Boys Rock! Read Online Free PDF Page A

then he was climbing down a ladder into a dark hole. Down … down … down … Colder, darker, spookier, creepier …
    He found himself walking through a long dark tunnel, and there was a noise like hockey sticks clacking together. Up ahead he could see a far-off light, and with every step he took, the clacking sound grew louder.
    Step by step … step by step …
    Wally’s heart began to pound. His pulse beat a little faster. His lips felt dry, and his palms began to sweat.
    And suddenly he was in the room with the light, and there was a bucket of bones in the middle of the floor. The bones were moving! All at once they rose up out of the bucket and into the air. The knee bone connected to the thighbone, the thighbone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to the backbone, the backbone connected to the neck bone, and—
    “Arrrrggggghhhhh!” Wally yelled as something touched his forehead.
    “Wally!” said his dad. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
    “Whooooh!” gasped Wally.
    “Are you awake? You okay?” asked Mr. Hatford.
    “Whoooaaaah!” Wally bellowed.
    “Wally, open your eyes. Sit up. Drink some water,” said his dad.
    Wally opened his eyes. He sat up. He was in his own room. There was a light on in the hall.
    “You were yelling loudly enough to wake the dead,” said Mr. Hatford.
    Dead
? “Whoooooh!” Wally yelped again.
    This time Mr. Hatford shook his shoulder. “Do you want to sleep with Peter for the rest of the night?” he asked.
    “No,” said Wally, his heart still racing.
    “Count to five,” said his father.
    “One, two, three, four, five,” said Wally.
    “Where are you?”
    “In the cellar,” said Wally.
    “No, you are right here in your own room, and I’m waiting for you to really wake up so I can go back to bed,” said his dad.
    “Good night,” said Wally. “I’m okay”
    Mr. Hatford went back to his own room, and Wally lay as still as a stone until his pulse returned to normal. This secret was too big to keep. This secret was going to drive him nuts.
    And then he had a thought. Mike Oldaker had said that as soon as they found out who the bones belongedto, he’d tell Wally even before he called the
Buckman Bugle
.
    If it had been a bad secret, an awful secret, Mike Oldaker would not have told Wally, and he certainly would not have been willing to tell the Buckman newspaper. Unless he was lying, of course.
    Mike Oldaker had promised Wally a scoop, though, so for now, anyway, Wally was going to keep his mouth shut and see what happened.

Six

Psychic Energy
    E ddie was spitting bullets. She leaped up from the table, scattering pencils and papers all over the floor. How dare the boys name the newspaper the
Hatford Herald?
    “I’m the editor in chief, and no one asked
me
!” she bellowed when Beth brought the news. “I never gave my okay!”
    The posters were all around Buckman, Beth told her. The guys must have designed them on their computer, printed them up, and gone to every store downtown to put them in the shop windows.
    “So what would you have named the paper?” Caroline asked, somewhat surprised at the uproar. What could you
expect
from a Hatford, after all?
    “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have
Hatford
in the title, you can be sure of that!” Eddie fumed. “The
Malloy Messenger
! The
Girls’ Dispatch!
The
Buckman Bulletin!
The
West Virginia Word! Anything
except the
Hatford Herald
. I wouldn’t name it anything that even
smelled
of a boy!”
    Caroline tried to figure that one out. She wondered if the Hatfords had an aura that she couldn’t detect.
    “Well, we can’t do anything about it now,” Beth said. “If you went around changing the posters, crossing out
Hatford Herald
and making it the
Malloy Messenger
or something, it would look like you’re not really in charge, Eddie. Or that if you were, no one was paying attention.”
    Eddie growled in disgust.
    “You’ll just have to go along with it,” Beth told her. “You’ll