Ren nodded, then he and Kip climbed out of the car.

  They waved goodbye as Aunt Winnie drove onto the main road back toward Old Manor. As soon as she was out of sight, Kip pulled his blue baseball cap tight over his shaggy hair and sprinted toward the gates.

  “Hey, wait up!” Ren yelled, chasing after him.

  Ren zigzagged in and out of the crowd, shoving his way through the bat-wing entrance to catch up to Kip.

  Once inside, their eyes filled with wonder.

  This carnival wasn’t like other carnivals.

  It wasn’t like anything they’d ever seen.

  It was . . .

  A Halloween wonderland!

  Everywhere they looked, festive marvels glared back at them.

  Flickering jack-o’-lanterns blazed at the entrance of every ride. Costumed carnies handed out candy from ghoulish pumpkin buckets. And creepy music played from some unseen calliope while a cloud of bats circled overhead, as if waiting to feast on something dead below.

  It felt like being on the set of a spooky Halloween movie.

  Nearby, a carnival barker in a cobwebbed top hat and tarantula-infested jacket shouted at the passing crowd, “Come one! Come all! Welcome to the scariest carnival in the world, where you can experience all the thrills, chills, and horrors your heart desires! We have Clowntown and the Haunted Mirror Maze, the Jaws of Death and the Drop of Fear, brain-fried funnel cakes and blood-soaked cotton candy! Be afraid—yes, be very afraid—for this is your death rehearsal!”

  Kip gazed around wide-eyed at all of it, as if he had just entered a bizarre, delicious dream.

  “Let’s ride every ride and eat every kind of spooky food they have!” he shouted.

  “We have to pace ourselves,” Ren warned, looking around for anyone that might resemble a Tick-Tock Man. “Twenty dollars should get us each something to eat and a few rides.”

  Ren walked over to the nearby ticket booth and traded in the money for twenty tickets. When he counted to make sure the ticket operator had given him enough for his money, he saw that each ticket had the silhouette of a bat printed on it.

  “Which ride do you want to do first?” he asked Kip.

  “That one!” Kip said, pointing to the tallest ride at the very back of the carnival.

  Ren watched from afar as one by one, kids lay down in a wooden coffin, were pulled two hundred feet in the air on rickety tracks, and then free-fell into a giant grave carved into the ground. A smoke machine blew up a cloud of fog after each coffin disappeared into the black cavity.

  The neon sign at the entrance read:

  Drop of Fear

  “No way. I’m not doing that one,” Ren replied. “And I’m not doing Clowntown either. You know how much I hate clowns.”

  “Then I’ll do it alone,” Kip said, starting toward the ride.

  Ren grabbed his arm.

  “Aunt Winnie told me not to let you out of my sight,” Ren reminded. “So whatever rides we do, we do them together.”

  Kip pulled his arm away from Ren. “But you’re afraid of everything! If we do that, we won’t end up riding any of them!”

  “I’m not afraid. Just . . . cautious. Anyway, that ride looks like it could collapse any day now,” Ren said, then pointed to the rickety tracks, rusted from years of autumn thrills.

  “So what if it does—what if you’re standing beneath it because you were too afraid to get on? And then you get crushed by your own fear?”

  Ren realized that he had imagined all the bad things that could happen to him if he got on to the ride, but he had never considered the bad things that could happen to him if he didn’t.

  “Let’s just find something else,” Ren said.

  Annoyed but not wanting to miss out on a second of fun, Kip ran to get in line for the Skeleton Coaster. Ren followed after him and handed two tickets to the carnie operating it.

  For the next hour, Ren followed Kip around the carnival as he rode ride after ride. Ren even gave up one of his own tickets so Kip could ride the Ghost Ship a second time.

  Afterward, Kip hurried to a food stand and ordered a brain-fried funnel cake and a skull-shaped souvenir cup filled with liver-flavored lemonade.

  “I guess this is what they do with all the kids who fall off the rides. The ones who go splat! They grind them up and feed them back to the customers,” Kip said, then took a giant bite of his funnel cake.

