Free Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan Page A

her way as well.
    And then there was the coffin.
    The coffin sat right in the middle of the hall. Right there in front of her. There was no lid on it. It was open.
    Jennifer didn’t like the coffin. It scared her more than anything. She didn’t want to go near it. She didn’t want to look down into it and see what was inside.
    But she had to. The whispers wouldn’t let her alone. The whispers crawled into her brain like bugs and took hold of her with their skeleton fingers, drawing her on against her own will.
    “Sam Hopkins . . .”
    Even the magic friend-name couldn’t make it stop. She had to go. She had to see. Step-by-step-by-step. Down the hall to where the coffin stood. Until she was standing over it, looking down. Down and down into the dark of the coffin, the dark that went down and down.
    And then she saw. She didn’t want to, but she did.
    The thing inside the box had once been human, but it wasn’t human now. It was dead and rotten now, a skeleton crawling with whisper bugs.
    We are death , the bugs whispered out of the skeleton’s mouth.
    We are angels of death .
    We will destroy them .
    Destroy them all .
    Jennifer stared down at it, whispering back, “Sam Hopkins,” over and over as fast as she could.
    But the magic friend-name wasn’t powerful enough. The demon things kept whispering out of the dead creature in the coffin:
    They will see our power .
    They will be afraid .
    Afraid of us .
    Because we are evil .
    Because we are death .
    Jennifer stared down at the horrible thing while the whispers rose up to her. She wanted to run away, run away, run back to her room, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move from the spot. And then . . .
    Oh, then . . . then the thing in the coffin came to life!
    It sat up suddenly and reached for her.
    Jennifer started screaming—screaming and screaming. She couldn’t stop. Even when the bedroom doors burst open, when her mother and brother came rushing out of their rooms . . . even as they put their arms around her, calling out to her, calling her name over and over, she couldn’t stop. She went on and on.
    The whisper-things were gone. The wallpaper was back on the walls. The coffin was gone and so was the thing in the coffin.
    The house was back to normal.
    But Jennifer could not stop screaming.

9

Going Home
     
    I won’t give you a blow-by-blow description of how Jeff and Ed P. and Harry Mac beat me up. Anyway, to be honest, it would be more like a blow- after -blow description because the three thugs pretty much just punched and kicked me, blow after blow, for what felt like forever. If I got an answering punch in there anywhere, I don’t remember it. Mostly, I just tried to cover myself, rolling up in a ball, throwing my arms over my head, shielding what I could as best I could.
    It was bad. It was really bad. But it could’ve been a lot worse. No, really, it could’ve been. For one thing, the thugs didn’t play nice with one another. They didn’t take turns. I know that sounds like a joke, but it actually helped me. If they’d taken turns beating on me, they would have each gotten in some solid blows. But acting together the way they did, they kept getting in one another’s way. They bumped into one another and tripped over one another and sort of blocked one another without meaning to. It saved me from some of the real damage they could have inflicted if they’d come at me one at a time. Basically, if they’d been more polite, they would’ve been better thugs . . . But then, if they’d been more polite, they wouldn’t have been thugs at all, would they?
    So that was one thing that helped me. And another thing was the pickup truck. That road we were on—there was nothing up that way but some old farms, and most of those were abandoned—there was almost never any traffic passing by, especially during the week. Most days, Jeff and his pals would have been free to knock me around for as long as they wanted.
    But today—what do you know?—a