Monsterstreet #2 Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Clay Rodman, my best friend in the neighborhood where I grew up, with whom I shared a magical Halloween night long ago.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. The House at the End of Maple Street

  2. Secret Hideout

  3. The Halloweeners

  4. Trick and Treat

  5. Just Take One

  6. The Monsters

  7. Holy Halloween!

  8. Monster House

  9. Town Square Terror

  10. Festival of Horrors

  11. School of Nightmares

  12. Monster Mash

  13. Midnight Mayhem

  14. Making a Plan

  15. Eat Your Heart Out

  16. Monster Marathon

  17. Mother Knows Best

  18. Attic Secrets

  19. The Haunting Truth

  20. Not Afraid to Die

  21. Only the Dead Can Speak to the Dead

  22. Unburying the Truth

  23. Hallie Is for Halloween

  24. Transfiguration

  25. Halloween Forever

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Monsterstreet #3: Carnevil

  1. A Strange Wind

  2. Land of the Dead

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The House at the End of Maple Street

  Fisher gripped the straps of his backpack as he trudged down Maple Street, gazing in each window at the silhouettes of boys and girls putting on homemade costumes and nibbling on fresh-baked treats. Jack-o’-lanterns grinned at him from cobwebbed porches. Blow-up monsters and plastic gravestones loomed on leaf-covered lawns. And the sugary scent of candy wafted through the crisp autumn air, enchanting his nostrils. It seemed every house on the block was decorated for Halloween.

  All except one.

  The house at the end of Maple Street looked just as ordinary as it did on any other day of the year. There wasn’t a single pumpkin, not one fake spider, not even a sign that greeted guests with Happy Halloween!

  Fisher walked up to the door of the house, turned the brass knob, and stepped inside. He reached down to pet his cat, and heard his mom’s voice echoing from the kitchen. . . .

  “. . . Yes, I accept the position. We’ll be there before Thanksgiving. I’m very much looking forward to this opportunity.”

  Fisher peeked around the corner just as his mom hung up the phone. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and her short brown hair looked darker in the shadows where she sat.

  “Who was that?” Fisher asked.

  His mom winced, startled. “No one.”

  “It had to be someone,” Fisher pried.

  His mom sighed.

  “If you must know, I was offered a vice principal position in that town on the coast I was telling you about.”

  “We’re moving . . . again?” Fisher’s voice reeked of disappointment.

  “You know how much I don’t like being here,” his mom said. “I lived in this town, and in this house, long enough while I was growing up. I told you when we moved this summer that it was only a temporary stop for you and me after the divorce—until we could get settled somewhere better.”

  “But I’m just starting to get used to this place,” Fisher said. “Some guys at school even asked me to go trick-or-treating with them tonight. Do you know how hard it is to get invited to something at a new school? Everyone’s had the same friends since kindergarten.”

  “You can make new friends after we move,” his mom replied.

  “That’s what you said last time, and so that’s what I’m trying to do,” Fisher pointed out.

  “There’s no negotiating on this,” his mom said.

  Fisher felt the hot fire of anger burning in his chest, and he tried to push it down deep where he kept all his feelings. But it was too much to hold in.

  “If you and Dad hadn’t gotten a divorce, I never would have had to leave my friends in the first place!” he erupted like a volcano.

  His mom was silent. Fisher knew mentioning the divorce was a powerful weapon, and he only used it when he felt he had no other choice.

  “You’re entitled to your own feelings about it. And so am I,” his mom said, but her words felt cold. Like she wasn’t listening to him. Ever since the divorce, he felt like he and his mom were living on two different planets with nothing in common but their last name.

  “Why do you have to be so selfish?” Fisher mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  Fisher debated whether to say it again. Instead, he said something worse.

  “Dad wouldn’t make me move again.”

  He saw the color of anger fill his mom’s face.

  “Well, your dad isn’t here, is he? And as long as you’re living under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.”

  “I hate your rules!” Fisher shouted, still unable to control his temper.

  “That’s it, young man. You’re grounded,” she said in her principal-like voice.

  “But what about Halloween?”

  “Doesn’t make any difference to me what day it is,” she returned. “You know I don’t care for Halloween anyway.”

  “But Mom!”

  “With that attitude, you can stay in your room for the entire weekend. I’ve already put some moving boxes upstairs, so you can get an early start on packing.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Okay. The next month! Keep it up and you’ll be grounded for the rest of sixth grade.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then decided arguing would only make things worse. He turned and walked up the stairs to his bedroom and lay down in his reading tent, where he kept his stash of comic books and monster figurines.

  He heard his mom shout from downstairs, “By the way, I have to chaperone the Halloween dance at the high school later, so I’ll bring your dinner up before I leave. And no TV while I’m gone—I don’t want you having nightmares from all those monster movies that will be on tonight!”

  Fisher glanced across the room to the pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be filled. He had just unpacked everything a few months before, and now his mom was making him do it all again.

  Why can’t Mom just listen to me for once? And why can’t she just let me go trick-or-treating?

  Right then, a staticky sound buzzed over the walkie-talkie in his backpack.

