Rita Morse and the Sinister Shadow Read online

We did next what any sane person would do. We grabbed our bikes, hightailed it out of the park (after I convinced Ryan to move), and rode back to Ryan’s house as fast as we could. I didn’t care about my parents yelling at me anymore. I didn’t even care if they burned all my band shirts and made me wear pink athletic stuff to school every day. We had bigger things to worry about.

  Neither of us said a word on the way. The air stayed all electric until we got down to the corner, like whatever energy that portal had put in the air hadn’t faded yet. My hair stopped standing on end when we turned the corner to the library, but I didn’t slow down, even though everyone’s porch lights and glowing garden decorations stayed on. I wasn’t taking any chances.

  Ryan’s house was on the other side of town, two streets over from mine. That meant that we were really panting and out of breath by time we set the bikes up against the peeling wood of his porch. But I didn’t care. We got away from those shadow things.

  Ryan’s mom barely even noticed as we burst into the house and through the messy kitchen. Mrs. Sullivan sat at the table, playing some shooter game on her laptop. She played a lot of video games ever since Ryan’s deadbeat dad left them a couple of years ago. That was good that she was doing it now, because I didn’t want to explain why I looked ready to pee my pants. I couldn’t think of an excuse that came close to sounding normal. Mrs. Sullivan, it’s because we saw a UFO? That was almost as bad as the truth.

  “Hey, Mom,” Ryan said, patting her on the shoulder. His voice trembled a little and I thought he was going to spill everything right there. I think part of him wanted to.

  “Hey.” She nodded and squinted at the computer screen like she was trying to escape into it. I don’t even think she noticed me standing there, because she didn’t even nod at me like she normally did.

  Ryan sighed and went for the stairs. So it looked like no parents were going to get involved after all.

  I stepped over a few stacks of books and about tripped on a box of taped movies. Luckily, that was normal for the past two years, so I didn’t look too stupid. Ryan waved me up the stairs to the second floor. I followed him, scaling stacks of clothes and a couple of boxes. No wonder he wanted to get out and hang out with me so much. You could hardly breathe in this place.

  Not, of course, that I minded.

  There was barely a place to stand in Ryan’s room. For one thing, his mattress was off his bed. And the box for the computer he’d bought two months ago was still on the floor. Cards from his Darkworld deck were laying everywhere and his techno CD’s were in stacks all over his dresser and computer desk. I had to back against his old Sharkman curtains to find a place to stand. “Um…was that some weird hallucination or something? I really hope so.”

  Ryan pushed his goggles up farther on his head. Sweat still ran down his temples. That kind of answered my question.

  “Um…how many hallucinations chase you?” he asked, flipping on his dragon lamp. “And try to drag you away?”

  Okay. He had a point there. But that portal thing—I had too much trouble wrapping my mind around that one. “Maybe we should tell your mom about what happened. I think she’s more likely to believe something weird than my parents.” There seemed to be a lot of stacks of paranormal books laying around the Sullivans’ house. My parents always said that kind of stuff was stupid.

  Ryan sighed, leaning against his closet door. “If we could drag her away from the computer first. She didn’t even make dinner tonight. I had to do it.”

  “Sorry.” I hadn’t meant to bring up the whole situation with his mom, but my mind wasn’t working the best right now. Time for a subject change: finding out if that portal was even real or not. I needed to get my head together, because Ryan wouldn’t anytime soon. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “D…does it involve boarding up the windows and locking all the doors?” Ryan asked, rushing past me and pulling his curtains shut. “I’m finding my baseball bat tonight.”

  “No.” Of course I wanted to help him turn his house into a fortress, but we had to take this one thing at a time. “It’s just a way to tell if we were seeing things or not. You have some paper and a bunch of colored pencils?” I looked around the dumping ground that was his room. Ryan got to take all the art classes he could (his mom liked art, unlike mine) so he had to have some laying around.

  By some miracle, Ryan knew where to find those in the mess. He lifted a huge stack of mangas off his desk and dug out some blank paper, then fished out at least two dozen colored pencils from under the dresser. “Okay, Rita. What’s this for?”

  “We each go into a separate room and draw what we saw in the park. Without telling each other. If the pictures are the same, that proves it was real.” I felt a bit proud of myself for figuring that one out. Usually my other friend, Penny, was the one who came up with stuff like that.

  Ryan nodded. His skin was the color of that paste they made us use in art class. I could tell he was hoping we’d prove the “it was all real” theory wrong.

  I was with him. Telling Penny about this wouldn’t go over so well. For one thing, she’d yell at us for the toilet paper prank. Penny never got involved with anything like that. But we’d have to do it in order to get her help with figuring this out.

  I took a piece of paper and a bunch of pencils and headed across the hall to the storage room. Luckily there were tons of boxes in here to draw on.

  The bare light bulb glared down at me as I drew out the portal and those shadow people standing around it. And I’ll admit it. My hand shook as I did, making me mess up a bunch of times. This wasn’t something I wanted to see again. So I squinted and colored the purple swirls and scribbled in the shadow people like a two-year-old. As long as it got the point across, I didn’t care.

  Creaky footsteps got closer and Ryan knocked on the door. “Uh…done, Rita?”

  “Yeah.” My palms tingled. Here came the moment of truth.

  He opened the door and held up his own drawing.

  Uh, oh.

  The black hole with the purple swirls stared out of Ryan’s paper at me like the eye of some monster, and the leader shadow stood next to it complete with his hat and cape.

  In other words, we’d seen the same thing. It was real, all right.

  “Just wait until we have to tell Penny about this,” he said, slapping the paper down against his side. “That’s not going to be fun.”