They lived in the valley, about 20 minutes from the ocean, yet it felt like a lifetime. They had nothing but themselves and their adventures. Kiki and Dunn--they met in the field across the street from Dunn’s place, an abandoned patch of land. He’d been scouting around, searching for villains or goblins or someone to battle, following the stream of his wild imagination, when suddenly she jumped up out of nowhere, scaring him silly. Dunn jumped back, his feet thrown clear up in the air, and landed on a small cactus plant. That’s how they met, with her screaming bloody murder and jumping out of the brush, and with him getting his ass filled with thorns. And they became fast friends.

They were young in those days. Soon that field would be plowed and built on. The places where they used to irritate ant hills was soon a plot for two homes, with decks, pools and two-car garages. Swell. But there were other fields to explore.

One lay spread out across the main road. It was a field that no one ever really visited, mainly because of the stories that went with the place, stories that could scare an old lady to death--well, I say this because...it had. Old Widow Sanders, she fell right out of her rocking chair one evening when the local kids were gathered around at her place, swapping ghost stories. Lady Sanders shouldn’t have been listening; she had always been spooked by such stories. And with her bad heart... But she sat there and was sucked in by those tales of the weird. And then she heard one in particular, about a headless man coming out of the woods--Jorry Whitman was telling that one. And that’s when her heart just gave out. There was something to the story that got to the old woman, and Billy noticed the recognition in Sanders’ eyes. She appeared to have experienced that story. Billy, from that moment, was on a quest. He wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Kiki and Dunn had never sat in on those stories--that was back before their time. But they did have older siblings, so they heard about the neighborhood in those earlier days. And the end of Lady Sanders became its own ghost story, together with what Billy found out about the woman... But the two friends, now fifteen and a bit more than just friends, if you understand, were still young at heart and still into their explorations and discovery. They had not been jaded, violated and disillusioned by the world--not yet. So they set off into that mysterious and dark field, thinking of all the great tales they could tell afterwards. And their first night in the woods--well, it left them with such a scare that their tale, they vowed, would never, ever be told.