We left their house through the back door to avoid Mum seeing us. She would have definitely lost it if she saw him taking me out for another nighttime stroll.
As we approached the church, Frank Goolz was walking a good ten feet ahead of me, pointing his flashlight in every direction, talking excitedly and grinning as I struggled to keep up on the steep road.
He turned around when he realized I was losing ground. “Come on, Harold. Hurry up. She’s not going to wait for us all night.”
I was happy he finally got my name right.
“Aren’t you scared, even a little?” I asked, stopping to catch my breath. “Peter, the last guy she took, he’s a big fellow, and he was screaming like she was squashing him like a bug.”
“Did you see him being squashed like a bug?”
“No. He was behind a bunch of bushes.”
“How do you know he was squashed, then?”
“I don’t, but I heard how he screamed. And I saw how she grabbed him with her rotten skeleton hands.”
He nodded then continued up the road. “All the more reason to hurry up!” he said over his shoulder. “He could be still alive. He might need us to stop her from tearing him apart.”
“Do we really want to be a part of that?”
Frank Goolz stopped and pointed his flashlight at my face as I caught up to him.
“Are you scared of her, Harold?”
“Only a little,” I lied.
“You shouldn’t be. There is nothing to fear.”
“Two really tough boys have met her. One disappeared. The other screamed his head off. I would say there’s a case to be made for fear.”
“You know what I tell my daughters when they’re scared?” He held the flashlight under his chin, which made him look spooky.
“To return to their coffins and close them tight?”
He smiled. “Close. I remind them that the world we live in is like a story. Like a fairy tale. And that it’s fun that there are scary creatures in it, like monsters and demons and whatnots that live in the dark. If there weren’t, we would be living in a dull story. Would you want to live in a dull story?”
“I’ve always lived in a dull story. So far.”
“Well, that’s over. Now, you live in an exciting story. And tomorrow at dawn, you will be thrilled to tell everyone how you survived an attack by a vicious demon. Story of my life.” He laughed, but stopped suddenly, lifting his head like a dog smelling a rabbit. He pointed his flashlight toward the hilltop. “Did you see that?”
I followed the light as he moved it from one side of the road to the other. “What?”
“There!” he said, and my heart stopped. A shadow that could have been our monster flew across the beam of light and disappeared into the dark.
“Oh, crap!”
“Indeed.” He stepped behind my chair and grabbed the handles. But instead of getting us away from the apparition, he pushed me at high speed up the hill toward it.
He dropped the flashlight on my lap but didn’t stop. “Find her with the flashlight! Don’t lose her!”
I caught the flashlight right before it rolled to the ground. “Find her!” he shouted again.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, God.” I pointed the light forward, hoping she wouldn’t jump out of the dark and land on top of us.
He slowed to a stop at the top of the hill. We had reached the cemetery and I was shining the light at the old tombstones. I realized that it was no longer the bumps in the road that made my hand so unsteady. I was shaking like crazy.
“You see her?” he asked.
I tried to speak, but my throat had dried up.
I looked up at him. He was breathing heavily from the run, but he was also smiling. He winked when he caught me staring. “Can’t you feel it, Harold?” he asked, his voice a breathy whisper.
“What?” I finally managed to say.
“Her presence. Watching us. Can’t you feel it creeping up your spine?”
And suddenly I did feel it. “When you see a ghost, aren’t you supposed to run the other way?”
“Bah! Absolutely not. You go after it.”
And so we kept going, deeper into the cemetery. “Now. Show me where she attacked that boy. She might be spectrally attached to the area.”
I aimed the flashlight toward the bushes where she had grabbed Peter.
“So spooky! It’s perfect,” he said, steering us toward the dreaded spot.
“Don’t we need garlic or a crucifix or something?” I suggested as he pushed me into the dome.
“A crucifix!” Frank Goolz hooted. I had to part the branches with both hands as we moved deeper into the dark. “Oh, come on! You don’t fight a demon with symbols and superstitions.” He let go of my chair and searched his satchel.
