Crooked Hills

by Cullen Bunn

  Laughing, Marty let himself fall to a seated position with the water rushing up to his neck. I did the same. The jagged rocks poked at me through the seat of my shorts. Marty splashed a handful of water into my face, starting a huge splash fest that lasted five minutes. Alex laughed at us, and Lisa scurried out of the water and away from the blast zone.

  How awesome! In the city, we often went to the public pool, but swimming here, we had the entire creek to ourselves. No screaming babies. No prune-faced grannies sneering at you when you splashed a little too much. No grumpy lifeguards who were more interested in getting a tan than saving lives.

  “In a couple of days,” Marty promised, “we’ll bring some inner tubes out and float on the rapids.”

  That sounded great. I’d never done—

  With a sploosh! Alex vanished. His entire body dropped like a brick beneath the water. He didn’t even have time to scream.

  “Alex!” I jumped up. Water dripped from my body in sheets, spilling into the creek all around, sending ripples across the surface. I rushed to where he had been wading when he went under. “Alex!”

  “He wandered into a deep pocket!” Lisa cried.

  Now that she pointed it out, I noticed I couldn’t see the creek bed before me. Instead, it looked like a shadow covered the area. No telling how deep the hole might be, how far under Alex might have fallen. I didn’t see him anywhere.

  I drew in a deep breath. I was a pretty good swimmer. I had passed a CPR and life-saving course and everything. I just never expected to actually need it, especially not to rescue my brother.

  Just as I was about to dive into the deep, cold darkness, Alex broke the surface, coughing and sputtering... and laughing. His hair was plastered to his forehead in several pointy wedges, and his eyes were bright and surprised. I hauled him into the shallows. Marty gave me a hand.

  “You all right?” Lisa called from the shore.

  “I’m okay,” Alex coughed.

  I should have known he’d be all right. Like I said, I was a pretty good swimmer, but Alex could backstroke circles around me. He was on a junior swim team back home.

  “Something tells me,” Lisa said, “hanging around with the three of you is going to be nothing but trouble. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take care of you.”

  Marty and I looked at each other. An unspoken idea passed between us. At the same time, we jumped up and seized Lisa. I grabbed her left wrist, and Marty took her right.

  “No!” she shrieked. “Don’t you dare!”

  But it was too late for her. In time, Marty and I swung her arms.

  “One!” we cried together.

  “Don’t do it!” she yelled.

  “Two!”

  “I mean it!” Lisa thrashed against us.

  “Three!”

  We hurled her into the creek, clothes and all. Water burst into the air and rained down around us. We howled with laughter. Alex clapped his hands and cheered.

  Lisa surfaced, her hair matted down in her face. A few individually wrapped peppermints bobbed in the water around her. At first I thought she was going to come out after us. I had the feeling she could probably beat both Marty and me in a fight if she wanted to. But instead she started laughing, too, and splashing water up at us.

  We swam for a while longer, and Marty impressed (and soaked) us all by cannonballing off the concrete bridge into one of the deep pockets. I wasn’t quite ready to try the stunt, but it sure looked fun.

  After our swim, we collapsed on the bank for a while, letting the sun warm us. I took my shoes off, hoping to let them dry a little more quickly, but it didn’t seem to help much.

  I closed my eyes and let my mind wander a bit. After all was said and done, being in Crooked Hills wasn’t so bad. I missed my friends back home, sure, but I enjoyed my cousin’s company and I’d made a new friend in Lisa. And I had to admit, all of the strange occurrences and ghostly happenings of the area excited and intrigued me. While Marty shared my fascination with the strange, Lisa seemed to think it was a foolish interest.

  “All the ghost stories are just made up to scare little kids,” she said. “They aren’t true at all.”

  Marty waved toward the red-headed girl as if presenting her to an audience. “Lisa Summers, ladies and gentlemen, the world’s biggest skeptic.”

