Moonbog (2 page)

“I was not,” Kenny snapped. “I knew it was you all the time. ‘N I knew you were there, too. I was just playing along.” He was glad that he had found her, but a new fear began to rise when he thought she might tell his friends that she had scared him; then what would they think?

“You were too scared,” Susie said. She reached out and gave him a gentle, joshing shove. “You can admit it.”

“I was not!” Kenny yelled. Maybe it was the sudden release of finding Susie safe that made him act without thinking, but whatever it was that motivated him, he reached for Susie’s prized Yankees baseball hat and, with a quick spin, sent it sailing out like a Frisbee over the Bog.

“You twerp!” Susie shouted as, squinting, she peered at the hat, hanging on the branch of a swamp maple. It was suspended over a small smooth, mirror-like patch of water on the spagnum carpet. “You’re gonna go get it, too.”

“No, I’m not,” Kenny said in a childish sing-song voice meant to irritate Susie all the more for giving him a scare.

“My father’ll kill me if I don’t come home with that hat.”

Kenny shrugged and took a cautious step back, out of arm’s reach. “So go get it.”

Susie huffed and stood stock still for a moment, her eyes shifting from the hat hanging over the brackish water to Kenny and then back to the hat. Finally, with a deep breath, she started toward the tree.

“You be careful,” Kenny said. There was tension in his voice as he registered that his action had created a truly dangerous situation.

Susie looked at him with a steel-like glance and then made her way through the thick brush to the edge of the Bog. The sky overhead was the color of soot, and the thick mat of spagnum moss looked like velvet. Small, mounded humps dotted the smooth surface of what had long ago been a lake. The tree Susie was slowly making her way toward was on one such mound, about twenty feet from solid ground.

Kenny stood in the path, watching Susie’s slow, careful progress. He found himself tensing as he watched. “Be careful,” he called.

“Shuddup.”

“Maybe you should leave it ‘til tomorrow when the light’s better,” Kenny called.

Susie waved him quiet and then put all of her concentration on her slow progress over the mossy ground. Her stomach twisted whenever she placed her foot and she felt the ground shift with a thick, jellylike motion. She was biting her lower lip, and sweat formed on her forehead and between her shoulder blades.

She was about half-way to the tree when her foot suddenly sank through. She got wet up to the knee, and as she pulled away, for a panic-filled second, it was like slimy, invisible hands were trying to hold her there, to drag her down.

“You okay?” Kenny shouted.

Susie, flooded with fear, didn’t answer, but she grabbed onto one of the moss-covered mounds and was relieved to find that it was a stone—something solid. Wiping the muck from her knees, she looked at the vague form of Kenny and shouted, “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

Kenny almost yelled back that he was sorry, but until she had her hat back, he knew nothing he said would help.

After surveying the distance still to be covered, Susie put all of her concentration on her slow progress. She thought, with a little bit of stretching, she could make it from one mound to another and from there to the tree that held her hat. She looked at it, hanging there in the darkness. The white letters NY seemed almost to glow with an eerie phosphorescence.

She made it to the next rock but not without another soaking. She was glad that at least it was the same foot that got drenched. Then, from the mound nearest the tree, she reached up to grab her hat.

“Goddamnit!” she shouted suddenly, and her voice rang out across the Bog. Her fingers grasped more than two feet short of their prize. A faint breeze stirred and made the hat twist slowly.

Coiling back, Susie planted her feet firmly on the rock where she stood and then, with a deep, belly-grunt, she shot out into the air. She slammed into the tree and clamped her hands around it, hanging there like a monkey for a moment as she caught her breath. Her feet rested lightly on the soggy mound where the tree grew.

“Susie!”

Gritting her teeth, Susie shimmied up the trunk of the maple. The tree was small, almost strangled, trying to grow with the thick collar of the Bog around its base; it swayed back and forth with Susie’s weight and, as she neared the hat and her hand reached out, the shaking of the tree made the hat drop to the surface of the Bog with a dull plop.

