The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  I turn away from him, check on Nana.

  “You said you’d do it, remember? When I bled out there?”

  I nod. “Okay,” I say.

  “Just between you and me, okay? No one else needs to know.” “Don’t worry.”

  Nana flaps and splashes in the pond water. “No one else needs to know,” she sings. “No one else, no one else, no one else needs to know.…”

  A half dozen thorn branches droop over the top of the stone wall around the Widow’s Stone. I gently run my hand over them. They have the feel of plastic, and the plant they sprout from is shiny, as if it has been polished. I let the branches glide through my palm. I can feel their desire to cut me. I pull Pete’s knife from my pocket, pinch one of the branches firmly with my first finger and thumb, and cut off about two feet of it. Then I realize that damaging the thorns might not be the best idea right now.

  “I hope this works,” Ronnie says.

  “Ronnie—”

  “It’s just got to make me feel better,” he says. “That’s all, just make me feel better, let me sleep.”

  Ronnie pulls out a stack of postcards held together with a rubber band.

  “Postcards? You’re supposed to pick something that has meaning, Ronnie. Something of importance. If you want this to work, you have to—”

  “I like them,” Ronnie explains, avoiding eye contact with me. “They’re from all over.”

  Now I feel stupid. When you’ve known someone since you were really little, you sometimes forget. You just take their families for granted. You never question. So-and-so has no father, so-and-so has two mothers, so-and-so has a brother and a sister, but they’re not related because one’s mother married the others’ father. It’s just the way it is. So I never ask Ronnie about his parents. I know that his father travels a lot for work, that sometimes his mother travels with him. Vivek said once that Ronnie almost never sees them. That’s why he spends so much time with his grandparents. Those postcards do have meaning. Maybe a little pain too. I shouldn’t have doubted them, and I feel pretty lousy about it.

  Ronnie steps away from the Widow’s Stone and then pauses. “Promise me one more time that you won’t run away?”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “Okay,” he says, more to reassure himself than anything else. I place my hand on the top of the Widow’s Stone. Ronnie turns and starts walking.

  I look at the field of thorns, all their branches intertwining in a heaving, swirling sea of pain. I imagine what it would be like to be dropped into the center of them. I wouldn’t be able to get back to the Widow’s Stone without substantial slices to my skin and clothes. I’d have to protect my eyes if I could. But I’m not sure that I could. Lifting my arm to my eyes would leave the side of my body open.…

  Why am I even thinking about this?

  I reach into my pocket with my free hand and pull out the ring. I rub the outside of it, feeling the gentle weave of the etching. Lately I’ve been fiddling with it more, rubbing the edge, hoping to wear the tarnish off.

  A gentle breeze shifts the bushes, and one of the thorn branches rubs along my arm. I pull away. It doesn’t cut me, but it leaves tiny red lines along the skin. Being careful to keep my hand on the Widow’s Stone, I try to shrink from its reach.

  Ronnie’s made it about halfway to the Hawthorns. He walks quickly and cautiously, picking his way past the thorn branches one by one. The sun’s out, and I’m watching for him, but he’s still terrified. I know because I did the walk several times myself when we were little, and it spooked me each and every time. That dream freaked him out so much, I doubt it’s any easier for him now than when we were kids.

  There is something about the way Ronnie freezes on the path that stops my breathing. He has been moving too smoothly, and the way he is frozen there, his body locked awkwardly and his head turned to the side, tells me that something has gone wrong. I slide the ring back into my pocket.

  I can barely hear him push my name up from his throat. He bends over. The postcards drop by his side. He turns back toward me. He is gagging. He retches on the side of the path. He tries to move forward, but the retching hasn’t stopped. He vomits again. He inches forward, too scared to realize that he is shuffling through his own puke.

  I want to move forward, but my legs don’t respond.

  “Stucks!” he calls out when the choking has stopped. “Stucks!”

  I remove my hand from the Widow’s Stone and force myself out onto the path.

