Excerpt
Night of the Howling Hound #3
THWACK!
Joe gave the tent peg a thump with the mallet, then tugged the rope to make sure it was secure.
“Awesome!” said Matt, pegging in the other side. “Looks like we’re the first to finish!”
They were at the Wolf’s Leap Activity Center on the edge of Brockton Forest for a school camping trip.
“Not even a tornado would shift this thing!” said Ben, poking his head out of the tent.
But just then a tornado did shift it: a tornado in the shape of Bradley Piker, or Spiker, as he was known. He raced over and hurled himself at the side of the tent, making it bulge inward.
“Hey!” yelled Joe. “Watch it!”
“Says who? This is my tent, too,” said Spiker. “I’m with you guys tonight!”
“What?” Joe groaned. He really didn’t want to share a tent with Spiker—he was the biggest troublemaker in the class.
“Yep! Mr. Hill says I’m with you. I hope you’re not going to wet your pants and call for your mommy when it gets dark tonight, Joe Edmunds!”
Joe shot him a dirty look.
“Especially if the wolf starts howling,” Spiker said with a smirk. “The ghost wolf of Brockton Forest . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Joe. “I know . . . Hundreds of years ago a wolf escaped from some hunters by leaping off some rocks.” As he spoke he glanced over Spiker’s shoulder and noticed a jagged rock face, just above the tree line.
“But don’t forget the best part. After it escaped,” Spiker said in a spooky voice, “the wolf came back and stalked the hunters, catching them one by one, ripping out their throats and crunching their bones . . .”
Matt grinned. “You made that bit up.”
“And people say,” added Spiker, his voice dropping to a ghoulish whisper, “that you can still hear the ghost of the wolf, howling in the woods at night . . .”
As he spoke, the wind picked up and a cloud drifted over the afternoon sun, darkening the sky. Joe shivered. After all the weird stuff he’d seen, thanks to Uncle Charlie’s Egyptian amulet, he could easily imagine a ghost wolf lurking in the forest, watching and waiting . . .
“Hey, you guys!” came a shout. “If you’ve finished setting up your tent, I need some volunteers to help collect firewood!”
It was Lizzy—one of the camp counselors. She was small and wiry, with short red hair. According to their teacher, Miss Bruce, she was a champion rock climber. “Come on! It’ll be dark before we get the fire going!”
By the time they had built the fire, the counselors had prepared a campfire dinner.
“I’m starving,” said Joe, sitting down next to Matt with a plate piled high with franks and beans. There were twenty children from Joe’s class there, along with Miss Bruce and the principal, Mr. Hill. They sat together on logs arranged in a circle around the fire, digging into their dinner.
As Joe shoveled in his last spoonful of beans, he heard a strange noise in the distance . . .
Awwwhooooooooooo...
“What was that?”
Matt took a bite of hot dog and shrugged. “
I didn’t hear anything.”
Awwwhoooooooooo...
