The Midnight Tour

Dana laughed and shook her head.

“Let’s go,” Tuck said. “It is a good day to die.”

“Very amusing.”

Side by side, they started walking toward Beast House.

“Probably just some kids screwing around,” Tuck muttered.

“But they didn’t return their players,” Dana said. “So they must know we’ll come in and look for them.”

“Maybe that’s what they want. A little game of hide and seek.”

“You don’t suppose...” Not wanting to go where the sentence was leading, she ended it.

“What?” Tuck asked.

She shrugged. “Never mind.”

“Come on. Give.”

“Well...They won’t, you know, try to jump us?”

“That’s why I’m bringing you along, Bullwinkle.”

Dana lurched sideways, ramming Tuck off the walkway. Tuck stumbled through the grass, but didn’t fall. “Hey! Hey! Take it easy on the kid, huh?”

“I’ll pound your butt for you.”

Laughing, Tuck returned to the walkway. “You’re such a hard-ass.”

“What do we do really?”

“If we get jumped?”

“Yeah?”

They started to climb the porch stairs. Dana glanced at the dangling body of Gus Goucher. Swaying and turning ever so slightly in the breeze, it made quiet, creaking sounds.

“Probably won’t happen,” Tuck said.

“But what if it does?”

“You fight them off, and I’ll run for it.”

“Seriously. I mean, what if it’s three guys, and they’re just waiting for us?”

“Are they cute guys?”

“Oh, very funny.”

Tuck hurried across the porch. As she pulled the door open, she said, “It’ll be fine. Probably. You go first.”

“Me?”

“Size before beauty.”

“Bitch,” Dana said, but she was smiling as she stepped over the threshold. She felt strange: amused, jittery, excited, but not terribly frightened.

Tuck came in. Instead of shutting the door, she swung it wide open and kicked a doorstop under its edge. “In case we need to get out fast.”

“Great.”

Tuck grinned. Then she shouted, “HELLO, EVERYONE! ITS PAST CLOSING TIME! ITS TIME FOR YOU TO LEAVE! PLEASE COME OUT NOW FROM WHEREVER YOU’RE HIDING, AND EXIT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR.”

After her shouting, the house seemed very quiet.

Dana and Tuck stood in the foyer. They didn’t move. They didn’t talk. Dana barely breathed.

She wished she could see.

The sunlight coming through the doorway was so bright that she could hardly make out anything in the shadowy areas beyond its reach.

“Can you see?” she whispered.

“Not very well.”

“I feel like I’m half blind. Maybe we oughta shut the door.”

“And cut off our escape route?” Tuck asked.

“I’ll protect you.”

“Oh. In that case...” Tuck turned around, kicked the block clear and eased the door shut, squeezing out the sunlight.

Murky gloom swallowed them.

“Fine,” Tuck whispered. “Now we can really see.”

“It’ll be okay. We just need to wait for our eyes to adjust.”

“In the meantime...WE KNOW YOU THREE ARE IN HERE. NOW, PLEASE COME OUT. WE’RE NOT GOING TO LEAVE UNTIL YOU COME OUT. OR UNTIL WE FIND YOU. WE WILL FIND YOU. WE’LL BE CONDUCTING A ROOM TO ROOM SEARCH—AND I KNOW ALL THE GOOD HIDING PLACES. SO MAKE IT EASY ON EVERYONE AND JUST COME OUT NOW.”

For ^a while, they listened.

“At what point do we call for the police?” Dana whispered.

“At no point, if we can help it. This is probably just a prank. But if it turns into something worse...”

“Hi!”

They both jumped.

Suddenly, laughter came pouring down from the same direction as the voice. A couple of vague, blurry figures were visible at the top of the stairs.

The laughing stopped.

“Very funny, fellows,” Tuck said. She sounded more cheerful than annoyed.

She’s probably too relieved to be angry, Dana thought.

I sure am.

“Come on down, now,” Tuck said. “It’s time to leave.”

“Yes, ma’am,” one said.

“Are we, like, in trouble?” asked the other.

“Not so far,” Tuck told them.

They started down the stairs. They were about halfway to the bottom when Dana recognized them.

“My buddies,” she said.

“Yeah,” said the one in the Howard Stem T-shirt. “Hi, Dana.”

“We’re really sorry,” said the Beavis and Butt-head fan. “We didn’t mean to, like, cause any trouble.”

“What did you mean to do?” Tuck asked.

“You’re both such a couple of babes...”

“Yeah,” the other agreed. “Real babes. We just thought, you know, like we’d sort of hang out in here.”

“We were hoping maybe you’d show up.”

“So we’d have a chance to, like, pop out and scare you half to death.”

“Maybe get you to scream.”

“Real nice,” Dana said.

“We weren’t gonna do anything.”

“Nothing bad.”

“Figured it’d be cool to scare you, you know?”

“And, like, maybe you’d get a kick out of it?”

“It’s fun to get scared.”

“Up to a point,” said the other.

“Yeah. Not too scared. Just fun scared.”

Dana shook her head.

“Like when you go in a spookhouse?”

“Only we thought it’d be better not to.”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah.”

“What you said about three people.”