  “You’re demented, you know that? Those are just the names they give the food to go along with the theme of the carnival. It’s not really brain-fried or liver-flavored.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Kip asked just to annoy Ren.

  Ren shook his head in frustration.

  “You know, you might be the most irritating little brother on the face of the planet,” he said.

  “All right, all right. How many tickets do we have left?” Kip asked, then slurped a sip of lemonade.

  Ren felt in his pockets.

  “None,” he said. “We’re out.”

  “What do you mean?” Kip asked.

  “I mean we don’t have any left. We wouldn’t have run out so fast if you had paced yourself like I told you,” Ren said. “You should try listening to me sometime.”

  “What about that?” Kip asked, pointing to Ren’s back pocket. Ren reached down and pulled out the flyer.

  “I almost forgot,” he said. “We get one free ride with this.”

  “Ha, I knew it!” Kip shouted, and started to look around at their options.

  The Spider Spin was just across the midway next to the Witch’s Cauldron. But a Halloween Freak Show tent loomed to their left. The side of the canvas tent displayed drawings of a two-headed werewolf named Fang, a four-legged woman named Scary Mary, and an impossible creature with a jack-o’-lantern head called Johnny Pumpkinhead.

  The boys’ only other options nearby were the Cobwebbed Carousel or the Twisted Ventriloquist Show, where supposedly the puppets and humans switched places.

  “Which one should I use my flyer for?”

  “Your flyer? It blew up against my leg,” Ren said. “Besides, you used over half of our tickets.”

  “But I’m the youngest,” Kip said.

  “And I’m the oldest,” Ren replied.

  Just then, a girl’s voice interrupted them.

  “Tell you what—how about I read both your fortunes for that one flyer?”

  They turned and saw a girl wearing a black dress and a purple sash wrapped around her head. Two spider-shaped earrings hung from her ears, and her emerald eyes were framed with black eyeliner, giving her the look of a gothic enchantress. Weirdly, even though she looked their age, she had several streaks of gray hair.

  “You mean you’ll read our fortunes for free?” Ren asked.

  “Nothing’s free at the carnival,” she said, then gestured for them to enter her tent. “Consider this a discount.”

  “Awesome!” Kip said, hurrying into the tent without giving it a second thought. Ren followed.

  “I’m Zora,” she said, offering her hand.

  “I’m Ren. And this is my little brother, Kip.”

  They both shook her hand.

  Ren glanced around and saw that Zora’s tent was lined with black satin, giving it a dark appearance, like something out of an old horror film. Two chairs sat side by side at her table, as if she had been expecting the boys.

  They sat down, and Kip immediately touched the moon-colored ball at the center of the table. Purple lightning zapped toward his finger, giving him a mild shock.

  “Wow. Magic,” Kip said in awe.

  “It’s just an illusion,” Ren whispered. “There’s no such thing as real magic.”

  Zora smirked knowingly as she fed her pet spiders beneath the table. Then she sat down and spoke an incantation of indecipherable words.

  When she finished, the crystal ball floated off the table and hovered in midair.

  6

  Moony Visions

  Ren watched as the ball began to glow, dissolving the darkness around it. He waved his hand over and beneath it to see if there were any strings attached. But he couldn’t feel any.

  Kip, on the other hand, was hypnotized by the trick.

  Zora continued her spell, moving her hands majestically in front of the ball, as if trying to awaken some sleeping thing within it. Soon, the ball filled with fog, and a cryptic vision appeared.

  “I will gaze into my haunted ball and tell you what I see in your futures,” she began.

  The girl peered deeper into the mystical orb, and Ren and Kip scooted closer to get a better look.

  “I see two figures, two boys,” she continued. “One of them is wearing a mask, and the other is wearing . . . two masks.”

  “What does that mean?” Ren asked.

  “Only the oracle knows,” Zora said mysteriously. “And now I see a clock . . . yes, a clock . . . that turns backward,” Zora said.

