Field of Screams by Wendy Parris

Author:Wendy Parris [Parris, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

That night the dream came again.

Rebecca pushed headfirst into shrieking winds. Dark trees thrashed around her, and rain drenched her feverish body. She had to find something—she didn’t know what and she didn’t know why, but she was sure a terrible disaster would happen if she couldn’t. The wind whipped her hair and tore her breath away; her chest ached; she was suffocating. There was a flash and a huge black mass fell at her—

Thunder roared, and Rebecca woke, panting. Shadows filled her room, and rain splattered on the windows. She swiped away a stray curl clinging to her damp cheek and drank in the scene in front of her—the rocking chair in the corner, the quilt folded at the foot of her bed, the dark hallway past her open door.

She was safe. Everything was okay. Kind of.

Except the nightmare was getting scarier and scarier. If real thunder hadn’t boomed right outside her window and forced her awake, she’d still be stuck in the dream, for sure.

Rebecca lay still and tried to focus on happy thoughts, like Jenna did so easily. The Cubs were doing great, so that was good. Jenna’s dad had bought them tickets to a game in September, which would be totally fun. Uncle Jon had gotten her and Mom guest passes for the town pool, and it’d be nice to go swimming. If the rain ever stopped. She sighed. There she was, right back into her negative thoughts.

A soft scratch came from above. Rebecca’s eyes flew to a dark corner of the ceiling near the door.

Silence.

She waited, muscles tense.

Once after hearing sounds like that in the walls at home, they’d caught a mouse in a trap. Mom said mice tried to sneak into houses when the weather turned cold in the fall. It was summer now, but things might be different in the country. Or it could be a squirrel. That would make sense. The roof was probably pretty old and had a hole in it. She’d ask Uncle Jon about it in the morning. She let her eyelids flutter closed.

A long, drawn-out scraping noise shattered the quiet, as if something heavy was sliding slowly across the attic floor. Rebecca jerked upright. That was no animal. Someone was in the attic.

The sound cut off abruptly.

She peered beyond the foot of her bed, past her open door, and into the hall. Nothing stirred. Every other door was closed tight, except the bathroom’s, which stood ajar, revealing a night-light shining weakly on the tile floor. None of her family would be in the attic in the middle of the night.

Could it be the ghost?

The second the thought crossed her mind, cold air pressed into Rebecca’s skin, sharp as icicles. Down the hall, the attic doorknob began to glow a sickly green. As she watched, terrified, the glow flared and the knob rattled once, twice, three times, finally building into a constantly shaking blur. Rebecca lurched to her knees and pressed back against the headboard. Suddenly the door flew open, and a light blazed down from the attic.

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