An Author's Odyssey

  “I’m coming with you,” Bree said.

  “You can’t, it’s too dangerous,” Conner said.

  “Conner, I know you’re used to being the hero of your own stories, but this is mine,” Bree said. “I know this cemetery like the back of my hand. Besides, we only have twenty minutes until midnight—we have to get everyone out of here before then!”

  “What happens at midnight?” Red asked.

  Bree looked frightened. “The characters come out,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with you writers?” Red yelled. “If you wrote instruction manuals, we wouldn’t have this problem!”

  Goldilocks moaned again and squeezed Jack’s hand. They didn’t have much time before the baby arrived. Conner and Bree ran into the cemetery and searched through the mausoleums one by one.

  The Masked Man had taken Emmerich and Charlotte deep into the cemetery and forced them inside a mausoleum with stained glass windows and a statue of a fallen angel on the roof. He and his son sat on the casket inside as Charlotte prepared the equipment for the blood transfusion. The Masked Man kept a watchful eye on the nurse and a steady grip on his revolver as she worked.

  To keep up appearances, Charlotte drew blood from Emmerich and let it fill a small bag. Emmerich watched the blood drain from his body as if it were sand pouring out of his personal hourglass.

  “If you see my mom, please tell her I love her.” The little boy sniffled.

  “You can tell her yourself—I promise,” Charlotte whispered, and winked at the young boy.

  Next, the nurse prepared the Masked Man’s IV. She made it as unpleasant for him as possible. She forcefully straightened his broken arm and stuck him with the dullest needle she had.

  “Easy!” he barked.

  Charlotte pulled a small vial out of her pocket and filled a syringe with its clear liquid. She started injecting the solution into the Masked Man’s IV but he became suspicious and stopped her.

  “What is that?” the Masked Man snarled.

  “It’s just saline,” Charlotte said. “It’s to prevent infection.”

  “I don’t want you putting anything inside my veins except the child’s blood.”

  “I can’t put his blood into your system until the area is sterilized,” Charlotte said. “If you don’t want me to do my job correctly, then there was no point in leaving the fairy-tale world.”

  The Masked Man glared at her, held his revolver a little tighter, and allowed her to proceed. Charlotte injected the solution into his arm and watched him closely. The Masked Man suddenly felt very tired. His eyelids became heavy and the small mausoleum started spinning around him—he had been tricked! Charlotte hadn’t injected him with saline but with a sedative!

  “YOU WENCH!” the Masked Man yelled, and raised his revolver.

  Charlotte twisted his broken arm and the Masked Man shrieked in agony. He dropped the gun and scrambled to the floor to retrieve it. Charlotte threw the IV pole at the stained glass window and it shattered. She and Emmerich quickly crawled through it just as the Masked Man got his gun. He shot at them, but the sedative made him a lousy shot and he missed. The bullet ricocheted off the mausoleum’s stone wall and hit the side of his right leg. He screamed in pain.

  Conner and Bree were searching the mausoleums nearby when they heard the sounds of broken glass, gunfire, and screaming.

  “Mom!” Conner gasped.

  “Emmerich!” Bree said.

  They ran toward the sounds, praying nothing had happened to either of them. A dark and foggy graveyard was scary by itself, but knowing a dangerous man was lurking nearby with a gun made Conner and Bree feel like they were in a real-life horror movie. They jumped at every statue they saw, afraid it was the Masked Man looming through the fog. Luckily, they ran into Charlotte first.

  “Mom!” Conner said. “Thank God you’re okay! Where’s Emmerich?”

  Charlotte’s eyes darted around the cemetery. “He was right beside me a moment ago,” she said. “We escaped from your uncle but got separated in the fog.”

  Another scream echoed through the cemetery, but this time it was coming from Goldilocks.

  “Mom, you have to go and help her,” Conner said. “Bree and I will find Emmerich.”

  From the look in her eyes, Conner knew leaving him and Bree alone was the last thing his mother wanted to do.

  “We’ll be fine,” Conner said. “Right now, Goldilocks needs you!”

