Artifacts by Pete Catalano

Korie said. She shot a look at the other Grumpkin. “Leave that snake here.”
    The Grumpkin quickly hid it behind his back and looked away, but the head and tail both flopped onto the ground.
    “Put it down,” Korie said, a little more authority in her voice.
    The Grumpkin threw the snake to the side of the path and walked over next to his brother.
    Once everyone had settled down, we started through the forest again. The Grumpkins led this time. One of them had taken Touch from Tank, and together, they cleared everything from the path so we could walk easily.
    “Did you see him whip that snake?” I said to Korie.
    Korie laughed. “Oh my gosh. I didn’t know what to do when the other one wanted a snake to carry along, too. I felt so bad.”
    Crunch ran past us and up to the Grumpkins. As they looked straight ahead down the path, he chattered away.
    “We should’ve given him Crunch to play with,” I said. “That would have taken his mind off of the snake.”

Chapter Fourteen
     
     
    After being in the forest for what seemed like forever, we finally followed the Grumpkins into another clearing. I shaded my eyes against the bright sun, spying a run-down, four-story, ramshackle Victorian house in the distance. Judging the gap between where we stood and the house, it couldn’t have been more than a football field away.
    “What is that?” I asked Skylights, who had stepped up next to me.
    “A ghost,” Skylights said. I could hear the frustration in his voice.
    “You mean it’s not really there?” I asked.
    “Oh, it’s there,” he assured me. “It’s the place Hook and Butkus and the others are hiding all the things the teams have brought them over the past couple of days.”
    “How do you know that?” Korie asked.
    “We followed Smee and Durkin here,” Skylights said. “They were arguing and fussing back and forth so much they never noticed us. We saw them unload a truckload filled with boxes into the house and then leave as quickly as they arrived.”
    “So, whatever this artifact is, it should be in that house?” Tank asked.
    “Yes,” Skylights said. “There’s just no way on earth to get inside to look.”
    “Why’s that?”
    Skylights never took his eyes off the house. “Give it time, Jax, See how it taunts us.”
    The Grumpkins moved to either side of Skylights, and Crunch was still right beside them. The moment Crunch saw the house he took off running.
    As he lumbered across the grass, I could feel the ground rumble, tremors rippling and racing through the earth. When Crunch had run about twenty yards, the ground between the house and us exploded .
    Large, gnarled, twisted branches of a thick, heavy vine covered with razor-sharp thorns ripped through the earth in all directions, spiraling into the sky. The thickets were so massive and invasive they choked the life out of everything around them.
    “Blackthorn,” Grifter said, stepping from the woods behind Korie. “It’s a gift Hook brought to help keep us, and anyone else, out.”
    “It’s just as I imagined from the stories my mom read to me when I was little,” Korie said. “But even then, it didn’t seem nearly so … evil.”
    The branches knitted into an impenetrable wall. Dark and foreboding, it rose thirty feet into the air and raced over one hundred feet across the ground. There was no way in save a small, five-foot wide opening just to the right of center.
    “The house is a ghost,” Skylights said. “The Blackthorn disappears long enough to allow a peek, then comes roaring back.”
    Walking straight toward the Blackthorn, I was mesmerized. Stopping at the base, I tilted my head back to see how high it was and immediately got that feeling I was falling off the top.
    “You can’t climb it and you can’t go through it,” Skylights said, walking up behind me. “We’ve been trying since the moment we arrived.”
    I ran my hand across the long, sharp thorns and the stark, black, twisted skeleton formed by its