Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls
Read Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls Online
Authors: Wendelin Van Draanen
Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief
Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man
Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy
Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf
Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary
Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy
Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes
Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception
Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen
Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway
Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things
Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash
Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher
Shredderman: Secret Identity
Shredderman: Attack of the Tagger
Shredderman: Meet the Gecko
Shredderman: Enemy Spy
The Gecko & Sticky: Villain’s Lair
The Gecko & Sticky: The Greatest Power
The Gecko & Sticky: Sinister Substitute
The Gecko & Sticky: The Power Potion
How I Survived Being a Girl
Flipped
Swear to Howdy
Runaway
Confessions of a Serial Kisser
The Running Dream
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2011 by Dan Yaccarino
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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eISBN: 978-0-375-89735-1
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v3.1
For the dead
Special thanks to Melissa and Bryon Tomlinson at
Marshall-Spoo Sunset Funeral Chapel for answering
my many questions with humor and grace,
and to Michael Marsalek and his crew of merry men
for helping me feel peace among the tombstones.
I love Halloween.
And I’m sorry, but trick-or-treating is
not
just for little kids. It’s for anyone who likes to dress wacky and tear through neighborhoods in search of free candy.
Which definitely includes me and my friends.
And since last year was sort of a disaster because my friends and I wound up going into the scariest house in town to put out a
fire
and discovered a guy inside all bound and gagged and conked over the
head
, and since we had to deal with police and perpetrators and all of
that
, I swore that this year we were just going to have a fun, carefree Halloween, where the worst thing that would happen was we’d eat too much candy.
But then Billy wanted to cut through the graveyard.
And I made the mistake of going along.
Hudson Graham may be seventy-three, but he’s the coolest old guy you’d ever want to meet. I mean, how many “seniors” will offer up their house to a bunch of teenagers to use as their Halloween headquarters? Most old people zip up their homes, shut off their lights, and hide in a back room until Halloween is over. They don’t even hand out candy, let alone lend you stuff to help transform you into scar-faced zombies.
Dressing up as a zombie was new for me. I usually go as the Marsh Monster, with ratty green hair and marshy-looking clothes, but this year Casey and Billy were going trick-or-treating with Marissa and Holly and me, and they wanted to use super creepy makeup and blood capsules and fake scars and stuff, so just painting myself green seemed pretty lame in comparison. And after I jumped on the scar-faced zombie wagon, Marissa and Holly got on board, too.