  “I’m coming, Ronnie!” I shout to him. He starts to run, using his forearms to push the thorns out of his way. I feel the thorns scraping along my own arms, and I regret having used those clippers on that branch earlier. I hear their voices in the back of my head. They hiss in unison. You took one of our fingers.… How many can you spare?

  I get to Ronnie, grab his hand, and shout at him. “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  He is sweating and wheezing. He looks back down the path. “Oh, Stucks, don’t go! It’s filthy! What it did, that thing is filthy!”

  “Go back to the Widow’s Stone, Ronnie,” I tell him. “But don’t you go past. Promise me you’ll stay at the Widow’s Stone. I need you to watch for me.”

  Ronnie seems to get his breath, and he stands up tall. He wipes his mouth. “Okay,” he says, gathering himself. “Okay.”

  We separate. He takes my place as the watcher. My steps slow to a tentative crawl. I’m worried about the thorns, but I’m more worried about what I’ll find farther on up the path. Whatever is up there, I want to glimpse it first and turn my eyes quickly away, then look back when I am ready. I don’t want to be shocked like Ronnie was.

  I turn to check on Ronnie. He has one hand on the top of the stone, and he has turned back to watch me. Still cautious, I take another step forward, holding my breath and carefully picking my way around the spot where Ronnie got sick. Keeping my eyes on the path and the thorns, I reach down and pick up the postcards. I tuck them into my waistband. I take one more step forward.

  I can see it out of the corner of my eye, and I slowly turn my head to look, then quickly look away.

  The death of a pet is horrible enough, but what I see doubles that horror. Triples it. It is an image that I will never forget, an image that I am sure Ronnie will never forget. Morangie, the Milkes family pet, the hunter, the cat who had beaten up poor Boris on more than one occasion, is lying in the thorns just off to the side of the path. Large portions of her are missing. She has been torn apart not by something hungry, but by something fierce and angry. I steady myself, then look back at her. I can see her back legs, but her middle has been chewed away. I’m not sure if her spine is still connected. Insects have gotten at her, and her open stomach cavity crawls with worms, flies, and maggots. Half of her head is also gone, and her remaining eye, as quiet as the moon, as still as a noontime shadow, stares at nothing.

  “Morangie,” I whisper. I look back at Ronnie, who is still watching at the Widow’s Stone. I crouch down next to Morangie. I take off my T-shirt, then carefully reach through the branches and lay it over her. I close my fist over her head and gently lift her carcass. My hand expects some warmth. It expects the body to move at the joints. But Morangie is as cold as the ground, and with the exception of the nearly severed hind section, she is stiff. She doesn’t feel like flesh, but not like plastic either. Wood is the closest thing I can think of, but still this is like something I have never felt before.

  Pulling her from the bushes, I scrape my hand against the base of one bush, and my hand bleeds. The thorns are still quite alive. Morangie is stone-cold, but the thorns are still alive and ready to fight.

  “What are you doing?” Ronnie shouts. “Just leave her!”

  “I can’t,” I call back, wrapping her carefully in my shirt. I start back toward the Widow’s Stone. “If we leave her, she’ll just rot there. She’ll become fertilizer for the thorns. She deserves better than that.”

  Ronnie nods. He keeps his hand on top o
f the Widow’s Stone, but his eyes follow the wrapped thing I carry along with me. I know that his mind cannot connect this object to the warm, living creature that was his grandmother’s pet.

  “Go get a shovel,” I say to him when I get past the Widow’s Stone. “I’ll stay with her. We’ll bury her together.”

  Ronnie can barely take his eyes off her. I hand him his postcards. “Go,” I say.

  He nods and disappears down the path. I lay Morangie down on the far side of Whale’s Jaw and sit next to her on the parched ground. Overhead the cicadas scream.

  I look down at Morangie. “What the hell happened to you?” I ask her.

  Ronnie comes back with two shovels. “Let me pick the spot, okay?” he asks. We walk down one of the paths. He finds a small clearing, a place that is usually pretty sunny. “Here,” he says, and sticks his shovel into the ground.