  She rolled her eyes at him and stuck out her tongue. I noticed her tongue was a deep shade of red, much more red than any normal person’s tongue, probably because of all the peppermints she ate.

  “What about Maddie Someday?” I asked.

  I forgot to spit twice, but Marty did it for me.

  “She’s just a myth,” Lisa said.

  “But we saw the Bleeding Rock.”

  “That’s just a place where high school kids party on the weekends. Somebody told me the town council wanted to encourage the legends to beef up the tourist trade.” She muttered under her breath. “For all the good it did.”

  “You want more tourists around?” I asked. “Why would you? I’d think it would ruin everything, all those noisy, pig-headed sightseers.”

  “At least it would bring some interesting people around,” she said.

  “Oh, how cold!” I feigned withdrawing a dagger from my heart. Maybe some of Marty’s theatrics were rubbing off on me. “My brother and I aren’t interesting enough for you?”

  “The jury’s still out.” She wrinkled her freckled nose. “But come on. You guys are from the city. You must be bored to death here.”

  “I kind of like it,” Alex said.

  “I’ll admit,” I said, “I thought I’d go stir crazy out here in the country, but I haven’t been bored yet.”

  “You’ve only been here for, what, a couple of days.”

  “But look at all that’s happened in the short while we’ve been here. I’ve seen a rock where an old witch was killed.”

  “Ahem!” Lisa said.

  “Okay... where a witch was rumored to be killed. I was almost clobbered by a speed-crazy thug, but was rescued by a cagey warrior princess.”

  Lisa blushed.

  “And,” I continued, “my brother fell into a bottomless underwater pit.”

  “It’s not bottomless,” Marty said. “It’s not even all that deep.”

  “Seemed pretty deep to me,” Alex mused.

  “This is just a little creek, really. There are some pretty deep ones around here. Some guys with scuba gear came around a few years back, and they dove down in the river hundreds of feet. They said they saw catfish at the bottom almost as big as a man.”

  Without even realizing it, I pulled my feet away from the water.

  “Yeah.” Lisa had a dreamy look in her eyes. “Those guys were neat.”

  “Don’t mind her.” Marty sneered. “She had a crush on one of the divers.”

  “I did not!” Lisa said.

  Marty snickered.

  We relaxed on the shore, letting the sun bake us as we talked. The rest of the afternoon passed at a quiet, peaceful pace. All in all, it was a great day, despite the encounter with Greg Crewes. If I could go back in time and freeze us all in that moment, I would, because what came after was awful.

  Just awful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “CHARLIE? YOU SLEEPING?”

  “Trying to,” I muttered.

  Actually, I was pretending to sleep, and obviously botching the job if I couldn’t even fool my little brother.

  “I’m not very tired,” Alex said.

  Great, I thought. I rolled my eyes, certain he couldn’t see me in the darkness of our room. Until he fell asleep, I couldn’t sneak out undetected. Marty and I planned on catching a glimpse of the spectral dog tonight, and we didn’t need Alex tagging along. Unfortunately, my brother was more talkative than sleepy.

  “I had a pretty good time today,” he said, “didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “This place might not be so bad after all.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I
was a little scared today,” Alex said. “The Bleeding Rock... and Greg Crewes... and almost drowning... those things all scared me pretty bad... but I’m glad you were there with me. I knew you wouldn’t let anything bad happen.”

  His words stung. I felt awful for being so irritated with him. Here I was, wishing he’d just shut up and pass out, and he goes and says something nice.

  Silence rushed in like creek water filling my shoes. I checked the clock on the nightstand. 10:45. Marty and I had agreed to meet at the back door at eleven. I didn’t want to be too late because I halfway suspected Marty might traipse off after the dog without me.

  “Try and get some sleep,” I said at last.

  “Okay.” Alex pulled the covers up around him. “Good night.”

