"Out where?" Rick whispered back.
"In the graveyard."
Rick had his flashlight too. He shone it out the window. "I don't see anyone."
"By the statue. Just behind it."
"There's no one there."
I looked. He was right. The figure was gone.
Josh had his sneakers on too now. He joined us at the window.
"What was he doing?" said Rick.
"Just standing there. Just staring up at me," I said.
"Who?" said Josh.
"I don't know. Someone out in the night. In the cemetery."
"There was someone in the cemetery staring up at you?"
"Yeah."
"That's terrifying," said Josh. "I mean, that's… that's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying. Isn't it?"
I nodded.
"I mean, isn't that terrifying?" said Josh.
"All right, man," said Rick. "I think we all get that it's terrifying."
"I wanted to make sure it wasn't just me."
"It's not just you." Rick moved his flashlight over the graveyard. The wind rose, the trees bending and creaking. We stood together, staring, as Rick's beam picked out a headstone, an obelisk, and then the mourning woman making her eerie gesture to the darkness. But there was nothing else in the graveyard now. No figure lurking in the deeper shadows. "Is it possible you could've…?"
"Imagined it?" I said. "I don't think so, bro. I heard it first. I heard this… this kind of groan."
"A groan?" said Josh, his voice breaking. "What do you mean, a groan?"
"I mean, like a… like a low groan, like, 'O-o-o-oh.' Like that."
"That is so terrifying," Josh murmured.
"Then I got up and came to the window. And when I looked out… I only saw it for a split second, but it was definitely there. A figure. A man, I think. With this kind of weird, white face…"
"A weird, white face? A weird, white face? What does that even mean?"
"It means a weird, white face, Josh. Like it… I don't know. Like it didn't have any features."
"How could it not have features? What kind of face is that? If it's a face it has to have features. Otherwise, it would be terrifying. Right? I mean, isn't that…"
The words caught in his throat as the wind became even stronger and the whisper and creak of the branches grew louder and under that whisper-yes, there it was again: that low, dreadful groan as of a man in pain.
Rick and Josh and I fell silent, gaping at one another with open mouths.
"Did you…?" Josh tried to say.
Rick and I nodded. We'd heard it too.
We turned toward the window, all three of us. All three of us shone our flashlights through the broken glass and out over the deep darkness. The darkness shifted and whispered with the night wind.
Before I knew I was thinking it, I heard myself say, "We have to take a look. We have to go out there."
"Right," said Josh. "Because we're not frightened enough. Because there's still a slim chance my hair won't turn white and I won't spend the rest of my life locked in a padded room cackling uncontrollably. Go out there? What are you talking about? Are you crazy?"
"I saw something," I said. "Someone-something-I don't know. We have to go and find out what it was."
"Why? We could stay here instead. We could not find out. It could be, like, an unsolved mystery."
But Rick understood. "That's the project," he said. "We came here to prove this place isn't haunted, that that's just a local superstition. If we don't investigate, we won't really know."
"I can live with that," said Josh. "Really. I'm strangely content just as I am."
"Yeah, but we're the ones who have to give the report," I said. "The whole point was to force Sherman to give us an A by doing something too cool for him to ignore. If we don't follow through, it won't happen. You can stay here," I told Josh. "But we've got to take a look."
I knelt down to tie my sneakers. Rick did the same.
"Oh, I can stay here," said Josh. "In the haunted house. Alone. By myself. Thanks. You're too generous. No, really." He knelt and tied his sneakers, too, muttering to himself the whole time.
It's funny-I mean, funny as in strange-in these last few weeks, I'd faced so many dangers, and I'd been afraid, more afraid than I like to think about or say. But I don't think I've been as fearful, before or since, as I was that night Rick, Josh, and I went out into the graveyard behind the McKenzie mansion.
We crept downstairs, our shoulders bumping together as we followed our flashlight beams down a long hall toward the back of the house. We came into a bare room lined with old, broken cabinets and shelves. It must have been the kitchen once. As we stepped in, we heard pattering footsteps. Small, furry bodies dashed out of sight as the light came near them.
Our beams picked out a door. We moved toward it.
When we stepped out of the house, we stopped and stood stock-still, all three of us. Inside, our flashlights together had seemed almost bright, lighting our way easily. Here, though, the night felt vast around us. It seemed to swallow the beams and drown them in nothingness. We stayed where we were. We stared. We were afraid to move away from the house, afraid if we got too far from it, we would not be able to escape back inside.
The trees moved and murmured above us. The sky seemed dizzyingly far away. The dark seemed dizzyingly deep.
"All right," I said. But I didn't step forward.
"All right," said Rick. But he didn't move either.
"This is terrifying," said Josh.
We stiffened, listening. There was a fresh rattle of dead leaves as the wind blew them tumbling over the earth in front of us. The sound made us lift our flashlight beams over the sparse grass and shine them in the direction of the noise.
One beam-Rick's, I think-touched on a white stone-a headstone-the headstone nearest to the house. There was the graveyard, barely twenty yards ahead of us.
It seemed until then that I'd forgotten how to breathe. I remembered now and drew in a deep breath.
