All Hallows' Eve (7 page)

But the door was padlocked shut.

We would have seen a baby,
she told herself.

Yet she remembered it had been only by
knowing
there was something—it had only been by staring into the gloom—that she had been able to make out the coffins.

Janelle knew she absolutely needed to get Ms. Hurston back here.

But when she stepped out from behind the mausoleum, her classmates were all out of sight. To get help, she would have to run across this section of the cemetery and down the hill. She would have to try to find the others—when it may or may not have been obvious which direction they had gone.

What if, after all that, she couldn't find them? Then she'd have to go back to the bus and tell the driver.

And all the while, she'd have to hope she would be able to find this particular mausoleum again.

Of course I could find it again,
she told herself.

And then—also
of course
—everyone would laugh at her because there'd be no way to get into the locked mausoleum. But they wouldn't need to get in to find out that she was wrong about the baby, or the kitten—that it wasn't either of those things. It was only...

Who knew? Something else.

But, still. The thought of a baby, a poor, unwanted baby, who had been here who-could-guess-how-long already, lying in the cold and dark among those dead bodies...

The thought of those dead bodies made Janelle pause.

Brandon's words came back to her—
Thank you very much, Brandon
—about it being Halloween and about Halloween being a day when you couldn't be sure about the people you met in a cemetery.

She looked again at the names and dates on the back wall.
Don't let one of them be a newborn baby,
she thought. She didn't think she could be rational enough to be brave if one of the bodies in that mausoleum was a baby. She told herself, before looking, that the cry, weak as it was, was from a real, living child, and
if
there was a dead baby listed, that would have to be just a coincidence.

But she thought herself lucky that none of the dates indicated a dead newborn.

She went back around to the front. She cupped her hand under the padlock and noticed for the first time that the shackle part had been cut.

It had to have been that way before, when they'd all been standing here looking in. Otherwise she would have heard the sound of someone sawing or cutting the lock.

Hmmm,
Janelle thought,
a poor, frightened unwed teenage mother—with a pair of bolt cutters.

She didn't open the doors but stood once again on her tiptoes. As before, at first everything was black, then shapes seemed to form out of the darkness: six coffins. With six dead people inside.

Something moved. Just barely visible in that almost nonexistent light, on the floor, toward the back corner on the right-hand side. Somehow they had all missed seeing it. It looked like a pile of rags. But it stirred. And the faint cry came again.

Janelle put her hand on one of the doors.

With a creak of metal on stone, the door pushed in, scraping the floor since—apparently—there had been some settling. A smell of musty old leaves tickled Janelle's nose.
Just leaves,
she tried to convince herself.
Just leaves.

She stepped into the mausoleum, still unable to make out much of what lay on the floor in the back. It had to be a baby blanket, she supposed, though now that she was closer, and with the additional light from the open door, it looked more tweedy than a traditional baby blanket—and were those arms, like a coat?

And a string, a long string, was attached to the bundle and made it move even as she watched, leading from the bundle to—

The door slammed shut behind her, enclosing her in darkness.

Janelle whirled around and could make out the silhouette of someone standing between her and the door. Someone with long scraggly hair: the man they had seen before, by the fountain—looking, she hoped, too much like a stereotype of a bad person to actually be one. He made that sound, somewhere in between a kitten and a baby. Then he dropped his end of the string and he said, "Hey, little girl, wanna explore with
me
?"

She managed a paltry little squeak—hardly a scream at all—before the man clapped his hand over her mouth. He tasted of sweat and dirt. She tried to wiggle out of his grasp, but he held her tight. She kicked, she jabbed with her elbows, she bit, but—strong as she had always considered herself—he shoved her down to the floor as easily as though she were a five-year-old. Her head clunked against the stone and she lost a moment or two of consciousness.

The next thing she saw was the long, long knife in the man's hand.

"No!" she screamed the instant she realized he'd uncovered her mouth.

