Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

?
”
    I shrug. “If you want.”
    “Oh, all right,” she groans. “I'll come with you.”
    So we sneak back toward the cabin, and while we're walking, we're whispering, “Do you see it?” “There it is!” “Look, it moved!” and stuff like that. Then, when we get to Showdown Rock, we hide behind it and just kind of hold our breath.
    Now you've got to understand—whatever this is, I know it's not the ghost of Moustache Mary, Holly knows it's not the ghost of Moustache Mary, and so do Dot and Marissa. Well, at least Dot. But when you're standing in a place where someone's been shot dead and you're looking through the fog at something moving in the air, it's easy to become a believer.
    And we're all completely petrified behind this rock when we hear a noise. A crunchy noise. A shuffly noise. A noise like someone—or some
thing
—walking through leaves.
    Marissa whispers, “Do you hear that!?”
    We all nod.
    “What
is
that?”
    Holly whispers, “It's not chains rattling, that's for sure.”
    I say, “Shhh. It's getting closer.”
    One look at Marissa and I know that, as much as she's trying to fight it, there's a scream working its way out of her body, and when it surfaces, houses all over Sisquane will be missing their windows. I cup my hand over her mouth and whisper, “Marissa, it's okay. Really, it's okay!”
    But that sound is getting louder, and now, besides the crunch and shuffle, there's a low, guttural breathing sound. And it's not coming from miles away—it's right on the other side of Showdown Rock.
    So we're all huddled up with our eyes as big as Frisbees, trying not to lose it, when what phantom being appears from around the rock?
    One very dark, very big…pig.
    It could've been a mouse. At that point it didn't matter. We screamed. I choked on mine, but Marissa's went straight through flesh and bone, and Holly and Dot rounded out the sound with some really shrill harmonics.
    Penny didn't care. She just wagged her curly little tail and nudged around my feet like she was hunting for truffles. And after we got over the fact that we'd been sniffed out by a pig, we looked back at the cabin and knew—the ghost was gone.
    We stood behind Showdown Rock for another few minutes, waiting for it to reappear, but it never did. Finally, Marissa says, “Can we
please
go now?”
    Penny keeps rooting around, sniffing and snorting her way back toward the ruins. I say, “Why don't we follow Penny?”
    Marissa rolls her eyes. “Oh, great. Now we've got a pig for a tour guide.” Now it's not like Marissa to be sarcastic when she's scared. But she wasn't biting her nails or doing the McKenze dance, she was standing there with her hands on her hips.
    So I laugh and say, “Boy, that scream did you a lot of good, didn't it?”
    “What do you mean?”
    I just laugh again and say, “Yeah, we've got a pig for a tour guide. Come on!”
    Penny leads us over to the cabin, all right, and proceeds to nudge her nose through the ashes and chunks of timber while we circle the place. And it strikes me again how bad it smells and how
small
the place was. And all of a sudden I'm full of questions. Like, How do you raise a family in a place like this? How long did they live there? When did the other house get built? But mostly I kept coming back to: What's going to happen now? Would Kevin bulldoze the rest of it down? It did seem wrong. Very wrong. And what about Mary's old grave? Maybe her bones weren't there, but it did feel like her spirit still was.
    And I found myself standing beside the ruins kind of overwhelmed by what had been. By the people who had built the place and lived their lives there. By the fact that they had done it day by day, with no electricity or running water, no trash collection or sewers, and all of a sudden Ifelt like a wimp, living at Grams' with a toilet and a refrigerator and a television.
    And standing there by the ashes, I started feeling very strange—like something bigger than my thoughts was