And if it was Mark—if it was Mark whispering and planning with his friends to do something wrong—then that was something Jennifer wouldn’t be able to think about. Because Mark was Jennifer’s hero. He was her protector. He always stood up for her whenever anyone teased her. If Jennifer found out something bad about him, something really bad, she might push it out of her mind . . . and with her being sick and all, it might come back to her in her hallucinations.
But Mark wouldn’t do anything that bad. Would he?
“I’m kind of off Mark . . .”
I remembered Zoe writing that when we were chatting online.
“He can be kind of arrogant.”
I remembered how shocked I was when she compared him to Jeff Winger.
And that made me think of Jeff . . .
“You think I’m scared of Mark? I’m sick of Mark. Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
Those were Jeff Winger’s words, weren’t they? I remembered he’d said them when he was bullying Jennifer that time—that time I stopped him—that time he and his goons beat me up.
“Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
What did he mean by that?
Now all these thoughts were tumbling through my mind at once. All these things I’d heard but hadn’t really paid attention to, hadn’t really understood.
“Harry Mac knew. He was going to tell the police. They decided to put him in a coffin. Under the tree. By the tarn. Send a warning to the others. Then they would be afraid.”
That’s what Jennifer told me last night.
And I thought she meant Jeff Winger and Ed P. had killed Harry Mac. I had asked her: “Was this Jeff Winger? Jeff and Ed P.? Are they the demons?”
And Jennifer answered: “They would be afraid.”
I heard a noise come out of me, a sort of long, low moan as the breath escaped me.
The person who murdered Harry Mac wasn’t Jeff. The murderer was trying to make Jeff afraid. That’s what she was saying.
“You think I’m scared of Mark? I’m sick of Mark. Mark’s pushed me just as far as I’m gonna go.”
The jumbled ideas in my mind started to untangle themselves. I thought: What if Jeff and Harry Mac and Ed P. knew something bad about Mark Sales? What if Mark had threatened Jeff, trying to get him to keep quiet . . . ?
But then Mark found out that Harry Mac was acting as a police informer . . . So Mark killed Harry Mac to silence him—and to make sure Jeff and Ed P. really would be afraid of him from then on.
All right, all right, it sounded insane even to me. And it was all coming together so fast in my mind, I couldn’t really lay it out logically. But I understood—I was beginning to understand—how the things Jennifer saw might be hallucinations and sort of visions at the same time . . .
And how it all might have something to do with Mark . . .
That was when the police showed up.
I could hear the knock at the door from all the way upstairs. There was something about that knock—I recognized it immediately. Most people rang the rectory doorbell, and even when they knocked, they didn’t knock like that. I knew from the pounding, urgent sound of it that it had to be the police.
I jumped out of bed. Rushed to the window. Opened it. Stuck my head out into the bright, cold morning. I could just see around the edge of the house, and sure enough, the tail end of a police cruiser was visible, parked at the curb.
I pulled my head in. I swallowed hard. I tried to think. What should I do? What should I do?
Jennifer must have told them what happened at the hospital. She probably tried to keep it a secret but was too confused to hold out for long. So now they were going to take me back to the police station, question me, maybe arrest me.
And meanwhile, something terrible was coming. “So many dead.” Today. Any minute. It was all real.
I heard the knock at the door again.
I heard my mother sing out, “Coming! Coming!”
I rushed to the dresser. Started pulling out clothes and stuffing myself into them just as fast as I could.
I had just got my sneakers on when I heard my mother calling, “Sam! Could you come down here for a minute, please?”
I froze. Just stood there in the middle of the room. All these thoughts were racing through my head and I just couldn’t figure out what to do. Detective Sims told my father that if he saw me again, he was going to arrest me for being part of Jeff Winger’s gang. Would he believe me if I explained to him about Jennifer’s “vision”? If I told him my suspicions about Mark Sales, would he investigate?
I thought about Detective Sims. His round, snowman’s face, his unwavering quirky smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. I seriously didn’t think he would believe a single word I said.
I didn’t think anyone would. Not without proof. Not fast enough. Not in time.
Jennifer wasn’t having visions. Her hallucinations were telling her what she knew but didn’t want to know. Her brother had murdered Harry Mac. Her brother was planning something terrible that he was going to do today. Nobody knew or understood any of this except for me.
No one could stop it—except for me.
“Sam!” my mother called from downstairs. “Sam, do you hear me? Could you come down here, please? Detective Sims is here and he wants to speak with you right now.”
I still didn’t answer. It would probably be only a few more seconds before she—or my dad or my brother—came to get me.
So I grabbed my jacket and raced to the window.
The rainspout. There I was again, wrapped around it, shimmying down. Down to the grass alley beside my house. No point trying to get out the front way—not with the police parked right there. So I took off for the back, climbed over the fence, and was in the backyard of my dad’s church.
Then I kept going, past the church, to the road.
I was on the run again.
25
The Shed
It was not a long way to Jennifer’s house, even on foot, but it seemed to take forever. I ran—and at every step I expected to hear someone shout my name or to hear a siren sound as a policeman spotted me and chased after me in his cruiser. I cut past houses, through backyards, trying to stay off the roads and out of sight as much as possible. But even so, I worried that the word was out, that everyone in Sawnee knew I was a hunted kid, that anyone might look out his kitchen window and see me and call the cops.
