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no friend after all.
    They hadn’t gone far when they heard something else. Marshall’s name, called from the sky above in an eerie voice like a night bird. And they smelled a terrible smell, like rotting meat. They looked up and saw a huge black shape cross the moon. A minute later, a terrible scream came from far behind them, a scream that sounded like Marshall. They turned and ran back. But he was nowhere to be found. And no one saw him again. Ever .
    I let our lightless cell fall into a deep, ominous silence. Then I screamed bloody murder. Mose gave out a scream of his own, one of those guttural, wordless things. Then he was laughing. He grabbed my hand and signed into my palm, I almost crapped my pants. Like the kids in the story.
    We lay down after that, both of us deep in our own thoughts.
    At length, Mose tapped my shoulder and took my hand. You tell stories but they’re real. There are monsters and they eat the hearts of children.
    After that, I listened to Mose breathe deeply as he drifted into sleep.In a while, I heard the little scurrying sounds from Faria as he came out from hiding to see if I had any crumbs to offer him. I didn’t, and not long after that, I was asleep, too.
----
    I WOKE IN the dark to the scrape of a key turning in the lock of the iron door. I was up in an instant. The first thought I had panicked me: DiMarco. I didn’t think he’d try anything with two of us there, especially if one of us was Mose. But like the Windigo, DiMarco was a being of huge, unsavory appetites, and we all knew the things he did to children in the night. So I tensed and prepared to kick and scratch and claw, even if he killed me for it.
    The light of a kerosene lantern shown through the door. Mose was awake now, too, crouched and ready, his whole body taut in a way that made me think of a bowstring about to let an arrow fly. He glanced at me and nodded, and I knew we would not go down to DiMarco’s depravities without a good fight.
    But the face that came into the lantern light was not DiMarco’s. Herman Volz smiled at us, a finger to his lips, and motioned us to follow.
    Just west of the school grounds lay a vast open field full of rock slag and tall wild grass, and beyond that was the huge pit of an abandoned quarry. We crossed the field using a path that had been worn over the years by kids and others who’d sneaked away seeking solitude or to throw rocks into that deep-gouged hole or, if you were Herman Volz, for another reason. There was an old equipment shed at the edge of the quarry and inside was a secret only Volz and Albert and Mose and I knew about. Volz kept a heavy padlock on the door.
    A small fire burned near the shed, and I smelled sausage cooking. When we got closer, I saw Albert holding a skillet, his face aglow in the firelight.
    Volz grinned. “Couldn’t let you boys starve to death.”
    “Sit down,” Albert said. “Food’ll be ready soon.”
    There were not just sausages in the skillet but scrambled eggs, too,and diced potato and onion. Albert was a good cook. When it was just him and my father and me traveling all over hell and gone, Albert had done most of our cooking. Sometimes it was over an open fire like this, or sometimes on the woodstove of some little motor court in the middle of nowhere. But he wasn’t a magician. He couldn’t just conjure food. I figured our meal had come from Volz’s pantry.
    I felt bad now for hating Albert when the Black Witch hadn’t sent him to the quiet room with Mose and me. I wondered if even then he’d been planning to find a way to feed us. Or maybe this was all Volz’s idea. Either way, I couldn’t be mad anymore.
    “What was the movie tonight?” I asked when we sat on the ground near the fire.
    “Something called Fighting Caravans . A western,” Albert replied.
    A western, of course. Which was fine with me. I liked shoot ’em ups. But I always thought it was odd at Lincoln School to show movies where Indians were mostly terrible people