Free The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan Page B

statue, all alone. It was a statue of a woman with a sort of hood over her head, a cowl. You couldn’t make out her face in the dark at this distance. But she was making a gesture with her hand, reaching out as if trying to stop someone from leaving.
    “Look at that,” said Rick quietly. “Weird, huh?”
    I used my flashlight to try to pick out the statue’s face. The light just barely reached her, but its faint ray brought her figure out of the darkness so that it seemed more real somehow, almost alive.
    “Stop doing that,” said Josh.
    I turned the flashlight off quickly.
    “She looks like someone she loved just died,” I said. “She looks like she’s sort of reaching out because she wants to stop him from leaving her and moving off into the land of death.”
    “Okay,” said Josh. “Now that’s the single most frightening thing anyone has ever said.”
    “Maybe we should stop standing here looking at her,” Rick suggested.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Yeah,” said Josh.
    We moved away from the window, back into the room.
    We took a few more pictures to prove we’d been here and everything. Then I made some recordings, talking about what it was like to be in the house and how spooky it was. Then we passed the PSP around for a while until the batteries started to run low. Finally, the best idea seemed to be to get into our sleeping bags.
    Lying in the bags, we went on talking for a while, but only for a while. We were all getting tired and the thing was, none of us wanted to be the last person left awake. That would’ve been too much like being alone. None of us wanted to be alone in this place.
    Luckily, I was tired and I fell asleep pretty quickly.
    Unluckily, it didn’t last.
    After about an hour, I suddenly found myself wide awake without knowing why. Had I heard a noise? I propped myself up on my elbow and listened. Nothing— well nothing, that is, except for the whispering wind in the trees and the creaking of the house and those quick little footsteps in the walls.
    I used my flashlight to check my watch. It was about one fifteen in the morning. I quickly passed the flashlight beam over Rick and Josh. They were fast asleep, totally unconscious, their mouths wide open with soft snores coming out of them.
    My heart sank. I felt totally alone.
    All right , I told myself, don’t get stupid. There are no ghosts here. That’s just a superstition. That’s the whole point of the project, right?
    Right. I lay down again, pulled my sleeping bag up around me. I listened to the house creaking and the mice running and the trees whispering and a low groan that was almost lost in the wind . . .
    I sat up quickly, my heart hammering hard.
    A low groan? What in the world was that?
    For a long moment I sat completely still, tense, listening as hard as I’d ever listened in my life. There was nothing. The creaking, the mice, the wind . . . There wasn’t any groan. There couldn’t have been any groan. I began to convince myself that it was just my imagination.
    Then I heard it again. A deep, complaining moan. It was coming through the window. It was coming from outside. It was coming from the direction of the cemetery.
    I stopped breathing. Long seconds passed. I told myself I was imagining things. I told myself to lie back down, to close my eyes, go to sleep, forget about it.
    But there was no way. No way.
    I worked myself out of the sleeping bag and stood up, my flashlight gripped tightly in my sweaty hand. I’d taken my sneakers off before getting in the bag. I slipped my feet back into them now, though I didn’t go to the trouble of tying them. Picking my way with the flashlight, I moved carefully to the window.
    The moon had gone down. I could just barely make out the shadowy fingers of the tree branches against the starlight, but below, in the cemetery, the darkness was almost complete. My eyes strained as I tried to pick out the stones and obelisks and the statue. I could trace their shapes only faintly in