"'No,'" he mimicked her, and he made the crying-baby sound again as he moved the knife closer to her throat.

But then there was a screeching sound that she hoped, she prayed, was the door opening again. Somebody from her class must have noticed that she was no longer with them.
Let it be one of the boys,
she wished, and not Alycia who was only about four and a half feet tall—or, in fact, any of the other girls, or even Ms. Hurston. What she needed was defensive lineman Reid. But she'd settle for Brandon.

Except that the little room hadn't gotten lighter the way it had when she'd opened the door before.

It wasn't one of the doors opening.

It was one of the coffins.

Something poured out of the coffin. At first Janelle thought it looked like smoke, or fog, but in another moment it took on a definite shape, a man, except that his edges weren't very stable, and she could see through him. He wore a three-piece suit. And he hovered, his feet not quite touching the ground.

It was enough to—for a moment—actually make her forget the man with the knife.

This was a ghost.

She was actually seeing a ghost.

And then she heard a ghost.

"Well, look at this, Margaret," said the man who looked like a banker, except for the fact that little wisps of him kept getting caught in the draft. "I thought I smelled live people."

There was more screeching. The five other coffins opened.

From one of them arose a woman in an ivory-colored dress that reminded Janelle—who had been primed all day by Ms. Hurston to notice details—of the kinds of dresses she had seen in pictures in her history book, from between the two world wars. This woman said, "I don't know, Daddy. I do believe that one smells almost-one-of-us to me."

Janelle assumed that meant her. She assumed it meant she was about to die. She just didn't know if that would be from fright—could someone actually die from fright?—or from her attacker slitting her throat. She could only assume that he was offering her up to these dead people. She remembered the conversation on the bus—about the undead sucking the life force out of the living through their eyeballs. Apparently they couldn't do that. Apparently they needed a live person to lure someone here to be killed and to be made into one of them.

But her attacker jumped to his feet, letting the knife clatter to the stone floor. He didn't look as though he'd been expecting any of this. Perhaps the talking, moving dead people were a surprise to him, too. Looking as scared as she felt, he pulled the door open.

One of the other women—an old, old, grandmother—kicked the door shut before he could get out. "Nasty man," she called him.

"Nasty," echoed the third woman, who was wearing what appeared to be a wedding dress. "Freddy, Bobby—do something."

There were two other men with her, both wearing old-fashioned military uniforms, though one looked even more old-fashioned than the other. They floated away from the shelves toward the man who had lured her in here—apparently
not
because he was on friendly terms with them.

Her attacker tugged at the door, and though his hands passed right through the grandmother, who stood there looking fragile enough that it seemed a breeze would dissipate her, the door did not budge.

The man who looked like a banker said, "You, sir, are a disgrace. How dare you break into our home?"

When her attacker tried to beat the spirits away, his hands passed through them. But the spirits were able to hold on to him, and they dragged him away from the door.

So the ghosts
would
be able to kill her without any help from the living. Janelle very much hoped that it wouldn't hurt, that it wouldn't be—as her classmates had been joking—through having her life force sucked out via her face.

Instead, the grandmotherly one said to Janelle, "No damage done. Make wiser choices, young lady. But don't be afraid of us."

They
weren't
after her?

Janelle felt someone's solid hands support her as she got to her feet, and it was the older of the two military men. When she tried to grasp his hand to thank him, her fingers passed through him, though he smiled kindly.

Still, when she looked back from the doorway, the spirits were clustered around her attacker. Though all they did was crowd him, he was unable to catch his breath. He wheezed, he gasped, he fell to his knees.

"Go," the woman named Margaret urged her. "Run."

Janelle ran.

Out the door.

Across the gravestone-littered grass.

Down the hill.

Along the cemetery road until she caught up with Xavier and Courtney, who were straggling behind the rest of her classmates.

"Looks like it's going to rain," Xavier said mildly.

And she took a deep breath, and another, and another.

Then she said, without even checking the sky, "Probably."

