The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  I hear a loud noise like a giant sucking of air. A blinding flash of pure white light knocks me to the ground. The trap fills with flame. For a second I see the creature silhouetted against the fire. His head spins as the flames roar up. He looks pitiful and sad and beaten, a hopeless thing startled by the flash of light.

  He stands erect. He is just as vulnerable as Ronnie, just as clever as Vivek, just as wise as Emily, just as kindred as Robin, just as torn as Pete. He looks just like me.

  The flames widen, obscuring him from my view. I hear a horrible thrashing, an agonized creature crying with a child’s voice. There is one last loud, tripping squeal, and then all is silent.

  Flames crawl up the Hawthorns, devouring their thorns. Tiny sparks rise into the air, and where the sparks land, fires spring to life in the parched leaves.

  Overhead, the sky rumbles. The wind stirs the flames. I call out to the fire, order it to recede, but it doesn’t listen. I planned everything perfectly … everything but the power of the fire.

  I try to stand, but I fall to the ground. The pain in my foot is too great. I cannot move.

  The flames rise in front of me. With deliberate fingers the fire crawls past the boundary I drew on the ground. In the projector inside my head, I see that it is not the fire reaching out of the burning Hawthorns, but the Pricker Boy himself, born again in angry flame. He rises out of the hole and spills fire toward the vast sea of thorns around us.

  The pain in my foot is unbearable.

  I feel all the light going away …

  blackness pours—

  numbing—

  projector flicker slows—

  and then—

  I remember Pete sitting at the fire last summer and laughing at Ronnie over the flames.

  “You claim that crap is true?”

  “Okay, Pete,” I shouted back. “If it’s all crap, why don’t you go back there right now? Go back there in the dark and leave your pocketknife in the Hawthorns. If there’s nothing to be afraid of, then you should have no problem walking alone past the Widow’s Stone, back through the prickers all the way to the Hawthorns.”

  I don’t know what made me take Ronnie’s side over Pete’s that night at the fire, but I do know it took Pete by surprise. He started to pull away from us after that night, little by little. But by then we didn’t mind.

  He answered my challenge, though. He walked out in the dark and left the knife there on the stone in the Hawthorns. And as far as I know, he never went back to retrieve it.

  I saw him in the woods the next day. I think the only reason he came to the woods was to find me.

  “I went out there. I did it,” Pete told me, stepping close to me.

  “I believe you,” I said. I moved away from him.

  He stepped closer. “Go out there and see. I want you to see it.”

  “No,” I said. “I believe you.”

  “What are you going to do now? In a couple of weeks they all go home. Who’s going to sit with you and tell little stories around the fire then?”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say. He was right. The others would go away and then it would be just me and Pete, and that thought was beginning to frighten me. Part of me wished it were Pete going away and the others who would stay through the winter.

  He pushed me and I stumbled, flopping backward onto the ground and hitting my tailbone. It knocked the wind out of me. Pete waited for me to do something, but I just sat there in the dirt trying to get my breath. He walked away, shaking his head. As he passed out of sight, he leapt into the air, grabbing the hanging branch of a small tree and pulling the trunk toward the ground. He released it, jumping into the air as the tree whipped back upright. I heard him whoop and shout like he had just scored a winning touchdown, and then he was gone.

  He showed up a few days later with some older kids from town. I knew them from school. They were the kind of kids who liked walking in numbers, walking in numbers and hoping to find smaller groups of kids. We were all swimming over near Ronnie’s, and they showed up to use the rope swing. It became clear pretty quickly that they weren’t there to swim. They had names for all of us. They made fun of Vivek’s ethnicity, and they said things to Emily that I won’t repeat. We left them alone there, all of us heading back over to my house and hiding inside. We watched them out the window and asked each other what had happened to Pete. It wasn’t long after we left them that their fun ended, and they headed off into the woods toward Whale’s Jaw.

