The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan Page A

nodded. We’d heard it too.
    We turned toward the window, all three of us. All three of us shone our flashlights through the broken glass and out over the deep darkness. The darkness shifted and whispered with the night wind.
    Before I knew I was thinking it, I heard myself say, “We have to take a look. We have to go out there.”
    “Right,” said Josh. “Because we’re not frightened enough. Because there’s still a slim chance my hair won’t turn white and I won’t spend the rest of my life locked in a padded room cackling uncontrollably. Go out there? What are you talking about? Are you crazy?”
    “I saw something,” I said. “Someone—something—I don’t know. We have to go and find out what it was.”
    “Why? We could stay here instead. We could not find out. It could be, like, an unsolved mystery.”
    But Rick understood. “That’s the project,” he said. “We came here to prove this place isn’t haunted, that that’s just a local superstition. If we don’t investigate, we won’t really know.”
    “I can live with that,” said Josh. “Really. I’m strangely content just as I am.”
    “Yeah, but we’re the ones who have to give the report,” I said. “The whole point was to force Sherman to give us an A by doing something too cool for him to ignore. If we don’t follow through, it won’t happen. You can stay here,” I told Josh. “But we’ve got to take a look.”
    I knelt down to tie my sneakers. Rick did the same.
    “Oh, I can stay here,” said Josh. “In the haunted house. Alone. By myself. Thanks. You’re too generous. No, really.” He knelt and tied his sneakers, too, muttering to himself the whole time.
    It’s funny—I mean, funny as in strange—in these last few weeks, I’d faced so many dangers, and I’d been afraid, more afraid than I like to think about or say. But I don’t think I’ve been as fearful, before or since, as I was that night Rick, Josh, and I went out into the graveyard behind the McKenzie mansion.
    We crept downstairs, our shoulders bumping together as we followed our flashlight beams down a long hall toward the back of the house. We came into a bare room lined with old, broken cabinets and shelves. It must have been the kitchen once. As we stepped in, we heard pattering footsteps. Small, furry bodies dashed out of sight as the light came near them.
    Our beams picked out a door. We moved toward it.
    When we stepped out of the house, we stopped and stood stock-still, all three of us. Inside, our flashlights together had seemed almost bright, lighting our way easily. Here, though, the night felt vast around us. It seemed to swallow the beams and drown them in nothingness. We stayed where we were. We stared. We were afraid to move away from the house, afraid if we got too far from it, we would not be able to escape back inside.
    The trees moved and murmured above us. The sky seemed dizzyingly far away. The dark seemed dizzyingly deep.
    “All right,” I said. But I didn’t step forward.
    “All right,” said Rick. But he didn’t move either.
    “This is terrifying,” said Josh.
    We stiffened, listening. There was a fresh rattle of dead leaves as the wind blew them tumbling over the earth in front of us. The sound made us lift our flashlight beams over the sparse grass and shine them in the direction of the noise.
    One beam—Rick’s, I think—touched on a white stone—a headstone—the headstone nearest to the house. There was the graveyard, barely twenty yards ahead of us.
    It seemed until then that I’d forgotten how to breathe. I remembered now and drew in a deep breath.
    “All right,” I said again.
    I started moving forward. Josh was to my left, Rick was to my right. They started moving, too, just behind me.
    As we advanced, our flashlight beams trembled over the small field of stones. I was aware of an awful sense of suspense as I waited for the terrible moment when one of the beams would pick out the figure with the gleaming,