I moved the flashlight around. The network of branches and dark leaves formed a perfect prison. I pointed the light at the ground right in front of me. Some of the thick roots snaking around us looked like they had been scraped with a knife. I imagined Peter kicking off their bark as he tried to escape.
“How do you fight her then?” I squeaked. The feeling of her presence was creeping so far up my spine it was practically strangling me.
“We can start with this.” Instead of a crucifix, he took out a huge old revolver. I didn’t know what was scarier: a zombie ghost waiting in the dark for the right moment to attack—or someone like Frank Goolz with a gun.
He took the flashlight from me and looked around, pushing branches aside with the gun barrel and shining the flashlight into the gaps. “Show yourself!” he called. He did a 360-degree search of the dome and then sighed. “Why isn’t she coming after us?”
“Is that really such a bad thing?”
“Harold, when you go hunting for ghosts, the least you should expect is to be attacked by one. Right?” He dropped his satchel on the ground and held the gun out for me to take. I looked at it like it was poison.
“Just take it,” he said impatiently. He shook it right in front of my face until, finally, I reached for it. I took it ultra-carefully. It was heavy, so I held it against my lap, making sure the barrel was pointing away from both of us. He knelt to look through his satchel, then switched off the flashlight and stood up. He turned around. He had transformed into a masked monster with two huge, shining blue eyes.
I nearly tipped over. “Oh, crap!” I shouted.
“What?”
“That!” I pointed to his face.
“Oh, this?” He tapped the contraption. He had put on a pair of goggles made of two thin brass telescopes attached to a metallic mask. They buzzed strangely and glowed with an eerie blue light. He adjusted the telescopes, twisting and turning the many dials on them.
“I see,” he said, looking around the dome.
“You see what?”
“Mostly shrubs and plants and plenty of nothing. But it’s all very blue.”
“What are those?” I asked.
He turned back to me, shining the blue lights into my face. He looked like a demented mechanical insect.
“Best buy ever.” He adjusted a dial. “Did you know Thomas Edison built a radio to communicate with the dead? He made goggles to see them, too. These are the goggles. They work better than the radio, I hope,” he added, laughing.
He picked up the satchel and walked deeper into the bushes, until I couldn’t see him anymore.
“Mr. Goolz?” I called, realizing I was alone in the dark with a gun. “MR. GOOLZ!”
“Yes?” I jumped at his voice and turned around. He had popped his head into the dome exactly opposite from where he had disappeared, his goggles still shining their blue light on me. “What’s the matter, Harold?”
“You disappeared!” The gun rattled dangerously on my knees as I gripped it with a shaking hand.
“Yes, and so did she, I’m afraid. I’m sure it was her we saw at the top of the road. And then she just vanished.” He switched off the blue light, removed the goggles, and put them back in his satchel. “I’m going to take that back from you, before you shoot someone.” He took the gun away and handed me the flashlight instead.
I immediately switched it on, trying to cast away all the darkness and hopefully some of my fear.
“She’s obviously not as interested in us as she is in those kids.” He sighed in disappointment.
“Why would a couple of bullies mean anything to her?” I asked.
“That’s exactly what we have to find out, Harold.” He got behind my chair and pushed me out of the dome. The gun in his hand rattled near my face as the chair jumped and bounced on the uneven terrain.
“What’s in there?” he asked, once we were back on the cemetery grounds. He pointed at the abandoned church with the barrel of his gun and I turned the beam of the flashlight to it.
“Just owls. And the gun we found. That’s where Suzie activated the Stone.”
He started for the church. I set the flashlight on my lap and reluctantly followed. When we reached it, he turned and looked back toward the trees hiding the Hewitts’ farm at the bottom of the hill.
“And down there?” he asked.
“Dogs and bad people,” I explained. The dogs had started barking steadily. I thought their message was quite clear: stay away. “Alex lives down there.”