  “A clock that turns backward?” Kip asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “There are many marvels in the world you have yet to see, boy,” she replied, which Ren thought was weird because she wasn’t any older than them.

  Zora continued consulting the ball, and a stream of images reeled through it. Ren and Kip waited patiently for her next revelation.

  Soon, the ball turned solid black, and Zora’s eyes grew distressed.

  “The oracle has sent a warning: it says, ‘The bond of love repels evil, but a love-bond broken invites evil in.’”

  “What does that mean?” Ren asked.

  “It means your chances of survival are better if you stick together,” Zora said.

  Ren and Kip exchanged a worried look.

  Zora then saw something else in the ball that the boys couldn’t see. She squinted, as if concerned, then quickly turned and opened her ancient spell book. She flipped through the pages, as if searching for an answer. She stopped on a page in the middle of the book and ran her finger over its text.

  After a moment, she looked up at them.

  “What is it?” Ren asked.

  She closed the book and leaned forward, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear. “You both need to leave the carnival right now and never come back.”

  “Why?” Ren asked, still not fully believing her magic was real but believing just enough to be afraid.

  Zora took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “According to the vision, one of you is going to—”

  She paused.

  “Going to what?” Ren asked.

  But Zora seemed distracted. Ren realized that she was no longer looking at her moon-ball but rather behind them toward the entrance of her tent.

  Curious, Ren slowly turned . . . and saw . . .

  A man in a black cape.

  Holding a wooden cane crowned by a ticking clock.

  7

  Brother’s Keeper

  “Good evening, Zora,” the man said in a deep, charming voice.

  Zora lowered the moon-ball to the table. She looked caught off guard, like a kid who was in trouble.

  “I was just—I was just looking into these boys’ futures,” Zora explained.

  “Find anything interesting?” the man asked, stepping toward them.

  “Fame and riches,” she lied, feigning a smile. “These boys are the lucky sort.”

  The man picked up a gold coin from the table and rolled it over his knuckles.

  “Destiny is a strange thing—there are always two sides to every coin . . . to every choice,” he said. “One leads to life, and the other . . . to death.”

  He closed his palm around the coin, and when he opened it again, the coin had vanished.

  “Wooow,” Kip said. “You’re a magician?”

  “Of a sort,” the man replied with a slight grin. He turned as if he was about to leave but stopped just behind Kip. “Oh, and . . . if you boys like magic, be sure to come to the big show on Halloween night.”

  “The big show?” Kip asked.

  The man nodded. “You won’t want to miss it. It will be to die for.”

  Something about the way he said the last sentence made Ren feel uncomfortable.

  “W-we’re just visiting town,” Ren said, not wanting Kip to get too friendly with the stranger. “And we ran out of tickets. I don’t think our aunt is going to give us more money to come back.”

  “Ah, did Zora not tell you?” the man replied. “There are other ways to pay for the rides.”

  He raised his cane in parting. When he turned back toward the entrance, his cape made a ruffling sound in the air.

  As soon as he disappeared out of the tent, Zora sat back down in her chair and gazed at her darkened crystal ball.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ren whispered to Kip, grabbing hold of his arm and pulling him toward the exit.

  “Why?” Kip asked.

  “Because something’s not right about this place,” Ren said. “And that old woman in Room 1942, Mrs. Wellshire, told me to stay away from someone called the Tick-Tock Man. I didn’t know what she meant, but that guy had a clock on top of his cane.”

  “You always think too much,” Kip said.

  “One of us has to,” Ren replied.

  Just as they were about to walk out of the tent, they heard Zora’s voice whisper behind them, “Remember . . . nothing’s free at the carnival. There’s always a price.”

  Ren squinted at her, slightly disturbed. Her warning only enhanced the twisted feeling in his gut. Without saying anything back to Zora, he pulled Kip outside and checked his watch.

  “You know, you don’t have to look at your watch every five seconds,” Kip said. “You’ll miss the entire carnival.”

