Dunc's Halloween

by Gary Paulsen

  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  THE CASE OF THE DIRTY BIRD, Gary Paulsen

  DUNC’S DOLL, Gary Paulsen

  THE COOKCAMP, Gary Paulsen

  THE RIVER, Gary Paulsen

  the voyage of the frog, Gary Paulsen

  CHOCOLATE FEVER, Robert Kimmel Smith

  JELLY BELLY, Robert Kimmel Smith

  MOSTLY MICHAEL, Robert Kimmel Smith

  THE WAR WITH GRANDPA, Robert Kimmel Smith

  HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, Thomas Rockwell

  YEARLING BOOKS/YOUNG YEARLINGS/YEARLING CLASSICS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Mary-mount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  For a complete listing of all Yearling titles, write to Dell Readers Service,

  P.O. Box 1045, South Holland, IL 60473.

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1992 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Yearling® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80371-9

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  .1

  Duncan—Dunc—Culpepper barreled down the alley, his knees coming up past his waist, his arms pumping like pistons. He was frantically chasing his best friend for life, Amos Binder.

  It was a Friday, the night before Halloween.

  “This way,” Amos shouted over his shoulder. “Hurry!”

  Dunc pounded with Amos across a street, through someone’s garden, and over a fence. He barely escaped being splattered by a dump truck and got shredded when he accidentally stomped on the tail of a very angry tomcat and spindled on the Mackersons’ steel picket fence. Finally, just as it seemed his lungs would burst, they collapsed on the front steps of the Kowalskis’, panting.

  Amos took a stopwatch out of his pocket and studied it under the cold light of a full moon. He shook his head. “Too slow—that took thirty-seven seconds.” He wheezed, fighting for breath. “We’ll need to cut it down to thirty-five if we want to stay on schedule.”

  Dunc was blue, fading to red. “Amos, tell me again. Why are we doing this?”

  “It will take rehearsal runs to hit all the good candy houses tomorrow night.”

  “I’d settle for less candy and more breath. My throat feels like someone rubbed it down with oven cleaner.”

  “No pain, no gain.” Amos looked at the watch again. “If I hadn’t tripped over the Winterses’ garden hose, I think we would have made it.” He rubbed his head. “What does it mean, that word Winters yelled at us?”

  Dunc shrugged. “I don’t know—I’ve never heard it before. Something to do with a truck, I think. Or maybe rotten vegetables. The thing you’ve got to remember is, tomorrow night will be even worse. The streets will be filled with little kids.”

  “We can hurdle them—two feet, at the most three. It’s easy to clear them.”

  “We’ll be carrying bags of candy. That’s a lot of extra weight.”

  “I’ve got that part all figured out.” Amos took a street map out of his pocket. “This red line is our route. See these blue squares?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re storage points. All we have to do is toss the candy in as we run by. That way we can travel light.”

  “And you figure we can hit every good place in town?”

  “Sure. I’ve labeled each distance with the minimum amount of time it should take us—if we run fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “Really fast.”

  “Amos …”

  “We have to run sixty miles an hour.”

  “Sixty miles an hour? Are you crazy? We can’t run that fast!”

  Amos shook his head. “Don’t be so negative. If we start at exactly eight thirty we’ll finish at ten forty-seven. Of course, we’ll have to minimize the time we spend at each door—two seconds max—but if we shorten ‘trick-or-treat’ to ‘trick-r-treat,’ we can save a tenth of a second per house. We need to reach Mrs. Krippner’s house before the late news is over.”

  Dunc stared at Amos for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. “All right.… What happens now?”

  “The next stop is the Andersons’—they always have those really good caramel apples. Then comes the Bigelows—they give out the full-size candy bars, not those little dinky ones. After that is Herb and Judy Fenson, they always have … oh, wait a minute. We’d better not go there.” He took a pen out of his pocket and crossed them off.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re kind of mad at me.”

  “Kind of?”

  “I was out walking Scruff the other day—”

  “You were walking Scruff? You two hate each other!” Scruff was the Binder family collie. He spent much of his time trying to take chunks out of Amos.

  “I have to walk him because Amy won’t.”

  “I thought she liked to walk Scruff.”

  “She likes me not liking to walk Scruff more.” Amy was Amos’s older sister. She felt about Amos the same way most people feel about foot fungus, and she worked hard to find names for him that included the word butt. Like butthead, buttface, buttwad. Her favorite was buttbrain, and she once told Amos that if she had nuclear capabilities, his room would be vaporized.

  “Anyway,” Amos continued, “we were about two blocks from our house. Exactly six hundred and thirty-seven feet from Melissa’s front walk—I’ve measured it from every angle within a half mile—when I heard a phone ring. It was Melissa’s ring. You know, the one ring followed right away by that all-important second ring?”

  Dunc nodded. Amos was in love with Melissa. He swore that Melissa’s ring was different from everybody else’s. Dunc had given up arguing with him about it a long time ago. It didn’t pay. Melissa spent almost all of every waking moment not thinking of Amos. As a matter of fact, she did not know Amos at all.

