Case File 13

by J. Scott Savage

  Dedication

  To the real Nick and Carter. You guys rock!

  Contents

  Dedication

  A Word of Welcome…and Warning

  Chapter 1: This Is How It Started

  Chapter 2: Frankenstein Shows Up and Gets a Treat

  Chapter 3: If You Hate Good-Bye Chapters, You May Need a Tissue for This One

  Chapter 4: The Part Where Nick Learns Everything He Ever Wanted to Know about Voodoo Queens—and Airplane Food (Yuck!)

  Chapter 5: Seriously, Don’t You Wish Your Great-Aunt Was Like Lenore?

  Chapter 6: Even My Cellar Isn’t This Interesting

  Chapter 7: You May Need to Break Out Your French Cajun Dictionary for This Chapter

  Chapter 8: How You Feel about This Part May Depend on Whether You Are a Cat Person or a Dog Person

  Chapter 9: Do Not Read This Chapter Right Before Going to Bed!

  Chapter 10: Are You Wondering What’s Happening in This Part? I Totally Am.

  Chapter 11: This Part Is Even Weirder than the Last

  Chapter 12: The Chapter in Which We Discover What the Heck Is Going On

  Chapter 13: Warning! If You Have a Weak Stomach or Food Allergies, You May Want to Skip This Chapter Entirely! Trust Me.

  Chapter 14: Do Not Try This Part at Home

  Chapter 15: Never Understimate the Power of Girls on a Mission

  Chapter 16: Carter Makes a Discovery that Doesn’t Have Anything to Do with Food

  Chapter 17: In Which We Meet One of the Best Characters in the Book, If I May Humbly Say So

  Chapter 18: Not for the Squeamish (This Means You, If Pulling Out a Loose Tooth Makes You Want to Hurl)

  Chapter 19: Don’t You Hate It When This Happens?

  Chapter 20: Ears to You (That’s a Little Pun on What Happens in This Part. Very Little.)

  Chapter 21: Can You Really Have Too Many Cemetery Chapters in a Scary Story?

  Chapter 22: This Part Always Makes Me Hungry

  Chapter 23: This Chapter Is Where Things Really Start to Get Weird

  Chapter 24: Seriously One of the Coolest Characters Ever

  Chapter 25: Come On, You Know You Have the Same Problem a Week or Two after Halloween

  Chapter 26: Where Things Become Clearer, and More Confusing

  Chapter 27: You May Want to Start Taking Notes from Here On (You Do Have a Monster Notebook, Don’t You?)

  Chapter 28: The Chapter Where Carter Tells Jokes and Angelo Pulls…Well, You’ll Have to See It for Yourself

  Chapter 29: Which Is So Surprising, Exciting, and Completely Thrilling, I Can’t Think of Words to Describe It

  A Final Warning

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Please relax and make yourself comfortable. I always say nothing goes with a good story like a cozy chair, a soft couch, or a fluffy pillow. I apologize in advance for interrupting your reading. I’m certain you didn’t open this book expecting to hear from an old man. And trust me, I am much older than you can possibly imagine.

  But this isn’t about me. It’s about you, the person reading these words or listening as someone reads them to you. You seem a good sort. Intelligent. Funny. Better-looking than most. But not prone to bragging about it.

  And yet the very fact that you hold this volume in your hands—that you dared open the pages of what could prove to be a rather frightening tale—tells me something about you. You are the kind of person who walks past graveyards, late at night, hoping for a glimpse of something gliding secretively among the headstones. While others lie awake in the darkness, terrified of unearthly beings oozing up from under their beds or slinking out of their closets, you dream of finding just such a creature. Capturing it. Perhaps taming it, as much as such a thing can be tamed, and making it your pet.

  You are a lover of all things strange and frightening. Instead of running from what goes bump in the wee hours of the night, you search for it.

  You remind me of three boys.

  Their case, file number 13, is so incredible, so shocking, you may not believe it.

  But then, it might be better if you don’t believe it. You’re probably safer that way.

