“There!” cried Coco. She was shining her phone light around the barn floor. It lit up a pile of rusty shovels.
Brian and Ollie looked at each other. “Can you hold the doors?” Ollie asked him.
“For about five seconds,” Brian grunted. He took a new grip on the door and gritted his teeth.
“Now!” cried Ollie. She let go of the handle, ran to the pile of tools, and grabbed a shovel. Brian’s arms were trembling; the door had already begun to give.
“Ollie!” he screamed just as she sprinted back and jammed the old wooden shovel handle sideways between the door handles.
Brian let go. It shook, but held. “Will it last?” asked Brian, panting.
“Probably not,” said Ollie grimly. “But it might last long enough.”
It was witch-soul dark in the barn, except for the stabbing beam of Coco’s phone light.
“Come on!” Coco cried. She pointed her phone at the ladder. The shovel handle was already splintering.
“Go on, Ollie,” said Brian, shoving her toward the ladder. When she hung back, he said, “Go on.” The ghost of a smile. “Chivalry, remember?”
Ollie met his eyes and without a word began climbing the hayloft ladder. No time to think of the height, not even time to be scared.
Coco’s light jerked up from the ladder to the door. Ollie risked a glance back. She was more than halfway to the loft. The old shovel handle was bending. With acrack, it gave. Now the door was sliding open. A soft painted-on face thrust itself into the gap.
Ollie made it into the hayloft just as the first scarecrowsshuffled into the barn. Brian, right behind her, was still on the ladder.
“Hurry, Brian!” Coco cried. “Hurry!”
I hope they can’t jump,Ollie thought.I hope they can’t climb.The scarecrows had surrounded the ladder, shaking it from side to side. Brian made a desperate grab for the lip of the hayloft just as the old ladder went tumbling sideways and crashed down onto the barn floor.
“Brian!” Ollie yelled. She and Coco hurled themselves forward at the same moment and grabbed his hands. The ladder lay on the barn floor, and Brian was dangling, feet over the splintered wood, above the grinning scarecrows. They made a whispering sound like straw rustling as they reached up their garden-rake hands.
Brian was heavy. His feet swung and kicked in midair. Ollie and Coco pulled together, pulled as hard as they could. Their sweaty hands slipped and slid. For a terrible moment, Ollie thought Brian’s hand would slip right out of hers, that he would fall to the barn floor, just like the ladder, and be snatched by scarecrows.
But Brian, gasping, got a foot up. Then another. A last, panicked tug and they were all in a trembling heap in the hayloft, safe for the moment but with no way to get down.
Could the scarecrows get up? That was the question.
The scarecrows glared at them. But Ollie had been right. They couldn’t climb with their garden-tool hands.One of them tried to pick up the ladder. But Brian and Ollie and Coco kicked it off when they tried to lean the ladder against the hayloft. This time, when the ladder fell to the floor, it broke into two pieces and was unusable.
“We’re safe,” whispered Coco. “We’re safe.” Her phone light flickered over the scarecrow faces.
“Maybe safe,” whispered Ollie. For more and more scarecrows were pouring into the barn. Among them were several they recognized. There was Denise Carter, and then Elodie Finnegan. Jim Johnson. Their hands were garden tools. All of them button eyed, with lips of string.
Ollie swallowed. “Let’s see if they can talk,” she said. “Maybe they can tell us something useful.”
“How can they talk?” Coco asked.
“Dunno. How can they walk? Hey!” Ollie shouted, before she could lose her nerve. “Hey! Can you talk?”
A sound from the scarecrows like the rattling of straw. Then Phil’s face looked up at them. Brian let out a pained breath. A hole in Phil’s straw mouth opened. A voice spoke like the wind in the wheat in summer. “Come down,” breathed Phil. “Come down and join us. It’s nice. You’ll like it. You live forever and you’ll never be sad again.”
Phil the idiot,Ollie had always thought. The guy who stuck girls’ hair to the back of their seats with gum. But Brian was staring at his friend, his face blank with horror.She reached out to take Brian’s hand; on the other side, she saw Coco doing the same thing.
“Ask him,” whispered Ollie. “Ask him if he remembers anything.”
Brian licked his lips. “Hey, Phil...” Gone was the hockey swagger, his voice a cracked whisper, not much better than the sound of a scarecrow. “What happened, man?”
“Come down,” returned the scarecrow.
