Andrew Klavan - The long way home

Now, there's a reason I knew this place so well and it had to do with Mr. Sherman again, my history teacher. This was two years ago. He was teaching a class about the Salem Witch Trials. If you don't know about the witch trials, they happened back in colonial days, before America became a country. There were all these hysterical girls running around screaming that witches were after them and they started off a sort of panic of fear through Massachusetts and other parts of New England. A lot of regular people suddenly got accused of being witches. Some of them were put in prison and about twenty or twenty-five of them were killed. Later, when all the panic passed, people realized they'd lost their senses and done a terrible thing, killing their neighbors for no reason.

Now, to me, this was a very interesting story. It was a reminder that you should never let yourself get swept away by the crowd. Sometimes everyone you know can be saying something or believing something and it can just be dead wrong. All around you there might be people getting all excited or panicked and yelling for you to do the wrong thing or believe the wrong thing. They can make it very hard for you to refuse them or even just disagree with them out loud. People get angry at you when you disagree with them-especially when they're wrong-and nobody likes to be unpopular or have people angry at them. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to use your reason and your heart and stand up for what's true-and I guess not enough people did that during the Salem Witch Trials. That's what I got out of it anyway.

But, of course, for Mr. Sherman the message was different. For him, the Salem Witch Trials proved that religion is bad. See, the people in Salem at the time were Puritans, very strictly religious. So since they were the ones who put the witches on trial, that proved to Mr. Sherman that religion was the whole problem. I think I may already have mentioned that Mr. Sherman was kind of a doofus.

Anyway, Mr. Sherman gave us an assignment. The assignment was to research a superstition and show why it was untrue. Now, on the face of it, I thought this was a pretty cool assignment. It sounded like fun. But we all knew Mr. Sherman. And we all knew if you wanted to get a really top grade, you had to do stuff that he agreed with. In other words, we all knew that if we wanted an A on this assignment, we had to pick some religious belief and show why it was superstitious.

This presented a problem for Rick Donnelly. Rick, as I said, was willing to say just about anything to get good grades so he could go to a really good college. But Rick and I went to the same church and neither of us felt we'd ever heard anything superstitious there. In fact, the stuff we'd learned there had been really helpful in just living ordinary life. So he didn't want to attack his own religion. And it seemed kind of impolite to attack somebody else's. So he didn't really feel right about this assignment at all. It really bothered him.

We talked about it in the cafeteria at lunch at our table with Josh and Miler.

"Look," I said, "there are plenty of superstitions. Black cats. Friday the thirteenth. Write about one of those. That's what I'm going to do."

"You know that's not what he's looking for," said Rick gloomily. He was a tall guy, one of the tallest in the school. His big face was the color of chocolate. It usually looked a lot more cheerful. "I mean, it's all right for you, Charlie. You argue with Sherman all the time, and you don't care when he gives you lower marks."

He was wrong about that. I did care. I cared a lot. But I wasn't going to lie just to get Sherman to give me better grades.

We were all silent for a while. Then I had an idea.

"Hey, you know what would be so cool?" I said. "What if we went and spent a whole night in the McKenzie mansion?"

"What?" said Rick.

"Yeah, yeah," I said, getting more enthusiastic as I thought about it. "We spend the night there and prove there are no ghosts, that it's not haunted. We prove that's just a local superstition."

Josh Lerner cleared his throat. Josh looked like the geek he was: short and kind of slump-shouldered with curly hair and big, thick glasses and a quick, nervous smile. Josh could be kind of a dork at times, but somehow you couldn't help liking him anyway.

"You know, Charlie, that's a very creative thought," he said. "And it raises an interesting question: Are you out of your ever-loving mind?"

I laughed. "Why shouldn't we? We just take some sleeping bags and camp out for the night and go home and write a report about it. We could take pictures and make recordings and everything and do a whole presentation. The thing is, it would be so cool that Sherman would have to give us an A. He'd have to-or he'd have to explain why."

"He would," murmured Rick, nodding to himself. "I mean, it would just be that cool."

"It would be cool," said Josh, "but you're leaving something out."

"What?"

"The part where we get so terrified we have heart attacks and die."

"I could see where that would cut into the coolness factor," said Miler Miles. Miler was a small, thin guy with short blond hair over a long face. You only had to look at him to know he was going to be some big corporate muck-a-muck when he grew up.

"Why should we be terrified?" I said. "We'd all be together. We'd have flashlights, cell phones…"

"Garlic, silver bullets, wooden stakes," Miler added.

"I think I'm having a heart attack already," said Josh. "Really. I'm serious. I can feel it."

As Josh gripped his chest with a worried look in his eyes, Rick nodded. "I'd do it," he said quietly.

"Sure," said Miler with a shrug. "I'd do it too."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," said Josh. "I can't spend the night in the Ghost Mansion. I have a nervous condition."

I looked at him. "What nervous condition?"

"I'm nervous about spending the night in the Ghost Mansion."

I laughed again. "Well, you don't have to do it then. You're not even in Sherman's class."

"Oh, right. I'm gonna let you guys go and me stay home-like that'd ever happen." Josh gave an elaborate sigh. "All right, all right. I'm in. Just mention how brave I was at my funeral."

So we decided to do it. Josh and Rick and I decided anyway. In the end, Miler said he couldn't do it because he was training for a track meet and needed his sleep. The assignment was due on Monday, so we went out to the mansion on Friday evening.

Now, I have to be honest here and say we didn't exactly get permission from our parents for this. It just wasn't a serious possibility. There were all sorts of signs around the Ghost Mansion saying it was private property and warning you to keep out and that you were entering at your own risk and so on. I was pretty sure that would make my father say no. He'd be all worried about lawsuits or whatever. As for my mother-well, she'd be worried about everything. She was like that. I mean, she worried about me going to school. I might fall out of my desk and land on my pencil or something-I don't know. She just found things to worry about. I knew there was no way she would let me do this.

It's not like I was going to lie about it or anything. I was just going to tell the truth a little late, that's all. I told my parents I was going to have a sleepover with Josh and Rick-I just didn't say where. Later, when we came home, I figured I would sort of just casually mention that little part of it. I didn't expect to get away with it altogether. I thought I might get grounded for a weekend or something. But once my parents knew we were all right and understood why we'd done it in the first place, I thought I would get off pretty easily.

Anyway, off to the mansion we went just before sunset. We had our sleeping bags and flashlights, our cell phones-which we could also use as cameras-and a little MP3 recorder I had. Josh even brought his Sony PSP so we'd have something to do if we got bored.