It didn’t happen. After ten minutes spent dodging between houses, I tumbled out of a backyard into a driveway and stepped onto the sidewalk of Arthur Street, where Jennifer lived.
It was a quiet lane of houses: two-story clapboards, most of them. Each with a porch out front. Each with a small square of lawn. There were no garages, so the cars were parked end to end on both sides of the street. A woman went past, walking her poodle. After that, it was quiet, empty.
Jennifer’s house was right in the middle of the block. A two-story clapboard with a porch like the others. When I came out onto the sidewalk, I was directly across the street from it. What I needed to do was slip alongside the house into the backyard. That’s where the shed would be. That was where Jennifer said she saw the “demons” meeting, where she overheard them discussing their plans. I had to get to it, and get into it, without anyone seeing me.
I came off the sidewalk, stepping between two parked cars, a minivan and a little Honda. I braced myself, gathering the courage to cross the street and make my run around the side of the Saleses’ house.
I was just about to take the first step when the Saleses’ front door opened. I caught my breath and froze, staring.
Mark pushed out of the house into the morning.
I jumped back quickly. Ducked behind the minivan. I knew if anyone saw me hiding there, it would look pretty strange, but I didn’t know what else to do. The good thing was: from that position, I could peek through the van windows and watch Mark across the street.
He came out onto the porch and stood t
here looking around. He was dressed in the school’s blue-and-orange tracksuit, long pants and hooded jersey, the hood pulled down behind him. He was carrying two large, heavy-looking duffel bags, the handle of one in each hand.
“They had bags. They opened the bags. The guns were in them.”
Jennifer’s words came back to me and I couldn’t help it: I shuddered, looking at Mark’s duffel bags. Was it possible—could it be possible—there were guns inside?
“I heard them whisper, ‘We are the angels of death.’ ”
Even I didn’t really believe it.
A second later a car came down the street and stopped in front of the house. It was an old car, really old, like from the eighties or something. Really flashy. Jet black with yellow racing stripes and fins like it was some kind of rocket. You could hear the muffler sputtering as the engine idled.
I’d never noticed the car around town before, but I recognized the driver sure enough: it was Mark’s track buddy, Nathan Deutsch.
When the car arrived, Mark came toward it, carrying the duffel bags down the porch steps. As he approached, Justin Philips got out of the front passenger seat. Justin walked around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. Mark followed him. He tossed the duffel bags into the trunk, first one, then the other.
Justin shut the trunk and got in the backseat of the car. Mark slipped into the front seat, next to Nathan. A moment later, with a rattling roar, Nathan put the car in gear and the three of them drove off.
I breathed easier as I came out from behind the minivan. They hadn’t seen me. What’s more, looking up, I could see Mrs. Sales in the house, moving past an upstairs window on the left side. If I hurried down the right side of the house, she’d be unlikely to spot me.
I didn’t wait any longer. I took off.
The space between the Saleses’ house and the house next door was narrow. I went down it as fast as I could. Then I was in the backyard, a rectangle of sparse lawn. The only things back there were a couple of old garden chairs and the shed. It was a fairly big structure, taller than me and long enough to fit, say, a small car inside. It had double doors. They were held shut by a padlock.
Of course, the padlock wouldn’t stop me. I was a trained thief, remember? I had the Buster in the pocket of my jacket, and I knew how to use it. I had spent a whole hour once with Ed P. schooling me on how to pick a padlock.
With a quick glance up at the Saleses’ house to make sure Mrs. Sales wasn’t looking out the back window, I ran to the shed and went to work. A real thief like Jeff Winger or one of his buddies would’ve probably had the lock open in five seconds. It took me almost half a minute before I got it to click. But then, I was nervous—really nervous—and that slowed me down. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure Mrs. Sales didn’t see me from the house.
When the lock dropped to the ground, I opened the shed door and slipped inside. I closed the door quickly, breathing a sigh of relief that I was out of sight. I brought my flashlight out of my pocket. I turned it on and panned the beam over the shed walls.
“O-o-oh,” I said—a low groan coming out of me.
“They write evil symbols on the walls.”
Boy, they sure did. The walls were covered with pictures and words just like the ones in the barn where I’d found Harry Mac. Only these were worse, uglier, meaner, sicker. And they covered every inch of the walls too, so it was like some kind of evil wallpaper. The scariest part was this huge picture of the devil’s face, painted so that the eyes looked like they were on fire and the teeth were dripping blood. When the flashlight touched it, the thing almost seemed to come alive. The whole time I was in the shed, I felt that devil watching me—and it only added to my sense of gathering disaster.
I forced myself to look away from the walls and to pass the flashlight beam over the rest of the room. I saw a small window on one wall. It was dirty, but you could see through it. I imagined that’s where Jennifer had posted herself as she’d spied on her brother and Nathan and Justin gathered here in the night.
