Silence rushed in like creek water filling my shoes. I checked the clock on the nightstand. 10:45. Marty and I had agreed to meet at the back door at eleven. I didn’t want to be too late because I halfway suspected Marty might traipse off after the dog without me.
“Try and get some sleep,” I said at last.
“Okay.” Alex pulled the covers up around him. “Good night.”
I waited for another twenty minutes or so, until I heard Alex breathing slow and steady. Asleep at last! I pushed the covers off of me—quietly—and stepped out of bed. I had made a point to wear normal clothes to bed instead of pajamas, so I didn’t need to worry about changing clothes. Barefoot, I tiptoed across the room to the door.
“Where are you going?” Alex asked groggily.
I winced. He was still awake, and now I’d been caught.
“Just going to the bathroom and getting a drink of water,” I said.
He didn’t answer. I figured he had drifted back to dreamland. I released a breath and opened the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak.
Marty’s door was open, and his room was dark and quiet. At first. I thought he was in bed sleeping, too, but I realized the shape beneath the blanket was just pillows. The oldest trick in the book, but I wished I’d thought of it. If Alex woke up and found me missing, he’d cause trouble. Too late now. I couldn’t risk sneaking back into the bedroom without waking him. I’d have to take my chances.
Marty waited by the back door. He was dressed and ready to go, and he handed me my still-damp shoes as I joined him.
“What took you so long?” he asked.
“Alex,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Why don’t you want him to come?”
I shook my head. “He’s just a kid. He’d get too scared.”
“He did fine today. A lot of kids would have been a lot more scared than he was. Maybe he’s braver than you think.”
“Trust me,” I said. “Just when you think he’ll be all right, he gets frightened and all bets are off. He does okay in the daylight, but I don’t want to know how he’d be in the dark.”
“If you say so.” Marty held up a pair of flashlights. He shook them, and the batteries rattled inside the plastic casing. He tested both of them, aiming the beams at the floor as he flipped the switches on and off a couple of times. He handed me one. “Don’t use these close to the house unless you really need to. I don’t want to risk our folks seeing the light.”
Luckily, the moonlight was bright enough we didn’t need the flashlights. We hid a few yards away from the mysterious hole where I’d glimpsed the dog the night before.
We waited.
The air was cool and damp, and a light low-hanging mist oozed between the trees. The mist, Marty promised, would only deepen as the night wore on, growing as thick as pea soup by early morning until the sun burned the fog away.
I noticed several odd zig-zagging lines trailing across the forest floor, up and down the fence posts, and across the yard. The trails glistened.
“What is that?”
“Haven’t you ever seen a slug trail before?”
“A slug trail? You mean that’s slime where a slug crawled?”
“Pretty disgusting, huh? They come out at night to feed with their tongues—all covered in teeth and slimy.” Marty stuck his tongue out and wagged it back and forth, laughing. “Sometimes they get in the house. Once, I was getting dressed and found a slug waiting in my shoe! Squished it right between my toes.”
Great. Another creepy crawly to worry about out in the woods. Tarantulas. Scorpions. Chiggers. Slugs. What’s next?
We sat in the woods for at least a couple of hours, but the dog didn’t return. My legs started to cramp, and I shifted uncomfortably. I yawned, long and loud.
“Figures,” I muttered. “It’s not going to show up here again.”
“Worth a shot, I reckon.” Marty looked off into the trees. “Dogs have more powerful senses of smell than humans. They can detect smells we don’t even know exist. He might have smelled us.”
“Might have smelled you.” I gave him a shove.
“You ate more beans at supper than I did!” He pushed me back.
Our laughter raced off into the night, echoing through the darkness and bouncing through the hills. I hoped we weren’t being too loud. I didn’t want to wake our parents or Alex. Looking back at the house, though, I didn’t see any lights flaring to life.
“Whether he smelled us or not,” I said, “he sure heard us. Sound really carries out here.”
“Whatever it was, we’ll probably never find it again.” Marty shook his head. “There are miles and miles of forest out here. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
We were about to give up and pack it in when the mournful whistle of the train cried out in the night, rising up like the cry of a sad ghost and fading into nothing.
