Trick or Trap

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Four

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

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  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  My name is Scott Harmon. I’m twelve. Old enough not to be afraid of graveyards. Or creepy, old abandoned houses. Or scratchy creaking sounds late at night. Or howls or whispers or screeches or shadows darting in front of me, or loud car horns or bursts of cold wind or … or …

  You probably get it. I’m old enough not to be afraid of a lot of things. But I still am. I mean, a lot of things make my heart skip a beat. Or make me choke or start to jump out of my skin. Or make me open my mouth in a yelp or a hey or a heeelp!

  Sure, I tell myself to man up, to get braver. Do you think I don’t wake up every morning and tell myself, “Scott, old buddy, old wimp, old fraidycat, today’s the day you’re not going to be scared of stuff!”?

  I say that every morning. Then I push back the covers, lower my feet to the floor — and something happens. Maybe I step into a big bowl of ice water my evil sister, Rita, put beside the bed. And I start off the day with a loud, shrill scream.

  Or maybe Rita slips some kind of animal under my sheets. Or maybe she leaves a frightening surprise, some creature big and ugly and dead, for me in my sock drawer.

  Rita is bad. She is nine and very cute with big, round black eyes and dimples when she smiles. What makes her smile? Scaring me, her older brother, and watching me scream my head off.

  She loves to frighten me and she’s very good at it. Mom and Dad think she’s adorable. I think she’s a terror. And I mean terror in the horror-movie kind of way. Rita can be terrifying.

  She even has an evil maniac laugh. If you heard it, you’d get chills, too. Seriously.

  And let’s face facts, Rita isn’t my only problem.

  As soon as I leave home, I’ve got Mickey Klass and his twin brother, Morty, in my face. The Klass brothers are like cavemen or Neanderthals. I mean, ape-men, primitive creatures you see in those science documentaries they make you watch in school.

  They are only twelve, but they are very hairy. They both have stringy, long brown hair hanging down their chubby faces. I think they could grow beards if they wanted to. No joke. They’re big and wide, built low to the ground, about the same size as those Fiat cars you see on the street, maybe a little bigger.

  And guess what? Their main mission in life is to terrify a kid we know and love named Scott Harmon.

  When some people find out you’re the kind of kid who is scared of things, they love to test you. They love to go after you. They love to make you squirm and scream and run.

  Face it. They’re mean. The Klass brothers are mean. It’s like they saw the word victim tattooed on my forehead. Do you know that word?

  Well, look it up. It will help explain why Mickey and Morty decided their new hobby would be scaring the pants off me and making my life miserable.

  So you can see why I’m eager to change my whole personality. Maybe slip out of this skinny, quivering Scott Harmon body and into a powerful, muscle-bound X-Men body, afraid of nothing, bursting with mutant powers to zap anyone who challenges me.

  I like Wolverine a lot. And sometimes I picture myself as Thor. He’s big and quiet. He doesn’t fit in, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t take nonsense from anyone.

  Sweet.

  If only there were brave pills you could take. I’d gobble one every morning, go downstairs, and say, “Okay, Rita — do your worst.” Or maybe on the walk to school: “Okay, Mickey and Morty — show me what you got!”

  Can you imagine that?

  Well, there aren’t any brave pills. And the chances are not too good that I am actually a Marvel superhero in disguise.

  That’s why I have to say, “Hooray for Amanda Gold!” Amanda is my best friend, my pal. And she is as cowardly and wimpy and afraid of stuff as I am.

  I’m not making this up. Ask her. She’ll admit it.

  When a mouse jumped across her desk last week in Ms. Mueller’s class, Amanda screamed so loud, she set off all the fire alarms in the school. Why the fire alarms? I don’t know. But you have to admit that’s pretty awesome screaming.

  After school, I told her how awesome that was. I mean, friends have to stick up for friends, right?

  And now you are probably wondering why Amanda and I are out on this cold, blustery gray October afternoon. Across the street from the ancient graveyard. Huddled together, shivering, gazing up at the cracked and rickety front stoop of the dark, abandoned house everyone says is haunted.

  Why are we here? That’s what you’re wondering, aren’t you?

  So am I.

  Actually, I knew why we were here. I knew it but I didn’t really believe it.

  This was step one. The first part of our plan to make ourselves braver.

  Halloween was coming soon. We had to toughen ourselves up. We had to be prepared.

  Amanda and I talked about it for days. If we made ourselves tougher and less afraid, we could change our lives. And we could get what every frightened, timid person in the world wants. You guessed it.

  Revenge.

  First, I wanted to get revenge against my darling little sister, Rita.

  This morning, Rita went into the bathroom before I woke up, emptied my mouthwash bottle, and filled it with some kind of red food coloring.

  I know, I know. Most kids don’t use mouthwash in the morning. But I have a thing about mouth germs. Don’t judge me.

  I was half-awake. I took a mouthful of the stuff and swished it around my mouth. Yuck. It tasted weird. I gazed in the mirror. I had RED TEETH! Red gums. Blood all over my mouth. Blood!

