by B. A. Frade
The next day, I heard the dog bark before I ever saw it.
Eddie never screamed. Some people, when they are scared, can’t muster even a squeak. I hadn’t known that about Eddie, but when Tyler and I ran toward the dog’s vicious growls, we immediately realized he was one of those people.
Eddie was standing on a pathway between two houses. This was the shortcut we all took into our neighborhood. Eddie lived on the street behind our house.
He must have left school before us, because my brother, turtle toes, wanted to drop off a book at the library. Where normal kids might drop and dash, not Tyler. He couldn’t leave one without checking out a new one, and picking took time.
By the time we got into the alley, the dog, nearly the size of a small horse, was facing Eddie, who was frozen like a statue in the park.
The beast was black with sharp teeth and matted fur that looked like it had never been brushed. It was growling, drool dripping from decayed gray gums and wolflike fangs. I’d never seen this dog before in the neighborhood.
“Eddie,” I said, coming into the alleyway, “don’t move.” Of course, instead of hearing “don’t,” Eddie must have only heard “move,” because he started to run backward, toward me and Tyler.
The entire Scaremaster’s story then came true, even the part about me and Tyler laughing at the end, though we tried desperately to hold back.
Eddie saw that he was trapped between me and Tyler at one end of the alley and the ferocious beast at the other. The dog bared its teeth, and although Tyler and I would have moved aside to let Eddie run past, Eddie’s brain wasn’t processing options very well.
I’d seen this same situation in the movies a thousand times but never in reality.
Eddie couldn’t make good choices, so he made a bad one. In a fit of fear and panic, he scrambled up and over the nearest fence. It was a six-foot chain-link barrier around a backyard that housed a pool.
The beast leapt after him without hesitation. It dragged itself over the fence in such a carefree way, it seemed to be part dog-beast, part giant monkey.
Behind the monster, Tyler and I followed. My shoelace got caught up in the fence, and Tyler had to pull me over. I guess Mom was right that I should keep my shoes tied. She’s so smart sometimes.…
As we landed on the other side of the fence, Tyler shouted to Eddie, “Stop. Wait. Come back this way.”
If Eddie moved toward us, instead of moving farther into the neighbor’s yard, we could create a distraction and lure the dog away from him. Tyler and I weren’t scared of dogs, not even this giant one, so we’d have an advantage.
Eddie was way past terrified. His logical brain had shut down. He saw the pool and—without considering whether the dog could swim, or that he was wearing his school clothes, or without really thinking at all—jumped in.
He landed with a splash.
Turned out that was a pretty good choice after all. The massive mutt didn’t follow. In fact, it bared its teeth one last time, as if to say, “I dare you to EVER shortcut through my alley again,” then turned, hopped easily back over the chain-link fence, and disappeared down the path.
That was when we laughed.
Later that night, when the Scaremaster asked whether that prank was scary, I didn’t answer right away. It was endlessly terrifying to Eddie. But to me and Tyler, scary wasn’t the right word: “Bizarre” was better. It was bizarre that the stories written in the book seemed to be coming true. Not just that, it was bizarre that Tyler and I were being blamed.
It didn’t matter that we knew we weren’t behind Maya’s spiders; Rachel had started telling everyone about that wild look Maya gave me and how I’d announced they weren’t poisonous (which they weren’t). Those facts led to a rumor that I’d been the one who put the spiders in Maya’s lunch box. Since Tyler and I did everything together, the rumors sucked Tyler in as my accomplice. Just like that, we were guilty without evidence or trial.
Eddie’s doggy nightmare was certain to make it all worse.
I didn’t think that Eddie would ever talk to us again. When he crawled, dripping wet, out of the pool, his backpack and all his schoolwork ruined, Tyler and I stopped laughing and looked at each other. He was so mad, his whole face was red-hot.
Eddie had dropped his phone when he jumped the fence. I found it and gave it back to him before we all went home, but the look in his eyes pretty much told me we were not going to be friends ever again.
