Into the Woods (Anomaly Hunters, Book One)

by J. S. Volpe

  “This is awesome.”

  “Wait till you see the third floor.”

  “There’s more?” Cynthia said.

  “You’ve seen only about half the total collection. A lot of the really outré items are upstairs.”

  They returned to the stairs and headed up to a small, square room that had doors in the north, west, and south walls. The east wall was blank.

  “How come it’s a square?” Calvin asked. “On the first and second floors, the area around the stairs was circular.”

  “The one in the basement is square, too,” Mr. May said. “So there is a weird sort of symmetry: square, circle, circle, square. Then the tower, crowning it all.”

  “What does it mean, though?” Cynthia said.

  He shrugged. “Who knows? No doubt it had some occult meaning to Turner, but I’ve never been able to determine precisely what.”

  Mr. May led them through the south door and into a large room that contained the now-familiar wooden shelves as well as many freestanding items too large to fit on the shelves. This room’s contents included a full suit of armor; a snow-white animal pelt; an old photograph of a group of men in old western garb standing in front of a dead Pterodactyl that was strung up on the wall of a barn; a jar full of white sand; a harpsichord; a painted plaster statue of a creature that looked like a cross between a reptile and a huge bat; a comic book titled Spooky Stories; a silver ring sporting a large, blood-red ruby; and an oil drum on a wooden pallet in a corner of the room.

  “Hey, Cyn,” Calvin said, pointing at the latter item. “Is that what you saw being delivered that one time?”

  She followed his finger, then her eyes lit up.

  “It is!” She strode over to the drum to look at it more closely.

  “What?” Mr. May said.

  “I saw this being delivered here a few years ago.”

  “Really?” He sighed. “I suppose I’ve let my caution slip a bit of late.” He frowned. “Now that I think about it, I do recall Mike saying something about a teenage girl in the area when he dropped it off. I had no idea it was you.”

  “Mike?” Cynthia asked. “Was that the guy with the sunglasses?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is he, a fellow anomaly investigator or something?” Calvin asked.

  “Not exactly. Just an old friend who sometimes helps me out with procuring and shipping things since I am no longer as mobile as I once was.” He shot a smile at Cynthia. “I guess I can see why you were so suspicious of me. I can only imagine what you thought when you saw mysterious metal barrels being delivered to your reclusive old neighbor’s house in the dead of night.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a laugh. She ran a hand over the drum’s top. “What’s in it anyway?”

  “The partly decomposed remains of an unknown life-form that washed ashore on a beach in Brazil. None of the biologists who examined it could figure out what it was, so in a truly astonishing display of scientific laziness they wrote it off as a partially digested jellyfish that had been vomited up by a shark or a whale. I had to pay a pretty penny to get a hold of it, then have it preserved properly and shipped all the way up here. Back in the old days, I would have traveled down there myself and saved half the expenses, but…” A gesture at his cane and a rueful grimace completed the thought for him. He turned toward the door. “Now come. There’s more to see.”

  The next room presented the same eclectic jumble of items, among them an antique telephone; a cylindrical block of marble carved with odd symbols; an assortment of human skulls, bones, and teeth, including one fully articulated skeleton sporting bulbous osseous growths; a pair of dusty, sharp-toed cowboy boots with rundown heels; a black leather briefcase on the side of which was a yellow symbol shaped like a Y in a circle; a few mangled pieces of an old silver Porsche Spyder; and a refrigerator.

  “Is the refrigerator anomalous, or does it contain stuff?” asked Calvin.

  “It contains perishable items,” Mr. May said. He opened the refrigerator door, revealing rows of metal canisters; glass vials containing a variety of substances, including blood, urine, and semen; and, in the freezer unit, a large block of ice in the heart of which was a mass of some red gelatinous substance.

  “What’s that stuff in the ice?” Calvin asked.

  “Laboratory tests identified it as raspberry jam.”

  “What’s so weird about raspberry jam?” Cynthia said.

