampire?” Billy asks.

  I turn to Billy. “He’s the guy in scrubs!”

  Billy ducks down between us so he can peek out, too, and we all listen as the Vampire asks the lady, “Did they deliver the suit?”

  “I have it up front,” she tells him. And it looks like she’s really leaving this time, only at the last minute she does a double take.

  Right at us.

  Suddenly she’s moving fast.

  Right at us!

  We all duck back and move between the shelves, but she doesn’t yank open the door and go, “Ah-ha!”

  She does something worse.

  She shoves it closed.

  So there we are in the pitch black in a giant refrigerator surrounded by corpses when Billy whimpers, “Mom-my!”

  Now, my diva mother would be of zero help in this situation, but I totally get what he means. I’m feeling panicked and claustrophobic, and I’m starting to shiver.

  “We’re not trapped,” Casey whispers. “There’s a release knob.”

  I knew he was talking about the big, flat disk on the inside of the door, but that wasn’t the point. “How are we going to know when to open it?” I ask him through the pitch black. “We can’t stay in here for forty-five minutes—we’ll freeze to death!”

  “Let’s give it five minutes and then just go for it.”

  “Mom-my,” Billy whimpers.

  “Knock it off, Billy!” I tell him.

  “Can I hug you?” he asks.

  “Oh, good grief.”

  But I can tell he’s actually serious, so I grope around until I find him, then give him a mondo hug. “Better?” I ask him after a minute.

  “Sí, sí, Sammy-keyesta,” he says, but it’s quiet. Like he really is completely creeped out and scared.

  “Look,” I tell him. “Remember how cool you thought it was to have Grim and Reaper? Just pretend that—”

  “This isn’t helping, Sammy-keyesta.”

  “Sorry.” I think a minute and then say, “So a fake dead body that looks like a real dead body is cool, but a real dead body is …”

  “Creepy.”

  “Huh. I wonder why that is.”

  “Because one’s real and one’s fake!”

  “So just pretend they’re fake.”

  “But they’re not fake!” he whimpers. “They’re real, and I want out of here!”

  “Got it.” I turn to where I think Casey is and say, “I don’t care if it hasn’t been five minutes, and I don’t care if we get caught. We’re bustin’ out of here.”

  So I grope around until I find the flat knob, and after turning it doesn’t do anything, I push on it and click, the door unlatches.

  The Vampire’s back to working on the dead guy, and really, at this point, I don’t care if he sees us.

  That doesn’t mean I wave a big red flag or anything. But after we’ve snuck out of the corpse cooler, I lead the guys toward the back door, tiptoeing past an emergency eyewash system, past a big trash can marked HAZARDOUS, past a mop in a pail, and a closet with bottles marked POISON.

  The machine’s still ticking and whirring, and maybe that makes it so the Vampire can’t hear us, but in another few seconds, he’s sure going to see us.

  And then, like a miracle, he turns away from us to adjust the machine.

  I abandon the tiptoeing and practically dive for the door, and when I open it, I discover a minivan and a hearse in a carport, and past them … daylight!

  I make a break for it, with Casey and Billy right behind me. We run for blocks and blocks without stopping, and when we finally do check to see if we’re being followed, we only gulp in about six breaths and then we run, run, run all the way to Hudson’s house.

  I collapse on the lawn, and then just lay there, gulping in air.

  Billy and Casey bend over with their hands on their knees, and finally Billy pants out, “I am never … ever … going to be able to … sleep … again.”

  I look at Casey. “I can’t believe you … dragged us into a … corpse cooler!”

  “I didn’t know what it was!” Casey pants back. “It was open, we were stuck …”

  “Not just … because of the … cooler …,” Billy pants. “Because of … that guy.”

  “The Vampire?” I ask.

  Billy nods. “His eyes.”

  I sit up and face him. “His eyes?” And then it hits me. “You looked back?”

  Casey goes a little bug-eyed. “So he saw your face?”

  Billy nods. “That dude’s got wicked scary eyes.”

  I collapse on the lawn again. “Oh, man.”

  This was not good.

  Not good at all.

  We hadn’t been at Hudson’s even five minutes when Casey’s phone went off. I actually like when Casey’s phone rings ’cause his ri
ngtone is the riff from “Waiting for Rain to Fall” by Darren Cole and the Troublemakers, which is “our” song, and he always gives me a little grin when he answers.

  But not this time.

  This time it was his mom calling, demanding that he come home right away.

  Billy went with him, and since I obviously wasn’t welcome at the Acostas’ house, I got left behind at Hudson’s. “Don’t let that boy drag you through parlors of any kind,” I called to Billy, and then hollered, “Thanks for the deadly date!” to Casey.

  “You know I’m mortified about it,” Casey calls back. “Buried in regret!”

  “Don’t believe him!” Billy shouts, “He took you there because he’s fatally attracted to you!”

  “Terminally so!” Casey shouts. Then he adds, “How else could I have survived such a grave undertaking?”

  “At least he didn’t take you to a fancy restaurant and stiff the waiter!”

  Casey laughs. “Or run off and join the Peace Corpse!”

  “Oh, that was bad!” I shout after him. “That was terrible.”

  So I’m laughing as I watch them go, but the minute they’re out of sight I feel really … alone.

  And kinda scared.

  Not that the Vampire’s going to find me and kill me or anything. It’s more like an invisible weight. Like something is trying to crush me from the inside out.

  I drag myself up to Hudson’s porch and even though I’m pretty sure he’s not home, I knock on the door, and then try the handle.

  Locked up tight.

  I really don’t want to go home, but Marissa’s house feels like it’s way too far to walk to right now, and since Holly’s working and Dot lives clear out in Sisquane and I don’t have a phone to call anybody, I make like Hudson and sit on the porch with my feet kicked up on the rail.

  I watch the world go by for a little while, but there’s a whole lot of nothing going on, so I finally pick up the newspaper and look at the “Halloween Horrors” article.

  Trouble is, the article reminds me of Danny, which of course reminds me of this awful secret I have from Casey, and pretty soon my brain’s all muddled and stormy and doomy.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, but I must have been in the depths of Doomsville when Hudson clomped up the side steps, because I jerked and spazzed and jolted all at once.