Mrs. Prattle was no shivery old woman afraid of her own Willow Street. Not one to check under beds or hurry past dark rooms. The late-night noises her big empty house made were no more worrisome than her own settling stomach.
Leb held the mason jar at arm’s length like it was full of hornets beating at the lid.
Technically, the jar was empty—just some smudges and a promise of trouble. The kind of trouble only Leb and Luther ever seemed to find. Or fling themselves into. Mostly Luther.
“You gotta bury it just so,” Luther had said, way too loud for the school hallway—and too confident for a kid who once tried to deep-fry a banana with a Zippo.
After eleven-year-old Leb buries a mason jar of “pure evil” for good luck, to liven up his graveyard, the graveyard caretaker’s son gets a deadly dose of just what he wanted. His whole island does—adults, kids, and animals from half the state of Florida flung together outside the graveyard gate. It’s up to Leb and his friends, the island ratcatcher’s son and the mysterious new girl at school, to keep this flood of good fortune from sinking the island … and getting more people killed.
But even an island of outcasts has its outcasts, and Leb’s “friends” barely know each other. They barely know their own island, turns out. And they don’t know enough to run the other direction. If they can get past the press, police, pent-up crowd, graveyard ghosts, cutthroat treasure hunters, and black-cloaked witches, something far worse still awaits them. That much they know for sure, now.