  A boy’s raspy voice came through. “The meeting’s about to start. You coming or what?”

  2

  Secret Hideout

  Fisher ripped the white sheet from his bed and used his pocketknife to cut out two oval holes for his eyes.

  “This will have to do for my costume,” he whispered, tucking the ghost sheet into his backpack and climbing out the window.

  As soon as his feet hit the ground, he ran to his bike. Then he pedaled as fast as he could into the forest at the edge of the neighborhood, just as the boy on the walkie-talkie had told him to do.

  The afternoon sun beamed through the skeleton trees, bathing the woods with an eerie autumn glow. Red and brown leaves crunched beneath his tires as he passed an old graveyard, running his fingers over the spikes of the rusted iron fence. A hundred yards up, he arrived at a giant oak tree three times the size of any others in sight. Its limbs were gnarled, twisted, and full of knots. A deep hollow stared out from its trunk like the eye socket of a skull.

  Fisher saw three other bikes lying on the ground near the base of the tree, and he knew he was in the right place.

  High above, a tree house was cradled within its limbs, hidden in camouflage.


  A handmade wooden sign hung on its side:

  THE HALLOWEENERS

  Est. 1955

  “Hey, I’m here!” he shouted, a bit nervous.

  A moment later, a boy wearing a tuxedo with a red bow tie and a black top hat looked over the edge of the tree house.

  But . . .

  The boy was missing his head.

  A mysterious empty space existed between the neck of his suit and his floating top hat. Fisher soon noticed a wire connecting the two, creating the illusion of an invisible man.

  “Champ?” Fisher called up, recognizing the boy’s voice.

  Two hands peeled open the chest of the tuxedo, and a plump face dotted with freckles peeked out.

  “Took you long enough!” Champ teased, shoving a handful of potato chips into his mouth. “Just pull the rope in the hollow and come on up!”

  Fisher reached into the tree hollow and pulled on a rope hidden in the shadows. A secret ladder was triggered, clattering down to him from above.

  He climbed, rung by rung, and opened the secret door at the bottom of the hideout.

  Champ stood above him, waiting.

  “Can you guess what I am?” Champ asked.

  “An invisible magician?” Fisher guessed.

  “Soooo close. But no,” Champ said, smiling his goofy smile. “I’m an invisible candysnatcher!”

  He grabbed a pillowcase from the nearby bookshelf and acted like he was stealing candy out of thin air and adding it to his plunder.

  “Cool illusion,” Fisher affirmed. “Did you make it yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Champ said. “I asked my dad for help, but he was too busy, so I just did it myself like I do every year. Anyway, come meet the guys.”

  Fisher felt a knot of nervousness in his stomach as they approached the other boys. He looked around at the magnificent tree house. Plastered against the walls were movie posters and books, monster figurines and handmade models. The entire place was a museum of strange, macabre relics.

  “Guys, this is Fisher. He’s the one I was telling you about who sits beside me in social studies,” Champ said.

  No one in the tree house seemed to care Fisher was there. He sensed he wasn’t the first person who Champ had invited to their secret hideout. And he hoped they would like him enough to let him stick around.

  “That there is Squirrel,” Champ said, pointing to a tall, skinny boy dressed like a vampire, sitting in the corner at a milk crate table. He was holding a ruler and geometry compass, drawing something onto a large sheet of paper.

  Squirrel nodded to Fisher, barely looking up.

  Champ continued, “He’s super smart. All GT classes. He likes to be in control, so he’s our secretary and treasurer.”

  “What are you?” Fisher asked Champ.

  Champ held up his bag of potato chips and winked. “Food service.”

  Fisher smiled and observed Squirrel, who was diligently working on his project.

  “If you can’t tell, he’s supposed to be a vampire,” Champ added.

  “Vegetarian vampire,” Squirrel corrected him, breaking out of his trance. “This year, our costumes are supposed to be ironic interpretations of our fears.”

  “Whatever,” Champ said, then continued, “Behind the bookshelf is Pez. He’s our president. Mainly because he could beat us up if we ever tried to take his place.”

  Fisher glanced around the side of the bookshelf and saw a boy dressed as a swamp monster lying on a couch and tossing a baseball up in the air and catching it in his mitt.

  “I’m a dehydrated swamp creature,” Pez said, then sucked water through a straw connected to an Ozark container rigged with shoulder straps.

  Champ whispered to Fisher. “Pez was bit by a moccasin in the creek last summer and nearly died, so now he’s afraid of water. Even though his dad’s the head swim coach at the high school.”

  Pez stood from the couch and walked toward Fisher.

  “What Champ isn’t telling you is that I have more home runs, touchdowns, and three-pointers than any kid at school. I just don’t like to swim anymore, that’s all,” Pez explained. “Anyway, what are you supposed to be, new kid?”

  Fisher held up his white bedsheet, timidly.

  “A ghost sheet?” Pez mumbled, unimpressed, then walked away.

  “As long as it’s an ironic interpretation of a fear, it will work,” Squirrel called from his workshop space.

  “You could be . . . a ‘ghost who’s afraid of ghosts,’” Champ suggested.

