Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls Read Online Free PDF Page A

work, anyway?” Holly asks. “Isn’t blood blood? Why does it matter if the person’s alive?”
    I shrug. “They like it warm?”
    Holly’s still trying to make sense of it. “Well, what if the person has
just
died? It’s still warm, right?”
    I throw my hands in the air. “If vampires were real, it would all make sense. But they’re
not.
” I turn to Marissa. “Everything’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about. He wasn’t a vampire. He was just … Well, I don’t know what he was doing there, but he wasn’t a vampire.”
    Holly nods. “She’s right, Marissa. He was probably just an undertaker or something.”
    I look at Holly. “What
is
an undertaker, anyway? Is that the guy who does the burying?”
    Casey shakes his head. “I think the undertaker’s the guy who arranges everything. Like at a mortuary?”
    “Then what’s a mortician?” I ask.
    Casey shrugs. “I think it’s the same as the undertaker?”
    “Okay … so maybe the guy with the car was setting up for a burial?”
    Marissa squints at me.
“In the middle of the night?”
    I shrug. “Maybe he’s a gravedigger? Maybe it’s one of those sensitive activities. You know—maybe people don’t like to
see
graves being dug? I mean, have
you
ever seen a grave being dug?”
    “No! But … but …” She sputters for a minute, then crosses her arms and practically stomps a foot. “I can’t believe you guys dragged me through a graveyard with vampires in it!”
    Now, while the rest of us have been trying to talk Marissadown, Billy’s been slyly maneuvering behind her. He lifts his arms way high, cranks his eyelids wide, and then zooms in with a big, wide chomp to Marissa’s neck.
    Marissa’s not shy about screaming. Marissa’s
never
been shy about screaming. But coming face to face with dangling spiders, or bloodied men in monster masks, or snarling, drooling, snapping dogs, or killer gang guys … none of that has
ever
made her scream like Billy’s little chomp on the neck.
    “AAAAA​AAAaa​aaaaa​aaaaa​aaaaa​aaah!” she screamed, and then she saw it was Billy and started
pounding
on him. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER do that again!”
    Billy was laughing and hiding behind his arms and his dangling candy sack, but Marissa got in some really solid slugs.
    “That was just so
mean,
” she says with a pout.
    Billy Pratt’s a hugger. He hugs everybody. Guys, girls, teachers, dogs … That’s just the way he is. So when he says, “Billy was a bad, bad boy,” and opens his arms for a hug, of course Marissa lets him hug her.
    Only as soon as he gets in close, he attacks her neck again, making loud slurping noises, going, “Aaaah! Blood at last, blood at last” in a Transylvanian accent.
    Marissa swats him away, but this time she can’t help laughing.
    At this point we’ve pretty much relaxed about the Vampire and are back in Halloween mode. So when Holly says, “So are we going over to that haunted house, orwhat?” everyone else goes, Oh, yeah—
that’s
where we were headed, and off we go in search of the haunted house.
    Now, when it comes to people in Santa Martina decorating their houses, Halloween is like Christmas. You’ve got the neighborhoods that get way into it with everybody trying to outdo the guy next door, and then you’ve got the neighborhoods where it’s completely dark—nobody does anything.
    People at school had been talking about the haunted house on the end of Feere Street for weeks, but since it was quite a ways from Hudson’s, I’d told myself that it was probably not worth going to—that if the goal was to get free candy, we’d be better off racing through neighborhoods where the houses were close together and not too big.
    But as we reached the Feere Street cul-de-sac, I changed my mind. For one thing, the road was blocked off and there were big wooden signs on posts with black brushstroke letters reading BEWARE, DEAD END, ENTER AT YOUR OWN