by William Bell
Whenever I took those things out of the box I’d hope that the big empty hole inside me would stop hurting. But it never did.
I put the things back in the box, locked it, and put it back in the hiding place. Then I hid the key. I set my clock radio for 12:00AM and turned the volume to low. Just to be safe, I turned the buzzer to ON.
I changed into my pajamas and got into bed. But I didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Because a picture began to form itself in my mind. I tried to fight it off, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. So I gave up, and let the picture grow.
Kenny stood in the pool of cool shade under the branches of the big willow at the foot of our yard. He was holding his new street board by the front truck.
“Karen! Karen! Lookit! I can do a Simon Sez!”
He had on pink running shoes, baggy jammers and a green T shirt with a big outline of Prince Edward Island on it. His red hair stuck out from under his helmet and his elbow pads were scuffed and dirty. Blood trickled from a scrape on one knee.
I was sitting up on our branch, leaning back against the rough willow trunk, reading. I didn’t feel like climbing down and going out the front to watch Kenny do a skateboard trick for the millionth time.
“Not right now, Kenny. I want to finish the last chapter. Then I’ll come.”
The brightness drained from his face. He turned and burst through the branches, out of the cool cave of the willow.
“‘I don’t give a care!” He tossed the words over his shoulder as he left. “Stupid book!”
I turned the page. I was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and even though The Horse and His Boy was waiting for me up in my room I read very slowly because I didn’t want the book to end.
A fishing boat droned by. A bumblebee buzzed in the leaves and a white butterfly fluttered in and out of the branches.
Then the explosion happened. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it–a deafening explosion of panic and fear inside my head. I went numb and dropped my book, nearly falling off the branch. I put out my hand to the trunk of the willow for balance.
At the same time I heard tires screech out on the road in front of the house. Then the terror that crashed in my head gave way to sharp, blinding pain and a feeling of … confusion.
I struggled down off the branch and stood on the ground, moaning and swaying, holding my head. The pain was horrible.
I pushed through the branches, stumbling and falling on the grass.
“Karen! Karen!” A woman’s voice. Hysterical.
I knew what was wrong even before I heard her.
I started running and stumbling across the backyard, past the comer of the house where the woman—it was Mrs. Scott, our neighbour—stood, her hand covering her mouth.
“Kenny!” I shrieked as I ran down the driveway and into the street.
A big black Chevy was turned sideways in the middle of the road, surrounded by a lot of people dressed in bathing suits, shorts and T-shirts.
I pushed through the crowd. In front of the black car was a chunk of splintered wood painted in crazy colours. And two pink skateboard wheels, ripped from the trucks, lying in a pool of blood.
Kenny lay on his stomach, his arms caught under him, his head to the side, his blank eyes staring at the stream of blood that flowed from his mouth to the skateboard wheels.
DAY
TWO
Early Saturday Morning
Bzz! Bzz! Bzz! Bzz!
I reached over and slapped the top of my clock radio. Ugh! I hated waking up in the middle of the night. Sitting up in bed, I leaned back against the headboard and rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
I climbed out of the waterbed and pulled on my jeans and a flannel shirt, my socks and running shoes. Then I added a wool sweater. It might be cold on the lake at night.
I padded quietly down the hall to John’s room and tapped gently on the door. I heard him moving around inside, so I went right in. The only light came from the study lamp on his desk.
John was already dressed—black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, and waterproof black hiking boots—as if it was Halloween and he was going out as a burglar. He was putting some things into a small red nylon pack sack and mumbling to himself like an old man whose memory was falling apart. On his desk top was a row of what he would call “items.” I saw a compass, a Swiss Army knife, two small flashlights, a small notebook, a pen, a bottle of bug lotion, two chocolate bars.
“How long will we be on the island?” I asked. “A month?”
“Be prepared, the Boy Scouts say.”
John sounded excited. He loved this kind of stuff.
I pointed to the chocolate bars. “Can I have one of those now? I’m starved.”
“No way. They’re for emergency only.”
He put the rest of the items in the pack, one by one. I could imagine him ticking them off the list in his mind. He zipped up the pack and turned to me.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“No, you’re not. Go put some rubber boots on.”
“Boots? What for?”
“ ‘Cause it rained after supper, that’s why. While you were sleeping.”
I was glad to hear that. It was an excuse. “I’m not going in the rain,” I said.
“It’s clear now. With an almost full moon. You’ll see.”
We slipped down the hall and crept down the narrow back stairs that led from the second floor to the kitchen. Mom told me that a long time ago these stairs were for servants who would have lived in the attic. They could go into the kitchen to work without disturbing the rich people who owned the house.
John was almost right about the weather. The back yard was moonlit but there were a few shreds of cloud in the sky. I looked out on the lake. There was a black smudge on the horizon—Chiefs’ Island.
We slipped out the kitchen door and ran across the wet grass to the boathouse. It was dead dark inside. John pulled the door shut behind us, felt around inside his pack, and got out one of the flashlights.
