The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  I stopped about thirty feet from the car. “I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “I think that thing may drop at any second. It could take us down from right here when it goes.”

  “Stay here,” Pete said. “I’ll go.” He started inching his way forward, all the time calling out, “Hey!”

  It was Hank Paulding’s Impala. I could smell thick exhaust coming from the motor. It was a monster of a car, long and wide and a guzzler of gas. Hank always told us that he was going to fix the rust spots and paint it cream yellow and take it out to car shows.

  “Hey!” Pete called out to him.

  Hank stopped gunning the engine and rolled down the window. “Oh hey,” he said. “Hey, hey.”

  “It’s me, Hank. Pete?”

  “Oh yeah. Pete. Hey, Pete.” His voice sounded thick and sleepy. It was clear that he had found his way to the bottom of a bottle of something. “Hey, Pete, give me a hand. I gotta get out of here. She’s back. I gotta …”

  “I think you’re stuck, Hank,” I heard Pete say. “How about we leave the car here and worry about it in the morning? Come on, I’ll walk with you back home.” Pete spoke to Hank as if Hank were a kitten he was trying to coax down from a tree.

  Hank started wailing. “No, no, ain’t gonna go back, no way!” He started hitting the gas again. I heard ice spasms radiating out from underneath the car. One of them passed right between my legs.

  Pete looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders. I thought he was going to walk back and tell me that we should just go to his place and call the police. If Hank fell in before they got out there, at least he wouldn’t take us down too. But instead Pete walked right up to the open window.

  “How about I give you a push, Hank?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah!” Hank said. “We’ll get it moving. You and me, Stucks. I mean … Pete? Is that you, Pete?”

  “Yeah, it’s Pete. Tell you what. You give it a little gas, and I’ll go to the back and give you a push. But gentle on the gas, Hank. Just a little bit.”

  “Okay, just a little.”

  I thought Pete was crazy. Even if he did get the car moving, it would only send Hank out farther, and then Hank might hit a thin patch over one of the springs that fed the pond. Pete sometimes had a sick sense of humor, but this wasn’t funny. It might even be murder or something. I ran up to Pete as he walked to the back of the Impala.

  “Pete, what are you—”

  “Stucks, stand here next to me. Hey, Hank? Stucks is here with me! We’re going to push you together!”

  “Okay. Good, good,” Hank called back.

  “Give it a little gas, Hank! Just a little!”

  Hank pressed the gas pedal, but Pete didn’t touch the car at all. He waited a few seconds while the wheels fought the ice, then told Hank to ease it off. I heard more squealing and popping from the ice.

  “I don’t know, Hank,” Pete said as he walked back to the open window. “Stucks and I pushed as hard as we could, but the wheels didn’t budge. I have an idea, though.”

  “Yeah?” Hank said. His eyes were glassy from the booze. Tears had streaked his face.

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “How about this?” Pete’s voice was still calm, as if it were a spring afternoon and Hank was just stuck in the mud. “I think your wheels have gotten too hot. I think they’ve been spinning so much that the heat’s built up in the rubber. So now they’re hot and they’re just melting the ice and you can’t get going over wet ice, right?”

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “Wet ice can grab tires on ice when it’s hot.…”

  I heard a sharp ping in the ice followed by several crunching rumbles. Pete shifted his feet from side to side. I saw his hands shaking. It was only then that I realized just how scared he was.

  “So maybe we get out and take a little walk, and we let those wheels cool down. In twenty minutes or so the wheels will be cool”—the ice wheezed and then wailed like a giant banshee—“and we’ll come back here and give it another shot. That sound good?”

  “Uh, sure, Pete. That’s a good plan.”

  Pete pulled open the Impala’s rusted door. He quickly reached into the car, shut off the engine, and stuck the keys in his pocket. Hank stuck one foot out, but he kept slipping so bad that he couldn’t even get the other foot out of the car.

  “Stucks, I need your help here,” Pete said desperately. I rushed over and we grabbed Hank under the arms. We pulled him from the car, and he immediately fell on his face, smacking his cheek against the ice.

