Page 80 of Middle of the Night

“Mom,” I say. “I need you to tell me. Who was your boss?”

Friday, July 15, 1994

2:52 p.m.

Billy starts to cry the moment the retreating forms of Ethan and the others vanish in the trees. Something about the way he can still hear the rapid crunch of their footfalls long after they’ve disappeared eclipses his fear, replacing it with disappointment and sadness.

They abandoned him.

All of them.

Even Ethan.

That thought—of being left behind by his best friend—brings the tears, which in turn brings shame. He should be fighting. He should be trying to squeeze himself through the bars. He should be doing anything but standing there sniffling, especially now that the man in the suit has him by the arm.

“Hey, there’s no need for all that,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Billy wipes his eyes and looks up at him. It’s the same man he saw yesterday, the one who sent him scrambling when he was spotted at the falls.

“But I’m still in trouble, right?” he says.

The man eyes Billy, stuck between the bars of the gate like the world’s worst jailbreaker. “Right now, I’d say you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands.”

With the man’s help, Billy finally gets free of the bars. All it takes is patience, sucking in his breath as much as he can, and a little maneuvering he didn’t get a chance to do before Ethan and the others fled.

“Well, now that that’s been taken care of, would you mind telling me why you’re here again?” the man says. “I told you not to come back. You should have had enough sense to stay away.”

What he doesn’t understand is that it was impossible for Billy to stay away. Not after what he’d been told by Johnny Chen the previous summer, when they both found themselves in the woods at the same time.

Billy had just started exploring the forest on his own, curious about what he might find there. What he found was Johnny sitting on a stump with a dazed look in his eyes.

“Hey there, Billy boy,” Johnny said, capping his words with an odd chuckle even though they hadn’t been that funny. “Whatcha doing?”

“Just looking,” Billy said.

“For what?”

“Ghosts.”

A year later, Billy’s still not sure why he told the truth. He guesses it’s because he thought Johnny would understand. He was also in the woods, after all, making Billy hope that maybe there was someone else on Hemlock Circle as curious as he was.

“Intriguing,” Johnny said. “There are definitely ghosts out here, but not where you think.”

He then told Billy about the Hawthorne Institute, a place Billy never knew existed. Now that he did, he wanted to learn everything about it.

“Is it haunted?” he asked Johnny.

“Not in the way most people think about hauntings,” Johnny said. “It’s more like a place where ghosts come to visit. The people there, they talk to them. So I’ve been told. I’ve never seen any myself.”

Billy’s eyes widened to the point where he imagined they were as big as saucers. “You’ve been there?”

“Plenty of times. Going there used to distract me from things I didn’t want to think about. Not anymore, but it helped for a little while.”

Billy, who also had things he sometimes didn’t want to think about, said, “How do I get there?”

He listened, rapt, as Johnny gave instructions on how to reach the Hawthorne Institute. Cross the road that cuts through the woods. Go a little bit farther until you reach the stone wall. Crawl through the hole in the wall and keep going until you hit the falls.

“From there, you’ll see the institute,” Johnny said.

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