I Dare You

Everything that happened on that dreadful night was Joey’s fault.

It had been the hottest spring in fifty years and the most boring school year of my life. It was now May and, as the summer was getting closer but the days weren’t getting any shorter, my friends and I started a dare contest: for every time we went to the principal’s office, we had a dare. Although it was fun initially, the dares had been getting more and more intense as we constantly tried to outdo each other. I couldn’t imagine what Zach’s dare would be! He had been caught drawing on school walls with a stolen spray paint, which was the dare we had given him the week before. As for myself, I had done pretty well so far and was confident I wouldn’t get in trouble this week.

That was, of course, until Joey threw paper balls at me. I had no other choice but to retaliate; it’s a matter of honor. I heard the teacher pronounce the dreaded words, sending me to the principal’s office.

As I went back to my dorm that night, I found Tyler and Louis laughing their heads off, teasing us about how nasty this week’s dare was going to be. They even left us to discuss possible dares in private. They came back an hour later with big grins on their faces.

‘Zach, Cole, we dare you to spend the night in Keystone Cemetery,’ Tyler exclaimed in a cheerful yet defiant voice.

‘And bring back something to prove you actually went,’ Louis added.

‘What about a skull?’ Tyler joked, and they all burst out laughing. I didn’t find it incredibly funny.

Some three or four miles outside the city, the Keystone Cemetery, which had once been Little Amtor’s main graveyard, stood, mostly abandoned. It was spooky, and I was terrified of it. Growing up, my brother Floyd used to tell me ghost stories taking place in the cemetery. I became so scared of the place that I would have to stifle a cry every time my parents drove by it. Floyd’s stories gave me nightmares, too, although I had never admitted it to anyone, especially not to Floyd.

As much as I resented the idea of spending the night in Keystone Cemetery, I couldn’t say ‘no,’ or the other guys would make fun of me for the remainder of high school. So, I took up the challenge, and so did Zach.

But first, we had to figure out how to get out of the dorm unnoticed and be back before the start of the next day. Zach and I spent the whole night, and most of the following morning, polishing up our plan. By noon, we were ready, and we spent the rest of the day in a state of great agitation and unrest.

The plan was simple... on paper. We would wait thirty minutes after our supervisor went to sleep. Then we would use the window at the end of the corridor on the first floor to get out. Tyler would close the window after us. On the other side, there was a platform leading to a flight of stairs. We would crawl across the complex to the football field and the fence at its far end. The breach in the fence was our way out.

I got to Tyler’s room at quarter past eleven that night, my backpack firmly secured on my shoulders. The boys were already waiting for me. We started toward the window, and I went first.

‘Hurry up,’ I whispered to Zach, already beating myself up for accepting the challenge.

He slipped through the window and landed on the platform next to me. We headed towards the stairs, ducking every time we walked by a bedroom window. 

As we reached the bottom of the staircase, I glanced over my shoulder to check if someone had seen us. Part of me was hoping someone had, so our expedition could end there. Unfortunately, no one had, and we made it out without incident. My heart was beating frantically. It had been almost too easy. I clenched my backpack straps as if for comfort, the last buoy to keep me from drowning. We started toward Keystone Cemetery. Tony looked as unnerved as I felt.

We walked the four miles that separated us from the cemetery without saying a word. As we reached the entrance gate, Louis finally broke the silence.

‘Brrr... it’s creepy.’

‘Yep,’ I said, hoping that my voice wouldn’t betray how terrified I felt.

There was a padlock on the gate. Despite my prayers, it gave way effortlessly when Zach yanked on it.

‘Ladies first,’ Louis said, visibly trying to hide his discomfort.

‘Is Little Zachary scared to go in first?’ I asked in a mocking voice.

‘Not at all,’ he replied, and to prove his point, he entered the graveyard first, which I was grateful for.

The air had become quite chilly, conflicting with the warmth of the past month. It had a suspended quality to it that made me hold my breath.

We walked down an alley, then down another one, and another one. The atmosphere had a deceitful vibe that I didn’t like at all. I couldn’t wait for this night to be over.

‘Jesus!’ Zach suddenly screamed in a high, fainting voice, making me jump. ‘Look at that.’

He was pointing at the bottom of a ditch.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said, approaching, not wanting to.

I looked into the ditch and pulled back in horror. A bunch of dead rats was lying there, some of them in a heavy state of decay. The putrescent smell was stifling. Louis was staring at the rats as if hypnotized. At last, he dragged his gaze away with a gasp.

The wind rose, shrieking through the trees. I looked around uneasily. We started walking again, and after a while, my tension began to subside, and I started to feel tired.

‘Cole, Cole, I saw something,’ Louis wailed, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I saw something moving in the shadows.’

I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around me, cocking an ear. My friend was turning in an awkward circle, trying to look everywhere at once.

A chilling sensation grew in my guts, oppressing me from all sides—that sensation of being watched. I heard a sound like two branches rubbing together. Something hissed in the woods, emitted a gurgling sound like the sound a mouth full of blood would make, and was silent. Closer to, a branch snapped. My heartbeat went from a walk to a sprint in half a second.

‘You don’t scare me,’ Zach shouted.

‘Stop it; there is nothing, you stop it!’ I yelled at him. But I wasn’t sure I believed that myself.

The deceptive moonlight turned the shape of the trees into silhouettes and faces that looked at us with hateful eyes. The cold breeze stirred the trees, changing the shadows in a disquieting way. My mouth was dry; my tongue was throbbing with tension. A growling sound rose, and suddenly, I saw it: a monster rising from behind a tombstone, bracing itself to leap on me. I shrieked and clapped my hands to my eyes.

For a few seconds, which felt like a whole hour, I was paralyzed. A moment later, Zach yanked on my shirt, and we started running for our lives towards the front gate.

But when we reached it and tried to pull the door open, it didn’t move. The padlock was firmly locked.

‘The door is locked,” Zach said in a state of near hysteria.

‘It’s impossible! You opened it when we arrived.’

‘It won’t budge, Cole. It’s locked!’

Panic overtook my body as we started running frantically in the other direction. I heard footsteps behind me getting closer, and I could almost feel the beast’s breath on my neck. We finally reached a hill. As I started climbing it, I stubbed my foot on a protruding rock and fell to the ground. Panic engulfed me, and I scrambled the rest of the way up.

I reached the top and swung one leg over the fence. I grasped two of the old rusted arrow points and swung my other leg. Zach did the same thing. We dropped to the ground. A cry of pain and despair escaped my friend.

‘I think I sprained my ankle,’ he said.

‘Man, we gotta run…,’ I urged him.

I helped him to his feet, and we started walking as fast as we could and as far away from the cemetery as possible. When we reached a safe distance, Zach dropped to the ground and started massaging his ankle. The graveyard stood in the distance, menacing but quiet. There was no sign of the beast.