  Did I scream in panic? Of course. You would, too, if you thought your mouth was dripping blood.

  I could hear Rita laughing all the way from the kitchen downstairs.

  So, yes, number one on my list is revenge against Rita.

  And, of course, Amanda and I were eager to get revenge on Mickey and Morty. We weren’t just eager, we were desperate to pay them back.

  Did I mention their hobby is torturing Amanda, too?

  So here we were, ready to prove to each other that we could change. We could become brave people in time for Halloween.

  I was wearing a wool cap pulled down over my ears, my winter parka, and a woolly sweater underneath it. But I was still shivering. Amanda had her hands tucked deep in the pockets of her coat. A long blue scarf, wrapped round and around her, covered her mouth and nose.

  The air was cold, and gusts of wind kept pushing against us, as if telling us to turn around and go home.

  The sky was almost as dark as night. In the old graveyard behind us, the tr
ees cracked and creaked in the wind.

  Did I mention that the graveyard is just one block from where Amanda and I live? And that Lucky Me has to walk past it every morning and every afternoon to and from school?

  Of course, I’m terrified of graveyards, and this one is particularly frightening. The gravestones are old, mostly rubbed smooth, cracked and tilted in every direction. It looks to me like the dead people have pushed up from under the ground, knocked over their tombstones as they pulled themselves up from their graves.

  That’s my worst nightmare. Well … one of them. That I’ll be walking past the graveyard, and I’ll see bony hands clawing the ground, someone slapping at the carpet of dead leaves from underground. A dead person … a zombie — pulling himself up from the cold, hard dirt. And then come staggering blindly toward me.

  That’s a bad nightmare, right? Don’t snicker or laugh. If you lived one block from a graveyard, you might have that nightmare, too.

  I pulled the collar of my coat higher. “Amanda, are we really doing this? Is this really going to make us braver? Are we making a big mistake?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Stop talking.”

  “But —”

  “We’ve already decided,” she said, crossing her coat sleeves in front of her. “So shut up. And let’s go.”

  I nodded. She was right. She knew me. She knew the Scott Harmon method for staying out of trouble. Just talk about doing something forever but don’t really do it.

  But like I said, we were desperate. We had to prove that we could be brave. We were going into the old, abandoned house. We had planned it, and now we were doing it.

  Amanda took the first step onto the stoop and I followed. The stairs were made of some kind of gray stone, but they were cracked and crumbling.

  No one had lived in this old house for a long, long time. Except maybe the ghosts. Everyone said the place was haunted. Everyone said weird howls and shrill cries rose from the house late at night.

  I don’t believe in ghosts. I mean, I don’t want to believe in ghosts. So I sure hoped I wasn’t going to run into any.

  Amanda and I climbed the three steps of the front stoop. The front door was black, the paint peeling. I didn’t see a doorbell. I mean, I didn’t plan to ring the bell. I just didn’t see one. The house was so old, maybe doorbells weren’t invented then.

  “Did you bring your phone?” Amanda asked. Her voice suddenly sounded tiny. Or was it just muffled by the swirling wind?

  I tapped my jeans pocket. “Of course,” I said. “I have it.”

  The plan, you see, was to sneak into the house, explore some rooms, and take pictures of us standing in there. The pictures would prove to the others that we were brave enough to go inside.

  Amanda tilted her head toward the doorknob. “Try the door,” she said.

  “Why don’t you?” I said.

  “Oh, wow. Nice start,” she snapped. “Totally brave, Scott. I’m impressed.”

  “If you’re going to be sarcastic, we can do this some other time,” I said.

  She just stared at me with her cold blue eyes. I knew that stare. It meant don’t mess with me.

  I wrapped my hand around the pitted brass knob. Twisted it one way, then the other. I tried pulling the door open. Then I tried pushing.

  And then I heard the raspy shout, a deep, angry, bellowing cry: “Go away! Go away from my house!”

  “Huh?” My heart jumped to my throat, my knees folded, and I nearly fell off the stoop.

  Amanda and I leaped back. We both spun away from the door. And I saw Mickey and Morty Klass grinning up at us from the sidewalk.

  Mickey shook his head. “Scotty, you really thought that was a ghost — didn’t you!”

  He and his brother let out high-pitched giggles and bumped their hairy knuckles.

  Their big, wide bodies were blocking the stoop. They wore furry brown coats that made them look like grizzly bears. Mickey’s face was half-covered by a cap with furry brown earflaps. Morty wore the red-and-black baseball cap with a skull on the front that he always wears.

  “Good joke, Mickey,” I said. “Very funny.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s funny,” Morty said. “Your faces!” The two of them laughed their cruel giggle again.

  “Can we go now?” Amanda said.

  “We just got here,” Mickey said, adjusting his furry earflaps. “You don’t want to hurt our feelings.” He squinted his piggy eyes at Amanda. “What were you two doing? Trying to break into the house?”

