“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.
PART THREE
THE CASTLE OF
THE DEMON KING
THIS MUST BE THE CASTLE OF THE DEMON KING
, JENNIFER thought.
Her mother said no. Her mother said it was only a hospital—St. Agnes Hospital—for sick people. But Jennifer had her suspicions.
The building loomed darkly against the dark gray sky like a castle in a movie. And who would live in such a dark, dark castle but a dark, dark demon king?
That’s what Jennifer was thinking—but she didn’t say it to her mother, of course. Her mother would just tell her these thoughts were crazy. Her mother would say she had to ignore them or make them stop. And Jennifer did try to make them stop. She tried to force them out of her mind the way you would force intruders out of your house. But they wouldn’t go. Even when she managed to silence them, she felt the bad thoughts standing like black shadows on the moonscape of her mind, staring at her, waiting for their chance to speak again.
“I had a long chat with the doctor on the phone and she sounded very nice,” Jennifer’s mother said.
They were walking up the front path now. Every time Jennifer looked up, the castle—the hospital—got larger and larger, spreading over her the way a monster would spread over you just before it snapped down on top of you and devoured you whole.
But it was not a monster, not a castle, Jennifer told herself. Just a great brick building of a St. Agnes Hospital where the doctor sounded nice on the phone.
“She told me she just wants to ask you a few questions,” Jennifer’s mother said. “Nothing scary is going to happen.”
Jennifer glanced at her mother, trying to gauge whether or not she was telling the truth. Jennifer wanted to believe her, to trust her, but maybe she was in league with the demons. Maybe that’s why she kept telling Jennifer there
were
no demons. A trick. To throw her off track. A trick-track.
But no, her mother just looked saggy and old, like a paper bag Jennifer had seen once blowing across the Shop N Save parking lot.
Shop N Save. Hopkins Save. Sam Hopkins Saved Me. Saggy and baggy at the Hopkins Save
, Jennifer thought.
That seemed very clever to her, very insightful. She wanted to tell the joke to her mother. But she knew it would only make her mother look confused and worried, so she kept silent.
They pushed through the castle’s—the hospital’s—big glass doors.
Run away, Jennifer!
The voice spoke very suddenly, very clearly in her mind. It wasn’t a whisper at all. It was a voice so clear that at first she almost thought it was her mother speaking again beside her.
Something terrible is going to happen .
. .
Jennifer shook herself, like a dog throwing off water. She threw off the voice, tossed it right out of her mind.
“Sam Hopkins,” she whispered aloud.
“What, sweetheart?” said her mother. “Oh yes, the Hopkins boy. He was very brave, wasn’t he?”
“He’s my friend,” said Jennifer, shivering.
“That’s nice,” said her mother, weary and baggy like the bag blowing at the Shop N Save.
Inside the castle they waited in plastic chairs in a big room. There were lots of other people waiting too.
Jennifer looked at a magazine. She looked at it very hard because she was afraid if she looked up she would see the demons watching her. In the magazine, there were pretty girls with bright smiles. Jennifer stared at them and the girls sent thoughts telepathically into her mind.
Don’t look up, Jennifer
.
If you don’t see them, they can’t hurt you
.
Jennifer stared at the pretty smiling girls and didn’t look up and didn’t see anyone she shouldn’t.
Only at the end of their wait, only after the nurse came and said Jennifer could go in and see the doctor now, only when she had left her mother behind in the chair, her mother smiling saggy-baggy in her chair, only as Jennifer followed the nurse to the door did she glance back over her shoulder and catch one glimpse of one terrible creature standing darkly among the other people who were waiting and reading their magazines. The terrible creature seized on the moment of Jennifer’s glance and whispered across the big room to her—whispered silently with its eyes:
Run away, Jennifer. Something terrible is going to happen soon. You have to tell Sam. You have to warn Sam Hopkins, your friend
.
Jennifer gasped, then forced herself to look away and followed the nurse through the door.
Now she was in the doctor’s office.
The doctor—if she really
was
a doctor—and of course she was; her mother had told her she was and she had sounded nice on the phone. Why would her mother lie to her? Unless she was one of
them
. . .
The doctor was a small woman with a nice face.
Nice face, rice cakes, ice skates
, Jennifer thought.