by Kat Ellis
I stifle a scream as someone steps out of the trees. In the glow of the flashlight she’s holding low so it won’t blind me, I see a woman wearing a smart green uniform and a smile. She’s in her late thirties, I guess, with blond hair pulled back into a knot. Pretty, in a bland sort of way.
“I thought I saw someone over here. I’m Ranger Crane. You must be Moira McCabe’s granddaughter, am I right?”
I can’t answer. Her smile slips as she pans the light over me.
“Are you okay?”
I begin shaking my head, then feel Nolan standing reassuringly at my shoulder. I paste on a blasé expression. “I’m fine,” I say. “I just dropped my phone down a hole and there was a weird noise coming from underground, like something rattling. And I found this . . .”
“A noise? What kind of noise?”
Ranger Crane crouches next to me with her flashlight. It’s a strange, bulky thing like a car battery with a handle on it, like something Jules Verne might dream up. She shines it down into the hole, her head bobbing left and right.
“I hope to heck the ground isn’t shifting again,” she says. “That’s all we need.”
I want to tell her to stop, to keep her distance, but before I can utter a word the flashlight flickers once, twice, and goes out.
“Aw, dang it,” she says. I’m sweating now, despite the chill in the air.
Ranger Crane’s face is lit up again, with a softer glow this time. She has a miniature flashlight on a silver chain around her neck. It’s like something you might pick up at Radio Shack.
She sees me looking and gives a fake-stern glare. “Don’t go telling anyone you saw this. We’re supposed to keep everything 1920s authentic while the Nightjar fans are in town for the festival. They’ll come after me with pitchforks if they catch me wearing it.”
“Who will?” I say.
She laughs. “The townsfolk. You know, like in your dad’s movie.”
I know she’s joking, but I can’t bring myself to laugh. I open the jitterbug and hold it out for her to see.
“Do you know who this might belong to?” I don’t know why I’m asking. I know the answer. Inside is a white beetle with a red pattern across its back, buggy black eyes catching the light as it wiggles its spiky legs. Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP.
Ranger Crane peers at it.
“Is that a jitterbug? Haven’t seen one of those in years . . .” She goes to take it, but I snatch it back and close the lid. Ranger Crane blinks in surprise. “You found it up here? Someone probably hung it in the Bone Tree,” she says, looking up at the dead branches of the tree above us. “Have you heard about the Bone Tree already? No? Folks usually just tie teeth up there, but I’ve known them to hang other things, too, if they had a special meaning.”
I watch the white acorns swaying in the breeze, and a part of what Ranger Crane just said slides into place. Those aren’t acorns. There are teeth hanging from the branches—hundreds and hundreds of teeth.
“But . . . why?”
“Superstition, you know? Don’t let your bones go to ground ’til you’re ready to go with ’em, as they say. And, a hundred years ago, this was the tallest tree in Harrow Lake. Mister Jitters—you hear about him? Well, the kids think that when they lose a tooth, Mister Jitters’ll catch a taste of their bones, and come out of the caves to hunt them down unless they hang the tooth from the Bone Tree.”
She laughs, but I don’t find it funny. Her words remind me of what Cora said at the museum, about how dead people aren’t buried in Harrow Lake.
“Of course, the kids who think they’re tough come up here and dare each other to call his name. If they’re really brave, they’ll put their hand in among the roots of the tree—if they make it to a count of five, then Mister Jitters is sure to come. But I haven’t heard of anyone making it to five yet. One did get the tip of his finger bitten off, but that was probably just some critter . . .”
I just put my hand in that hole. Was it five seconds? More? I don’t know . . . it felt longer.
Mister Jitters is sure to come.
I’ve been raised on horror stories, but they’ve never made me recoil like this. I want to get away from this place, this woman, the faint rattle of teeth swaying in the dead branches above us. There are so many of them . . . so many people in this town who must believe, at least a little, that their monster is real.
Why did I have to drop my damn phone?
