From there, the house looked even worse, more sinister. It swelled up at the crest of the hill, seeming to grow larger and larger as Kyle stared at it. A long, white car stood in the driveway, a ghostly hearse waiting patiently for whatever haunted inside the house.
“Come on,” Brady whispered. “The coast is clear.”
Kyle risked a quick glance down the street. Amazingly enough, Brady was right. There wasn’t a kid in sight for three or four houses on either side. The group that had just crossed Oleander was hidden behind the swelling bulk of a garage, and even though Kyle could clearly hear their happy laughter and the ringing echoes of “Trick-or- Treat,” he couldn’t see them.
“Now’s our chance,” Brady said. He slipped from the shadow of the tree, crossed the weed-infested yard, and crouched by the darkened left headlight of the long, white car.
“Hurry.”
Kyle hurried. Bent over as if he were running against a strong headwind, he followed Brady’s trail until he too crouched on one knee in front of the car. The silvery-gleaming grill loomed over his shoulder like a tooth-filled mouth, and Kyle suddenly wanted to join the clowns and the fairy princesses and hold his pillowcase out for packets of Milk Duds and maybe even some of those little Mars bars that he considered the ultimate pay-off of the evening. But Brady was moving again, running low, dodging invisible shadows and phantom enemies as he skirted the corner of the garage and disappeared. Kyle swallowed hard and followed. He was running so hard as he rounded the garage that he almost rammed into Brady.
“Look,” Brady whispered, his finger pointing toward the side of the house. In the faint light, his skin seemed dead-white, his finger more bone than flesh. The mummy wrappings seemed distressingly real, and even the rank smell of old ketchup seemed to have disappeared, replaced by something heavier and hotter and darker.
Kyle looked.
The side garage door hung open.
“Cool,” Brady said. “Come on.”
“Hey…uh, I mean…”
Brady turned and looked coldly at Kyle. “Chickenshit?”
“Uh, no, I…” But there was nothing to say. Brady shook his head. The message was clear. Come with me and be my friend, or stay out here in the dark and you’re on your own.
Kyle wasn’t too familiar with the term blackmail, but at that moment he understood the panic and terror of its victims. Brady was blackmailing him. At stake was a lifetime’s friendship. He didn’t want to go into that house. He would have been willing to do almost anything rather than go into that house. Go to bed at six o’clock for a month straight. Eat lima beans and spinach. Study his spelling words for hours on end. Do dishes. Wash windows. Clean toilet bowls.
Anything.
But given the way Brady was acting, given the stakes Brady had established, Kyle had no choice. He followed Brady into the darkness.
5
The garage was pitch-black, but Kyle had expected that. Everything about the old house was dark and grim and gruesome
“Wait a minute,” he said softly. He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small red and silver metal flashlight. When he depressed the switch, the bulb flickered. It was only a penlight bulb, and the batteries were obviously weakening, but it gave out enough light for the boys’ shadows to dance grotesquely behind them as they moved. And enough for Brady to whisper, “Watch out. There’s a big crack here.”
Kyle stepped cautiously, letting the light play for a moment on the ragged edge of concrete. It looked like a miniature cliff when the dim yellow light spilled across it. Brady knelt by the crack and touched a dark spot with his fingertips.
“Blood,” he intoned in his best Bella-Lugosi-as-Dracula voice. “ Blooood!”
“Stop it,” Kyle said. “It’s not blood. It’s probably just…just oil or dirt or something.”
“Aw, come on,” Brady answered, punching Kyle lightly on the shoulder. “Get into it. This is a Haunted House, see, and this is the blood of a crazed axe murderer who slices his victims’ throats with a rusty knife and drinks their blood. Only he got nervous and spilled some. And I’ll bet if we looked around we’d see the white, blood-drained bodies hanging on great big hooks on the walls.”
“Don’t,” Kyle began, but almost instinctively he swung the tiny beam of the penlight in a wide arc.
Both boys screamed.
The penlight clattered to the floor, blinked twice, and died.
The boys screamed again, Kyle’s voice higher and sharper than Brady’s. Something filmy, cob-webby, and slightly sticky flickered against his cheek. He yelped and slapped at the thing with his free hand.
“Oww!” Brady yelled as Kyle’s open hand caught him on the shoulder, right where a long strip of mummy wrappings had become unraveled and flapped back and forth. “Oww! That’s me.”
He grabbed Kyle’s arm. Kyle let out a small screech, then a whimper before he understood that it was Brady. Only Brady.
“I…I saw…something,” Kyle said finally, his breath still catching in his throat. There was a moment of silence. Something rustled in the dark. Brady’s feet, Kyle decided.
Hoped.
“Yeah,” Brady admitted, his voice echoing hollow and frail. “Yeah. I did too.”
“What was it?”
“I dunno.”
“Should we…”
“Where’s the light?” Brady’s whisper had dropped almost to inaudibility.
“I…dropped it.”
“Shit.” There was another long moment. Nothing moved in the garage. There was no sound.
Maybe, Kyle thought frantically, maybe if we don’t move, it won’t know we’re here. We’ll be safe. Something shuffled to his right. “Brady!” He grabbed out and found Brady’s arm-or what he hoped was Brady’s arm. It was swathed in stiff bits of cloth that in the dark depths of Kyle’s imagination hung fetid with mold and clotted with long-rancid mummy-sweat.
“Here. I’m trying to find…just a sec.”
The arm wrenched away and Kyle was left alone in the darkness. He scrunched his eyelids so tightly closed that blue lightning streaked across the darkness. He concentrated on every sound. A small scrape. A smaller flick. And Brady’s laugh, harsh and hollow.
“Gotcha.”
Kyle jerked his eyes open. He was staring into the pale yellow eye of his own penlight. He held his hand over his eyes. Even the dim glow seemed too bright. The light disappeared. As his eyes adjusted to the near darkness, Kyle saw Brady sweep the closest wall with the beam. There was so little illumination that he could make out no details-just a broad stretch of yellow-grey drywall. And a hint of white. He drew in his breath with an audible hiss.
Brady laughed again and walked toward the thing apparently hanging in the corner. As the light spread across its smooth surface, even Kyle felt a flood of relief.
It was not a blood-drained corpse after all. It was only a water heater. Brady touched the slick enamel surface with his free hand. The mummy wrappings hung like dead moss from his arm.
“Cold,” he announced, as if he had discovered an important clue. He bend over and peered into the darkness under the heater.
Kyle’s arms shot out, as if to grab Brady and pull him back, away from there, away from the darkness that might hold…rats, snakes, spiders, anything at all.
“No pilot,” Brady said. He straightened up and turned the penlight toward Kyle. For the second time in moments, Kyle’s eyes took the full force of the light and he blinked against it