  “Oh, oh,” Hank moaned. “Please help. I can’t walk too good.” He was bleeding out his mouth. The guy stank. It was worse than his usual stink. Now he had hard-alcohol breath on top of it. We reached down and hoisted him back to his feet.

  “Cars are a bitch, huh, Hank?” Pete said as we stepped away from the car. He was trying to sound calm so that Hank would come along with us easily, but he was straining against Hank’s weight. In my head I was pleading with the ice to hold out for another minute or two.

  “Yeah, cars are no good,” Hank slurred.

  We were about ten feet away when the ice under the car started shrieking. I could feel the vibrations up to my knees. It wasn’t just a single explosion this time, though. They continued in smaller, individual aftershocks as the fault lines expanded.

  We started moving faster, but we had no traction, and Hank was dragging us down. I think … I think that for a second I considered dropping Hank and making a run for it. If it had been anyone else but Pete with me, I probably would have.

  Thirty feet away and we heard what I can only describe as a dragon groaning, and then the most terrifying sound yet. Water splashing.

  The cracks were still traveling along under our feet. We let Hank fall to the ground and started dragging him by the shoulders of his coat, but we had waited too long. The ice under our feet split, and all three of us dropped down into the water.

  It took a second for the cold of the water to hit me. When it did hit, it knocked the breath out of me as surely as a punch to the stomach would have. For a brief instant I remembered Ed Giles, our local loudmouth, telling me that “when you fall through the ice on a really cold winter day, you’re actually better off, because that water is always going to be warmer than the air.” Well, I can tell Ed Giles for a fact that when you hit the pond water in the middle of winter, the cold takes a quick breath and then starts ripping your life away. No exaggeration, Ed. I don’t know what your winters are like down there in the Florida Keys. Up here, the cold air plays fair, but the water takes the cold right to your soul.

  My legs were kicking against the water and the broken ice. It had to be less than ten seconds before I stopped feeling my legs altogether. I was flailing.

  “Stucks!” I heard Pete shout. “Stucks, put your feet down!”

  I barely heard him through my panic, but I did as he told me to do. My foot didn’t reach the sandy bottom of the pond. But it did reach the submerged edge of Hank’s rock pile.

  Pete and I clawed over the rocks to the shore, pulling Hank along with us as we went. I looked back and saw the Impala slide sideways under the ice.

  We dropped Hank and collapsed onto the ground. Our breath flew out in clouds. Behind us the pond gurgled and belched as it swallowed the Impala down.

  “Hey, Hank!” Pete wheezed. “Don’t forget where you parked!”

  Once Pete and I got our breath, we helped Hank up and got him walking. We caught him whenever he stumbled. Our clothes stiffened as the water in them froze.

  Hank’s house is built on the side of a steep hill, and long stilts level out the front. The house loomed overhead, but the windows let out a lot of light from within. At night Hank’s place always makes me think of a really bright streetlight. You don’t want to look at the light, though, because Hank often walks around naked up there.

  Hank looked up at his house and fell backward to the ground. “No, no, no!” he wailed. “I can’t go up there! Don’t make me go up there!”

  Pete’s voic
e was still soothing, gently coaxing. “But Hank, it’s your house. And we can’t go out driving anymore, because we don’t know where the Impala is. You gotta go home.”

  “No, she’s up there! She won’t leave me alone!”

  I felt my skin prickle, and it wasn’t from the cold. Every once in a while Hank would tell us that his house was haunted by a pale, long-haired young woman. Sometimes he would wake up at night and she’d be standing at the foot of the bed, staring at him. Sometimes she would stand in the corner and wave her finger at him. Perhaps strangest of all, she would sit down and watch television with him. He spoke about her so matter-of-factly that we never considered that he was pulling our leg. We knew that he believed it, and that meant either that he hallucinated, which seemed beyond even Hank Paulding, or that his house really was haunted.

  “I can’t go back there!” Hank shouted. “I gotta get out! Where’s my car? Stucks, can you see my car?”

  “No, Hank, I can’t,” I said, and it couldn’t have been any further from a lie.