We were getting ready for bed when I decided to answer the Scaremaster’s question. He’d written:
The dog chase scared you, right?
Me? No. It scared Eddie. Not me.
I was feeling angry about who this was and why he or she or it was doing these pranks, so I wrote:
No!!!!!!
I added a whole lot of extra exclamation points for emphasis, and then I shut the book.
Tyler came into the room with an arsenal of kitchen weaponry in a cardboard box. There were several knives, a meat cleaver, a cheese grater, and a potato peeler. Mom had taught us both to cook, so we knew how to use kitchen tools properly. What Tyler planned wasn’t at all proper. Mom would be upset if she found out.
“Special circumstances,” Tyler said, setting down the box. “Since Cook wouldn’t let me use hers at school, I have no choice but to use Mom’s.” He raised her sharpest blade over the journal’s cover, like he was about to commit bookicide—that would be a fancy way to say “book murder.” “First we find out how this thing works. Then we find out who’s behind it,” he said.
I still believed in my possessed-book theory, but it felt better thinking that there was a person behind the pranks so we could stop him (or her).
Tyler slammed the knife into the front cover with a mighty “hi-ya!”
“Uh-oh,” I said as he stepped back from the book. Mom’s favorite knife was bent at the tip. “Hammer it flat,” I suggested. “She’ll never know.”
Tyler frowned. “That’ll never work.”
Mom was smart, and we both knew she’d be mad. But Tyler didn’t seem overly worried. He was determined, no matter what, to get into that book cover.
After he had bent two more knives and broken the potato peeler off its handle, I told him to set down the meat cleaver. “We have to leave her something to cook with,” I said, adding, “or we’ll starve.”
He looked at the book, then at the broken weapons. “What kind of book is this? Why can’t we open it? We’ll never know how it works!”
I gave him a long knowing look, to which he replied, “You’re wrong, Ryan.”
I shrugged. We were back to my original, and now only, conceivable theory. “Supernatural possession,” I said in a soft voice.
Tyler shook his head. “I’m going to find out who’s behind this and what they want.” He opened the book and wrote:
Who are you?
The Scaremaster
What do you want?
A scary Halloween
Are you a person?
I’m the Scaremaster.
“See?” I told Tyler enthusiastically. “Not human.”
Tyler tried again: What are you?
The Scaremaster
“This could go on all night,” I told Tyler. “How do we get him to stop?”
“I guess we ask nicely,” Tyler said, reminding me of the good manners Mom always talked about.
I agreed to try. I loved a good prank, but what had happened to Maya and Eddie wasn’t funny.
Tyler raised his pen to ask the Scaremaster politely to stop terrorizing our friends but froze when a new story appeared.
There was a girl named who was afraid of clowns. Thanks to Ryan and Tyler, tonight would be the scariest night of her whole life.
“He’s going after Soon-Yi,” Tyler said, a mortified look on his face.
I was the only one on planet Earth who knew about Tyler’s crush. It started the first day of school this year when Soon-Yi sat next to him in math and asked what page they were on. He hadn’t actual
ly talked to her since, but that didn’t keep Tyler from always knowing what page they were on, just in case she asked again.
Knowing that her name went on the blank story line, I grabbed a pen to write it in.
“Wait!” Tyler stopped my hand. “I’m not sure the Scaremaster can identify who in our class has which fear. We keep adding the names to the blank line. It’s like we’re telling him who to terrorize.”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked. There were times that Tyler’s slow consideration of a problem was good. This was one of those times. I’d have already written poor Soon-Yi’s name and let the clowns attack. Instead, Tyler took his time, reflecting on the situation until he had a plan.
“Let’s put in someone else’s name,” he suggested. “Someone who isn’t afraid of clowns.”
“Write my name,” I said, handing him the pen. “Clowns are dumb.”
Tyler hesitated. “The Scaremaster, whatever he is, is pretty smart. I think he might know there are no other Ryans in our class. And certainly no girls named that.”
