The Pricker Boy (19 page)

If Pete thought I was going up there alone to possibly
come face to face with a ghostly corpse with a rotting face, he had another think coming. “No way,” I whispered.

“There’s nothing up there, Stucks. The guy’s drunk as hell.”

“He’s seen her when he’s sober, Pete!”

Hank kept whining. “She keeps telling me I’m no good. Over and over, ‘You’re no good, Hank.’ Where’s my car? I gotta get out of here! Where’s my car?”

It was no use. We couldn’t get him to go back up to that house.

Hank passed out on the couch in Pete’s basement. I grabbed my sleeping bag from my house and left a note for my parents, and Pete and I stayed up playing Berserk until we fell asleep on the floor in front of Hank. In the morning he was gone.

We decided that we wouldn’t tell Hank what happened to the Impala. We were pretty sure that he wouldn’t remember, and if he did he’d be too embarrassed to say anything to us about it. Chances were he’d think it was stolen or that he’d lost it in a poker game.

That was how a ’72 Chevy Impala got to the bottom of Tanner Pond. And more importantly, that was the lonely, bitter night that I watched Pete risk his life to save a sad man who would have otherwise found his way down under the ice.

It wasn’t me. I was just following along, and I was ready to run with the first snap of the ice.

* * *

I’ve been reading by the pond for only a few minutes when the Cricket sneaks up behind me with a bicycle horn and honks it right in my ear. I scowl at him. He sits down beside me and mimics my scowl face. Eyebrows dragging low, bottom lip jutting out, he sits on the ground beside me and pretends to angrily turn the pages of an invisible book. I laugh. I close the book and lay it by my side.

I wiggle my thumb and little finger in the air, then run my index finger across my outer ear, then finish by rubbing my thumb across the fingertips of my right hand. CRICKET, LISTEN TO STUCKS.

The Cricket lifts his fist and nods it.

I make the Cricket sign again, then shake my fist back and forth. I wiggle two fingers at the ground, then put my palms together and open and close them like a whale’s mouth. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

“No more this summer,” I add out loud, and he covers my mouth. He lifts his fist and shakes it back and forth.

I make the signs again. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

He again shakes his hand back and forth. He is in what my mother calls “toad mode,” meaning that he is being a pain for the sake of being a pain.

I run my thumb across my fingertips again. Using both hands I pretend to pull my chest open. STUCKS AFRAID. I follow it with the original instructions. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

Again he shakes his fist no. He wiggles his pinkie and thumb in the air, shakes his fist, and pretends to split his own chest open. CRICKET NOT AFRAID.

I want to say something, but I have no signal for it. It’s something that I have never asked him before. Unable to think up a sign and too annoyed to create a new pantomime for it, I speak out loud.

“Why?” I ask. I make the sign for his name, then shake my fist, then trace my index finger over my outer ear again. CRICKET NOT LISTENING. “Why?” I repeat out loud.

He doesn’t cover my mouth. He just looks up at me and repeats his signs. CRICKET NOT AFRAID.

I make the sign for my name, then pretend to pull my chest apart. STUCKS AFRAID. I make a tight fist in front of my chest, then pull it apart again. VERY AFRAID.

We had all walked Vivek and Emily home on the night of the sounds. We were terrified, but we figured that it was easier to be terrified in a group of five than to force any one of us to walk alone. After they were safely in their cottages, Ronnie, Robin, and I made our way back down the hill.

In the days following, Robin tells me four times that she is not going into the woods again under any circumstances, not even to Whale’s Jaw. For almost a week, no one goes into the woods, even in the daytime. Then Ronnie comes to me. I ask him what he wants, but he stutters, whispering so low I can’t hear him.

“What do you want, Ronnie?”
“Will you do a widow’s walk with me?” he asks.

“Are you serious?” I ask him.

“Yeah. Listen, I know you don’t want to. But it has to be you. Emily will try to talk me out of it. Vivek will just make a joke. I can’t trust him not to run away. Robin is too upset to go back there. But you’ll understand. You know about bad dreams. And I know that if you promise me you’ll do it, you won’t run away on me.”

“Ronnie, what happened?”

We are down at the water’s edge. I’m sitting on the shore while Nana takes her daily swim. Ronnie sits down and lowers his voice.