Ranger Crane puts her hand on my arm and shakes her head gently. “It’s just a story. Nonsense, really. But maybe you should put that back where you found it, all the same.”
“I didn’t find it on the tree,” I say. “It was in the ground.”
“It was . . . oh.” She forms her lips into a thin line for a moment. “I guess that makes you a brave one.”
“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to put my hand in there.”
She taps a fingernail on the shell of the jitterbug. “Maybe somebody left this as a gift for Mister Jitters.”
I don’t care where the jitterbug came from anymore. “Could you point me in the direction of my grandmother’s house? I’ve gotten myself turned around in your well-signposted woods.” It comes out snappier than I intended, but I just want to get out of here.
She dusts off her knees. “Sure. I’ll walk you.”
We make our way through the trees, and I listen to the breathing of the cracked canopy above us and the regular tap-tap-tap as Ranger Crane’s pendant swings back and forth against her chest.
“There’s the McCabe place,” she says at last, just as a roof breaks through the trees up ahead.
“I’ll be fine from here.” I go to leave her, but she stops me.
“You know, that sound you heard was probably just a rabbit that got startled by a big old hand shooting into its burrow. Or a squirrel, maybe.”
“Sure,” I say, but I can’t imagine rabbits or squirrels or any other rodent chattering like that.
She nods efficiently. “All righty. So it’s nothing you need to go telling anyone else about, is it?”
Is she threatening me? I can’t read this woman. When I don’t answer, she hisses in a breath through her teeth.
“There’s been talk around town that there are signs of another big landslide on the way—not signs with any basis in science, you understand, just folktales and nonsense. Did you know that if you see a spiderweb spun with red thread, that means someone you know will be crushed to death?”
“I did not know that.”
Ranger Crane laughs at my dry tone. “Yeah, apparently that’s a thing. And there’ve been at least six red spiderweb sightings in the last couple of months, which of course must mean there’s a landslide coming.” She rolls her eyes. “I put it down to kids and red food dye myself. Oh, but there’s also the screaming.”
“The screaming?”
“Mr. Bryn keeps a cockerel. A couple days ago it quit crowing at dawn, and now it makes this awful screaming sound like a baby crying right after sundown. Mr. Bryn is convinced it’s an omen.”
I imagine that old man from the museum worrying over his cockerel and stifle a laugh. Ranger Crane apparently reads something else into my silence.
“Hey, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this. We get so caught up in our spooky stories here it’s easy to forget how it might sound to an outsider . . .”
She keeps talking, but I’m thinking back to the Bone Tree hanging over me, its branches full of teeth. How could anyone grow up in a town like this and not believe in monsters?
“. . . the last thing you need right now,” Ranger Crane is saying. “Still, maybe you should stay indoors when it’s dark, all right? That’s what I tell my two—not that they listen . . .”
She waits while I walk over to the front steps, then disappears back into the woods.
* * *
• • •
“I’m afraid Mr. Nox is taking a nap right now. Any message?”
“Just . . . tell him I called again.”
CHAPTER TEN
I lie in bed, turning the jitterbug over in my hands. Thin starlight bleeds in through the curtains. There’s no moon again tonight. No wonder Ranger Crane seemed so keen to get me out of the woods earlier. Maybe I was mere moments from becoming a part of the forest myself, and I never even knew it. I try to shake off the idea, but it lingers like it’s sprouted roots.
Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the jitterbug. If it was left as a gift for Mister Jitters—by Lorelei or whoever—then it probably wasn’t a great idea to steal it from him. Shit.
I kick back the covers and lie there in Lorelei’s cotton nightdress, hoping the whisper of a breeze from the open window will cool my damp skin. Grandmother must have pressed the wallpaper back into place while I was out, but now it’s started to curl again at the corner. I shut my eyes. If I can’t see it, it’s not there. I recite lines of dialogue in my head—snippets from some of my favorite movies—and splice them together so they make new scenes. I do this whenever I can’t sleep: I can watch Ellen Ripley blast Pennywise the clown out of an airlock. Pit Child’s Play’s Chucky against the fiercest resurrectees from Pet Sematary. The jumbling of worlds eventually becomes a kind of white noise, forcing my mind to shut down and let me dream instead.