  After Emily and Ronnie and Vivek and Robin went back to their winter homes at the end of the summer, Pete seemed better. We hung around together, and sometimes it was almost like old times. Almost. Pete was never quite all himself. In school he hung around with older kids, and I knew that he started getting into drugs. He never tried to get me into them, though. One day his friend Dean tried to pick a fight with me, but Pete called him off.

  Pete went missing in January. It was so cold then, and the weatherman said that it was only going to get colder. The daytime temperature was hanging around five, and the wind ran reckless across the flat, smooth ice of Tanner Pond. It cut into your blood no matter how many layers you put on. Ice punishes in many ways. I’ve slipped and fallen on the ice before, and given the choice, I’d rather fall on concrete or pavement any day. They’ll both hurt you, but ice will shock your bones too. Ice waits a long time to come into being, and when it finally gets there, it doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about anything.

  I was confused that January afternoon when I saw Pete head out onto the ice just as the sun was going down, but I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. I didn’t care where he was going or what he was doing. I had already decided that I never, ever wanted to see him again, and that if he ever got close to the Cricket again, I’d kill him with whatever I could get my hands on.

  I am conscious enough to know that the fire has reached me. One leg of my pants has caught fire, and I know that I should try and get out of the way, but my legs don’t seem to work. A hand reaches out and grabs my elbow, yanking me backward. My arm twists. In the socket a sudden shock of pain—

  Rolling my body in the dirt—put the flames out—foot flopping back and forth—too much—

  He has me over his shoulder. He is running with me down the path away from the fire. I can taste the smoke in my mouth, and I feel pain in my chest when I try to breathe. The fire is following us, riding the wind and sprinting through the dry brush. We can keep ahead of the flames, but the smoke is another matter altogether. I can barely breathe, and I don’t know how the person carrying me can run with no air and my body weight over his shoulder.

  He has carried me away from the Widow’s Stone, far beyond the Hawthorns. I can’t tell just how far back we’ve gone. The fire has turned the night woods a haunting orange. It’s not the peaceful glow of campfire light. It’s the smooth, steady light of a fire too enormous to flicker or to play or to ever be controlled. I lift my head up. The fire has spread out across the thorn patch. The Hawthorns are triplet towers of flames reaching thirty feet into the sky. The woods squeal and cackle as they burn. The wind blasts through it all, urging the flames on toward us. Everything is dying in this monstrous fire. I hope that my friends got away safe, because I can’t stand the thought of losing another one.

  “Hold on,” the person carrying me shouts over the flames. “It’s almost here. It’s coming.” I recognize the voice as Pete’s.

  There is a sudden, violent burst of light, and a split second afterward a sound like a giant sheet of ice being cracked in two. A few seconds later, I feel the first huge drops of rain strike me. The thunderclouds split open, and we are drenched in a wall of water. The flames hiss, but the lightning and thunder drown their anger. The smoke grows thicker as the fire dies.

  Pete runs with me through the mammoth boulders to the Hora House, but he does not stop. He somehow squeezes us through the fissure in the stone wall and carries me over the jagged rocks to the far side of the
hill before he puts me down. The wind continues to drive thick smoke at us, but the hill offers shelter from it. Pete and I huddle together against the rocks as the rain pours down. Soon muddy water is running down the sides of the hill over the loose stones. I am soaked through. I can’t feel my foot anymore. I try to breathe in clean air, but my breath is broken by blackened coughs. As odd as it sounds, the dull throb in my shoulder feels good. At least it’s not my foot anymore.

  “Did I do it, Pete?” I scream over the rain. “Did I kill it?”

  “Yeah, you killed it!” he shouts back. He leaves me then, walking up to the top of the hill to watch the storm.

  I struggle along behind him, but I can barely move. It’s a slow crawl over the rocks. Twice I ask him to come back and help me, but he doesn’t respond.

  A half hour later, it’s all over. The rain has slowed to a steady drive, and the fire seems to have died out entirely. The night is dark again. I made it to the top of the hill, and Pete and I are overlooking the scorched thorn patch. Smoke continues to blow past where we are sitting, but the earth is too drenched for the fire to ignite again.

