At first I tried to persuade Erica to come with me, but she’d said no so often, I gave up asking. Fine. Let her mope around the house with Little Erica. It was obvious she’d rather talk to a doll than to me. Pretty insulting, I thought.
On the school bus, we sat next to each other, but we didn’t talk to each other and no one talked to us. Erica stared out the window, as if she expected to see something in the woods. I stared straight ahead, trying not to listen to the other kids laughing at the snobs from Connecticut.
One day after school I left the house in such a hurry I forgot my binoculars. I’d been watching a red-tailed hawk for a few days, and I needed the binoculars to see him in the woods. Annoyed at myself, I hurried home just in time to see my sister disappear into the woods on the other side of the house.
I stopped where I was, puzzled. Erica hated the woods—what was she up to? Maybe I should follow her and find out. Hadn’t Mr. O’Neill told me to keep an eye on her?
Keeping a good distance between us, I walked as silently as if Erica were a bird I didn’t want to frighten away. She’d taken a narrow path that meandered through the woods like a deer trail, circling around boulders and trees. Every now and then she stopped and stared into the underbrush as if she were looking for something.
Finally she came to a clearing and sat on a fallen tree. Cuddling her doll, she began whispering, just as if someone was with her—not the doll, but a person. I peered into the bushes around her, but I didn’t see anyone. At least I don’t think I did—it was more like I sensed a presence.
But no, that was crazy. All I heard was a whisper of wind prying leaves from branches. All I saw were shadows. I backed away from Erica. If she wanted to sit in the woods and hold imaginary conversations, let her. Why waste my afternoon spying on her?
Without making a sound, I crept away, retrieved my binoculars, and went in search of the red-tailed hawk.
By the time I came home, it was almost dark. Erica was sitting on the couch reading to Little Erica, exactly what she’d been doing when I’d left the house.
I lit the fire and sat beside her. “Have you been here all afternoon?”
She looked up from her book. “Of course. Where else would I be?”
“It’s such a nice day, sunny and everything, I thought you might have gone outside to play for a while.”
The doll regarded me with her usual blank stare, but Erica frowned at me. “You know I hate the woods.”
I was about to accuse her of lying but then decided against it. Maybe I’d follow her again tomorrow, just in case I’d missed something.
Suddenly Erica leaned toward me and asked one of her typical out-of-nowhere questions. “Do you ever have secrets, Daniel?”
“Sometimes. Why? Do you?”
“Maybe,” she said softly. She smiled and gazed into the fire.
“What do you mean ‘maybe’? Either you do or you don’t.”
Instead of answering, Erica began reading to the doll again. “‘Once upon a time a woodcutter had two children, a boy named Hansel and a girl named Gretel—’”
“About your secret,” I said, “the one you may or may not have. Has it got anything to do with the woods?”
“I’m reading to Little Erica now,” my sister said. “Don’t interrupt me.”
I wanted to snatch the book out of her hands and throw it into the corner and hurl the doll after it. Instead, I left my sister and the doll on the couch and went to the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. As I ate, I heard Erica reading “‘Nibble nibble, mousekin’” in a scary witch’s voice, much deeper and raspier than her normal voice. I almost got up to see if someone else was in the living room.
The Secret
The old woman waits in the woods, but you wouldn’t recognize her. She has taken the form of the girl in the cabin. She watches Erica sit down on a log, just where the dolly tells her to sit. Good. The girl is biddable. She does as she’s told.
The old woman comes closer. She smiles shyly and waits for Erica to notice her.
“Who are you?” Erica is startled, but not afraid, as she would be if the old woman had come as herself.
The old woman wears a gray plaid dress with a round collar. Her hair is red and curly. Her face is sweet and sad.
“I come to be your friend.” The old woman speaks in a soft, childish voice that soothes the girl.
“I don’t have any friends,” Erica whispers.
“You got yourself one now.” The girl sits on the log beside Erica. “That’s a mighty pretty dolly you got. Can I hold her?”
Erica holds the dolly tighter. “She’s very special.”
“Please.” The girl reaches for the dolly. “I ain’t never seen a dolly so pretty as that.”
Erica looks distrustful, but the dolly whispers, “Let her hold me, it’s all right.”
Reluctantly, Erica hands the little girl her dolly.
“Oh, I wish I had me a dolly like this one,” the little girl says.
Rocking the doll in her arms, she croons a little song. The tune is familiar, but Erica can’t make out the words.
Later, when Erica goes home, she doesn’t remember what happened in the woods. It’s a secret, even from herself.
After that, the old woman in her little-girl shape meets Erica in the woods every day. She tells her she lives with her sweet old auntie in a pretty little cabin on the tippity top of a hill. “She loves me ever so much,” the old woman says in the little-girl voice. “More’n anybody ever did.”
“More than your mommy and daddy?” Erica asks.
“My mama and daddy never loved me. They made me work hard at chores and beat me black-and-blue and made me sleep on the floor by the fireplace ’cause I was so bad.”
“My parents would never do that.”