“Now look!” Susie shouted with frustration.

“Be careful!” Kenny yelled. To him, Susie was merely a dark blot against the darker line of the distant horizon.

Susie let herself down from the tree and touched the ground with the tips of her toes. The ground gave but seemed solid enough, so she lowered herself all the way down. Kneeling, with warm water soaking through her pants legs, Susie reached for her hat. Her fingers danced, close to their goal, but not close enough. She wanted to keep one hand reassuringly on the thin trunk of the maple, but if she did, she knew there was no way she’d get her hat—and after coming this close, she wasn’t about to leave it. She leaned out over the slimy water. The aroma of thick decay made her stomach churn. She reached . . . reached. Her finger shook, with the effort.

And then it happened. In the split second between when she slipped and she hit the water, she knew she should have left the hat where it was . . . until the next day, if not forever. She hit the water with a dull thud, sank through the thick carpet of spagnum, and then seemed to be sucked down into the slimy water.

Kenny knew almost immediately that something was wrong. The sound of Susie’s body hitting the water hit his ears like a cannon shot. His throat burned as a scream ripped from his lungs. “
Susie! No!
”

He took off through the brush toward where she had been, but as soon as he realized that he was wet up to the knees, he drew to a halt. From where he stood, he could barely make out the hump of ground where the maple tree grew. What made his stomach clench into a freezing ball was the gaping black hole in the carpet of spagnum. It looked like a crater on the moon, but in its center, the brackish water churned with the violent struggle that was going on below the surface.

In her panic, Susie lost her sense of direction. The thick water of the Bog surrounded her like a heavy, wet blanket. Strong invisible hands made her motions thick, as though she was swimming in honey, but the blackness that engulfed her was not sweet; it filled her lungs with decay.

Kenny continued to scream as he watched the black water churn. Panic ripped through him, keeping him there, frozen as he watched. Then, when he saw a hand claw up out of the ooze and seem to reach imploringly toward him, he turned and ran.

He lost the path and tore through the woods, not knowing even which direction he ran. He had to find someone . . . someone. Susie was drowning, and he needed help. As the night sounds of the Bog hushed around him, he let his screams tear the night air.

“Help! Help! Somebody, please, help!”

He ran with everything he had. Branches whipped his face, and arms, and tears, hot and salty, streaked his face. At last he broke out into the open, and across the field, he saw a house outlined against the dark sky. He didn’t recognize the house in his whirlwind of terror, but as he made his way toward it, he saw someone standing at the edge of the field beneath a tree. Kenny started toward the dark shape, not even knowing who it was as he screamed his repeated appeals for help. Drawing to a halt in front of the man, Kenny almost collapsed as he sputtered a garbled account of what had happened.

“You’ve got to come! You’ve got to help!” he screamed, unashamed of the tears that coursed down his face.

Suddenly, with a swiftness Kenny didn’t even notice until the fingers clutched his throat, the man grabbed him and, turning him around, held him in an iron-bound grasp.

Kenny opened his mouth to cry out, but the steely fingers clamped his throat off. Holding him from behind, the man jerked him into the air until his feet kicked wildly. The man’s other arm crushed Kenny’s chest until the exhausted air in his lungs felt like fire.

“You just keep your mouth shut, you understand?” the man said thickly.

Kenny felt the pressure relieve as the man took his hand away from his throat. Behind him, Kenny heard a faint click. He didn’t know what it was until, looking down, he saw the knife blade poised less than an inch from his stomach. The scream that ripped from his throat was his last as Kenny felt the blade slice through his shirt and into his intestines.

I

I
t had been warm all day, pulsing with the promise of early summer and downtown, there was even a hint of what August was going to be like in New York City. Right after work, David Logan met Allison at her apartment. Neither of them wore a coat or even a sweater as they loaded their luggage into the back of David’s VW Rabbit. They headed out of the City and up Interstate 95-North to Maine. Now, seven hours later, the knife edge of wind that blew in David’s window hit his neck with a numbing chill. Allison took her coat from the back seat and drew it tightly around her shoulders. She sighed with exasperation.