There wasn’t much else. The top of a round table sat in the center of the dirt floor—just the top; the legs had been sawed off. There were several half-burned candles on the table. And there were some cushions positioned around the edge of it—I guess so people would have a place to sit. Then, against the back wall, there were two storage boxes, their lids held shut with padlocks.
I knew what I had to do.
I propped the flashlight on one of the cushions so the beam would point at the padlock while I worked. I was really nervous now, thinking about what would happen if I got caught in here—especially if Mark came back and found me. The image of Harry Mac dead in that crate was still very fresh in my mind. I could feel the devil on the wall watching me from the shed shadows. I could almost hear him chuckling at my fear.
Anyway, the point is, I was basically freaked. My hands were shaking really badly. I had to wipe the sweat off them twice before I could get a good solid grip on the Buster. But I finally got the padlock open. Then I lifted the lid. Grabbed the flashlight. Shone it inside the box.
Empty.
Which wasn’t as reassuring as you might think, because I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the stuff that had been in the storage box was now in the duffel bags Mark had been carrying.
“They had bags. They opened the bags. The guns were in them.”
I re-padlocked the one storage box and then moved over to the other. Hard to work the Buster with the sweat pouring down my forehead into my eyes, but I did it. I opened the lid and grabbed the flashlight and looked in and thought: Empty, just like the other one.
But then I thought: Wait a minute. No, it’s not.
Lying in one corner of the box was a small notebook. It was one of those old-style ones with a binding and hard cover that’s sort of marbleized black and white. The cover worked like camouflage so that at first I didn’t notice the book lying there. Only as I was getting ready to shut the lid again—only as I was turning away—did the flashlight’s beam touch on the cover and give the notebook’s presence away.
The minute I saw it, I felt my breath go short. I knew there’d be important stuff inside. I reached down and took the notebook out of the box. I set it on the dirt floor. I dragged my sleeves across my face to wipe the sweat off. Then, holding the flashlight on the notebook with one hand, I flipped it open with the other.
The notebook’s pages were covered with writing and scribbles and doodles and drawings—sort of like the ones on the wall, except with more words in between the pictures. I turned the pages, squinting at the horrible images, reading the words as quickly as I could. It was all crazy, violent, nasty stuff—a lot of it too awful to quote. But my eyes picked out some sentences and phrases:
The little people have to learn to fear.
Worship me, worship me, worship me.
I kept turning the pages, kept reading.
The conspiracies against us will be paid for with death.
We are champions. We were cheated.
Death is my power, and through death my power will increase.
The words rose and twisted and curled around the pages like wisps of smoke. Filling the spaces in between the words were the drawings of snakes and skulls and demons and so on. And that was just the stuff I can tell you about. I wondered if Jennifer had been able to see any of this as she spied from the window. I wondered if these images had gotten into her head and become part of her hallucinations.
I continued to turn the pages—and then I stopped.
I had come to a page where there were no words at all. Just a very carefully drawn picture. It was a picture of a coffin. There was a man inside it. He was tied up and gagged. I knew it was supposed to be Harry Mac.
So they had planned the whole thing right here. And Jennifer had watched through the window. And even though she couldn’t bear the thought that her brother was evil, the idea had worked its way into her schizophrenic hallucinations.
Then she had desc
ribed the hallucinations to me, and I had run to the scene she described. I must’ve gotten there just at the wrong time. Mark and Nathan and Justin must have hidden while I came into the barn, while I discovered Harry Mac tied up in the box. Then I guess they had the bright idea that they could not only kill Harry Mac, they could frame me for the crime. And they would have gotten away with it too, if my dad wasn’t smarter than they were, and smarter than Detective Sims.
I swallowed down something sour in my mouth and started turning the notebook pages faster.
More words. More images.
We have to do something really spectacular to make them acknowledge our superiority.
The die is cast.
We are the real champions!
Death is my power.
There’s no turning back.
Now there were pictures of guns. Not hunting rifles or pistols. Machine guns like they use in wars. And hand grenades. And not just pictures. Lists of them: AK-47, M-6, Glock 9mm . . .
When we are done with this town, there will be nothing left but death and fear.
Finally, I came to the last page of the notebook. What I saw there was more horrible than anything. More horrible than pictures of skulls and demons and whatever filth had somehow polluted the mind of Mark Sales.
Because here there was a series of diagrams. Notes. A plan. It took me a couple of seconds before I figured out what it all meant, but then it became clear.
Mark and his friends had created a death trap.
The diagrams showed Sawnee Stadium. I caught my breath when I recognized it. The Empire and Cole meet—the big track meet—was today, this morning. After the whole crazy night with Jennifer at the mental hospital, and the police coming in the morning, I had forgotten all about it. But I sure enough remembered now. I remembered Justin saying how Empire and Cole needed to be taught a lesson. I remembered the team’s bitterness at feeling they’d been cheated out of the championship. I remembered Mark saying, “Come the big meet, we have to show them all who we are.”
The diagrams detailed the whole plan. The road leading in through the trees. The parking lot outside. There were even scribbled figures meant to represent the crowds that showed up there for sporting events. There were labels under each drawing—“people”; “car”; “concession”—and there were arrows to show which way traffic moved, which way the people moved. It was all very detailed.