  “Nothing, except that the Antarctic ice in which it was found has been dated as being over forty thousand years old.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

  “But how did raspberry jam get inside forty-thousand-year-old ice?” Calvin said.

  “I haven’t a clue. Nobody does. That’s the point.” He headed for the door. “Now come along. We have one last room to see.”

  The third and final room on the third floor was the biggest Collection room of all. Among the many items on display were a skull carved from a single block of crystal; a typewriter-sized machine bristling with dials, knobs, and wires; a shriveled, green, faintly luminous human hand; a small metal sphere with three grooves around the middle; a football-sized blue egg with yellow speckles; an ebony box with a stylized gold Z on the lid; a black glass orb the size of a grapefruit; brittle brown fragments of an Ancient Egyptian papyrus preserved in a small glass case; and a black coffin propped up in one corner of the room.

  “Um, there’s nothing in that, is there?” Cynthia asked, pointing at the coffin.

  “Only my pet zombie,” Mr. May said.

  Cynthia breathed out a small, uncertain laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Yes. It’s empty. Though it supposedly once housed a vampire, which is why I have it here.”

  Calvin cocked his head. “You believe in vampires?”

  “I neither believe nor disbelieve. I choose to maintain an attitude of utter, unapologetic agnosticism. I have never seen a vampire (as far as I know), but I have seen countless other things that supposedly don’t exist or can’t happen. The universe is a far, far stranger place than most people suspect. Wonders and mysteries abound for those with eyes to see. Alas, too many people lack those eyes, or lack the courage to use them. They prefer to believe what they’re told and not to ask too many questions. Life is safer and easier that way. But there are those of us who aren’t content with that, who think their own thoughts and go their own ways and wish to experience the mysteries of the universe in all their mad and fecund variety.”

  “Yeah!” Calvin said, nodding vigorously, his mouth stretched in a huge grin. He was bursting with excitement. He felt as if the remarkable thing he had been waiting for all his life had finally happened.

  Cynthia’s response was more restrained. She nodded thoughtfully and said, “This is all really cool and everything, but I’m not entirely clear how all of this connects up with Emily.”

  Mr. May nodded. “That’s what we need to discuss next. The time has come to put the pieces together and develop a plan of action. If, that is, you still wish to proceed. The two of you came here yesterday thinking I was behind Emily’s disappearance. Well, now you know (I hope) that I am not the culprit. But you also know that the situation may be far more complex and unusual than you first thought. If you intend to continue investigating—and I hope you do; the two of you have the makings of excellent investigators—then I can help you. I am no longer young and spry and able to gallivant about in search of answers. But you are. And all my knowledge and resources and decades of investigatory experience are at your disposal, if you want them. Bear in mind, though, that the police and FBI won’t be terribly happy if they find us sniffing around on our own. Technically that would qualify as interfering with a police investigation, and that’s no small crime.”

  “What about you?” Calvin said. He waved a hand at the Collection around them. “If things go wrong, you’ve got a lot more to lose than we do.”

  “I apprecia
te your concern, but I can take care of myself. Over the years I’ve faced down much worse foes than the May Police, or even the FBI. But in a way, you do in fact have more to lose than I do: your futures. My life is nearly over, but yours are only just beginning. I want you to be fully aware of the stakes we’re playing for and the risks we might face. And not just from the police, either. There are also the unknown forces behind the tragedies that have played out in this area over the last two hundred years. Keeping all this in mind, do you still wish to continue?”

  “Of course,” Cynthia said. “I’m not backing down now.”

  “Me either,” Calvin said.

  Mr. May nodded. “Good. Then follow me, and we’ll begin.”

  Chapter 14

  See Emily Play (II)

  1

  “I quit!” John snapped, flinging away the page of math problems and slumping back against the front of the couch. He and Anna sat on the floor in his living room. The carpet around them was strewn with half a dozen similar pages. “This is stupid. I didn’t even get assigned it anyway. I wasn’t there. I don’t see why I should bother.”