  “There was a repairman on the top of the pole in front of Herb and Judy’s corner grocery with a phone in his hand. I started up after him as fast as I could—you have to answer before that second ring or you’ll lose them—and I forgot that I was still holding Scruff’s leash. He came up after me, whining and choking and growling. Halfway up the pole, I let go of the leash so he wouldn’t strangle.”

  “That was nice. Instead of hanging him, you splattered him on the concrete.”

  “No. He grabbed my pant leg. My belt gave out, and my pants worked like a parachute as he dropped to the ground.” Amos shrugged, remembering. “It wasn’t Scruff that was the problem—it was the telephone man.”
>
  “What happened to him?”

  “He saw me scrambling up the pole, and just because I was screaming with my pants off, he thought I was crazy. Some people are such poor judges of character.”

  Dunc waited. “And?”

  “He climbed to the top of the pole to get away from me and tried to balance there.”

  “Tried?”

  “When I reached for the phone, he fell one way and I fell the other. I landed in the Johnsons’ compost pile across the street. He fell through the awning of Herb and Judy’s, right into the watermelon stand. He goes into surgery tomorrow to get the seeds removed from his ears. They’re sprouting.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “What about me? I never did get to talk to Melissa, and I’ll be spitting compost until I die. What do they put in that stuff, anyway?”

  It comes from horses, Dunc thought, then he shook his head. It was better that Amos didn’t know.

  Dunc studied the map. The red line ran everywhere. It would have been much easier to highlight the places they weren’t going to go.

  “Melissa probably wanted to find out what I’m wearing to the Halloween party tomorrow night. She’ll want to recognize me.”

  “Right.” And the moon, Dunc thought, rides on the back of a large turtle.

  A sudden long, lonely howl cut the night.

  “What was that?” Dunc asked, shivering.

  “I’m not sure I want to know.” Amos looked—and tried not to look at the same time—around them on the dark street.

  “It sounded like a dog. Sort of.” Amos shrugged.

  “A dog about as big as a Chevrolet, maybe.” Dunc shook his head. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a dog.” He had been kneeling and he stood up. “Right. Let’s go home.”

  “Home? What about the rest of the route?”

  “Forget about the rest of the route.”

  “But what about the candy?”

  “Amos, anything that can howl like that will think we’re candy. Let’s go home.”

  Amos began to fold the map, then shook his head. “I didn’t spend a whole year working on this to get scared away by a big dog.” He stood up.

  “Amos …”

  “It should take us forty-two seconds to reach the Andersons’. Let’s go.”

  “Amos—”

  But Amos was gone, sprinting down the street. Dunc held back for half a second, shook his head, then followed.

  .2

  Dunc was in midhurdle over a plastic flamingo in the back of Mrs. Rigletti’s yard when he heard the howl again.

  It was closer than it had been the first time.

  Much closer.

  Again the howl sounded, rattling the few remaining leaves in Mrs. Rigletti’s ash tree.

  Amos had frozen next to a tall hedge, and Dunc took a step to be near him.

  “I’m not really happy about this,” Amos whispered.

  Dunc nodded, started to say something, then stopped.

  Footsteps padded on the opposite side of the hedge—big footsteps. They seemed to echo.

  “Dunc, you don’t suppose this is somebody playing a joke, do you?”

  A huge muzzle came around the end of the hedge, snorting twin jets of steam from the nostrils. Then a head, and yellow-green eyes that looked directly at and through Amos and Dunc. The lips lifted to show a seemingly endless row of daggerlike teeth, and it took Dunc a full second to realize that the eyes were looking down on them. Whatever it was, the thing was enormous—a scabby, furry, growling house.

  Amos nodded, smiling. “Sure. Look—you can see the line where the rubber mask ends. Right there, in back of the drool. It’s all a—”

  He pointed with a finger and very nearly lost it. In a spray of saliva the teeth swirled and went for the hand. But at the same time Dunc grabbed Amos by the collar and jerked him backward, and the fangs missed and took off about a two-foot section of hedge as neat as a gas-powered trimmer.

  “—joke.”

  By the second step, Dunc was running, dragging Amos backward.

  Time hung for half a second, two. Dunc and Amos were moving. Amos’s legs caught up with him and his body wheeled, but his head was still facing back at the monster.

  The beast spat bits of the Riglettis’ hedge, dropped to all fours, and tore after the boys.

  Dunc dug hard with his left foot, feinted to the right, then leaned and angled left, ducking down to dive beneath the hedge. Amos had been looking back, watching the thing gain on them, but when he turned, Dunc was suddenly not there.

  “Dunc!”

  “Ummph.…” Dunc scrabbled through to the other side. “Come left. Hard!”

  But it was too late. Amos was already past the point where Dunc had dived. He smelled breath on his neck, hot breath, worse than anchovy-pizza breath. Amos threw another quick look over his shoulder and found himself looking down a throat as big as a tunnel.

  He hung a right so fast, it threw the monster off.

  “I’ll come around.” Amos snatched a pink plastic flamingo out of the ground as he passed through the Riglettis’ garden and tried to use it as a sword. The monster bit its head off.

