Read It and Weep! Read Free

stiffer than a playing card or an index card. Almost as inflexible as if it were made of thin wood or something. It was bigger than an ordinary playing card too.
    She studied the picture on it. In the center of the card was a round orange shape, crisscrossed with measurement lines of some sort. It looked sort of like a compass, except that instead of north-south-east-west indications there were odd symbols. It was set against a blue background with floating gray clouds, and in each corner of the card was a winged horselike creature, each one a little different from the next. At the bottom of the card, in old-fashioned type, Charlotte read the words WHEEL OF FORTUNE . She turned the card over. On the back was a twirly, intricate design, almost like the pattern on an Oriental carpet. And something was written—handwritten—in old-fashioned, spidery script, diagonally across the back. She brought the card closer to the light, and squinted at it.
    Pass this along or you’ll be sorry.
    Pass what along, she wondered, turning the card over and then back again. The card? Was this some person’s idea of a dumb chain message? She despised those, the ones that urged her to forward the e-mail to ten people or she’d have bad luck, or whatever. Her cousin Sheila was always sending them to her, apologizing but saying she didn’t dare break them because she was superstitious. Well, Charlotte wasn’t. She usually deleted them promptly. If it was a chain message, it was a strange way to receive it. After all, putting a message in an old library book wasn’t the fastest way to communicate. She put the card inside the book again and placed them both carefully on her bedside table. Then she turned out the light and went back to sleep.
    And plunged right into a nightmare.

Chapter 3
    Running, running, but her legs felt so heavy. It was dark. Nighttime, with a wan gray light where the moon shone feebly behind rushing clouds. The gloom hung heavy. Fog swirled around her. What was chasing her? Something terrible. Something just out of sight, in the swirling darkness, something that was intent on harming her. Not knowing what her pursuer looked like seemed almost scarier. She knew only that she must get away.
    Now she was running barefoot through cold, muddy, slimy stuff. Her pajamas were soaked from the mist. She sloshed through the swampy marsh. Who knew what lurked in that sucking mud? Her legs could hardly move. Every leaden step was a huge effort. Her bare feet squelched unpleasantly.
    The thing—her pursuer—was gaining on her. She could hear it just behind her, running through the mud in big, sucking gulps. Now she could feel its hot, stifling breath on the back of her neck. She smelled something foul: putrid and rotten and sickly sweet all at the same time. And then it grabbed her, an icy hand on her shoulder, just like what had happened so many years ago on her cousins’ basement steps.
    She fell down, face-first, into the stinking, slimy mud. She couldn’t breathe. Something was holding her face down in the muck. She was going to drown, to suffocate. She tried to scream.
    And woke up with her head buried in the pillow.
    It was morning.
    She could smell coffee brewing. Her mother was up, of course. Charlotte glanced at the clock. Six forty-five. The alarm wasn’t due to go off for fifteen more minutes. She groaned and swung her feet out of bed. That was the last time she was going to read a scary story before bed. In fact it was the last time she would read a scary story, period.
    She dressed quickly, pausing to frown at herself in the mirror. Her brown hair spiraled down past her shoulders in a wildly unkempt way. She gathered it up and tied it back with a hair elastic. Her braces glinted at her in the mirror. Why had she inherited each of her parents’ flaws and none of their good traits? She’d gotten her father’s unruly hair, but not his startling blue eyes or his