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