  “Bet they wanted to hide in there so they could kiss,” Morty said. He made gross kissing sounds on the back of his hand.

  They both howled with laughter.

  Amanda scowled at them. “We were just looking around,” she said. “Exploring.”

  “We have to go,” I said. “Catch you guys later. I have to be home for my origami lesson.”

  Feeble. I know it. That was totally lame. But my brain just doesn’t work well when these two hulks are breathing down my neck.

  “I could do some origami on you,” Mickey said. “Fold you up into a little bird.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “My body doesn’t fold. Really.”

  Morty reached up and poked my chest hard with two fingers. “Bet we could fold you,” he growled. “Make you into a cute little bird and you could cheep cheep cheep like a canary.”

  “No thanks. I’m allergic to birds,” I said. “I break out in big red bumps.”

  I gazed around, searching for an escape route. They had us trapped at the top of the stoop.

  “Forget all that,” Mickey said. “Scott and Amanda like to explore. So let’s do some exploring.”

  “Yeah,” Morty said. “We got a good place for you to explore. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  They grabbed us and pulled us off the stoop.

  “Get your paws off me. Let us go,” Amanda said. “Come on, guys. It’s cold out here. Let us go.”

  They pushed us across the street to the low brick wall that runs around the graveyard. On the other side of the wall, the wind howled through the bare trees and sent clumps of dead leaves dancing over the gravestones.

  “I really have to get home,” I insisted. “I promised my little sister I’d show her how Velcro works.”

  The Klass brothers ignored me. They were grunting excitedly. They really did look like short, wide bears.

  Amanda suddenly went pale. She crossed her arms tightly in front of her. I saw her shiver. “We’re in trouble,” she whispered.

  “Good thing you like to explore,” Mickey said, unable to keep an evil grin from spreading across his face. “Since you two lucky dudes just joined the Dare Club.”

  I swallowed. “Dare Club? What’s that?” My voice cracked.

  Mickey’s grin didn’t fade. “We dare you to do things, and you do them.”

  Amanda hugged herself. “What if we don’t want to join?”

  The two hulks burst out laughing. “You’re already lifetime members!” Mickey exclaimed. He slapped me across the back really hard. “Congrats, dude.”

  “Are you ready for your first dare?” Morty asked. It wasn’t a question — it was a threat.

  “No,” I said.

  “Wh-what do we have to do?” Amanda stammered.

  Mickey’s grin finally faded. He shook his head. He stared hard at Amanda and me. “You’re not going to like it,” he said softly.

  A blue-and-white city bus rumbled past. I saw a kid in a red cap staring out at us from a back window. If this were a movie, I’d grab Amanda’s hand and we’d dart across the street. We’d chase after the bus and leap inside. And watch the Klass brothers back on the sidewalk, scratching their heads.

  But this wasn’t a movie. I watched the bus turn the corner and disappear.

  “Here’s your first dare,” Mickey Klass said. “It’s an easy one. Too easy.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll come back when you have a harder one,” I said. I started to wal
k past them, but Morty grabbed the front of my coat and shoved me back.

  “We dare you to go through that gate,” Mickey said, pointing. “And follow the path through the graveyard to the other side.”

  “Easy,” Morty said, wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand.

  Amanda and I gazed at the rusted iron gate that opened into the cemetery. I wondered if the Klass brothers knew that walking in the cemetery was our biggest fear.

  We had to pass the graveyard twice each day, to and from school. We always walked around it. A lot of kids took a shortcut through the graves to the other side. Those were the kids who did not have bad nightmares about walking in the graveyard. Those kids did not include Amanda and me.

  Amanda and I glanced at each other. I shivered. It wasn’t from the cold. It was from fear.

  “I … don’t think I can do it,” I told the Klass brothers. “I didn’t bring the right shoes. My mom will kill me if I get these shoes muddy.”

  Morty raised his big boot and stomped as hard as he could on the toe of my shoe. When he removed his boot, he’d left a big mud stain on my shoe.

  “Morty and I are going to watch you the whole way,” Mickey said. “We want to see if a dead person reaches up from underground and grabs your legs and tries to pull you down.”

  Another one of my most frightening nightmares. How did he know?

  It was Amanda’s turn to shiver. “If a dead person tries to pull us into a grave,” she said, “will you two come rescue us?”

  “No way,” Morty said. “We’ll just laugh.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be funny,” Mickey agreed.

  “Ha-ha,” I said.

  Morty gave me a shove toward the gate. “Stop stalling. We dared you to walk through the graveyard. So …”

  “Maybe I could do it tomorrow?” I said. “I don’t feel right disturbing the dead on a weekend.”

  Mickey and Morty squinted at me. They were both wheezing now, breathing hard. That’s how you could tell they were angry.

  “Sunday is when the zombies come out,” Morty said. “You want to see zombies — don’t you?”

  “Get going,” his brother muttered.

  I saw Amanda’s shoulders slump. She knew we had no choice. We had to walk through this frightening place we had been avoiding for months and months.