  “Thank you,” I say. “No one is going to believe this. No one is going to believe that you came out of the woods and saved me. But maybe if I tell them about this, they’ll forgive you for all that other stuff, and you can come back again. It wouldn’t be like before, I know. But maybe it could be something new, and—”

  “Stucks, I told you. I’m never going back there.”

  “But you could. It’s safer now. The Pricker Boy is gone now. You could come back.”

  “Stucks, I’m never going back there. I can’t.”

  I don’t want to ask him the question that’s in my head, but I can’t stop the words from coming out. “Pete, what were you doing that night out on the ice? I saw you go, and I saw what you were carrying. You have to tell me what happened.”

  “That’s why you’ve been bugging me all summer? Messing with your nana’s stinking plants? Stucks, you already know what happened,” he says. “You have all the pieces, but you don’t have the guts to put them together. You’re too scared. You’d rather hide behind some bullshit ghost story.”

  “You have to tell me it was an accident, because I’m more afraid of what you did with that ax out on the ice than of any monster that might be here in these woods.”

  “You still think there was a monster?” he asks. When I don’t answer, he slaps me hard across the face. “I asked you a question!” he shouts.

  “Yes!” I scream back. “I saw him! And yes, I’m afraid of him! Why aren’t you?”

  “You want to know when I stopped being afraid of the Pricker Boy? It was one night last fall. I was just taking the garbage out. You know how your mind plays tricks on you and you begin to think about what might be there when you turn around in the dark? Well, I had just had a fight with my parents, and I was so pissed off, but it wasn’t at them really. I was … I dunno … pissed and thinking about everything. And then I realized that it wasn’t really anything that was making me mad—it was something in my brain. Something that just made me angry. Like I’d always been angry. It was the thing that made me want to hurt people that I cared about. Like the way my dad would do to me. Anyway, I got this quick flash thought: ‘What if I turn around and the Pricker Boy is right there?’ And then I thought that if he was there and he dragged me off into the woods, he’d be doing me a favor, ’cause there’s plenty of real things to be afraid of that are a lot scarier than he ever was. I wish there was a Pricker Boy, because it was so much easier being scared of him.”

  Pete takes his index finger and stabs it into my temple. “Your Pricker Boy is only real here,” he says. “Here. Only here. So kill him here.”

  I cover my head to protect myself from his jabbing finger. “But he has to be real! We all heard him!” I protest. “We heard him that night in the woods, playing with the souls of the children he killed. We heard him!” I can feel my anger beginning to rise, but I try to hold it back because I know that he won’t like it.

  “You know the sounds of the woods at night. Those other kids don’t know because they live in the city ten months out of the year. Owls, bullfrogs, bugs that scream when the darkness comes. Coyotes sound like Hell itself when they start whooping, and you saw what happens when they get hold of a cat. Remember that night we camped in the yard, and two raccoons got in a fight and we thought it was witches screaming at each other? And what scared Boris that morning? A fox? Maybe a bobcat was in the area this summer. Hell, it could have just been another dog. It could have been anything.”

  “Anything? Then it could have been ghosts too,” I say, almost begging.

  “Believe what you want to believe. I don’t care. I’m sick of arguing with you.”

  I begin desperately throwing out ideas. “It could have been a ghost, or maybe it was some kind of soul trapped out there. A wood nymph, or a demon. Maybe, just maybe, because we believed in him, that’s what brought him to life, and—”

  “Shut up!” he screams. “What do I have to do, Stucks? Tell me what I have to do to get you to leave me alone. Do you want me to tell you that it wasn’t your fault? Fine, it wasn’t your fault! But let me go. After all these months just let me go!”

  “I should have … I should have done something. I should have done more. That’s why everyone needed to be safe this summer. I should have done something.”

