Authors: R.L. Stine - (ebook by Undead)
Sam stepped quickly over the fallen tree. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?”
Louisa and Nat followed close behind him.
“We—we’re going back to the cottage,” I told them. “It’s late, and—”
“Did you kill the ghost?” Nat demanded. His eyes peered up at me hopefully.
I patted his hair. It felt real. His head was warm. He didn’t feel ghostlike
at all. He was a real little boy.
Harrison Sadler is a total liar, I thought.
“Did you kill the old ghost?” Nat repeated eagerly.
“No. We couldn’t,” I told him. Nat let out a disappointed sigh.
“Then how did you get away?” Sam demanded suspiciously.
“We ran away,” Terri told him.
It was almost the truth.
“Where
were
you guys?” I demanded.
“Yeah. You didn’t do a very good job of distracting him,” Terri added
sharply.
“We—we tried to warn you,” Louisa replied, tugging nervously at a strand of
long, auburn hair. “Then we got scared. We ran into the woods and hid.”
“When we didn’t hear the rocks fall, we got even more scared,” Sam added. “We
were afraid the ghost got you. We were afraid we would never see you again.”
Nat uttered a frightened sob and took Louisa’s hand. “We have to kill the
ghost,” the little guy whimpered. “We have to.”
Sam and Louisa tried to comfort their little brother. I gazed down at the two
fresh graves. A cool wind made the trees whisper and shake.
I started to ask Sam about the two graves. But he spoke before I had a
chance. “Let’s try again,” he said, staring hard at Terri then me with pleading
eyes.
Louisa rested her hands on Nat’s tiny shoulders. “Yes,” she agreed softly.
“Let’s go back and try again.”
“No way!” I cried. “Terri and I got away from there once. I’m not going back
and—”
“But it’s the perfect time!” Louisa insisted. “He’ll never expect you to come
back tonight. We’ll catch him completely offguard. It will be a total surprise.”
“Please!” Nat begged in a tiny voice.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I couldn’t believe they were asking
us to do this.
Terri and I had risked our lives by climbing up there. We could have been
killed by that lying old ghost. We could look like that horrible dog skeleton
right now.
And here they were, asking us to climb right back up there and try again.
It was a ridiculous idea. No way I would agree to it. No way!
“Okay,” I heard my sister say. “We’ll do it.” Louisa and her brothers burst
into happy cheers. Terri had done it to me again.
Terri led the way to the beach. I scrambled to catch up with her. The three
Sadlers, talking excitedly among themselves, trailed behind.
The night suddenly seemed darker, as if someone had dimmed the lights. I
raised my eyes, searching for the full moon. But it had disappeared behind heavy
clouds.
I felt a large raindrop on my shoulder, then another on the top of my head.
The wind picked up as we neared the ocean.
“Are you totally crazy?” I whispered to my sister as we made our way over the
pebbly sand toward the cave. “How could you agree to do this?”
“We have to solve the mystery,” Terri replied, glancing up at the cave. It
sat darkly above the rocks. No flickering light. No sign of the old ghost.
“This isn’t one of your dumb mystery books,” I told her angrily. “This is real life. We could be in terrible danger.”
“We already are,” she replied mysteriously. She said something else, but the
strong wind off the ocean carried her words away.
The raindrops started to come down faster. Large, heavy drops.
“Stop, Terri,” I demanded. “Let’s turn back. Let’s tell the kids we changed
our minds.”
She shook her head.
“Let’s at least go back to the cottage and tell Agatha and Brad,” I pleaded.
“We can trap the ghost tomorrow. During the day, maybe…”
Terri kept walking. She picked up the pace. “We have to solve the mystery,
Jerry,” she said again. “Those two fresh graves—they really scared me. I have
to find out the truth.”
“But, Terri—the truth is, we might get killed!” I cried.
She didn’t seem to hear me. I brushed raindrops from my eyebrows. The gusting
winds were swirling the rain around us. The rain pattered against the rocks,
sounding like sharp drumbeats.
We stopped at the bottom of the rocks. Up above, the cave stood over us,
still completely dark.
