Dead Boy

by Laurel Gale

  “It’s not personal. My mom doesn’t like anyone.” He paused for a moment, thinking. Nothing in the park would pose much of a threat as long as they stayed away from the storage shed. “You’re right. We should go to the park.”

  “And while we’re there,” Melody added, running ahead of him, “maybe we can get the Meera to grant you a wish.”

  —

  The water dripped brown and foul-smelling from the fountain.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” Melody said.

  “No. This is good enough.” Crow rinsed the eyeball off before shoving it back into his socket.

  “Can you see all right?”

  He blinked a few times, and the two streams of vision synced up. “Yeah, I can see fine. Do you want to trick-or-treat some more?” Maybe she’d forget about the Meera.

  Before she could answer, a cracking sound pierced the night.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  It was a familiar noise, one that Crow had heard only minutes earlier. With his eyes working properly again, he could see its source, too. Luke and Travis.

  Grace and Hannah were with them.

  Melody hid behind a tree. “Come here. Don’t let them see you.”

  “One second,” Crow said, his curiosity getting the better of him. He thought he had seen something in the flash of explosions.

  While Grace and Hannah cheered them on, Luke and Travis threw their firecrackers. But they didn’t throw them randomly; they were throwing them at something. Crow inched closer to see what exactly that something was.

  The explosions cast an unsteady light on a pair of long ears and a twitching nose. A rabbit. The poor thing looked terrified.

  But was it really scared? Was it even a rabbit? Crow doubted anything so helpless could live next to a monster.

  And the monster could take on any form it pleased, small or large, terrified or terrifying.

  “Leave it alone!” Crow yelled.

  “You again?” Travis threw a firecracker at Crow. “Freak! Want to be set on fire again?”

  Crow dodged the firecracker. “I think you should leave that rabbit alone. I think it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? A rabbit! What’s it going to do? Nuzzle me to death? Or is it supposed to be an alien, too?” Luke threw another firecracker so that it landed right next to the animal.

  The rabbit growled.

  Grace and Hannah, who had been laughing the entire time, fell silent. Luke and Travis stopped throwing firecrackers. One, already lit, burned Luke’s hand. He dropped it, not really paying attention, and it exploded at his feet.

  The rabbit had transformed.

  It had the lower body and eyes of a goat, the claws and tail of a scorpion, and the beak and wings of an owl. A single horn, long and sharp, rose from the center of its forehead. A silver collar engraved with a series of spiraling symbols, like some unknown language, wrapped around its neck. Its skin was a complex tapestry of fur, feathers, and scales.

  This was the Meera’s true form. This was what had stood over Crow’s casket years ago.

  Spiderwebs shot out from the Meera’s torso. The sticky silk covered Luke, who struggled unsuccessfully to break free. When the Meera tugged at the webbing, Luke fell. His screams filled the park.

  Grace and Hannah picked up stones to throw at the Meera. It snarled in response. A second stream of spiderweb flew toward them.

  Travis yanked on their arms, pulling them out of the way just in time to avoid being trapped in the webbing. The three of them fled while the monster dragged their friend into the storage shed.

  Luke’s screams faded. The park was silent once more.

  “What do we do now?” Melody asked.

  Crow walked toward the shed. “We follow him.”

  Before crawling through the hole left by the missing panel, Melody removed a flashlight from her trick-or-treat bag and turned it on. Once inside, the light revealed Luke’s Halloween bag, the candy spilling out onto the filthy floor, but no sign of Luke himself.

  “Where did he go?” she asked.

  Crow shrugged. Without furniture or supplies, the room offered no hiding spots. But the Meera had definitely entered the shed, dragging Luke behind it, so he had to be there somewhere.

  Melody shined her light on the ceiling. Thick tangles of spiderweb covered every inch, but there was no boy trapped inside.

  Something buzzed in the corner of the shed. Crow elbowed Melody and pointed to where he wanted the light. A fly, no bigger than the yellowed fingernail on Crow’s pinkie, flew around for a minute before landing on the wall.

