Tales from the Haunted Mansion Vol. 1: The Fearsome Foursome (16 page)

Shnnnnk!
What was that?

Oh, nothing much. Just the sound a shovel makes when it enters dirt. Followed by something decidedly worse. Hmmm. What could be worse? Try the sound that same dirt makes when it’s being dumped onto a coffin—
your coffin
—as you’re buried alive!

Forty minutes later, Steve’s bike zipped into the parking lot of the Davis Family Funeral Home. In his left hand was a bag containing a strawberry-banana smoothie—Rolly’s consolation prize for being the butt of a pretty sick joke. After he dismounted, Steve noticed an Eternal Rest Deluxe Recliner by a small mound near the construction pit. His cousin hopped out of the hearse and met him halfway across the lot. Steve was eager to hear how it had gone.

“Like a dream, Cuz,” Drew replied before reconsidering. “For him, maybe a nightmare.” He gave Steve the details. How the coffin had been loaded into the hearse and driven in circles. How he’d lowered it into the construction pit and dumped dirt onto the lid. And—voilà!—buried alive.

Roland Price wasn’t really buried alive. You may breathe, dear reader. For now.

Steve was barely able to breathe, he was laughing so hard. “Did he scream? Did he say the words ‘I quit’?”

Drew thought about it. “Now that you mention it, no. He didn’t say anything at all.”

“Sure he did.” They approached the coffin. “There had to be some begging. Just a little.” Again, Drew shook his head. “Not even a whimper?”

“Seriously, dude, he didn’t make a peep.”

In a fit of temper, Steve threw the smoothie across the lot, a strawberry-banana
splat
! How was that possible? Was Rolly Price truly unbeatable?

By then, Drew was ready to call it quits.
You win some, you lose some.
He approached the coffin and undid the lock. But before he opened the lid, Steve stuck out his hand. “Wait!” He checked his timer: three more seconds to go. Drew shook his head. “Dude, really?”

Steve nodded. “Three…two…one.”

Drew opened the lid and took a step back, allowing his cousin the first look inside. For a moment, Steve didn’t know what he was seeing. Or, more accurately, what he
wasn’t
seeing. He brushed his hand across the blue velvet interior. “Where is he?” Drew returned to his side and they both stared down, bug-eyed, in silence.

The coffin was empty. Roland Price was gone.

“This is crazy!” hollered Steve. “He’s in there somewhere. He has to be!” He frantically examined the coffin—the top, bottom, and sides.

“I did everything like we planned!” explained Drew in a panic. “I snatched the coffin from viewing room two, loaded it in the hearse—”

Did you catch that? Because
Steve
certainly did.
“Wait–wait–wait! Viewing room two. You said ‘viewing room two’!”

Drew nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Rolly was in viewing room three. Drew, you took the wrong coffin!”

Drew stood there, teetering in shock. It was like he hadn’t heard what he’d just heard. Except he’d heard it! Steve couldn’t wait for him to play catch-up. He had to act—fast! Rolly’s life might depend on it. He ran back into viewing room three, only to discover an empty riser. “Wh-wh-where’s the coffin?” He kicked over a folding chair, collapsing all the chairs like dominoes. “Where did it go?”

Drew arrived seconds later. “They must have taken it.”

“Who? Taken it where?”

Drew knew his cousin wasn’t going to like the next bit, but he said it anyway. “Where do you think? Where coffins go. To get buried in a cemetery.”

“Which one, Drew? Before his air runs out! Which cemetery?”

The look on Drew’s face said
I dunno
. “We go everywhere. That’s our motto. Mr. Davis must have scheduled an after-hours pickup.”

“Find out. Call your boss!”

Now Drew was on the brink of a full-blown panic attack. “Call my boss? Do you know how serious this is? I can lose my job. Worse than that, I’ll go to jail!”

“It doesn’t matter! Don’t you understand? We locked a kid in a coffin!”

Drew glared at his cousin. He didn’t like the implication, not one bit. “No, Cuz. The way I see it,
you
locked a kid in a coffin. All I did was sprinkle a little dirt on an empty box.” And on that note, Drew headed to the hearse and settled in behind the wheel.

Steve chased after him, on the verge of begging. Okay, it wasn’t the verge. This was a full-on beg fest. “Please-please-please! I’ll do anything! You have to help me!” He smushed his face against the windshield. “It’s Steve-o! You can’t do this to me!”

