The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  “Be careful,” she said as Nate crouched down, shone the light into the crawl space beneath the trailer, which rested uneasily on crumbling concrete blocks.

  “Oh!” he said, startled. He stood up straight and took two steps back.

  If whatever was under there scared Nate, it had to be bad.

  “What is it?” Helen asked, nearly frantic now, and not really wanting to know what he’d seen. She wanted to grab his hand, yank him back into the trailer, bolt the door, turn out the lights, and hide.

  “Nate?” she asked, voice shaking. “What do you see?”

  He laughed, relieved. “It’s a porcupine!”

  “What?”

  “A quill pig, that’s what some people call it. But it’s actually a rodent, of course. It’s so much bigger than I thought! And he’s kind of cute, honestly. Come see.” Nate was talking in that fast, excited way he did when he encountered a new creature.

  A porcupine. Only a woodland creature, not the wild witch of the bog. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let herself climb down the front steps.

  “Will I end up with a face full of quills?”

  “Not if you don’t get too close,” Nate said.

  “Don’t they shoot them out?”

  “No, that’s a myth. You’d have to touch him to get quilled. The quills are hollow and have little barbs. Come on, hurry up! I think I scared him off. He’s heading out under the other side.”

  She joined him, took his hand, and together they circled around the trailer, the blazing bright beam from the flashlight illuminating everything in their path.

  “There he is.” He pointed. “See!”

  She looked and saw a thick, squat animal the size of a large cat lumbering along. She could make out its quills. She laughed at its clumsy waddle, its complete lack of grace. Nate put his arm around her, and together they watched it disappear into the woods. “So cool,” he said, and Helen turned and looked at him, saw his huge, excited smile.

  “I love you,” she said, kissing his cheek.

  Nate went back to the trailer, got down on his knees, and peered underneath.

  “Man, those teeth do a lot of damage. If he’d kept at it, he would have gone right through the floor and ended up cuddling in bed with us.”

  “God, I hope not!”

  “I’ve heard porcupines like plywood. It’s the glue, I think. They also like anything people have sweated on, like ax handles.”

  “Glue and sweat, great tastes.”

  “To a porcupine, yeah,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to bed.”

  On the way in, he stopped in the kitchen, grabbed his nature journal to write down the details of the porcupine sighting. So far he had several pages of notes and sketches, mostly of birds, including the great blue heron.

  “Come on,” she said. “You can document your Mr. Nibbles encounter in the morning.”

  He crawled into bed beside her, put his arm around her. “Nothing like that at the condo in Connecticut,” he said, clearly still excited. A supersized rodent that ate plywood and ax handles might be a nightmare to some, but to Nate it was a thrill.

  She kissed his neck, gave it a gentle nibble as she pushed her body against his, heard his breathing quicken. “Still thinking about the porcupine?” she whispered.

  “Not at all,” he said, his hands moving up under her nightgown, tugging it off.

  * * *

  . . .

  An hour later, she lay awake thinking of the porcupine, remembering the terrible grinding sound of it chewing. Nate, of course, was out cold, naked beside her, his limp arm draped over her stomach.

  She closed her eyes, willed herself to sleep.

  But she couldn’t get the chewing noises from her head.

  She imagined an old woman with pointed teeth chewing her way up through their floor.

  My, what big teeth you have.

  She woke to sunlight streaming in through their small, narrow, prisonlike rectangular bedroom window. God help them if there were ever a fire in another part of the trailer—they’d never get out.

  Nate was not beside her. She looked at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How had she managed to sleep so late? And how had she not noticed Nate getting out of bed?

  She crawled down to the bottom of the bed, slid off, and grabbed her robe from the door. There was a pot of coffee waiting in the kitchen. She poured a cup, pulled on her sneakers, and went outside to find Nate. The sun hadn’t come up from behind the hill yet and the air felt cool. But the black flies were out: tiny, godforsaken creatures that swarmed, found every patch of exposed skin and left bites that itched like crazy. They’d already gone through three bottles of eco-friendly DEET-free bug repellent (which Helen was convinced the little bastards actually liked the scent of) and Nate was finally at the point of agreeing to try something a little more hard-core. As they swarmed her face, Helen vowed to go buy a can of OFF! today. And maybe a hat with an attached veil made of fine mesh netting—she’d seen one at Ferguson’s in the hunting section. She’d look like an idiot, but she was sick to death of being eaten alive.

  Nate was standing inside the skeletal frame of the house, right in the center of what would be their living room.

  “Hey, you,” she called, walking over to join him, entering through the opening that would be their front door, imagining how wonderful it would be to have an actual door there to shut out the black flies.

  He didn’t answer.

  He was staring down at the floor, frowning.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, coming up behind him, coffee mug still clenched in her hand.

  Had the porcupine made his way up here in the night, started chewing up their house?

  “Nate?” she asked.

  There, on the plywood subfloor they’d nailed down, was one of their chunky carpenter’s pencils. It had been used to write a message in big, sloppy capital letters:

  BEWEAR OF HATTIE

  “Hattie?” Nate said.

