My Friends Are Dead People (26 page)

By now, the footsteps were as close as they
could possibly be. I tossed another rock over my shoulder. There
was a solid hollow sound before it hit the ground.

“
Jesse, yslas,” shrieked
Meesi, ramming herself back into the rocks.

Cosqué was painfully standing over us,
gaping at the pile of rocks. Three more wounded yslas came limping
behind him.

“
Cosqué?” I said, not sure
if he was here to injure or rescue me, or if he even
cared.

Meesi turned to me and said softly, “Jesse,
why are they here? They’re dangerous.”

Cosqué’s bloodied head turned down at us.
“Jesse, where’s the way out?”

“
I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s going on?”

There was a sharp cry from the other side of
the wall.

“
Jack is here. We have to
get out of here before he kills us all–” His face twisted. He
braced himself against the pain. “
Do you
understand? Jack is here!
”

Meesi grimaced at the name.

“
Close your eyes!” ordered
an yslas just as a flash of red light sliced through the
air.

All of us closed our eyes just in time.
Seconds later, it faded back to black and everyone started breaking
rocks by placing their hands firmly on them, looking too depleted
to use stronger magic. One yslas had broken through. Everyone moved
to his end and climbed through. I waited next to Meesi, who was
waiting for her turn.

“
He tried to blind the
whole mountain!” she mentioned. “He-he’s coming.”

Meesi turned to the wall, and whispered
something in horror. The last yslas had gone through, and she
hurried inside. As I started, my ankle was pulled back, caught
between two rocks.

“
Meesi!” I yelled down the
opening.

Meesi wasn’t coming back, nor was anyone
else. I tried pulling off the rocks, but I was stuck. This couldn’t
be happening to me. How could they not know they left me? How could
Meesi?

“
Meesi!
” I yelled again.

But no one answered.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

The WRITING ON THE
WALL

“
Don't leave me, Meesi,” I
whimpered hopelessly. “You can’t leave me. I don’t know what to
do.”

There was nothing in here that I could use
to free myself. What else was there to possibly do? There were
certainly enough rocks to cover myself and keep hidden until
Halloween was over. I could continue to scream, but there was a
dreadful thought someone else might answer the call. I turned back
to the tunnel, seeing only dust particles floating in the
light.

“
Jacoby? Dorian?” I called
out quietly. “Katie–” I heard two people talking further down.
“Hello?”

It switched abruptly to a different
language. What language was that?

“
Please, help me!” I
pleaded. “I’m stuck!”

And then I knew. The language was German. A
large body began to take form in the cloud of dust, and Lorseria
appeared, crossing the ray of light streaming across the room. Four
other tortics entered one by one, filing in close behind him. They
were having a heated discussion. Lorseria gave one snarl, and they
quieted down.

Thinking there was nothing else to try, I
clenched my hands into fists and took a deep breath. Before I knew
it, I was slamming both hands into the rocks, cutting and bruising
myself. The rocks shattered on its own, and I was levitated into
the air and rotated to face Lorseria.

“
Tell me where she is?” he
rasped.

One of the tortics spoke to Lorseria in
their own tortic language. There were a lot of high-pitched squeaks
that sounded like dolphin’s underwater.

Lorseria turned back to me. “Tell me where
she is, Jesse, and I’ll send you home.” His fingers snatched my
waist.

I screamed.
“
She
–” I
muttered. “
She–
”
The pain was too unbearable. His claws were like the back of a
porcupine.

“
Where is she?” demanded
Lorseria impatiently.

The pain eased. “Meesi is not here!”

Lorseria didn’t believe it, nor did the
others.

“
It’s the wrong country,”
I said. “We came to the wrong place. Meesi’s not here.”

Lorseria spoke to a tortic huffing hot
fumes. “He’s no use. Kill him.” Lorseria dropped me and vanished
down the hazy tunnel. One of the larger tortic picked me up and
muttered an incantation at my heart. Through tears, I saw black
light shining from the tips of his long fingers.

