I look at Mr. Taggart, who has ripped up the emergency brake in his car. It’s literally been torn off. He just looks at me and then looks at the brake in his hand.
Then something miraculous happens. Something that I couldn’t ever have seen coming.
Mr. Taggart, the miserable grump from the summer, starts to laugh. Not just laugh, but howl.
Soon I’m laughing too. Because laughter can be like that. A spontaneous, joyous sort of thing.
Especially after, you know, you survive death by stupidity in a car.
We’re laughing, and then I see something fluttering by my car window. I glance over and watch it land on a bush by my window.
The bluebird is back.
Of course it is.
Maybe if I knew what it sounded like, I’d know if the bird was laughing too.
A couple hours later, I arrive back home.
“How’d it go?” Mom asks me.
“Well, I drove us off the side of a mountain.” I chuckle again in complete disbelief.
“Yeah, right.”
I smile and then reach into my pocket. “There you go. A license. Well—not the official license—it’s just a temporary certificate for now. But I finally got it. Real one is coming in the mail.”
“Congratulations,” Mom says in an excited tone. “About time.”
“Miracles do happen.”
I think back to the tow truck and Mr. Taggart getting back to the town and still laughing at the whole driving off the side of the mountain.
“That car is a hunk of junk anyway,” he said to me. “You want to know the first thing I thought as we were going over the side of the mountain? Huh? I was hoping that we’d just blow up in a big ball of flames like they do in the movies. But no. We just—we just kinda got … stuck.”
He laughed again and then said he wouldn’t say anything about it.
So, yeah, I got my license.
And yeah, I got to see Mr. Taggart find the whole thing hilarious.
The license wasn’t the miracle.
It was that smile.
And it was finding that road again. Finally.
87. Start of the Breakdown
Man, my faith is weak.
That feeling I had sitting in the pew got washed away with this morning’s rain.
The vast, open, endless blue seems to be forgotten underneath this ceiling of gray.
Something about today is different, and I don’t know what.
Something about Kelsey is different.
Every day we pass and smile and say hi, but that’s it. She’s waiting but doesn’t understand why. And I know that one day I’ll be able to tell her more of the story, but I can’t. Not just yet. So I wait, and the days and the nights morph and then suddenly I see her on this gloomy, wet morning as I’m trying to dry off from my wet morning ride.
I see her talking to some other guy and smiling.
I see her smiling and laughing.
I try not to let her see me, but maybe she does. Maybe she wants me to see her.
You don’t understand, Kelsey.
But later when I pass her in the hall, she doesn’t smile or say hi. She just looks away.
Is this how it starts?
When one morning is enough, and that day is the day to change. When the hurting has morphed into something more. When the temporary break turns into a full-fledged breakdown.
I look for her at lunch, but she’s not in her normal place.
I look for her by her locker later, but that doesn’t work either.
She’s deliberately avoiding me.
Don’t give it away, Chris, don’t let them see you still care for her.
And then later I see her walking with her bodyguard Georgia. I start toward her, but then I see the same tall guy come up to her. A younger guy, a junior I think, but a jock and good-looking and so freaking tall.
I don’t understand you.
I let them go, and I let this day go.
This day in the middle of April when I’m trying to just be patient and wait.
But maybe she’s no longer waiting on me.
88. The Wheel Goes Round and Round
The note in my locker is supposed to comfort me. And I guess in some ways, yeah, it does.
It’s a typed note without a name at the bottom. But I know it’s from Mr. Meiners.
Chris:
It’s not safe to come around. The group isn’t meeting anymore. At least not for a while until things die down.
Remember this from Psalm 61:3—
“For you are my safe refuge, a fortress where my enemies cannot reach me.”
Keep this verse by your heart. Remember it when you need it the most.
I fold up the note and look around to see if anybody is spying on me. But I know that someone is probably always keeping tabs on me, everywhere and all the time.
I want to believe that God is my refuge and fortress. But it feels like I need to find that place first before I can be safe. Right now it seems like my enemies are all around me. There’s nothing I can do but just walk amidst them and hope that one of them doesn’t grab me and slit my throat.
A nice thought before heading to English class.
A little while later, I’m beating myself up.
Wondering what happened to that take-charge, stubborn guy.
He left the moment that stubbornness got him nowhere.
What happened to the guy who refused to take no for an answer and didn’t like being told what to do?
Jocelyn happened. Then Poe happened. Then Lily happened.
They all either died or were forced away.
It’s the middle of the night, and I’m counting the minutes until tomorrow and the days away until May and the weeks until Memorial Day.
Just counting and feeling the dread seep in and doing nothing about it.