I thought about the girls at school. It would be too complicated to text anyone and ask if they were afraid of clowns. What was I going to say? “Don’t panic, but… how ’bout Mom?” I suggested. “She’s not afraid of anything.”
“She’s not in our class,” Tyler replied, though I could see he was thinking about it.
“Hear me out,” I said, getting into the idea. “She’s a nurse. She sees blood all the time. She sees gross wounds and hears real-life scary stories all day,” I told him. “I bet she can handle a few psycho clowns.”
It took a few more minutes, but I convinced Tyler it was a good idea. I felt satisfied that whatever the Scaremaster had planned for tonight would fail as I wrote Lucy into the blank spot for the story.
As it had happened every other time, my handwriting disappeared and he re-wrote it in his own cursive scrawl.
“Oh no!” Tyler exclaimed as the Scaremaster changed the name to his own handwriting and started the story fresh.
The story wasn’t about “Lucy” as we expected, but rather the Scaremaster had written “Soon-Yi.”
Tyler looked at me with bulging eyes and said softly, “I have a bad feeling.…”
I bit my bottom lip. “Me too.”
Chapter Five
Wednesday morning, Soon-Yi wasn’t at school.
And worse than that, no one would talk to us.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Tyler over chicken nuggets and tater tots. It was my favorite lunchroom meal, but I couldn’t enjoy it.
The way things were going, we’d have no friends by the dance on Friday night. If we didn’t have friends, who’d care if we switched places? No one. Our big Halloween scare was going to be ruined! While I liked hanging with Tyler, I couldn’t imagine talking to only him—for the rest of our middle school career.
I was beginning to despise the Scaremaster.
I decided to tell him that.
“Hand over the book,” I said to Tyler.
He gave me a blank look.
“Don’t pretend you don’t have it,” I said. “I know you brought it to school.”
“I was going to see if Mrs. Clancy had a blowtorch or battle-ax in the janitor’s office,” Tyler said. “Well, maybe not a battle-ax,” he corrected himself. “But a weapon bigger than a kitchen knife. We gotta break this book open.”
Having a possessed book was not nearly as fun as I had thought it would be. Even if Tyler didn’t agree it was possessed, we’d come to the same conclusion: It was time to get rid of the thing.
Sure, we could have just ditched it in the field behind school, but then someone else might find it and the scary stories might keep on appearing. Plus, it felt wrong to carelessly toss out the Scaremaster’s journal. I worried that the Scaremaster would be really mad if we did, and who knew what might happen to our friends then?
On the subject of what to do with the book, I was now 100 percent with Tyler. We needed to destroy the Scaremaster’s journal forever.
“Can I see it?” I pushed my tater tots around on the plate with a fork.
“Oh, fine, but don’t get the Scaremaster started on another story. We have to put an end to this!” Tyler set the book on the table. There was no evidence on the cover that he’d ever even attempted to damage it. The book was looking newer and newer every day. I sighed.
“So if Mrs. Clancy won’t lend us a blowtorch, what other book-destruction ideas do you have in mind?” I asked, but before Tyler could answer, the Scaremaster wrote:
Did you hear about Soon-Yi?
I showed the question to Tyler, who turned red with anger. “I told you not to start anything!” He snagged my pen out of my hand.
Tyler wrote:
She’s not at school.
She may never come to school again.
WHAT DID YOU DO?
Tyler was furious. There were no Soon-Yi rumors yet, so we hadn’t heard what happened. Rachel must have been behind on the news.
I told Tyler to call Soon-Yi, but he said he couldn’t.
“I haven’t talked to her since that first day, so it would be weird to start now,” he explained.
“But we’re concerned,” I said, feeling the hair rise on my neck. “Maybe you can pretend she’s sick and offer to deliver her homework after school.”
