The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  “What the hell?” Vivek says. Emily actually steps forward, turning her ear in the direction of the sound.

  We hear it again. It is a single voice, wailing from the woods. At first I think that it might be Pete out there, hiding out in the darkness and trying to mess with us all, but there is something unreal about the sounds, and I know that Pete could never produce them.

  Vivek stumbles backward down the path. I hear Boris’s growl rumbling.

  The voice yelps—excited and happy. It isn’t forming words, just releasing sounds into the night. It’s human, or at least it sounds human. My skin prickles cold in spite of the heat. This is clearly a child’s voice. A child’s voice mixed with blindness, blackness, and blood.

  “My God,” Ronnie says. “I’ve never heard anything like that before in my life.”

  The voice calls again, almost forming words before dissolving into nonsense. Now it’s a voice of madness, of gibberish. It says nothing rational, but it delights in every squeal it produces, as if it has been bound and gagged for a hundred years and some dark angel has finally reached down and ripped the muzzle from its mouth.

  And it’s getting closer.

  “Come on, let’s go!” Vivek shouts at us.

  Robin joins him on the path. “Guys, let’s get out of here!”

  “No,” Emily responds softly, as if she is in a trance. “Let’s wait a moment.”

  Another voice joins, just as sickly as the first, and the two of them echo through the woods together. Any lingering suspicion that Pete is the cause of the noises evaporates, and I find myself crossing my fingers and praying that if Pete is in the woods tonight, he is far away from whatever is making these noises. Another voice joins, and another. Four in all, whooping with delight, happy together in the darkness out near the Hawthorns.

  “It’s children,” Emily says, stepping toward them again. “They sound like children.”

  They rush at us from over the hill. Emily doesn’t move. I push Ronnie down the path and grab Emily by the arm. I pull her along behind me. Boris follows at my heels.

  We sprint halfway down the path, but just past the twin climbing trees, Emily yanks her arm out of my hand. “Let go of me!” she says. Again she turns toward the noises. “I want to know what they are.” She starts to jog back toward them.

  I know what they are. They’re those things that rose up around Emily in the cellar of the Hora House. Those things that were sleeping in the leaves. We woke them up, and now they’ve come back to the woods. And if I need to save her from them again, I’ll do it. I’ll throw her over my shoulder if I have to. I run after her, but just before I get to her, she reaches up and grabs hold of one of the branches of the climbing trees. She pulls herself up and disappears into the darkness above. From behind me I hear, “I’ve got to see too.” Ronnie pushes past me and climbs up behind Emily.

  “Are they nuts?” Vivek says. “I’m getting out of here!”

  I look at Robin. She looks back at me. “Let’s go,” I say.

  “Okay, Cousin.”

  Vivek is a few steps away before he realizes that we’ve taken to the trees with the others. He curses, looks toward the safety of home, stamps his foot, shakes his head at our stupidity. Then he follows us up.

  I look down at Boris. He’s growling, whining, pawing at the dirt. “Boris,” I call down. “I’m fine. It’s fine. Go home!” He looks up at me. I can see genuine concern in his eyes. “Go home!” I shout at him. He obeys and runs off down the path.

  I take the right tree with Emily. Robin follows Ronnie up the left one. Vivek pushes himself into the crook between the two. The voices haven’t followed us. They’ve stopped somewhere up around Whale’s Jaw. But they’re still screaming.

  They do sound like children playing in the woods, but there is something else to them, some other quality that is impossible to put my finger on. Their voices are hollow. They sound like children whose minds have been torn apart and then sewn back to rag dolls. Unable to form words anymore, they simply scream out for each other, scream out and sing and laugh in the darkness.

  “They sound like demons,” I say. “They sound like devils. Playing in our woods.”

  Then I see something. In the dim light of those lanterns I see a large figure moving around the fire pit. The figure screams, and all the other voices go silent. He goes into a rage, furiously smashing at the lanterns and throwing our chairs off into the bushes. One of the lanterns catches fire, and in the flames’ yellow glow I can see the thing more clearly. He looks as if his shoulders are covered with short, sharp antlers. His hips look more like haunches.