  “Hey, that’s good,” Fisher said, pulling the sheet over his head. He peered out the eyeholes and playfully made a moaning sound like a ghost. “I mean, everyone’s afraid to die. Right?”

  “Champ told us you drew some pretty rad jack-o’-lanterns in class,” Pez continued. “Says you seem to know a lot about monsters. Is it true?”

  “I know some stuff. I have the entire collection of Monster Magazine and have seen just about every scary movie ever made.”

  “That’s somewhat impressive,” Pez said. “But the real question is . . . do you think you have what it takes to be a Halloweener?”

  Pez stared down at Fisher, dissecting him with his eyes. Fisher gulped, feeling warmth rush into his head and sweat form in his palms.

  Fisher removed his ghost sheet, then asked the question he somehow knew he’d dread asking. . . .

  “What’s a Halloweener?”

  3

  The Halloweeners

  They stared at Fisher like they couldn’t believe he had asked the question. Either that, or that the answer was so secret that they would have to kill him if they told him.

  Pez picked up a wooden gavel and knocked on the tree-stump table at the center of the tree house three times.

  Squirrel, Champ, and Fisher joined him.

  “The Halloweeners,” Pez began, “is the greatest, most secret club that’s ever existed in the history of the world. A Halloweener is someone who’s sworn to preserve and protect Halloween at all costs.”

  “Yeah, and to get in, you have to profess Halloween as your favorite holiday. And devote yourself to learning everything about it,” Squirrel added. “Most important, you have to take the oath to uphold the Three Sacred Laws of Halloween.”

  “Three Sacred Laws?” Fisher asked.

  Squirrel stepped forward, looking like a professor.

  “One . . . no smashing jack-o’-lanterns,” he said. “They’re the most sacred symbol of Halloween.”

  “Two . . . no stealing candy,” Champ added, then mumbled out the side of his mouth, “It’s my least favorite law.”

  “Three . . . no disrespecting the Dead,” Pez warned. “Halloween is the one night of the year when the Dead wander among the Living. That’s why our tree house is next to the graveyard. We’re their protectors.”

  Fisher glanced out the tree-house window to the iron gates of the cemetery below. They looked like a doorway into another world. Giant oak trees canopied the hundreds of gravestones rising up from the ground like cracked teeth. Fisher imagined all the corpses lying beneath the ground, rotting away in their dark, suffocating boxes.

  He gulped.

  “What happens if someone breaks one of the rules?” he asked.

  Pez, Squirrel, and Champ stared at him as if he had just committed blasphemy.

  “Bad things will happen,” Squirrel warned him. “And you’ll be excommunicated from the ancient order of the Halloweeners forever.”

  Fisher put up his hands in surrender.

  “Got it. No breaking the rules,” he confirmed.

  “So . . . ,” Pez continued in his most serious voice. “Do you think you have what it takes to join the club?”

  Fisher thought of all the cafeteria lunches when he had sat alone at a table while everyone else sat with their friends. These were the first guys who wanted to be his friends since he had moved. Plus, they loved Halloween as much as he did.

  “I’m in,” Fisher professed. “I want to be a Halloweener.”<
br />
  Pez smiled. “Good. Then you have to help us win the Halloween Games. The three categories are costume contest, trick-or-treating competition, and jack-o’-lantern carving. And this year, we have a secret weapon.”

  “Secret weapon?” Champ asked excitedly.

  Squirrel took the scroll from the milk crate where he had been diligently working and rolled it out over the tree-stump table. It was a map marked up with pencils, crayons, and colored markers. Fisher had never seen such a meticulously detailed blueprint.

  The top of it read:

  The Halloweeners’ Trick-or-Treat Map

  “My parents are in charge of the festival every year,” Squirrel explained. “They judge by candy weight, not quantity. So we want to get as much poundage as we can before we weigh in. I’ve marked all the houses with candy baskets in red. But remember, the Second Law of Halloween is no stealing candy, so we can only take as many pieces as the instructions on each basket allow. Got it?”

  Fisher nodded, impressed that Squirrel had broken trick-or-treating down to a science.

  “The blue houses here are the ones that give the biggest candy bars. We’ll get those next,” Squirrel said.

  “This map is brilliant,” Champ gushed. “Even better than the one you made last year.”

  “I like to improve on my designs,” Squirrel said. “My dad says it’s what successful people do.”

  Pez put his hand on Fisher’s shoulder. “You help us win the Games and you’ll be an official Halloweener by the end of the night. You still in?”

  Fisher nodded.

  “All right, then. What are we waiting for?” Pez asked.

  He put his hand out over the Halloweener emblem carved into the center of the tree stump. It was a jack-o’-lantern filled with candy and resting against a gravestone—symbolizing the Three Laws of Halloween.

  No smashing jack-o’-lanterns. No stealing candy. And no disrespecting the Dead.

  Champ and Squirrel put their hands on top of Pez’s hand.

  Fisher respectfully stood aside and watched as the three of them chanted their ancient motto aloud: “Once a Halloweener, always a Halloweener. Till death and beyond!”

  He envied their camaraderie, and wanted more than anything to join them.