“Don’t tease the big bad Bubba Moon!” he called, and jumped into the circle.
“Pete!” Tyler cried.
Benny tried to snatch him back, almost toppled, almost stepped over the painted line himself, but Chrissy grabbed him, pulled him to her side. She said later she didn’t know why she did that – she’d had no way of knowing how important that had been – but her hands had moved and they’d probably saved Benny’s life. He’s still alive today because of her.
Pete spun and danced in the circle and he laughed and howled Bubba Moon’s name like a wolf. We stared, horrified. It took me a few seconds to realise how cold it had gotten. At first I thought it was just me, but in the light I could see little puffs of vapour leaving Chrissy’s mouth.
“We should go,” Tyler said.
“Run away!” Pete shouted. “Run away all you like! You’ll never get away from big bad Bubba Moon!”
He stopped singing and dancing and suddenly dropped to the ground, crossed his hands over his chest and said, “Hey, guys, who am I?” He laid his head back and closed his eyes and pretended to be dead.
And then all our flashlights went out.
Chrissy cursed and Tyler cried out and Benny stumbled back and someone stumbled into me and Chrissy was beside me and I grabbed her and she grabbed me and we hit a pile of junk behind us and it all came crashing down, and then we were running for the window. Tyler was first, trying to haul himself out of there. I shoved a chair into him and he got a foot up on that and boosted himself up. I wanted Chrissy to go next, but Benny was shrieking too loud to reason with, so when he was halfway out I pushed Chrissy forward and she didn’t object. Tyler took hold of her left arm and helped her out, and her long legs vanished like spaghetti being sucked into a hungry mouth.
I got one foot on the chair, reached up, looked over my shoulder into the darkness and called Pete’s name, and there was sudden silence.
The world beyond the window was dull. I could hear the others scrambling, their faint voices. There was light now, their flashlights active once again, flooding my little patch of basement. I existed in a cocoon of yellow and white that kept the darkness back.
“Pete!” I said again.
Pete was silent.
I couldn’t go without him. I’d never be able to face him if I ran out on him. The panic was fading. I was starting to think rationally again.
In the shaking light of my cocoon, I saw the tips of Pete’s shoes. Chrissy saw them, too, and shifted her flashlight. I could see Pete’s legs now. He stood on the very edge of the darkness, his hands by his sides, his upper body in shadow. Not moving. Not speaking.
Every last bit of moisture left my mouth. I tried to say his name, but my heart was thudding so loudly that I couldn’t even hear how it sounded. Pete’s arms rose and he stood like that for a moment.
And then he ran at me, teeth bared, face frozen in a mask of hatred.
I screamed and Chrissy screamed and Benny and Tyler probably screamed as well, and Pete had almost reached me when he fell sideways, laughing so hard I thought he was crying.
“Your face!” he gasped. “Oh my God, your face!”
And he collapsed again with laughter.
“You’re such a tool,” I said, turning my back on him and climbing out. Chrissy helped me to my feet, but I shook off her hands and walked away, my whole body trembling. Tyler helped Pete out of the basement, which wasn’t an easy task due to how much Pete was laughing.
“Your face!” was all he could say. I left him there, left all of them, and I got on my bike and cycled home.
didn’t see any of them the next day, but the day after that school started again and we were back together, all of us except Chrissy, who I passed a few times in the hall, but didn’t say anything to. What happened at Bubba Moon’s house was quickly forgotten about amid the hustle of a new school year. Pete didn’t come in the next day, though, or the day after that, and on the third day in a row when he didn’t come in Chrissy Brennan tracked me down at my locker.
“Have you heard from Pete?” she asked, without even saying hello first. Her hair, a rich brown that always shone so healthily, was tied back off her face. I may have only been a kid, but I knew enough to know that she probably wasn’t as beautiful as I thought she was. My brother had once talked about a girl he’d liked, the prettiest girl he’d ever known, and then I met her and she was OK, but nothing special. She had a nice smile, but her eyes were too close together. My brother couldn’t see it, though. He was blinded by his own infatuation, and I reckoned I was, too.
What I saw when I looked at Chrissy Brennan was pretty blue eyes and an amazing smile and a face I could gaze at for hours. She was lean and athletic and she wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, and even though her friends thought we were dorks she still hung out with us whenever she felt like it. I knew she liked Moonlighting and Knight Rider and I thought she was beautiful, but I was fully aware that I probably couldn’t trust my own judgement.
It was only years later when I was looking back through old photographs that I realised that yeah, Chrissy Brennan really was as beautiful as I’d always thought, and that realisation made me smile a little.
“He hasn’t been in for a few days,” I said, but of course she already knew that. That’s why she was asking.
“I was going to call by his place after school,” she said, “to see if he’s OK. Do you want to come?”
She probably didn’t want to go there alone, that was all, and yet there was a small flicker of hope that lit inside me that maybe, perhaps, she wanted to spend some time with me without the other guys getting in the way.
“Sure,” I said. “Straight after?”
“Yeah. Were you doing anything?”