“I’ve been having this dream, Stucks. A bad one.”

Ronnie looks out at Nana in the water, and when he is convinced that she isn’t listening, he whispers, “I’ve never had a dream like it before. It was one of those dreams that when you wake up you’re not sure exactly where you are because it was so real.”

“I know the feeling,” I say quietly. “Tell me.”

“It was just you and me in the dream. We were in your house. I don’t know where everyone else was, but it was nighttime. But it felt like it had been night for a while, for days and days, and that everyone else … well, that they were all
gone.
And that they weren’t ever coming back. It was like—”

“The end of the world,” I say, nodding quickly. “Judgment Day. And everyone else had faced judgment ex cept you.”

“Yes! But … you didn’t seem scared. You pulled out a piece of paper and wrote numbers on the page, but not in any order. 9, 3, 8, 2, 7, 5 … Then you took a clear glass and turned it over on the paper. We were sitting across from each other, and we each reached out and placed a finger on the edge of the glass. It started to move.”

Ronnie looks around to make sure that there is no one in the bushes eavesdropping. I want to point out that the only person who does things like that is … well, Ronnie himself, but I figure it’s best not to interrupt him.

“The glass chose five numbers before it stopped moving. Then you looked at me and said, ‘Go ahead.’ There was a phone on the table. I picked it up and dialed the numbers. But there was nothing on the other end. No sound at all. I remember laughing, and I said, ‘Nobody home.’

“So we did it again, and this time it picked three numbers. You dialed this time, and you listened, and your eyes lit up. You passed the phone to me. I could hear static, and behind the static I could hear voices. Little kids talking back and forth to each other. Then we did it again, and it chose six numbers. I dialed. This time a voice answered.”

Ronnie stops and grits his teeth. His voice quakes. “It was a kid’s voice, but it was from far away, like he was on the other end of the yard and he was shouting over a storm. He said, ‘Can I come visit you?’”

I look away from Ronnie and check on Nana. She is floating blissfully in the cool pond water. Overhead in the trees, cicadas buzz in the heat.

Ronnie continues. “I said, ‘Who is this?’ And the boy’s voice said, ‘You know who this is.’ It sounded like a voice from Hell, Stucks. Worse than those noises the other night. It was like it was laughing at me. Then it said, ‘I’m coming over for a visit right now.’ I said, ‘You don’t know me.’ And it said …” Ronnie fights against his shaking voice.

“It’s okay,” I say, “just tell me about it.” I’ve felt the fear of a nightmare so strong it doesn’t fade as the day goes on. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

“It said, ‘You bled out here. I can smell you. I know what cottage you’re in.’ He said it again: ‘I can smell you.’ Then the line went dead.” Ronnie wipes his eyes and laughs nervously. “It’s the same dream every night, every night since … well … you know. Last night I woke up, and I didn’t go back to sleep. Unless we do something, I’m not going back to sleep at all. I’ll stay up all night for days if I have to.”

“Ronnie, if a widow’s walk cured bad dreams, I’d have asked you to do one with me years ago.”

“I know it’s just a dream, but I want to do it anyway. Be my watcher while I do a widow’s walk this afternoon. Please, Stucks.”

I turn away from him, check on Nana.

“You said you’d do it, remember? When I bled out there?”

I nod. “Okay,” I say.

“Just between you and me, okay? No one else needs to know.”
“Don’t worry.”

Nana flaps and splashes in the pond water. “No one else needs to know,” she sings. “No one else, no one else, no one else needs to know.…”

A half dozen thorn branches droop over the top of the stone wall around the Widow’s Stone. I gently run my hand over them. They have the feel of plastic, and the plant they sprout from is shiny, as if it has been polished. I let the branches glide through my palm. I can feel their desire to cut me. I pull Pete’s knife from my pocket, pinch one of the branches firmly with my first finger and thumb, and cut off about two feet of it. Then I realize that damaging the thorns might not be the best idea right now.

“I hope this works,” Ronnie says.

“Ronnie—”

“It’s just got to make me feel better,” he says. “That’s all, just make me feel better, let me sleep.”

Ronnie pulls out a stack of postcards held together with a rubber band.

“Postcards? You’re supposed to pick something that has meaning, Ronnie. Something of importance. If you want this to work, you have to—”

“I like them,” Ronnie explains, avoiding eye contact with me. “They’re from all over.”