  Charlotte was torn between her obligations as a mother and her duties as a nurse. But she had to remind herself she wasn’t the mother of a normal child—she knew Conner was more than capable of taking care of himself. He had proven it time and time again.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” Charlotte said. “Be safe.”

  She hugged her son and kissed him on the cheek. Then Charlotte followed Goldilocks’s moans to the front of the graveyard and prepared to deliver the child.

  Conner and Bree hurried in the opposite direction, looking for their friend.

  “Emmerich!” Bree whispered. “Where are you?”

  They found Emmerich crouching behind a tombstone. He was trembling and looking around with large, frightened eyes. The fog was the thickest in this part of the cemetery, and he hadn’t been able to tell who Bree and Conner were until they were just a few feet away from him.

  “There you are!” Bree said.

  “Conner! Bree!” Emmerich cried with relief. “Where’s Charlotte?”

  “She went back to help Goldilocks,” Conner said. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  “NOT SO FAST!” shouted a voice behind them.

  Conner and Bree slowly turned around and saw the Masked Man creeping toward them. He was in the worst shape of his life: His limp was much worse now that he had a sprained ankle and a bullet wound on the same leg. His clothes were covered in blood, and the sedative had made the bags under his eyes droopier than usual. He was fighting the medication off with all his remaining strength.

  “The boy is coming with me!” the Masked Man yelled.

  Conner stood between his uncle and Emmerich.

  “No one is going anywhere with you!” he said.

  “Stupid boy!” the Masked Man said. “Get out of my way or I’ll shoot!”

  “Go ahead!” Conner said. “You’ll never be satisfied no matter how many people you kill and no matter how powerful you become! And if I can’t stop you, my sister will! Good luck facing her once she finds out you killed me!”

  The Masked Man ignored Conner and pointed his gun at his nephew’s head. “Give my regards to your father.”

  Just as he was about to press his finger against the trigger, they were all startled by a loud scraping sound. The lids of three stone caskets nearby were pushed open, and the corpses inside suddenly stood up from their graves.

  “What’s going on?” Conner whispered to Bree.

  She glanced down at her watch. “It’s midnight,” she said. “All the bodies in the cemetery come back to life for a few minutes every night to stretch their legs and visit with each other. It’s supposed to be a morbid representation of what break time is like in a public high school!”

  All three corpses were women, and although in Bree’s story they were less decomposed than they would have been in real life, each had obviously been dead for a long while. Their skin was so pale, it was a shade of blue, there were dark circles under their eyes, and parts of their bones stuck out from their skin.

  The women wore very specific clothing from different eras in history. The first woman wore early-fifteenth-century armor, and her skin was partially burned. The second woman wore a dress with wide sleeves, a necklace with the letter B, and a headband with a long veil. The third woman wore an enormous ball gown and lots of jewelry and had a towering white wig. The two women in dresses also had stitches around their necks, as if their heads had been detached from their bodies and then sewn back on.

  “Who are they?” Conner asked. “Why do they look so familiar?”

>   “This area of the cemetery is called ‘Wronged Women Row,’” Bree said. “These are the women I thought had unfair deaths in history. That’s Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, and Marie-Antoinette.”

  The historical figures stretched and yawned as they came back to life. It was like they were waking from a long nap rather than coming back from the dead.

  “I just adore our nightly stretches,” Joan of Arc said. “Don’t you, Anne?”

  “It certainly gives us something to live for.” Anne Boleyn giggled.

  “You know what I always say,” Marie-Antoinette said. “Death is what you make of it. Just like everything else, it’s all in the execution!”

  The corpses laughed wildly among themselves. Apparently nothing tickled them more than jokes about their mortality. The women turned to a fourth casket in their row whose occupant hadn’t risen yet.

  “It looks like Bo is sleeping in again,” Joan of Arc said.

  “She’d better wake up and stretch, otherwise she’ll be very stiff tomorrow,” Anne Boleyn said.