  The Widow’s Stone doesn’t mark a boundary anymore. We went into his lair, so now he’s come into ours.

  He lifts his head. His chin is one long spike. He releases a sustained howl and then strides off up the hill. The voices answer, yelping as they follow behind.

  The woods go quiet. After a few minutes Emily climbs down, brushes her hands together, and starts back toward Whale’s Jaw.

  “Where are you going?” I whisper, jumping down behind her.

  “Where do you think I’m going?” she replies. The others climb down behind us.

  “Are you crazy?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says, still walking away from me. “My shoes. I took them off when we started talking. So I’m going back for them. Oh, and they left one lantern burning, and I’d rather not see the woods burn down tonight. I’d also rather not go alone. I’d like your company. All of you. So come along.”

  I make myself go, and the others follow silently behind me. Once we’re back, Emily picks up her shoes. I stomp out the smoking lantern, then check all the others to make sure they haven’t caught fire. I’m not sure what I’m going to say to my father about this. There’s only one that survived the destruction, swinging on a long branch and casting a shifting green light over everything.

  “Now then,” Emily says. “Who do you think did this?”

  “Who?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘who’?”

  Vivek shakes his head. “You really are nuts, aren’t you?”

  Emily continues. “We all saw someone. The question is who? If we can figure out who they were, then I think everything else will fall into place.”

  “Who they were?” I ask. “You mean you didn’t see him?”

  “I told you, I don’t know who they were. I couldn’t see clearly enough. But I saw three, so we know that much.”

  I march up to her and grab her by the shoulders. She doesn’t try to wiggle away. “Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t see a creature covered with giant thorns?”

  “Come on, Stucks, don’t start that again,” Vivek says. “In fact, let’s all of us just get out of here before those things come back.”

  Emily takes my hands from her shoulders and then gently holds my forearms. “Things?” she asks Vivek. “What did you see?”

  “I saw coyotes,” Vivek said. “Five, maybe six of them. Running in circles around the pit. Look down! The tracks are all over the place.”

  Emily lets go of one of my arms but holds the other. “Of course there are animal tracks, Vivek. Boris has been here since Stucks came up to light the lanterns.”

  “I saw coyotes! Plural! With an s! Running in circles and yapping at each other’s heels and making that god-awful noise!”

  “Emily? What did you see?” I ask.

  “I saw three women. They plucked the lanterns from the trees, blew out the candles.”

  “And this?” I say, pointing out the destruction around us.

  “Well …” She hesitates. “Ronnie knocked his chair over. Robin hit a lantern. Perhaps in our panic—”

  I spin around. For no reason, or some reason, I don’t let go of Emily’s arm. “Ronnie?”

  Ronnie is cowering at the edge of the path, shifting from one foot to the other. He looks like he’s about to be sick. “Can we go, please? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  Emily lets go of me and walks over to Ro
nnie. “What did you see, Ronnie?” she asks him, so quietly that I can barely hear her.

  “Don’t make me say,” he whispers back.

  “It’s okay. Tell us.”

  “I saw babies.”

  Gooseflesh crawls down my arms, and I feel a muscle twitch in my stomach.

  Vivek starts to shout. “Okay! Okay! This is so messed up! I’m getting out of here.”

  “Shut up and listen to him,” I say.

  “I didn’t see what wrecked the lanterns and the chairs,” Ronnie continues. “All I saw were babies. A fire started in the fire pit, a tall fire that lit up the whole area. And then something crawled over the rocks around the edge. It looked like a baby, only its legs weren’t fully formed. It fell into the dust and wiggled like … like those eels we used to catch in the pond. Like those eels looked when they started dying in the sand. Then more started coming, a dozen or so, crawling up over the rocks and making those horrible noises and dragging themselves into the bushes.”

  I don’t want to hear any more of what Ronnie has to say. I just want to get back home and get back inside the house. “I agree with Vivek,” I tell them. “Let’s go.”