I shook my head and kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t ask any more questions. Pressing for insignificant details was something I did when I was excited, and it was a dead giveaway. We arranged to meet at the school gates and then Chrissy walked off, her books under her arm, and I went to double history and served my time until the bell rang. I grabbed my bag, hurried to the gates, waited there for Chrissy. She walked up and we went off together in full view of everyone on the bus. It was a good moment for me.
“What do you know about Bubba Moon?” she asked, breaking the silence that followed immediately after.
I suddenly suspected that this time together was going to be all business. “When he was alive? He was a Satanist. He had a black magic cult that met at his house. My brother says you used to be able to hear chanting if you passed late at night and the wind was coming from the right direction, and sometimes screams. He says.”
“Did you know the police were investigating him?”
I didn’t know that. “What for?”
Chrissy looked at me. “Murder. Kids were going missing and they thought Bubba Moon and his cult were doing it.”
“I didn’t hear anything about any kids going missing.”
“Not here, not in this town. Not even in this state. But in areas where his cult members lived, a kid would go missing before each one of his meetings. It started years ago, way back in the sixties. Why do you think they dug up his yard after he died?”
“I didn’t know they had.”
“Well, they did,” said Chrissy. “Dug it all up, looking for the bodies. They never found any.”
“Jeez,” I said. “Where did you hear all this?”
“My housekeeper. She says everyone knows, but they don’t like to talk about it.”
“That’s creepy,” I said. “Someone like that, living in our town… Any one of us could have disappeared.”
“My housekeeper says Bubba Moon was an evil man. Like real, actual evil. Not just bad. You know?”
I nodded.
“Did you feel it?” she asked. “You did, right? In the basement? You felt how evil he was, didn’t you?”
That feeling, that dreadful feeling of malevolence that had made the hairs on my neck stand up. “I guess.”
&nbs
p; Chrissy’s eyes flashed. “You guess? That’s it? You guess you felt something?”
“No,” I said quickly, “I mean I did. I felt it.”
Satisfied by my answer, Chrissy nodded. “I think he was so evil he infected his house, that’s what I think. That’s why the place felt like that. The basement especially. It’s probably strongest in the basement because that’s where he died. And that circle, the circle Pete lay down in…”
She was scared. She was actually scared as we walked along on that beautiful warm afternoon.
“You think that’s why he hasn’t been in?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.
Chrissy blushed, and didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. Maybe. If Bubba Moon’s evil can infect a house, why not a person?”
“Because he was living in that house for years,” I said, as if it was a scientific principle. “It’s like a bad smell that’s been around for ages. It doesn’t just go when you take the rotten thing out the room. It takes a while. You have to open windows and stuff. If it’s been there for long enough, the smell lingers. Pete was only in that circle for a few seconds. He was lying down for less than that.”
“Did you see how sick he looked on the first day back, though? He was all pale, and he had bags under his eyes.”
I hadn’t noticed that. But I did notice that Chrissy had led the way to Pete’s neighbourhood without once having to ask me for directions.
Pete’s house stood on a quiet street, and like all the other houses it had a sectioned-off front lawn and a back yard closed off by a wooden fence. We passed a man waiting for a bus and crossed to the other side of the road where a woman stood leaning against a lamp post, reading a paper. There were a few other people standing around, everyone doing their best to mind their own business. Chrissy glanced at me, frowning slightly.
We walked up the path and I knocked on Pete’s front door.
“They’re looking at us,” Chrissy whispered.
I kept my eyes forward. Seeing a whole bunch of random people on the street all with their heads turned, staring at me and Chrissy, would have been more than I could have handled. It would have been like something out of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a film I’d caught on TV the previous year that had given me nightmares. I shivered. My mouth was dry. No one was coming to the door.
I tugged Chrissy’s sleeve and she followed me round the side of the house. We paused at the living-room window. Pete’s mom and dad sat sleeping on the couch. The TV was on and so were all the lights, even though there were still hours to go before the sun dipped. We moved on without saying anything, all the way round the house to the back, to Pete’s window. We peered in.
Pete sat in the middle of the floor, legs splayed in front of him and shoulders hunched. His head was down. Eyes closed. There was something above him. Something that flickered, like heat rising off asphalt. It made my head hurt to look at it. Every few seconds, it became almost solid, and that solid form was a man, leaning down with his hands grasping Pete’s head.
Chrissy made a sound, halfway between a gasp and a whimper, and the next time the form flickered into view the man was looking straight at us.
We both cried out, stumbled back from the window, and bolted for the street. We had just reached the path when Pete’s front door opened and his mom stepped out.
“Well, hello there,” she said brightly.
We faltered in our escape, came to an awkward, stilted stop.
“Pete’s in his room,” Pete’s mom said, standing aside. “Come on in. I’ll tell him you’re here.”
We should have run. I knew we should have run. Every instinct in my body was telling me to run, to get out of there. But instead we bowed our heads, the both of us, and walked dutifully into the house. The door shut behind us.
“Pete,” Pete’s mom called, “your friends are here!” She smiled at us. “You’re so good to come by,” she said. “He hasn’t been feeling well lately.”
Then she turned, went to the couch, and sat down beside her husband. Instantly, her chin dropped to her chest, and she was back asleep.