“Who?”
“The first boy who disappeared.”
He nodded and leaned forward, squinting into the distance. “That’s interesting,” he said.
“What is?”
He snatched the flashlight from me and aimed it at a spot in the trees.
“There,” he said. “See it now?”
I braced myself for the attic lady, and yelped and cursed when I saw something just as bad instead. Jonas Hewitt was standing at the edge of the trees, looking up at us. He was holding his plank of wood, and as we watched, he started up the hill toward us.
“We gotta go,” I said.
“Hold on,” Frank Goolz said. “He looks like he wants to talk.”
“Old Hewitt doesn’t talk. He hurts people instead. And he has a plank.”
Frank Goolz switched off the flashlight and handed it back to me. The moon illuminated Old Hewitt as he dragged his heavy weight up the hill.
“We have a gun. I think we win.” Frank Goolz hid the gun in the satchel. “Hello there!” he yelled, waving at Old Hewitt.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Old Hewitt yelled back.
“Taking a night walk with my young friend Harold here.”
Old Hewitt didn’t stop until we were within striking distance. He was breathing heavily from the climb and looked even more dangerous up close.
“No one comes here at night!” It sounded more like a rule than a simple statement. He pointed his plank at Frank Goolz. “I know you. You’re that big-shot writer.”
“Indeed,” Frank Goolz said, adding a funny mock bow. Old Hewitt spat on the ground, just like Alex always did.
“I saw you snooping around. You got no business on my grounds.”
“Actually …” Frank Goolz searched for something in his satchel. I didn’t know what would be worse, the gun or the goggles, but he took out his notepad and pen instead. “I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Are you some kind of cop?”
“No, I’m just a big-shot writer, like you said.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Harold? Would you mind switching on the flashlight so I can show this man a couple of my sketches?”
I switched on the flashlight and it shone straight into Old Hewitt’s face. He covered his eyes and roared like a bear.
“Sorry!” I yelled, turning the beam to the notepad.
Frank Goolz flipped through the monster sketches, searching for the attic lady. “There!” he said happily. He didn’t seem to notice that Old Hewitt’s already wretched mood was deteriorating fast. He held one in front of my face. “Is this a good one?”
It did look like the rotting woman, drawn standing behind a rough stick figure who was supposed to represent Peter. I nodded, and Frank Goolz turned to Old Hewitt. “Have you seen anything like this creature walking around your grounds?”
“Creature? What kind of creature?” he said, his whole body tensing toward the little orange notepad.
“This is just a rough sketch, I’m afraid.” Frank Goolz took the flashlight and lit up the notepad right in front of Old Hewitt’s face. “But there might be details that ring a bell. Like the bloodied scarf. Or her hair, maybe? She wears it in an unusually huge bun on top of her head. See the dead eyes, too. And the throat, it looks like it’s been torn away. Quite gruesome, really.”
Hewitt stared so intently at the drawing, I thought he would fall into it. Frank Goolz watched him carefully. “Would you like to see more sketches of her?” He turned the pages slowly. “Does she look familiar, then?”
Old Hewitt looked up from the notepad, his mouth half open, his eyes full of questions and terror. He grunted and shook his head like a boxer recovering from a hard punch. He slapped the notepad out of Frank Goolz’s hand and stepped back, pointing the plank at us.
“You get away from my grounds, you nutjob. You get away now.” He turned and walked down the hill, nearly running away from us.
“Well,” Frank Goolz said, bending to pick up the notepad. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“He looked scared,” I said. “But they’re scary drawings.”
“They were more than just drawings to him,” he said, switching off the flashlight and dropping it and the notepad into his satchel. “That man knows something we don’t.” He retrieved the goggles, put them on, and turned a dial. The blue light turned on, the goggles hissing and buzzing as he looked down the hill.
“See anything?” I asked.
“No, they’re absolute rubbish. Damn you, eBay, right?” But he kept them on, watching Old Hewitt disappear behind the trees.