Jokers Club Read Online Free PDF

mind?” Geoff asked.
    “Yeah,” spoke Dale. “What are we going to do there?”
    “Can someone tell me what’s going on?” Jason asked. Geoff filled him in on the legend.
    Colonel James Fox was a member of a prominent family in town back in the 19 th century. They had a farm out beyond the local cemetery. Colonel Fox was stationed in Virginia when the Civil War broke out, and he sided with the Confederacy. He was killed in a battle, and his body was shipped back to New Hampshire for burial in the family tomb. The Fox family had a mausoleum by the woods in a back lot of their farm. It was here that Colonel Fox was first mummified, and then laid to rest in the family crypt with his ancestors. The Fox family and farm were long gone, but the tomb still stood in that back lot by the woods, which had now begun to overtake the tomb with its undergrowth, concealing it.
    But many people in town knew of the burial site. In the past, pranksters had broken into it and college kids sometimes used it for fraternity initiations. Oliver told him once of how his two older brothers and some friends from school had broken into the mausoleum and partied there. They had propped the Colonel up in his casket, tied a bandana around his head and put a can of beer in his hand.
    “Now it’s our turn to have some fun.” Oliver grinned.
    “It sounds kinda risky,” Jason said.
    Oliver stared at him. “Listen. We don’t like chicken-shits in our club.”
    Jason shut up.
    Oliver looked around at the rest of them. “Well, what’s everybody think?” His eyes caught Lonny’s. “Mudge?”
    “I’m with you, you know that.”
    “How about you, Carpenter?”
    “This’ll be cool.”
    Oliver turned to Geoff. “Thorn, you write all the scary stories, this should be right up your alley.”
    “I don’t know why we haven’t thought of this before.”
    “Woody?”
    Paul had just shoved the last piece of a candy bar in his mouth, so he was only able to nod.
    “Peak?”
    “I’ll go along with everybody else.”
    Oliver turned back to Jason. “See, that’s why we’re a club. We always stick together.”
    “I guess so.”
    “No guessing.”
    “Okay.”
    “When do we go?” asked Lonny.
    Oliver looked out one of the screened windows. “When the sun goes down.”
     
    *   *   *
     
    At nighttime, the figures of seven young boys raced through the shadows of the tree-cluttered ravine. They came out the other end and shot through the yard between a pair of houses and out onto Elm Street, crossing it and racing up the hill to the Pines. They hesitated for only a brief moment amongst the pine trees, looking down the hill at the Little League field, the cemetery beyond it and what they knew lay even further beyond: The Fox Mausoleum.
    They descended the slope and ran along the perimeter of the ball field, one behind the other. Oliver led the pack, with Lonny right behind, then Dale, Geoff, Jason, Martin and Woody bringing up the rear, a generous gap between him and Martin.
    Their pace slowed to a walk when they reached the thick field of wild grass, goldenrod and milkweed out beyond the cemetery. They had to pick their way carefully through the tangle of undergrowth which seemed to  grab at their limbs and clothes. Oliver, leading the way like a safari guide, almost missed the two marble pillars covered with growth.
    “Here,” he cried as the others gathered around him. He could now make out the slightly trampled path that ran between the pillars.
    “Follow me, boys.”
    It was just beyond the pillars that they came to the gray stone mausoleum. The front was about eight feet in height and descended sharply toward the back into the earth, the back barely a foot above the ground.
    “Wow,” Geoff said.
    “It’s so old,” Woody puffed out between breaths.
    There was a white marble crest above the crypt which held some weathered and time-worn words about the Fox family that were no longer decipherable. Beneath that, Jason read the