Soon we were in the rowboat, wearing our life jackets, making our way over the calm water toward the island. I was sitting in front, facing backward, and I could see all the lights of the town. On the left the legion hall was all lit up and the white beacon was flashing on top of the phony lighthouse of the seafood restaurant next door to it. The town dock was dark—a little too early in the season for boats to be passing through. High on the hill I could see the big lit-up cross on top of Guardian Angels Church. A lot of the kids still called it the Bingo Cross because of the bingo games they used to hold in the church basement every weekend.
John kept rowing, pulling us farther and farther away from the lights. I began to feel creepy. There was a thin cool breeze twitching my hair, and up in the sky the moon stared down at us like a sick eye. Around us was dead silence, except for the splash of the oars and the ripple of the little waves off the bow of the boat.
I turned around, surprised to see how close the island loomed. It filled the horizon. I turned back and looked at the lights. They seemed to have faded.
The oars thumped as John rested them on the gunwales of the boat. He turned to face me.
“Let’s put some bug lotion on before we get to shore,” he whispered.
After we had rubbed the greasy stuff on our faces, necks and hands, John started rowing again and soon I could hear wavelets washing the shore of the island.
The bow of the rowboat bumped up onto a rocky shelf and I scrambled out. John shipped the oars, grabbed his pack, wobbled to the bow and stepped onto shore. Together we dragged the little boat up onto the rock. As we took off our life jackets and tossed them into the boat I looked back across the dark water to our house, a long way off. Upstairs, one light burned in a window. Mine.
“Maybe we should pull the boat up under the trees to keep it out of sight,” John said, looking around. “Don’t forget, this island is forbidden ground.”
“Come on, John
, who’s gonna be out on the lake in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know. Fishermen, maybe?” He laughed.
“People don’t go fishing at twelve o’clock, dingbat.”
“Speaking of time, I’ll set my watch for two o’clock. If we don’t find anything by then we’ll come back.”
“No way! One o’clock. I’m not wandering around in the bush at night for two hours!”
“But it’s half past twelve, now. That’s only half an hour. How about one thirty? A fair compromise.”
Fair, except that one thirty was probably the time John wanted all along. He slapped at a mosquito and set his electronic watch alarm. Then he dug flashlights out of the pack and handed one to me.
“Don’t use this unless you have to. We’ll be able to see pretty well once we get used to the dark in the bush.”
Then it hit me. We were whispering. Why? There was no one around for miles. I hoped.
John shrugged the pack onto his back. “Okay, let’s go.”
I didn’t ask him if he had a plan. John never did anything without a plan. He never forgot his lunch when he was leaving for school, never forgot his homework, never forgot anything. I bet each morning he even planned when he’d go to the bathroom that day. Probably wrote it down, too.
Holding his compass, he led the way off the rock shelf that lined the shore and stepped into the trees.
Two things happened. It got black dark, and the mosquitoes found us. But in a few minutes my eyes got used to the darkness and the bug lotion kept the mosquitoes off my skin. Most of them.
As we walked along slowly, groping ahead of us, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that we shouldn’t have been there. I felt like a thief or a trespasser. I didn’t like the dark, either. It was creepy in the bush at night. There were noises. Rustles. Animal sounds. Out on the lake a loon cried, Aaloooooo, Aaloooooooo.
“How are we gonna know if we find the cemetery? And how are we gonna find it in the dark?” I whispered to John’s back.
He turned to face me and waved away a mosquito, then started to count on his fingers as he talked.
“I’m working back and forth in a zigzag pattern. If it’s on this end of the island, which it’s supposed to be, we’re bound to run across it. It stands to reason that it will be in a clearing. A clearing is easy to find.”
When we started moving again I heard something that turned me cold. I stopped dead. So did John.
“A wolf!” I hissed.
The long eerie howl sounded again. It sounded close.
“There haven’t been wolves around here for generations, Karen. Come on, get serious.”
I wasn’t so sure. And John’s whisper told me he wasn’t as certain as his words were. The howl came again, angry and sad. I suddenly felt colder.
“Dogs,” said John. “It’s dogs on the other side of the lake.”
I was thinking of the spooky graveyard I had daydreamed about on the dock that afternoon. Only this time, there was a huge black shape gliding between the headstones. Its long white teeth shone in the moonlight.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
I followed my brother, more afraid of looking stupid than of getting my throat ripped out by a wolf. I wasn’t in the mood for one of his lectures about how girls are more emotional than boys.
After endless trudging through the dark bush, stumbling, getting whacked in the face by branches I couldn’t see, and slapping at mosquitoes, I’d had enough. I was hot and sticky and my eyes stung from bug lotion. I stopped.
“That’s it. I’m not going a step further.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to. Look.”
“Look at what? I can’t even see my hand in front of my—”
John stepped aside, pointing ahead like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in A Christmas Carol.
