Thursday, 5/13/10 - "R" is for Rat (part 4)

The boys were having fun with Frankie's initiation. Getting him to go onto Old Lady Mackye's property - alone, at night - to pick a rose was scary enough. They all agreed that if Frankie did that much then he was Ratz material and they would let him join the club.

But just to see how tough he really was, they were asking him to lay that rose on Old Lady Mackey's headstone and at the stroke of midnight to recite the Incantation For The Release Of Souls while lying on top of her grave.

The incantation was something that Brat had pulled out of a dusty old book the he had found at the flea market. There was no writing on the black leather cover or on the spine. There were no words inside the front cover, either, only pictures. One picture was a circle with a star inside. Each point of the star touched the circle. The picture was simple but if he looked at it for too long, it made him dizzy.

On the facing page was a picture of a man with a ram's head and legs. The ram's horns spiraled up and the tail snaked around from behind and curled up at the end. The ram was grinning.

Since the book had no markings on the outside, Brat sometimes opened it from the wrong side and found that everything was printed backward: the pictures, the words, everything was just the opposite. The page in the center of the book had one side written in each direction.

Brat had purchased the book for a dime and, for some reason he couldn't explain, kept it hidden in his room.

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Frankie stood at the door to the Rat Hole and knew that if he knocked he would have to go through with the initiation. He raised his fist to knock but hesitated, looked at the full moon rising and thought about the nightmares he had been having lately, then brought the fist down twice on the doorframe.



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Standing across the street, the boys could barely see Old Lady Mackey's house. The moonlight seemed unable to penetrate the weeds that tangled across the yard. As if illuminated by its own internal light, a single white rose was clearly visible beside the snaggle toothed porch at the end of the overgrown pathway.

"Remember, no running. You have to walk in and walk back out with the rose."

"Uh huh," was all that Frankie could manage through his dry mouth.

"We will be here watching. Ready?"

He wasn't ready. He never would be ready but even as he was thinking that he couldn't do this his feet started moving him away from the group and across the street.

When he reached the other side he stood at the end of the pathway looking at the white rose with its strange glowing light. He told himself that the rose was no more than forty feet away, fifty at most. As he stood there the pathway appeared to lengthen and the rose to move further and further away.

"Hey, Frankie!" It was Brat on the other side of the street. "Don't take all night. You have a date with Miss Mackey at midnight!"

Brat laughed but it was a nervous laughter that sounded like distant thunder before a storm.

Frankie turned back toward the path, looked at the glow of the white rose and took the first step ...