  “Come on, Hank,” Pete said. “You gotta go home.”

  Hank started to crawl across the ground away from his house. “No, no! She’s up there!”

  Pete smiled at me. “Well, maybe it’s not so bad. When was the last time you had a date, Hank?”

  I laughed, but Hank was too far gone to catch the joke. “She’s been following me all night. Right at my elbow! Her face is rotting but she keeps staring!”

  “Damn, I’m cold,” Pete said to me. “My coat’s frozen stiff. Really. We need to get inside.” He pulled at the edge of his coat, and it didn’t bend. “Hey, Hank! What if I stay here with you, and Stucks goes up to your house to make sure she’s gone?”

  If Pete thought I was going up there alone to possibly come face to face with a ghostly corpse with a rotting face, he had another think coming. “No way,” I whispered.

  “There’s nothing up there, Stucks. The guy’s drunk as hell.”

  “He’s seen her when he’s sober, Pete!”

  Hank kept whining. “She keeps telling me I’m no good. Over and over, ‘You’re no good, Hank.’ Where’s my car? I gotta get out of here! Where’s my car?”

  It was no use. We couldn’t get him to go back up to that house.

  Hank passed out on the couch in Pete’s basement. I grabbed my sleeping bag from my house and left a note for my parents, and Pete and I stayed up playing Berserk until we fell asleep on the floor in front of Hank. In the morning he was gone.

  We decided that we wouldn’t tell Hank what happened to the Impala. We were pretty sure that he wouldn’t remember, and if he did he’d be too embarrassed to say anything to us about it. Chances were he’d think it was stolen or that he’d lost it in a poker game.

  That was how a ’72 Chevy Impala got to the bottom of Tanner Pond. And more importantly, that was the lonely, bitter night that I watched Pete risk his life to save a sad man who would have otherwise found his way down under the ice.

  It wasn’t me. I was just following along, and I was ready to run with the first snap of the ice.

  * * *

  I’ve been reading by the pond for only a few minutes when the Cricket sneaks up behind me with a bicycle horn and honks it right in my ear. I scowl at him. He sits down beside me and mimics my scowl face. Eyebrows dragging low, bottom lip jutting out, he sits on the ground beside me and pretends to angrily turn the pages of an invisible book. I laugh. I close the book and lay it by my side.

  I wiggle my thumb and little finger in the air, then run my index finger across my outer ear, then finish by rubbing my thumb across the fingertips of my right hand. CRICKET, LISTEN TO STUCKS.

  The Cricket lifts his fist and nods it.

  I make the Cricket sign again, then shake my fist back and forth. I wiggle two fingers at the ground, then put my palms together and open and close them like a whale’s mouth. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

  “No more this summer,” I add out loud, and he covers my mouth. He lifts his fist and shakes it back and forth.

  I make the signs again. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

  He again shakes his hand back and forth. He is in what my mother calls “toad mode,” meaning that he is being a pain for the sake of being a pain.

  I run my thumb across my fingertips again. Using both hands I pretend to pull my chest open. STUCKS AFRAID. I follow it with the original instructions. CRICKET NO GO TO WHALE’S JAW.

  Again he shakes his fist no. He wiggles his pinkie and thumb in the air, shakes his fist, and pretends to split his own chest open. CRICKET NOT AFRAID.

  I want to say something, but I have no signal for it. It’s something that I have never asked him before. Unable to think up a sign and too annoyed to create a new pantomime for it, I speak out loud.

  “Why?” I ask. I make the sign for his name, then shake my fist, then trace my index finger over my outer ear again. CRICKET NOT LISTENING. “Why?” I repeat out loud.

  He doesn’t cover my mouth. He just looks up at me and repeats his signs. CRICKET NOT AFRAID.

  I make the sign for my name, then pretend to pull my chest apart. STUCKS AFRAID. I make a tight fist in front of my chest, then pull it apart again. VERY AFRAID.

  We had all walked Vivek and Emily home on the night of the sounds. We were terrified, but we figured that it was easier to be terrified in a group of five than to force any one of us to walk alone. After they were safely in their cottages, Ronnie, Robin, and I made our way back down the hill.