I know I can pray, and I do pray. But I don’t see any burning bush in the middle of Solitary or any parting seas on Marsh Falls. Nope. Just nice, raging silence.
There has to be something I can do.
There has to be a way to stop whatever’s going to happen on Memorial Day before it arrives.
I try and think who I can ask for help. Somebody out of the norm, somebody not in this crazy story. Mom and Dad are out. Uncle Robert is useless. Aunt Alice—well, I’ve got some other questions to ask her, but she won’t help me figure out how to solve this mess.
Kelsey is still avoiding me and talking to the basketball star.
Newt knows, right? Yeah, maybe he does know, but he’s been avoiding me too. He wants me to keep fighting, but then he ends up hiding out while watching me do so.
But sometime in the circling wheel of my thoughts that keep spinning and changing, the wheel stops and lands on someone unexpected.
Yes.
I picture a guy nicknamed after a candy bar. A guy who pays me for doing—well, I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing, but he thinks I’m doing something.
Ask Mounds.
Of course I can’t tell him everything. But he’s one of the few people who won’t wonder if I’m losing my mind when I ask about something to do with ghosts and demons and dark things.
89. What Is Imagined and What Is Real
The soft and steady sound of the cicadas singing along with the crickets makes me almost believe this is a perfect night in April. Almost. Mounds and I are about an hour away from Solitary. We sit at the edge of the woods that open up onto a railroad bridge towering over a small river below. The bridge hasn’t been used in a long time, of course, but Mounds says that sometimes late at night people can hear the sound of a train whistle or even feel the rumbling of a runaway ghost train.
We’ve been here for an hour … and
nothing. Mounds knows we’re probably not going to hear or see anything tonight.
I bring up the conversation I’ve been wanting to have with him all night.
“What would you do if you knew there was some kind of, like, real evil around you. Threatening you?”
Mounds doesn’t laugh, because naturally he believes in this sort of thing. “Like Paranormal Activity style? Pulling you out of bed and stealing your children?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“The first question would be what exactly are we talking about. A vampire? A demon? A ghost?”
“Someone who attacks at night. In the darkness. Draining bodies of blood.”
“Well, then, that’s a vampire you’re talking about.”
I don’t think Staunch is a vampire. I don’t think they really exist.
But demons do.
“But couldn’t like a demon do that sort of thing?”
“If it walks like a vampire and talks like a vampire and sucks blood like a vampire, then chances are high that it’s a vampire.”
“You really believe in them?”
Mounds takes out a candy bar, which I’m sad to see is a Milky Way. He offers me one, but I say no. So far I haven’t ever seen him actually eat a Mounds bar. I’m tempted to joke and ask if he’s really who he says he is, but I’m actually trying to get some info from him.
“I believe in anything that is unexplainable. These tracks, for instance. This one girl came here and for some reason walked to the middle of those tracks. People thought she was doped up, others thought she was trying to kill herself. She claims to have heard a train coming for her, and she ran and jumped off the end of the bridge. Broke both her legs but was fortunate she didn’t die.”
“You believe her?”
“Why not?” Mounds says as he chews his candy bar. “That’s the thing with unexplained phenomena.”
“So what would you do—about this evil—about this person who you think is a vampire?”
“You do what they’ve always done. The brave ones, of course. The heroes. You go and put a wooden stake through their heart.”
“You think that would work?”
“If a hundred or a thousand stories share the same basic info with you on how to kill a vampire, then you might want to believe in them.”
“Do you believe in the Bible?”
“Of course. But I believe there’s also room for interpretation, since there’s so much in the Bible that makes absolutely no sense.”
“I don’t think there are vampires in the Bible.”
“Yeah, but there’s other freaky stuff,” Mounds says. “Who’s to say that one of those demons or monsters isn’t really a vampire? Maybe they just didn’t call them that. Like Goliath. He was some giant. But what if he was like Frankenstein or something? Or maybe a god that had been thrown out of heaven?”
I think Mounds just managed to combine a gothic horror story with a Greek myth and a Sunday school tale.
That guy has a future in horror mash-ups.
“So you’d try to kill him?”
“What? A vampire?” Mounds chuckles. “Man, did you ever read Salem’s Lot? By Stephen King? I read it and then saw the miniseries and was like totally freaked out. Forget Twilight. These vampires scared you. These were ones you didn’t mess around with.”
“So no?”
Mounds curses. “Absolutely no way.”
“But you’re a ghost hunter.”
“Yeah, a ghost hunter. Not a ghost killer. I’m not Van Helsing or someone like that.”
“Van who?”
“What? You didn’t see the movie? Hugh Jackman?”
