Party Games by R. L. Stine

Author:R. L. Stine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466856516
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20.

PARTY CRASHERS

We followed him down the long hall. The faces of the Fear ancestors on the wall portraits appeared to watch us as we passed. I walked between Kerry and Eric. We didn’t talk.

It was strange seeing Eric so serious, not clowning. Beads of sweat had formed across his forehead. He kept mopping the sweat off with one hand, but then more would appear.

As we turned into another hall, he frowned at me. “Are we having fun yet?”

I shuddered. “People warned me not to come here. Maybe … I should have listened?”

Mac’s angry face flashed into my mind. He was so determined to keep me from coming to the party. I could see his jaw clenched tight, and once again, I heard his frantic pleas. “Just don’t go, Rachel. I … I’ve heard things I shouldn’t.”

What did that mean?

I hadn’t even thought about it till now. Mac was jealous. He couldn’t stand the idea of me being with Brendan Fear. But what did he mean exactly? What had he heard?

At the end of the hall, gray light poured in through the square window onto a dark-wood door. One of the back doors. Through the glass, I could see trees blowing in a strong wind. Dead brown leaves bounced off the window.

Brendan opened the last door in the hall. It revealed a narrow room with a row of four TV monitors along a control panel with rows of dials and buttons and blinking lights.

The room wasn’t big enough for us all to follow Brendan inside. We huddled in the doorway and watched as he sat down on a tall bench at the control panel.

I raised my eyes to the four screens. The pictures were in black-and-white. I figured out that two cameras were posted at the front of the house and two at the back.

“I’m going to rewind,” Brendan said, “and see if we can see anything going on.”

He leaned over the panel and turned some dials. I heard a low whine, and then the pictures on the four screens immediately began to scan backward.

I saw leaves blowing across the front walk. Birds landed and took off in the tall grass in the back. A squirrel raised its head as if staring into the camera. As the storm clouds hovered, the pictures darkened, then grew bright, then darkened again.

“Oh, wow,” Brendan murmured. He stopped the video from rewinding. Leaning closer to the screen in front of him, he started it moving again. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

I grabbed Eric’s shoulder as I saw the two men on the screen. Two men striding up to the backdoor. They had black ski masks over their heads. And they each had a rifle on one arm.

Hunting rifles.

I screamed as one of them raised his rifle and swung the handle at the backdoor. I could see the window glass shatter. And I watched one of the masked intruders reach in through the broken window and push open the door.

As they strode into the house, they disappeared from view.

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