  “That night I disappeared? Even if you had said something that night, you couldn’t have saved me. It wasn’t your fault. Let me go, because if you don’t, I’ll kick you away. I’ll knock you down. I’ll break your bones. I’ll spit on you, I’ll put out my cigarettes in your eyes, I’ll do whatever it takes to get you to go back to your life and leave me alone.”

  I try to crawl away, using my elbows to drag myself through the mud. “I can’t have imagined it all. I can’t be imagining you right now.”

  “Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t.” It feels like he’s really here, even though I know that he can’t possibly be. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  I want to ask him so many more things, but I can feel him fading away. I would give up anything if it would just keep him here for another five minutes, because I know that when he goes this time, he won’t be coming back.

  But I have to keep telling myself over and over again that he’s dead. He’s dead and gone. He’s dead and gone. He’s dead and gone.

  “That’s better,” he says. “Hey, you keep my knife, okay? But don’t stick it in a drawer somewhere. Use it for stuff. Whittle things with it. Carve your initials into the trees. You and Emily. In a heart or something.”

  His voice is getting farther and farther away; it’s unraveling in the smoky air. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Tell them all that I’m sorry.” I can barely hear him. His voice is disappearing into the trees, disappearing into the brooks, disappearing into the old stone walls. He’s calling to me from his backyard, calling to me from the top of Whale’s Jaw, calling to me from the deep waters he was never afraid to swim out to.

  “You’re a better friend than I ever deserved,” he says, and though he doesn’t say goodbye, I know that I am alone.

  Except for the sound of a dog barking in the distance, and the sounds of voices, calling my name, getting closer and closer.

  When Pete went missing last winter, the police and the firefighters searched the woods and the frozen pond, but they didn’t find any sign of him. It was so cold those first few days. I remember wondering where he was, and knowing that if he was outside somewhere, he couldn’t survive in all that cold.

  Pete was missing for forty-four days. In March, when the ceiling of ice cracked on the pond and the wind drove the huge pieces over toward the dam, two boys were chucking rocks out onto the ice. They saw a bit of someone’s jacket poking through the shifting chunks of cold glass. They told their parents, and within two hours the police had pulled Pete’s body from the frigid water.

  They never found the ax.
I assume that Pete dropped it down the hole in the ice after he chopped his way through. By morning the hole he had chopped had frozen over, and over the next few days the snow and the deep freeze removed all traces of what he had done.

  I want to believe that it was an accident, that he went out there in a rage, and that he planned to take out his rage by swinging an ax against that implacable floor of ice. I want to believe that he just walked across a thin patch that wheezed and cracked and gave out beneath his feet. I don’t like imagining him grasping and clawing at the edges of the ice. But the alternative, that he went through purposefully, willfully, is even more horrible to consider.

  And until now I’ve never been ready to tell anyone what happened on the afternoon before he disappeared.

  It’s been three days since the fire, and in that time I’ve been questioned by police and firefighters and doctors. I told them what I saw in the woods. I told them how it shifted and giggled and wheezed and lurched at me in the darkness. Then they asked how I was able to escape the fire, and I told them about Pete carrying me to safety. After that they didn’t believe anything I said.

  I don’t care what they believe. They weren’t there. I was. I was there when the Pricker Boy crawled from the basement of the Hora House. I was there when I trapped him in the Hawthorns. I lit the fire, and I saw it get out of control. I heard the storm destroy the fire. And I was there when my friends found me, led by a fat, faithful dog who is right now asleep at my feet.

  Everyone’s over at my house. Ronnie, Vivek, Emily, Robin. We’re in the family room with my parents. Nana is the only one who isn’t here. She’s pretty ticked off at me. She lectured me all afternoon about messing around with things that I don’t understand, about making things up as I go along, about taking things from her garden without asking her. Then she went outside and dug up some horse radish. She ground it and made me smell the stuff until I choked. Then she scattered it in bowls around the house. After an hour my father couldn’t stand the smell anymore, so he declared the house clean of evil spirits and carried the bowls outside.