Free The Light (Morpheus Road) by D.J. MacHale Page B

last piece?" I repeated. "Then what's this?"
    I blew past him and charged into the art room. He followed right behind.
    "You are not supposed to be in this school," Frano whined. "Please leave before you get yourself into trouble."
    I ran for the table with the unfinished sketch of Grave-digger and declared, "Explain that!" I stared right at Frano while pointing to the sketch on the table. He looked puzzled.
    "All right, I suppose I missed one," he said.
    "Yeah, tell me about it. I am so going to report you to somebody."
    "Didn't you say it wasn't finished?" he asked.
    "Yeah, it's probably one I threw away and you pulled it
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    out to ..." I looked down at the sketch as the words caught in my throat.
    The sketch was finished. Gravedigger's face was there in full detail. More detail than I think I'd ever done with one of his drawings. His skeletal mouth was twisted into an evil sneer while his sunken eyes seemed to stare at me from the page.
    "What exactly is your issue here, Mr. Seaver?" Frano asked.
    I swept the sketch off the table and crushed it into a ball.
    "I know you did this," I said to him. "I don't know why, but you better not mess with me again or you're going to be in huge trouble."
    I threw the crumpled paper at him and ran out of the room. I didn't want to see it, ever again.
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    Chapter 7
    I was in no shape to go back to work.
    My house was only a few blocks from school, so I rode straight there. I didn't even call Mr. Santoro to tell him I wouldn't be back. There were too many other things banging around in my head to worry about being responsible. I wanted to be home. Home was safe. Home was sane. I felt sure that as soon as I got there, I'd calm down and start to piece things together.
    When I got to the house, I locked the door and ran around the entire downstairs, pulling shades and closing blinds. I didn't want anybody looking inside and I didn't want to be able to look out, either. When I thought back to the face that appeared at the kitchen window, it gave me the sweats. It may have been a shopping bag, or not. I didn't know and I wasn't taking any chances. Either way I didn't want any more faces or bags or whatever peering in at me.
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    I ran up to my room, planning to lock myself in and sit in a corner with a blanket over my head. I had to think. I had to figure this out. I sprinted up the stairs and down the hall to my bedroom. The door was closed. When I pulled it open, any hope of figuring out a sane, logical explanation for what had happened at school was destroyed.
    Lying on my bed, fast asleep, was Winston. There was no way for a cat to get in or out of that bedroom. Or the house for that matter. The cat I saw at school couldn't have been Winston. But it was. It had Winston's tags. My legs turned to rubber. I sat down on the floor, staring at my contented little kitty. She didn't even budge. Somehow until that moment, I had been able to convince myself that there were logical explanations for everything I had seen and heard. The sounds; the artwork; the rogue breezes; the symbol; the cell phone; even what I thought was my Gravedigger character come to life ... I felt certain that with enough reasoning I could find innocent solutions to everything.
    Except for the cat.
    That was definitely Winston at the school, but there was no way for her to have gotten out of the house. Seeing her lying on that bed made me realize that whatever the explanations were for what was happening, I wasn't going to like them.
    So much was happening that defied the rules of the world that I started to wonder if the problem was me. Maybe I was going crazy and imagining things. Why not? Grave-digger existed in my head. Frano might have been right. I might have been obsessed. It wasn't a happy solution. But accepting that everything existed only in my mind was easier to buy than any other explanation I could come up with. Because I couldn't come up with any. What did "going crazy" mean anyway? Was I going to be