"All right," I said again.
I started moving forward. Josh was to my left, Rick was to my right. They started moving, too, just behind me.
As we advanced, our flashlight beams trembled over the small field of stones. I was aware of an awful sense of suspense as I waited for the terrible moment when one of the beams would pick out the figure with the gleaming, featureless face.
Then, suddenly, Josh's beam fell on the statue of the mourning woman. Even though I knew it was just a statue, the sight of her up close like that was still a shock. She seemed to float out of the darkness at us like a ghost. I could make out her face now, the staring, empty eyes, the parted, fearful lips that seemed about to whisper, "No. Don't go." And her hand, that gesturing hand… You could almost sense the presence of the dead spirit she was trying to hold on to. You could almost see it moving away in the black air before her.
Josh saw the statue and stopped in his tracks, gaping up at it. I heard him swallow hard. He kept his flashlight trained on the woman's face, as if he couldn't force his hand to move.
I took one look at her, then looked away. Still, I could feel her staring down at me with those cold, marble eyes as I kept walking toward her, kept walking toward the place where I'd seen that other figure, the weird, faceless presence.
The mourning woman loomed over me as I got closer and closer to her. Then, a few feet away from her, I stopped. It was too much. Her presence was too eerie. The dark beyond her was just too deep. The possibility of coming upon that featureless man I'd seen staring up at me was just too real. I was afraid to go any farther.
I was about to announce that there was nothing there. About to turn back.
But then I spotted something-something lying on the ground. My passing flashlight picked out a little patch of white. I moved the beam around until I found it again.
"Look," I said.
My friends closed ranks around me. Their flashlight beams joined mine. We stared down. There was
a dry branch lying in the leaves just on the far side of the statue, just a few feet away from the statue's base. The stick had snapped in half and the white core of it stood out against the brown background of the dirt and leaves.
"See that stick?" I said. "It's broken. Like someone stepped on it." I moved my beam around the stick. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed to me there were other disturbances, discolorations in the leaves where they had been overturned, their damp undersides facing upward.
"Broken stick," said Rick softly. "Doesn't have to mean anything…"
"I know," I said. "But look at the leaves too. It looks like someone was walking there."
I'll never be sure where I found the courage, but all at once I was walking forward again, moving away from Rick and Josh. The mourning woman was right above me now, staring down at me as I moved alongside her- and then past her. I went to the broken stick. I bent down and picked it up. I straightened, holding the stick in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Turning the stick this way and that, examining it under the light.
And as I did, I felt a hand snake up from the earth and wrap its cold fingers around my ankle.
I'm embarrassed now when I remember the shriek I let out. And I shrieked again as I tore my ankle free and stared down to see a white, featureless face gleaming up at me from the ground.
In a single, swift movement, the uncanny figure leapt to its feet in front of me, its hands lifted in the air, its fingers curled like claws.
And it shouted, "Boo!"
Because it was Miler, of course. Who else could it have been?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Return Josh, Rick, and I did not beat Miler to death and bury his mangled body in a shallow grave with a headstone warning future would-be practical jokers that this could be their fate. We wanted to, believe me. And he deserved it, that's for sure. I can't even remember now why we decided to let him live. He'd brought some brownies his mother had made-maybe that was it. Or maybe it was because he also brought an extra PSP with a battery pack that would last till dawn and keep us from having to go to sleep again. That was important, too, because at the time, there didn't seem to be any chance we'd be able to sleep again-ever- so a little gaming seemed like it might be a good way to pass the time.
Anyway, for whatever reason, we let Miler live and he took off the plastic mask he'd used to hide his features and joined us in the house and told us all about how he didn't really have a track meet to train for but had just come up with this awesome idea for a practical joke that was sure to scare the daylights out of us. Which, after the terror had passed, we were forced to admit had worked pretty well and had, in retrospect, been incredibly terrifying while being kind of hilarious at the same time. And yes, I was also forced to admit that I had screamed like a girl when Miler grabbed my ankle and that that had also been more or less hilarious. In fact, as I recall, I was forced to admit this several times before I finally punched Josh in the arm to get him to shut up about it.
Mostly, we spent the rest of the night laughing until we couldn't breathe and then breathing enough so we could start laughing again. On top of which, the story of Miler's prank made for such a good report that Mr. Sherman was, in fact, forced to give us the As we were looking for. And that, in turn, got my parental sentence reduced from two weeks grounded to one Saturday cleaning out the garage.
That hadn't been that long ago. A year and a half or so- not that long in the scheme of things. But it seemed to me like another life.
Now, I had come back to the old McKenzie place. I didn't have much choice. I had to try to clear my name. I couldn't let the police find me, and I couldn't let my friends get involved and put themselves in danger. The Ghost Mansion was the only place I could think of where I could hide long enough to get the job done. No one ever came here. No one even passed by. No one would have any reason to suspect that they would find me here.
The iron gate that blocked the way in was held shut by a chain, but the chain was wrapped only loosely through the bars. When I pushed against the gate, the chain slid off and dangled between the bars. I opened the gate wide enough for me to squeeze through.