“Oh yes, they would. Parents never love their little ones. They can’t wait to get rid of them. You’ll see. One day they’ll get fed up with you and start treating you bad, just the way mine did.”
Erica stares at her, and the little girl smiles. Things are going well. Erica believes everything the girl tells her. “They already love your brother more than you.”
“It’s true,” Erica says. “They’ve always loved Daniel best.”
“My auntie’s keeping an eye on you,” the little girl says in her sweet little, false little voice. “She loves you even though you don’t know it yet, and she aims to rescue you and bring you to her cabin, where me and you will live like sisters.”
The little girl pats Erica’s hand. “Come live with us afore they start into beating you and scolding you and making you sleep by the fire. Why, they could kill you dead one night.”
Erica draws back a little. “You’re scaring me.”
The little girl says, “There ain’t nothing to be scared of. Come away with me, and I’ll keep you safe.”
“Will I have to go to school?”
“School? No indeed. Old Auntie got no use for school. She’ll teach you all you need to know.”
Erica nods her head. Yes, she’ll come with the little girl. And stay with her and Old Auntie. And never go to school again. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But soon.
The old woman sees the brother watching from the woods. He can’t see her, but he knows someone is there. “I must go,” she whispers to Erica, and slips away into the woods.
Seven
The next day, I left the house with my binoculars and my bird book, but instead of going to the woods, I hid in the tall weeds near the house and waited. It was a colder day and windy, but in a few minutes Erica ran out the back door, darted across the yard, and disappeared into the woods.
She took the same path, turned off into the clearing, and sat on the fallen tree. Her bright blue scarf blew in the wind, and her red hair swirled.
Hiding behind a tall maple, I watched her closely. Once in a while she whispered to the doll, but for the most part she neither moved nor spoke. She sat still and stared into the woods—waiting, I thou
ght, but for what? Definitely a girl with secrets. No “maybes” about it.
The wind yanked the last of the leaves from the trees and sent them flying through the air. They rustled and sighed and sank to the ground in brown and yellow heaps. Some settled in Erica’s hair and on her shoulders. Others landed on Little Erica.
Nothing distracted my sister. Not the falling leaves. Not the squirrel chattering on a branch over her head. Not the crow cawing from the top of a dead tree. She sat so still, I thought she must be holding her breath.
Suddenly she stood up and took a step or two toward the dead tree. She held the doll tightly and whispered to her.
While I watched Erica, I glimpsed a shadow drifting toward her through the trees—dark and formless, like a wisp of fog or smoke. I couldn’t tell what it was—an old woman, a little girl, an animal—something small and dangerous, I could sense it. Behind it was something else, something worse, a shadowy, bony thing, taller than a man.
“Erica!” I shouted. “Stop, don’t go near it! Run!”
My sister turned to me. “Daniel! What are you doing here?”
The shadow, or whatever it was, vanished, but I grabbed Erica and started pulling her away. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see? There was something there!”
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go!”
“No. You’re coming home, right now!”
“My doll,” she cried, “my doll.”
Little Erica lay on the ground where my sister had dropped her, her face in the leaves.
“I have to get her!” Erica twisted and turned, kicking me, flailing her arms. “She wants her! She’ll take her!”
“Who wants her?” I yelled. “Who’ll take her?”
Erica didn’t answer, but she struggled even harder to get away from me, crying and screaming. Holding her was like holding a cat that doesn’t want to be held. She didn’t have claws or sharp teeth, but she managed to bite me twice and scratch my face.
But I didn’t let her go. And I didn’t pick up the doll.
Out of the woods at last, I saw Mom and Dad getting out of the van. When they saw me hauling Erica through the weeds, they hurried toward us.
“What’s going on?” Dad shouted. “Are you all right?”
With a burst of strength, Erica broke away and ran to Mom and began a sobbing account of what happened. “I was playing in the woods,” she cried, “and all of a sudden Daniel grabbed me and started dragging me home. He said I wasn’t allowed to be in the woods. He made me leave Little Erica there—she’s lying on the ground all by herself.”
Dad and Mom looked at each other. “You take care of Daniel,” Mom said to him. “I’ll get Erica into the house. She’s hysterical.”
“No.” Erica began struggling again. “I have to get Little Erica. I can’t leave her there!”
“It’s almost dark,” Dad said. “We’ll get the doll tomorrow.”
“No, no! I’ll never see her again.” Erica thrashed about wildly, more like a cat than before.
“Take her to the house, Ted,” Mom cried. “I can’t hold her!”
Dad got a firm grip on Erica, picked her up, and carried her toward the house. Her shrieks finally stopped when the back door closed behind Dad.
Mom turned to me. “What’s this about? Why wouldn’t you let her get the doll?”
“There was something in the woods, something dark and scary.” Words tumbled out of my mouth. I didn’t think about what I was saying. I didn’t try to stop myself. “I had to get her away from it.”
Mom looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I saw it. I was scared. I thought it was going to grab Erica. She was just standing there, like she was paralyzed or something.”
Mom put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “Daniel, how often do I need to tell you? No one is going to take you or Erica. No one is going to disappear.”
