I nearly jumped out of my own skin—that’s how startled I was to see her. It was as if she’d appeared out of nowhere, and the way she was staring at me with that pale, serious face of hers—just standing and staring without saying anything—well, it was eerie. Very. It was like having a ghost stare at you.
“Oh!” I said, nearly choking on the sound. “Uh . . . hi, Jennifer.”
She went on staring another long moment. Then her lips turned up in a shy little smile. She lifted her hand in a shy little wave. “Sam Hopkins,” she said. And then she repeated my name: “Sam Hopkins.”
“That’s me, all right.”
She smiled and nodded for a long time. Then she said, “Thank you for stopping Jeff. The Winger. From hurting me. He was mean.”
“Yeah, he was,” I said. “I’m sorry he did that. I’m really glad you got out of there all right.”
“Because you helped me.”
“Well . . .”
She lifted her hand and reached for my face as if to touch the bruises there. I guess I kind of flinched a little. The bruises were still really tender.
But in any case, Jennifer didn’t touch me. Her finger just sort of lingered close to my cheek, then dropped back to her side.
“They hurt you,” she said sadly. “They hurt you because of me.”
“They hurt me because I busted Jeff in the grille. It wasn’t your fault.”
Jennifer smiled. “You were my Sam Hopkins friend,” she said.
It sounded so funny I laughed. “Well, good. I’m glad to be your Sam Hopkins friend.”
Jennifer looked this way and that, as if she wanted to make sure there was no one around to hear her. There wasn’t. We were alone in that little grass alley at the edge of the house next to the bike port and the willow tree.
Jennifer dropped her voice and leaned toward me. “I said your name last night,” she confided to me as if it were her great secret.
“You . . . what? What do you mean?”
“I said your name,” she repeated, even softer than before. “When the demons came to my house.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a weeping willow tree in winter. It’s kind of a spooky tree to begin with. In summer it has those branches that hang down mournfully to the ground. But in winter, when the branches are bare, they sort of stick out every which way, all unruly like a witch’s hair. Then when the wind comes through them, they shudder and snicker and whisper almost as if the witch were coming to life.
The wind came through the willow now and the weeping willow shook and whispered. With that and with what Jennifer said about the demons and with her staring at me after she said it, I felt as if something cold and yucky had run up my back, like an insect with icy feet. I shivered like the tree.
“Demons, huh?” I said. I hoped maybe Jennifer was making some kind of joke, but I didn’t really think she was. “You get those a lot around your place?”
She nodded. “They come in at night. When no one else can see them. They change everything.”
“Yeah, I guess they would.”
“They put a coffin under the tree.”
“Sorry?” The bowing branches of the winter willow swayed and whispered and I glanced at it—just to make sure there were no demons there right now. “What tree are we talking about exactly?”
Her eyes got wide. She leaned in even closer, her voice even more soft and secret and serious. “The one in the hall outside my bedroom. It’s a demon tree. A low-spreading oak over the tarn.”
I licked my dry lips. I found my own voice getting softer too, like Jennifer’s. “What’s a tarn?”
“It’s like a lake. A flat, black, round lake under the spreading branches of the tree. The demons come out of it and they gather there. They write evil symbols on the walls. And they put a coffin under the tree.”
“Wait,” I said. “This is in your hallway? In your house?”
Eyes big and round, she nodded.
“And you saw this?” I asked her. “You saw this coffin there?”
“I saw the thing that was in it too,” she said.
“In . . .?”
“The coffin.”
Okay, well, that didn’t sound good. In fact, this was really starting to creep me out in a major way at this point. I mean, I didn’t mind Jennifer saying silly-sounding stuff that rhymed or whatever. But this sounded downright crazy. Or something. A tree in her hall? With a coffin under it? With a thing in the coffin . . .?
And just then the clouds seemed to grow even darker in the sky, and the air around us seemed to get darker too. The wind blew down the alley of grass, and the willow shifted and rattled as if something were hiding under its branches. I thought I felt the first drops of rain touch my bruised face.
“Sam Hopkins,” Jennifer whispered.
“What?” I said.
But she didn’t answer. It was as if she just wanted to say my name out loud.
“What was in the coffin, Jennifer?” I asked her.
“It was dead,” she answered.
“Yeah, I was sort of afraid you were going to say that.”
“And then it sat up.”
“What?”
“It reached for me. It had skeleton fingers.”
For a second I just stood there, just gaped at her. I mean, I’d heard stories like this before, of course. My brother used to tell them sometimes when we were camping out in the backyard—ghost stories, you know, to scare me before I went to sleep. And I’ve read comics and seen TV shows where scary stuff like this happens, skeletons getting out of their coffins or whatever. And sure, it creeps me out. But I always know somewhere inside me that it’s just a story, right? Just a comic or movie, not something that could ever happen in real life.
But this was different.
I’m not saying I believed what Jennifer was saying. But I did believe that she believed it. I could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t lying or making it up. Somehow she had actually seen this stuff. Or dreamed it. Or something.
And somehow that made it scarier than a movie, scarier than a comic book or a story. Because Jennifer was real. She was standing right there in front of me, staring at me with her spooky eyes.
“Sam Hopkins,” she whispered. Which made the whole thing even scarier.
I shook my head. “Why do you keep saying my name like that?”
“It’s magical.”
“It is?”
“Yes. There’s magic in a friend’s name.”
“Oh.” I guess I could understand that. Sort of.
The wind blew up again. This time as it came down the grass alley, it carried a full rainfall with it. I felt the damp spray against my face, stinging on the sore places. I heard the rain begin to patter in the branches of the trees all around me. And the willow branches rattled and whispered.
Jennifer felt it too—the wind, the rain. She looked up at the sky for a long moment. “Something terrible is coming,” she said.
“Just rain,” I told her.
But she shook her head, still studying the darkening clouds above. “No. Something else. Something bad. Soon. Very soon.”
I looked up too, trying to see what she saw.
When I looked down, Jennifer was gone. No, wait—there she was—down the alley, backing away from me, backing over the grass along the house, shaking her head.
“Something terrible is coming,” she repeated.
“What?” I asked her. “What is it? Coming when?”
Jennifer glanced up at the sky one more time, then back at me. She shook her head, a desperate look in her eyes. “Sam Hopkins,” she whispered.
Thunder struck and the rain poured down.
Jennifer turned and ran away.