She never did tell anybody what had almost happened.

And she most especially didn't tell what
had
happened.

Not even when she heard Mount Hope Cemetery mentioned on the news the next day. She learned that authorities—checking the cemetery after Halloween night to make sure no pranksters had caused any damage—had found a dead man in a crypt that had been broken into. Despite the large knife that was on the floor beside him, the man looked to have died by natural causes: He had simply stopped breathing. The police described him as a homeless man, and they speculated he had been using the crypt to sleep in, because they found his tattered tweed coat bundled up as though he'd been using it as a pillow.

Ms. Hurston, Janelle thought, would be appalled at the politically incorrect stereotyping.

The news report went on to say that there was no evidence the coffins had been disturbed.

"Fortunately," the report ended, "there was no damage done."

This is a picture of me and my best friend, Aimee Ann. We've known each other since kindergarten, when our mothers ran into each other—almost literally!—in the school parking lot. Afterward, while they were waiting for us, they got to talking and realized we lived only one block apart, which meant each of them could drop us off and pick us up half the time if they car-pooled and took turns.

It was like Fate.

We were destined to be inseparable best friends.

Aimee Ann loves my mom just as much as I love hers. It's like we both have two families.

As kids, we used to share toys; now that we're teens, we've moved on to sharing makeup. On occasion we have been known (don't tell the teachers!) to share homework. We've always shared clothes. That's one of the main reasons to have a best friend! We once even shared a boyfriend—though that, honestly, was a bit of a test of our relationship. But then we figured you can get a boyfriend—especially one of Chuckie Zarpentine's quality—anywhere. But how often are you going to find a forever friend?! So we both dumped him.

This picture is from last summer. Every year for, like, the last five years, Aimee Ann's parents have rented an RV for a week at Darien Lake and—because they know better than to try to separate two best friends!—they invite me to go with them. Camping, swimming, enjoying all-week passes at the amusement park, being together day and night: It's like one, never-ending pajama party for two.

You can see the Ferris wheel in the background. Aimee Ann and I love riding on Ferris wheels.

Notice how we're wearing our matching Mickey Mouse T-shirts? "You're like twins," my mother said, then laughed, when she brought them home for us, "separated at birth."

Aimee Ann and I loved those T-shirts.

I know I sound like a cold, hateful monster when I complain about Nikki.

But, oh, those retarded Mickey Mouse shirts. I don't think I ever truly hated an article of clothing as much as I hated those. I mean, c'mon, we were about to start
high school,
not third grade—and they were secondhand from the Volunteers of America Thrift Shop. The one Nikki gave me had some sort of anonymous stain on the front, like maybe the previous owner had a problem with getting her food into her mouth in any consistent manner, or maybe she just drooled a lot.

Nikki might or might not have noticed. She could be hard on clothes herself. She was always borrowing my stuff and returning it with stains or spills or snags or stretched-out waistbands.

But, "Be nice," my mother kept telling me. "The Bianchis haven't had as easy a life as we have. It wouldn't hurt you to be bighearted."

The Bianchis. Poor husbandless, friendless Mrs. Bianchi, who worked at the Stop 'n' Go Mini Mart in the afternoon and as a bartender in the evenings. Ever since they met, when she almost ran my mother down in the school parking lot (and any truly sane mother would have taken that as an omen), she and my mother were supposed to take turns driving us to and from school. But Mrs. Bianchi was always calling to say, "Could you please drive the girls in tomorrow? I'm having to work the late shift, and morning comes around so fast when I haven't gotten home till 3
A.M.
I mean, I
could
do it if you can't..." Or, "I know it's my turn to pick the girls up, but I need to cover for one of the other cashiers, who didn't come in today..."

Even on days when she
said
she'd pick us up, Nikki's mother wasn't reliable. After she forgot us at school two or three times, my mother learned to hang around the house around two forty-five or three o'clock so I could call her, just in case.