Signal (2 page)

I whistle and she comes back—with another scrap of the same T-shirt-like material in her mouth. It has a smear of bright red blood on it. When blood is still red instead of brown, it’s, like,
fresh
, right?

I look around uneasily, but there’s nobody else in sight. This is starting to freak me out. Let’s face it; blood is creepy stuff.

Josie has taken off again, and I shrug and follow her. I wonder if it’s a person or an animal that’s bleeding and then realize it’s a stupid question: animals don’t rip up their T-shirts to blot their cuts. Probably somebody sneezed and got a bloody nose, or got scratched while picking raspberries. But what if it’s something worse? I wonder if I should get help.

When we moved and it looked like I was going to be on my own for most of the summer, Dad gave me a cell phone. I could call him now. Or 911. But is this an emergency? I’m not sure. I take the phone from my pocket and turn it on. No reception. It must be because of the high cliffs on both sides of the stream.

I put the phone away and scan the ground. The trail is soft and moist here and I see footprints. Feeling like a real tracker, I stop to study them. They have the pattern of sneakers or running shoes, like the ones I’m wearing, but since they’re only partial prints I can’t get a sense of the size. Josie comes over and examines them, too, but
doesn’t seem to find them very interesting. They’re not animal tracks, after all.

Then I notice that the person who made the prints has left the trail. There is an old, dilapidated mill ahead on the left. On the right is a meadow of tall grass, and it’s clear someone has recently moved through it. I follow the path of broken, mashed-down stalks of grass, wondering what in the world I’m doing, but doing it anyway.

Josie apparently thinks this detour from the trail is great fun, because she bounds ahead of me, making her own path through the undergrowth. The meadow ends at a steep shale slope, and I can see an avalanche of thin, crumbly stones that were sent cascading down it by the person ahead of me, who I’m beginning to think of as “the bloody guy.”

So I climb the slope, too, annoyed by the ease with which Josie manages the slippery shale incline that has me on all fours, panting and clutching at anything that looks solid. It’s like climbing a sand dune, so with each step I slide back half a step.

When I get to the top of the hill, I see a house that seems to be abandoned. There are no cars, and the grass is overgrown. Beyond the house is a cornfield, a monster cornfield, and alongside that is an equally huge wheat field. Both of them stretch as far as I can see into the distance.

The guy’s track leads right to the edge of the corn.

It’s late July and we’ve had a lot of rain, and the cornstalks are already higher than the top of my head. They are planted right up to the edge of the yard, crowding the house, standing in silent rows and shimmering in the hushed, hot, humid air. I stand at the edge of the field where the bloody guy went in, wondering if I should bother to follow him.

I take a few steps into the corn, and that’s all it takes to feel as if I’ve been transported to an entirely different world. The plants are so high and so thick that things look the same in every direction. I feel
swallowed up
by the corn. I fight back a panicky claustrophobia and realize that I’d never be able to find the bloody guy in here if he didn’t want me to—and it’s pretty obvious he
doesn’t
want me to, since he seems to be purposely hiding from me.

I want to get out of that cornfield as fast as I can. I’m about to turn and retrace my steps when I hear a sound coming from out of the greenness growing all around me. I cock my head and listen closely. There it is again. Breathing. Hard breathing.

The bloody guy
is
in the corn, and not far away. He has to know I’m here, and yet he isn’t saying hello or asking for help. He’s hiding. And panting.

A breeze stirs the corn. The tops sigh gently, and the lower, more dried-out leaves make a clacking sound against each other. Suddenly I’m more spooked than I’ve ever been in my life. I turn and run out into the
open air and across the farmyard. “Josie! Come!” I call. I slip and slide down that shale cliff, land at the bottom in a tangle of limbs and loose rock, then get up and run, run, run back down the trail, wanting nothing but to put distance between me and whoever is breathing out there in the corn.

I
SPEND THE AFTERNOON THROWING A BALL FOR
Josie and thinking about the bloody guy. Then, just when I’m expecting Dad to come home for dinner, he calls to tell me he’s tied up at work and won’t be home until close to nine o’clock.

“Dad, it’s
Sunday
,” I say.

He sighs. “I know, Owen. But this is my first big audit, and the client is very important to the firm.”

I look around at the living room, where cardboard boxes still line the walls, right where the moving guys left them. “I thought we were going to unpack some of this stuff today. You know, get moved in.”

Another sigh. “I hoped we could, buddy, but there’s no way it’s going to happen today. Listen, there’s some leftover fried chicken and cole slaw in the fridge, right?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“You can warm the chicken up in the microwave.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, Owen. I’ll get home just as soon as I can. Call if you need anything.”

“Okay, Dad. See you.”

I feed Josie, nuke the chicken, and sit down in front of the TV. I barely even notice what’s on, because I keep thinking about the bloody guy who was hiding in the cornfield. I try to imagine what happened to him and why he didn’t want me to see him. It’s odd. It’s mysterious. It’s fun to have something new to think about.

The next morning, Dad has already left for work by the time I get up and have a quick breakfast. Josie picks up one of my running shoes, drops it at my feet, and wags her tail expectantly. I get on my bike and head for the trail. Josie trots along by my front wheel, on the side away from the traffic on the highway. I never taught her this; she just figured it out on her own.

I park my bike at the trailhead and lock it, and Josie and I start our run. We’re heading back to the place where I heard the bloody guy breathing. I’m curious, excited—and scared.

I look around with more attention than usual, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary on the trail this morning. The sun is shining through the mist that’s rising off the bushes and trees, and it’s so peaceful and pretty that the panic and fear I felt yesterday seem ridiculous.

