The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan Page B

featureless face.
    Then, suddenly, Josh’s beam fell on the statue of the mourning woman. Even though I knew it was just a statue, the sight of her up close like that was still a shock. She seemed to float out of the darkness at us like a ghost. I could make out her face now, the staring, empty eyes, the parted, fearful lips that seemed about to whisper, “No. Don’t go.” And her hand, that gesturing hand . . . You could almost sense the presence of the dead spirit she was trying to hold on to. You could almost see it moving away in the black air before her.
    Josh saw the statue and stopped in his tracks, gaping up at it. I heard him swallow hard. He kept his flashlight trained on the woman’s face, as if he couldn’t force his hand to move.
    I took one look at her, then looked away. Still, I could feel her staring down at me with those cold, marble eyes as I kept walking toward her, kept walking toward the place where I’d seen that other figure, the weird, faceless presence.
    The mourning woman loomed over me as I got closer and closer to her. Then, a few feet away from her, I stopped. It was too much. Her presence was too eerie. The dark beyond her was just too deep. The possibility of coming upon that featureless man I’d seen staring up at me was just too real. I was afraid to go any farther.
    I was about to announce that there was nothing there. About to turn back.
    But then I spotted something—something lying on the ground. My passing flashlight picked out a little patch of white. I moved the beam around until I found it again.
    “Look,” I said.
    My friends closed ranks around me. Their flashlight beams joined mine. We stared down. There was a dry branch lying in the leaves just on the far side of the statue, just a few feet away from the statue’s base. The stick had snapped in half and the white core of it stood out against the brown background of the dirt and leaves.
    “See that stick?” I said. “It’s broken. Like someone stepped on it.” I moved my beam around the stick. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to me there were other disturbances, discolorations in the leaves where they had been overturned, their damp undersides facing upward.
    “Broken stick,” said Rick softly. “Doesn’t have to mean anything . . .”
    “I know,” I said. “But look at the leaves too. It looks like someone was walking there.”
    I’ll never be sure where I found the courage, but all at once I was walking forward again, moving away from Rick and Josh. The mourning woman was right above me now, staring down at me as I moved alongside her— and then past her. I went to the broken stick. I bent down and picked it up. I straightened, holding the stick in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Turning the stick this way and that, examining it under the light.
    And as I did, I felt a hand snake up from the earth and wrap its cold fingers around my ankle.
    I’m embarrassed now when I remember the shriek I let out. And I shrieked again as I tore my ankle free and stared down to see a white, featureless face gleaming up at me from the ground.
    In a single, swift movement, the uncanny figure leapt to its feet in front of me, its hands lifted in the air, its fingers curled like claws.
    And it shouted, “Boo!”
    Because it was Miler, of course. Who else could it have been?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Return
    Josh, Rick, and I did not beat Miler to death and bury his mangled body in a shallow grave with a headstone warning future would-be practical jokers that this could be their fate. We wanted to, believe me. And he deserved it, that’s for sure. I can’t even remember now why we decided to let him live. He’d brought some brownies his mother had made—maybe that was it. Or maybe it was because he also brought an extra PSP with a battery pack that would last till dawn and keep us from having to go to sleep again. That was important, too, because at the time, there didn’t seem to be any chance we’d be able