The long way home

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Haunting That's what we called it anyway. Josh and Miler and Rick and I. We had always called it that. All the kids did. Its real name was the McKenzie house. It had once belonged to a rich guy-a guy named McKenzie, I guess. He owned a factory or something back before I was born.

In those days, this had been the fancy part of town, but now it was practically deserted. The house was deserted too. It had been for as long as I could remember. For as long as I could remember, there had been nothing behind these iron gates but a looming wreck of a building. It was three stories tall with some attic rooms in places. There were gloomy gables and black bay windows and a tower with a mansard roof. The whole jumbled structure sat on the top of a little rise of grass, and its black, broken windows seemed like dead eyes staring down at the world. It was as if the place was just watching and waiting for someone to come near it so it could… Well, I don't know what, but it wouldn't be good. If ever a house was made to be haunted, this was the house. It even had a little graveyard in back. I guess that's where the McKenzie family laid their dead to rest.

Now, there's a reason I knew this place so well and it had to do with Mr. Sherman again, my history teacher. This was two years ago. He was teaching a class about the Salem Witch Trials. If you don't know about the witch trials, they happened back in colonial days, before America became a country. There were all these hysterical girls running around screaming that witches were after them and they started off a sort of panic of fear through Massachusetts and other parts of New England. A lot of regular people suddenly got accused of being witches. Some of them were put in prison and about twenty or twenty-five of them were killed. Later, when all the panic passed, people realized they'd lost their senses and done a terrible thing, killing their neighbors for no reason.

Now, to me, this was a very interesting story. It was a reminder that you should never let yourself get swept away by the crowd. Sometimes everyone you know can be saying something or believing something and it can just be dead wrong. All around you there might be people getting all excited or panicked and yelling for you to do the wrong thing or believe the wrong thing. They can make it very hard for you to refuse them or even just disagree with them out loud. People get angry at you when you disagree with them-especially when they're wrong-and nobody likes to be unpopular or have people angry at them. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to use your reason and your heart and stand up for what's true-and I guess not enough people did that during the Salem Witch Trials. That's what I got out of it anyway.

But, of course, for Mr. Sherman the message was different. For him, the Salem Witch Trials proved that religion is bad. See, the people in Salem at the time were Puritans, very strictly religious. So since they were the ones who put the witches on trial, that proved to Mr. Sherman that religion was the whole problem. I think I may already have mentioned that Mr. Sherman was kind of a doofus.

Anyway, Mr. Sherman gave us an assignment. The assignment was to research a superstition and show why it was untrue. Now, on the face of it, I thought this was a pretty cool assignment. It sounded like fun. But we all knew Mr. Sherman. And we all knew if you wanted to get a really top grade, you had to do stuff that he agreed with. In other words, we all knew that if we wanted an A on this assignment, we had to pick some religious belief and show why it was superstitious.

This presented a problem for Rick Donnelly. Rick, as I said, was willing to say just about anything to get good grades so he could go to a really good college. But Rick and I went to the same church and neither of us felt we'd ever heard anything superstitious there. In fact, the stuff we'd learned there had been really helpful in just living ordinary life. So he didn't want to attack his own religion. And it seemed kind of impolite to attack somebody else's. So he didn't really feel right about this assignment at all. It really bothered him.

We talked about it in the cafeteria at lunch at our table with Josh and Miler.

"Look," I said, "there are plenty of superstitions. Black cats. Friday the thirteenth. Write about one of those. That's what I'm going to do."

"You know that's not what he's looking for," said Rick gloomily. He was a tall guy, one of the tallest in the school. His big face was the color of chocolate. It usually looked a lot more cheerful. "I mean, it's all right for you, Charlie. You argue with Sherman all the time, and you don't care when he gives you lower marks."

He was wrong about that. I did care. I cared a lot. But I wasn't going to lie just to get Sherman to give me better grades.

We were all silent for a while. Then I had an idea.

"Hey, you know what would be so cool?" I said. "What if we went and spent a whole night in the McKenzie mansion?"

"What?" said Rick.

"Yeah, yeah," I said, getting more enthusiastic as I thought about it. "We spend the night there and prove there are no ghosts, that it's not haunted. We prove that's just a local superstition."