  “Yeah, but you know Miss Dryer,” Anna said. “She’s just gonna have you do it when you come back to school.”

  John rolled his eyes. “Who cares anyway? I mean, Emily’s…you know, she’s out there somewhere. We should all be trying to find her instead of doing stupid math.”

  “People are looking for her. The police and the FBI. We just have to wait and let them do their job. Besides”—she held up the paper he had tossed away—“this’ll help take our minds off everything. And it’s stuff we should know.”

  John snorted.

  “Look, John, I know how you’re feeling. I’m scared for her too. But we can’t just sit around and stew. We need to do stuff. We need to keep busy.”

  John kept his gaze fixed on the carpet, but he could see her staring at him out of the corner of his eye, a small, hopeful smile on her face. It annoyed him how Anna always unquestioningly sided with the schools and the government and society’s whole intricate network of silly rules and regulations that forced people to do stupid things they didn’t want to do. People who forced other people to do things they didn’t want to do were bullies, weren’t they? And bullies were bad, weren’t they?

  For Anna to support this bullyish system was kind of ironic, seeing as how it had been their opposition to a bully that had brought her and John and Emily together in the first place…

  2

  It happened during recess the third week of second grade. It was a pleasant sunny summer-like day, and John was squatting in a quiet corner of the playground watching little black ants stream in and out of their sandy holes in the dirt. Most of the other students were on the main paved area of the playground some ways off, screaming and yammering and running about and doing all the hectic noisy things they usually did. The only person near John was Emily Crow, who was jumping rope in a grassy area on the other side of some bushes. Every now and then he heard her chanting rhymes as she jumped, most of them idiosyncratic variations of rhymes he had heard other, more normal girls chanting, with absurd, gruesome, and/or fantastical words substituted for the more traditional ones.

  John knew who Emily was—she was in his class after all—but he had never talked to her and didn’t know a lot about her. He knew more about her family than he did about her. This was mainly thanks to Aunt Colleen, who had kind of a bee in her bonnet about local history. One time when Aunt Colleen was picking him up after school, she spotted Emily Crow coming out of the building behind him and then spent the whole drive home prattling on about the Crow family. John had tried to tune most of it out like he usually did when she started going on about stuff like that, but he had caught just enough to learn that the Crows used to be big deals around town because they made beer. “Why, without the brewery,” Aunt Colleen had gushed, “May would probably be just a single intersection surrounded by five miles of cornfields.” John got the impression that only people who knew much about the past cared about the Crows anymore. And most people didn’t care about the past.

  John himself didn’t care about the beer or the old dead guys who made it or any of that stuff, but he was surprised to find that he was starting to grow interested in Emily Crow. Like him, she was smart and strange, and she often played alone. He felt a weird kind of thrill to find someone else on the sidelines like him, someone he identified with, and he felt an even weirder thrill that this person was a girl. As he listened to her recite her latest goofy rhyme (this one had begun: “Late last night and the night before, twenty-nine hobbits were barfing on my floor…”), he considered going over to talk to her, but he didn’t want to bother her, and he wasn’t really sure what to say anyway.

  A large shadow fell over him. Or rather, one large shadow and three smaller shadows.

  John knew without looking up that the large shadow belonged to Buddy Harris. Those rotund curves could belong to no one else in school. Buddy Harris was the class bully, a collection of cruelties and crudities animating a huge blubbery mass that weighed nearly twice that of any other kid in the second grade. His mouth was twisted into a permanent smirk, one that didn’t waver even when he was being scolded by the teacher, or when Principal Powell was suspending him, or when someone was slugging him in the face, like Ritchie Givens did last year (Ritchie wound up getting the crap pounded out of him, of course). Above that smirk was a pair of dark, beady eyes that looked horrifyingly blank, like a doll’s or a shark’s.

  Buddy was always accompanied by a trio of smaller, thinner jerks named Scott, Luke, and Nathan. John could never remember which was which. Not that it mattered. They were just interchangeable underlings, like the bad guys’ henchmen on the old Batman TV show.

