“Stop doing that,” said Josh.
I turned the flashlight off quickly.
“She looks like someone she loved just died,” I said. “She looks like she’s sort of reaching out because she wants to stop him from leaving her and moving off into the land of death.”
“Okay,” said Josh. “Now that’s the single most frightening thing anyone has ever said.”
“Maybe we should stop standing here looking at her,” Rick suggested.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Josh.
We moved away from the window, back into the room.
We took a few more pictures to prove we’d been here and everything. Then I made some recordings, talking about what it was like to be in the house and how spooky it was. Then we passed the PSP around for a while until the batteries started to run low. Finally, the best idea seemed to be to get into our sleeping bags.
Lying in the bags, we went on talking for a while, but only for a while. We were all getting tired and the thing was, none of us wanted to be the last person left awake. That would’ve been too much like being alone. None of us wanted to be alone in this place.
Luckily, I was tired and I fell asleep pretty quickly.
Unluckily, it didn’t last.
After about an hour, I suddenly found myself wide awake without knowing why. Had I heard a noise? I propped myself up on my elbow and listened. Nothing— well nothing, that is, except for the whispering wind in the trees and the creaking of the house and those quick little footsteps in the walls.
I used my flashlight to check my watch. It was about one fifteen in the morning. I quickly passed the flashlight beam over Rick and Josh. They were fast asleep, totally unconscious, their mouths wide open with soft snores coming out of them.
My heart sank. I felt totally alone.
All right, I told myself, don’t get stupid. There are no ghosts here. That’s just a superstition. That’s the whole point of the project, right?
Right. I lay down again, pulled my sleeping bag up around me. I listened to the house creaking and the mice running and the trees whispering and a low groan that was almost lost in the wind . . .
I sat up quickly, my heart hammering hard.
A low groan? What in the world was that?
For a long moment I sat completely still, tense, listening as hard as I’d ever listened in my life. There was nothing. The creaking, the mice, the wind . . . There wasn’t any groan. There couldn’t have been any groan. I began to convince myself that it was just my imagination.
Then I heard it again. A deep, complaining moan. It was coming through the window. It was coming from outside. It was coming from the direction of the cemetery.
I stopped breathing. Long seconds passed. I told myself I was imagining things. I told myself to lie back down, to close my eyes, go to sleep, forget about it.
But there was no way. No way.
I worked myself out of the sleeping bag and stood up, my flashlight gripped tightly in my sweaty hand. I’d taken my sneakers off before getting in the bag. I slipped my feet back into them now, though I didn’t go to the trouble of tying them. Picking my way with the flashlight, I moved carefully to the window.
The moon had gone down. I could just barely make out the shadowy fingers of the tree branches against the starlight, but below, in the cemetery, the darkness was almost complete. My eyes strained as I tried to pick out the stones and obelisks and the statue. I could trace their shapes only faintly in the deep shadow.
There were no more groans. Only the wind. The stirring of branches. The rattle of leaves.
I was about to turn away. But before I did, I raised the flashlight and shone its beam out into the night.
The dim ray picked out a headstone not far from the house. I shifted the flashlight to the side and another headstone became visible, then another. Finally, the light rested on the black base of the statue. I raised it slowly and the mourning woman in her cowl came into view.
I gazed down at her where she stood ghostly and pathetic and still.
And slowly, I became aware that there was another figure standing just behind her.
It was a vague outline beyond the reach of the light. The figure of a man standing motionless, his face upraised and turned toward me. It was a weird, empty face. It seemed to have no features. It seemed to gleam bizarrely in the darkness.
My heart sped up. I started to move the light to get a better view.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed my shoulder. I cried out and dropped the flashlight. Its beam rolled crazily this way and that around the room.
“What’re you doing?”
It was Rick, standing behind me.
“Oh! Oh!” was all I could say. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would explode.
“What?” muttered Josh from his sleeping bag—and both Rick and I jumped, startled by the sound of his voice.
“There’s someone . . .” I managed to whisper finally. “Someone out there.”
“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 forc
ed 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.