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garlic.”
    “And some holy water,” Marissa adds, and then Holly says, “And a silver dagger,” and I throw in, “And a blowtorch.”
    “A blowtorch?” Marissa asks me.
    “Aren’t vampires supposed to be afraid of fire?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she says like she can’t quite believe she forgot this valuable piece of vampire-repelling information. She turns to Casey. “Sammy’s right. No little candle is going to keep her back. You need a blowtorch.”
    “Or maybe just a lock on your door?” I say.
    He laughs. “Now
that’s
a good idea.”
    So we head up the driveway and the more distance we put between us and Heather, the better things get—which must be a law of physics or something, because no matter where on earth you are, it’s always true.
    Plus, there’s now lots of decorations to distract us. The dirt driveway we’re walking on is horseshoe-shaped—it curves up to the house, then curves back down to the street—and the yard that’s on the inside of the horseshoe has awesome decorations. There are classic, arched-top tombstones, full-sized coffins, and giant spiders dangling in massive webs from the branches of a tree.
    Between the driveway and the yard there’s a white picket fence. It’s not a tidy little white picket fence like you’re used to thinking of. It’s haphazard, with boards nailed on crooked and sideways and upside down. And the KEEP OUT OR DIE signs inside the fence make it pretty clear you’re not supposed to cross the barrier of haphazardness.
    Besides coffins and tombstones and giant dangling spiders, there are also tall metal stakes with skulls wobbling on top of them. They’re like a little army of laughing heads, and something about them is very creepy. I know it’s all fake, but what’s making everything seem
alive
is that the air is filled with the sounds of torture. Shrieking and creaking and moaning and groaning and demented laughing.
    A shiver goes through me and I mutter, “Why do skulls always look like they’re laughing?”
    “They do, don’t they?” Casey says.
    “Yeah. It’s like it takes dying to finally get the joke.” I look at him. “Which is a weird thought.”
    I didn’t have a chance to think about that weird thought too long, though, because all of a sudden Marissa grabs me. “Did you see that? It moved!”
    “What moved?”
    She points to one of the coffins. “There!”
    Sure enough the lid is creaking back, and after it’s open about six inches, a puff of smoke comes out before the lid settles back down. Then a big R.I.P. tombstone a few feet away from the coffin seems to shiver and the section of ground in front of it starts moving. Like something is pushing, pushing, pushing from underground, trying to escape.
    “Do you see that?” Marissa gasps, squeezing my arm.
    A bone-chilling scream fills the air as a corpse in a noose drops down right in front of us. So of course Marissa lets out a bone-chilling scream of her own, which seems toscare the corpse clear out of its mind because it goes shooting back up, disappearing inside the branches of the tree.
    So there we are, trying to recover from all of
that
, when an eerie voice behind us says, “Tarry here and you too will DIE!”
    Marissa screams again because the voice is
right
behind us, breathing down our necks. But when we whip around, we see that it’s just Billy, and he is totally busting up.
    “You brat!” Marissa cries, backhanding him.
    He laughs. “You are so jumpy! Even in a
fake
graveyard!”
    And yeah, the stuff may be fake, but it’s
awesome
fake, and as we walk along I say, “I can’t believe someone would do all this and not charge admission.”
    “They don’t charge,
and
they give out candy,” Billy says. “I heard last year they gave full-sized Snickers.”
    A black cat jumps off the lap of an overstuffed mummy that’s slouched on a chair on the driveway side of the white picket fence. The mummy’s obviously fake, but the cat?
    “Is that real?” Holly asks