  “What’s taking so long in there? Did you fall in?” Carter Benson called to the closed bathroom door. The only answer was a muffled something from the other side that he couldn’t understand.

  Stretched out on a big, red beanbag chair, in his friend Nick Braithwaite’s bedroom, Carter scarfed a handful of Doritos and burst into song. “Stranded on the toilet bowl. What do you do if you can’t reach the roll?”

  “You are one sick tadpole,” Angelo Ruiz said without looking up from Nick’s desk, where he was putting the finishing touches on a very realistic-looking plastic vampire model.

  “He’s been in there half an hour,” Carter said around a mouthful of chips. “Even my sister doesn’t take that long. Kid ought to try prune juice or something.”

  Angelo pushed back the dark hair hanging in his eyes, added two drops of red paint to the vampire’s fangs, and studied the model with a critical gaze. His big brown eyes appeared positively huge behind his even bigger glasses. Apparently satisfied with his work, he set the model on the desk. “He’s not on the toilet. Nick said this is going to be the scariest costume ever. Maybe it takes a while to put on.”

  Carter rolled his eyes. He was a foot shorter than Angelo, and although he ate more than the other two boys combined, he never seemed to gain any weight. He also couldn’t settle on a color for his short, spiky hair. This month it was dyed candy-apple red, but a few spots of last month’s Day-Glo yellow still showed through above his ears. “My grandma could put on a costume faster than this and she’s so old she has hieroglyphics on her driver’s license.”

  “Not a pretty picture,” Angelo said with a shudder.

  Carter jumped to his feet, pressed one hand to his lower back, and shuffled across the room. “Come give your Granny Goulash a big wet smackerooni, and I’ll let you have one of my stale oatmeal toffee bars. Or is this something I scooped out of Fluffy’s litter box? Can’t really seem to remember.”

  Angelo grimaced. “Remind me never to go to your grandma’s for Thanksgiving.”

  Before Carter could respond, an ominous voice that sounded as though it were talking through a pile of wet blankets spoke from inside the bathroom. “Two…more…minutes.”

  Angelo cocked an eyebrow and glanced toward the door. “This is gonna be good.”

  It was October 28, three days before Halloween, the boys’ favorite holiday of the year—even better than Christmas or the Fourth of July. The candy was great, and going to haunted houses was cool too. But their favorite part was coming up with costumes that were scarier than the ones from the year before.

  Carter dropped onto the chair and dug to the bottom of the chip bag. “I bet it’s a mummy.”

  “Nope. We did mummies three years ago. Remember? You forgot to wear anything but your boxers under the bandages.”

  “How was I supposed to know it was going to rain?” Carter said, frowning at the memory of having to run home in nothing but his underwear and a few strands of soggy brown crepe paper. And the worst part was, he only had half a bag of candy when the downpour hit.

  In the four years since they’d discovered their mutual love for monsters and become best friends, Angelo, Carter, and Nick had gone trick-or-treating together every Halloween. One year they all went as headless horsemen, complete with bloody neck stumps and gruesome severed heads. Another year they were chain saw–wielding surgeons, with spare body parts sticking out of their lab-coat pockets.

  They’d become something of a legend around their neighborh
ood. Every year the other kids—and even the parents—waited to see what the “Three Monsterteers,” as they called themselves, would be. This year it was Nick’s turn to come up with the idea, and although they knew he’d been working on the costume for months, he’d remained extremely secretive about what that costume was. But tonight, three days before Halloween, was the big unveiling.

  “Do you think there are such things as real monsters?” Carter asked, eyeing Angelo’s vampire model. “You know, actual bloodsuckers and stuff like that? Or do you think it’s only in the movies?”

  “Definitely not just the movies,” Angelo said. “I read this story last month about three hunters who got lost in some woods way up north.” He was always searching for new stories and articles about monsters, haunted houses, aliens, or other creepy stuff he could add to his monster notebook.

  “What happened to them?” Carter upended the chip bag and dumped the last of the crumbs into his mouth.

  “They hiked till it started getting dark,” Angelo said, rubbing his glasses on the front of his shirt. “Finally, they figured they weren’t going to find their camp before morning, so they decided to light a fire. Only they just had one match. Two of them went out looking for branches and stuff while the third guy carved up a couple of sticks.”

