Part One
1
My friends and I did a horrible thing.
We murdered Candy Shutt, a girl in our class, and then we ran away.
Well, we didn’t exactly murder her. It was kind of an accident. But we caused it. We sneaked into her house. We tried to steal a piece of her jewelry. She came after us. She grabbed for it.
We watched her tumble down the stairs. We heard the horrible crack her neck made when her head hit the wall. We saw her body sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, so still . . . so unnaturally still . . . her head tilted at such a wrong angle.
We knew Candy was dead. And we ran.
We didn’t tell anyone we were there that night. We kept our secret. Just the three of us—Nikki, Shark, and me.
That was in October. And now it’s a month later, and we can’t stop thinking about it. Dreaming about it. Talking about it.
Some nights I dream of Candy’s big silver pendant with the glowing blue jewels. She called it an amulet. I see Candy wearing it, using its evil, casting spells on me and my friends.
And then suddenly, I’m wearing the amulet. And in the dream, I feel all strange, as if I’m outside my body, watching myself, falling into the blue glow of the jewels, surrounded by blue, changing . . . changing into some kind of evil creature . . . changing into some kind of roaring beast. A roaring beast in a tight blue shirt. I’m practically bursting from the shirt. I see red lettering on the front. And I know it’s blood. Words scrawled on the shirt in blood. I struggle to read them as the blood pours down the front of the shirt.
And suddenly I can read it clearly. My name?
NATE GARVIN, YOU MURDERED ME!
And I wake up screaming.
Yes, it’s happened two or three times. And I have to make up an excuse to my mom, who comes running into my room, her face wide with alarm.
“Nate, why are you screaming in your sleep again?”
I blink my eyes. I can’t make the blue glow fade away. It lingers like a fog in front of me. “Uh . . . just a bad dream, I guess. I was dreaming about school.”
That’s what I tell her.
But of course I was dreaming about Candy. Poor, dead Candy, who fell down the stairs right in front of us. Crack . . . crack . . . crack. And that amulet, which we all believed to be so evil.
It’s hard to understand if you don’t live in Shadyside. If you grew up in Shadyside, you’d know all the stories about the Fear family. They were early settlers of the town. They built a huge mansion on the street named after them—Fear Street.
People claim they were evil. The Fears used the dark arts and evil sorcery to get their way—and to entertain themselves. Weird howls and screams of horror were heard coming from the Fear Mansion day and night. When we were kids, most of us were too frightened to put a foot anywhere near that street.
We even learned about the Fear family in school.
Simon and Angelica Fear were the most evil of them all. Angelica wore a jeweled amulet that she said gave her immortality. She used it to cast spells and put curses on her enemies.
I never believed any of the stories. I don’t believe in evil curses or casting spells on people. I always thought the stories about the Fear family were made up.
But when Candy Shutt showed up wearing a silver amulet with blue jewels, bad things started happening to me and my friends.
I know it sounds crazy. But we became convinced she had found Angelica Fear’s amulet. And that she was using it against us.
So we sneaked into her house and tried to steal it.
And that’s when the accident happened. That’s when Candy fell to her death.
We were left standing there holding her amulet. The evil amulet. Only, it was plastic and glass.
Yes, a total fake.
Not Angelica Fear’s amulet. A cheap copy. With no magical powers. A cheap copy that broke in half, just the way Candy broke.
Candy died for nothing.
Nikki, Shark, and I ran from the house and never told anyone.
But it’s a month later, and I wake up screaming.
I know it wasn’t my fault. But how can I make the nightmares stop?
2
Some nights it helps to go hang out and talk with my friends. We wait till our parents are asleep. Then we sneak out of our houses and head for Nights, the all-night bar on Fear Street.
We call ourselves the Night People.
I don’t know who started it. Maybe Jamie Richards and Lewis Baransky. But now, a whole bunch of us Shadyside High kids sneak out nearly every night.
After midnight in Shadyside, the houses are dark and silent. The streets are empty. Hardly anything moves. The whole world belongs to us.
No one knows about our secret life except Ryland O’Connor, the bartender at Nights. Our parents think we’re snug and sound asleep in our beds.
We usually start out at Nights. Then we wander around town. We don’t do much, just hang out. You know. Enjoy the darkness and be together in our secret world.