FOR THE NEXT THREE days, Oggie stayed home from school and I stayed with him. He had eight stitches in his head. Half his hair was shaved off, and a big patch of gauze was over the back of his head. Mom put him on the end of the couch with a blanket and told him to stay there.
“You look like an alien,” I told him.
“So do you,” he said back.
He was right, I did. When Mom and I got back from taking him to the emergency room that night, whatever bug I’d been coming down with caught up with me. For three days I was on the other end of the couch, sneezing and coughing and running a fever.
Mom kept on going to work, but she called about forty-five thousand times to see how we were. Well, maybe not forty-five thousand, but a lot more than she needed to. She had the lady next door coming over to check on us. She must have told Dad to keep an eye on us, too, because he called up once from the road.
“So, Oggie,” Dad said. “I heard some kids hit you with a rock. They won’t get away with it, will they?”
“They already DID get away with it,” Oggie said.
“I know, but usually, I mean. You don’t let people at school push you around, do you?”
“Not usually,” Oggie said. “I just go in the clos—”
“HEY, DAD!” I screeched. “Somebody’s at the door. We’ve got to hang up!”
We hung up fast, before Dad could hear what Oggie was going to say.
“Listen,” I said when we were back on the couch. “You don’t have to bring up going in the closet all the time.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because it doesn’t sound that great. In fact, it sounds pretty lame, as if you aren’t standing up for your rights.”
Oggie stared at me. “What’s wrong with the closet?” he asked. “YOU go in there all the time.” He must have been noticing where I went at night when I couldn’t sleep.
“That’s different,” I said. “As you know, I’m attempting to write a book.”
“Well, I’m attempting things, too,” Oggie said, sticking out his chin. “The closet is where I attempt them the best.”
We were into the third day of sitting on the couch when, about three o’clock in the afternoon, a car with a loose tailpipe began gunning up and down the street outside. It rattled by four or five times.
Then the phone rang, and when I picked up, nobody was there. I could hear someone breathing on the other end, but they wouldn’t speak. Five minutes later, the phone rang again and the same thing happened. I left the receiver off the hook after that.
I started going to the window to look out. I couldn’t see anything, but I had an eerie feeling somebody was out there. After the phone calls, I thought it might be Ralphie and Ringo looking for me like before.
“What’s wrong?” Oggie asked. He was watching TV.
“Nothing.” I didn’t want to scare him.
I kept looking out the window. Pretty soon, I saw a shadow dart down the alley that’s across from our house. Then somebody’s head was peeking around the corner, looking up at our window. It was a girl’s head that had very short hair.
“Raven!” I yelled.
“Where?” Oggie said.
“Outside in the alley.”
“You mean she’s HERE?” The only Raven he’d heard of was the one in The Mysterious Mole People.
“Just wait,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I went running down to the front hall to tell her to come in. She saw me at the door, but before I could say anything, she put her finger on her lips and nodded her head up the street.
When I looked, my knee joints went weak. There was Cat Man. Right on Dyer Street. He was getting out of a big turquoise-colored car with Ralphie and Ringo. They slammed the doors shut and started walking up the sidewalk toward Jupiter. I ducked inside and beat it back upstairs. Mom had put a lock on our door that she said a storm trooper couldn’t get through, and I was glad.
“Don’t move!” I told Oggie. “Somebody’s coming we don’t want to see. Raven gave me a warning.”
Pretty soon, the doorbell rang. Oggie’s eyes practically came out of his head.
“It’s not the Mysterious Mole People, is it?” he whispered. “It couldn’t be them!” Even though he knew they weren’t real, he was just checking.
“No, it’s not,” I whispered back. “It’s the Night Riders.”
The doorbell rang again. And again. We sat still on the couch, hardly breathing. Finally, the ringing stopped. We crept over to the window. Down the street, I spotted Cat Man getting back into the car. He was driving, with Ralphie up front and Ringo in the backseat. They pulled out with a rattle from the curb. It was the car with the bad tailpipe! They drove by our house and disappeared down Dyer Street.
Oggie saw the car, too. He didn’t know who was in it, though.
“That was a Pontiac Bonneville!” he told me in an awed voice after it went by. “They stopped making them a long time ago. I only ever saw one other one in my whole life.”
At that moment, across in the alley, Raven stepped out. She saw us at the window and gave us the all-clear signal. I went down and opened the front door a crack. In about ten seconds, she slid inside.
“That was close,” I said. “What’s Cat Man doing here? How did he know where I live?”
Raven looked at me and shook her head. “Archie,” she said, “you got trouble again.”