  “What did you do with Luke?” Crow asked the fly.

  The fly ignored him.

  “I know you’re the Meera.” Actually, he knew no such thing. It could have been a common housefly that just happened to wander into the shed. But he suspected otherwise. “Tell me where Luke is.”

  The fly grew fur, a tail, claws, and teeth. Mostly, it just grew.

  Definitely the Meera.

  Crow tried to stand his ground, but his knees wobbled. “Wh-where’s Luke?”

  The Meera, now in the shape of a lion, roared. Its sharp teeth glistened in the glow of the flashlight. Crow had liked it better as a rabbit.

  “Maybe we should go,” Melody whispered.

  “What about Luke? And what about the wish?” If he left now, he doubted he’d ever work up the courage to come back. “You can go if you want. But can you give me your flashlight?” He held out his hand.

  “No. I’ll stay if you stay.” The light shook in her trembling grasp. “Can’t run away from a mystery, can I?”

  The lion roared again, its breath hot on Crow’s skin. He was sure the beast was about to eat him, but he couldn’t remember how to move. So he stood there, perfectly still, while the lion’s mouth opened wide and enveloped his head. Its teeth scraped against his scalp. Its tongue dripped saliva onto his nose. Everything was dark and hot and moist.

  “Where is Luke?” he asked, his voice echoing in the large cavern of the lion’s mouth. “And h-how do I get a wish?”

  The lion roared, but it didn’t chomp down. Crow took that as a good sign.

  “I know you grant wishes. My parents came to you a few years ago. You brought me back from the dead, but not completely. So now I need to make it right. I need a wish.”

  Another roar, but still no chewing.

  “There’s a test, right? I’m ready for it.”

  The lion stepped back, releasing Crow’s head from its mouth. Its mane disappeared. Its golden fur transformed into a tabby pattern, and it shrank into a fluffy, wide-eyed kitten.

  Adorable, Crow thought, though he felt no urge to pet it.

  The kitten walked to a metal grate in the floor. It pawed at the grate, meowing.

  “Are we supposed to go through there?” Melody asked.

  “I think so.” Crow wedged his fingers into a gap between the concrete ground and the metal grate. The grate lifted easily. Melody shined her flashlight down the large hole it left. It was a six-foot drop, give or take a foot.

  Crow jumped, once again thankful that his mother had reinforced his joints. He looked around, but without the flashlight, all he could see was an impenetrable blanket of darkness.

  Above, the kitten meowed. Then it roared, and Melody jumped.

  “You didn’t say anything about a test,” she said, rubbing her ankle.

  “I didn’t think we’d be taking it tonight. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” She stood up straight. “What do we do now?”

  She turned around slowly, letting her flashlight reveal their surroundings. They were in a long, narrow tunnel. In one direction, the tunnel ended just a few feet away. In the other direction, it went on farther than the flashlight could show. The walls were packed earth, decorated with a series of identical engravings, each depicting a tortoise. There were torches, too, but they were unlit. Melody’s flashlight provided the only light.

  “I guess we walk.”

&n
bsp; She nodded, and they started forward.

  “I’m not surprised, you know,” she said.

  “Oh,” Crow said. “About what?”

  “This.” She gestured around the tunnel with her flashlight. “The monster. The secret passageway under the park. All of it. This sort of thing is more common than most people want to believe. My old town had monsters, too. Nobody believed it, of course, not even with all the strange stuff that kept happening. Weather changed without warning. Adults got mad for no reason. Sometimes they even slurred their speech, wobbled around, and talked nonsense, all clear signs of mass possession. Some people knew, I’m pretty sure, but they kept everything hush. A real conspiracy.”

  “Oh,” Crow said, not sure whether sudden rainstorms or short tempers were all that strange. Not compared to their current situation.

  A long howl echoed through the tunnel, followed by a scream that sounded very human. Crow couldn’t tell if it came from behind them or ahead of them. Close or far away.

  “Is that Luke?” Melody asked.

  “Who else could it be?”