Josh Lerner cleared his throat. Josh looked like the geek he was: short and kind of slump-shouldered with curly hair and big, thick glasses and a quick, nervous smile. Josh could be kind of a dork at times, but somehow you couldn't help liking him anyway.

"You know, Charlie, that's a very creative thought," he said. "And it raises an interesting question: Are you out of your ever-loving mind?"

I laughed. "Why shouldn't we? We just take some sleeping bags and camp out for the night and go home and write a report about it. We could take pictures and make recordings and everything and do a whole presentation. The thing is, it would be so cool that Sherman would have to give us an A. He'd have to-or he'd have to explain why."

"He would," murmured Rick, nodding to himself. "I mean, it would just be that cool."

"It would be cool," said Josh, "but you're leaving something out."

"What?"

"The part where we get so terrified we have heart attacks and die."

"I could see where that would cut into the coolness factor," said Miler Miles. Miler was a small, thin guy with short blond hair over a long face. You only had to look at him to know he was going to be some big corporate muck-a-muck when he grew up.

"Why should we be terrified?" I said. "We'd all be together. We'd have flashlights, cell phones…"

"Garlic, silver bullets, wooden stakes," Miler added.

"I think I'm having a heart attack already," said Josh. "Really. I'm serious. I can feel it."

As Josh gripped his chest with a worried look in his eyes, Rick nodded. "I'd do it," he said quietly.

"Sure," said Miler with a shrug. "I'd do it too."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," said Josh. "I can't spend the night in the Ghost Mansion. I have a nervous condition."

I looked at him. "What nervous condition?"

"I'm nervous about spending the night in the Ghost Mansion."

I laughed again. "Well, you don't have to do it then. You're not even in Sherman's class."

"Oh, right. I'm gonna let you guys go and me stay home-like that'd ever happen." Josh gave an elaborate sigh. "All right, all right. I'm in. Just mention how brave I was at my funeral."

So we decided to do it. Josh and Rick and I decided anyway. In the end, Miler said he couldn't do it because he was training for a track meet and needed his sleep. The assignment was due on Monday, so we went out to the mansion on Friday evening.

Now, I have to be honest here and say we didn't exactly get permission from our parents for this. It just wasn't a serious possibility. There were all sorts of signs around the Ghost Mansion saying it was private property and warning you to keep out and that you were entering at your own risk and so on. I was pretty sure that would make my father say no. He'd be all worried about lawsuits or whatever. As for my mother-well, she'd be worried about everything. She was like that. I mean, she worried about me going to school. I might fall out of my desk and land on my pencil or something-I don't know. She just found things to worry about. I knew there was no way she would let me do this.

It's not like I was going to lie about it or anything. I was just going to tell the truth a little late, that's all. I told my parents I was going to have a sleepover with Josh and Rick-I just didn't say where. Later, when we came home, I figured I would sort of just casually mention that little part of it. I didn't expect to get away with it altogether. I thought I might get grounded for a weekend or something. But once my parents knew we were all right and understood why we'd done it in the first place, I thought I would get off pretty easily.

Anyway, off to the mansion we went just before sunset. We had our sleeping bags and flashlights, our cell phones-which we could also use as cameras-and a little MP3 recorder I had. Josh even brought his Sony PSP so we'd have something to do if we got bored.

It was easy to get inside the house. The heavy front door was locked, but there were plenty of other doors that were open. We found a big empty room-a parlor- on the second floor and set ourselves up in there. Then we took a look around so we could take some pictures.

The place was pretty spooky, I have to say. The rooms were mostly empty, but now and then you'd find an ancient sofa or a dresser or something-just standing there alone in a room as if it was waiting for someone to come in and use it. The windows were all broken so the wind came through, making the dust shift on the floors and the spiderwebs wave back and forth in the corners. There were these creepy noises, too, every once in a while: little footsteps. Mice in the walls. That's what we told ourselves anyway.

But it wasn't until the night came down that the real, serious creepiness set in. The house sort of settled around us then, making all sorts of little creaks and pops that sounded like somebody walking around. The mice went crazy, running here and there in the walls. Some even came out and we would jump when we saw them suddenly scampering past the doorway. The wind picked up. It played in the branches outside, making the trees whisper and groan as it went past.

But the spookiest thing of all was the graveyard.

In the upstairs parlor where we were, there were two big windows on one wall, the panes half-broken. When we went to stand in front of one of them and peered out through the jagged shards of glass, we had a full view of the McKenzie family cemetery in the back. It was a scary sight to see.

