A Hollow Dream of Summer's End (9 page)

How strong he used to be, Aiden thought.

“It’s a nightmare,” Freddie said. "It's got to be."

"I don't know what it is," Aiden answered. "I don't know."

Behind Freddie's eyes a thousand calculations were going on, a thousand possibilities were being worked out. Then, all at once, those paths led back to the same fact: that the two boys were stuck in a treehouse, trapped by a shambling creature below.

A grotesque.

A monster.

And at this realization Freddie's eyes turned to liquid, his battle posture folded in on itself, and the lanky boy collapsed to the ground.

It was not the first time Aiden had seen Freddie cry. That had been last year, when his dog Bruno had died during the height of the summer heat in August. They had found the bulldog outside, swarmed by flies and stiff, still tied to the run that had given him no shade to lie in. Yet on that day Freddie had shed only a few tears. Then he had gone inward, silent and brooding for days, until Kenny Baumbach had made a wayward diss at sports camp and found himself beneath a half dozen haymakers and Freak Out Freddie's wrath.

Now, in the dark treehouse lit only by their flashlight and candles, Freddie cried harder than Aiden knew possible. Clutching his scratched hand, that strong boy, always ready to pick a fight, whimpered, sobbed, and curled into a ball on the cold wood floor.

Aiden wanted to hug Freddie, to shield him and say: “Everything is going to be all right. You’ll see. Everything is going to be fine.”

But he knew that maybe it wouldn’t be all right. That maybe it never would be. The doctors, they hadn’t been able to save Bruno. Nor would they be able to bring Brian back from the dead. The three best friends had played their last video game together, tossed their last disses at each other.

Now it was just the two of them in that treehouse.

The two survivors.

14.

THE RADIO DIDN'T WORK.

Or if it did, no broadcasts made their way this far out into the boonies. Both bands, AM and FM, were a void of emptiness. Nothing, not even static played as Aiden cycled from the bottom to the top and back again.

It was an old radio. Its dials were digital, made back when digital was as new augmented reality and glasses-free 3D. Exposed to the air and moisture up here for two decades or more, the old radio had probably stopped working ages ago.

And what had he been hoping for? A broadcast, a warning?

"We interrupt this evening’s performance of
A Prairie Home Companion
to bring you a breaking news report: a monster has been sighted in the foothills south of the city. He wears tattered clothes, has three legs, a taste for flesh, and goes by the name Mister Skitters. If sighted contact Animal Control."

Aiden let out a private chuckle at that thought: a dozen animal rescue officers all trying to wrangle Mister Skitters with doggie restraint poles. It seemed a little more serious than a rabid possum or a raccoon attack.

He turned the radio off, checked the iPad for the errant end of a signal but nothing came through. Not good, he thought to himself. They were in a treehouse, but they might as well be on an island in the middle of the ocean.

—

Time passed in a heavy slog, punctuated only by Freddie's faints sobs. Aiden sat there in numb detachment, replaying the events over and over. The thing from the woods, tattered rags and teeth. A mouth large enough to swallow a head. Those gnarled haunches. And that arm, that wretched arm with the double joints, the tentacled fingers, the eyes. Blinking berries and bitter acid. The smell was still thick in the air.

He rewound the events, again and again, yet the horror remained. It was, he thought, not unlike the first time he'd seen a horror movie. Not that different at all.

It had been at Brian’s house, three years ago, when Freddie was out of town, that Aiden and Brian had stumbled on to his sister’s DVD case. They’d scoured the discs until they found one, a gruesome image of six women, bodies forming a skull-like mask. The movie itself had been just as grim. It was a dark tale about a trip into a cave home to cannibal mutants. At first the monsters killed the women. Then the women killed the monsters. In the end one of the women killed the other, and by the time the credits rolled Aiden didn’t even know who lived and who died and who went crazy. It was an ending as bleak as any Aiden had ever seen by age nine. And now, at age twelve, an ending that didn't seem so far fetched.

Sleep hadn’t come in the hours after the credits rolled. Brian had been scared, clearly so, and when Aiden was almost asleep Brian had snuck out to use the bathroom but never returned.

The monsters had gotten him, Aiden thought for hours. They had gotten his friend and he was next.

Dawn was a world away, and so he hid beneath the covers, waiting for the moment the door creaked open and a ghost white mutant with blood-soaked teeth entered the bedroom. Waiting for death, he realized.

But dawn did come, and somehow he had fallen asleep, or perhaps had drifted in and out. Brian returned at breakfast, confessing that he had been so scared he had snuck off to sleep in his parents' bedroom. He had abandoned him, Aiden remembered thinking. His best friend, he had left him to the creatures from the cave and his imagination.

Yet it had only been a movie that had caused Brian to forsake his friend that night two years ago. A movie they were never supposed to watch.

But this wretched night was no movie.

This was real. His friend lay dead on that great lawn, that no man's land between safety and sanctuary. He had abandoned Brian, no different than Brian had abandoned him on that dark night years ago. Part of him had never forgiven Brian for that, part of him never trusted Brian after that.

