Watcher in the Woods

by Robert Liparulo

  The boy saw him, spat on the floor, and smiled. He started toward David.

  David ran for the cafeteria door and hit the bar that opened it. He would have been better off slamming into a brick wall. He banged his cast on the door—again!—and bounced off. The doors were locked.

  Man, they shut down early around here, he thought.

  He scrambled to his feet. Clayton and Joe were ambling slowly toward him, knowing he was cornered, savoring his fear. The only other exit David knew about was on the far end of the hallway, past the boys who wanted to pound him to a pulp. He was near the short leg of hallway that had been his introduction to the building’s interior—the first he had seen of the school when he had portaled from the linen closet to the locker.

  The locker, number 119. It was right there, not fifty feet away. He could probably reach it before Clayton and Joe got to where they could see him go into it. Did he dare?

  He thought about Clayton—madder than ever, bloody lip and all.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision.

  He darted into the short hallway, directly toward the center locker, the locker that was the way out of this mess.

  From around the corner, Clayton called, “That’s a dead end, King David! You’re stupid, just like your dad.”

  As he approached the locker, David’s eyes focused on the latch. Please, please, please, he thought. Don’t be locked. He saw that there was no lock on it yet, and his heart was thankful for the break. His sneakers squeaked to a stop in front of it. He had the latch lifted and the door opened before the momentum of his body had slowed. It was empty.

  “Ollie, ollie oxen free,” Clayton called.

  Quickly he looked in their direction. They hadn’t come around the corner yet. David climbed in and pulled the door closed behind him.

  CHAPTER forty - one

  TUESDAY, 3 : 21 P . M .

  David felt the sides of the locker move away from his shoulders. Instead of metal and pencil shavings, he smelled wood and fresh laundry. Instead of a thin steel floor under his feet, which buckled a little when he shifted his weight, he was standing on solid floorboards. Even the quality of the darkness had changed, reflecting the difference between the light that came through the locker vents and the dimmer illumination of his home’s upstairs hallway as it seeped through the crack under the door. He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, pulling in a deep breath. As he released it, he released the tension of knowing he was about to get pounded. He smiled at the thought of Clayton and Joe coming around the corner and not finding him.

  The possibility of their having witnessed his vanishing inside locker 119 brought a tinge of concern back to his stomach. But compared to the beating Clayton had promised, it was a concern he could live with. He would not be able to avoid Clayton forever, but at least this gave him time to figure out what to do about the school bully.

  He shut the linen closet door and glanced around. Home. He had never been there alone before. It was a little creepy, the silence, the stillness. The only light came from the sun, filtered through the trees outside and the bedroom windows. It gave the house an unlived-in, museumlike feel.

  He bit his bottom lip. Dad was waiting for him at school—honking for him to come out. He did not know about the portal from school to home. After Mom had been taken and Dad had come clean about having lived in the house before and knowing its secrets—though apparently not this one—he and Xander should have told him about the linen closet. David wasn’t sure why they hadn’t, except that it seemed everything had been moving a thousand miles a minute since Mom’s kidnapping. They just hadn’t had time.

  He felt a pang of guilt, knowing there were other reasons as well: David and Xander liked knowing something about the house Dad didn’t, and what if they wanted to use the portal sometime? They didn’t want Dad restricting them or jumping all over them. And that they had kept it a secret this long would make telling Dad about it that much harder.

  There was no way Xander would say anything, no way he would even suspect that David had used the portal now. He and Dad would just keep waiting for him. When he didn’t come out, they would probably search the school. All the while, Toria would be waiting at her elementary school. Dad would be worried sick.

  David would have to go back through and meet Dad at the school. Of course, he’d need to wait until he was sure Clayton and Joe had given up looking for him. That would give him time to think of an excuse for being late.

  A murmuring reached his ears. It had the rhythm and alternating tones of human conversation. He wondered if someone had left a radio on. Dad liked to listen to what he called “talking heads” in the mornings.

  David crept down the hall to the banister that overlooked the foyer. He leaned over the railing but could no longer hear the voices. Something creaked, and he realized it was overhead—from the third-floor hallway. His heart began to race as he thought of the big, bare footprints they had found in the house and the man who had taken Mom. Had he returned? Or was it someone else?

  He detected the murmuring again: a deep rumbling of spoken words, followed by more words in a slightly higher tone. Two people!

  The footprints they had found had all been similar. They had assumed that someone—as in one person—had been in the house. But David was hearing two voices! He crept farther down the hall past the master bedroom door on his left. For just a moment he was terribly sure that he had misjudged where the creak and the voices had come from. After all, how could you tell in a house that played with sounds the way children played with marbles?

  He was frozen in front of the master bedroom’s open door, sure that if he turned to look, two people would be looking back at him. Then a man said something in a sharp tone. It was not as near as the bedroom, and David felt relief. He turned his head and saw no one in the room. He continued to the end of the hallway. Here, a second hallway branched toward the back of the house. The secret panel at the end was hinged open. He tiptoed toward it. The door to what was now the MCC came up on the right. But the voices were clearer now—and definitely coming from upstairs.