For a while Mounds gets off track talking about the movie and how it should’ve been an epic series like X-Men and other comic-book movies. He’s a big geek who not only loves horror movies and comic books but makes them his life.
“Let’s call it a night,” he says eventually, picking up his big body off the forest floor and heading back to the minivan.
As I follow, he asks me a question. “Is there really some kind of evil vampirelike thing you know about?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“That means yes.”
“Like I said—referring to it like a vampire—I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Books and movies that twist and distort these things—like Casper the friendly ghost or vampires that glitter in the sun—I think they desensitize us to the original horror of the story. Like watching violence on YouTube. You know? Or porn. You watch enough of that—and believe me there’s enough of it out there—and you become numb to it all. You play a video game where people’s heads are being blown up around you, and suddenly you might not be so absolutely horrified if that actually happened.”
“You sound like you’re against that kind of stuff,” I say.
“Me? No way. Dude, I’m a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound dork who eats all day and hunts for ghosts. I’m online all the time watching everything. No. Not against anything, to be honest. But I do long to know the difference between what is imagined and what is real. The stuff we’ve seen together—that stuff is real. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s real. Call of Duty or Van Helsing or Twilight—that stuff isn’t real. It’s just faking it, like a kid on Halloween. I do all this because I’m tired of seeing the costumes and eating the candy, you know? I want the real thing.”
I want to tell him that I don’t need to do anything else to understand that the evil in this world is real and concrete. I don’t say anything, however, because I can’t.
But I keep thinking of Staunch and Kinner.
I wonder if there’s anybody who would actually ever come with me to the Staunch house to see if he’s really sleeping in a coffin in the dark basement.
Then I remember the guy who told me about some of the skeletons in Staunch’s closet. Some of the literal skeletons that he found on Staunch’s property.
Brick.
He’d come along for the ride. He’s just crazy enough to not really care as long as it sounds kind of fun.
90. Question Marks or Bite Marks?
What story am I really in?
Could it really be a … ?
No.
I don’t want to begin to believe it, because it can’t be.
But if it walks like one and talks like one and bites like one …
I think of all the vampire movies I’ve seen. No, I haven’t seen the Twilight movies even when Trish back in Libertyville wanted me to go see them with her when we were a couple. But there are others I’ve seen.
I saw The Lost Boys late night once and thought it was kinda corny. But maybe it’s because it’s ancient, from like the eighties.
I saw a foreign movie called Let the Right One In that freaked me out but also forced me to read subtitles, so I don’t think I got the full freak-out intended. I never saw the American update.
I’m sure I’ve seen others. Once I watched a little of that vampire show on HBO called True Blood.
But I don’t honestly know much about vampires except that I’ve seen a lot of clips of them in those teen love stories that keep getting released.
There’s that guy who never wears his shirt and turns out to be a wolf.
You’ve seen wolves of your own.
There’s a family of vampires who are like a clan.
Sorta like the group who hide under robes.
But I don’t buy it.
No.
There’s no way.
There’s only one way to find out.
I wonder if it’s true. Really true.
What if I could take a stake and kill off the bad guy?
What if Kinner is a real, true vampire?
You’ve never see
n him in the light, right?
That’s crazy.
You’ve seen the tunnels he lurks around in.
A hundred thoughts swirl around, and I wonder if it really was a good idea to ask Mounds those questions.
But I know I need to try and answer some of them. At least the one big one.
91. A Night of Romance and Mystery
I still get weird looks from kids I don’t know. Maybe I’m just used to it, because it doesn’t bother me like it once did. But today, as I’m in a familiar place with Brick outside the glass doors in front of the cafeteria, I notice the stares. Maybe it’s because they’re looking at the skinhead next to me smoking a cigarette. Maybe they’re wondering why Brick and I are even talking and if we’re friends.
Or maybe some of them are paid to spy on you just like Jared and Lily were.
I have a little over a month left at this place. I can deal with it. The stares of strangers are no longer that big a deal.
Whoever—or whatever—is living inside the Staunch house … now that’s a big deal.
“So what are you saying, Buckster?”
I’ve been talking around the issue and haven’t really gotten to what I want to ask him.
“I need someone to help me break into the Staunch house.”
Brick takes a drag from his cigarette as he nods and raises his eyebrows, looking intrigued. “Turning into a thief or something?”
“No.”
No, I actually need you to help me find out if a Dracula is in the basement.
“Well, you gotta tell me why we’re breaking in.”
I glance around to see if anybody can hear us. Nobody is close enough. “Remember when you told me what you found on his property—in the woods?”
“How could I forget that? Still have nightmares of that pit with all those dead bodies in it.”
“I want to see who’s living in the basement.”
Hurt: A Novel (Solitary Tales Series) Page 26