  Helen thought back to the image that had kept her up last night: the old woman with the sharp teeth, gnawing and gnawing, coming for them.

  “She’s the woman I told you about, remember?”

  The one who pulled poor Edie Decrow into the water.

  Helen swallowed hard, then continued. “Hattie Breckenridge—the one who lived at the edge of the bog.”

  Nate shook his head, frowning. “I think our witch ghost needs some spelling lessons,” he said.

  “Nate, you don’t think…” She couldn’t even finish saying it—that it might really be a ghost who’d left the message.

  “I think some locals are messing with us. Probably kids, probably drunk or high. Scare the flatlanders, ha-ha.”

  Nate turned and went back to the area where they’d been keeping their tools.

  “Have you seen my hammer with the blue handle? I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Jesus. It’s like there’s some mysterious vortex. My cell phone, the level, my hammer. Maybe the kids are taking our shit, too.”

  “If we were being robbed, wouldn’t they take more than a couple of random tools?” Helen asked.

  “Not if they were just doing it to mess with us,” Nate said grimly.

  “I’m sure the tools are around here somewhere,” Helen said now. It was the logical, adult thing to say. She didn’t tell him that when he’d said “vortex,” she’d immediately thought of the deep center of the bog and all that could be hidden there.

  CHAPTER 10

  Olive

  JUNE 10, 2015

  “I can’t believe how much better this one works,” Mike said. Olive was letting him try out the brand-new metal detector, and he was waving it over the ground at the edge of the bog.

  Mike was right: the
new metal detector was amazing. It was so much more sensitive than her old one and could find things much farther down. So far, she and Mike had found two metal buttons, some coins, an old hinge, and bullet casings. And that was from working on only one square of her grid.

  “I think I should go back and redo all the areas I already searched,” she told him. “The treasure might be too far down for my old machine to pick up on. But this one will get it.”

  Mike nodded but kept his eyes on the ground. He didn’t believe in the treasure. He’d never come right out and said that, but it was obvious to Olive.

  He was wrong, though. Hattie’s treasure was real. She felt it in her bones, especially when she was out here in the bog; she knew she was close. And Mama had been right: they were going to be the ones to find it. Now, without Mama, it was all up to her.

  The treasure called to her, whispered, pulled on her, told her not to give up. That this could be the day.

  Keep looking, it seemed to say.

  You’re so close.

  Some people, they were afraid of the bog. They said Hattie’s spirit was out there, and she was angry, looking for revenge. They said that if you went after dark, you’d see her walking across the bog, that the pink lady’s slippers that bloomed in the woodlands around the edges sprung up in the places where she’d stepped.

  Olive had seen plenty of lady’s slippers but never a ghost. She’d come at night, setting her alarm for one a.m. and keeping the clock under her pillow so her dad wouldn’t hear it. He was a heavy sleeper and was always sound asleep by midnight. She’d come on full moons and sat by the edge of the bog, begging Hattie to show herself, begging her to leave a clue about where the treasure might be. But the only figures who ever materialized there in the bog were very much alive: hunters and hikers sometimes; but at night, it was older kids who’d come out on dares to get high, fool around, drink beer, and piss on the old foundation of Hattie’s house, daring her to come forward.

  “Come on and show yourself, witch!” a boy hollered once while Olive watched from her hiding spot behind a big tree. Olive held her breath, wished Hattie would come forward, scare the crap out of the kid and teach him a lesson. No such luck.

  “Careful, she’ll put a curse on you,” the girl who was with him squealed.

  The boy laughed, cracked open another can of beer. “Let her try. She ain’t nothing but a pile of bones sunk down at the bottom of the bog.”

  Olive picked up a rock then and threw it deep into the center of the bog, where it landed with a huge splash.

  The girl screamed.

  “The fuck?” the boy said.

  “Let’s get outta here,” the girl said in a trembling voice, and the boy didn’t argue.

  Olive waited for them to go, then cleaned up the crushed beer cans they’d left behind—it didn’t seem right to leave them there. It seemed…disrespectful.

  “Mike?” she said now.

  “Yeah?” He looked hopeful. Expectant. It made her cringe a little, deep down inside, when he looked at her this way. When all she ever seemed to do lately was hurt his feelings and disappoint him.

  “You don’t believe the treasure exists, do you?”

  “I—”

  “Ya gotta tell the truth. I’ll know if you’re lying.” She would, too. His left eyebrow always went up a little when he was lying. It was a funny thing, but she noticed it every time. It helped her beat the crap out of him whenever they played poker for pennies in Mike’s old tree house. He also got all sweaty when he was even a little bit nervous, his ears got red when he was mad, and he chewed his top lip when something was worrying him.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe,” he said.

  “Well, what is it then?”

  “I think the treasure might exist. I mean, it’s definitely possible. But I’m just not sure that anyone should go digging it up.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause. It’s Hattie’s, right? Are you sure you want to go messing around with anything that belonged to her? It’s probably, like, cursed or something.”

