The Dead End Read online

  Finally, she came to the door of the front bedroom. Casey pushed it open and gasped.

  There was someone in the room, a dark figure haloed in light. The thought that flashed through Casey’s mind was that she’d seen a dark angel.

  As Casey scrambled backward, the figure did, too. Suddenly, she realized she was looking at her own reflection in a mirror above the dressing table. Sunlight streaming in from the window behind her had given the impression of a halo.

  She slowly stepped toward the mirror. Something about it had caught her eye. She looked closer. The glass surface was covered in dust. Scratched across it, as if someone had traced a finger through it, were two words:

  GET OUT

  THE DEAD END

  by Mimi McCoy

  For Amanda, with thanks

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bite Into The Next Poison Apple, If You Dare…

  Poison Apple Books

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s the scariest story ever,” Casey Slater said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  She leaned back on the pillows on her best friend Jillian Morton’s bed, holding a fuzzy plush pig in her hands. As she spoke, Casey squeezed the pig tightly.

  “Tell me,” said Jillian, frowning down at her nails. She was sitting cross-legged on her white bedroom carpet, painting her fingernails traffic-cone orange. The two friends were hanging out in the apartment where Jillian lived with her parents and brother, catching up on gossip from school that afternoon.

  Casey shook her head. “I don’t even want to say it out loud.”

  This time Jillian looked up. “Casey,” she said with exasperation.

  “What?” Casey’s large brown eyes widened innocently.

  “You always do that. You always say, ‘It’s the scariest thing ever,’ and then you won’t say what it is.”

  “Well, this is really scary,” Casey told her. “Just tell me!”

  “Okay. But you asked for it.” Casey took a deep breath. “Today I was checking my e-mail during library time. Jaycee Woodard sent me a story about this girl in New Jersey who got killed.”

  “Killed how?” asked Jillian, as Casey knew she would.

  “Some girls at her school were teasing her,” Casey explained, “and they pushed her down a manhole into the sewer —”

  “They pushed her into a sewer?” Jillian interrupted. “That’s not teasing. That’s, like, seriously warped.”

  Casey raised her eyebrows as if to say, Do you want to hear the story or what?

  “Sorry,” said Jillian. “Go on.”

  “Well, she never came up,” Casey said in a hushed voice. “So the police went down into the sewer and they found her body. She broke her neck when she fell. When the police talked to the girls that pushed her, they all lied and said that she’d fallen by accident, and everybody believed them.”

  “Wow, that’s really horrible,” Jillian said.

  “I know. But that’s not all,” Casey told her. “There was another part.” This was where the story started to get scary. She gave the plush pig another comforting squeeze.

  “The e-mail said to forward it after you read it, so that everybody knows what really happened to the girl,” Casey explained. “But a boy who was a friend of Jaycee’s cousin didn’t forward it. That night when he was taking a shower, he heard this creepy laughter. Well, as soon as he got out of the shower, he ran over to his computer and forwarded the e-mail, but by then it was too late. The next morning the police found him dead in the sewer.” Casey shuddered. “And when they did the ontopsy —”

  “Autopsy,” said Jillian.

  Casey blinked. “What?”

  “When they cut the dead person open,” said Jillian, who liked gory TV shows. “It’s called an autopsy.”

  “Okay, autopsy. Whatever.” Casey felt slightly annoyed at being interrupted during the scariest part. “They found out his neck had been broken in the exact same place as the girl who got pushed. And at the bottom of the e-mail it said you have to forward it to five people with the message ‘She was pushed!’ or you’ll wake up in the sewer in the dark, and the ghost of the girl will come get you.” Casey gave the pig an extra-hard squeeze.

  But Jillian didn’t look frightened at all. “Please tell me you did not forward that e-mail,” she said, giving her friend a stern look.

  “Of course I did!” Casey exclaimed.

  Jillian rolled her eyes. “Casey, that story was obviously bogus. People make up that junk just to get you to forward it. It probably had a virus attached.”

  Casey tried to remember if there had been an attachment. “I don’t think so,” she said without much confidence.

  With a jingle of bracelets, Casey pushed her long black bangs out of her eyes and sighed, wondering what she should have done. Which was worse, a computer virus or a killer ghost? It seemed like you were taking your chances big-time either way.

  It just reinforced Casey’s belief that the world was full of hidden perils. Despite what people said, she thought that what you didn’t know probably would kill you in the end. It simply did not pay to take chances.

  Jillian was the opposite of Casey. She took chances all the time. She Rollerbladed and ate sushi and shopped at secondhand stores. Even Jillian’s hair was daring, cut in a sharply angled bob with a long, bleached streak through her bangs. Jillian had gotten the streak after school one day; she’d just walked right into a salon and sat down in the chair like it was something she did all the time. Even though her parents hated the way it looked, there was nothing they could do, Jillian said, because, after all, it was Jillian’s hair.

  Jillian had encouraged Casey to get a streak, too. But Casey had worried that a bleached stripe in her black hair might make her look like a skunk. Besides, she’d heard that you could get cancer from the peroxide.

