Read Doll Bones for Free Online Page B

smacking against one of the panes he couldn’t see, one of the lower ones, hidden behind blue half-curtains.
    A sudden gust of wind made the branches outside shake and jitter. He couldn’t help imagining the long, bony fingers of the trees scraping against the glass.
    When he was a little kid, he’d had a firm belief in universally observed monster rules. He’d been sure, for example, that if he kept all parts of himself on the mattress and shrouded beneath blankets, if he kept his eyes closed, and if he pretended to be asleep, then he’d be safe. He didn’t know where he’d gotten the idea from. He did remember his mother saying he’d smother himself if he kept sleeping with his head under the comforter. Then one night—quite randomly—he fell asleep with his head above the covers like a normal person, and no monster got him. Over time he got spottier about observing his safety precautions, until he routinely slept with an arm dangling off the side of his bed and his feet kicked free of the sheets.
    But right then, at the sound of the wind, for one panicky moment, all he wanted was to burrow under the blankets and never come out.
    Tap. Tap.
    The thing hitting the window was just a branch, he told himself.
    Or an insomniac squirrel rattling around in the gutters.
    Or a neighbor cat trying to pick a fight with The Party.
    Tap.
    He was never going to be able to go back to sleep if he didn’t look. Zach slid out of bed, his bare feet padding over the carpet. Steeling himself and taking a deep breath, he pushed aside the curtain.
    There were a few scattered pebbles on the roof tiles in front of his window. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was that when he looked past the roof, he saw two dark figures looking up at him from the moonlit lawn. He was too surprised to shout. They had windblown hair and upturned faces and, for a moment, he didn’t know them. But then he realized it was only Poppy and Alice, not zombie girls or witches or ghosts. Alice lifted her hand in a shy wave. Poppy had another handful of pebbles and looked ready to throw them at him.
    He let out his breath and waved back a little unsteadily. His hammering heart started to slow.
    Poppy beckoned to him. Come down, she was signaling.
    He thought of the note that Alice had passed him and the way she’d underlined important , but he couldn’t think of anything so important that it would lead them to sneak out of their houses on a Friday night. Alice’s grandmother would ground her for the rest of forever if she found out.
    Zach backed away from the window. Quietly he went to the closet and pushed his feet into a pair of sneakers. He pulled a sweater over his T-shirt and crept downstairs in his alligator pajama bottoms.
    The Party followed, mewling plaintively, probably hoping to be fed.
    The under-cabinet lights in the kitchen were bright enough to stumble through by, and he managed to find his coat on a hook in the entranceway. The microwave showed the time in blinking green numbers: three minutes past midnight. Zach shouldered his coat on and went outside, closing the door before the cat could slip through.
    Poppy and Alice were waiting for him.
    “Hey,” he whispered into the dark. “What’s going on? What happened?”
    “Shhhhh,” Poppy said. “You’ll wake up everyone. Come on.”
    “Where to?” he asked, looking back at his house. There was a light on in his parents’ bedroom upstairs. Sometimes his mother stayed up late to read; sometimes she fell asleep with the light on. If she was still awake, the sound of them talking might carry up to her, but he wanted to know something before he just followed Alice and Poppy into the night.
    “The Silver Hills,” Alice said.
    That was a junkyard that specialized in metal about half a mile from their houses. The owner bought everything from car parts to tin cans and, although no one was sure what he did with them other than let them rust in huge mounds on his property, they were