The Ghost in the Third Row by Bruce Coville

Author:Bruce Coville
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497668423
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER TWELVE

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I pushed again. Nothing.

“Chris!” I yelled. “Quit fooling around! Let me out of here!”

“Well, open the lid and get out,” said Chris. “I’m not stopping you.”

If I live to be a hundred, I doubt that moment will ever come off my list of the ten worst things that ever happened to me.

I smashed my hands against the lid of the coffin. “CHRIS!” I screamed. “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

“Hold still!” yelled Chris. “I’m trying!”

I could hear her scratching and poking around the edges of the lid.

I took a deep breath and tried to hold still. That got me to wondering if there were air holes in the coffin. Weird visions began to flash through my head. I saw my entire fifth-grade class coming to my funeral. I saw our teacher, Mrs. Grambicki, standing at the edge of the coffin, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and talking about what a good kid I had been.

“It won’t budge!” Chris said, interrupting my funeral. “I think it’s broken.”

I think I went a little crazy right then. I remember pounding against the lid like a little kid having a tantrum.

“Hold still!” Chris yelled. “You’ll knock the thing off the sawhorses. You might break it.”

“I don’t care if it breaks!” I yelled. “Get me out of here!”

Chris started to say something, but she was interrupted by an angry voice yelling about “all the racket going on down there!”

It was Pop.

I stopped pounding. I knew Pop would get me out of the coffin. But I had a feeling when he did I might wish I was back inside it again.

The next few minutes were a jumble of voices and noises. Pop yelled at Chris about the trouble she was causing, and Chris yelled right back, trying to explain to him about my being trapped in the coffin.

Finally it dawned on him what she was saying. “Damn fool kids,” he muttered. He began banging at the side of the coffin. Suddenly the bottom opened up, and I came crashing down onto the floor.

“Ouch!” I yelped. “That hurt!”

“Serves you right!” said Pop gruffly. “The two of you don’t have any business fooling around down here, anyway. Let me see your hands,” he added.

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I realized that he had noticed what I hadn’t even felt in all the excitement: my hands were scraped and bleeding from pounding on the lid of the coffin.

I held them out for his inspection. He grabbed them, turned them over roughly, then said, “We’d better take care of these. Come with me.”

Glancing at each other nervously, Chris and I followed Pop to his office, which was where we had been trying to go before we got distracted by all those props. Only we had intended to go in without Pop, so we could check things out.

Actually, I’m not sure “office” is the right word for the place. It was just a large, dingy room filled almost to overflowing with stuff most people would consider junk.

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