  I waited for another twenty minutes or so, until I heard Alex breathing slow and steady. Asleep at last! I pushed the covers off of me—quietly—and stepped out of bed. I had made a point to wear normal clothes to bed instead of pajamas, so I didn’t need to worry about changing clothes. Barefoot, I tiptoed across the room to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Alex asked groggily.

  I winced. He was still awake, and now I’d been caught.

  “Just going to the bathroom and getting a drink of water,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I figured he had drifted back to dreamland. I released a breath and opened the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak.

  Marty’s door was open, and his room was dark and quiet. At first. I thought he was in bed sleeping, too, but I realized the shape beneath the blanket was just pillows. The oldest trick in the book, but I wished I’d thought of it. If Alex woke up and found me missing, he’d cause trouble. Too late now. I couldn’t risk sneaking back into the bedroom without waking him. I’d have to take my chances.

  Marty waited by the back door. He was dressed and ready to go, and he handed me my still-damp shoes as I joined him.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “Alex,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Why don’t you want him to come?”

  I shook my head. “He’s just a kid. He’d get too scared.”

  “He did fine today. A lot of kids would have been a lot more scared than he was. Maybe he’s braver than you think.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “Just when you think he’ll be all right, he gets frightened and all bets are off. He does okay in the daylight, but I don’t want to know how he’d be in the dark.”

  “If you say so.” Marty held up a pair of flashlights. He shook them, and the batteries rattled inside the plastic casing. He tested both of them, aiming the beams at the floor as he flipped the switches on and off a couple of times. He handed me one. “Don’t use these close to the house unless you really need to. I don’t want to risk our folks seeing the light.”

  Luckily, the moonlight was bright enough we didn’t need the flashlights. We hid a few yards away from the mysterious hole where I’d glimpsed the dog the night before.

  We waited.

  The air was cool and damp, and a light low-hanging mist oozed between the trees. The mist, Marty promised, would only deepen as the night wore on, growing as thick as pea soup by early morning until the sun burned the fog away.

  I noticed several odd zig-zagging lines trailing across the forest floor, up and down the fence posts, and across the yard. The trails glistened.

  “What is that?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen a slug trail before?”

  “A slug trail? You mean that’s slime where a slug crawled?”

  “Pretty disgusting, huh? They come out at night to feed with their tongues—all covered in teeth and slimy.” Marty stuck his tongue out and wagged it back and forth, laughing. “Sometimes they get in the house. Once, I was getting dressed and found a slug waiting in my shoe! Squished it right between my toes.”

  Great. Another creepy crawly to worry about out in the woods. Tarantulas. Scorpions. Chiggers. Slugs. What’s next?

  We sat in the woods for at least a couple of hours, but the dog didn’t return. My legs started to cramp, and I shifted uncomfortably. I yawned, long and loud.

  “Figures,” I muttered. “It’s not going to show up here again.”

  “Worth a shot, I reckon.” Marty looked off into the trees. “Dogs have more powerful senses of smell than humans. They can detect smells we don’t even know exist. He might have smelled us.”

  “Might have smelled you.” I gave him a shove.

  “You ate more beans at supper than I did!” He pushed me back.

  Our laughter raced off into the night, echoing through the darkness and bouncing through the hills. I hoped we weren’t being too loud. I didn’t want to wake our parents or Alex. Looking back at the house, though, I didn’t see any lights flaring to life.

  “Whether he smelled us or not,” I said, “he sure heard us. Sound really carries out here.”

  “Whatever it was, we’ll probably never find it again.” Marty shook his head. “There are miles and miles of forest out here. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  We were about to give up and pack it in when the mournful whistle of the train cried out in the night, rising up like the cry of a sad ghost and fading into nothing.

  “Where’s the train coming from?”

  “Crooked Hills used to be a rail town, but that dried up before I was even born. Now the train doesn’t even slow down when it passes through. Still comes through twice a day, once around midday and once in the middle of the night.”

  In the following silence, another sound answered the train.

  The dog’s howl.

  It was off in the distance, and the echo made it sound like it came from all directions at once, bouncing through the trees.

