But even as I told myself to turn around and run back to my bike, I started moving down the far slope of the hill toward the barn.
Do right. Fear nothing
.
The closer I got to the place, the spookier it looked. Big. Dark. Empty. And it seemed to expand and shudder with the wind. The door kept knocking against its bolt, straining against its hinges. The closer I got, the more I expected the door to burst open and something—Jennifer’s demons, maybe—to come rushing out at me.
I reached the barn. Again, I had that feeling that someone—something—was creeping up behind me. Again, I looked around. Again, I saw nothing.
I turned back to the door and put my hands on the bolt. Felt the door moving and straining against my hand like a living thing.
I lifted the bolt. I pulled the big door open. The barn yawned wide and dark in front of me.
There was the coffin.
I wasn’t nervous anymore. I was scared out of my wits. My stomach was in knots. I had to use all my willpower to keep from running away.
It’s not really a coffin
, I told myself.
It’s just a crate. It’s just an old crate in an empty barn
.
And that was true. It wasn’t shaped like a coffin. It just looked like an old shipping crate or something.
But I couldn’t help noticing that it was just the right size to hold a body.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me. It had skeleton fingers.”
I ought to go
, I told myself.
I ought to get out of here, get some help. I ought to call the police
.
But what would I tell the police if I called them? There’s an empty barn with a box in it? There’s a schizophrenic girl who says something terrible is going to happen? And I had a dream? And there are dreams in the Bible?
No. It would sound ridiculous. In spite of all my fears—in spite of my horror-movie imagination—nothing had really happened. Nothing terrible. Nothing at all.
The problem was, I still felt I couldn’t leave here before I was sure everything was all right.
So I stepped into the barn.
The daylight disappeared behind me. The barn’s shadows closed over me. The place was big and empty and the shadows were dark. I could vaguely make out piles of garbage—farm tools, lumber, auto parts, crates—lying against the wall. I couldn’t help feeling that there were things moving unseen amid those weirdly shaped piles—but I told myself it was just my imagination.
I stepped closer to the box in the center of the dirt floor.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me.”
I shook my head rapidly, hoping to get rid of Jennifer’s words.
But now, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw something else. Something on the walls. Writing. Slashed symbols. I turned and saw a picture of a grinning skull. A picture of a grinning devil. The word
DEATH
splashed in huge letters.
“The demons come out of the lake and they gather there. They write evil symbols on the walls.”
My breath caught and a sound came out of me—a sound I didn’t like to hear—a frightened whine that made me sound like a little boy scared of the monster under my bed, trying not to call for my mommy.
What was this place? What was that box? What was happening?
I really wanted to run. I wanted to run so badly it was almost like my legs were going to start moving without me. But I kept thinking of what Jennifer had said—had repeated over and over:
“Something terrible is going to happen. Sunday.”
Today. Now.
Do right!
I screamed at myself in my mind.
Do right and fear nothing, Sam!
If something terrible was going to happen—and if I was the only one who knew—and if I could do something to stop it—then I had to find out what was going on and do whatever I could.
I took another step toward the box.
And something inside it started to move.
I stopped dead-still. My mouth hung open. I thought I must be imagining things. But there was no way. No way I was imagining this. Clearly, from inside the box, came the sound of thumping. I even thought I saw the box tremble a little—as if something was twisting around in there.
And then . . . another noise . . . I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Then I was. It was a voice. Muffled. Straining to speak. A human voice.
This was no demon. Someone was in there! Someone was trapped in that box. Struggling to get out. Calling for help.
Do right!
I had forgotten all about the bruises and sore spots on my body now. I rushed forward. The box had a lid on top of it. The lid was just boards hammered together. There were ropes running through the spaces between the boards and the spaces in the crate. The ropes were knotted to hold the lid in place.
I knelt in front of the box and began to try to untie the knots as fast as I could. It wasn’t easy. My hands were shaking like crazy. I felt the shadows of the barn moving all around me. I felt the symbols on the wall watching me: the grinning death’s head, the grinning devil, the strange symbols, the slashed words . . .
DEATH .
. . I felt sure something was hiding behind the piles of garbage on the walls, watching me . . .
And all the while, from inside the box, the thumping noise continued, growing more rapid—more desperate, I thought. The muffled voice tried to call out, cracking in its strain. It sounded panicky and fearful.
I pulled frantically at the rope—and finally, finally, the knot came loose. I grabbed hold of the lid and shoved it off the box.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness now. I could see clearly what was inside—
who
was inside the box.
It was Harry Mac. Jeff Winger’s muscleman crony. The guy who had chased me onto the railroad bridge. The guy who had helped Jeff beat me silly down by the road. He was tied up with ropes. He was gagged with an old bandanna. His eyes were white with terror. His face was streaked with blood.