I started up the last stretch of the path to the Ghost Mansion.
It was dark and cold as dawn approached. The half- moon that had shone through the church window earlier that night was low to the horizon now, sinking out of sight behind the faraway trees. The last dark of night seemed to gather around me. I had a small keychain flashlight in my pocket. I took it out and pressed its button occasionally to send a thin white beam down at the path. It wasn't much light, but it was enough to keep me headed in the right direction.
By now, the broken macadam of the road was all but gone. There was nothing left but dirt and stones. They crunched under my sneakers as the path dipped down into a small valley and then rose again.
I climbed up over the crest of the little hill and finally saw the house.
It hadn't changed any. It still loomed large and tumbledown and gloomy on the top of the rise. It still stared out at the darkness through its broken windows as if waiting for victims to approach. The predawn wind still moved over the surrounding fields, still stirred the trees and the unmown grass so that the place almost seemed a living presence, restless and murmuring. It was all just as I remembered it.
But if the house hadn't changed, I had. I'd changed a lot. The last time I'd come here, I was pretty much just a kid, getting into a little harmless mischief. I was afraid of ghosts then. The noise of mice in the walls made me jump and shiver. A staring statue in a graveyard sent a chill up my spine.
I was older now-a young man, I'd guess you'd call me. Even though I'd lost a year of growing up-even though I couldn't remember it-I had grown up all the same. I was still afraid-I was afraid all the time-but the things that frightened me were different. They were real. Not ghosts, but people-bad people-who didn't believe we should have the freedom to think and say whatever we wanted and live the way we thought was right. They hated America because we had those freedoms. They wanted to hurt our country and they wanted to hurt me. I was afraid of them-the bad guys-and I was afraid of the good guys, the police. The police who wanted to put me in prison for the next twenty-five years. I was afraid they would catch me before I could find out the truth.
So as I walked up the hill toward the Ghost Mansion, my feelings were weird-mixed, I guess would be the best way to describe them. I looked up at that great hulk of a house sitting against the deep blue sky and among the silhouetted trees-I looked up at it and I felt it looking back down at me-and yeah, I have to admit I still felt that old chill, that same chill I'd felt the last time I was here, as if something supernatural, something bizarre and frightening, might be waiting for me behind those black, staring windows.
I felt that-but mostly, I felt something else. I felt sad. I missed those old days, those days I'd last been here. I missed being a kid. I missed being afraid of dumb things that couldn't really hurt me. I missed laughing until I couldn't breathe and then breathing and laughing some more.
I guess the point is that more than anything, I missed my friends. I missed Rick and Miler and Josh. I missed having someone to kid around with and talk to. I missed long conversations about girls and sports and arguments about whether Medal of Honor was cooler than Prince of Persia and why part 2 of any trilogy was never as good as parts 1 and 3. I missed being with the guys who knew me best and liked me just the way I was. I missed my friends.
But they were gone. I had to face that. Those days were gone and I was alone, as alone and empty as the McKenzie house.
The dark house rose over me as I approached. The autumn branches of the trees leaned down toward me, creaking and groaning as I stepped into the shadow of the doorway.
The last time I'd been here, I remembered, the front door had been locked and we had had to go around to the side before we found a door that was open. Now I just touched the front door and it opened easily, the rotten wood around the latch cracking and giving way.<
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I stepped inside. The door swung closed behind me with a soft, high moan. I stood in the foyer at the foot of the front stairs as the brooding darkness of the house closed around me.
I was about to reach for my flashlight, but then I noticed: in the time it had taken me to walk up the path, the first faint light of dawn had crept into the sky. That light was filtering to me here from the windows in the living room off to my right. After only a moment or two, my eyes adjusted and I could make out the shapes of things pretty clearly.
I went to the foot of the stairs and peered up into the deep shadows. I put my hand on the banister-and then quickly pulled it away as I felt the slimy dust under my palm. I was about to start upstairs when I hesitated. Did I hear something up there? Was something moving around?
I stood still and listened. The wind was rising the way it does at dawn and it blew freely through the house. The house creaked and settled, just the way it had the last time. And the mice-they were still here as well. In fact, they sounded particularly active. I could hear them scurrying this way and that. I guess they were trying to get back to their nests before daylight.
I smiled to myself, remembering how Josh and Rick and I had lain in our sleeping bags, listening to those same noises, scared out of our wits. Every time we heard a new noise, we would glance at one another nervously and try to explain it away, try to laugh it off and reassure one another. It seemed kind of silly now.
So I started up the stairs again-and stopped again. I had heard something. Something was moving around on the second floor. It wasn't the wind or the house or the mice either. It was bigger than that. I could tell by the way it made the floorboards shift.
I was tense now. My mind was racing, trying to come up with some explanation, trying to make sense of it. I thought it might be the cops or even the Homelanders, waiting for me. But how would they ever think to come here? Maybe it was just some animal, I told myself. Some raccoon who'd gotten stranded. Or maybe it was some homeless guy who'd crept in to get out of the cold and get some sleep.
The long way home h-2 Page 7