  David reached the secret panel and leaned through the opening.

  A rumbling voice drifted to him from the upstairs hallway. He furrowed his brow in concentration. He did not understand the words he was hearing.

  As though reading his thoughts, a different voice said, “In English. If I ever need your help outside this house, in this time, you will need to speak the language of the day.”

  As deep as this English-speaking voice was, the other man’s was deeper. It rumbled like boulders in an avalanche, but much slower. It said, “Not . . . easy.”

  “I know. We’ll work on it. I have another mission for you.”

  David heard the rustling of paper.

  “This man . . . see, here? Must not reach his destination.”

  The boulder-voice said, “Want . . . kill?”

  “Of course. Do what you do best.”

  Boulder-man grunted.

  “You’ll find him here . . . in this world. Look for the—”

  Trying to hear, David stepped through the secret panel. His cast thunked against the door. He froze in place and held his breath. Silence. The men upstairs had stopped talking. Then came the sudden sound of footsteps—two sets of them, moving fast, growing louder.

  David spun around, already moving out of the hidden panel’s threshold. His cast hit the door again, louder this time. He didn’t care. He shoved his shoulder into it. It flew open and crashed into the hallway wall. He was at the junction of the upstairs hallways when he heard a clattering of shoes on the stairs behind him. A more muffled pounding made him think of the barefoot giant who had taken Mom. A man with shoes, a man without: David had no desire to meet either one.

  He moved as fast as he could, past the master bedroom, the landing, Toria’s room, the bathroom. Three doors lay ahead: his and Xander’s room, the spare bedroom, and the linen closet. He had to reach the linen closet before his pursue
rs rounded the corner. He gritted his teeth and willed his feet to move faster. He reached the closet door, opened it, and stopped.

  At the far end of the hallway, Taksidian came racing around the corner. He saw David and paused. The only sounds were David’s panicked breathing and the footsteps of the barefoot man hurrying to catch up.

  Taksidian said, “Boy!”

  David scrambled into the closet and slammed the door. He felt the air change around him, the walls press in.

  Come on, come on! he thought.

  When light appeared before him, forming itself into the vents of the locker door, he pushed it open to step through.

  It was only at this moment that he even considered the possibility of Clayton still looking for him in the short hallway.

  Who cares? he thought. Clayton or Taksidian? No contest.

  Still, it would be a disaster if Clayton found out about—

  Hands grabbed his shirt and yanked him out of the locker.

  CHAPTER forty - two

  TUESDAY, 3 : 34 P . M .

  “What are you doing?” Xander said. Gripping David’s shirt, he gave him a shake. “What were you doing in there?”

  David looked back at the open locker and said, “Taksidian’s right behind me. He saw me go into the closet.”

  Xander’s jaw tightened. “What? Why did you go through?”

  “Clayton—”

  “Never mind!” Xander said. He shoved David aside and reached for the locker door.

  “Wait!” David said. “Does it work if the door’s left open? What if he can’t follow me here if we don’t shut it?”

  Xander flashed an expression at David that was part confusion, part frustration. He backed away from the locker. “And what if he just appears in the locker?” He snapped his fingers. “Okay, okay, I have an idea. Wait here.” He ran out of the short hallway and around the corner.

  “Xander!” David yelled. “Xander!”

  “Wait there a sec!” He sounded pretty far away. “If Taksidian shows up—run!”

  David backed away from the locker. He kept his eyes on its dark interior. Did something move in there? He squinted. Nah, just shadows. He heard footsteps, and his stomach cramped. Could sounds come through before a person did?

  Then Xander came jogging around the corner. Reaching the locker, he said, “Okay,” and slammed the door closed.

  “Xander, no!” David said.

  “I got it, I got it.” Xander slipped a combination lock through the hole in the latch. He smiled at David. “See?”

  Bang!

  Something slammed against the locker door from the other side.

  Xander jumped, and David screamed.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  David started to run, but Xander grabbed his arm to stop him. Xander whispered, “It’s locked. He can’t get through.”

  “He could break the lock,” David said.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Xander pressed his lips together. He stepped close to the locker and held his hand up to it, but didn’t actually touch it. He said, “Leave us alone.”

  The banging stopped. Xander looked at David. David shrugged.

  A voice came through the door. It was deep and echoey from the smooth metal walls inside. “Leave the house, and I’ll let you be.”

  The words chilled David’s skin. He stepped forward and said, “We want our mother back.”

  Silence. Then: “I don’t have her.”

  David said, “Did you take her?”

  More silence . . . longer. David was about to repeat his question when Taksidian said, “You should know by now, nothing about that house is as simple as that.”

  Xander slammed his fist against the locker door. “Did you take her or not?”

  They waited for a reply. And waited.

  David yelled, “Do you know about our mother?”

  After a minute of silence, Xander whispered, “I don’t think he’s in there.”

  “How could he leave? I thought you had to open and shut the door?”