  “Dunc, help me!” He was angling back around to the hedge where Dunc was waiting by the hole that went through to the other side.

  “Dive! When you get here, dive, and I’ll grab you!”

  Amos took two more giant leaps, shoved the pink flamingo back once more, heard a crunch, and dived for the hole.

  And almost made it.

  He came in at a slight angle. Because he was off to the side, his front half went through clean, but he jammed at the waist for half a second, his knees wedged in and his butt jammed up in the air.

  A perfect target.

  The fangs came down in a drooling arc, opened and bared, then slammed shut like a vise, and half of Amos would have been gone, but once more Dunc grabbed him by the collar and jerked him. The teeth all but missed—one fang caught the fleshy part of his rear end and made a small rip through Amos’s jeans and cut a little scratch. Like a cork in a bottle, Amos popped through.

  “Now!” Dunc snapped. “Now move!”

  He dragged Amos to his feet as the monster’s head came slamming into the hole. It was approximately twenty feet to the Riglettis’ backyard ash tree, and Dunc made it in one leap, with Amos flying behind him like a rag.

  “Climb!” Dunc screamed, grabbing a limb. “It’s our only chance.…”

  Amos caught the same limb, and they hit the tree like cats chased by dogs.

  Even then it wouldn’t have worked. It was too close. What saved them was that the beast became stuck momentarily in the hole, couldn’t get through, and had to pull out and go around the hedge.

  As it was, Amos barely escaped getting another wound in the same place. He heard the jaws snap shut and broke all existing records for tree-climbing by using Dunc’s back as a ladder.

  Twelve feet up, there was a cross limb, and the boys sat on it, peering down.

  “What do you suppose it is?” Amos asked. He had to scoot sideways to avoid sitting where his butt was scratched. “It sort of looks like a dog.”

  “If you could cross a dog with a crocodile, maybe.” Dunc shook his head. “And then it would have to be a very big dog and a very big crocodile.”

  The beast leaped up at them and the boys jumped, but it missed them by half a foot. Amos was still holding the tattered bits of the plastic flamingo—he’d forgotten to drop it—and he swiped at the monster with the end of it.

  For a moment it stood, its head cocked sideways, peering up at them with yellow-green eyes, a low growl rumbling in its throat.

  “The eyes,” Dunc said. “Isn’t there something familiar about them?”

  Amos stared down, then shook his head. “I don’t see anything there I recognize—or want to recognize.”

  Again it jumped up at them, and again it was half a foot short. Its claws shredded tree bark on the way down, and this time it lowered to a crouch, growl
ed up at them once more, and with a loping gait disappeared off into the darkness along the hedge and between the houses.

  “Gone,” Dunc said. “I think it’s gone.”

  Neither boy moved.

  “Yup.” Amos nodded. “I think you might be right. It’s gone.”

  No movement.

  “I guess we could get down,” Dunc said.

  “Yeah, I guess we could.”

  Still no movement.

  Mrs. Rigletti came out at seven the next morning, just after daylight, to empty her cat box. She was surprised to see Dunc and Amos sitting in the ash tree in her back yard.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Rigletti,” Amos greeted her. “How are you this morning?”

  Mrs. Rigletti stared a them for a full half minute. Amos was still holding a scrap of her pink plastic flamingo, and her hedge looked as if a buzz saw had hit it.

  Her mouth opened, closed, opened and closed again, and she turned back into the house, shaking her head.

  She knew about Amos Binder, knew better than to ask questions.

  .3

  Amos awakened just after noon with a funny, dried-out taste in his mouth, as if he’d been panting. After his mother and father had chewed him out for being gone all night and grounded him until sometime after he started shaving, he’d put iodine on the scratch on his rear end and crawled into bed for a nap.

  He climbed out of bed and used the mirror over his dresser to examine the scratch again.

  It was gone. Completely. There was an iodine stain there, but no scratch, no other mark of any kind, and even the slight pain was gone.

  “What—”

  At that precise moment the phone rang.

  Dunc had once tried to calm Amos about the phone ringing, tried to use logic to show Amos that it wasn’t really necessary to go totally insane when the phone rang. And Amos had nodded and agreed, and the next time the phone rang he had been gone like a greyhound when a rabbit sped past. He simply couldn’t help it. “I come from a bad gene pool,” he’d told Dunc. “Bad phone genes back there somewhere.”

  Phones were located at four strategic points throughout the Binder home. They had started with one in the living room and one in the kitchen. But after Amos had destroyed the upstairs railing trying to get down by the second ring, his father had put two more phones upstairs, one by the bathroom door—because he thought Amos spent so much time in the bathroom—and one near the top of the stairway. All the phones had twenty-foot-long coiled cords to give Amos room to maneuver. In a family conference Amos’s mother—who had already been run over several times—had suggested putting phones every four feet along all the walls, but Amos’s father had voted it down as too expensive. Amy, Amos’s sister, had wanted to put a phone in the toilet and when he went for it “flush him away,” but nobody but Amos had taken her seriously.