The Pricker Boy (12 page)

At the time, it cracked us up.

Scratched, sweaty, and covered with mosquito bites, we pause for a moment at Whale’s Jaw. Vivek slaps the back of the rock and shouts, “Olly olly oxen free!”

“Now that we’re back, that was kinda cool,” Ronnie mumbles, his eyes to the ground.

“Cool?” Robin asks.

“For us to see it, I mean. For us to all go out there. We finally got to see what was out behind the Hawthorns.”

Robin shakes her head. “He thinks it’s cool! Bugs and sweat and thorns ripping your skin! Evil old houses with things in the basement!”

She did see it! She must have! I spin around to look at her, but she’s already stomping down the path toward the house.

“Well?” Ronnie asks, turning to the rest of us. “Am I wrong?”

“About this?” Vivek asks. “No, you’re right about this. But you’re wrong about so many other things, Ronnie, like how to comb your hair or start a fire or balance cinder blocks on your head. Those things … well, you just don’t do them so well.”

“Shut up,” Ronnie says quietly. “Just shut up.”

“Oh now, Ronnie,” Vivek says. He throws his arm around Ronnie and leads him down the path toward home. “You’re so serious. Your grandfather is about to see how dirty you are. Think of how awful your life will be then. These are your last few minutes to laugh. So laugh, bud! Laugh!”

“It was interesting,” Emily says after they’ve gone. “We saw things. A rock with scratches on it. A collection of
erratics. The remains of an old cottage. But I don’t think we learned much. Nothing that proves anything. They could all just be bits and pieces of things Ronnie was told years ago, things that he then wrapped into a story.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“Stucks, I don’t know that I’m saying anything, really. I’m thinking.” She turns and stares up at the Widow’s Stone. “And I’m worrying. Worrying about you.”

She gives me a moment to respond, but I don’t say anything.

“You grabbed Ronnie and chucked him into that mud. That’s not like you. It’s more like …”

“Like who?”

She turns and looks me dead in the eye. “Like Pete,” she says.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe. I don’t know a lot of things. But something here doesn’t ring true, and I’d like to know what it is.”

I grit my teeth, step quickly toward her. She doesn’t back away. “I saved you back there,” I say. “Back at the Hora House. You don’t even know it. For all your thinking and your pondering and your analyzing, you don’t know anything. You couldn’t even see it! But I could. I saved you!”

She looks at me curiously but doesn’t say a word. I turn away from her and head back toward the cottage.

I like the idea that I saved her. I like feeling it even if she doesn’t know that it happened. I was scared out there at the
Hora House, but even so, I was the one who got her out of there. But there’s no way for me to explain that to her.

“Stucks!” she calls after me, but I don’t turn around.

Then again, louder this time, I hear, “Stucks!” But it’s not Emily; it’s Robin, running as hard as she can, Vivek and Ronnie following along behind her. Her face is flushed. “The Cricket isn’t at the house! Your mom says he hasn’t been there all afternoon. She thought he was with us!”

My mind goes quiet for a second, and then I realize what has happened. He wouldn’t have stayed behind while “the big kids” were up to something in the woods. How could I have been so stupid to think that he would?

“Oh no,” I whisper.

I start running back into the woods. I pass the Widow’s Stone without pausing, rushing headlong into the thorns. I use my body to push them out of the way, hoping that I might clear a path for those behind me. I only worry about my eyes. I just need to protect my eyes.

“Cricket!” I shout. “Cricket! No playing! Come out now! No playing!”

From the back of my mind a little voice reminds me that this is how I have always imagined the Pricker Boy moving through the bushes, running at full speed regardless of the thorns. I reach the Hawthorns. I am about to run deeper into the woods when the others catch up with me.

“Stop!” Emily says. “Take a second! Think!”

“He’s out there alone!” I shout.

“Stop for just one second!” Emily says. “You don’t even know where he is. He could be anywhere.”

“Yeah, what’s the big deal?” Vivek asks. “He’s a weird kid. Could be jumping at butterflies from the roof of your house for all you know.”

I stop, breathe deep, then walk in small circles. I point at the rest of them. “You guys go back to the Widow’s Stone! If he comes back this way, I want him to see you!”

“I’m not staying here,” Robin says. “If you’re going back there, I am too, and you can’t stop me.”