“We’ll wait down here,” Sam said. His eyes kept darting up to the cave. I
could tell he was really frightened. “This time we’ll do a better job of distracting the ghost if he
comes out.”
“He better not come out,” I muttered, lowering my head against the falling
rain.
A jagged bolt of white lightning crackled across the sky.
I shivered.
“Come up with us,” Terri told the three of them. “You can’t help us way down
here.”
They hung back. I could see the fear on their faces.
“Come up to the cave entrance,” Terri urged. “You can always run down the
rocks if the ghost appears.”
Louisa shook her head. “We’re too afraid,” she confessed.
“We need your help,” Terri insisted. “We don’t want the ghost to know we’re
on top of the cave. Come stand on the ledge in front of the cave. Then—”
“No! He’ll hurt us! He’ll eat us up!” Nat cried.
“Jerry and I can’t go up there again unless you come up to help us,” Terri
insisted firmly.
Louisa and Sam exchanged frightened glances. Nat clung to Louisa, trembling.
The rain swept down harder.
Finally Sam nodded. “Okay. We’ll wait for you at the cave mouth.”
“We don’t mean to be so frightened,” Louisa added. “It’s just that we’ve been afraid of him our whole lives. He—he—”
Her voice trailed off.
We turned and started our climb. It was much harder this time. It was so much
darker without the moon. Rain kept blowing into my eyes. And the rocks were
slippery and wet.
I stumbled twice, fell forward, scraping my knees and elbows. The wet rocks
kept sliding under my sneakers, rolling down toward the beach.
Another jagged bolt of lightning stretched across the sky, making the cave
glow white above us.
We stopped at the ledge in front of the dark cave mouth. My entire body
trembled. From the rain. From the cold. From fear.
“Let’s just warm up inside for a moment,” Terri suggested.
The three Sadlers clung together. “No, we can’t. We’re too scared,” Louisa
replied.
“Just for a second,” Terri insisted. “Just to wipe the rain from our eyes.
Look—it’s coming down in sheets.”
She practically shoved Louisa and her brothers into the cave. Nat began to
cry. He held on tightly to his sister.
A roar of thunder made us all jump.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever done, I thought, shivering.
I will never forgive Terri for this. Never.
And then a yellow light flared in front of us at the mouth of the cave.
And under the yellow light, the old ghost flickered into view. He carried a
flaming torch in one hand. A strange smile played over his pale face.
“Well, well,” he uttered in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the
rain. “Here we all are.”
“Nooo!” Nat let out a terrified wail and tried to bury his head in his
sister’s wet T-shirt. Sam and Louisa froze like statues. The flickering light of
the torch revealed expressions of horror on their faces.
Harrison Sadler stood in the cave entrance blocking our escape. His dark,
sunken eyes peered from one of us to the next.
Behind him, the rain crashed down, glowing eerily from flashes of bright
lightning.
He turned his attention to Terri and me. “You brought the ghosts to me,” he
said.
“
You’re
the ghost!” Sam cried.
Nat wailed, his arms wrapped tightly around Louisa’s waist.
“You have terrified people long enough,” the old man told the three trembling
kids. “More than three hundred years. It is time for you to leave this place.
Time for you to rest.”
“He’s crazy!” Louisa cried to me. “Don’t listen to him!”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Sam added with emotion. “Look at him! Look at his
eyes! Look where he lives—all alone in this dark cave! He’s the
three-hundred-year-old ghost. And he’s lying to you!”
“Don’t hurt us!” Nat wailed, clinging to Louisa. “Please don’t hurt us!”
The rain suddenly slowed. Water splattered off the rocks outside and dripped
steadily from the top of the cave. Thunder rumbled, but in the distance. The
storm was moving out to sea.
I turned and caught the strangest expression on my sister’s face. To my
surprise, Terri was actually smiling.
She caught me staring at her. “The solution,” she whispered.
And I suddenly realized why she had agreed to come back to this frightening
cave, to face the frightening old man again.
Terri wanted to solve the mystery. She
needed
to solve it.
Who was the ghost?
Was it Harrison Sadler? Or was Harrison telling us the truth? Were our three
friends the ghosts?