“You did it to yourself, kid. We warned you. The whole family warned you! These dares would be the death of you. But you wouldn’t listen.”

“I’m listening now!” Steve took a breath, then backed away from the windshield. “I’m listening now.”

“Tell that to Rolly. A little too little, a little too late—wouldn’t you say?” Drew threw the hearse in gear and peeled out of the lot, leaving Steve standing alone with nothing but his terrible thoughts. He had to think, to figure out his next move. But before he could do that, his phone buzzed with a text. There was a message from Rolly. Steve’s hand shook as he stared at the display. It said:

DIG ME UP.

Still, as bad as the text was, Steve was somewhat relieved to know Rolly was alive and breathing, and that was a start. At the same time, he was trapped in a coffin—the Eternal Rest Deluxe Recliner—with about two more hours of air at best.

Steve returned a text, asking Rolly if he knew where they’d taken him. A reply came back almost immediately:
HURRY THE WORMS.

That was horrible news. Mostly for Rolly. The worms, they were another story. Logistics-wise, Steve couldn’t possibly cover every graveyard in town. He would need help, his first recruit being the always reliable Noah, who Steve figured might still be up, perusing his dad’s old horror comics. But Noah texted back:
CAN’T—BIGGER FISH TO FRY.
(At the moment, Noah was attending a pool party. Heh.)

Steve was about to try Willa and Tim when it occurred to him: cell phones are equipped with GPS! He’d be able to pinpoint Rolly’s exact location through his phone signal. Several swipes later, he did just that, locating Rolly Price at the Eternal Grace Cemetery, one of the oldest, most distinguished boneyards in the land. All Steve had to do was dig him up, as per Rolly’s written request, and they could put this whole misunderstanding behind them.

In theory, anyway.

What would he need? The proper tools, of course. To dig up a grave!

Steve remembered seeing a spade in the garage; thank goodness Mom liked to tinker in the garden. Or maybe she was a gravedigger.
Who knows what mothers do while their children are at school?

Steve hopped on his bike and was back home within minutes, rummaging through the garage. He located the spade, stuffed it into a duffel bag, and was soon gliding back down the driveway when his father stumbled onto the front porch, barely awake. In his underwear. “Yo! Where you goin’ with that stuff at this time of night?”

Steve didn’t have time to discuss it. “Some dude’s buried alive and I have to dig him up!”

His father nodded, never quite opening his eyes. “Okey-doke. Got your house key?”

“Got it!”

His father scratched his butt and headed back inside.

Steve tore across town, topping his best speed. Eternal Grace Cemetery was thirteen miles away, and by the time he arrived, the moon was high in the night sky. It had to be after midnight.

From the outside, the graveyard looked even older than its reputation suggested. There were no streetlights, of course, but there was plenty of atmosphere. You know the kind. Leaves rustling in the wind. Creaks, rattles, and a familiar
caw-caw
from within a blackened tree. Steve looked up.

A large raven—yes,
that
raven—was perched on a branch, peering down as if to pass judgment.

Steve had to keep moving. Clouds began to pass in front of the moon. It was too dark to wing it
(bad pun intended)
. To compensate, he switched his cell to night vision mode. Moving it back and forth, he picked up an image: there were three dudes hunched together by the side of the road. Hitchhikers in old-fashioned attire, thumbing for a lift. An unnatural glow pulsated around them—probably a camera defect or a lens flare; Steve couldn’t tell which. But when he glanced up to see them “live,” the hitchhikers were gone.

They must have found a ride. Good for them.

Steve squeezed through the gate, entering the hallowed ground. As he passed through a forest of crumbling tombstones, Steve knew this was as scared as he’d ever been. Still, for Rolly Price, he had to press on. Passing grave after grave, name after name, song after song.
Yes, the dearly departed do like to sing.

It was true. Steve could hardly believe it himself. He could have sworn he heard a barbershop quartet harmonizing within the graveyard. Steve looked through his phone again to see in night vision, and the sight that met his eyes was beyond his darkest imaginings. The Eternal Grace Cemetery was alive with movement and song in a
gore
geous panorama of macabre merriment; phantasms of every size, shape, and denomination had manifested everywhere!