  We all start to leave, but then Ronnie notices Robin sitting on the edge of Whale’s Jaw. Her back is to us. She’s crying as quietly as she can, hoping that we won’t hear her. Emily goes over and sits next to her.

  “What did you see?” Emily asks.

  “No, no, no,” Robin sobs.

  “Tell me,” Emily says, just as quietly as she did to Ronnie.

  “I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want him to be so angry. Why does he have to hate us so much? Why would he want to scare us like this?”

  “Who did you see?” I ask.

  She turns around, wipes her eyes, looks directly at me. “You don’t care. You’re the only one who feels anything, remember? I don’t have the right to feel anything because I don’t know anything about trees or vines, and this place isn’t mine and these people aren’t my friends—isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you told me?” She starts crying again and turns away.

  “Tell me what it was,” Emily says to her. She places a hand on Robin’s shoulder.

  Robin leans into Emily and composes herself as best she can. “I saw Pete,” she says. Emily holds her for a minute, then helps her up. They move down toward the path. I reach over and grab the last remaining lantern. I lead, using the lantern to show each of them the rocks and roots that might trip them.

  But as far as I’m concerned, Robin shouldn’t be crying. I think she’s just pretending. Just trying to get attention. And it works. Emily keeps an arm around her all the way back to the cottages. Vivek and Ronnie offer comfort with their silence.

  And me? I’m left lighting the way.

  I try to sleep that night, but I don’t like what I see when I close my eyes, so instead I lie awake watching the ceiling. I can see the slight sliver of the moon through the branches of the pine trees outside my window. I lie back on my bed and pull the covers up over my lips.

  “That’s how they get you, Stucks. They get in through your mouth when you’re asleep.”

  I know that the voice isn’t in the room with me, but I hear it next to my head anyway. When we were kids, Pete and I used to sleep out in a tent in his backyard. He wasn’t afraid of being in the woods at night. But I was. And Pete knew it.

  “They’re like elves, or little trolls,” he told me on one of the first nights we were out there. “They come out of the woods at night. If they find you, they’ll try to get in through your mouth. But if you keep your mouth covered, they can’t get at you. If they do get inside you, Stucks, they’ll crawl up and eat your brains a little bit at a time, and you’ll slowly go crazy. This one kid I know lost his mind and killed his whole family. He’s in a crazy house now.”

  I remember wanting to run back inside the house, but I was too scared to even step outside the tent into the darkness.

  “Of course, when you fall asleep, that cover may slip off your lips, so it’s not the best way to protect yourself. There’s only one thing that can really protect you from them.”

  “What is it?”

  “You won’t like it. It’s terrible.”

  “What?”

  “Well, if you gotta know … it’s dog turds. You put them under your pillow at night, and you never have to worry about trolls.”

  I giggled a little, so Pete went on.

  “Oh, those little guys just love dog turds. Can’t get enough. They crawl up the bed to get you, and they smell those dog turds, and they forget all about little-kid brains. They grab those turds and take off. They’re so happy, they go home screaming to all the other little trolls, and then there’s a big dog-turd troll party.…”

  By then I was laughing out loud, and then Pete was laughing too, both of us not able to stop, and I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t scared of being in the woods anymore. And if I did begin to get even a little scared, all I had to say was “dog-turd troll party,” and we’d start laughing all over again.

  Still, before I went to sleep that night I made sure that my chin was tucked into the neck of my sleeping bag. And I even did it some nights when I was in the house. Sometimes I couldn’t get to sleep until that sheet was pulled up over my lips.

  I still do it sometimes when I wake up from a nightmare, or sometimes at night when I get that feeling … that feeling that I’m not alone, that something unhealthy is nearby. I know I probably look stupid with the sheet up over my lips. Maybe there is a Pricker Boy, but there are certainly no demonic gnomes running around the woods, trying to get into my head and eat my brains. I know that, but I keep my mouth covered by the sheets anyway.