The night was clear, but there was only a sliver of a moon. At first, when we looked out, all we could see were the trees, their great spread of naked branches black against the starlit sky. The grass below them was in deeper darkness. But after only a moment or so, our eyes adjusted and the shapes of the graves came clear.

They were mostly headstones, about a dozen of them. But there were also a few obelisks here and there. Then, off to the right, there was a statue, just one statue, all alone. It was a statue of a woman with a sort of hood over her head, a cowl. You couldn't make out her face in the dark at this distance. But she was making a gesture with her hand, reaching out as if trying to stop someone from leaving.

"Look at that," said Rick quietly. "Weird, huh?"

I used my flashlight to try to pick out the statue's face. The light just barely reached her, but its faint ray brought her figure out of the darkness so that it seemed more real somehow, almost alive.

"Stop doing that," said Josh.

I turned the flashlight off quickly.

"She looks like someone she loved just died," I said. "She looks like she's sort of reaching out because she wants to stop him from leaving her and moving off into the land of death."

"Okay," said Josh. "Now that's the single most frightening thing anyone has ever said."

"Maybe we should stop standing here looking at her," Rick suggested.

"Yeah," I said.

"Yeah," said Josh.

We moved away from the window, back into the room.

We took a few more pictures to prove we'd been here and everything. Then I made some recordings, talking about what it was like to be in the house and how spooky it was. Then we passed the PSP around for a while until the batteries started to run low. Finally, the best idea seemed to be to get into our sleeping bags.

Lying in the bags, we went on talking for a while, but only for a while. We were all getting tired and the thing was, none of us wanted to be the last person left awake. That would've been too much like being alone. None of us wanted to be alone in this place.

Luckily, I was tired and I fell asleep pretty quickly.

Unluckily, it didn't last.

After about an hour, I suddenly found myself wide awake without knowing why. Had I heard a noise? I propped myself up on my elbow and listened. Nothing- well nothing, that is, except for the whispering wind in the trees and the creaking of the house and those quick little footsteps in the walls.

I used my flashlight to check my watch. It was about one fifteen in the morning. I quickly passed the flashlight beam over Rick and Josh. They were fast asleep, totally unconscious, their mouths wide open with soft snores coming out of them.

My heart sank. I felt totally alone.

All right, I told myself, don't get stupid. There are no ghosts here. That's just a superstition. That's the whole point of the project, right?

Right. I lay down again, pulled my sleeping bag up around me. I listened to the house creaking and the mice running and the trees whispering and a low groan that was almost lost in the wind…

I sat up quickly, my heart hammering hard.

A low groan? What in the world was that?

For a long moment I sat completely still, tense, listening as hard as I'd ever listened in my life. There was nothing. The creaking, the mice, the wind… There wasn't any groan. There couldn't have been any groan. I began to convince myself that it was just my imagination.

Then I heard it again. A deep, complaining moan. It was coming through the window. It was coming from outside. It was coming from the direction of the cemetery.

I stopped breathing. Long seconds passed. I told myself I was imagining things. I told myself to lie back down, to close my eyes, go to sleep, forget about it.

But there was no way. No way.

I worked myself out of the sleeping bag and stood up, my flashlight gripped tightly in my sweaty hand. I'd taken my sneakers off before getting in the bag. I slipped my feet back into them now, though I didn't go to the trouble of tying them. Picking my way with the flashlight, I moved carefully to the window.

The moon had gone down. I could just barely make out the shadowy fingers of the tree branches against the starlight, but below, in the cemetery, the darkness was almost complete. My eyes strained as I tried to pick out the stones and obelisks and the statue. I could trace their shapes only faintly in the deep shadow.

There were no more groans. Only the wind. The stirring of branches. The rattle of leaves.

I was about to turn away. But before I did, I raised the flashlight and shone its beam out into the night.

The dim ray picked out a headstone not far from the house. I shifted the flashlight to the side and another headstone became visible, then another. Finally, the light rested on the black base of the statue. I raised it slowly and the mourning woman in her cowl came into view.

I gazed down at her where she stood ghostly and pathetic and still.

And slowly, I became aware that there was another figure standing just behind her.