“Where’s the train coming from?”
“Crooked Hills used to be a rail town, but that dried up before I was even born. Now the train doesn’t even slow down when it passes through. Still comes through twice a day, once around midday and once in the middle of the night.”
In the following silence, another sound answered the train.
The dog’s howl.
It was off in the distance, and the echo made it sound like it came from all directions at once, bouncing through the trees.
“You hear that, right?” I asked my cousin. “I’m not imagining it, am I?”
“I hear it.” Marty stood up and cocked his head, trying to detect the source of the sound. “Sounds like it’s trying to talk back to the train whistle.”
“Just like last night,” I said.
The howl faded.
“You know what this means?” Marty’s face brightened as an idea crossed his mind, and I knew what he was thinking before he spoke the words. “If it always answers the train whistle, we can track its howl. We might be able to find it.”
“No way.” I shook my head. “We couldn’t possibly pinpoint the sound.”
“You never know. With a little luck, we might be able to—” He snapped his fingers. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I know one of the best trackers in the state!”
“You do?” I asked. “Who?”
“You already met her.”
“Lisa?” I asked.
“You bet. She knows these woods even better than I do, and she’s a natural tracker—part bloodhound.”
“You think she’d help us?”
“Sure she would. She’d see it as a challenge. And besides—” Marty winked. “—I think she likes you.”
“No, she doesn’t!” I raised my voice a little too much, and the words resounded through the darkness.
“Okay, okay,” Marty said. “You’re probably right. She probably doesn’t like you at all. Heck, she hardly knows you.”
I grumbled under my breath.
“Cheer up,” my cousin said. “By tomorrow night we’ll be on the hunt for your mystery dog.”
The idea of finding the dog filled me with a sense of dread.
I FORGOT ALL ABOUT THE SQUEAKY BEDROOM DOOR as I crept back into my room. The hinges let out a long, drawn out creeeaaaaaak! I feared I would wake everybody in the entire house, especially my little brother. I didn’t want to face his questions. No way he’d believe I had been getting a drink of water and using the bathroom for three hours. Despite Marty’s jokes, I hadn’t eaten that many beans for supper!
Lucky for me, Alex didn’t awaken. He just rolled over and muttered something I couldn’t make out.
I tiptoed to bed. It didn’t hit me until I crawled beneath the covers, but I was wiped out. My eyes felt heavy, and my arms and legs ached. I sagged into the mattress like a trash bag full of Jell-O. I wasn’t used to staying up so late. Something told me, however, I’d have many late nights to come.
Alex mumbled something again. He looked to be sleeping peacefully for the most part, but every now and then he fidgeted or twitched. The glow of the moon filtering through the window bathed him in a bluish light. I didn’t know he talked in his sleep, but then again I’d never really shared a room with him all that often.
He said something again, and this time I understood him.
“Someday.”
He was having a dream—or more than likely a nightmare—about the old witch!
I considered waking him up, but decided against it. In a couple of minutes he settled down and didn’t say anything else. I watched Alex for a while, waiting for him to say something else about Maddie. He was still and quiet, though. I closed my eyes.
I might have gone right to sleep, except for the screaming.
From outside.
The animals.
Screaming.
The sounds startled me, and I sat bolt upright in bed. The chickens squawked as though a coyote had broken into the henhouse, and the goats shrieked terrible bleating cries. Awful, screeching cat cries added to the maddening racket. I threw the covers aside and climbed out of bed to investigate—
That’s when I noticed Alex was gone. His covers were messy, but he wasn’t in bed. He must’ve heard the sound, too, and his curiosity got the best of him. Why didn’t he wake me?
I stepped into the hall. The thin carpet beneath my feet twitched like the hair on a tarantula’s legs, and the moon’s blue light illuminated the passage, even though no windows were nearby.
I tapped lightly on the door to Marty’s bedroom.
“Marty! Wake up! Something’s wrong outside.”
He didn’t answer. I tried the door knob, but it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. I pressed my ear up against the wood and listened. I couldn’t hear a thing.