  Sometimes you couldn’t tell if Pete was trying to scare you or just trying to be funny. Whether he was trying to scare you or stop you from being scared. You had to be careful. He could be nice one minute, and the next he’d slash at you and slice deep enough to scar.

  It had started small. Last summer Pete was fine on some days, not so great on others. He liked Ronnie’s stories, and he enjoyed swinging from the rope swing that hung over the pond in front of Ronnie’s grandparents’ cottage. Some days, Pete accepted Ronnie as one of the gang.

  But other days, Pete wasn’t fine. A tiny match can set paper, which sets kindling, which sets logs aflame. Pete’s moods were like that. On those days, it was always better for Ronnie to just go home and read a book or work on a new story and forget hanging around with us. Everybody got mad at Ronnie at one point or another. Ronnie’s that kind of kid. He gets under your skin. He’s a little too clean, a little too smart. It’s like he thinks he’s just a little bit better than the rest of us. Not a lot, but a little. And that was enough for Pete to really hate him on some days. Pete, who wasn’t book-smart at all, and who didn’t own a shirt that ever needed ironing.

  Last summer during one of the worst heat waves we were all over at the rope swing. Pete was doing his usual crazy flips and dives. Sometimes it looked like he would come down in shallow water and snap his neck. Ronnie got hold of the rope and was about to swing out when Pete said, “Hey, Ronnie, do a flip. Just go up and flip backward into a dive.”

  Ronnie shook his head. “I don’t do that stuff.”

  And that was it. I’m sure it was those five words that set Pete off. Something about Ronnie’s tone that Pete didn’t like. Something that registered in Pete’s brain as, “I’ll leave that stuff to dumb assholes like you.”

  “I don’t do that stuff.” Not “I can’t do that stuff.”

  “I don’t do that stuff.”

  A second passed, and in that second I could feel Pete change, feel his personality shift. Ronnie turned to jump, and Pete said, “That’s ’cause you’re queer.” Ronnie stopped and blinked at him, then laughed a little and swung out over the water. I remember his skinny arms straining just from holding his own body weight up. He reminded me of a scrawny old man as he let go and flopped into the water. Ronnie always looks like that
whenever we’re swimming or climbing trees or running around. He’s never been all that coordinated, and he always looks awkward when we get to sports and other physical stuff. His body favors a clean shirt and a good book. His movements hold no grace.

  Of course, Vivek is no better. He swung out after Ronnie. Whenever Vivek lets go of the rope, he likes to stick out all his arms and legs and scream like a demented Tarzan. This time his flapping appendages and garbled yodeling ended with a crack as his body slapped the surface of the water. When he surfaced, he moaned, “Ohhhh. That one hurt.” I knew that it wouldn’t stop him from doing the same thing the next time.

  I swung out next. When I got to the surface of the water, I could see Ronnie and Pete talking. Pete had this sick smile on his face. Then Pete swung out and did a flip in the air, the same one that he had suggested that Ronnie do. I climbed out of the water, and Ronnie shook his head. “Sometimes I hate that guy,” Ronnie muttered, but I ignored him. I was hoping it would all go away so we could just go on swimming. I only wanted to swing and swim and try to stay cool in the sickening humidity.

  Pete broke the surface of the water and shouted with joy, more to rub Ronnie’s face in it than anything. He climbed out of the water, and Robin swung out. Pete started in on Ronnie again, and Ronnie finally said, “I wish you’d just leave me alone.”

  And Pete said, “That’s ’cause you’re queer.”

  It went on like that for a while. No matter what Ronnie said, Pete responded, “That’s ’cause you’re queer.”

  At one point Emily followed behind me, holding her nose and turning back to face the shore before doing a pin drop into the water. She surfaced, and before I could swim back, she caught me by the elbow.

  “What’s going on with them?”

  “I dunno.” I guess it was lie, and I guess I lied because I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t know enough to do anything about it.

  When we climbed out of the water, I heard Ronnie say to Pete, “That’s a dirty word. I don’t like that word.” I winced when he said that. He sounded like a prissy librarian.