  John had never run afoul of Buddy, probably because John was quiet and didn’t attract much attention. But for some reason John had attracted Buddy’s attention today.

  “What’re you doing?” Buddy said.

  “Nothing,” John said, standing up. If they discovered he was watching the ants, Buddy would just stomp on them.

  “Yeah? Nothing? You’re really just sitting over here doing nothing?” Buddy’s tone was mocking, snotty.

  “Pretty much,” John said as calmly and pleasantly as possible. He didn’t want to fight. If a fight started he knew he would get his ass kicked by Buddy and his henchmen, none of whom had a problem with unfair fights. John wouldn’t have minded a fight—even an ass-kicking—if it had been in pursuit of something worthy. But a fight based on nothing more than the caprice of some surly fatboy was utterly stupid.

  It was about five minutes till the end of recess. Under the circumstances, five minutes was a long time, but if John could keep Buddy distracted until then he could avoid this senseless confrontation. After that, Buddy’s dull wit and poor memory ensured he would probably forget all about his inexplicable beef against John well before school let out. But what would be a decent distraction?

  “Hey, I heard a good joke the other day,” John said. “Wanna hear it?”

  “No,” Buddy said. “I already got a pretty good joke standing right in front of me.”

  John felt a sinking feeling. Clearly Buddy was determined to start something no matter what.

  Still, maybe there was a way out of the situation. Maybe it would be best to be direct about everything. Had anyone ever tried that with Buddy?

  “Why do you want to start something?” John said. “What’s the point?”

  Buddy blinked at him for a moment, apparently taken aback by the question. Then he scowled. “I don’t need a point. I just feel like it, that’s all.” Behind him, one of the henchmen chuckled with approval.

  “But why do you feel like it?” John asked.

  “Why do you feel like it?” Buddy repeated in a high-pitched mocking voice. Buddy grabbed the front of John’s T-shirt in one pudgy fist. “Cuz I do, dickbreath.”

  “But you must have a reason. You—”

  “The reason is
, you’re ugly and stupid.”

  Evidently, rational discussion just didn’t work with some people. John felt a rush of anger and injustice that he was about to get beaten up over nothing at all.

  The hell with it, he decided; he might as well make it over something.

  “I heard your mom fucked Principal Powell last night.”

  Buddy gawped at him in surprise. Over his husky shoulders, his henchmen exchanged equally surprised glances.

  “What’d you say?” Buddy roared, yanking John toward him.

  “Of course, that was after your dad sucked the principal’s dick,” John went on in a bland, conversational voice. “I guess he wanted to get it nice and wet for when he slipped it to your mom.”

  One of the henchmen started to laugh, then caught himself just in time to turn the laugh into a gasp of mock outrage. Buddy’s dark unibrow descended in a furious glare, while his lips squeezed together into a line as thin and white as a razor scar.

  John was trying to decide whether he should now punch Buddy in the face or knee him in the crotch. Whatever he did, he would get the crap beaten out of him—that was pretty much inevitable at this point—but he wanted to inflict enough damage to ensure that Buddy wouldn’t want to bother him in the future.

  But before he could decide, a girl’s voice called out behind him, “I wouldn’t do that, Buddy!”

  Buddy’s gaze flicked over John’s shoulder. Then Buddy groaned and rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, great,” he said. “It’s the birdy girl.”

  John turned his head and saw Emily Crow standing on the edge of the bushes that bordered this side of the playground. Her arms were crossed, and her expression was set and stern. She must have heard what was happening, then circled around and wriggled through the bushes. She was trying to help him. He felt that weird thrill again.

  “Get your birdy face outta here!” Buddy snapped at Emily. One of his henchmen added a couple of caws for good measure.

  “You shouldn’t bother him,” Emily said. “He’s got special powers, you know.”

  Buddy snorted. “What can he do, turn gay?”