The Stone, the Cipher, and the Shadows by Brad Strickland

Author:Brad Strickland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Anticipating the cemetery raid kept Johnny awake that night. The professor usually went to bed at ten-thirty and then read himself to sleep. In fact, he’d once confided to Johnny, “If insomnia ever bothers you, I highly recommend The Life and Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett. I was rather charmed that my father gave me the name of an—ahem!—eminent literary character. He never allowed me to read the book until I was about seventeen, and then I discovered it is repetitive, boring, and the main character is a scoundrel! Reading it always sends me right to dreamland.”

At eleven-thirty, Johnny quietly got out of bed, already dressed in jeans, heavy socks, and a thick red sweatshirt. He pulled a dark-brown sweater over this, picked up his sneakers, and hefted his Boy Scout backpack. It wasn’t fancy, just a tan canvas bag with a tie-down flap and two storage compartments. He stowed one of the professor’s big, nickel-plated flashlights inside, along with a pair of gloves, a red-and-black flannel cap with earflaps, and his old canteen, which he rinsed out and filled with water, just in case he got thirsty.

He tiptoed downstairs. The big old house creaked a little, and the Waterbury clock ticked in the dining room, slow and melancholy. The professor’s snores drifted from upstairs. No other noise. Johnny put on and tied his sneakers and donned his winter jacket.

At the front door Johnny paused to make sure he had the spare key and the torn paper in his jeans pocket, then slipped out onto the porch. He relocked the door. To him the click sounded as loud as a shotgun, and he hoped the professor hadn’t heard it. Nothing happened, and he stepped off the porch.

For a crazy moment he thought a big dog crouched straight ahead of him, and then he recognized the fire hydrant. The Dixon house lay dark and silent.

Fillmore Street stretched lonely in the dead of night. The streetlights threw long black twisted shadows of tree branches. The temperature must have been about thirty degrees, and past Mrs. Kovacs’s house he turned up his jacket collar and put on his cap and gloves.

He walked fast. Now and then a dog barked from a back yard or a car rumbled past. When he heard one approaching, Johnny ducked behind a tree or a parked car so the driver wouldn’t see him.

He turned left on Water Street, hunched his shoulders, and walked faster. The ramshackle houses and run-down small storefronts loomed on either side, and hardly any streetlamps lightened the gloom. He reached the cemetery and hesitated on the gavel drive leading under the arch. The luminous hands of his wristwatch both reached for twelve o’clock. Where was Fergie? Where was Sarah?

Johnny clamped his teeth, trying to get up the nerve to slip inside the cemetery. He didn’t really believe the place was crawling with ghosts—but on the other hand, you never really knew. As he hesitated, he heard a low moan. A quavering,

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