by Chris Lynch
Anyway.
“But, Dad, do you really have to be hunting for it right now? Shouldn’t you just leave it until morning?”
He pointed at me like I had a clever and original thought, which is what he tended to do whenever I gently told him what to do.
“Yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to wake your brother at any rate, would I?”
“Certainly not,” I said.
He came to my door, grabbed my chin between index finger and thumb, and kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“Night, Vee,” he whispered.
“Night, D,” I said.
I heard Dad’s door shut downstairs just as I had gotten myself all tucked in and arranged, fluffed and settled in bed. Almost immediately, a feeling of rightness came over me; Dad in his place, Walter in his, the waves slapping more quietly in the distance, and the nighttime push of the late summer wind returning to an occasional gentle puff through the window screen. And as the feeling of right settled over, so, too, did the heaviness of sleep.
It seemed like one minute later I heard Walter’s bedroom door close and his rapid little footsteps down the stairs and out.
I spent a good long time there, up in my bed, pretending. Pretending I didn’t care. Pretending I thought he was just silly and that this was not my concern and that he could handle it himself. Pretending I was all cozy and snuggled down in my bed and sleep was there, right there, almost there, just about there, just about…
Pretending I was going to stay put and not go down to the beach after Walter.
Truth be told, it wasn’t any good long time. It was maybe twelve seconds. I was up and dressed so quick, it was like my clothes had been standing there and I just jumped into them.
I didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all—the lonely dark night on the thin breezy road that took me the few hundred yards from our house to the beach. I got instantly a kind of new respect for Walter, the way he determined to do this, planned and waited, then got out here and made his way through the darkness to the unknown by himself, alone with nothing but his ten years and no me.
He was very brave, I thought.
He was going to need it, because I was going to kill him.
If I got there. I found this walk to be about the scariest walk I ever walked.
I didn’t do this kind of thing. This kind of dark, late, lonely thing.
But I made it. And when I did, when I emerged off the road onto the sand dune wall that acted like a standing guard between the regular ordinary world and the beach world, I was yanked both ways with competing feelings of excitement and even more scaredy-catness.
It was, as advertised, a bonfire. A beautiful bonfire it was, too, once I allowed myself to settle down enough to appreciate it. It was tall, neat, and tepee shaped. Big fat sparks and embers shot straight up, like an upside-down funnel, in a perfectly orderly procession of light into the sky. Harmless and glorious and controlled all at once, as if every element knew exactly what it was supposed to do and we were not at the mercy of the chanciness of fire.
I stood there at the top of the dune, gaping like a total yokel.
And if that were not enough, there was a reception as if they had all been expecting me.
“Sylvia!” called one tall blond girl, hopping up off a log and waving at me with a big sweeping side-to-side motion like she was trying to signal a passing ship. She came running toward me then, and if she didn’t have such a warm and welcoming tone in her voice I would have run in the other direction. I considered it all the same.
“Hi,” she said, all breathless from scaling the dune. I suppose I could have met her partway instead of planting myself like a lighthouse. But I didn’t. “I’m Jennifer.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Sylvia, which, I know, you already know.”
“I know,” Jennifer said. She tipped her head sideways, shyly. She had rounded pink cheeks, and even with just a good moon for light I could see she was blushing. Also, up close, her voice receded to a sweet, whispery trill. “You want to come down to the fire?”
“Well,” I said, like I was being coy or something. Duh, maybe I could pass it off like I was just out for a stroll, walking a nonexistent dog or something. “Sure, I guess.” Right, sure and guess contradict each other. But they fairly represented my feelings.
We walked through the sand, toward the impressive snapping light of the fire. Jennifer was barefoot, and as my sneakers had started filling with granules I pulled them off. When we reached the fire, I was surprised to realize that the whole party was a rather intimate group actually.
“Everybody, Sylvia’s here,” Jennifer said.
“Hi, Sylvia,” everybody said.
Everybody but one, that is.
“Hello, Walter,” I said firmly. I don’t know what I thought I was getting at since he had only done exactly what he’d told me he was going to do. And since I never even told him not to do it.
Still. He knew what he did. So I fixed him with a you-know-what-you-did stare.
“Hiya,” Carmine said. He hopped to his feet and came right up to me. I flinched, took a half step back. He was, of course, hugging himself furiously as he walked.
Jennifer put out a traffic cop hand. “Down, boy,” she said, “and stop hugging yourself. What did Mom tell you about that?” Then for good measure she gave him a helpful little shove back toward his seat.
“Don’t mind my brother,” Jennifer said. “He’s just confused because sometimes he thinks he’s human.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking I liked having her between me and Carmine.
In addition, there were three other girls sitting around the fire, to whom I was introduced. There was Robin, a small black-haired girl with grinning eyes who played the flute—and played it beautifully—during most of the first ten minutes I tried to talk to her. Emma, who struck me as being most like me, fair to dark hair, medium height, medium shape, medium, medium, medium…
“I know,” she said when I mentioned it. “In a way it’s good, right? Like you always have a way to measure the world. Like everyone you meet, if they are taller than you, they are tall. If they are shorter than you, they are short. It’s nice if you want to kind of blend in, but not if you want to stand out. I think, sometimes, that I am the very exact center of everything everywhere in the universe, like the hub of the wheel of everything. Don’t you feel like that?”