  We work side by side without talking for nearly an hour. Stones and roots make the digging difficult, but obstacles do not stay in our path long. Ronnie kneels down next to stones and digs in his fingers around them, and when he gets a handhold, he tugs with all the strength in him, releasing small crying sounds as he strains. He hacks at roots with his shovel until they are severed, then he reaches down and tears them from the ground. At times I stand aside and let him do the job alone, holding his shovel and stepping away as he kneels and wrestles the earth with his fingers. Dirt gets ground into his clothes, dug under his nails, smeared up his arms. It even gets into the scar on his wrist, making it all the more noticeable, but he doesn’t seem to care.

  We create a hole deep enough to prevent any animals from digging Morangie up. I lay her in the hole myself, wanting to save Ronnie the horrible wooden feel of her body. I let him throw the first shovelful of dirt over her.

  Ronnie forgets about the widow’s walk. It wouldn’t have helped him anyway. I think our situation is a bit more serious than that. I think so because the same thing has been happening to me every night. The same dream. Night after night. And if he thought his was bad, then I’m never going to tell him mine.

  But I’ll tell you.

  In my dream I’m hiding in an unfinished room about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. There’s no plasterboard—in fact, the windows haven’t been put in yet, and where they should be there are just square holes leading to the outside. There is no door. I’m alone, and this one boxed room is the last safe place. Everything else has been overrun. The locks on the gates of someplace worse than Hell have broken, and everything inside has gushed out and infected the Earth. Everyone and everything is gone.

  For whatever reason, I am safe so long as I stay in that room. But outside the room there are things that want me to come out, or they want me to invite them in. I can see them moving around through the windows. They’ve brought my friends to the windows to try and lure me.

  Vivek is dead, and they’re dragging him around the outside walls, dragging him in circles over and over again.

  They’re just talking to Robin, but talking is enough because the things they’re whispering to her are making her cry, loud at first, and then slowly weaker and weaker until her cries sound like strangled mewls.

  Emily is still alive, but she can’t be, but she is, but she can’t be because those things have ripped her body apart, pulled her insides out, and they’re crawling all over her. She’s trying to scream, but they’re crawling inside her mouth.

  They have the Cricket, but they’ve turned him into something else.

  They’re forcing Ronnie to …

  I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

  Not one cloud has disturbed the sun all day. Another day’s worth of moisture is being leeched away from the parched ground. A little more green is being sapped from the leaves and grass. The cicadas are screaming to each other in the trees.

  We’re all down near the water together, but no one is saying much of anything. Vivek is lying back in a lawn chair. Every few minutes he leans forward and scratches at his legs where the poison ivy used to be. Ronnie is pretending to read, but he hasn’t flipped a page in his book for fifteen minutes. Despite the heat, Robin is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she’s just staring at the pond. I don’t think she’s aware that any of us are here.

  The Cricket is the only one who seems normal, but he’s certainly not going to break the silence. He’s wading in the water, turning rocks, scooping up algae, grabbing at critters.

  I’m sitting in a patch of sun next to Emily. My blood feels thick in my veins. My neck and shoulders ache. I have a slight headache, and it’s making me nauseous. I haven’t let myself sleep for two nights now. The buzzing of the cicadas feels like it’s crawling over the surface of my mind.

  Emily is wearing a one-piece bathing suit. She came down to swim but decided against it, so she placed a towel in the sun, lay down on it, and started shucking her way through a few handfuls of peanuts. Halfway through her snack she fell asleep, her head lolling to the side, one arm flopped up next to her ear.

  The belly of her bathing suit is covered with peanut shells. I reach over and begin flicking off the larger shells one by one into the grass. The smaller ones I gently pluck and toss away. When those are gone, I decide that it would be best to just leave the dust of the peanut skins alone.

  Emily’s body jerks. She gasps. Her head lifts off the towel. She reaches up with one hand and grabs my wrist. Her other hand closes around my fingers. Her sudden grip pulls me toward her. It’s as if she’s grasping my arm and pleading for me to pull her up out of some deep pit. She shouts something I can’t quite make out. She opens up her eyes and looks at me. “Stucks,” is all she says. She rubs my hand, pulls it closer to her. She hugs my hand against her cheek. I feel a tear there. I’ve never known Emily to cry, even when we were little.