  “You hear that, right?” I asked my cousin. “I’m not imagining it, am I?”

  “I hear it.” Marty stood up and cocked his head, trying to detect the source of the sound. “Sounds like it’s trying to talk back to the train whistle.”

  “Just like last night,” I said.

  The howl faded.

  “You know what this means?” Marty’s face brightened as an idea crossed his mind, and I knew what he was thinking before he spoke the words. “If it always answers the train whistle, we can track its howl. We might be able to find it.”

  “No way.” I shook my head. “We couldn’t possibly pinpoint the sound.”

  “You never know. With a little luck, we might be able to—” He snapped his fingers. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I know one of the best trackers in the state!”

  “You do?” I asked. “Who?”

  “You already met her.”

  “Lisa?” I asked.

  “You bet. She knows these woods even better than I do, and she’s a natural tracker—part bloodhound.”

  “You think she’d help us?”

  “Sure she would. She’d see it as a challenge. And besides—” Marty winked. “—I think she likes you.”

  “No, she doesn’t!” I raised my voice a little too much, and the words resounded through the darkness.

  “Okay, okay,” Marty said. “You’re probably right. She probably doesn’t like you at all. Heck, she hardly knows you.”

  I grumbled under my breath.

  “Cheer up,” my cousin said. “By tomorrow night we’ll be on the hunt for your mystery dog.”

  The idea of finding the dog filled me with a sense of dread.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I FORGOT ALL ABOUT THE SQUEAKY BEDROOM DOOR as I crept back into my room. The hinges let out a long, drawn out creeeaaaaaak! I feared I would wake everybody in the entire house, especially my little brother. I didn’t want to face his questions. No way he’d believe I had been getting a drink of water and using the bathroom for three hours. Despite Marty’s jokes, I hadn’t eaten that many beans for supper!

  Lucky for me, Alex didn’t awaken. He just rolled over and muttered something I couldn’t make out.

  I tiptoed to bed.
It didn’t hit me until I crawled beneath the covers, but I was wiped out. My eyes felt heavy, and my arms and legs ached. I sagged into the mattress like a trash bag full of Jell-O. I wasn’t used to staying up so late. Something told me, however, I’d have many late nights to come.

  Alex mumbled something again. He looked to be sleeping peacefully for the most part, but every now and then he fidgeted or twitched. The glow of the moon filtering through the window bathed him in a bluish light. I didn’t know he talked in his sleep, but then again I’d never really shared a room with him all that often.

  He said something again, and this time I understood him.

  “Someday.”

  He was having a dream—or more than likely a nightmare—about the old witch!

  I considered waking him up, but decided against it. In a couple of minutes he settled down and didn’t say anything else. I watched Alex for a while, waiting for him to say something else about Maddie. He was still and quiet, though. I closed my eyes.

  I might have gone right to sleep, except for the screaming.

  From outside.

  The animals.

  Screaming.

  The sounds startled me, and I sat bolt upright in bed. The chickens squawked as though a coyote had broken into the henhouse, and the goats shrieked terrible bleating cries. Awful, screeching cat cries added to the maddening racket. I threw the covers aside and climbed out of bed to investigate—

  That’s when I noticed Alex was gone. His covers were messy, but he wasn’t in bed. He must’ve heard the sound, too, and his curiosity got the best of him. Why didn’t he wake me?

  I stepped into the hall. The thin carpet beneath my feet twitched like the hair on a tarantula’s legs, and the moon’s blue light illuminated the passage, even though no windows were nearby.

  I tapped lightly on the door to Marty’s bedroom.

  “Marty! Wake up! Something’s wrong outside.”

  He didn’t answer. I tried the door knob, but it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. I pressed my ear up against the wood and listened. I couldn’t hear a thing.

  The awful goat cries from outside grew louder. Forgetting about Marty’s help, I rushed down the hall and out the back door. My shadow, black as midnight and twisted horribly, chased after me.