Ghoul

Timmy and Doug skidded to a stop.

'What happened here?' Timmy stared at the rutted ground.

'My dad says some teenagers must have drove through here last night. Went off the road and through this section of grass where there aren't any tombstones, and then kept on going right on through the corn.'

'Mr. Jones is gonna be mad when he sees that,' Doug said, eyeing the bent and broken stalks. 'They messed his field up.'

'Nan. Corn grows back so fast, he won't even notice it. By this time next week, the stalks will be twice the height they are now.

Timmy and Doug agreed that he was right.

'How'd you guys know I was here?' Barry asked.

Timmy nodded back toward the church. 'Your dad told us.' Barry's face darkened. 'Oh. Did he say anything else?'

'Yeah.'

'How bad?'

'Well, he was pretty angry…'

'He was up late,' Barry apologized. 'I went to bed after that special Friday night Family Ties was off, but I couldn' t sleep. I was in bed listening to Doctor Demento on the radio. I heard Dad get up around midnight and leave the house. He didn 't come back till early this morning. Said he' d chased some kids out of the cemetery. Same kids that did this, I guess.'

Timmy shrugged. 'Was he drinking?'

'I don't know. He stayed awake long enough to tell me what he wanted me to do today. Then he went to bed.'

Barry refused to meet his stare, and Timmy knew then that he was lying.

'He was pretty pissed off,' Timmy repeated. 'More than usual.'

'I don't want him anymore pissed than he already is,' Barry said. 'My birthday's coming up, and he said I could get a Yamaha Eighty dirt bike if I listened.' Timmy frowned. Since when did the Smeltzers have the money for a dirt bike?

'Was he angry at you guys for waking him up, or just angry in general?'

'Both,' Doug said. 'He called me a fag, because I don't play baseball and stuff. Said that's why my dad left.'

'I'm sorry, man. You know that's not true.'

'I know,' Doug said softly, 'but it still hurts sometimes. Just cause I don't play sports, that's no reason to say mean things like that.'

Barry squeezed his friend's shoulder. 'I feel bad. He was probably just really tired.'

'He was acting weird.' Timmy refused to let Barry make excuses for his father's behavior.

'Said we weren't allowed to play here anymore, and you weren't allowed here, either, after sundown.'

'That's true,' Barry confirmed. 'Some new rule about trespassing. Guess these teenagers were the last straw. Nobody is allowed in here after dark. He called the church board this morning, right before he went back to bed. Sounds like they were in agreement.

He got permission to get some signs made up and everything.' Doug dismounted. 'What about during the day?'

'Well,' Barry said, finished with the raking, 'he told me we weren't allowed to play around here anymore, especially not after dark. The way it sounded, he didn' t want me here at all, except to work. No bike riding. No skateboarding.'

'That sucks,' Timmy spat. 'What's the big deal?' Barry shrugged.

Timmy felt his summer slipping away, and it angered him.

'Where are we supposed to hang out instead?'

'The dump?' Doug suggested. 'Or over in Bowman's Woods? I bet Mr. Bowman wouldn't care. Or Mr. Jones's pond?'

'No way.' Timmy slid off his bike and flicked a bug off the front mag wheel. 'Only thing we can do at the pond is fish. We can' t swim in it with all those snapping turtles and water snakes.' He shuddered at the mere thought of snakes, then continued. 'And too many other people go through Bowman 's Woodshunters, hikers, older kids. Besides, it 's too far to go every day. The Dugout is right here. We're just going to abandon it?'

'We could build a new one. A better fort.' Doug segued into the introduction from The Six Million Dollar Man.

'We can rebuild it. We can make it better than it was before. Better. Stronger. Fas '

'Shut up,' Barry said, rolling his eyes. 'Retard.' Doug pouted. 'Then how about a tree house?'

Timmy scoffed. 'A tree house? Get real, man. Those are for pussies. It' s too easy for other kids to raid. You guys want Ronny, Jason, and Steve stealing our stuff when we 're not around?'

Ronny Nace, Jason Glatfelter, and Steve Laughman, each a year older and a grade higher than the boys, were the town bulliesand their sworn enemies. They lived beyond the Jones farm, along Route 116, but often road their bikes up the hill and into Timmy, Doug, and Barry ' s territory. Presently, an uneasy truce existed between the two trios, but all of them knew that before the summer was over, because of slights real or imagined, a new war would break out. The last time, it had been because Ronny and Jason had thrown rocks at Doug and called him fat boy when he rode by their homes on his way to the Colonial Valley Flea Market.

The time before that, it had started because Barry shot Steve in the butt with his BB gun.

Although none of the boys would have admitted it out loud, they looked forward to the yearly wars. The familiarity was comforting.

Barry wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. 'Look. If we're inside the Dugout, then my dad can't see us, anyway. He'll never even know that we' re over here. I don

't see the point in moving. And besides, when we sneak out at night, it ain't like nobody knows. We can play over here then.'

All three of them were experts at sneaking out, crawling through their bedroom windows after their parents had gone to sleep and getting into midnight mischief; or at least Barry and Timmy were. Doug often used the front door rather than the window, since his mother never seemed to care if he was home or not. Agreeing that Barry was right, they turned toward more pressing matters. Timmy decided to keep quiet about the fact that his grandfather was aware of the Dugout 's existence. He wasn't sure how the guys would react.

'Is that the map?' Barry asked, pointing at the tube in Doug's hands. 'You done with it?

Grinning proudly, Doug nodded.

'Let's see it.'

Doug glanced around furtively, as if expecting Barry's father, or perhaps one of their archenemies, to be lurking behind a tombstone.

'Let's take it to the Dugout first. Safer there.' With Barry perched atop Timmy' s handlebars, they rode over to the fort, and stowed their bikes in the tall weeds, obscuring them from view. They made sure no one was in sight, and then pulled up the trapdoor, quickly climbing down the ladder and disappearing into the hole. Once they were settled, Timmy pulled the trapdoor shut, plunging them into darkness. Barry clicked on the flashlight and shined the beam around until Timmy struck a match and lit the rusty kerosene lamp they ' d salvaged from the dump. The soft glow filled the underground space, flickering off the moldering centerfolds of naked women and posters torn from the pages of Fangoria and Heavy Metal hanging from the tancolored wood paneling, which had been rescued from the dump and pinned to the soil with twelvepenny nails, clothesline, and generous amounts of duct tape. (The most important thing that Timmy's father had ever taught him was that duct tape could be used for anythingfrom battlefield triage to plumbing to hanging pictures.) Doug moved a stack of comic books, Hustler, and Cracked magazines off the card table and pulled the cap off the plastic tube, while Timmy and Barry fished cans of Pepsi out of an old Styrofoam cooler. With something bordering on reverence, Doug took out the map, unrolled it, and spread it across the table.

'Wow,' Timmy exclaimed after a moment's pause. Barry whistled in appreciation.

'You guys like it?'

'Totally.' Barry's attention was glued to the map.

'You did good, man.' Timmy clapped Doug on the back. 'It's amazing.' Spread out before them was a scale