“Then keep up,” I say. I reach up into the Hawthorns and pull down one of the dead branches, breaking off a thick stick about three feet long. I begin to break off the spikes so that it is easier to hold.

“Uh, Stucks,” Ronnie whispers. “Stucks, do you remember …”

“What?” I ask him.

“What Emily said? About harming the trees?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. My mind is on one thing and one thing alone.

“It will bring sickness to the household of the offender,” he whispers, almost as if he doesn’t want the trees to hear.

“Let it bring sickness,” I say. “I just want my brother back.”

I swipe my stick through the air, knocking it against the thorn branches that block the path. The bulk of them break to the sides. I swipe again and step onto the path.

I feel the wind pick up, and the thorn branches begin to
sway. For a moment, they seem to intertwine, like a giant net, or like an angry trap whose jaws are just beginning to twitch. Evening is coming, and they are waking up.

I push forward down the path, shouting for the Cricket. I hack at the bushes, but the thorns take their toll on me. My arms and hands are covered with scratches, and I have at least one gash across my face. The salt from my sweat has gotten into the cut there, and I can feel it stinging.

“Cricket, no games! Come out now!” I call.

The muscles of my arm begin to burn. I look behind me. My cousin has been keeping up. And right behind her, keeping pace as well, is Ronnie. He’s risking a lot by coming back out here—if not with whatever supernatural creature that might be lurking in the bushes then with his very real grandparents, who will surely kill him when he returns home. His good pants and shirt are snagged and torn, filthy with blood and sweat.

I hand the stick off to my cousin. She begins slapping at the thorns, her fresh arm hitting harder than my tired one could. After a while she passes off to Ronnie. I cringe. If his spindly muscles can’t take the strain, I’ll grab the stick from his hands and drive on ahead of him.

But to my surprise he does okay. Soon we pass the black puddle, stomping right on through the mud. We reach the spot where we strayed from the path, the part that leads off to the Hora House. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to imagine the Cricket back there alone.

But we have to, so we go.

Through the bushes, into the pines, past the sleeping stone giants, we call the Cricket’s name the whole way, even as we pass around that last stone and head down the incline to the Hora House. Ronnie stumbles on the way down, loses his footing, and almost falls into the cellar hole. I grab him and he pulls at me like a panicked, drowning man. Clinging to my arm, then my shoulder, then pushing off, he climbs past me to get as far away from the hole as he can.

Robin and I check the area. She circles the house to check the basement. The Cricket is nowhere to be found.

The sun is just falling past the peaks of stone; in less than an hour the pond will blaze with the sunset. But now, here in the woods, as the sunlight disappears behind the boulders, dusk comes early to the Hora House.

“What now?” Robin asks. She shouts out for the Cricket, turning in circles as she does.

“Cricket!” I shout with her, but my voice only strikes weakly against the rocks.

“Guys?” Ronnie asks hesitantly.

“What?” Robin says tersely.

“I have to pee.” He says it so pathetically, as if we’re teachers and he’s asking permission.

“Well, just go,” Robin says. “I don’t care.”

Ronnie nods, turns his back to us, and unzips his pants. I look up at the tops of the stones, hoping to find the Cricket perched up there, just as Ronnie and I found him perched on Whale’s Jaw two days ago. I see nothing. But I
feel the darkness beginning to gather around us. A full minute passes before I notice that Ronnie isn’t peeing.

“Ronnie?” I ask.

“I can’t go,” he says, his shame as thick as the heat. “I can’t go if you guys are here.”

“What are you talking about?” I bark. “You just … you just do it, Ronnie. You’ve been doing it all your life! So pee!”

“I’m not looking,” Robin says impatiently.

Ronnie zips up his pants. “I can’t. I can’t go if people are around. Listen, I’ll be okay. I’m just going to walk around this boulder. I won’t go far. You guys wait for me.”

“We shouldn’t separate,” I warn him.

“I don’t want to. But I have to. Darn it, I feel silly.”

Robin shrugs at me. “Do you have a better idea?” she asks.

I wave him off. “Go. But be quick about it.”

Ronnie walks off through the boulders. I continue to search for any sign of the Cricket.

I hear a giggle.

A clear giggle. One that I am meant to hear. Where it comes from, I can’t really tell. The sound bounces off the stones, seems to come from everywhere.

