What sort of weird twilight zone had I crossed into that put Dylan Doyle in my living room? I could hardly breathe I was so freaked out about it. Corey, who actually recognized Dylan as my enemy, did a double-take when he walked past the room. He didn't say anything though, and I was privately grateful. Not that I would've ever told either of them that . . . but I was. It was more than a little awkward. I definitely didn't want him upstairs in my room. It'd been revolting enough to let him through the front door. So I just brought all the papers down and we sat on the floor of the living room. I spread them all across the carpet.

Dylan grabbed for some of them, but, being in my own territory, I got possessive. "Don't touch!" I ordered. Then, picking through the stories, I pulled out his and handed it to him like it was a snotty kleenex.

He ignored my rudeness and practically jumped on the written words in front of him. I watched his eyes zoom across the pages. I'd never considered Dylan a reader, but he sure seemed to be a good one. When he finished (in about half a minute), he glanced up at me and said hoarsely, "Somebody wrote this?"

"Obviously," I replied. "It's written, isn't it?"

Dylan still ignored my attitude. He was too interested in what was in his hands to get mean. "You didn't write it, though? You just found it?"

"Yeah."

"How weird, man." Anger crept into his face, but it wasn't aimed at me. Suddenly, he barked out, "Somebody's spying on my Mop? That's freakin' messed up!"

Just then, my mom walked past the living room. "Now Cole," she started, "you know I don't like the word freaking. It's—" She stopped when she spotted Dylan. She was drying a dish in her hands. "Oh," she said confusedly, looking first at him and next at me. "I didn't know you had a friend over."

I fumed. "He's not my friend!"

Mom lowered her eyebrows and stared at me. "All right . . ." I could tell she wasn't sure what to say. Then she turned around and left.

Dylan had his eyes down like he was trying not to catch my gaze. After about a minute of stupid-feeling silence, I noticed how totally jerky I'd just sounded. I didn't think Dylan cared, but still. "Well . . . you aren't my friend," I tried to say, tried to make myself sound better. Then I asked real quietly, "Are you?"

"No!" he automatically snapped. He calmed down. "I didn't mean to say it like that."

Things were getting weird. "Whatever. I don't care. If you want to keep that, go ahead. I don't need it."

Dylan got to his feet, knowing I was ready for him to leave. "Right. Thanks . . . I guess. See you around."

"Sure. Oh, by the way . . ."

He was halfway out of the room but stopped and looked back expectantly.

"Why do you call your grandma Mop?"

Frowning, he said, "Because. When I was a kid I couldn't say Grandma. I could only say Mop."

I nodded like I cared, then turned away. I didn't hear him leave, but I figured he had. As I sat on the couch getting ready to watch some TV, I wondered if the world was coming to an end. When I'd been less crazy, I'd sworn that the planet would have to blow up before I had a normal conversation with that kid. And now, he'd been in my house, in my living room, and I'd asked him if he was my friend. I could never tell Adam. I wouldn't be able to live it down.

That night I actually got a phone call from Adam. He'd been out of school that day because he'd woken up and barfed. Now, he told me, he felt fine. He'd even eaten some dinner. When I asked him why he'd called, he told me that he wanted to meet me outside my house at around nine-thirty; he wouldn't tell me why. So, with that frustration on my mind, I hung out downstairs with my parents (ugh!) until it was time. Then I told them I was heading out with Adam and would be back around ten. My mom and dad didn't seem to mind. It was Friday, and there was nothing in Goldenrock worth getting scared over (unless you counted the trailer people or Dylan's grandmother). Now, I was just assuming I'd be back home by ten. I didn't even know what Adam was planning on doing. Sometimes I hated that he tried to act all mysterious when what I wanted to hear was a good, solid answer.

He was out by the street lamp, leaning against it like a smoker without a smoke, wearing a dark knit hat over his dark, long hair. He pretended to not even see me coming, even though I knew I was clearly visible. When I reached him, he pulled a hand out of his pocket, adjusted the ball chain around his neck, and said, "Long time, no see."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. A day."

"A lot can happen in a day. Thousands of minutes. Maybe more."

I wondered what he was getting at.

"It only takes a second to die."

"What?" I scowled.

He motioned me onward with a nod of his head. "Come on."

"Where are we going?" I asked as we started walking.

Like the word meant absolutely nothing, he said, "Graveyard."

I grabbed onto his elbow and swung him around. "A graveyard? Why?"

Adam shrugged.

He'd gone nuts. Either that or he was playing a seriously twisted prank on me. Adam knew how much I hated graveyards. Ever since my grandpa had died and I'd had to watch them drop him into the ground. Then his mom—my great-grandma—had said, "Now he's maggot food. Bore right through the coffin, those little buggers." Eww. I could still remember her toothless mouth muttering those words, her breath smelling like old cigars. She was dead now, too, but fortunately I hadn't had to watch her get buried. After my grandpa, though, I was never comfortable walking around in graveyards. I think it was mostly because the thought of walking on top of half-eaten corpses freaked me out. I didn't even like to think about graveyards.