My sister is really crazy, I thought, shaking my head. She risked our lives
because she had to solve the mystery.
“Let us go,” Sam told the old man, breaking into my thoughts. “Let us go, and
we won’t tell anyone we saw the ghost.”
The torchlight dipped low as a strong gust of wind invaded the cave.
Harrison’s eyes seemed to grow darker. “I’ve waited too long to get you here,”
he said quietly.
Louisa suddenly reached out to Terri. “Help us!” she cried. “You believe us—don’t you?”
“You know we’re alive, not ghosts,” Sam said to me. “Help us get away from
him. He’s evil, Jerry. We’ve seen his evil our whole lives.”
I turned from Harrison to the three kids.
Who was telling the truth? Who was alive? And who had been dead for over
three hundred years?
Harrison’s face hovered darkly in the dipping, waving torchlight. He pushed
his long, stringy hair off his forehead with his free hand. And then he startled
us all by puckering his dry lips and letting out a long, high-pitched whistle.
My heart skipped a beat. I gasped. What was he doing? Why was he making that
shrill sound?
He stopped. Then whistled again.
I heard the scraping of footsteps, rapid footsteps on the stone cave floor.
And then a low, dark figure came loping toward us out of the darkness.
A monster! I thought.
A ghost monster.
It uttered low, menacing growls as it neared. Its head bobbed low, and two
red eyes flared as the creature bounded into the light of the flaming torch.
“Oh!” I cried out as I saw that it was a dog. A long, lean German shepherd.
The dog stopped a few feet in front of us. When it saw Harrison, it bared its
teeth. Its growl became a ferocious snarl.
Dogs can recognize ghosts,
I remembered.
Dogs can recognize ghosts.
The dog’s red eyes caught the light of the torch as it turned to Louisa and
her two brothers.
It reared back on its hind legs—and began to howl and bark.
“They’re the ghosts!” Harrison Sadler cried triumphantly to Terri and me,
pointing.
Snarling, the big dog leaped at Sam.
With a cry of fright, Sam raised both arms to shield himself.
The three kids edged deeper into the cave.
The dog barked fiercely, baring its jagged teeth.
“You—you really are ghosts?” I cried out.
Louisa let out a pained sigh. “We never had a chance to live!” she cried.
“The first winter—it was so horrible!” Tears rolled down her cheeks. I saw
that Nat was crying, too.
The dog continued to snarl and rage. The three kids backed farther into the
dark chamber.
“We sailed here with our parents to start a new life,” Sam explained in a
trembling voice. “But we all died in the cold. It wasn’t fair! It just wasn’t
fair!”
The rain started up again. The wind blew sheets of water into the cave
entrance. The torch flame dipped and nearly blew out.
“We never had a life at all!” Louisa cried.
Thunder roared. The cave seemed to shake. The dog growled and snarled.
And as I stared at the three kids in the wavering light, they began to
change.
Their hair dropped off first. It fell in clumps to the cave floor.
And then their skin peeled away, curling up and falling off—until three
grinning skulls stared at Terri and me through empty eye sockets.
“Come stay with us,
cousins
!” Louisa’s skull whispered. Her bony
fingers reached out toward us.
“Join usssss!” Sam hissed. His fleshless jaw slid up and down. “We dug such
nice graves for you. So close to ours.”
“Play with me,” Nat’s skull pleaded. “Stay and play with me. I don’t want you
to go.
Ever
!”
The three ghosts moved toward us, their skeleton hands outstretched,
reaching, reaching for Terri and me.
I gasped and stumbled back.
I saw a frightened Harrison stagger back, too.
And then the torch blew out.
The torchlight flickered and died.
The heavy darkness made me gasp.
I could feel bodies moving, scraping over the wet stone cave floor.
I could hear the whispered pleas of the three ghosts.
Closer. Closer.
And then a cold hand gripped mine.
I screamed before I heard her whispered voice: “Jerry—run!”
Terri!
Before I could catch my breath, my sister was pulling me through the
darkness.
Into the rain. Onto the slippery rock ledge.
“Run! Run!” Terri cried, her eyes wild, her cold hand still gripping mine.
“Run! Run!”
The word became a desperate chant.