  “Oh, Bo, darling?” Marie-Antoinette called to the casket. “It’s midnight, dear! Come out and join us!”

  The lid on the casket slid open and a fourth corpse stood up in her grave. She wore a dainty dress and a bonnet and held a staff. She must have been the most recently departed, because she was far less decomposed than the other corpses were.

  “Sorry, girls, I was counting sheep,” the woman said. “It helps me pass the time between stretches.”

  “What’s your count up to now?” Joan of Arc asked.

  “Twenty-eight million, nine hundred and seventy-four thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three,” the woman said.

  Conner recognized the woman immediately. It caught him completely off guard because he thought he’d never see her again—even in a fictional story.

  “That’s Bo Peep!” Conner whispered to Bree. “You put her in ‘Cemetery of the Undead’?”

  “This must be my second draft,” Bree said. “I was upset by how Bo Peep died, so I added her to the story.”

  As strange as it was to see their deceased acquaintance, it was nothing compared to how Emmerich felt at the sight of his birth mother. He had hundreds of questions he wanted to ask, but he was too afraid to speak.

  Seeing her corpse come to life made the Masked Man feel like he had stepped into a nightmare. He couldn’t tell if she was really there or if she was just a hallucination brought on by the sedative.

  “Bo Peep?” he asked in shock.

  All the undead women turned to the sound of his voice. It was the first time they realized their row had visitors.

  Bo Peep was enraged to see him. “Lloyd!” she yelled.

  The other corpses gasped.

  “Is this the man you were telling us about, Bo?” Joan of Arc asked.

  “Yes, he is,” Bo Peep said. “He’s the one who used me, who tricked me, and who broke my heart! He’s the whole reason I’m in this cemetery! I’d still be alive if it weren’t for him!”

  “And look—he’s not alone,” Anne Boleyn pointed out. “There are three young people with him.”

  “I know them, too,” Bo Peep said. “What are the three of you doing with a man like him?”

  “I promise, it’s not by choice!” Conner said. “He’s holding us hostage!”

  Hearing this angered Bo Peep to no end. She stepped out of her casket and charged toward the Masked Man. He had never been so terrified in his entire life. He aimed his revolver at her, but it didn’t stop her from approaching him.

  “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot!” he warned her.

  “You can’t hurt me anymore,” Bo Peep said.

  She reached toward him with her cold dead hands, and the Masked Man shot at her—using the third and final bullet in the revolver. Bo Peep looked down at the bullet hole in her torso, but it only infuriated her even more.

  “Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice, shame on me!” she said.

  “Get away!” the Masked Man said. “I’m warning you!”

  “Your threats are as empty as your soul!” Bo Peep said.

  The Masked Man hobbled away from her as quickly as his injured leg would allow. He wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, though, and fell right into an empty grave with an unmarked tombstone. He tried to climb out of it, but dozens of decaying hands suddenly stuck up from the dirt below and grabbed hold of him. They pulled on his legs, his arms, and his clothes and pulled him into the ground with them.

  “UNHAND ME AT ONCE, YOU DEMONS!” the Masked Man yelled.

  He screamed and tried to free himself, but there were too many for him to fight. The more he struggled, the more hands appeared. Even after he was completely underground, his screaming could still be heard aboveground, but the sound of his voice became fainter and fainter as he was pulled deeper and deeper into the earth.

  When the noise had finally disappeared completely, an engraving appeared on the tombstone: HERE LIES LLOYD BAILEY—BELOVED BY NONE.

  As much as Conner hated the Masked Man, it was still a terrifying thing to witness. He wondered if his uncle was really gone for good, but when he turned to Bree, he saw she looked just as frazzled as he did. Bree’s story of the undead had taken on a life of its own.

  “Well, that’s all the excitement I can handle for one night,” Joan of Arc said.

  “Time to go back to sleep,” Anne Boleyn said with a yawn.

  “See you tomorrow night, girls,” Marie-Antoinette said. “Same time, same place—for all eternity.”