  Xander shook his head. “Maybe he just made his point: nothing is as simple as that.”

  David said, “Want to look?”

  “No way.”

  David stepped past him and pressed his ear against the door. He squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of a bang! suddenly breaking his eardrum. He heard nothing inside. No breathing, no metal buckling under shifted weight. He squinted up into the vents. Only blackness.

  “If he’s not in there, he’s in our house,” Xander said.

  “With the big barefoot guy,” David agreed. To Xander’s puzzled expression, he said, “I’ll tell you later. Dad needs to hear it too.”

  Xander nodded toward the locker. He said, “Is there stuff in there? Books, a jacket, like someone’s using it?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  Xander stepped closer. He licked his lips, then began slowly turning the dial on the combination lock.

  “What are you doing?” David hissed.

  “We don’t know if this locker has been assigned or not. Either way, a lock will draw attention to it. And we had to give them our combinations, in case they want to open them and not use bolt cutters. I don’t want any school officials even thinking about this locker. And I definitely don’t want them thinking about me and this locker.”

  “Like someone’s going to take the time to test every combination they have to see whose lock it is,” David said.

  “If they figure out the locker does weird things, they will,” Xander said, leaning closer to the dial. The lock snapped open.

  Before he could slip it off the latch, David grabbed Xander’s fingers and the lock. He whispered, “What if he’s in there?”

  “Get ready to run.”

  With the care and slowness of a demolition expert snipping the wires of a bomb, Xander maneuvered the lock out of the hole in the latch. As soon as it was clear, he backpedaled away. David matched his steps, never taking his eyes off the locker door.

  They waited. Finally, Xander nudged him. He gestured with his head and started for the bend in the hallway. They went around it and headed toward the double doors at the far end, snapping their eyes over their shoulders to make sure no one was following.

  When it seemed safe to talk again, Xander said, “There were two kids roaming around when I came in looking for you. Are they part of this?”

  David said, “I was trying to hide from them.”

  “In the locker?”

  David nodded.

  “And you ran into Taksidian? Your luck just seems to get better and better, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell me about it,” David said.

  By the time they reached home, David had told his father about the linen closet portal, his passage through it that afternoon, and his encounter with Taksidian. Xander confessed his role in keeping the linen closet secret and helped David explain the part about talking to Taksidian through the locker door.

  Dad stopped the SUV at the end of the street in front of their house. He sat there with the engine idling, peering through the windshield. Xander turned in the front seat to exchange a worried look with David. Even Toria understood the significance of it all and remained quiet.

  “Well,” Dad said finally. “I can’t say I’m happy about your keeping the closet a secret, but I understand.” He reached out and gripped Xander’s shoulder. “And I suppose I don’t have the best track record for honesty myself right now. But no more secrets, okay?”

  Xander nodded.

  Dad threw his arm over the back of the seat and gazed at David. “Okay?”

  “Um . . . Dad?” David said, wondering how his father was going to take the news of his sons getting shot at on some Civil War battlefield. “Last night—”

  “I woke him up again,” Xander interrupted. He gave David a quick scowl—there and gone. “We . . . looked for that guy again who was watching the house.” He smiled, a little too broadly. “We didn’t see anybody.”

  Dad
looked from Xander to David, back to Xander.

  He knows something’s up, David thought, miserable.

  But instead of quizzing them, Dad simply nodded.

  David leaned forward and turned his head to peer at the house. “What if they’re still in there?”

  “Daddy?” Toria said, sounding frightened.

  Dad looked through the window at the house. “Okay. We’ll search the house together.”

  “With knives?” Xander suggested.

  “No!” Dad said, pointing at his oldest son. “We’ll just . . . grab something to defend ourselves when we get in there. No knives.” He killed the engine, and they all got out.

  As Dad unlocked the front door, David edged close to him.

  “Dad?” He touched his father’s arm. When he got no answer he said, more insistently, “Dad!” and gave him a push.

  “What, Dae?”

  Instead of answering, he pointed. Thirty or forty feet beyond the side of the house, a man stood in the woods. He wore a dark overcoat like Taksidian’s, but it wasn’t Taksidian.

  “What the—?” Dad said. Without taking his eyes off the stranger, he descended the porch steps.

  “Dad . . .” Xander said.

  “I’m taking care of it, Xander,” his Dad replied.

  Xander said, “No, Dad, look.”

  Dad looked up at Xander; then his eyes followed Xander’s pointing finger toward the opposite side of the house. There, deep in the woods, stood another man. Dad looked again at the first stranger and took a step toward him. He called out, “You’re on private property! I’m calling the police.” He went to the door and pushed it open. “Come on, kids.”

  “Who are those men, Daddy?” Toria asked.

  “Just people trying to scare us.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. Xander, shut the door. Make sure it’s locked. Let’s take a look around.”

  “Are you gonna call the cops?” David asked.

  Dad frowned at him. “Probably not. I’m not sure anyone in this town is on our side.”

  CHAPTER forty - three