And he wondered: if Brian ever returned, would he forgive Aiden for leaving him to the monster?

15.

SLEEP CAME.

It was not a warm respite but a cut, a cold splice between time. There was something, then there was nothing. Then there was a foot in his ribs, nudging.

"Wake up," Freddie said. "Shh, get up!"

It felt odd to have slept. Impossible. Yet somehow his thoughts had drifted to darkness and the time had moved on without him. An hour, perhaps a little more. The candles had gone down, but not too much. And in that dim light Freddie seemed more composed, more put together. A sanity had returned to his eyes.

"How long was I out?"

"I don't know," Freddie answered. "It's two-fifteen."

"Is it still there?"

"No," Freddie said. "It's gone."

Aiden sat right up. "Really?"

"I think so."

Aiden hurried to the window, studied the yard. Sure enough, the thing was gone. In its place a half-dozen sprinklers clicked and clattered, spraying blooms of water across the dark lawn.

"Sprinklers went off a few minutes ago. When I looked it wasn't there."

The sky was unchanged, a grey cotton blanket. No moon, no stars. Yet the lawn glistened, a starry night in a world of wet shadows below. A single patch of grass was more disturbed than the rest. A few holes, some pieces torn out by finger and foot. Evidence of a struggle. And an empty space where their fallen friend had lain.

"Where's Brian?" Aiden asked. "Where did he go?"

"I don't know. Maybe it dragged him off into the woods. I was trying to work the radio when I heard the sprinklers go off. When I checked, they were both gone. Maybe it took him to the woods, I don't know."

The thought of Brian, shirtless and alone in those dark woods, disturbed Aiden deeper than he thought possible. Brian had always been scared of the dark, and Aiden knew of no place more shadowed than an oak forest on a moonless night. No worse place to be alone.

Not alone, he realized. He was with Mister Skitters.

Freddie fiddled with the radio, slapping the side and adjusting the antenna.

"FM's the same," Aiden said. "It doesn't get any channels."

"That's impossible."

"Why?"

"’Cause it should be getting something. Like static at least, right?"

"I don't know, maybe," Aiden said, studying the yard below. "Even if we get something, so what? It's just a radio. We can't talk or anything."

"Piece of crap," Freddie said, slapping the silver shell of the old device.

Aiden traced the perimeter of the yard, unable to find any outstanding shape among the shadows. There were a thousand suspects, sure, but none better than the others.

"Do you think we should go down?" he asked. “To check at least?”

"Yeah, maybe that's a good idea," Freddie answered.

The two boys slowly opened the wood hatch, ready for anything to pop out. But nothing did. They stared down into the wet abyss below. Damp grass glistened in the beam of Freddie's flashlight. Soggy dirt and tanbark at the base of the redwood.

They would get wet. They would have to run through the sprinklers, but perhaps they would get away, and if they did the cold would be worth it. Anything would.

"I don't see it," Freddie said. "Do you?"

"Hand me the flashlight."

"Don't drop it."

“Duh.”

Aiden leaned over the hatch, lowered his head. The world tilted upside down. The grass became the heavens; the dark, cloudy sky a milky seascape below. Aiden panned the flashlight across the yard, searching for forms among the shadows. Shapes and faces, so many dark places to hide. Yet he found nothing, no trace of Mister Skitters.

"I think it's clear," he said.

"You sure?"

"No, I'm not. But I think it's clear. Maybe we should drop the ladder."

"Okay," Freddie whispered and started to unroll the ladder.

"Dude, your hand," Aiden said, pointing to Freddie's left hand.

"It's nothing," the lanky boy answered, scratching his enflamed forearm. The skin had taken on a dark discoloration, not unlike a rash of poison oak. There was plenty of that in the woods and foothills of Alder Glen of course, but none that acted that fast. This rash had come from that lash of Mister Skitter's arm.

"It itches, okay? Just stop staring."

"Yeah, sure," Aiden answered, making sure to avoid the dark spots where the filth had spotted and stained the rungs of the ladder. "Okay, that's it."

The ladder dangled thirty feet into the wet shadows below. Again, Aiden dipped his head below, turning the world upside down once more. He scanned the lawn, the perimeter, that faint flashlight beam doing its best to render monsters out of nothing.

And what if that was all it had been? he wondered. A shadow and a fear? A prank his dad had pulled? What if Brian had been in on it?

Perhaps, he thought. Perhaps that was it. Two summers ago it had been the campfire story of the Razor Tickler. Or the woman with the painted face that wandered by the old asylum. Or the twins in the middle of the lake, the ones that could only be seen at midnight on the anniversary of the night they drowned trying to save each other.

And suddenly it didn't seem so scary to climb down that ladder. Suddenly the thought of something that skittered on three legs seemed to be back where it belonged: among the childish fears of shadows in closets and monsters beneath the bed.