  Ren shrugged, as if to say, Whatever. “We still have an hour before Aunt Winnie is supposed to pick us up,” he said. “We should wait outside the gates.”

  “But there are still a lot of rides we haven’t ridden,” Kip complained.

  “I already told you—we’re out of tickets,” Ren said. “And this place gives me the creeps.”

  “You’re such a scaredy-cat. The magician said there are other ways to pay for the rides,” Kip replied.

  “And you really want to stick around to find out what he means? Lesson number one in life: never trust a grown man wearing a cape,” Ren said. “Let’s go.”

  “If you want to wait outside, then go! But I’m going to walk around some more until Aunt Winnie gets here.”

  “We need to stick together,” Ren reminded him. “Like the girl said.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in all that hocus-pocus stuff.”

  “I don’t,” Ren replied, realizing that part of him did. “But I’m telling you, something’s not right about this carnival.”

  Ren reached for Kip’s arm, and Kip yelled, “Let go of me!”

  A few carnival-goers stopped to examine the situation. Ren could feel their eyes poring over him.

  “All right, I’m done,” Ren said. “You want to walk around on your own, then go for it. I’m tired of being your babysitter. All I do is stand around being the responsible one while you get to have all the fun.”

  Ren turned his back on Kip and began to walk away.

  “Fine!” he heard Kip shout.

  Ren walked ten more yards, then looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Kip still standing there.

  But his little brother was already gone.

  Ren shook his head and kept walking toward the gates. He made it another few steps before his conscience got the best of him and he felt his chest growing tighter.

  What if something happens to Kip? he worried. What if he gets hurt and I’m not there to help him? I can’t just let him roam around the carnival on his own.

  Ren whirled around and scanned the crowd, looking for Kip’s blue cap. But there were too many other people wearing similar hats.

  He walked along the midway, examining the faces in each line, hoping to find his brother waiting to get on a ride. He heard frightened shrieks coming out of the Haunted Mirror Maze, terrified laughter echoing out of Clowntown, and blood-curdling screams pouring out from the Jaws of Death. But he didn’t see Kip anywhere.

  Ren sat down on a sarcophagus-shaped bench and put his head in his hands.

  If I don’t find him soon, Aunt Winnie is going to kill me, he thought.

  Right then, the chilly October breeze brushed over him.

  Just as he was about to give up his search, he looked over and saw . . .

  Kip.

  Standing at the entrance to the Drop of Fear.

  Talking to the man in the black cape.

  8

  Rehearsal for Death

  Ren sprinted toward them, but he was too late. The coffin lid closed, and Kip rose high in the sky on the rickety tracks.

  “How did he get on? He didn’t have any tickets left!” Ren shouted at the Tick-Tock Man.

  “I told you, boy, there are other ways to pay the carnival,” the magician said. “But fear not. Death comes to us all.”

  The strange man walked away, and Ren noticed the clock at the top of his cane was glowing. Even weirder, an eerie green mist was seeping out of it. Ren looked to see if the hands of the clock were turning backward, but he couldn’t get a close enough view.

  He then noticed other kids getting onto nearby rides without providing tickets. They simply walked to the front of the line, held out their right arm, showed a stamp or something to the carnie operator, and walked onto the ride. Ren wondered what they were using as payment.

  His gaze turned up to Kip’s coffin just as it came to a stop at the top of the track two hundred feet in the air. All the sounds around Ren disappeared as he held his breath, waiting for the coffin to drop. His stomach churned at the thought of being trapped in a box about to free-fall to the ground, and he wondered what Kip was feeling in that moment.

  The costumed carnie operating the ride shouted a countdown into his giant megaphone. . . .

  “Seven . . . Six . . . Five . . . Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”

  Then . . .

  He pulled the lever.

  The clicking sound of the tracks took Ren’s breath away.

  Whoosh!

  Ren watched in breathless horror as the coffin fell, until it vanished into the dark gravelike cavity in the ground.

 

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