Robin spins around and points out a break between the stones.

I hadn’t seen it before. I doubt that any of us had. But by stepping three feet to my right, I see a thin path through a split in one of the boulders. It’s like a secret doorway.

I see something move in there.

I take off running. I hear Robin right at my heels. There’s just enough room for us to squeeze through the break, and once through we find a hidden path twisting up and away between the rocks.

I’m not watching where my feet are landing, and a couple times I trip on the small stones that litter the path. The path starts to climb, and I catch sight of a little boy up ahead of me.

“Cricket!” I shout, scrambling over the rocks. “Cricket!”

I charge between two boulders, turn, and head uphill again. The path levels off. Small blueberry bushes cluster between rocks. Vaguely, I can tell that we’ve reached the peak of a hill, that off to my left there is a clear view over the woods. But up ahead I see a figure.…

A boy, but not the Cricket. Not the Cricket at all. He looks back at me with gray eyes in a gray face—looks back and giggles. He’s young, but he’s old at the same time. I see him but at the same time I can’t. It seems as if a thin film of mucus has fallen over my eyes, blurring my vision and causing me to see the newly born and the ancient at the same time. He darts away and melts into the granite.

My feet freeze on the path; it feels like ice has gathered around my legs. All of a sudden I can feel the whole weight of the day—the walking, the heat, the frustration, the arguing. All of it settles in my thighs and calves, and I feel like I can’t go any farther. If that gray thing shows itself again, I won’t even be able to run away. It’s as if a drug has hit my blood, cooling me all over with ice water, dragging
me downward, begging me to lie down and rest at least until the cold night comes.

Another giggle wakes me from my trance. My eyes clear. I turn around. The Cricket is right behind me, his face one giant grin. I start back toward him, the older brother, the angry brother, ready to make it clear to him just what he has done to us.

Robin gets to him before I do. She grabs him by the shoulders, kisses the top of his head. “You’re a pain in the butt,” she says to him, gasping. He laughs, tosses a slow-motion punch against his jaw, and slaps his own behind. OUCH BUTT.

The Cricket reaches out and pokes my arm with his index finger, but I ignore him. I’m not going to laugh at this joke. In fact, this joke isn’t over yet. We still have to get back. I turn my back on him and then … I see it all before me. Our path has ended at a rock cliff, and beyond the cliff, the woods stretch all the way back to the Hawthorns. In the distance Tanner Pond reflects the fading sun like a golden mirror.

Directly below me is the cellar hole of the Hora House and—and—and—

My whole body shakes. I couldn’t see it from below, but up here it’s so clear. The Hora House was built in a small depression in the ground. On all sides it’s surrounded by the boulders. They fit together like puzzle pieces, forming rough walls.

It’s a pit. A pit of stone. We did find the stone pit; we just
couldn’t see it from below because we were standing in it. If Vivek were here right now, I would yank him to the edge and make him look down into it. To hell with his “time-line problem.” The stone pit wasn’t the cellar of the Hora House. It wasn’t built in the 1940s by Daniel Hora. It was built over ten thousand years ago by a massive receding glacier.

Hora didn’t build his house over the stone pit. He built it down
in
it.

“Robin? Robin, look. Look down at the—”

“No, Stucks, look at this.”

It’s a magnet down there, pulling at my eyes. I force myself away from it, turn back to her. “What?”

“Well, look.”

She is looking the Cricket up and down. He’s dirty, but that’s not unusual. He’s smiling, but that’s not unusual either. It takes me a second to realize it, but she’s right: something is definitely wrong.

There isn’t a scratch on him. Not a nick. Nothing. Not one sign of broken skin. Most of us hadn’t made it a hundred paces past the Hawthorns without getting cut, and we were working together to get through the thorns. On this second trip, I got cut from head to toe. I look like an extra for a zombie movie. How has he followed us all the way out here without getting a single scratch on him? His legs aren’t even that muddy, and there’s no way he could have crossed the black puddle without thick mud staining his skin up to his knees.

I try to figure this out, but then I remember Ronnie.
Ronnie, who had followed us all the way back here again, who had without hesitation come back through the thorns to find the Cricket. Ronnie, still in his good pants, tired, knowing he is already in trouble at home, poor Ronnie who is too shy to pee with us watching … We left him alone in that stone pit.