Allie looked at all the other barrels. Were those barrels full of others who failed the test, unable to die, yet unable to escape, left to pickle in their own thoughts for all time?

“The other boy next,” the Haunter said.

Lief shook his head. “No. No, I don’t want to! I just want to go.”

“Bring me the stone and you can go.”

He looked at the faces of the kids around him, but they didn’t seem to have faces beneath the dark wrappings.

“I don’t like this game,” Lief cried. “I don’t want to play.”

“Let him go!” Allie demanded. “What kind of monster are you?”

The Haunter only gave her a single-toothed smile, then turned to Lief again. “The stone.”

With no choice, Lief went to the stone, and tried to lift it. He grunted in frustration with each grasp, and Allie suddenly found herself thinking of that stupid arcade game, where a claw tried to scoop up a stuffed animal. The claw almost always came up empty-handed. And so did Lief.

“Nooooo!”

The Haunter’s goons were on him, and although Lief and Allie tried to fight them, there were just too many of them. Lief was plunged into another barrel, kicking and screaming and sloshing brine across the floor, until they nailed on the lid. Allie could hear his sobs from within the awful brine.

Then the dark figures pulled open the lid of a third barrel, and waited.

“Bring me the stone,” the Haunter said to Allie.

Allie always prided herself on being cool in a crisis, and coming through when it really mattered. She had to figure the angle here. She had to think them all out of this.

“I’ll bring you the stone, if you release my friends.”

The Haunter did not move. Did not bat an eyelash. Allie knew she was in no bargaining position, yet still the Haunter said “Agreed. Your friends for the stone.”

So this was it, then. She had brought them here, and only she could get them out.

A stone on the ground. It seemed such a simple thing, but she reached for it with the same terror with which she would have reached for a burning coal.

Grabbing the stone was like trying to grab a shadow. Her fingers passed through it again and again, and she found herself angry at the stone: a stubborn piece of the living world, refusing to admit that she existed. “I Am!” She wanted to shout at it. “I exist, and I WILL move you!”

Still her fingers passed through it again, and again.

“Enough!” said the Haunter, and his goons advanced on her.

Move you stupid stone, move!

Allie forced every ounce of her will to the tips of her fingers and closed them again over the smooth rock, and again, her fingertips failed her.

But this time the stone wobbled.

Suddenly the goons stopped moving, and the Haunter stood up. The entire world seemed perched on the tips of Allie’s fingers.