My Friends Are Dead People Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a single door at the back. I shakily
put the lantern as far out in front of me as possible. Living in
the door itself was a snoring jack-o’-lantern with flaring
triangular nostrils, breathing hot air. Its eyes were shut, but
every time it snorted, the eyelids fluttered, illuminating a red
light from inside. How was this possible? How was all this
possible? I was inside a sequoia, hundreds of feet below my
house.
    I didn’t wait for the jack-o'-lantern to
wake up and ran out of the tree, down a sloping root leading me
away from the tree. Finally, I had reached the floor.
    “ Oz!” I called out into a
cloud of heavy fog. There wasn't an echo at all. “I’m at the bottom
now! . . . Oz! ”
    I knew she wasn’t coming, but I waited
anyway. After a few minutes, the fog dispersed a little, and I
continued on my journey through a field of weeds and hundreds of
pumpkins of all shapes and sizes. In the thickest part of the
weeds, there was one the size of a car. A huge toothy smile was
carved into it. It almost looked as real as the one in the door. As
I walked around it, I noticed at the far end a green-tinted
scarecrow sitting at the very edge of a block of hay. Its creepily
thin body was mostly hidden by a brown coat and a large black hat.
Something about it was creeping me out, and I didn’t want to be
anywhere near it. I exited the field and hurried up to a
fifteen-foot tall gate surrounding a hilly cemetery. The top was
weaved into:
     
    H a l l o w e e n’s H i l
l
     
    The gate's door was locked with giant
padlocks created to look like a roaring gargoyle. As I leaned
through the iron bars I tripped on something hard. On the ground,
there was a flattened stone. Etched into it was:
     
    I kNoW yOu BeTtEr ThAn YoU dO yOuRsElF
    TrUsT mE
    cOmE fOrWaRd If YoU dArE
    i Am YoUr FrIeNd ThE jAcK-o-MaN
    dOn’T lOoK bAcK uNlEsS yOu DoN’t FeAr Me
     
    “ Yeah, right,” I said to
myself. However, I cautiously turned around.
    “ BOO!” shouted Katie
excitedly, jumping in the air like a ninja.
    “ What – what are you–” I
gasped, stumbling back and landing on my butt.
    “ Isn’t this the best? . .
. I can’t believe Oz kept this from you. It’s amazing! Did you see
the large pumpkin? Oz planted it fifteen years ago. What about the
pumpkin in the door? That thing scared me.”
    “ She told you about this
place?”
    “ Yeah, just now. She said
this used to be a haunted house.”
    “ Why didn’t she tell
me?”
    “ I don’t know.”
    I looked behind Katie, becoming aware of a
steady glow silhouetting her body. More of the strange writing was
carved on the back of the huge jack-o’-lantern.
     
    TrY tO tRiCk Me AnD
    i WiLl GiVe YoU a TrEaT yOu WoN’t FoRgEt
    TrIcK oR tReAt
    YoUr FrIeNd, JaCk
     
    Katie ran over to the gate and read the
words on the stone. “It’s a riddle. Jack was a prankster.”
    “ Who’s Jack?”
    “ I thought I told you
about him,” she said.
    I shook my head.
    “ Jack was an Irishman who
liked playing cruel tricks on people. He was denied into Heaven and
Hell seven times. He now lives forever, trying to find a way to get
back at them. A man as evil as him can never die.”
    “ Didn’t you say some guy,
Jaculus, might have killed your mother? Is this the same
guy?”
    Katie didn’t answer, distracted by something
on the gate. There were two words set far apart from each
other:
     
    t r i c k t r e a
t
     
    “ Trick or treat,” I
read.
    “ Jesse, I can read, you
know,” she stated.
    “ I know.”
    “ We have to
choose.”
    Katie must have already
made up her mind because she was running over to the trick sign. She pulled
back on the tooth-shaped handle, and the gate screeched open onto a
wooden bridge, built over a cascading stream that ran around the
cemetery.
    “ No, this is the best,” said Katie,
already climbing on all fours up the hill. “How could someone have
made all this?”
    She waited for me to catch up. We both
stopped at a large tombstone.
     
    Aidan