I rolled the scroll up, set it back in the locker, and closed it.
“What’s going on up there?” Zack snapped.
I went back to the ladder and climbed down it.
“It’s haunted,” I said.
“What’s haunted?” Zack asked.
“The barn, the house, the whole damn farm,” I said, rubbing my arms. It’d suddenly gotten really cold.
“Bullshit. I’m going up there,” Zack said. He started to climb up and the loft door slammed shut. Becca grabbed my wrist as the smell of death returned.
“Ugh!” Zack yelled, jumping off the ladder. The ladder started to vibrate like a big wooden tuning fork and a thunderous moan came from the dirt floor. Becca’s short nails dug into my skin and I moved towards the door.
“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” I said. Zack stumbled to my side and the three of us hurried to the rattling barn door. The moans got louder and the powerful smell of blood, gunpowder, and even a trace of burnt flesh caused me to hold my breath.
I reached the door and swung it open.
The cool night air was a blast of fresh oxygen after the stench of the barn and I stumbled outside. I went about twenty feet to the edge of the driveway and stopped, resting my hands on my hips as I breathed deeply. Zack lumbered a few feet ahead and fell to the grass while Becca stood next to me silently wiping her eyes.
A set of bright yellow headlights glowed in the corner of my eye. I looked down the driveway. My parents were home.
My dad’s truck stopped in front of the house and the headlights went off. They got out of the truck and walked up to us.
“Hey, kids,” my mom said. “You’ll never believe who we ran into in town!”
None of us said anything.
“It was Mr. Waters from the farm down the road. He told us that this barn was once a hiding spot for some Union soldiers and that there was some kind of fight here with some Confederates once! Isn’t that neat?”
I looked over at Zack and Becca. Their faces were blank and exhausted and I imagined that mine was as well. A few coyotes howled across the pumpkin field and we just stared at each other in the dark October night.
The back of the gray-stone mansion stretched a good fifty yards end to end. It had been vacant now for almost eight years and this was the first time that my brother Shaw and I had dared to get this close. But it was the middle of Christmas break, a foot of fresh snow had fallen last night, and on a boring Wednesday afternoon we were looking for stuff to do.
“Do you think he can see us?” Shaw asked.
“There’s no ghost, Shaw,” I said. I stepped off the half-mile long path that ran between the woods and connected the mansion’s football-field-sized property to our subdivision. Shaw and I might have been twins but he was a way more gullible eleven-year-old than I was. “It’s just a story people made up to keep kids off the property.” I walked onto the mansion’s arctic like backyard and I heard Shaw’s boots crunching through the snow behind me. When we got to around the center point, I stopped and looked around. We were about forty yards from the path and maybe another forty from the mansion. “This is good,” I said. “We can build it here.”
“OK,” Shaw said, scooping up a pile of snow in his gloves. “Let’s rock.”
I kicked some snow into a little pile and we began to create our fort.
For the next hour we packed together the snow walls and then built an igloo-like roof. Some flurries had fallen during that time but nothing heavy, and the cold, dry air had started to make my eyes water a bit.
“Did you ever hear the one about the Thompson kid?” Shaw asked as he smoothed out the side of the fort’s entrance.
“Yeah. Ghost boy touches Jeffrey Thompson’s arm and Jeffrey spends the next year in the hospital with bone cancer; he recovers and then gets killed in a car accident the following year,” I said as I packed more snow on the roof.
“I’ve heard five or six stories like that, Max. Everyone who gets touched dies or has really bad things happen to them for the rest of their life.”
“It’s a joke, Shaw. Stupid stories adults make up.” I stopped working on the fort and looked over the mansion. “I mean, look at this place. It’s got to be worth millions and it still hasn’t been sold. They don’t want kids messing with it so they say that the family’s kid died when he was ten and now haunts the place. Also, notice how part of the story is that the ghost won’t leave the property—that it stops at the trailhead? That’s pretty convenient.”
Shaw didn’t say anything but the wind kicked up and heavier snow started to fall.
I walked to the entrance of the fort, knelt down, and peeked in. “Nice. Looks good in there. We can even go get Stan and Todd and they can build a fort and we can get a good snowball fight going.”
Big snowflakes blew past my face and I looked up. The snow had started falling hard and the wind had picked up so much I had to take a wide stance to brace myself. Shaw came up next to me, “It’s another blizzard. Maybe we should get back before the snow gets too heavy.”
“Well, we’ve got the fort,” I said.
“Yeah, but this thing is heavy. Really heavy. I don’t want to get trapped out here.”
The wind and the snow kicked up even harder and everything was a blur of white and gray. I held out my arm and could barely see