  “I don’t know why you’d pay attention to anything Jaycee Woodard says, anyway,” Jillian remarked as she twisted the cap onto the nail polish bottle. “She’s so full of it. Remember when she told everyone at school that you can die from swallowing your gum? Which, by the way, you can’t. I looked it up.”

  “But this was her cousin’s friend,” argued Casey, who never swallowed her gum. “So she would know if it was true, right? It’s so awful to think that could have happened to someone we almost sort of know.”

  Casey could clearly picture the boy waking up in the dark sewer, frightened and confused. And somewhere nearby in the shadows, a vengeful ghost lurked, ready to —

  “Stop thinking about it,” Jillian commanded, pointing an orange fingertip at Casey’s nose. “I know you are going to obsess about this. So just stop right now.”

  Jillian was right. Stories like this always got stuck in Casey’s brain. She couldn’t forget them even if she wanted to. They were a little like having canker sores. She poked and poked at them, even though she knew it would just make it worse.

  “I can’t help it,” she told Jillian. “It’s just so … horrible.”

  “What’s horrible,” said Jillian, “is that you’re killing my pig!”

  Casey looked down. She was squeezing the pig so ti
ghtly that she looked like she was trying to strangle it.

  Casey laughed and threw the pig lightly at Jillian’s head. Jillian grinned and ducked. That was the great thing about Jillian. She could always make Casey laugh and forget about whatever was bothering her.

  “Let’s talk about what we’re going to wear to Makayla’s party,” Jillian said, changing the subject. Makayla Meyers, one of their classmates at James J. Walker Junior High, was having a party the first weekend of summer. Everyone at school had been talking about it.

  “You have to see this dress I want to get,” Jillian said. She got up and went over to her computer. Very carefully, so as not to disturb her still-drying nails, she typed in an address.

  Casey got off the bed and went to peer over her shoulder. “Wow,” she said, looking at the dress Jillian had pulled up on-screen. It was a green plaid with a smocked top and a tied halter neck; Casey thought it looked like a cross between a swimsuit and a kilt. “Does it, um, come in any other colors?”

  “Nope, that’s the only one,” said Jillian, not taking the hint. “Isn’t it cute?”

  “Sure,” Casey lied. It wasn’t worth the trouble to disagree about a dress.

  “So what are you wearing?” Jillian asked, swinging around to face Casey.

  “I was thinking of just wearing jeans and my coral vest,” Casey said.

  Jillian shook her head. “Too safe.”

  “What’s wrong with safe?” Casey argued. “Just because I’ve worn it before doesn’t mean it’s boring.”

  Jillian rolled her eyes. “Not ‘safe’ as in ‘boring.’ I meant ‘safe’ as in ‘that vest makes you look like a crossing guard.’ This is the time for something new and exciting. May I remind you that this party is the first weekend of the first summer …”

  “Of the rest of our lives,” Casey chimed in with a grin. She and Jillian already had their whole summer planned out. “We’re going to hang out every single day.”

  “And we’ll meet two cute boys,” Jillian reminded her.

  Casey nodded. “Who are best friends, too.”

  “And they’ll be our boyfriends. The four of us will do everything together.”

  “Like, go to the beach …”

  “And to Six Flags …”

  “But not on the roller coaster,” Casey put in quickly. “I don’t do roller coasters.”

  “Okay,” Jillian said with a shrug. “Me and my guy will go on the roller coaster, and you and your guy can hang out on the merry-go-round or whatever. Either way, it’s still going to be the awesomest summer ever.”

  Casey’s cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the number. “It’s my mom. She’s probably calling to tell me to come home for dinner.”

  “Ask her if you can eat here,” Jillian said.

  Casey flipped open her phone. “Hi. Can I stay at Jillian’s for dinner?” she said.

  “Is that how you’re answering the phone these days?” her mother replied.

  Casey sighed. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “So can I?”

  “Not tonight, Casey,” Mrs. Slater said. “Dad and I have some news. We’ll tell you at dinner. Fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “What did she say?” Jillian asked as Casey hung up.

  “She said I have to come home. My parents have some kind of big news they want to tell me.”

  “You better watch out,” Jillian warned her. “That’s what my parents said when they told me we were getting the Pest.” The Pest was Jillian’s five-year-old brother. She called him that because he was always getting into her stuff and driving her crazy.

  Casey picked her backpack up from Jillian’s floor and swung it onto her shoulder.

  “Call me later,” Jillian said.

  “I will.” The two friends hugged like they always did, then Casey headed for the door.

  Outside Jillian’s apartment, she took the stairs five flights down to the first floor. Casey tried never to take the elevator, ever since she’d heard a news story about a cable that snapped and sent four people plunging to their doom. There were lots of things that Casey was afraid of, but falling to her death definitely made the top of the list.

  Casey and Jillian lived in identical redbrick buildings just two blocks away from each other on the east side of Manhattan. Casey walked slowly, enjoying the early evening. The trees overhanging the sidewalk were thick with leaves, and the warm air felt rich with the promise of the summer ahead. Even the rush-hour crowd, with their briefcases and business suits, seemed to be dawdling more than usual.

