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They all waited for it to crackle back to life. Nothing. Coco’s mom reached out and tapped it, pressed the tuning button, but it didn’t help. “That’s weird,” she said. “Maybe it’s the storm.”
Coco didn’t miss the radio. She was full of peanut butter and getting sleepy. She leaned her head on Ollie’s shoulder to doze. Brian was reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Brian liked sea stories. He and Ollie had both read one called Captain Blood and spent a few weeks arguing about the ending. Coco had read the book too, to know what her friends were arguing about, but it was about pirates. She hadn’t liked it and felt a little left out of the whole argument. Coco didn’t like novels, really. She liked books about real things. Bugs and dinosaurs and the history of space flight.
Brian began to read by the light of his phone. Ollie put her cheek against her window and stared into the wild night. Coco, half asleep on Ollie’s shoulder, began recalling the last chess game she’d played. It was on the internet, with someone named @begemot.
Coco loved chess. Her favorite books were histories of famous players and famous matches. One of her favorite things to do was to play online. On the internet, no one could be smug and assume she was easy to beat just because she was small and pink-haired. Sleepily, Coco went back over the opening moves of her last game. She’d played white, which always goes first, and had opened with Queen’s Gambit . . .
Up and up they climbed.
Coco fell asleep, still thinking about chess.
Coco dreamed. Not about chess.
In her dream, she was walking down a dark hallway, so long that she couldn’t see the end of it. Bars of moonlight fell across the carpet, striping it with shadows. But there weren’t any windows. Just the moonlight. It was bitterly cold. On each side were rows of plain white doors, the paint rotten and peeling. Behind one of the doors, Coco heard someone crying.
But behind which door? There seemed to be hundreds. “Where are you?” Coco called.
“I can’t find them,” whimpered a girl’s voice. “I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find them. Mother says I can’t go home until I find them.”
Coco thought she heard footsteps plodding along behind her. Heavy, uneven footsteps. Her skin started to crawl. But she had to find the crying girl. She was sure of it. She had to find her before the footsteps caught up. She ran along faster. “What are you looking for?” she called. “I can help you find it. Where are you?”
Then she lurched to a halt. A skinny girl, about her own height, dressed in a white nightgown, had appeared in the hallway. Her face was in shadow. “Here,” the girl said.
For some reason, Coco did not want to see the girl’s face. “Hello?” she said, hearing her voice crack.
“I’m looking for my bones,” whispered the girl. “Can you help me?”
She moved into the light. Coco flinched. The other girl was gray-faced and skinny. Her eyes were two blank pits. Her lips and nose were black, like she had terrible frostbite. She tried, horribly, to smile. “Hello,” she said. “It’s cold here, isn’t it? Won’t you help me?” She reached out a single hand. Her fingernails were long and black in the moonlight.
Coco, stumbling backward, ran into something solid. A huge hand fell on her shoulder. Coco whirled and looked up into the face of a scarecrow. Its sewn-on mouth was smiling wide. Its hand wasn’t a hand at all, just a sharp garden trowel. It had found her at last, Coco thought. It had found her, and now it was going to drag her off. She’d never get home again . . .
Coco opened her mouth to scream, and woke up with a gasp.
She was in the car, in the snowstorm, driving to Mount Hemlock, and her mother was talking to Mr. Adler in the front seat. It was cold in the back seat; her toes in their winter boots were numb. Coco sat still for a second, breathing fast with fright. Just a dream, she told herself. She’d had a lot of scarecrow dreams in the last few months. So had Ollie and Brian. Just a dream.
“How much farther, Roger?” Coco’s mom asked.
“Should be pretty close now,” said Mr. Adler.
Coco, a little dazed from her nightmare, stared out the front windshield. It was snowing even harder. The road was a thin yellowish-white strip, piled thick with snow. More snow bowed the trees on either side.
The Subaru was moving slowly. The thick snow groaned under the wheels, and Mr. Adler seemed to be struggling to keep the car going straight on the slippery road. “What a night, huh?” he said.
“Want me to drive?” asked Coco’s mom.
This time the usual cheer was gone from Mr. Adler’s reply. “It’s okay. I know the car better.” Lower, he added, “Just pray we don’t get stuck.”
Now the car was coming down into a gully, the road turning slightly.
But the road wasn’t empty. For a stomach-clenching second, Coco thought she was still dreaming. Right in front of them, in the middle of the road, stood a tall figure in a ragged blue ski jacket. It looked like a scarecrow. The figure was perfectly still. One palm was raised and turned out as though to beg. As though to say, STOP. The face was hidden by a ski mask.
Coco felt a jolt of terror. But then she realized that the person had real hands. Not garden tools. She wasn’t dreaming; this wasn’t a scarecrow.
Mr. Adler wasn’t slowing down. “Stop!” yelled Coco, yanking herself upright. “Look! Look!”
Mr. Adler slammed on the brakes. The car skidded, turning sideways, swinging them toward the thick black ranks of trees. Coco braced, waiting to hear the thump of someone slamming into the side of the car. The person had been so close . . .
Nothing.