Struggling against the ropes that tied him, he cried out to me frantically from behind the gag. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew he was trying to scream for help.
I reached forward to pull down the gag, but before I could, I heard a noise behind me.
I turned and saw a silhouetted figure charging at me out of the shadows.
And suddenly, the wind rose. The barn door blew shut. Darkness.
The next second, something struck me—hard—on the side of the head, and I toppled over into a deeper darkness still.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious. It didn’t feel like very long at all. At first, when I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember where I was or what I had been doing. I could hardly think about anything except the pain throbbing in my forehead.
I was aware that it was dark. I was aware that I was uncomfortable, my face pressed into the cold, rough dirt. I was aware that, somewhere, the wind was blowing—roaring all around me. There was another sound too—a high-pitched wail far away—almost hidden inside the wind. What was it?
But before I could figure it out, I became aware of a louder noise: the door rattling, banging on its hinges . . .
Then it came back to me. Where I was. What had happened. The tree. The lake. The barn. The coffin. The figure charging through the shadows . . .
Harry Mac!
I started to sit up quickly—but the minute I did, the throbbing pain above my eyes became a lancing knife of agony. I cried out, clutching my head. Stars and purple blotches flashed in front of me. I sat there on the barn floor, half-upright, holding the bruised place, my body wavering back and forth as I fought down nausea.
The wind kept blowing. And that high-pitched keening sound hidden in the wind grew louder, steadier. What was it?
Harry Mac . . .
I fought down the pain. I had to help him. I turned to the box in the center of the room. I could just make it out in the shadows that grew lighter and darker as the door moved in the wind, as it let in sunlight from outside and then blocked it again.
But the box was still there, just as I’d left it. The lid was as I’d left it too, thrown off, leaning against the side.
Flinching at the pain, I moved to the box, took hold of the side, drew myself up over it. I looked down into it.
Harry Mac was still there, still bound, still gagged, still staring up at me with his white eyes. I reached in and grabbed his shoulder.
“Harry Mac, you all right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Harry . . .”
I tried to lift him, but he was limp, too heavy. I leaned forward into the box and tried to get a better grip. And as I did, I saw . . .
“Oh!” I said. The breath rushed out of me.
Harry Mac was still staring at me, but now I realized: His eyes were no longer filled with fear. His eyes were empty. Completely empty.
Harry Mac was dead. A round bullet hole showed darkly in the center of his chest.
I fell back from the box, scrambling away. The images and words on the wall seemed to swirl around me on every side. The grinning skull. The grinning devil.
Death
.
As I scrambled back, my hand touched cold metal. I saw something lying under my fingers. A pistol.
The door rattled. The wind blew. That high-pitched keening sound grew louder and louder, closer and closer.
I knew what it was now. It was a siren.
The police. They were almost here.
Detective Freddy Sims was fat and bald. With his round belly and round head, he looked kind of like a snowman, only with big, bushy gray eyebrows. Also, he had these big unsnowman-like saggy bags under his eyes and thin lips that curled at one corner into a sort of permanent smile, as if he found the whole world kind of stupid and annoying but kind of funny at the same time.
He came into the room where I was sitting. It was a small room in the police station. It was white with soundproofing tiles on the walls and ceiling. There was nothing in it but a long table and chairs and a video camera hanging up high in one corner. I had seen a lot of rooms like this on television police shows. In the shows, police detectives interrogated people in rooms like this until the people burst into tears and confessed to murder. As you might guess, I was not happy to be there.
At least I wasn’t alone. After they arrested me at the barn, the police called my dad. He came straight from the Bolings’ house, still wearing jeans and a checkered flannel shirt. His eyes looked damp and bright as if he were in pain. I guessed he was. First his best friend dies, then his son gets mixed up in a murder? Not a good day for my dad.
Dad and I sat next to each other at the table. I tried not to pick at the bandage that was taped to my head behind my right ear. It covered the place where I’d been slugged, which was still throbbing and aching despite a lot of extra-strength aspirin.
The snowman-shaped Detective Sims sat across from us. There was a black folder on the table in front of him. Along the side of the folder, there was a label that read “Macintyre, H.” Macintyre was Harry Mac’s full last name.
Sims pressed the tips of his pudgy fingers together and looked down at them with that permanent little smile of his—as if he found his hands kind of silly somehow. Then he looked up at me. He went on smiling.
“You’re Sam Hopkins?” he asked—as if that was kind of amusing too.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice shook a little. Even though I hadn’t broken any laws, I was nervous to be talking to the police.
“As I understand it, our officers found you alone in an abandoned barn with the dead body of Harry Macintyre. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Detective Sims held up a fat finger, telling me to be quiet. I was quiet. “They tell me Mr. Macintyre had been shot with a 9mm automatic pistol.”
“I know, but . . .”
“The pistol in question was also in the barn.”