“Huh?” David grunted, casting a quick glance at her. She had been quiet for at least fifteen minutes; that, to David, meant she was either asleep or angry. A second sigh told him that she was not asleep.

“Well, you didn’t tell me it was going to be Christly
winter
up here!” She sighed again and snuggled deeper into the folds of her coat.

“Sorry,” David mumbled, easing the window up until there was just a crack left open. Allison reached over and snapped the heater on. The car filled almost instantly with hot air.

“How much further is it anyway?” Allison asked. She made a point of keeping her gaze fixed on the road ahead, as if that would shorten the miles. The headlights reached down the narrow road, illuminating the parallel walls of unbroken pine trees on either side.

“Oh, we passed Portland about a half hour, forty-five minutes ago.”

“I never saw a
city
.”

David smiled. “That was Portland, where we got off the Interstate.”

Allison made a soft sound to register her total lack of concern for the existence of Portland.

“So,” David continued, mostly just to keep up some kind of conversation so he wouldn’t get sleepy, “we got off 95 at exit 8, and got onto Route 302 in Westbrook. Now we’re traveling north.”

“As if I couldn’t guess,” Allison snapped. “I mean, I wouldn’t be all that surprised to see Santa Claus go zinging by on his sled.”

David almost laughed, but then he realized that she hadn’t intended her comment to be funny. He reached out and snapped off the heater. “Too much heat. Makes me sleepy.”

“Christ,” Allison muttered, but David let it pass. “Anyway, as I was saying: we’re heading north on Route 302. We’ve been through North Windham.”

“You mean that blinking yellow light?”

“Yeah. I’d say it’ll be just about sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds and we’ll see the beautiful hamlet of Holland, Maine.”

“Approximately, that is,” Allison said, still with no trace of humor in her voice.

“Yeah, well, I’ve driven these roads quite a few times, you know.”

Outside, the wall of pines broke on the left, giving a beautiful, expansive view of Sebago Lake, stretching out like a huge spot of ink to the darkened mountains on the horizon. David knew that, in another few minutes, the view on the right would also widen, giving him his first view of the lower end of the Bog. Its real name was Lovewell Bog, but all the locals called it simply The Bog—capital B. David felt a slight shiver in spite of the car’s overworked heater.

“Well it’s in the absolute middle of
nowhere
, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” David said with a chuckle.

Allison sighed as she picked up her purse and fished for a cigarette. She lit it from the dashboard lighter and settled back slowly, exhaling a billow of smoke. “You want one?”

David shook his head. “Come on. Don’t make it any harder than it is. I haven’t had one for almost three months now. Hey! There it is!” he said suddenly, slowing the car down and pointing to the scene outside the window. “That’s the Bog.”

Allison grunted. David took as long a look as he dared without actually stopping the car. The Bog stretched off into the night, dimly illuminated by the half moon. Patches of mist and open water glowed an eerie gray against the thick black contours of pine and scrub brush. David eased his window down a notch and smiled as the night song of the spring peepers grew louder.

“There’s a better view of it after we get off 302.”

“I can hardly wait,” Allison said, reaching out to flick the ash of her cigarette into the ashtray.

David bit his lower lip, then spoke. “You know, this is sort of a pain in the ass for me too.”

Allison nodded her head curtly. David glanced at her as her face was illuminated by the glowing tip of her cigarette.

They came up to another blinking yellow light. David slowed and took the right turn easily. As soon as he was off Route 302, he found the road was as familiar as if he had never left Holland—had never been away for the last eight years. He felt he knew every twist, turn, and bump instinctively. With that thought came a strange mixture of emotions: excitement at being back in his hometown; nervous anticipation because of why he was there; resentment that he had to come back to Maine at all; and . . . what else?