But when I get to the meadow near the shale slope, my feet start to falter. Some of that fear and panic sets back in. I’m also feeling kind of ashamed that I ran away. Maybe the guy actually
did
need help, but was afraid of
me
for some reason.

The path through the meadow is faintly visible, although most of the grass has perked up. I follow it to the bottom of the hill, and climb.

At the top, I stand for a while looking around and catching my breath. The cornfield is as huge as I remember, stretching endlessly in a sea of sameness that could hide an army. No sense looking there.

I check out the house, which is clearly deserted but doesn’t seem as if it’s been left for too long. It doesn’t have that haunted house look that places get when they’ve been neglected for years, with drooping shutters, peeling paint, broken windows, and the smell of rot and decay. This place looks unlived in, but like you
could
live in it if you wanted to and you felt like doing some fixing up. Josie is sniffing around the foundation, probably hunting for mice.

I walk closer, and then climb three wooden steps up to the porch. My hand reaches out to try the doorknob. If it’s locked, I’ll leave; there’s no way I’m going to break in.

The knob turns, and I see the lock is broken. I push the door open and step into the kitchen. It smells hot and musty inside, but not bad. There’s a table with four chairs around it, and a refrigerator, stove, and sink. Exactly
what you’d expect to see. I turn the cold water handle, and nothing comes out. The counters are bare but dusty. There’s a cupboard door hanging open and I can see the shelves inside are empty.

I walk across the floor. Josie follows me, her toenails clicking on the cracked linoleum. We go through an arched opening that leads to what I figure is the living room. There’s a couch with some of the stuffing coming out of the cushions, a fireplace, and a rickety table that looks like it would collapse if you put anything heavier than a napkin on it.

The house feels so still and empty I have the odd sensation that it’s holding its breath until I leave. But I’m not ready to go quite yet. I peek into a room that looks like it was an office, and into a bathroom. In the office I see a couple of broken pencil stubs and some scraps of paper; in the bathroom, a box of tissues and a spray bottle of cleaning stuff lying on its side. Nothing very exciting, and I feel my interest waning.

But there is a stairway to a second floor, and it seems dumb to leave without going up there and checking it out, although going
upstairs
in a stranger’s house seems like more of an invasion of privacy than poking around downstairs. Or at least that’s what I think as I climb the first couple steps. Josie stays at the bottom, whining at me beseechingly, but when I keep going she decides to come along and races past me.

There are two rooms and another bathroom on the second floor. The first room has flowered wallpaper and
holds a metal bed frame with a grungy-looking mattress on it, and a dresser, its empty drawers open. The bathroom has an old-fashioned-looking tub with a plastic shower curtain, and some sort of frilly, lacy thing over the toilet tank. That cracks me up. As if nobody’s going to notice there’s a toilet under it.

Josie runs ahead of me and starts to bark. I hear the dancing sound her paws make when she wiggles her whole body in delight at seeing a new person. Then I hear a muffled scream and I feel like my stomach just jumped up into my throat. I stop walking. Part of me wants to blow out of there as fast as possible, but another part draws me forward and into the other bedroom. The bloody guy is sitting up, looking at me.

Except the bloody guy is a girl.

S
HE
’
S A GIRL ABOUT MY AGE
, I
REALIZE AFTER
I recover from my shock and surprise. She’s sitting up on the mattress, clutching what’s left of a torn white T-shirt around her. She has the oddest, greenest, most glittery eyes I’ve ever seen, and they glare at me with a mixture of fear and defiance. She’s wearing dirty shorts. A makeshift bandage tied around her head has slipped out of place and now hangs crookedly over her right eye. There’s a bad cut there, and more cuts on her arms and legs, which are streaked with dirt and dried blood. Her light brown hair is tangled and caked with blood above the cut.

Her lips look pale and cracked and dry. My own mouth and throat feel dry just looking at her.

Maybe she feels as stunned as I do, because we both stay right where we are, staring, like we’re playing some weird game of freeze tag. Finally, Josie breaks the spell,
looking back and forth from the girl to me and barking as if she’s urging us to
get on with it
, whatever it is we’re doing.

I have no idea what we’re doing, or what
she’s
doing, anyway, sleeping all by herself in a deserted house with cuts on her head, arms, and legs. At last I manage to ask, “What happened to you?”

She keeps looking at me but doesn’t reply, almost as if that question is too big to even start answering. Or maybe her throat is too dry. So I say the next thing that comes to my mind. “You want some water?”

There’s a long drawn-out silence, and I’m starting to wonder if the injury to her head has made her stupid, or if she’s deaf or mute or something, or if maybe she doesn’t understand English. But then she nods, just slightly.

“Okay, I’ll go get some.” I head—fast—straight to the stairs and down and out the door, Josie at my heels.

My mind is racing, thinking about water. I could go to the creek by the trail to get some, but I don’t have a container to put it in and besides, even though people swim in the creek, including me, I’m not sure the water is safe to actually drink. Of course, Josie drinks it every day. This doesn’t prove anything, though, because in general the more unsanitary something is the better Josie likes it.

I decide the only thing to do is go back to the trailhead where I left my bike. I keep a bottle of water in the clip on the handlebar stem for slugging down at the end
of my run. As I race along the path, I wonder about the girl. I wonder why I didn’t ask her more questions, and I guess it was because there was something so odd and unsettling about her and her glittery eyes and her blood-streaked appearance.

When I reach my bike I get on and head back up the trail. I don’t try to ride through the meadow, but stay on the trail until I get close to the hill that leads up to the farmhouse. By then, Josie is panting from running beside me, so I let her take a long drink from the stream. Then I stash the bike in some bushes near the hill and begin to climb. It’s harder with one hand holding the bottle, and I finally stick it in the waistband of my shorts.