I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Except to shiver under the heavy blanket of icy snow.
I struggled to force down my panic. I knew I had to move — now.
Using all my strength, I grabbed the snow above me and pulled myself up.
I moved only a few inches. But it gave me space to kick my feet.
Kicking and thrashing, I dug my way to the surface. With a last burst of strength, I pulled myself out of the deep snow. Then I raised my face to the sky and sucked in breath after breath of the cool, fresh air.
“Hey, look.” A voice beside me. I turned to see Peter. He had pulled himself up, too.
He pointed to a dark strip of red light in the sky. The color stretched along a black horizon.
Peter’s face was hidden by the mummy mask. He turned to me. “Where are we?” His voice came out muffled and tiny.
I didn’t answer right away. I gazed into the strip of red-purple light. “That’s … the sun starting to come up,” I said. “The snow … the avalanche … it must have taken us away from there…. It brought us back.”
I spoke in my voice. My human voice. I was me again. No longer a four-legged animal.
And we were standing on a street, gazing into the night.
Peter followed my gaze. Then a cry escaped his throat. “The snow is gone! Monica, we’re alive! The snow … the mountains — all gone!”
I swallowed. My throat ached from screaming. “Peter,” I said, “Look at me. Am I … back? Back to normal?”
He squinted at me. “You were never normal!” he said. He laughed at his own joke.
I gazed down at myself. It was hard to see. I had two masks on my face, one on top of the other.
But I was me again. Shivering in the autumn cold in my little gymnastics costume.
I glanced around. We were standing on the sidewalk on a block of dark houses. An empty lot across the street.
It took me a few seconds to realize we were standing right where our house used to be. The sight of the bare lot sent a wave of sadness over me.
I turned to Peter. “We don’t have a lot of time left,” I said.
Peter nodded. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his white uniform. “I — I can’t believe what’s happened to us tonight,” he said softly.
“I’m afraid to find another mask,” I confessed. “Afraid to put another mask on. Each time it — it takes us into a horror movie.”
“Except it’s all real,” he said. “But, Monica — we have to keep going. We only have three masks.” He stared at the empty lot in front of us.
“We don’t have much time,” I said.
“How about the skull mask?” he said. “That should be easy to find.”
I squinted at him. “Easy? Why?”
He shrugged. “So far, the masks have been their own clues — so …”
I finished his sentence. “The best place to find a skull mask is … a graveyard.”
We both began walking in the same direction. Hillcrest’s oldest graveyard was about a three-block walk.
The night was eerily still. The houses we passed were all dark. No cars on the street. The trees didn’t rustle. No whisper of wind.
The only sounds were our shoes thudding on the sidewalk and the beating of my heart.
I had to jog to catch up to Peter. “Are we — are we really going into the old graveyard on Halloween?”
“What’s scary about it?” Peter demanded. “It’s only dead people.”