“I can’t.” Tyler shook his head. When it came to his crush on Soon-Yi, he was super shy. He could barely talk to her at school, there was no way he could go over there and have a whole conversation at her house. I nearly laughed because it seemed like my brother was more afraid of Soon-Yi than of the Scaremaster.
There was only one way then to find out what had happened to her. We needed the Scaremaster to tell us the rest of the Soon-Yi story, but when we asked, the Scaremaster simply wrote: The end.
Then that disappeared, and a new story began.
Without reading it, Tyler crossed out the Scaremaster’s words as fast as they appeared. When there was a small pause between paragraphs, Tyler wrote in the blank space:
No more stories!
The Scaremaster immediately replied.
I’m not finished.
Whatever he’d been writing dissolved, and the page suddenly looked clean, white and new. I had an eerie shiver as writing appeared:
Three days till Halloween and the big party at school. So much scaring left to do.
I felt like I could hear him laughing at us through the book.
There were a lot more kids in our class, some probably didn’t have big fears, but I was certain there were other kids who had hidden phobias.
“Let’s say there are ten kids without any fears.” Tyler was using his math skills to work out the probability. “That leaves about ten more who have them, give or take a few. Three days till the dance, so on average, he has to scare three and a third kids per day to get them all.” Tyler wondered, “What awful stories could he tell?”
My brother and I knew a lot about fears. That came with our obsession for scary stories and movies. Every time we’d watched a frightening film, we looked up the phobias that the movie was about. It was amazing how many things there were that scared people.
“I know who has achluophobia.” I pinched my lips together. “In science, when we were doing a unit on electricity, Mohammad told me that he is scared of the dark.” I wondered if the next story might be about him.
“How about astraphobia, fear of lightning and thunder?” Tyler said. “Someone might have that.”
“Poor Eddie already faced cynophobia,” I said. That meant fear of dogs. “How about ophidiophobia?”
Tyler shrugged. “Snakes give a lot of people the creeps.” He tacked on, “Not us, of course, but other people.”
“Shhh…” I put a finger to my lips. Tyler was talking too loudly. I hoped he hadn’t just given the Scaremaster a snake-scare idea! But so far, the author seemed to respond only to writing in the book. I didn’t think he could actually hear us through the
pages.
I happened to glance down at the book, which was still open on the table.
A new story had begun. This one was actually titled “Acrophobia.”
I couldn’t remember what that meant. I had to ask Tyler.
“Heights,” he said with a long sigh. I knew he was upset that another story was starting. “When does this end?” he muttered.
We both fell silent, thinking about everyone we knew, trying to discover who was going to be the star of this story.
I didn’t have any idea who in our class might be afraid of heights, but there was a niggling feeling in the back of my brain. I’d heard of someone… but who was it?
The Scaremaster then began.
Once upon a time, there were twin boys, one named Tyler and the other, Ryan.
If I never heard someone say “Once upon a time” ever again, I’d be happy.
The Scaremaster was the master at scaring, but now it was their turn.
I whipped around to look at Tyler. “What does he mean by that?”
Tyler was still so mad about whatever had happened to Soon-Yi, he quickly wrote in thick, heavy print:
We have our own scary plans for Friday night. Back off!
I raised my hand for a high five. “Way to tell the Scare-monster who’s boss!” We slapped palms.
That didn’t stop the story.
The twins threw Mr. Ramirez’s car keys onto the roof of the school.
“Oh, darn,” I told my brother. “Now I remember who’s afraid of heights. Remember the carnival at the start of the school year? Mr. Ramirez refused to climb the rock wall.” Tyler and I went, like, fifty times each. The view from the top was amazing.
“Not Mr. Ramirez!” Tyler gasped. That was almost worse than Soon-Yi. We’d started Spanish classes this year, and he was our favorite teacher. On test days, he always brought a piñata, and anyone who finished his or her test got to take a swing. Last week, Tyler was the one who broke it open. There were prizes and candy inside. Even though I didn’t do very well, it was the best test ever!