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Chamber. They'll go straight out of that and into the Room of the Living Dead…"<br />
"I think we should have druids," said Bonnie abruptly.<br />
"Have what?" said Elena, and then, as Bonnie started to yell "droo-ids," she waved a quelling hand.<br />
"All right, all right, I remember. But why?"<br />
"Because they're the ones who invented Halloween. Really. It started out as one of their holy days,<br />
when they would build fires and put out turnips with faces carved in them to keep evil spirits away.<br />
They believed it was the day when the line between the living and the dead was thinnest. And they<br />
were scary, Elena. They performed human sacrifices. We could sacrifice Coach Lyman."<br />
"Actually, that's not a bad idea," said Meredith. "The Bloody Corpse could be a sacrifice. You<br />
know, on a stone altar, with a knife and pools of blood all around. And then when you get really<br />
close, he suddenly sits up."<br />
"And gives you heart failure," said Elena, but she had to admit it was a good idea, definitely scary.<br />
It made her feel a little sick just thinking about it. All that blood… but it was only Karo syrup, really.<br />
The other girls had gone quiet, too. From the boys' locker next door, they could hear the sound of<br />
water running and lockers banging, and over that indistinct voices shouting.<br />
"Practice is over," murmured Bonnie. "It must be dark outside."<br />
"Yes, and Our Hero is getting all washed up," said Meredith, cocking an eyebrow at Elena. "Want to<br />
peek?"<br />
"I wish," said Elena, only half jokingly. Somehow, indefinably, the atmosphere in the room had<br />
darkened. Just at the moment she did wish she could see Stefan, could be with him.<br />
"Have you heard anything more about Vickie Bennett?" she asked suddenly.<br />
"Well," said Bonnie after a moment, "I did hear that her parents were getting her a psychiatrist."<br />
"A shrink? Why?"<br />
"Well… I guess they think that those things she told us were hallucinations or something. And I<br />
heard her nightmares are pretty bad."<br />
"Oh," said Elena. The sounds from the boys' locker room were fading, and they heard an outside<br />
door slam. Hallucinations, she thought, hallucinations and nightmares. For some reason, she suddenly<br />
remembered that night in the graveyard, that night when Bonnie had sent them all running from<br />
something none of them could see.<br />
"We'd better get back to business," said Meredith. Elena shook herself out of her reverie and<br />
nodded.<br />
"We… we could have a graveyard," Bonnie said tentatively, as if she'd been reading Elena's<br />
thoughts. "In the Haunted House, I mean."<br />
"No," said Elena sharply. "No, we'll just stick with what we have," she added in a calmer voice,<br />
and bent over her pad again.<br />
Once again there was no sound but the soft scratching of pens and the rustle of paper.<br />
"Good," said Elena at last. "Now we only need to measure for the different partitions. Somebody's<br />
going to have to get in behind the bleachers… What now?"<br />
The lights in the gym had flickered and gone down to half power.<br />
"Oh, no," said Meredith, exasperated. The lights flickered again, went out, and returned dimly once<br />
more.<br />
"I can't read a thing," said Elena, staring at what now seemed to be a featureless piece of white<br />
paper. She looked up at Bonnie and Meredith and saw two white blobs of faces.