It was a vague outline beyond the reach of the light. The figure of a man standing motionless, his face upraised and turned toward me. It was a weird, empty face. It seemed to have no features. It seemed to gleam bizarrely in the darkness.

My heart sped up. I started to move the light to get a better view.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed my shoulder. I cried out and dropped the flashlight. Its beam rolled crazily this way and that around the room.

"What're you doing?"

It was Rick, standing behind me.

"Oh! Oh!" was all I could say. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would explode.

"What?" muttered Josh from his sleeping bag-and both Rick and I jumped, startled by the sound of his voice.

"There's someone…" I managed to whisper finally. "Someone out there."

"Out where?" Rick whispered back.

"In the graveyard."

Rick had his flashlight too. He shone it out the window. "I don't see anyone."

"By the statue. Just behind it."

"There's no one there."

I looked. He was right. The figure was gone.

Josh had his sneakers on too now. He joined us at the window.

"What was he doing?" said Rick.

"Just standing there. Just staring up at me," I said.

"Who?" said Josh.

"I don't know. Someone out in the night. In the cemetery."

"There was someone in the cemetery staring up at you?"

"Yeah."

"That's terrifying," said Josh. "I mean, that's… that's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying. Isn't it?"

I nodded.

"I mean, isn't that terrifying?" said Josh.

"All right, man," said Rick. "I think we all get that it's terrifying."

"I wanted to make sure it wasn't just me."

"It's not just you." Rick moved his flashlight over the graveyard. The wind rose, the trees bending and creaking. We stood together, staring, as Rick's beam picked out a headstone, an obelisk, and then the mourning woman making her eerie gesture to the darkness. But there was nothing else in the graveyard now. No figure lurking in the deeper shadows. "Is it possible you could've…?"

"Imagined it?" I said. "I don't think so, bro. I heard it first. I heard this… this kind of groan."

"A groan?" said Josh, his voice breaking. "What do you mean, a groan?"

"I mean, like a… like a low groan, like, 'O-o-o-oh.' Like that."

"That is so terrifying," Josh murmured.

"Then I got up and came to the window. And when I looked out… I only saw it for a split second, but it was definitely there. A figure. A man, I think. With this kind of weird, white face…"

"A weird, white face? A weird, white face? What does that even mean?"

"It means a weird, white face, Josh. Like it… I don't know. Like it didn't have any features."

"How could it not have features? What kind of face is that? If it's a face it has to have features. Otherwise, it would be terrifying. Right? I mean, isn't that…"

The words caught in his throat as the wind became even stronger and the whisper and creak of the branches grew louder and under that whisper-yes, there it was again: that low, dreadful groan as of a man in pain.

Rick and Josh and I fell silent, gaping at one another with open mouths.

"Did you…?" Josh tried to say.

Rick and I nodded. We'd heard it too.

We turned toward the window, all three of us. All three of us shone our flashlights through the broken glass and out over the deep darkness. The darkness shifted and whispered with the night wind.

Before I knew I was thinking it, I heard myself say, "We have to take a look. We have to go out there."

"Right," said Josh. "Because we're not frightened enough. Because there's still a slim chance my hair won't turn white and I won't spend the rest of my life locked in a padded room cackling uncontrollably. Go out there? What are you talking about? Are you crazy?"

"I saw something," I said. "Someone-something-I don't know. We have to go and find out what it was."

"Why? We could stay here instead. We could not find out. It could be, like, an unsolved mystery."

But Rick understood. "That's the project," he said. "We came here to prove this place isn't haunted, that that's just a local superstition. If we don't investigate, we won't really know."

"I can live with that," said Josh. "Really. I'm strangely content just as I am."

"Yeah, but we're the ones who have to give the report," I said. "The whole point was to force Sherman to give us an A by doing something too cool for him to ignore. If we don't follow through, it won't happen. You can stay here," I told Josh. "But we've got to take a look."

I knelt down to tie my sneakers. Rick did the same.

"Oh, I can stay here," said Josh. "In the haunted house. Alone. By myself. Thanks. You're too generous. No, really." He knelt and tied his sneakers, too, muttering to himself the whole time.

It's funny-I mean, funny as in strange-in these last few weeks, I'd faced so many dangers, and I'd been afraid, more afraid than I like to think about or say. But I don't think I've been as fearful, before or since, as I was that night Rick, Josh, and I went out into the graveyard behind the McKenzie mansion.

