A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven Read Free

the craziest thing we had ever seen. Here was this silhouette of a giant man, backlit so you could not see his face, but apparently casting the very light it was silhouetted against. It was like a blue-white nightmare. I remember its hands clenching and unclenching. I remember it heaving like it was gasping for air. I remember the hands of my friends pulling on my clothing trying to get me to join their escape. I remember the sight of what looked like blood on the walls. The last thing I saw before I screamed was that thing, seemingly without moving a muscle, coming toward us.
    We almost killed each other running out of Cold House. The front door, now a hindrance, was finally torn from its last hinge by running children. I was the last one out of the house. As I took the porch steps, my left leg plunged through old wood, tearing into my shin. I looked behind me, and that thing was framed in the doorway—menacing, unnatural. I could feel its light on my face, understand? I was utterly shell-shocked and I could not move. For some reason I knew it wanted me. This had been my plan, my idea, and this thing knew it. And it was going to punish me. I closed my eyes.
    Then Henry was pulling me from the steps. He dragged me behind him, and I limped to keep up. We did not stop until we saw the lights of the streetlamps, shedding illumination and a bit of safety on our tiny bodies as we collapsed with the others next to the entrance to the woods. Nobody spoke. Someone was crying.
    After a long time we all sort of stood as one and shambled quietly back toward the apartments. We were almost a walking funeral procession. As we came upon my building, Tina, Joe, and Brock silently peeled off to slip back into their own homes. Matt, Henry, and I crawled back into my room and, without another word, did our best to fall asleep. The next day we crawled out into the afternoon sunlight and sat against the wall of the complex, suddenly very vocal about what we had seen. Henry asked me if it had said anything to me, and I shook my head. Matt was convinced the thing had a hook for a hand, and nothing I said could change his mind. After a while Joe stopped over, and he was overly excited. He wanted to go back. I said I was in—so did Matt. Henry did not say anything. When we went to Tina’s house, she said she was not feeling well and did not want to go. Brock’s mother said he refused to even come to the door and asked us if we had been fighting. He never hung out with us again and avoided us around the complex.
    As Matt, Joe, and I headed toward 14th, Henry suddenly had to go home. He said he would call me the next day after baseball practice. We were never very close after that day; I became more interested in music and comics, and he got more involved with sports. Tina still came around, but she flat-out refused to talk about Cold House. She even went as far as to say it never happened, that our imaginations had gotten the best of us.
    The three of us who were left refused to pretend that it did not happen, and that afternoon we made our way back to the trails, leaping over the tripwires that now seemed pedestrian compared to what we had seen the night before. We came up on the house quickly and only really paused to take our time on the steps. As Matt and Joe bounded inside, I stopped for a second to look at the hole where my leg had broken through. I had cleaned up the gash without alerting my mother, who would have asked too many questions. I stood beside the hole, and immediately my mind went back to the moment when I was face to face with that supernatural spectacle, and I studied it a long time. So by the time I entered the house, the other two were already upstairs. I did not even notice that the front door was missing until I heard Matt and Joe shouting for me to “get up here NOW!” Moving to the bottom of the stairwell, I saw that there was nothing on the walls. No blood, but nothing that would have reminded me of blood in that