  As she walked, Casey tried to guess what her parents’ news could be. She didn’t think it was very likely that they were having a baby; there wasn’t room for another person in their small two-bedroom apartment.

  Maybe Mom lost her job, Casey thought with a lurch of fear. Or maybe Dad got fired from the school where he works. And then we’ll have to go on welfare, and we probably won’t be able to afford our apartment anymore. We’ll move to a different part of the city, and I’ll have to go to a new school, where the kids are mean and push people into sewers….

  “Stop it,” she told herself, interrupting that train of thought. “It’s probably nothing like that at all.”

  Casey sighed. She wished her mother could have just told her the news on the phone. She hated surprises, even good ones.

  As she turned onto her block, Casey noticed part of the street was marked off with orange cones. Two workers in blue hard hats were working in an open manhole.

  Casey shivered, thinking again of the ghost in the sewer. Tightening her grip on her backpack, she ran the rest of the way home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!” Casey yelled as she came in the door.

  The smell of frying meat greeted her. In the tiny entranceway, Casey threw down her backpack and slipped off her sneakers, then headed into the kitchen.

  Both her parents were crowded into the narrow space. “Hi, sweetie,” said her mother, who was tearing up lettuce for a salad. “Go ahead and wash up. Dinner is almost ready.”

  Casey squeezed between them to get to the kitchen sink. As she rubbed soap over her hands, she studied her parents, looking for some clue to their big news. Her mother was still dressed in her office clothes, a tan skirt, white blouse, and pumps, her long black hair twisted up in a clip.

  She looks tired, Casey thought. But after scrutinizing her mother’s face, Casey decided she looked no more tired than usual.

  Casey turned her attention to her dad, who was flipping chops in a pan on the stove. She thought she detected some new flecks of gray in his ginger-colored hair, but she couldn’t say for sure.

  When they were all seated around the table, Casey’s dad served up pork chops and salad, while Casey’s mom poured iced tea. Finally, Casey couldn’t take it any longer.

  “So what’s the big news?” she asked.

  Her parents glanced at each other with secretive smiles. Casey’s mother gave a little nod as if to say, You tell her.

  “We bought a house!” Casey’s father said, beaming.

  “A house?” Casey’s brow wrinkled in confusion. Nobody in Manhattan lived in houses, except for extremely rich people, which the Slaters definitely weren’t. “You mean a new apartment?” she asked.

  Her dad laughed. “No, Casey. A summerhouse. In New Hampshire. A place where we can really get away from it all.”

  A house, so that was all. Casey sighed in relief. “So that’s where we’re going for vacation?” she asked, cutting into her pork chop.

  “Even better,” her mother replied. “We’re going to spend the whole summer there.”

  “The whole summer?” Casey abruptly put down her knife.

  Her mother nodded. “We’ll leave the day after school gets out and come back in August.”

  As the words sank in, Casey felt a cold pit in her stomach. All her beautiful summer plans seemed to dissolve before her eyes.

  “This cannot be happening,”
she murmured. Casey closed her eyes and clenched her hands into tight fists, digging her fingernails into her palms. Whenever she had a nightmare, this was how she woke herself up. The sharp pinch of her nails always jarred her back into reality. Now she squeezed until there were half-moon circles in her skin, but when she opened her eyes, she hadn’t moved. She was still sitting at the dinner table. Her parents were both looking at her.

  “Casey, are you listening?” her father asked.

  Casey let her hands fall to her sides. It was no use. This wasn’t a bad dream.

  “It’s a beautiful old house,” her dad went on, “just a few miles from a lake where we can go fishing and picnicking…. Maybe I’ll even get a boat!” He smiled to himself at the thought.

  Fishing? Casey stared at him. The closest her dad had ever come to fishing was opening a can of sardines. She waited for him to say he was kidding, but he was lost in his daydream and didn’t seem to notice.

  Casey turned to her mother. “Where is this house exactly?”

  “The town of Stillness. Stillness, New Hampshire — doesn’t that sound peaceful? Just wait till you see the place, Casey,” her mother replied. “It’s a great big old farmhouse with a porch swing. We’ll sit out there and drink lemonade and listen to the birds.” Her eyes glazed over dreamily.

  Casey looked back and forth between her starry-eyed parents. “But what about your jobs? You can’t just leave them!”

  “Dad decided not to teach summer school this year,” said her mother. “And I’m taking a leave of absence. I have a lot of vacation saved up, and I’ve worked it out so I can take a few weeks of unpaid leave.”

  “The house needs some work,” her father added. “Fixing it up is going to be our full-time job this summer.”

  Casey stared at her dinner without really seeing it. “I can’t believe you bought a house — a whole entire house — without telling me.”

  “We wanted to surprise you,” her father said. “We’ve always wanted a house in the country. We just never thought we’d be able to afford it. We couldn’t believe the asking price on this one, and then the sellers accepted our offer so quickly — it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”