  “And?” Carter asked, his voice quiet.

  Angelo wiped his palms on his jeans. “When the two hunters came back from getting wood, there was a pile of kindling and a pocketknife on the ground. But the third guy was gone. They shouted like crazy, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. By then it was getting really cold. They figured maybe he went to take a leak or something, so they were going to start the fire without him. Just before they lit the match, a cloud blew over the moon, and everything went dark.”

  “Go on, go on,” Carter said, unconsciously crumpling the empty bag in his hands.

  Angelo held his fingers in front of him, as though striking a match. “The guy lights the match, and he sees two pairs of eyes looking back at him. One is the second hunter’s. But the other set is…red. Both of the guys swear they saw a hairy face, with a big, humped forehead and wicked-sharp teeth as long as their fingers. They said the creature was squatting down, and its belly was all swollen out like it just ate a huge meal. And here’s the totally sick part—it was wearing the torn shirt of the third hunter across its shoulders like a trophy.”

  “Werewolf?” Carter breathed.

  Angelo nodded knowingly. “The cops figure the only reason it didn’t eat the other two guys was ’cause it filled up on their friend.”

  At that moment, the bathroom door creaked open a few inches and a hand reached out and shut off the bedroom light. Both boys gasped. As the door opened all the way, Carter and Angelo squinted into the bathroom, which was lit by a strange purple glow.

  “Nick?” Carter’s voice came out shakier than he intended. That story about the hunters had really gotten to him.

  Instead of an answer, there came a wet, chuckling sound.

  Something appeared in the doorway, and Carter’s stomach somersaulted into his throat. The figure that stepped out of the bathroom was hunched slightly, but it still stood a full foot taller than Nick. From one side of its face, a single eye glared a baleful red. The other side was a mass of twitching muscle and shining white bone.

  The creature shambled into the room, and although Carter knew it had to be Nick, he still found himself pushing back into the beanbag. The creature was dressed in the torn rags of a shirt and pants. Through the rips and holes, the gray flesh of its arms and legs appeared to be peeling away in spots. It moved with the slow, jerky steps of a puppet.

  “Zombie,” Angelo whispered, not sounding too steady himself.

  Hearing Angelo’s voice, the figure swiveled its head toward him. The zombie’s mouth opened in a snaggletoothed grin, and the creature reached into the front of its shirt and pulled something out. For a moment, Carter couldn’t see what it was holding, but he could tell something was moving in its fingers. Then he realized what it was, and all the breath whooshed out of his lungs. The zombie gripped a human heart in its fist.

  The heart was beating.

  As though taking a bite of a fresh apple, the zombie brought the beating heart toward its lips and said, “Behold, your new costume.”

  “What did you think of the heart?” Nick asked. It was a sunny Friday afternoon, the day after he had shown his friends the zombie costume, and the three of them were walking home from school. They’d been discussing their Halloween plans all day long.

  “Freaking awesome,” Carter said. “I can’t believe it actually beats.”

  “Did it scare you?” They stopped and waited for the light to turn green so they could cross Pleasant Hill Boulevard.

  “Are you kidding?” Carter scoffed. “I totally knew it wasn’t real.”

  Angelo looked up from the book he was reading about extraterrestrials that harvested human organs. “So that dark stain on the front of your pants was apple juice?”

  “You’re full of it.” Carter’s face went red, and he quickly changed the subject. “I guess you made the heart out of cherry Jell-O or something, huh?”

  Nick grinned at Angelo. “Actually, it’s two balloons covered with toilet paper and latex, painted red. You make the heart beat by squeezing another balloon attached to the end of a rubber hose. I read about how to do it on the internet.” Even he was impressed with how well it had turned out. It was sort of disgusting just holding it.

  “Grossed me out,” Angelo said, closing his book. “At least a little. But I don’t think zombies eat hearts. I’m pretty sure they crave human brains.”