Adam knew that, so I had no clue why he was thinking I'd go to one with him.

"Get a life, Adam. I'm not going there with you."

Before I could walk away, he grabbed onto me. "Hold on, Cole. I don't mean to creep you out . . . not really. But there's something there I want to look at."

He was serious, but I was still suspicious. "Well . . . what? What's so important that we have to go to a graveyard in the middle of the night?"

"Nothing," he said sharply. Then, "Just my dad. Turning away from me, he started walking again. "And it's not the middle of the night," he threw back over his shoulder. "It's only nine-thirty."

Whether he was crazy or not, I must've been the truly insane one, because for as freaked out as I was, I followed him. He didn't force me to go. He didn't say he'd be mad if I didn't. I could've turned around and gone home at any moment. See, although I was scared, I was also curious. Whatever it was about Adam's dad was making me wonder. So I followed in my friend's footsteps, stepped from shadow to shadow behind him, half-forgetting where I was even going due to the G.I. coming out in me. It was only when we reached the iron Goldenrock Cemetery gates that I felt the fear reawaken in the pit of my guts.

A shudder rippled down my spine. One lonely streetlight shone above the gate, but it was fizzling out. It gave a weird, staticy, watery glow to the ground and beyond. Behind the iron rods, the cemetery was pitch black. It was the most uninviting thing I'd ever seen, and here I was getting ready to go into it. Before Adam moved, I went and pulled at the gates. A thick chain was wrapped around the middle bars, holding them tightly locked. There was no way they'd open without a key to the padlock.

"Shoot," I said, obviously not disappointed. "Guess we can't go in." I shrugged.

Adam rolled his eyes at me and, turning sideways, slid vertically through the bars without even touching them. Once on the other side of the gate, he looked at me expectantly, like he was impatient and waiting for me to join him.

I huffed, but he just waited. "Oh, yeah," I mumbled. "You're like, thirty-five pounds. A piece of string. I wouldn't fit through there if you folded me in half." I wasn't that much bigger, I knew. I was just trying to be difficult. Even as I finished saying that, though, I was squeezing myself through the bars. And I touched them on both sides.

There I was. Crazy, that was for sure. Standing with my feet on the wrong side of the graveyard gate. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't been in Goldenrock Cemetery since my grandpa's death. That had been eight years ago. It was so dark that I could just barely see the outlines of gravestones from the broken streetlight. Everything more than twenty feet away was totally hidden. When I looked at Adam again, I noticed he'd retrieved a flashlight from one of his pockets and turned it on. I was grateful for that, at least. Even he wasn't bold enough to go walking into a pitch-dark graveyard in the middle of—I mean, nine-thirty at night. Adam whipped the light across the darkness; the weak yellowy beam picked out a few gravestones close by, but if he wanted to see more, we'd either have to walk farther or find a floodlight. By the way Adam started off into the black, I knew the floodlight was not an option. With my stomach feeling suddenly sick, I hurried after him.

It wasn't long before we couldn't see the streetlight by the front gate anymore. There were enough trees to block it out within seconds of walking. I just tried to stay as close to Adam as I could. I definitely didn't want to get lost. That would've been a nightmare-come-true.

I was just lucky it was so dark, because I couldn't even really see the gravestones unless Adam's flashlight hit them directly. Of course, that made walking kind of difficult. We both tripped several times. I was trying not to think that there were dead bodies under my feet, and I have to say that concentrating on not falling helped my brain stay occupied.

We went practically half a mile into the cemetery before Adam felt like stopping. For as small as Goldenrock was, there sure had been a lot of people die there. I remembered my mom telling me once that the reason it was so big was because City Hall hadn't wanted to take down any trees to create the cemetery, so they'd left them there. That meant they had to dig around roots whenever they buried someone, and that meant the place was real spread out. I had that thought plodding around in my head when Adam said, "Ok. It should be around here."

I remembered that he still hadn't exactly explained why we were there. "What should? What are you looking for?"

"A grave," he replied.

"Yeah, I could've guessed that. But whose?"

"A dead guy's." He got down on his knees and began to crawl across the ground, feeling for markers and shining his light wherever he found one. Before I could get any more frustrated, he added, "I'm not sure if it will be here or not. I just know this place goes by dates, right? So if I'm right, the guy should've died around ten or eleven years ago."

I wanted to ask him who again, but I figured he wasn't going to tell me unless he found the gravestone. So I started to look too, even though I had no idea what I should keep my eyes open for. And I didn't have much light to see by, either, just the leftovers from his flashlight. It was a pain, really, but I still got down on my hands and knees and started to brush the long grass aside.