“Hey, guys,” Pete said as he passed us on his way to the kitchen.
Chrissy and I looked at each other, then we followed him in. He stood with his back to us, looking at the fridge.
“Come to see how I’m doing, eh?” he asked.
“You haven’t been in school,” said Chrissy. Her voice sounded weirdly thick.
“No, I haven’t,” said Pete. After another moment, he opened the fridge door. “I’ve been feeling under the weather. I’m getting better now, though. Would either of you like a juice box?”
“No thank you,” said Chrissy.
“No thanks,” I said.
“I’m going to have one,” said Pete, and he took out a juice box, closed the fridge, and turned. “Have you been getting much homework?”
Chrissy didn’t answer. She probably figured it was my turn.
“Not really,” I said. “What’s been wrong with you?”
“I’ve been under the weather.”
“The flu?”
“Just under the weather.”
“Pete,” said Chrissy, “does it have anything to do with what happened at Bubba Moon’s house?”
Pete looked at her, looked at us both, and then down at his juice box. A moment passed. His right hand trembled. I was reminded of my grandpa, who’d had Parkinson’s, which made his hands shake constantly. It got so bad he couldn’t even take his own pills without spilling them all over the floor.
Then Pete’s tremble passed, and he opened the juice box with ease and took a long, slow drink. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, burped, and grinned like a little kid. “Sorry, Chrissy, what did you say?”
“Nothing,” I said before Chrissy could repeat her question. “We just called by, to make sure you’re OK. So you’re OK, you’re doing fine, and that’s good. We have to go now.”
Pete’s face fell, almost comically. “Already? But you just got here!”
“We have to go,” I said again.
“Yeah,” said Chrissy. “My mom’s waiting in the car outside.”
Pete frowned. “But you walked here.”
Chrissy was moving back, but I froze. “How did you know?” I asked, and he looked at me. When he locked eyes with me, I could see that haze again, just over his head, and the flickering image of the man looming over his shoulder.
My thoughts slowed and a weight pressed down on my mind like a thick, heavy blanket, smothering the sharp edges, deadening the sharp voices, darkening everything and bringing it all to a slow and lethargic crawl. My eyelids lowered. My strength drained. My energy sank from my body, to my feet, and out across the floor. A yearning for rest filled me, like too much food at Thanksgiving, and I yawned, such a big yawn, and my head nodded forward with such a slow and gentle—
Chrissy yanked on my arm, pulling me out from under that blanket, and strength and fright surged through me, and before I knew it I was following her out of the house, up the path. The people on the street swung their heads towards us.
I pushed Chrissy and we ran.
There was a shout and I glanced back and they were chasing, all those people, running after us. They were bigger and stronger and faster, they were full-grown adults, and in a flat-out race they were going to catch us. I grabbed Chrissy’s hand, pulled her off the street again, trampling the flowers in some nice old lady’s front lawn. We ran into her back yard, jumped and scrambled over the fence, landed in a garden, and sprinted for the street beyond the house. There was a loud crack and we both looked back to see the wooden fence explode, a man running through the gap.
Still gripping Chrissy’s hand, I took a short cut through the narrow alley that led to the rear of the parking lot at the Green Fields Mall. We hopped over the low wall, dropped the two metres to the ground on the other side, and ran on across the sparse lot. This time of day, most people would be parking out front. We needed to get to a populated area.
They wouldn’t do anything in a populated area. I hoped.
Chrissy looked back, gave a cry. I didn’t need to look. I knew they were behind us. I knew they were gaining. I also knew we only needed a few more moments and then we’d be safe.
We ran up to the rear doors of the mall, which slid open much too slowly for my liking. I squeezed through the gap, dragging Chrissy after me, ran up the steps, and we burst through an invisible barrier into a bubble of safety. Suddenly we were surrounded by people – mothers and kids and teenagers and fathers and businessmen and working women and shops and stalls and muzak and people handing out pamphlets and people collecting for charities – and we slowed to a fast walk and got into the middle of them all.
Only then did I turn, only then did I look back at the ones chasing us. They stood at the edge of this imagined bubble of mine, their eyes on me and Chrissy, cheated out of their prey. Slowly, they drifted back, until we lost them in the crowd.
I was still trying to get my breathing under control, but Chrissy was fitter than me, and already looking around for help. She spotted a mall cop and squeezed my arm. We hurried over. He stood on the periphery of the Food Court, thumbs hooked into his belt. He looked bored and unimpressive, but he was a mall cop with a walkie-talkie, and a mall cop with a walkie-talkie could get real cops over here in two minutes flat.
Right before we left the forest of people, literally two steps before we emerged into the empty space in front of the mall cop, Chrissy pulled me to a sudden stop.
The mall cop said something into his walkie-talkie. He chuckled at the response. A thought, completely unconnected to the danger we’d found ourselves in, floated to the surface of my mind like a stray balloon that had lost its tether. I wondered if mall cops, or anyone who used a walkie-talkie for that matter, had to undergo specialised training in order to understand what anyone else was saying on those walkie-talkies. Every time I passed one and it gurgled to life, all I heard was a confusing mess of abrupt sounds and crackle.