Read Online Johnny Halloween by Norman Partridge - Free Book Online Page B

spooky, but just a trick. Still, he wanted to call Ron Allen for backup.
    The one-armed man pulled another man forward, and a third man started to push the chalker, circling the first two. Nardo’s hand drifted to his gun.
    Darkness… Light… Midnight…. There was a sudden series of sharp beeps—someone’s wristwatch signaling the hour—and a circle of flame exploded between Nardo and the crowd. Inside the circle, two ashen faces swam against a roiling red-orange background, and Nardo immediately recognized Bill as one of the men.
    A glint of metal amid the flames. A knife arcing above Bill’s head.
    Bill and the other man disappeared behind a curtain of sparks.
    Nardo banged through the gate and sprinted through a tombstone obstacle course. The sparks were flickering low, but rising curls of mushroom-colored smoke hid his progress from the chanting men. Again, he went for his gun, hesitated just an instant at the thought of an elaborate prank, and instead pulled his chucks and dove for the circle just as a dozen sprinklers fountained water over the cemetery lawn.
    The flames were quenched almost instantly. The edge of the circle glowed orange, and as Nardo passed over it he saw Bill again, saw the cartoon-like outline of a bat glowing red on the grass at his brother-in-law’s feet. Then the wind kicked out of Nardo’s lungs and he felt like he was elbowing through something alive, like you’d feel if you were flailing around in the guts of a whale, and the chanting that boomed in his ears suddenly increased in pitch until it became a shrieking whine. But all he could think about was getting there, getting to the knife that even now was descending toward Bill’s heart, and he whipped the chucks around the one-armed man’s wrist and levered the two sticks together.
    There was a sound like an ear of corn being stripped from its stalk as the man’s wrist powdered. His hand fell away. The knife landed at the point of the bat-design’s left ear.
    “Jesus.” Nardo pulled his gun as the tall man dropped to his knees. “Jesus!”
    The screeching whine screamed to a deafening pitch. Nardo whirled toward the robed men. A few of them crouched at the perimeter of the circle, dying beneath cascading fountains of water, puddling to nothing like outcasts from The Wizard of Oz . Nardo was ready to surrender to a feeling of crazy relief—Bill already had and was laughing heartily at the wild sight of dissolving devil cultists—but then Nardo saw that several others had escaped the sprinklers; they had transformed themselves into huge black bats, not kites, and now they flapped leathery wings and dived before the full moon, staying well away from the sprinklers.
    Hot wind blasted through the circle, a scorching twister driven by the circling bats. A black shadow washed over the moon, and Nardo’s mind couldn’t accept the reality of the dark silhouette until his patrol car came crashing down, shattering marble tombstones and collapsing a section of wrought-iron fence. The creatures that had dropped the car darted to the edge of the cemetery, and just as Nardo noticed that the water from the sprinklers wasn’t penetrating the circle, the sprinklers sputtered and dripped off to nothing.
    Bill swore. “Those bastards turned off the timers. They’re gonna come for us now, Nardo. Christ, do something!”
    Before the last sentence had issued from Bill’s lips, a huge bat dived toward him, its steely incisors dripping saliva. Nardo fired just as the creature dodged up toward the moon, and then another sound cut at the men inside the circle, the sound of a bullet ricocheting off metal. Three tiny flashes exploded at the circle’s perimeter, and the bullet fell spent on the singed grass before Nardo could begin to react.
    With the stump of his wrist, the one-armed man rapped on the invisible barrier. Three echoing knocks, like knuckles on a empty oil drum. Then the man laughed, and his laughter increased in pitch until it was