The Chase Page 0,4

was that Julian had killed Summer. He made her face her worst nightmare, which was a messy room. Piles of garbage and giant cockroaches. Yes, it did sound funny, but it wasn't....

No, none of them had read Kafka.

Look, it wasn't funny because it had killed Summer. She'd been buried in a garbage dump from hell, under piles of filth and rotting stuff. They'd heard her screaming and screaming, and then finally the screaming had stopped.

The body? For God's sake, where else would the body be? It was there, buried in rubbish, in the paper house, in the Shadow World.

No! The sliding glass door did not have anything to do with it. That had happened after they escaped from the Shadow World. Jenny had tricked Julian and locked him behind a door with a rune of constraint on it. When they got back to the real world, Jenny had put the paper house back in the game box, and then they'd called the police. Yes, that was the call made at 6:34 this morning. While they were on the phone, they'd heard glass breaking and come out to see two guys taking the box over the back fence.

Why would anybody want to steal the box? Well, these guys had been following Jenny when she bought the Game. And seeing the Game-it did something to you. Once you saw that glossy white box, you wanted it, no matter what. The guys had probably followed Jenny home just to get the box.

NO, SUMMER DIDN'T GO THAT WAY, TOO! SUMMER WASN'T THERE! SUMMER WAS ALREADY DEAD BY THEN!

It was only after telling it that Jenny saw how crazy the story sounded. At first the police wouldn't believe that Summer was really missing, no matter how many times Tom demanded a lie detector test.

The police finally began to believe when they called Summer's parents and found that nobody had seen her since last night. By then Jenny and the others were sitting in the detective bureau around a large table with detectives' desks all around them. By then Jenny had picked out pictures of the two guys who'd stolen the game. P.C. Serrani and Scott Martell, better known as Slug, a name he'd chosen himself. They both had records for shoplifting and joyriding. P.C. was the one who'd been wearing the bandanna and black leather vest, Slug the one in the flannels with the bad complexion.

And it turned out that they were both missing, too.

The worst part was when Summer's parents came down to the station to ask Jenny where Summer really was. They didn't understand why Jenny, who had known Summer since fourth grade, wouldn't tell them the truth now. The kids finally were given a drug-screening test because Summer's father insisted their story sounded exactly like things he'd seen in the sixties. Like a very, very bad trip.

Mrs. Parker-Pearson kept saying, "Whatever Summer's done, it doesn't matter. Just tell us where she is."

It was horrible.

Aba was the one who finally stopped it.

Just at the point when the fuss got the biggest and noisiest, she appeared. She was wearing a brilliant orange garment that was more like a robe than a dress, and an orange headcloth like a turban. She was Dee's grandmother, but she looked like visiting royalty. She asked the police to leave her alone with the children.

Then Jenny, shaking all over, told the story again. From the beginning.

When it was over, she looked at each of them. At

Tom, the champion athlete, sitting with his normally neat dark hair wildly tousled. At Audrey, the ever-chic, with her mascara rubbed off from sobbing. At Zach, the unshakable photographer, whose gray eyes were glassy with shock. At Michael, with his rumpled head in his arms. At Dee, the only one of them still sitting up straight, proud and tense and furious, her hair glistening like mica with sweat.

At Jenny, who had looked back at her with a mute plea for understanding.

Then Aba looked down at her own interlaced fingers, sculptor's fingers, long and beautiful even if they were knotted with age.

"I've told you a lot of stories," she said to Jenny, "but there's a famous one I don't think you've heard. It's a Hausa story. My ancestors were those-who-speak-Hausa, you know, and my mother told me this when I was just a little girl."

Michael slowly lifted his head from the table.

"Once there was a hunter who went out into the bush, and he found a skull lying on the ground. He said, although he