We crept downstairs, our shoulders bumping together as we followed our flashlight beams down a long hall toward the back of the house. We came into a bare room lined with old, broken cabinets and shelves. It must have been the kitchen once. As we stepped in, we heard pattering footsteps. Small, furry bodies dashed out of sight as the light came near them.

Our beams picked out a door. We moved toward it.

When we stepped out of the house, we stopped and stood stock-still, all three of us. Inside, our flashlights together had seemed almost bright, lighting our way easily. Here, though, the night felt vast around us. It seemed to swallow the beams and drown them in nothingness. We stayed where we were. We stared. We were afraid to move away from the house, afraid if we got too far from it, we would not be able to escape back inside.

The trees moved and murmured above us. The sky seemed dizzyingly far away. The dark seemed dizzyingly deep.

"All right," I said. But I didn't step forward.

"All right," said Rick. But he didn't move either.

"This is terrifying," said Josh.

We stiffened, listening. There was a fresh rattle of dead leaves as the wind blew them tumbling over the earth in front of us. The sound made us lift our flashlight beams over the sparse grass and shine them in the direction of the noise.

One beam-Rick's, I think-touched on a white stone-a headstone-the headstone nearest to the house. There was the graveyard, barely twenty yards ahead of us.

It seemed until then that I'd forgotten how to breathe. I remembered now and drew in a deep breath.

"All right," I said again.

I started moving forward. Josh was to my left, Rick was to my right. They started moving, too, just behind me.

As we advanced, our flashlight beams trembled over the small field of stones. I was aware of an awful sense of suspense as I waited for the terrible moment when one of the beams would pick out the figure with the gleaming, featureless face.

Then, suddenly, Josh's beam fell on the statue of the mourning woman. Even though I knew it was just a statue, the sight of her up close like that was still a shock. She seemed to float out of the darkness at us like a ghost. I could make out her face now, the staring, empty eyes, the parted, fearful lips that seemed about to whisper, "No. Don't go." And her hand, that gesturing hand… You could almost sense the presence of the dead spirit she was trying to hold on to. You could almost see it moving away in the black air before her.

Josh saw the statue and stopped in his tracks, gaping up at it. I heard him swallow hard. He kept his flashlight trained on the woman's face, as if he couldn't force his hand to move.

I took one look at her, then looked away. Still, I could feel her staring down at me with those cold, marble eyes as I kept walking toward her, kept walking toward the place where I'd seen that other figure, the weird, faceless presence.

The mourning woman loomed over me as I got closer and closer to her. Then, a few feet away from her, I stopped. It was too much. Her presence was too eerie. The dark beyond her was just too deep. The possibility of coming upon that featureless man I'd seen staring up at me was just too real. I was afraid to go any farther.

I was about to announce that there was nothing there. About to turn back.

But then I spotted something-something lying on the ground. My passing flashlight picked out a little patch of white. I moved the beam around until I found it again.

"Look," I said.

My friends closed ranks around me. Their flashlight beams joined mine. We stared down. There was a dry branch lying in the leaves just on the far side of the statue, just a few feet away from the statue's base. The stick had snapped in half and the white core of it stood out against the brown background of the dirt and leaves.

"See that stick?" I said. "It's broken. Like someone stepped on it." I moved my beam around the stick. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed to me there were other disturbances, discolorations in the leaves where they had been overturned, their damp undersides facing upward.

"Broken stick," said Rick softly. "Doesn't have to mean anything…"

"I know," I said. "But look at the leaves too. It looks like someone was walking there."

I'll never be sure where I found the courage, but all at once I was walking forward again, moving away from Rick and Josh. The mourning woman was right above me now, staring down at me as I moved alongside her- and then past her. I went to the broken stick. I bent down and picked it up. I straightened, holding the stick in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Turning the stick this way and that, examining it under the light.

And as I did, I felt a hand snake up from the earth and wrap its cold fingers around my ankle.

I'm embarrassed now when I remember the shriek I let out. And I shrieked again as I tore my ankle free and stared down to see a white, featureless face gleaming up at me from the ground.

In a single, swift movement, the uncanny figure leapt to its feet in front of me, its hands lifted in the air, its fingers curled like claws.

And it shouted, "Boo!"

Because it was Miler, of course. Who else could it have been?