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I wanted to believe Mom. I hadn’t seen anything in the woods. Neither had Erica. It was all my imagination. Selene Estes had disappeared, but she hadn’t been taken by Bloody Bones. He was a legend, he wasn’t real. I couldn’t have seen him.
But no matter what I told myself, I knew I’d seen something. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know what it was, but it had been there.
After Erica cried herself to sleep, I talked Dad into going to the woods with flashlights to look for the doll. I didn’t want to leave the house, but I felt bad about leaving Little Erica in the woods. That doll was just a hunk of plastic to me, but to Erica she was almost a real person.
When we opened the back door, a gust of wind blew leaves into the kitchen. They skittered across the floor and settled in corners as if they’d been waiting to come inside.
It took all of Dad’s strength to pull the door shut behind us. The night was biting cold. An almost full moon lit the field.
At the edge of the woods, we turned on our flashlights. The wind tossed the trees, and their shadows danced over the path, crossing and crisscrossing the ground, making it hard to see.
I stayed close to Dad and aimed the flashlight at the ground. Nothing looked familiar. It was as if we’d taken a different path, one you could find only at night. I heard noises in the undergrowth. I imagined creatures you’d never see in daylight scurrying through the dead leaves. I kept my eyes on the path so I wouldn’t see anything in the shadows on either side of me.
After we’d walked for half an hour or so, Dad stopped. His flashlight probed the dark, picking out one tree, then another. An owl was caught in the beam for a moment, its eyes huge and shining. Without giving me time to identify him, he flew soundlessly into the woods.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Dad asked.
“I think maybe we passed the clearing,” I admitted. “I don’t remember it being this far.”
“I told you we should wait until morning to look for that doll.”
I shone my flashlight behind us. “It all looks the same in the dark.”
“So I noticed,” Dad said.
We turned around and walked back the way we’d come. Dad studied every tree, every boulder, every fallen log.
He asked the same questions over and over. “Is this it? Does that tree look familiar? Do you think we’re close?”
My answer was always the same. “I don’t know.”
After a while, Dad came up with new questions. “Did you scare Erica on purpose? Why didn’t you stop and let her get the doll? Were you teasing her? Bullying her?”
“No,” I said. “No. I saw something, Dad. I thought—”
He shook his head. “You saw something. All this because you saw something. What’s wrong with you? I’ve been all over these woods and never seen anything out of the ordinary.”
Bumbling and stumbling ahead of me, Dad thrashed at dry weeds and dead vines with a stick. Everything was my fault—my fault Erica was hysterical, my fault the doll was missing, my fault we couldn’t find the clearing, my fault we were wandering around in the woods freezing our butts off.
“I give up,” Dad said. “The doll’s gone, and your sister is heartbroken. You should feel really great about that.”
Dad had never talked to me this way. He got mad so easily now. So did Mom. Erica was unhappy and secretive and strange. I was miserable in school. And lonely. Nothing was right.
Without speaking to each other, Dad and I left the woods and trudged across the field. In the cold and windy dark, the house looked warm and inviting. Lights shone from the windows, smoke rose from the chimney, but it was like a mirage. Up close, inside the house, the warmth and happiness vanished.
No one spoke at breakfast. Mom slammed bowls of cold cereal down in front of Erica and me. She and Dad had already eaten and were getting ready to leave for work.
Before she left, Mom hugged Erica. “Please don’t look so sad, sweetie. You and Daniel can look for Little Erica when you get hom
e from school. In the daylight, you’re sure to find her.”
Erica didn’t say anything. She sat with her head down, her cereal untouched, tears trickling down her cheeks.
“Erica, I promise I’ll find her,” I said. “I don’t know what got into me. I thought—”
“That’s enough, Daniel,” Mom said. “Forget about what you thought you saw in the woods. You’re just making matters worse.”
“But Mom—”
Outside, Dad blew the horn, already annoyed.
“I have to leave.” Mom grabbed her purse and fumbled with the zipper on her parka. The horn blew again.
“All right, all right,” Mom muttered. To me she said, “Find the doll. Erica’s very upset. She cried all night.”
The door slammed shut, and the van drove away, its tires spraying gravel. I took Erica’s untouched cereal and put our bowls and glasses in the sink. “We have to leave in ten minutes,” I reminded her.
She nodded, but she didn’t move from the table.
“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth?”
No response. I did what I had to do in the bathroom and returned to find Erica sitting exactly where I’d left her.
I took her parka and mine off the hook. “Here, put this on.”
Erica got up slowly and allowed me to help her with her jacket. “You should at least comb your hair,” I told her. “You look terrible.”
“Who cares what I look like?” Erica pulled on her mittens and a knit cap Mom had made for her. “Everyone at school hates me.”
“Where are your schoolbooks?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked around and saw her book bag on the floor by the front door. From its weight, I knew her books were inside. “Did you do your homework?”
“No.” Erica slipped the straps over her shoulder and followed me outside. The wind was cold and damp and smelled of winter.
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