Oh. Oh jeez. Well, no. Not really. Not actually. Not ever, as a matter of fact. Oh boy, I never even considered it, being the hub of the wheel of everything. How horrifying would that be?
“God, I hope not,” I said, sounding I’m sure a little bit desperate.
But I was soothed quickly enough by the rising volume of Robin’s flute competing with the elements, filling the swirling air with “Greensleeves.”
And the last was Debbie, who I wanted to pick up and squeeze from the minute I saw her. She was littler than me by a good bit. She was smiley, almost in a perpetual state of laughter, though on closer look I could see that was just the way her face was built—eyes creased and ready, nose twitchy, mouth turned up.
But she was smiling, too. “Really glad you decided to come, Sylvia,” Debbie said, first shaking my hand like this was a business meeting, then putting both hands on my shoulders like she was imparting sage wisdom—from a half foot below. “Walter said you were being kind of shy about the party thing, but here you are.”
Right. Here I are. At the party thing.
You’d have to say it was more thing than party.
I saw no sign of anyone beyond these four girls, huggy-buggy Carmine, and Walter. This was supposed to be some kind of annual summer-ending tradition featuring the entire under-twenty population of the village. Was this the entire under-twenty population of the village?
“Where’s the rest of the village?” I asked casually.
The girls exchanged glances. Walter just looked at me kind of sheepishly while Carmine looked at the ground like a bad dog.
“It’s
over that way,” Debbie said, smiling and pointing in the general direction of the rest of the village.
I didn’t want to sound unpleasant, but I kind of needed more. “Where are all the other village kids?”
Again looks went around the bonfire like the wave at a football game. Robin resumed playing the flute, some hoppy Irish-jiggy thing.
Again, Debbie smiled, and Debbie gestured. “Over that way, I guess,” she said, indicating, again, the village.
“You seem confused,” Jennifer said quite rightly. She took me by the arm and led me over to a nice spot in the sand, sculpted sort of like a beanbag chair, just close enough to the fire. As we got near, something snapped, a little explosion. I jumped, scared, excited.
“Yes,” I said, catching a breath, “I’m confused. A little. I thought this was like some kind of ritual, like a big celebration with every kid in the town and all the teenagers…”
I could see by the flickering firelit expressions that I was way off and sounding stupider by the syllable. Then, all eyes turned to Carmine.
“What did you do?” Jennifer said.
Carmine didn’t answer. Walter also looked peculiar, and guilty, but in a different way. A stupider way.
Jennifer turned back to me. “Sorry, Sylvia. We were having a little beach fire. We do that sometimes. Just us. So then my brother, Mr. Delirious, starts blah-blabbing about how he knows you guys and how he’s been hanging out with you guys and even your dad is showing him around the place and everything…”
Rude it may have been, but I found it physically impossible to look at Jennifer anymore. I found it impossible to look at the other girls or the fire or the sea. I could see nothing in this world other than the top of Carmine’s demented, rectangular head. I stared at him so hard, if I were a magnifying glass he’d already have a white-hot pinhole in his head.
“So,” Jennifer went on, “like I said, sorry. For Carmine. He has reality problems. He should be made to wear a sign or something.”
I looked at Walter then, and he at me. He shrugged. I shrugged. He just looked so forlorn, so young, so dumb. We were here now, so what could we do?
“Tell us all about yourself,” Emma said, “tell us all.”
Well, I didn’t want to do that. But like I said, I didn’t really want to be rude either.
“There’s nothing to tell, really. We lived in New Hampshire before we moved here, up near the Canadian border. Then our dad was asked to move for his job. Then we came here. And then, tonight, we came here.”
I don’t suppose I really thought that would be quite fleshed-out enough. I hoped, though.
Everybody waited. You know that thing when people can help you out of an uncomfortable moment in the conversation, or they can just let it hang there, floating in the air and picking up gas until it’s like a blimp…
“And she had a whole lot of pets that are dead now and buried all over the yard at our old house,” said Walter, being so helpful I wanted to bury him in the yard.
“Shut up, Walter.”
I thought it would just be a minor embarrassing moment, but it was apparently more.
Debbie, Emma, Jennifer, and Robin all looked quickly to each other, pointing and nodding as if I had just said the secret word or something.
“What?” I asked.
Robin started playing something sad and mournful on her flute.
“Nothing,” Jennifer said. “It was just that, well, we didn’t know that exactly about you but we knew, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.” I didn’t mind sounding a little crisp with them now, since they were creeping me out. Or making me angry. They were weird. Or they were nosy. I wasn’t sure what they were, but right now they were too much of it.
“Listen, stop,” Debbie said, getting up and coming over to wedge herself between Jennifer and me. “You’re scaring her.”
“I’m not scared.”
I was fairly seriously scared. I was right about the night. No good, the night, no good at all. Should have been in bed.
“We just figured, there was some sort of…sorry…death connection to you, that’s all.”
