The other boys stood, frozen.

‘Sure,’ Douglas said. ‘They’ll teach us at school, say, here’s your heart, the thing you get attacks with! Show you bugs you can’t see! Teach you to jump off buildings, stab people, fall and not move.’

‘No, sir,’ Sam gasped.

The great meadow of graveyard rippled under the last fingers of fading sunlight. Moths fluttered around them, and the sound of a graveyard creek ran over all their cold moonlit thoughts and gaspings as Douglas quietly finished:’ Sure, none of us wants to just lie here and never play kick–the–can again. You want all that?’

‘Heck no, Doug…’

‘Then we stop it! We find out how our folks make us grow, teach us to lie, cheat, steal. War? Great! Murder? Swell! We’ll never be so well off as we are right now! Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you! Well, do we fight back? Will you let me tell you how to run?’

‘Gosh,’ said Charlie. ‘Yeah!’

‘Then,’ said Doug, ‘talk to your body: Bones, not one more inch! Statues! Don’t forget, Quartermain owns this graveyard. He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you! But we’ll show him. And all those old men who own the town! Halloween’s almost here and before then we got to sour their grapes! You wanna look like them? You know how they got that way? Well, they were all young once, but somewhere along the way, oh gosh, when they were thirty or forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegm–hocked up on themselves and that phlegm–hock turned all gummy and sticky and then the next thing you know there was spittle all over them and they began to look like, you know, you’ve seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their shells, by God. Then they began to look like all those old guys. So, what you have is old men with young guys trapped inside them. Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the old men will let the old young men out. But they won’t be young anymore, they’ll be a bunch of death’s–head moths or, come to think of it, I think the old men are going to keep the young men inside them forever, so they’re trapped in all that glue, always hoping to get free. It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Pretty bad.’

‘Is that it, Doug?’ said Tom.

‘Yeah,’ said Pete. ‘You sure you know what you’re talking about?’