LOT'S MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: A Wisp of Something Dark

After I get some shoes on, Grim and me go invisible again and sneak down to the basement (by far not my favorite place, but the safest right now—yeah, that says a lot). When nobody comes after us, Grim whooshes us away.

When I'm all together again, I make sure that the Glass Man's medallion is safe in my pocket. It didn't do anything weird to me as far as I can tell.

At first, I don't know where Grim has taken me this time. Then I hear the hum of Route 254. We're outside of Fishersville, in Staunton. I'm guessing we're about thirty minutes away from the Shermans'.

A dark building sits alone on a hill. Only a few stunted trees dare to grow around it. Most of their leaves are gone.

Hey ... I know this place. It's the DeJarnette Center. It used to be where people put runaways and screwed up kids. Greg and my mom used to threaten to send me here all the time. Somewhere there's a little cemetery for kids that were left by their families. Maybe that was just yet another thing Greg made up to scare me. He told me tons of shit like that.

A building with a small brick chimney is right off the side of the main house. Black smudges rim the top. Chunks of mortar have already fallen out it. That's where they burn the really bad kids, Greg would say. Then he would grab me by the collar and say I'd end up here. When I lived with mom and Greg, I used to have weird dreams (yeah, even back then) about this place, about being locked inside that little building with the chimney. And about how skin crackles and turns black as it burns.

"Dylan?"

Blinking, I say, "Yeah, Grim?"

"I woulda come sooner, but I kinda didn't know how long a week was. By the time I found out, the week was already up." He scratches his head. "I woulda come sooner. Did I say that already?"

"Yeah." Still looking around, I ask, "Why are we here?"

"The Old Bone Woman saw it in her bones that we needed to be here tonight, so something can find us. She said you'd know the question to ask whatever we find."

And I do. What is the Stone Men's weakness?

The question I ask Grim, though, is something totally different.

"Not all ghosts are like the ones in Grief's Dawn, are they?" I ask all of a sudden, still not able to look away from the building and the thick clumps of night's blood clinging to the sides of it.

"The ones with Loomis are taken care of. He makes sure that they don't get all angry and scary." Grim starts moving faster. "They don't know what's going on. They're still kinda lost in what they used to be."

"Yeah, but they can't do anything to us, right?" I ask.

He doesn't answer right away. When he finally does, he says, "If they get angry enough they can. I've heard stories of ones that get so angry that they can break things and hurt people."

When I glance up at the old windows, I catch a blur of something. I feel a whole lot colder all of a sudden. I think about the people that were locked up in this place.

"We should go, Dylan." Then Grim says, a little nervous, "There are some places that even monsters don't like to be."

Together, we walk around the hill the old DeJarnette building sulks on. Things are quiet here, so quiet that I can almost hear the building slowly falling apart.

Beyond it, on the highway, the traffic keeps humming. I can't see the cars, not from where we are, but I can hear them.

Not sure what to look for, I poke around in the weeds a little bit. But there's nothing there except for some bits of trash. That's when I see a flicker of red light. At first I cuss a little, thinking it's Shard.