  “Who cares?” Carter pulled a slightly squashed Snickers bar out of his pocket as the light changed. “All I care about is that we get tons of candy.”

  “And that we scare everyone,” Nick reminded him. “Remember how jealous Angie Hollingsworth was last year when we did the werewolves?” Angie and her friends Tiffany and Dana were almost as fanatic about monsters as Nick and his friends were. Every year they tried to outdo the boys’ costumes. And every year they failed. At least as far as the Three Monsterteers were concerned.

  “Their Cerberus was completely unbelievable.” Angelo agreed. “Whoever heard of giggling hell hounds? Speaking of werewolves, can you guys spend the night? I rented The Beast Must Die.”

  Carter made a face. “Isn’t that movie like a hundred years old? Why didn’t you rent something newer like Saw IV?”

  “My mom won’t let me watch R-rated movies.” Angelo shrugged. “Besides, Peter Cushing plays Dr. Lundgren. It’s a classic.”

  “I can’t,” Nick said. “I’ve got a ton of homework.” He shifted his backpack. Over the past couple of weeks, he’d been spending more time on the costumes than he had on his assignments. “If my parents find out I’m two weeks behind on math and science, they’ll ground me for sure. No way I’m being stuck home on the best night of the year.”

  Silently, the three boys pondered how awful it would be to get grounded on Halloween, of all nights. As they turned onto Hamilton Drive, Angelo brought up a problem they’d been thinking about for the last month. “What are we going to do about Frankenstein this year?”

  Frankenstein was the code name they’d given Cody Gills, the meanest kid at Pleasant Hill Elementary School. At six feet two inches tall, and weighing just over two hundred pounds, he was the biggest kid in sixth grade, and even in most of the junior high as well.

  Frankenstein made it his personal goal to torment the Monsterteers every chance he got. Halloween was the worst, when he spent the entire night hunting them so he could beat them up and steal their candy. The last couple of years they’d been able to avoid him by going to different neighborhoods or ducking into houses when he came by. But that didn’t mean their luck would hold up.

  “What if we tell him we’re going as killer surgeons again this year,” Carter suggested. “That way he’ll spend all night looking for kids in bloody scrubs.�
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  Nick considered the idea briefly. “Don’t you think he’d get a little suspicious when he saw three matching zombies? It’s not like we fit in with the average trick-or-treaters.”

  Angelo nodded and kicked an empty Coke can lying in the gutter. “He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. But even he’s not that dumb.”

  “I guess we could go to another neighborhood again,” Nick said with a grimace. In movies and books, monsters were cool. But the real-life variety that beat you up and laughed in your face when they made you cry weren’t nearly as fun.

  “But then we’d miss showing up Angie,” Carter said around a mouthful of chocolate.

  Caught up in their conversation, none of the boys had been paying attention to what was going on around them, so it wasn’t until a long shadow appeared over the Coke can Angelo was kicking that they looked up and saw who was standing on the sidewalk in front of them.

  “Hello, wusses,” Frankenstein said, his muscular arms flexing as he cracked each of his knuckles. Even though he was only twelve, he already had a couple of long hairs sprouting from the tip of his chin, and the beginnings of sideburns.

  Nick felt the spit dry up in his mouth. Had Frankenstein overheard what they were saying? If so, they were dead. “Hey, Frank—I mean, Cody.”

  Carter took a quick step backward, but Cody darted forward, wrapped an arm around the smaller boy’s neck, and pulled him close. Dropping his half-eaten candy bar, Carter tried to twist out of the bully’s grasp, but Cody held him tight.

  “Planning your lame Halloween costumes again?” Cody asked with a lopsided sneer. “What’s it going to be this year? Princesses? Angel-boy can be Cinderella, Stick can be Snow White, and the midget here can be…” He frowned, apparently unable to think of another princess.

  “Sleeping Beauty?” Carter gasped, his face going bright red as Cody continued to squeeze his neck.

  “Leave him alone.” Nick moved forward, his heart pounding against his ribs. He knew Cody was twice his size and could smash him to a pulp, but the sight of Carter hanging helplessly in the bully’s grip flipped some kind of switch inside him.