Ahead of us the darkness was a couple of shades less dark.
“It’s a clearing,” John announced. “Let’s take a look.”
We crept forward slowly, to the edge of the trees.
“Yeah, yeah, this must be it!” he whispered, excited. “Look!” He pointed again.
The clearing looked about twice the size of a tennis court. The ground was uneven, patchy with shadows, and overgrown with brambles and birch saplings that looked like ghostly white sticks in the moonlight. But I could still see the gravestones, leaning crookedly. Looking just like the ones in my daydream.
The night sounds had quit. All I could hear was our breathing.
“Come on,” John whispered.
The wolf howl cut through the night like a jagged knife. It was long and painful-sounding. It gave me the creeps.
“John, I don’t—”
John grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the trees and into the clearing.
Then we turned at the same time and looked at each other.
“Can you … can you feel it?” John stuttered. A cloud of vapour escaped from his mouth as he spoke.
“Yeah, I’m freezing!” I shuddered.
I pulled John back into the trees. Our breath clouds disappeared and the warm night air on my cold face made me feel clammy.
“Weird, eh?” said John. He didn’t sound so sure of himself now.
“What’s going on?”
“Search me. Let’s skirt the clearing a little and try again. Probably … probably that was just a cool air pocket—you know, like you get in swamps sometimes. They’re caused by water and air currents and stuff.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t a swamp and there’s no water and the air is as still as d— it’s just still, that’s all. Otherwise, your theory sounds great.”
John didn’t answer. He started working his way along the border of the clearing, staying in the trees. On my right, the gravestones stood silent, as if they were waiting for something.
John stopped. “Let’s try it here.”
We stepped out of the trees. And into a freezer. If anything, it was colder. I started shivering.
“Well, I’m gonna keep going,” John hissed. His face was almost hidden by the clouds of vapour from his breathing.
We walked a few steps forward and stood in front of a white gravestone. It leaned a little to the right. The words were all blurred and impossible to read.
But I could read the first two numbers of the date—1 8.
John had crouched down and was unzipping his pack. His fingers were so cold he fumbled with the zipper.
“What are you doing, John? Let’s get out of here before we freeze to—”
While I was saying those words I had looked up, and I was scanning the gravestones. Near the far edge of the graveyard was a clump of birch saplings. Beside it was a gravestone.
My breath caught in my throat.
On the gravestone a man was sitting.
I turned away and dropped to my knees and pressed my hands to my eyes. My palms felt like slabs of ice against my cheeks.
“No, no, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see anything.”
“What?” John whispered. He was on his knees too, trying to copy the blurred words on the gravestone into his notebook.
“There’s somebody here,” I finally managed to say.
“What? Where?” Then, “Cut the nonsense, Karen. First you hear a dog that you think is a wolf and now—”
I punched his arm, knocking the notebook out of his hand.
“Shut up!” I hissed. “Take a peek yourself. Over that way.” I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb.
John raised his body slowly until his head was a little higher than the gravestone. I couldn’t resist. I turned and looked too.
“See him?” I whispered, my voice shaking.
“Yeah.”
The man was perched on the gravestone the way you’d sit on a fence while you were watching a ball game. He seemed to be staring off into the trees. His legs were crossed at the ankles and his hands rested in his lap. He had moccasins on his feet, leather leggings, a leather vest, and a leather headband holding bac
k long black hair.
From his belt hung a little leather bag, easy to see because it sort of glowed. He was sort of fat—we could see his pot belly where the vest hung open—and he had a double chin that almost hid a tight necklace of animal teeth.
His face was dark-skinned, oval, with a big flat nose and a wide thin mouth. It was like a scary mask carved out of wood—creased and craggy and harsh.
Then it hit me. It was dark, but I could make out every detail of his appearance, even the bead and quill work on his moccasins.
“Let’s get out of here, John. If he catches us here, he’ll kill us.”
“No, wait. I wonder who he is. A guard, maybe?”
“Who cares. Let’s go!”
“Okay, okay, just wait a—”
Beep beep! Beep beep! Beep beep!
It was John’s watch alarm. It had one of those piercing, nerve-splitting sounds you could hear for miles.
“Jeeze!” John hissed. He fumbled with the watch and the beeping stopped.
The man on the gravestone turned his head very slowly.
And looked right at me.
His eyes were dark and empty, like pits with black fires burning at the bottom. There was some kind of horrible energy coming from them, and when he turned them on me, I felt trapped, like an insect wriggling on a pin.
He seemed to stare forever, as if he were looking right through me.
Then he slowly lowered himself from the gravestone.
“Oh, no. No. We’re in for it now.” I was breathing fast and my heart was pounding. The frost from our breathing made a fog around my head.
And through the fog I could see the man start walking. He took a couple of steps toward us.
I heard scared animal noises and realized they were coming from me.
But the man turned and walked toward the bush, away from us. When he reached the trees he disappeared as if he had stepped behind a curtain.