  In the days following, Robin tells me four times that she is not going into the woods again under any circumstances, not even to Whale’s Jaw. For almost a week, no one goes into the woods, even in the daytime. Then Ronnie comes to me. I ask him what he wants, but he stutters, whispering so low I can’t hear him.

  “What do you want, Ronnie?” “Will you do a widow’s walk with me?” he asks.

  “Are you serious?” I ask him.

  “Yeah. Listen, I know you don’t want to. But it has to be you. Emily will try to talk me out of it. Vivek will just make a joke. I can’t trust him not to run away. Robin is too upset to go back there. But you’ll understand. You know about bad dreams. And I know that if you promise me you’ll do it, you won’t run away on me.”

  “Ronnie, what happened?”

  We are down at the water’s edge. I’m sitting on the shore while Nana takes her daily swim. Ronnie sits down and lowers his voice.

  “I’ve been having this dream, Stucks. A bad one.”

  Ronnie looks out at Nana in the water, and when he is convinced that she isn’t listening, he whispers, “I’ve never had a dream like it before. It was one of those dreams that when you wake up you’re not sure exactly where you are because it was so real.”

  “I know the feeling,” I say quietly. “Tell me.”

  “It was just you and me in the dream. We were in your house. I don’t know where everyone else was, but it was nighttime. But it felt like it had been night for a while, for days and days, and that everyone else … well, that they were all gone. And that they weren’t ever coming back. It was like—”

  “The end of the world,” I say, nodding quickly. “Judgment Day. And everyone else had faced judgment ex cept you.”

  “Yes! But … you didn’t seem scared. You pulled out a piece of paper and wrote numbers on the page, but not in any order. 9, 3, 8, 2, 7, 5 … Then you took a clear glass and turned it over on the paper. We were sitting across from each other, and we each reached out and placed a finger on the edge of the glass. It started to move.”

  Ronnie looks around to make sure that there is no one in the bushes eavesdropping. I want to point out that the only person who does things like that is … well, Ronnie himself, but I figure it’s best not to interrupt him.

  “The glass chose five numbers before it stopped moving. Then you looked at me and said, ‘Go ahead.’ There was a phone on the table. I picked it up and dialed the numbers. But there was nothing on the other end. No sound at all. I
remember laughing, and I said, ‘Nobody home.’

  “So we did it again, and this time it picked three numbers. You dialed this time, and you listened, and your eyes lit up. You passed the phone to me. I could hear static, and behind the static I could hear voices. Little kids talking back and forth to each other. Then we did it again, and it chose six numbers. I dialed. This time a voice answered.”

  Ronnie stops and grits his teeth. His voice quakes. “It was a kid’s voice, but it was from far away, like he was on the other end of the yard and he was shouting over a storm. He said, ‘Can I come visit you?’”

  I look away from Ronnie and check on Nana. She is floating blissfully in the cool pond water. Overhead in the trees, cicadas buzz in the heat.

  Ronnie continues. “I said, ‘Who is this?’ And the boy’s voice said, ‘You know who this is.’ It sounded like a voice from Hell, Stucks. Worse than those noises the other night. It was like it was laughing at me. Then it said, ‘I’m coming over for a visit right now.’ I said, ‘You don’t know me.’ And it said …” Ronnie fights against his shaking voice.

  “It’s okay,” I say, “just tell me about it.” I’ve felt the fear of a nightmare so strong it doesn’t fade as the day goes on. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  “It said, ‘You bled out here. I can smell you. I know what cottage you’re in.’ He said it again: ‘I can smell you.’ Then the line went dead.” Ronnie wipes his eyes and laughs nervously. “It’s the same dream every night, every night since … well … you know. Last night I woke up, and I didn’t go back to sleep. Unless we do something, I’m not going back to sleep at all. I’ll stay up all night for days if I have to.”

  “Ronnie, if a widow’s walk cured bad dreams, I’d have asked you to do one with me years ago.”

  “I know it’s just a dream, but I want to do it anyway. Be my watcher while I do a widow’s walk this afternoon. Please, Stucks.”