What I came across wasn't what I suspected Adam was looking for, but it sure surprised me all the same. I could hardly read the engraving on the small, flat marker right under my palms, but my fingers felt out the words, and I thought I knew what they said. "Adam!" I whispered. "Shine the light here!"

He sighed like he was aggravated, but the flat beam was suddenly on me and then down on the gray rock below.

"'Ryan and Lynn Doyle,'" I read aloud, scanning the carved letters with wide eyes. "'Loving parents of Dylan Doyle.'" Before noting the dates, I looked up at Adam, who was standing over me. "These are Dylan's parents," I said somewhat louder. "You know—Doyle? This is his mom and dad's grave." I studied the marker some more. "They died ten years ago." Then I fell silent. Something was moving inside me, and it wasn't my dinner or anything like sickness. It was as if I could feel my heart beating. Like I could suddenly understand something that had always been in me but kept hidden. I even forgot where I was until Adam interrupted everything around me again.

"So what? Lots of kids have dead parents. It's not like he never knew or anything."

"Yeah, but . . ." I started to say, but then Adam turned the flashlight back to the area he'd been looking in and the grave marker vanished into blackness. I could tell it was there only because I still felt it under my hands. It was cold in the hot summer air.

For several minutes, I just sat there with my hands on that gravestone. I didn't know whether I was just tired or what, but my brain was feeling soft. I was as still as a gravestone myself until Adam shouted, "Hey! Cole! I've found it! Come here!"

Getting up, I forgot Dylan's parents' grave as soon as I left it. I hurried over to where Adam's voice was, about ten feet away, and crouched down low to read the words on the two-foot high marker he had his flashlight centered on. I read it to myself. When I was done, I stood up straight and gave him a confused sort of look. "So?" I asked.

"Don't you recognize the name?" he asked me, waving the light up and down kind of impatiently.

"No. Why would I know who Ted Barnes is?"

Adam hung his head for a minute, then pulled it up again. Rubbing his forehead, he frowned like he was angry and replied sharply, "That's the guy sending my mom stuff."

I thought. He was confusing me. "You mean the flowers and mail and all?"

"Yeah. That's the name on all the letters. Spelled the same and everything."

"But how? How can she get anything from a dead person?"

He propped the flashlight under his chin and stared at me. The features of his face were outlined in kind of a spooky way. "Exactly," was all he had to say.

I was still beyond confused, but I didn't have much time to think things over. A sound suddenly came from not too far away, and it made even Adam jump. "Turn your light off!" I hissed, and he did it at once. That must've been the marine in me, because I seemed to know that if there was something out there, we'd be sitting ducks with a light in our hands. Now we were in total darkness. Not even the moon could help us out. There were trees overhead and bugs whirring, and everything else was dead dark silence.

I didn't want to tell Adam that the noise had sounded like a footstep. I didn't want to say that thought out loud because it freaked me out to the extreme. No normal people wandered around graveyards in the middle of the night (or nine-thirty). If there was somebody there, it had to be some body we woke up. Had some dead thing gotten angry at us for walking over its half-rotten corpse? For as dumb as I was, I knew that was a stupid idea. But it made perfect sense to me in the pitch blackness of Goldenrock Cemetary as I stood there like a scared rabbit with Adam, whose anxious breathing could probably be heard a mile away. In fact, zombies made more sense than anything else. The night can bring some pretty weird stuff to life in your head.

"There's nothing there," said Adam so quietly I could barely hear him. He had latched on to my shirt sleeve like he was a chicken. I was ok with that, though, because I was more scared than ever myself.

My heart beat crazily. "Are you sure?" I asked.

He waited before answering. "Yeah," he finally replied. "Yeah, I'm sure. Nobody's psycho enough to be here right now."

His mention of a psycho brought even more horrible thoughts into my mind. What if there was some whacked out guy standing right behind us, waiting for the right second to reach out and saw off one of our arms or legs for some freakish experiment . . . "Turn your light back on!" I said. I couldn't handle it. I couldn't handle not knowing. That was the wuss in me coming out.

I could feel him shivering behind me as he fumbled around with the light. He hit it several times, muttering, "Come on, stupid thing—work!"

And then there was light. A beam brighter than before, it seemed, shot up into the blackness above. Small sprinkles of dust and some dead leaves floated in its brightness as Adam pulled it down level with the gravestones.

The first thing we saw besides the grave we'd just been reading was the definite outline of an enormous figure that hadn't been there before. It was pure shadow; we couldn't see a face or much of a body. It was just a big black blob, but it certainly hadn't been there a couple of minutes ago. Right in front of us, the figure shifted around what appeared to be its shoulders, and then, so suddenly that our hearts leapt into overtime, a massive hand reached out toward us, revealing its flesh and bone in the beam of Adam's flashlight.

The two of us screamed louder than we'd known we could, but it still didn't get rid of the pure terror in either of us. Jumping into action, we turned and bolted back the way we'd come, getting out of that graveyard in less than half the time it had taken us to wander in.