“
No, no
,” I wept. “
I-I
. . .
Mee-Mee-Meesi
–”

I heard Lorseria shouting. It was too late.
A stream of black light flew out of the fingers and plunged into my
heart, causing it to skip a beat, and another beat, and
another.

Liksa - inflec -
lou
, I heard him utter in the squeaky
language, the last word alleviating the pain completely.

I screamed.

“
Where’s Meesi?” he
snarled. He brought up his pointy fingers. I stopped
screaming.

“
She . . .” I sniffed. I
couldn’t give her away. I couldn’t. “She’s on the other
side.”

“
Of the mountain?” He spun
me around so I faced the opening in the landslide. “Did she go
through there?”

All the tortics sniffed the air. I took a
sniff, breathed in some dirt, and sneezed. But just before I did, I
smelled the same exact thing I had smelled at the stadium – a
decaying foul odor. I hit the floor as the tortics walked through
the wall. Seconds later, Meesi poked her head out of the opening.
“It worked?” she said. “They’re gone?”

I nodded happily. “I thought you had
left–”

“
I
wouldn’t leave you. I had to spend time conjuring Jack’s
smell – we gotta go.”

I was relieved to get out of there. I didn’t
want to ever see another cavern in my life. “Where’s Cosqué?” I
asked inside a pulverized passage.

“
He left me.”

“
Meesi, I need to find my
friends.”

Meesi slowed at the next fork in the tunnel,
thinking it over, and then turned into the one furthest to the
right and continued to choose the rightmost path.

“
You can’t just pick the–”
I said, just as I fell through a waist-deep hole, covered with
sticks and roots.

“
Sorry,” said Meesi,
lifting me out of there.

“
Sorry?” I said,
confused.

“
Jack made this hole. I
covered it back up to set a trap for the tortics. Why are
they
here?”

“
Jack,” I
half-lied.

Meesi got on her hands and knees and crawled
through a short passage. She stuck her head out and said to me,
“I’ve fallen through two times.”

I remembered Katie telling me that Jack
liked to play pranks. All of a sudden I felt gloomy. I hoped Katie,
Jacoby, and Dorian were doing better than we were. Katie was with
Jacoby so she had to be safe. I didn’t have a weapon at all. And it
was getting too dark to search the grounds for a sharp object. I
did have Meesi though.

As I crawled out into a short tunnel, I saw
a fluorescent green glow coming from the wall.

oUt, BuT iT iS
tHrOuGh

“
What’s that mean?” said
Meesi.

I walked back to where the writing started.
The glowing text was very familiar. “Meesi, it starts over here,” I
whispered because the place was extremely quiet.

We walked along the wall, reading it.

EvErY eNtRaNcE iS bLoCkEd
OfF. ThErE iS a WaY oUt, BuT iT iS tHrOuGh ThE tUnNeLs UnDeR tHe
MoUnTaIn.

“
No, no,” said Meesi,
stopping dead in her tracks. “We can’t go down there.”

“
Why not?” I
said.

“
I’ve never been there and
there’s no light in there.”

“
There’s no lights
anywhere, Meesi. This is all the light we have.”

“
And the lamps and the
explosions,” she added.

“
Meesi, you said you’ve
been everywhere. Why can’t you find the way out then? Did you
really forget?”

Meesi paced in front of me for a second,
thinking. “Okay,” she decided.

Both of us cautiously shuffled down a steep
path that the writing had gone in, reading it as we descended.

ThErE iS a WiTcH hIdDeN
dEeP uNdEr ThIs MoUnTaIn WhO wIlL kNoW tHe SeCrEt PaTh OuT. HeR
nAmE iS jOlU, aNd As LoNg As YoU dOn’T tAlK tO hEr ShE wIll sHoW
yOu ThE wAy. YoU mUsT nOt CoMe ClOsEr ThAn TwEnTy ReD vInEs Of HeR.
ShE iS oVeR pRoTeCtIvE oF hEr TeRrItOrY aNd WiLl CaSt A cUrSe On
YoU.

At this point, the writing
curved down into a hole in the floor. I stuck my head inside.
“
It keeps going
,”
I said, listening to my echo.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Meesi climbed
down a dusty rope ladder. After a few seconds, I grabbed onto the
ladder and slowly followed.

