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?”