It’s not working now, though. I can hear the faint rustling of the paper arching back from the wall. The whole sheet could peel away and land on me any second. Finally, I give up and open my eyes.
The wallpaper looks the same as before, peeling, but no more than it was. Just a corner of the sheet furled delicately back on itself.
Then I see it. The paper is moving. No—something under it is moving. The beetle-lines covering the wallpaper warp and shift, some thing making the paper bubble as it moves toward the peeling corner. I hear it, too. A rustling, snapping sound.
I should move, scuttle out of bed and get away from this place—or at least turn the light on—but I can’t. Can’t move, or make a sound.
A thin shadow crawls from between the sheets of wallpaper. Stretches, thin as a blade, until it’s as long as my forearm. Then it bends and starts tapping at the wall around it. Like an antenna, or the leg of some giant insect.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP. . .
I try to scream. It comes out as a moan, low in my throat. Then, as though drawn by the sound, another long shape pokes out next to the first. Oh, god. Oh, god. They’re not insect legs—they’re fingers. Long, blade-thin fingers, dancing across the wall.
Mister Jitters.
I put my arm in that hole. I took his jitterbug.
A hand slides free of the wallpaper, dragging an arm behind it. Its long fingers still tap-tap-tap away. The wall bulges around what must be a shoulder, then a head. It swivels under the paper, and I see the outline of pinprick eye sockets, a mouth gaping as though it’s about to speak.
With a violent effort, I sit bolt upright in bed, knocking something off the nightstand with a flailing arm. My hand shakes as I turn on the lamp and scramble out of bed, panting. But there’s nothing on the wall; the paper lies flat.
It was just a nightmare. I was dreaming. My nightdress sticks to my skin with cold sweat.
The nutshell lies on the floor where I knocked it a moment ago. In the lamplight, the white beetle glitters, its legs dancing with a faint tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP.
* * *
• • •
“Where are the jitterbugs?” I ask my grandmother over breakfast. My breakfast takes the form of a milky cup of coffee, into which I stir too much sugar while she fusses over the stove.
“The jitterbugs?” she says without looking up.
“They’re not in my room anymore.”
After another hour or so of lying in bed this morning, staring up at the unmoving wallpaper and feeling annoyed at myself for letting a bullshit story get to me enough that it infiltrated my dreams, I finally noticed that all the jitterbugs were gone. The shelves had been completely cleared—all except for the wooden carriage clock sitting on the highest shelf. Too high for my grandmother to reach, I imagine. The only jitterbug left is the one I found last night under the Bone Tree, now a hard lump in my pocket. After the dream I had, I should’ve thrown the damn thing away, but, when I took it from the drawer in the nightstand, it slid almost of its own accord into the pocket of my borrowed dress. Today it’s the royal-blue knit dress Little Bird wore when the townspeople chased her into the caves.
“Could the jitterbugs perhaps be in the same place you didn’t put my suitcase?”
Now she turns around. She looks annoyed. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“The jitterbugs. You moved them, didn’t you? Like you moved my suitcase.”
For a second, I think she’s going to give in and admit to hiding my stuff. But she just rubs her knuckles against her temples like I’m giving her a migraine.
“Will you please stop doing that?” she says.
I hadn’t noticed how aggressively I was stirring my coffee. The spoon clatters against the edge of the cup. I set it down in the saucer.
“You’re saying you didn’t hide my suitcase just so I’d have to wear Lorelei’s movie clothes? So I’d look more like her? Make it easier to pretend she didn’t leave you without a backward glance?”
Something like pain flashes in her eyes, but only for a second.
“But it wasn’t just me she left, was it?” she says crisply.