ClImB dOwN, iT wOn’T bE
mUcH lOnGeR. YoU wIlL bE aBlE tO sEe ThE mOoN iN aN oWl HoOt. ThIs
Is A sEcOnD tElLiNg: YoU mUsT nOt CoMe WiThIn TwEnTy ReD vInEs Of
JoIu. ShE wIlL sPeAk To YoU, aNd YoU wIlL nOt UnDeRsTaNd HeR aT
fIrSt, BuT cOnTiNuE tO lIsTeN aNd In TiMe YoU wIlL. ShE wIlL sHoW
yOu ThE wAy. YoU mUsT fOlLoW hEr, AnD

I jumped off the rope ladder onto a stone
floor of a round den. The writing realigned itself with the floor,
wrapping around the walls.

sHe WiLl GiVe YoU a
HeLpInG hAnD.

A large boulder blocked the rest of the
text. We quickly walked around it and skidded to a stop. A figure
that must have been the witch was sitting underneath the last of
the writing. Her bony arms were wrapped around her knees, and her
head was tucked in. She sat motionless while her black robe and
long black hair blew about wildly.

“
Jesse,” said Meesi,
cowering behind me.

I had figured out the meaning of the
writing. We had made a terrible mistake.

FeEl FoRtUnAtE tHaT yOu
WiLl SuRvIvE fOr OnLy A lItTlE lOnGeR.

“
We have to climb back
up,” I whispered, keeping my eyes on the witch. “The writing
brought us down here. It wanted us separated from everyone else. We
were tricked, Meesi. Meesi!”

Meesi was transfixed by the witch. I wanted
to think it was Jacoby who wrote it, but this really wasn’t like
anything he would do.

Meesi looked harder at the witch, whose
shriveled body was outlined by a glow.

“
Jack!
” she sputtered, her voice cracking.

I inched over to the side, keeping an eye on
the top of the witch’s head and her rattling limestone necklace.
There was one last word and it was the only word that I was hoping
it wouldn’t be.

JaCk

Meesi started treading backwards, but I
wanted to see the front of the witch and cautiously crept around
it. “Hey!” I said.

I still couldn’t see the witch’s face. It
was tucked too far down into her lap.

“
Meesi, we’ll go right
after this,” I whispered, taking a soft step forward. “I just have
to see if–”

“
I don’t want to be here
anymore. What if it comes back in here?”

“
The witch must be with
him. But she’s not moving. It’s like she’s dead.”

The witch’s lifeless shape was really
beginning to give me the creeps. Meesi was right: it was time to
go.

“
Jesse, the-the ladder,”
trembled Meesi. “It’s gone.”

I looked up. The hole was still there, but
there was no ladder.

“
Jesse, the witch . .
.”

The witch
was
gone.

“
He did lure us down
here,” I said as a large boulder dissolved. The next to go were the
tangled roots on the floor, then the rocks and the
plants.

“
It’s trying to take us
again,” said Meesi.

“
Can you fly?” I
asked.

She shook her head.

“
What can you do? Can you
climb out of here? You said you can see through walls. Maybe we can
dig a hole where it’s thin.”

Meesi grabbed my hand. There was nothing
left in the den. Everything had disappeared.

Then the loveliest voice came from high
above us. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if it was a voice from
heaven.

“
Anyone down there?
Jesse?” It was Katie. Her voice was calm.

“
Get us out of
here!
” I shouted. “
He’s taking us!
”

“
What?” replied Katie
faintly. “Hold on.”

“
No, no, no, Katie, we
don’t have time to hold on! Katie!”

The longest few seconds passed.

“
Katie!
” I shouted.

“
Katie!
” repeated Meesi.

A rope hit the top of my head.

“
Grab on!” Katie called
from above.

Meesi and I were already clinging onto the
rope, waiting. We were lifted out of the hole in three short
yanks.

“
You okay?” said Katie,
helping us to our feet moments later. “We saw the writing. I knew
you would follow it.”