Mrs. Prattle was no shivery old woman, living alone in that big house next to a graveyard all these years, she’d tell you. She wasn’t one to check under a bed or hurry past a dark room or feel uneasy at the top of the stairs. The late-night noises that old house made were as worrisome to her as her own late-night settling stomach.
“Leb clutched the mason jar like it was full of hornets. The thick glass held nothing, in fact, but shadows and a promise of trouble, the kind of trouble only Leb and Luther seemed to ever get into, fling themselves into most times. Mostly Luther “You gotta bury it just so,” he’d said at school that morning, holding the thing out the same way Leb did now. “It can go any which way otherwise.” Leb should have asked what that precisely meant—any which way. Not that Luther knew precisely anything about anything, cocksure little eyes engorged behind their own thick glass, but Leb should have asked. He’d been distracted by the other eyes and ears and by the other three words—the “It’s pure evil” bit—Luther dropped like litter before that.
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.