  When the howling and the screaming faded, they walked in silence.

  Crow kept expecting the tunnel to end, or to open into a room, or to turn, or to do something, but instead it just went on and on. After a while, he started counting the tortoise engravings. Five. Thirty-three. Seventy-eight. Three hundred, and still no end in sight.

  “Let’s take a break,” Melody said. She sat down on the ground and opened her trick-or-treat bag. While she ate some chocolate, Crow examined one of the engravings. The tortoise had a foot stretched out, like it was walking, just like the other 299 engravings they’d passed.

  “What kind of test do we have to take?” Melody asked.

  Crow sat next to her. “I don’t know. My dad never said.”

  “I hope it’s not math. I’ve never been any good at math. Or history. Maybe we’ll get lucky and I’ll get a juggling test and you’ll get a drawing test. Then we’re sure to pass.” She hesitated. “What happens if we fail?”

  “I’m not sure. Not exactly. Some sort of punishment.” Or death, but Crow didn’t want to scare her any more than was necessary. “We should definitely make sure we don’t fail.”

  “And if we pass, we get a wish?”

  Crow nodded.

  “Well, I know what you’re going to wish for.” She stood up. “But neither of us will ever get a wish if we don’t get out of this tunnel and start the test. Maybe we should head back. We might have missed a secret door or something. Or we could ask the Mar…Mor…”

  “Meera.”

  “Or we could ask the Meera for instructions.” She shined her light the way they had come, squinting into the darkness. “That’s strange.”

  She ran a few paces, retracing their steps, and Crow ran with her. Then suddenly they both stopped. They had to. There was nothing but solid wall in front of them; the tunnel had ended.

  Melody shined her light at the ceiling. There was a metal grate, exactly like the one they’d come through. “We’re where we started again. But how is that possible? We walked for a long time—miles, I think—but after we turned around, we only ran a few feet.” She frowned. “Maybe the tunnel looped?”

  Crow shook his head. “The tunnel’s straight. And if it were a loop, it would go on in both directions. Give me a piece of your chocolate.”

  Melody handed the candy to him. “I thought you couldn’t eat.”

  “I can’t.” He unwrapped the chocolate and smeared it against the ground. It wasn’t quite as good as chalk, but it would have to do. He drew an arrow. “Let’s start walking again. I want to test something.”

  They resumed walking. A couple of minutes later, they passed the arrow. A couple of minutes after that, they passed it again.

  Crow pointed to the arrow the third time they passed it. “We keep traveling the same stretch of hallway, again and again and again.”

  “So it’s magic.” She smiled. “Even before I met you, I knew magic was real. Ever since I found a fairy circle as a child. Sure, my dad said it was just a bunch of ordinary mushrooms, but then why would they have been growing in a perfect circle?”

  Crow was about to explain that the mushroom circle was simply the visible part of an underground fungus and not evidence of fairy habitation, but he stopped himself. Maybe Melody was right, and magic was responsible. As an animated corpse, standing in a strange tunnel guarded by an even stranger wish-granting shape-shifter, he felt unqualified to argue against magic.

  “Should we go back up?” Melody asked. She pointed to the grate that, despite all the walking they’d done, was only a short distance away. “You can give me a boost, and then I’ll help pull you up.”

  Another howl made her last words difficult to hear. There was more screaming, too.

  “No,” Crow said. “I think we need to keep walking.”

  Melody frowned. “But the tunnel doesn’t go anywhere. We could walk forever and end up right where we started.”

  Crow walked over to the nearest engraving. “The tortoise is walking. It’s a sign. A hint. We have to walk, too. This is the test.”

  “Are you sure?”

  No. “Yes. Mostly. And if I’m wrong, what’s the worst that could happen?”

  “We could spend days down here. Our parents could call the police to file a missing-child report. We could die of dehydration. Well, I could die.” She looked at the tortoise. “But I think you’re right. And I do want a wish. And to find out more about this Meera.”

  They kept walking. Time passed, but it was impossible to say how much.