  Olive chuffed out a laugh, picked up the metal detector, and slipped the headphones back on. Mike sat down on a fallen log and pulled a bag of Skittles out of his backpack, offering some to her. She shook her head and went back to work.

  They were searching the northwest corner of the bog. Even with the headphones on, she heard hammering and Helen’s and Nate’s voices. Olive and Mike weren’t technically on their land, not way over on this side of the bog, but still, Olive didn’t really want them to catch her. But she had their routine down by now. They worked every morning, took a break for lunch, then worked until just before dinner. They’d usually take a walk down to the bog either before or after dinner. And they couldn’t see the bog from their house. They were uphill, up a steep path through a little strip of woods. So Olive felt safe. And even if they caught her, she wasn’t doing anything illegal. She’d just smile real big, introduce herself as a neighbor, and tell them she was fooling around, looking for old coins and stuff.

  She’d been watching Helen and Nate enough to know things had been tense lately. They snapped at each other when they were building, accused each other of misplacing tools. This morning, Nate had a big freak-out about his cell phone, which had been missing for days.

  Olive smiled, thought they’d be gone soon. They’d realize they couldn’t hack it, then pack up and leave. She’d also been buoyed by the rumors she’d been hearing in town. People were saying that Helen and Nate should never have come. Olive liked the idea of the whole town being against them, making them feel unwelcome; this would drive Helen and Nate away for sure.

  Olive marked her map with a big, satisfying no-treasure-here X and tagged the corners of the grid with tiny pieces of red string tied around saplings—something no one would notice if they weren’t looking. Then she moved on to the next part of her grid: a six-by-six-foot section along the northern edge of the bog. Her sneakers were already soaked, so she didn’t mind working on such soggy ground. Her feet sank into the mossy carpet, the water well above her ankles in places. Tall rubber boots would have been better. There was always the chance that Daddy would notice her wet sneakers and ask how she’d gotten so soaked going to school and back.

  She was playing hooky more and more these days—she figured with just days of school left before summer vacation, it didn’t really matter all that much. As long as she did decently on her final exams and turned in her papers, she figured she’d pass ninth grade. She’d been ripping up the notes they gave her to bring home for her dad, asking to set up a special meeting, saying Olive’s truancy had become a serious issue. Deleting the messages from the school on the digital answering machine (yeah, they still had an answering machine—something her mom had picked up at a yard sale—and the weirdest part was hearing Mom’s voice on the recording each time someone called: You’ve reached the Kissners. We’re not home right now, but leave a message and we’ll get back to you; neither Olive nor her father could bear to erase it). Sooner or later, if he didn’t already know how much she’d been skipping (of course he knows, dumbass), he’d find out. But by then, she’d have found the treasure, and it wouldn’t matter anymore. He’d be so happy, so proud, that he’d understand completely why conducting her search had been way more important than showing up for freshman biology and English each day.

  Mike was giving her a lot of shit about missing school, too. He’d cut out early himself today, sneaking out after lunch to come meet her here in the bog. But he’d been trying to make her feel guilty about it all afternoon—like if his dad found out, he’d get hell and it would be all her fault for being such a bad influence. Like he didn’t have a choice. Like she actually had that much power.

  Olive looked out across the bog. “Maybe Hattie’s here now, watching us.”

  “Quit it, Kissner,” Mike barked.

 
It always amused Olive, how easy poor Mike was to scare.

  “Are you here with us, Hattie?” she called out. “Give us a sign.”

  “Shut up,” Mike said.

  “Okay, Hattie,” she said now as she stood with her metal detector. “If you are here, help me out, okay? Show me where the treasure is!”

  Mike gritted his teeth. “You shouldn’t be talking to her like that,” he warned.

  She held the metal detector out in front of her like some heavy dowsing rod, pretending to be pulled right, then left. Mike’s eyes got bigger, more frantic.

  Odd Oliver, she thought. Being cruel to her one and only true friend. Talking to ghosts.

  She wondered if there were people who really could talk to ghosts. Aunt Riley said there totally were. That mediums were real and had a special kind of gift.

  “Can you talk to ghosts?” Olive had asked her once.

  “I know people who can. I haven’t been able to myself, not yet, but I keep trying.”

  Now Olive wondered if being able to talk to ghosts was something you were born with. Like people who had a photographic memory or were supertasters. Which brought Olive back to thinking about natural selection again. About Darwin sailing around on his boat, the Beagle, and writing notes, drawing pictures of birds.

  Everyone’s looking for something, she thought. Ghosts. Scientific explanations of the world around us. A new and different life somewhere else.

  Buried treasure.

  She started sweeping the metal detector over the ground in front of her, through brush, tall grass, and sedge. Nothing. She startled a moth, which came fluttering up from the grass. A damselfly darted down in front of her. A junco chattered from a nearby cedar. She continued slogging forward, sweeping carefully, making her way through the thick brush at the edge of the bog. Then the high-pitched beep of a signal. A strong one. Her heart banged in her chest.