At the sound of Frankie’s voice, I just about jump out of my skin.
“Liar,” Will whispers. “You don’t hear nothing!”
Frankie’s eyes are wide. “I hear ticking!”
Will looks at Pete.
“Thirty seconds,” Pete says.
My body is shaking now, and goose bumps cover me from the back of my neck down to my soggy feet. Frankie is lying on top of Jacob Hiltch’s grave, summoning his witch of a wife.
Or was she already here, waiting for us? Did she close the gate?
“Frankie, come away from there!” I whisper. “You don’t have to do this! We’ll find another way!”
“What’s it sound like?” Will bends over him.
“Super loud! Like a freight train!”
A current of electricity charges down my spine at that. “Pete, call it off!”
Beside me, Pete says softly, “Forty seconds.”
I snap back to the gate. A forest of tombstones blocks our way. We’ll never make it out in time.
The fog’s grown thicker too.
“It’s ticking faster!” Frankie whispers.
“I don’t hear nothing!” Will insists. “You’re making it up!”
Frankie’s face is pale, deathly pale. “It’s beating like a drum!”
“Pete, call it off!” I cry again.
“Fifty seconds.” Pete keeps his eyes on the watch.
Will stares, breathless. “He really hears it.” And now I know Will is scared too.
“Fifty-five seconds.”
My heart pounds. My skin crawls. I feel the urge to turn again to the yard. But I don’t. I can’t. My eyes are locked on the tombstone of Jacob Hiltch and my cousin lying before it.
Pete says softly, “Time.”
The word echoes against ancient headstones, and the four of us hold our breath and listen.
The night around us is silent.
The witch ain’t here.
Frankie stays flat and motionless.
“Frankie,” I whisper, “you did it!”
He don’t move.
Will leans over him. “You hear that? You did it, fool! You can get up now. Unless you like lying on a dead man’s grave.”
But Frankie stays still.
I drop down beside him and lay a hand on his shoulder. When his head turns, he looks at me like he’s just woken up from a deep sleep.
“Is it over?” he asks.
“What you talking about?” Will says. “’Course it’s over!”
“Couldn’t you hear Pete counting out the seconds?” I ask Frankie fearfully.
He sits up slowly. Wet leaves stick to his front. “At first . . . but then all I could hear was that ticking! It just kept getting louder and louder. It wouldn’t stop. And . . .” He pauses.
“And what?” Will asks.
Frankie looks straight into his eyes and says in a slow, deep voice, “I felt it. A drumming under the ground. As if . . . as if Hiltch was alive.”
Will stares.
My knees go weak.
It ain’t possible. Hiltch couldn’t possibly be alive. He’s been deader than a doornail for almost two centuries. But Frankie sits before us in the curling fog, his eyes so wide, and I know he ain’t lying.
Will looks at him hard. His eyes rise to Pete, then dart about the stones. “Let’s get out of here.”
Pete shrugs. “Nicely done, Frankie.” He drops the watch into his pocket. There’s a click and his flashlight’s bright beam spills yellow light over our cousin. Frankie’s shirt clings to his chest and stomach. There are smudges of moldy graveyard dirt all down his front.
“So I passed the test, right?” he asks.
“I’d say so,” Pete says. “And since I’m the final judge, that’s all that counts.”
Frankie looks to me then. Through my fading fear, realization seeps in: Frankie’s passed their test. We are going with my brothers on their expedition.
Pete’s flashlight swings away as he begins back through the headstones. Will follows, hands buried deep in his pockets.
“I don’t think he heard anything,” he mutters. “I think he made it up.”
Frankie stands up and tries to brush some of those leaves off himself.
“Frankie, you did it,” I whisper as we follow them back to the gate. “You did it!”
“Guess so,” he says. “It wasn’t that bad, really.”
It’s incredible. None of us has ever spent a whole minute over Hiltch’s grave. Frankie ain’t only tough. He’s the toughest boy I’ve ever seen. Who would have thought a city boy would have that kind of guts?
But just then Frankie suddenly stops in front of me. Looking past him, I see Pete and Will have stopped too.
“What is it?” I ask.
No one answers.
Then I see her.
Beyond the beam of Pete’s flashlight, standing among the stones, is a woman. A woman in white.
The witch is here.
Chapter 9
MADLINER PLACE
Fear has a taste. It’s dead leaves and butterfly weed and moldy earth. It’s a funny thing to think as I run through that graveyard in the fog and the dark with my brothers and my cousin and a witch chasing us. But I taste it just the same, even though my tongue is bone-dry in my spitless mouth as I gulp chilly night air—maybe for the last time—and force my rubbery legs to move even faster.
A tombstone rushes out of the dark. I twist away from its shovel shape, my knee scraping rough stone as I go. The next one catches me square in the stomach. I go right over it and land flat on my back, all the wind rushing from me in a sudden gust.
I lie on wet soil with that tombstone leaning crookedly above me. Whoever it belongs to, they’ll be sharing it with me. That witch will kill me right here.
A pair of hands seizes my collar. It’s Frankie. He drags me up and points wildly through the curling fog to the stone wall.
“Straight through and don’t stop!” he shouts.
He don’t make any sense. The wall is too high to jump, and we are nowhere near the gate. Then a piece of mist lifts and I see what he means: there’s a section of the wall that’s crumbled. It’s hardly more than a heap of stones.
“Let’s go!” he cries and, still holding on to my collar, he starts off through those tombstones once again.
A splash of yellow light sweeps across us: Pete’s flashlight swinging crazily as he runs somewhere behind us. So the witch ain’t got him yet. Then I hear Will cussing—awful, terrible things—but that’s a relief too. If he’s cussing, he ain’t dead.
Frankie and me run along the wall. There’s a white-hot fire in my lungs, its flames licking the insides of my ribs. My knee throbs where I scraped it against that stone. My breath comes in ragged gasps.
“There it is!” Frankie cries.
Mist rolls through the hole in the wall. It rushes past my face as Frankie and me hurtle through that opening and go rushing into black night beyond. Next thing I know we’re crashing through high, wet grass and I’m laughing, laughing like crazy though there ain’t nothing funny about it.
Trees ahead. Tall and dark and safe. The trail appears on our left and I angle myself toward it, pointing so Frankie can see where to go. Only he doesn’t see; he keeps running straight and we bump. We stagger yet somehow keep from tumbling into the sea of fog that swirls about our knees. We keep running, and now thick tree trunks are dashing past us. We’re into the woods.
“We made it, Frankie, we made it!”
“Shut up, you fool!”
Will’s voice blasts in my ear and I realize he’s been right behind us the whole time. Grabbing hold of us both, he shoves us down behind one of the trunks, and all three of us slide into dead leaves and wet earth. At once, I twist to look back, expecting to see that witch coming right for us, her pale bony arms out, fingers grasping—
But the field is empty. The witch is nowhere to be seen. And neither is Pete.
For one horrible instant, I think the witch has got him. Then there’s a sound from behind me and a boy-shaped shadow drops into the leaves beside us. It’s Pete. There’s a few twigs in his moppy blond hair and he’s breathing fast, but other than that, there ain’t a scratch on him. Before we can say anything, he raises a finger to his lips and motions for us to follow him. In a heartbeat we’re moving again—but not down the trail. Instead, Pete leads us up the side of a steep hill.