  At first, nothing changed, but then the floor became muddy. As their feet sank farther and farther into the thick sludge, every step became a struggle. Soon it came up to their ankles, then their knees. When it reached their hips, Crow wondered whether they would get stuck. He tried to swim, thinking that if he could float up to the top, the mud wouldn’t be so bad, but his feet always sank to the bottom. Melody’s efforts met with no more success.

  Now the sludge reached their shoulders. Melody held the flashlight and her bag of candy above her head.

  The tortoise engravings urged them on, but the tortoise didn’t have mud up to its chin. Any higher, and Melody would suffocate. And even with the greatest effort, Crow moved only a fraction of an inch. He would get stuck there, he feared. Stuck for eternity. He wouldn’t even be able to die, since he had already done that.

  He wanted to turn back, to return to the safety of his house. But turning back would mean failure, and he still didn’t know what happened to those who failed. Perhaps something even worse than getting stuck in mud. He forced himself forward, one tiny step at a time.

  Melody coughed, spitting out the mud that had seeped into her mouth.

  “Give me your stuff,” Crow said, worried that she’d drop everything. He took the candy and the flashlight and held them as high as he could above the muck.

  Melody took another step, then another, then another, even as the mud covered her nose. She closed her eyes as the mud crept up to her forehead. Every now and then, she jumped up in an attempt to reach air.

  Just a few steps behind her, Crow did his best to continue forward. He imagined that Melody’s head became completely submerged, but he couldn’t be certain. Thick sludge now covered his eyes, too, and even when he forced them open, he couldn’t see anything. One of his hands kept the flashlight and candy held above his head, but it was only a matter of time before the mud covered everything.

  They would be buried alive. Melody would, anyway. Crow would just be buried. It was actually kind of fitting, not that this made him feel any better about the situation.

  He stopped. Clearly they had lost, so what was the point in struggling anymore?

  Something reached through the mud and touched Crow’s free hand. He recoiled, fearful of the creatures that might hide in the Meera’s lair, but the thing persisted. Fingers wrapped around fingers. It was Melody’s hand. She was pull
ing him forward.

  The mud levels receded. Crow wiped the mud from his eyes, and they scrambled onto solid ground, Melody gasping for air. The test was over. They had passed.

  Water spurted from the top of a large, two-tiered fountain located in the center of a dark room.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Melody asked.

  “Is anything safe here? But I don’t think the Meera would mess with the water. It wants to test us, not poison us.”

  Crow and Melody clambered onto the lower level, where they washed away the mud. Once they were clean enough to move without the muck weighing them down, Melody gulped water from the upper level, while Crow used the flashlight to examine their new surroundings.

  The tunnel had disappeared. Now there was only a single room, about the size of Crow’s bedroom except with a much higher ceiling. The walls were natural dirt again, lacking both windows and doors. Just like in the tunnel, unlit torches and a series of engravings decorated the walls, although the familiar tortoise was nowhere to be seen. The engravings here depicted a bird.

  In addition to the fountain—which looked suspiciously similar to an oversized birdbath—there was a long, thick coil of rope and a large pile of sticks left in a heap on the ground.

  Melody, soaked and shivering, climbed down from the fountain. “What now?”

  “I think this is the second test, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do. There doesn’t seem to be a way out.”

  “What about up there?” Melody pointed toward the ceiling. “I think I saw something while I was getting a drink.”

  Crow shined the flashlight up where she had pointed. Sure enough, there was an opening in the wall, just big enough to crawl through and about twenty feet above his head. “How are we supposed to reach it?”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “No idea.”

  Crow sat down. This was a test, which meant there had to be a way to pass. He just needed to figure out what the Meera wanted them to do. In the last test, the engraved tortoise had urged them to keep walking.

  “Does the bird mean we’re supposed to fly?” he asked, shining the flashlight on the new engravings.

  “I hope not.” She took off her butterfly wings, the flimsy material now a torn and tattered mess. “You don’t think the Meera thought these were real, do you?”