Now I feel stupid. When you’ve known someone since you were really little, you sometimes forget. You just take their families for granted. You never question. So-and-so has
no father, so-and-so has two mothers, so-and-so has a brother and a sister, but they’re not related because one’s mother married the others’ father. It’s just the way it is. So I never ask Ronnie about his parents. I know that his father travels a lot for work, that sometimes his mother travels with him. Vivek said once that Ronnie almost never sees them. That’s why he spends so much time with his grandparents. Those postcards do have meaning. Maybe a little pain too. I shouldn’t have doubted them, and I feel pretty lousy about it.

Ronnie steps away from the Widow’s Stone and then pauses. “Promise me one more time that you won’t run away?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Okay,” he says, more to reassure himself than anything else. I place my hand on the top of the Widow’s Stone. Ronnie turns and starts walking.

I look at the field of thorns, all their branches intertwining in a heaving, swirling sea of pain. I imagine what it would be like to be dropped into the center of them. I wouldn’t be able to get back to the Widow’s Stone without substantial slices to my skin and clothes. I’d have to protect my eyes if I could. But I’m not sure that I could. Lifting my arm to my eyes would leave the side of my body open.…

Why am I even thinking about this?

I reach into my pocket with my free hand and pull out the ring. I rub the outside of it, feeling the gentle weave of the etching. Lately I’ve been fiddling with it more, rubbing the edge, hoping to wear the tarnish off.

A gentle breeze shifts the bushes, and one of the thorn branches rubs along my arm. I pull away. It doesn’t cut me, but it leaves tiny red lines along the skin. Being careful to keep my hand on the Widow’s Stone, I try to shrink from its reach.

Ronnie’s made it about halfway to the Hawthorns. He walks quickly and cautiously, picking his way past the thorn branches one by one. The sun’s out, and I’m watching for him, but he’s still terrified. I know because I did the walk several times myself when we were little, and it spooked me each and every time. That dream freaked him out so much, I doubt it’s any easier for him now than when we were kids.

There is something about the way Ronnie freezes on the path that stops my breathing. He has been moving too smoothly, and the way he is frozen there, his body locked awkwardly and his head turned to the side, tells me that something has gone wrong. I slide the ring back into my pocket.

I can barely hear him push my name up from his throat. He bends over. The postcards drop by his side. He turns back toward me. He is gagging. He retches on the side of the path. He tries to move forward, but the retching hasn’t stopped. He vomits again. He inches forward, too scared to realize that he is shuffling through his own puke.

I want to move forward, but my legs don’t respond.

“Stucks!” he calls out when the choking has stopped. “Stucks!”

I remove my hand from the Widow’s Stone and force myself out onto the path.

“I’m coming, Ronnie!” I shout to him. He starts to run, using his forearms to push the thorns out of his way. I feel the thorns scraping along my own arms, and I regret having used those clippers on that branch earlier. I hear their voices in the back of my head. They hiss in unison.
You took one of our fingers.… How many can you spare?

I get to Ronnie, grab his hand, and shout at him. “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

He is sweating and wheezing. He looks back down the path. “Oh, Stucks, don’t go! It’s filthy! What it did, that thing is filthy!”

“Go back to the Widow’s Stone, Ronnie,” I tell him. “But don’t you go past. Promise me you’ll stay at the Widow’s Stone. I need you to watch for me.”

Ronnie seems to get his breath, and he stands up tall. He wipes his mouth. “Okay,” he says, gathering himself. “Okay.”

We separate. He takes my place as the watcher. My steps slow to a tentative crawl. I’m worried about the thorns, but I’m more worried about what I’ll find farther on up the path. Whatever is up there, I want to glimpse it first and turn my eyes quickly away, then look back when I am ready. I don’t want to be shocked like Ronnie was.

I turn to check on Ronnie. He has one hand on the top of the stone, and he has turned back to watch me. Still cautious, I take another step forward, holding my breath and
carefully picking my way around the spot where Ronnie got sick. Keeping my eyes on the path and the thorns, I reach down and pick up the postcards. I tuck them into my waistband. I take one more step forward.

I can see it out of the corner of my eye, and I slowly turn my head to look, then quickly look away.