  The women lay back down in their graves. They pulled the lids over their caskets, tucking themselves in for a good night’s rest. Bo Peep wandered back to her casket, but Bree stopped her before she stepped inside it.

  “Bo?” Bree said. “I’m not sure this is the right thing to do, but if I were you I would want to know. It’s so difficult to say—I guess I’ll just spit it out: Emmerich is your son.”

  Bo Peep stared at the young boy in bewilderment. If she still had a pulse, it would have been racing. If she still needed to breathe, she would have been breathless.

  “You’re my son?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Emmerich said.

  “Hagetta said she would find you a good home. Did she?”

  “She did,” he said. “I have a mother—an adoptive mother, who loves me very much.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Bo Peep said. “Knowing that, I might finally be able to rest instead of counting sheep.”

  Emmerich eyed Lloyd’s grave. “Is my father ever coming back?” he said.

  “Not from where he’s going,” Bo Peep said. “He’ll never harm you or anyone else ever again.”

  Bo Peep removed a small necklace from around her neck and placed it in her son’s hand. Bree and Emmerich remembered her showing it to them while they traveled down the secret path with the royals the year before. It had a thin chain and a small stone heart with a crack across it.

  “Here, something to remember me by,” Bo Peep said. “You seem like a kind child. I’m sorry I didn’t raise you myself, but you were better off with your adoptive mother. I was too young and foolish to be a mother. You didn’t deserve to inherit my mistakes.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Good night, Emmerich,” she said. “I hope we see each other in our dreams.”

  Bo Peep lay back in her casket and pulled the lid over her body. Bree put her arm around Emmerich as he watched her go. Once she was gone, he looked down at the necklace and held it tightly in his hand.

  “Speaking of mothers,” Conner said, “we should probably find my mom and the others.”

  Conner, Bree, and Emmerich hurried to the front of the cemetery to regroup with their friends. The closer they got, the louder and clearer the others’ voices became.

  “Push, Goldilocks!” they heard Charlotte shout. “Push! Push! Push!”

  “ERRRRRRRR!” Goldilocks grunted.

  “You can do it, Goldie!” Jack
encouraged his wife. “You’re almost there!”

  “I can see the head!” Charlotte declared. “Just one more push!”

  “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT?” Red screamed loudest of all. “I AM NEVER HAVING CHILDREN!”

  Soon the sounds of a crying infant echoed through the cemetery. By the time Conner, Bree, and Emmerich found the others, Goldilocks and Jack were the proud parents of a healthy and beautiful baby boy. There wasn’t a dry eye in the bunch.

  Charlotte cleaned the baby off and wrapped him in towels she found in the ambulance. He had his mother’s golden curls, his father’s strong chin, and his aunt Red’s doe-eyed expression.

  “Jack, we’re parents,” Goldilocks said tearfully. “We have a son!”

  “We’re an official family,” Jack said affectionately.

  “We did it!” Red said, and burst into happy tears. “I only wish Charlie was here to see it!”

  Although she had had nothing to do with creating the child, she hugged Jack and Goldilocks as if she were a new parent, too.

  “What are you going to name him?” Conner asked.

  “Hero,” Goldilocks said confidently. “That way, it won’t matter where he’s from, what he becomes, or who his parents are—he’ll always be the hero of his own story.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A SITUATION

  As soon as they stepped through the beam of light and returned to the Otherworld, Charlotte and Jack took Goldilocks and Hero to the Saint Andrew’s emergency room to be examined by a doctor. Conner, Bree, Emmerich, and Red went straight to the multi-purpose room to tell the others what had happened in the “Cemetery of the Undead” and to share the good news of Jack and Goldilocks’s son.

  Conner figured Cornelia must have spread the word about the Masked Man, because everyone in the multi-purpose room had a long, somber face and seemed worried sick. Even the Blissworm’s smile wasn’t as pronounced as it usually was. Bree and Emmerich were a little overwhelmed by all the people they didn’t know but could have sworn they recognized.

  “Conner!” Bob shouted. “Are you all right? Where’s your mother?”