My fingers tighten around my cup. Grandmother glances at it, perhaps wondering if I’m going to throw scalding-hot coffee in her face.
The thought never crossed my mind, Grandmother.
“I haven’t laid eyes on your suitcase, Lola,” she says. “And I didn’t move the jitterbugs. Honestly, it’s as though you think I have nothing better to do than play silly games.” She takes off her apron and flings it on the counter. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going upstairs to lie down.”
“Wait,” I say as she moves to go. “Why did Lorelei like them so much? The jitterbugs?”
For a moment I think she won’t answer, but then her expression softens, becomes almost worried. “It’s the sound they make—Lorelei said it helped her sleep. She always was a fanciful girl, and never a good sleeper.”
“Do the jitterbugs have anything to do with Mister Jitters? That was who she drew all those pictures of, right?” Hidden beneath layers and layers of the same ugly wallpaper. Even though I’m awake now, with the sun sauntering in through the windows, I shiver at the memory of my dream.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP . . .
I take the white jitterbug out of my pocket and lay it on the table in front of me.
Grandmother’s hand shakes as she reaches for it. “Where did you get that?”
I snatch the bug away from her. She can’t have it. Her hand lands on my wrist instead. I try to pull free of her grip, but the claw is firm.
“Where did you get that jitterbug?” she repeats, sharper this time. I can tell she wants to rip it from my hand.
“I found it in the woods,” I say. “Why?”
Grandmother drags me by my sleeve through to the living room. I’m too stunned to fight her. She taps the glass of one of the mantel photos with her fingernail. It’s the one of Lorelei sitting with her father.
“That was her favorite. I thought she took it with her.”
She doesn’t mean the picture itself. A jitterbug exactly like the one I’m holding rests in Lorelei’s hand in the photo. It has the same white beetle sitting inside, the pattern on its back clearly visible, and the black eyes shining, almost alive. I run a finger over the smooth body of the bug. It’s warm, like the heat of my flesh has seeped into it. “You really think it’s the same one?”
Grandmother doesn’t answer at once.
&nbs
p; “Her father made that jitterbug for her—it was the first one she had, before she learned to whittle them for herself. That one was always her favorite, seeing as it came from him. Lord, that man doted on Lorelei from the moment she was born.”
I study the two figures in the photograph. Teenage Lorelei is perched on one of her father’s knees, his arm at her waist pulling her close. It hits me under the ribs: Nolan never sits with me like that. He doesn’t make things for me—certainly not his movies. I would love it if he made me something, even something small . . . Hell, Nolan could make me a paper airplane and I’d treasure it.
But that’s not Nolan. He doesn’t do gestures. There’s no point wishing for anything to be different.
“He spoiled that girl. And she broke his heart by taking off with the first man with a fat pocketbook.” My grandmother sneers. “And doesn’t your father just love lording that over everyone?”
The chair behind me creaks as she sinks down into it. Like the Mister Jitters puppet in the museum, collapsing as Cora grew tired of making it dance.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Grandmother doesn’t answer, just watches me with eyes like chips of ice.
I’m not embarrassed that Nolan’s wealthy. I might have been born into it, but he certainly wasn’t. I never met them, but I know Nolan’s father died when Nolan was just a kid, and his mother raised him alone while working four different jobs to cover the rent. Whatever Nolan has now, he earned.
“Sure, Nolan has money,” I say, “but he’s generous with it. Last year he gave to a bunch of different charities . . .”
“Oh, yes. He’s very generous. Sends his little checks every month so he can pat himself on the back for taking care of the old dear. As if that makes up for the fact that he stole our daughter away and then couldn’t keep her in line the way a husband should.”
“Keep her in line?”
Grandmother continues as though I haven’t spoken. “Do you know, he has his assistant call me—his assistant, mind, because he’s too important to call me himself—once a year to see how I am?” She gives a snorting laugh. “Checking whether I’m dead yet, he means.”