  “Are you okay?” Ronnie asks.

  Emily lies back down on her towel and shakes her head. “I try to stay awake, but I can’t do it.”

  “What do you see when you close your eyes?” I ask, letting her cling to my hand.

  She shakes her head again. “I don’t want to say.”

  I squeeze her hand. “No one wants to.”

  “This has never happened to me before. I rarely even remember my dreams, and I’ve never had a nightmare.” She sits up, brushing off the last of the peanut remnants from her bathing suit.

  “I, uh, sort of, brushed you off,” I say awkwardly, trying to explain myself. I point at her stomach and then the peanut shells lying in the grass.

  “Yes, thank you,” she says, then adds, “These nightmares are driving me insane. I don’t know how you deal with it, Stucks.”

  “I’m used to them. Tell me about the dream. You’ll feel better.”

  “Do you know the outside shower in the back of our cottage?”

  I am suddenly as scared of listening to her nightmare as I am of having my own.

  “I dream that I wake up. I’m in my own bed. It’s morning, just like any other morning. I grab my bathrobe and go outside. I turn on the water, take off my bathrobe, and step under the shower. It doesn’t even feel like I’m dreaming. It’s so real, and it’s so normal, at least up to that moment.”

  I don’t need to know any more. I have a pretty good idea where this is going.

  “Then the door to the shower is kicked open, and someone comes in, hits me in the back, and grabs me by the hair.” Her voice trails off. I don’t know how she can keep herself steady telling us about this. Knowing how vivid my own dream has been, and knowing how disturbed Ronnie was by his, I can’t imagine how she can live through this each night.

  “I guess that’s it,” Emily says. “You get the picture.”

  “Can you see who it is?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, but I’m pretty sure that she’s lying.

  I look around. We all look sick, all desperately tired. Except the Cricket of course. He looks fine. He comes up from the water to show me a handful of freshwater mussels that he pulled from the sand. He gives me a few.<
br />
  “Is it all of us?” I ask. “I know about me, and I know about Ronnie.” Ronnie sits up, staring at me as if he didn’t want me to tell, but under the circumstances I think it’s the right thing to do. “And now it’s Emily.”

  Vivek’s eyes are bloodshot. They jitter from side to side. “Every night I dream that insects are chewing at my legs. They’re made of fire, and they burn and gnaw through my skin, into the muscle, and then they chew through to the marrow. I feel every bit of it. Even when my shinbones snap in two.” He reaches down and scratches his legs again. I thought it was just the last of the poison ivy that was bothering him, but I guess I was wrong.

  Ronnie relates the story of his own dream. As he does, Emily lies back down, placing her arm over her closed eyes.

  “Robin?” I ask.

  She doesn’t look at us, doesn’t stop staring out at the pond, but she nods. “But I’m not going to talk about mine, so please don’t ask.”

  “What about you, Stucks?” Emily asks.

  “I see us all standing in a circle, putting this all to rest,” I say. I impress myself with how convincing I sound.

  “That’s your nightmare?” Vivek asks. “You wanna trade?”

  “Stucks and I tried to get rid of mine,” Ronnie admits. “I asked him to do a widow’s walk, but all we found was the body of my grandmother’s cat. Something had ripped her apart.”

  “Good God,” Vivek says.

  I look over at Robin, expecting her to jump in, to talk about how upset she is, to claim that she’s more scared than anyone, but she doesn’t move.

  “I have an idea,” I say. I start chucking the mussels back into the water.

  I’m tentative. I have to sell this, and I’ll only get one shot. “I think that my dream, as frightening as it is, is trying to tell me something.”

  “What’s that?” Emily asks. I can tell that she’s ready to analyze. She’s “interested.”

  “First, we all need to admit that whatever this is, it’s gone beyond anything that we can explain. There’s no way to explain what happened to us in the woods—”