The awful goat cries from outside grew louder. Forgetting about Marty’s help, I rushed down the hall and out the back door. My shadow, black as midnight and twisted horribly, chased after me.
Wind buffeted me as I stepped outside. Bits of dirt flew in my face, stinging my skin, and I held my hand up to shield my eyes. Clouds of fog drifted across the yard, swirling, taking spectral shapes. In the distance, dark clouds covered the sky, and lightning streaked down to the earth, chased by a peal of thunder. The moon was blanketed by the clouds, and only a few feeble rays of light stretched down to the yard. A storm was brewing, but it wasn’t raining yet.
Another jagged bolt of lightning lit the sky, and in the flash I could see the animal pens. The goats stood at the edge of the fence, their hourglass-shaped eyes reflective in the sudden flashes of light. They stuck their heads out and cried, their tongues wagging in their mouths.
“B-baaaaa-aa!”
Behind the goats, chickens dashed back and forth in a nervous frenzy. They were supposed to be locked in the henhouse during the night, but someone had obviously let them out. The door to the chicken coop slammed open and closed, the hinges shrieking, the door battered against the frame by the wind.
I didn’t see any sign of my brother.
I rushed to the animal pens and started to undo the gate. I planned on herding the chickens back into the coop before the storm swept across the yard. But as I approached the gate, I noticed something ghastly.
None of the chickens had heads!
They ran back and forth, their wings flapping, like they had just gotten the axe. But they never flopped over and lay dead on the ground. And somehow they made a wet cackling sound, even though they had no mouths!
I stumbled away from the gate.
No way was I going in there with a flock of undead chickens!
Lightning jumped across the sky, closer now, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned around, and saw an old woman scuttling across the yard. She wore a filthy robe that flapped behind her like bat wings. Her hair was white and stringy, falling into her eyes like a cobweb mask. She carried a baby goat under one arm—and my brother under the other!
“Alex!”
Before I took a step, a mangy yellow dog jumped out of the darkness to block my path. It snarled and barked, drool dripping from its jaws.
Its eyes looked like the eyes of a person.
The old woman leaped into the air and landed on top of the sagging shed. A ruby red ring gleamed from one of her fingers, like fire blazing through blood-slathered glass. She scrabbled across the top, the sagging roof creaking beneath her feet, then jumped into the air again and vanished into the fog. Alex looked back and reached out for me.
“Charlieeeeeeeee,” he cried.
And he was gone.
The dog jumped on me and clamped its slobbery jaws around my throat.
I woke up.
A dream! My heart pounded in my chest, but I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t usually have nightmares, but with everything I’d been thinking about lately—unwanted vacations, annoying little brothers, headless chickens, freaky dogs, and hideous witches—it didn’t surprise me much.
I glanced over at my brother—
But Alex wasn’t in his bed.
THE BRIEF MOMENT OF UNCERTAINTY PASSED. Although Alex was gone, just as he had been in my nightmare, his bed was neat and tidy. Instead of the ghastly glow of the moon, bright light streamed through the window. I squinted and rubbed my eyes. I looked at the clock and gaped in surprise at the time. 11:00! I never slept that late! Usually, I liked to rise early and squeeze as much out of school-free days as I could.
Thinking of the dream, I shuddered. Despite the warm morning light, I felt cold and shivery, like I’d been walking barefoot through snow on a wintery day. I had heard people usually forget their dreams pretty quickly. I wished that was the case! I had a feeling I’d remember the awful dream about Maddie Someday for as long as I lived.
I touched my fingers to my throat, half expecting to find a ruined mess of chewed, bloody flesh. For a second, I could have sworn I felt slobber from the dog’s jaws on my skin. No, I realized, not slobber, but my own clammy sweat.
All I wanted to do was throw the covers over my head, bundle up, and nap for another couple of hours—without nightmares, of course. I still felt pretty groggy. But I couldn’t stay in bed all day, not if Marty and I were going to talk to Lisa.
I jumped up and straightened the covers quickly. Compared to Alex’s perfectly made bed, mine looked pretty messy, but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I ducked my head into Marty’s room (his door was open) and saw he was already up and about. His bed hadn’t been made at all, so I felt a little better about my rush job.