“Why?” I said, sliding away from Debbie through the sand.
She slid along after me. Robin’s flute played louder, but the sea, the surf, got oddly flat and quiet.
“It’s not you, Sylvia—don’t worry. It’s the house, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” I said. “That’s all? Don’t worry? I think I will worry, maybe. What about the house? What about my dead pets?”
“It’s just what happens,” Debbie said. She turned to address her friends. “Remember Sarah? She was really nice, remember? It was the same with Sarah. And what was the name of that girl before? It seems like such a long time ago…”
“I’m going home,” Walter said, and stood up straight and expressionless as a toy soldier.
“Don’t,” Carmine said. “Please, don’t do that. Here, let’s go down to the water and throw stuff in.”
Walter was allowing himself to be towed toward the water’s edge, but he kept looking back at me kind of hopelessly. Serves him right. I told him not to come. Or I meant to. Anyway, he should have known…
Well, who got us into this? I said to him telepathically because I was too stunned to say it normally.
“The house,” Emma said with an almost irritated sigh, “just attracts people who have, sort of, histories of death stuff attached to them. Your pet cemetery is probably the answer. But the fact is, everybody who has ever lived in the Gravedigger’s Cottage has been just dripping in it.”
“We are not—”
“Is it just the three of you, then?” Emma asked sharply, sweetly, softly.
“Emma,” Jennifer scolded.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Yes. It is just the three of us.”
They waited again, the blimp growing almost visibly in front of us.
But that was fine. Let it grow.
Eventually, Robin lowered the flute from her lips. I already missed the sound of it.
“How come nobody ever sees your dad?” she asked.
“People see him,” I said.
“We don’t see him.”
“He’s a private person. He’s been busy. There’s a lot to do at the house before he goes back to work. He likes his privacy. He’s going back to work tomorrow. There’s still lots to do though.”
“Hmm,” Robin said. Then she started playing “Amazing Grace.”
“He’s the Digger now, you know,” Emma blurted, shattering the song, shattering everything.
“He is nothing of the kind!” I shouted.
Debbie came right up to me, put her small arm around my shoulders. I wanted to pull away but I didn’t. I didn’t because I also wanted to feel the way an arm around my shoulders made me feel.
“She doesn’t mean it like that, Sylvia,” Debbie said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Jennifer said forcefully. It was an odd mix, her high breathy voice and a bossy manner, but she did it. “She just means that that’s the tradition, that the new owner of the Gravedigger’s Cottage becomes the new Digger, that’s all.”
Again, that’s all. That’s all? I was beginning to wonder what folks around here would consider worrisome.
“My father is no gravedigger, thank you. And we don’t change like that just because we moved into a house.”
“You don’t move into The Diggers,” Emma said, “it moves into you.”
Oh, how much I hate the nighttime. That probably would not have bothered me in the nice light of daytime. Nothing would have been hiding in there, in the dark corners of that stupid, stupid statement, if the beautiful burning cleaning light of daytime were here to clear it all up. But this was nighttime and I was out here, on the beach by the fire under the bald weak moon, and that stupid, stupid statement got in me and thrashed all around inside.
“Well, that’s just stupid,” I said.
Emma stood up. “Are you calling me stupid?”
&nb
sp; The whole point of how Walter and I wound up here on the Beach at the End of the World in the middle of the night was that we wanted to get along, not alienate people. That was the idea.
“Yes, I suppose I am calling you stupid. And now I’m getting my brother and going home.”
I got to my feet and stormed toward the surf, pounding with each step, with each step of course making no sound in the sand so why bother pounding? I expected somebody to follow me, to try and make things better. Nobody followed me.
“Walter,” I called into the darkness.
Almost instantly Walter appeared, almost too instantly, his round white face blossoming out of the black on black of the water under midnight sky. I caught my breath. “We’re going,” I said.
“Great,” he said.
I took him by the hand and led him back up the beach.
“Wait. Don’t,” Carmine said, rushing along behind us. He sounded wounded, genuinely sad to see us go—which was a weird bit of nice in the middle of the weird load of weird.
We passed through the group of girls, past their fire, which was dying down. Robin was back to playing softly, something like “Taps” actually, piping the fire into the next life. Debbie merely said good-bye to us in a nice enough way, while Emma predictably said nothing.
Carmine was still chasing after us as we headed up the sand dunes, where we were also caught up by his sister.
She didn’t say anything before grabbing me lightly by the elbow. I turned, pulling my elbow back.
It was nearly the exact spot where she had first greeted me. We could have been standing in the same footprints. “Don’t take it so hard,” Jennifer said. “It’s just the way things are. You inherited all that goes with the house. No big deal. Not your fault. Nobody’ll hold it against you.”
“Hold what against me?” I snapped. “There is nothing to hold. This is stupid. We haven’t done anything. We haven’t become anything. My father is about the farthest thing from a Digger you could possibly get. And our cottage is a perfectly lovely place.”
I felt an overwhelming desire to cry, as I listened to my words. As I heard myself defend my dad and my home. I felt an even more powerful desire not to, not now.