To protect his own sanity, Steve decided it was a dream—it had to be—albeit a magical one. And if it was a dream, maybe the whole Rolly Price incident had never happened. He could wake up and start the day all over again. But a new text from Rolly guillotined that happy thought. This one simply said:
FASTER NO AIR
.

Steve switched back to GPS mode, rendering the graveyard lifeless once more. At least, to the naked eye. A tiny flag on the display indicated
YOU ARE HERE
.
Here
happened to be the site of a fresh grave without a headstone. Those come later. For the time being, it was just a big ole pile of dirt. And six feet under that dirt was Rolly Price, snug inside the Eternal Rest Deluxe Recliner. Guaranteed not to rot for ten years.

Steve pulled the spade from the duffel bag. “Hang in there, Roll. I’m coming!” He began to dig, dig, dig, spraying dirt into the air like somebody’s life depended on it—which it did. Before long, Steve was in the grave, digging as fast as he could until—
THWACK!
Steve hit coffin, then cleared away the layer of soil on top by hand, worms squishing between his fingers. “Almost there, buddy boy!”

Soon there was only the lock to deal with. Steve used the spade, splitting it in two.
You can forget about that ten-year guarantee.
He slid his fingers under the lid and, in the millisecond before it opened, thought about what he might find inside. The blue velvet interior would likely be shredded, with bits of Rolly’s fingernails embedded in the lining. And what of Rolly himself? As he’d tried to escape, his frustration might have led to insanity. He would be a foaming mad lunatic; his only thoughts would be acts of vengeance…against ole Steve-o himself.

But whatever the outcome, Steve had accepted his fate. For it was a fate of his own design. His hands clasped the lid, opening the coffin in silence. (You can forget those surround-sound
creeeeeaks
you hear in the movies.) “Roll?” inquired Steve, really hoping he wouldn’t get a reply from anyone other than Rolly. But Steve’s real fear was getting no response at all, which was what happened. He clicked on his flashlight app and looked inside.

Steve almost fainted when he saw the body, and he had to use the walls of the grave to keep himself from collapsing. There was, as he’d feared, a stiffened corpse inside the coffin, its face an unnatural blend of blues and greens. The eyes, which had retreated into the back of the skull, were a milky white. What had Steve done? How much had his dares cost him?

He leaned in, eyeball-to-eyeball with the lifeless shell of his former rival. There wasn’t much he could say.
Sorry I buried you alive?
Well, that would be a start. But in fact, the first word to emerge from Steve’s mouth was…“Marshmallows?” He had gotten a good look at the eyes and that was exactly what they were. At the same time, he recognized the face from Parties 4 Smarties. It was a Halloween mask.

Steve had been played, big-time. But
how
?

Before he could cry out in madness—
and I am delighted to inform you, that
is
coming
—he heard the sound of a phone…this time not his own. Steve looked around, finding it by his feet in the corpse’s pipe-cleaner hand. He plucked the cell loose and, with all the craziness swirling around him, managed a demure “Hello?”

A voice on the other end exploded with laughter. “Lost again, Steve-o!” Yes, it was Roland Price.

Steve squeezed the phone, about to crush it as he would have crushed Rolly, given the chance. The complete and utter humiliation. The remarks he would have to endure at recess! But all he could hear then was Rolly laughing his guts out.

“It was your cousin!” Rolly started to explain. “The Drew-meister! The entire shebang was his idea. He said you needed to learn your lesson, once and for all, about the price of all those dares. Well, have you?” Rolly had to stop talking, because from that point on, all he could manage was
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Yet Steve wasn’t in on the joke. No, not that time. His eyes, the same ones the girls usually swooned over, had turned to stone. And his smile was no longer roguish. Now it was wide—a little too wide. As if Steve had gone totally insane.

“Double dare!” he blurted into the phone, invoking the next rule of the game. “All I have to do is last two little hours inside this coffin and I get my title back! Who’s shaking now, buddy boy?”

It might have been a rhetorical question, but as it turned out, Rolly really was shaking. He had heard the change in Steve’s voice. It was the verbal equivalent of that mad smile, and it scared the laugh right out of him. “Okay, Steve, enough is enough. Joke’s over. What are you doing?”

“Taking a little nap. Wake me when I get my title back.” Steve climbed into the coffin, lying on top of the dummy corpse. It was additional padding—not that the Eternal Rest Deluxe Recliner needed it. And anyway, if Steve got hungry, he could always eat the eyeballs.