CHAPTER XXI

DO DREAMS COME TRUE?

Nickie was clinging to him and making funny little noises deep in his throat. Skippy let him cling, for he was shaking from head to foot himself and he blinked his eyes in the darkness.

"You seen _him_--you seen--" Skippy stammered, frightened at the sound of his own voice.

"I don't know what I seen," Nickie said, his words scarcely audible because of his chattering teeth. "I--that scream--you heard that, hah?"

"Sure, and I seen him look terrible. Lissen!" Mechanically, they put out their hands to feel for the window and pressed close to it oblivious of the fresh downpour of rain which swept in upon them, drenching them to the skin. The gale screamed its hardest, the lantern creaked in Nickie's shaking hand like some spectral voice out of the night, but that was the only sound to reach their listening ears.

"_Timmy!_" Skippy called suddenly. "Timmy--_answer_!"

"You hurt, Timmy?" Nickie's query was pathetic.

A tense silence seemed to beat upon their ears and for a while they had difficulty in even listening to the noises of the storm. Their eagerness to hear Timmy's thin voice had plunged them into a temporary oblivion from which they recovered with a start.

"You believe in spooks?" Nickie asked in a whisper.

"Nope." Skippy gulped. "Why?"

"Call once again, hah?"

Skippy called, loud and long.

The wind screamed in answer, mockingly.

"Let's beat it downstairs an' have some light, hah?" After a pause: "You ain't got matches, I s'pose?"

"Would I be standin' here in the dark?"

Nickie's throat was full of noises. "We better be careful goin' down the ladder--say, we didn't leave the lantern in the hall lighted."

"An' the one in the kitchen too," Skippy reminded him grimly. "There ain't no light till we get to the kitchen n' find a match."

Nickie stopped short. "Where's that rope an' that iron handle?" he asked fearfully.

"I hid 'em under that rubbish by the window just now. So go on. Le's get down."

Nickie sighed. "I oughta knowed you wouldn't forget nothin' even at a time like this."

They groped their way down the ladder and waited for a moment in the upper hall listening to the various sounds throughout the house and the noise of the storm. They could not see each other and they instinctively pressed their bodies close together. Nickie had his hand through Skippy's arm and clung to it tightly. Then by a mutual impulse they moved toward the stairway with measured steps, their ears strained and listening for all that their eyes could not see.

It was a long and awesome journey to the bottom of the stairway and once there they had a whispered consultation as to whether to go around through the rooms to the kitchen or march straight past the cellar door and so on into the room. Skippy decided on keeping to the hall even though it meant passing the door to the dim regions below.

They had not taken two steps in that direction, when Nickie gave vent to a blood-curdling scream.

"_What?_" Skippy cried frantically.

"_My foot!_" Nickie was gasping in the dark. "Sump'n run over my foot!"

"_A rat!_" Skippy said, disgustedly. "I said to shut that cellar door, Nickie!"

"Oh my head!" Nickie groaned. "I was scared skinny. Kid, let's run."

Skippy was human enough to accede and they made the kitchen in one breath-taking bound.

Nickie let go his hold on the other's arm. "Whew!" he said nervously. "Gimme a match."

"Yeah, that's what I say," Skippy said, moving noisily about the room. "They ain't on this stove--I've felt all over. Say, you lit that lantern we took up to the attic."

"Sure, I did. Wha'd I do with them matches?" Nickie asked himself desperately.

It was another day before he found out, and in the interim they had decided that there was no other room in the house which offered the comparative peace of their own room. At least they could shut themselves in there. And that they did, not stopping until they had pushed their heavy bed tight against the stout oaken door.

"What we afraid of, huh?" Skippy asked in a small voice. They had undressed and were in bed.

"I dunno, kid!" Nickie admitted honestly. "I'm kinda broke up in a hundred pieces like, since that scream."

"_Timmy's?_"

"Say, was it sure enough him?"

"Why, sure--gee whiz, who else...."

"That's why I ast if you believe'n spooks!"

"Nickie! Gee whiz, we heard Timmy talkin'--didn't he tell us twas all a trick with Devlin--didn't he say Devlin meant to kill him and...."

"Yeah, an' ain't that like his dream the other night? Ain't it like he comes back in his dream an' stands under that big tree? Ain't it all in his dream how he's tellin' us up at the winder an' warnin' us, when zip, he sees this arm come out an' pretty soon he feels like he's chokin'? How do we know he ain't kicked off somehow last night an' tonight he comes back from the dead, hah?"

Frightened as he was, Skippy could not help smiling into the darkness. "Say, I thought you was a real tough guy when I first spotted you. An' here you're talkin' bout spooks an' comin' back from the dead like you're a regular sissy."

Nickie did not protest. Something had happened to him and he was incapable of explaining just what it was. The tough guy, as Skippy termed it, no longer existed, for Nickie had looked upon an evil which had shaken him to his very soul. He did not know it then, but the small sins which were directly responsible for his present predicament had gone, never to return.

"I dunno, kid," he said, slowly, "but it's like I'm payin' for doin' what I done an' makin' my aunt cry an' worry after she brought me up. I knowed it worried her but I kep' on stubborn-like so now I got it good! Long's I live I won't never forget Timmy's scream, whether it was him'r his spook!"

"Maybe it was good then that this happened," Skippy said practically. "Whether it was Timmy's ghost or not." But after a pause, he added, fearfully: "Gee whiz, Timmy _can't_ be dead!"

"I think different, kid. I think he is!"

"But we heard him talk, Nickie. You an' me, we heard it like we hear each other talkin' now, didn't we?"

"Sure. But ain't it funny, kid, how it's all like it was in that dream he told us about?"

"I'll say it's funny. It's like his dream so much that it gives me the creeps. Even to the part where he told us how he stood by the evergreen tree an' then sudden like when he's warnin' us to beat it, them arms reached out n' grabbed him an' he felt like he was chokin' to death. Gee whiz! If the two of us didn't hear him speak, I'd say there was sump'n spooky about it. We even heard the car!"

"Sure, we did. An' we see somethin' dark like a guy's arms reach out from behind that tree, didn't we?"

"I couldn't swear I did, Nickie. It chokes me when I think of it. Lissen, you don't think that was really Devlin--that he could really ki--kill Timmy?"

"Kid, since I been here, I don't know what's real an' what ain't--see? All I know is I'll go nutty if there's any more goin's on like we see tonight."

Skippy was of the same mind, but he didn't say so. He would have given much to know just how much was imagination and how much was stark reality. Timmy's empty cot, a vague shadow against the side wall, did much to keep these dreadful thoughts in his mind. Through wearying hours the scream of his dreams and his scream in the clearing seemed to echo mockingly through the storm. Skippy felt exhausted, yet all through the long night the question revolved in his mind.

Was it a dream come true?