feel an extra presence, pressing in tight.
And getting tighter.
Like something coming at us, spurred on by the boy’s prayer.
I needed to break the hold. “Nice little setup you have here!
His eyes popped open, his head snapped around to face me, and a horrified expression spread across his face. Busted. Ha ha!
“What are… wha.. what are you d-doing here?” he managed.
“Watching you make a fool of yourself.”
Whatever I had felt coming on, it disappeared as soon as I spoke. I told myself it was nothing, just some wacky feeling brought on by listening to him carry on like that. But it was easy enough to decipher the real story on this hill; the boy was nuts.
“H-h-how long have you been there?” Trevor’s voice shook.
“Long enough. What was that? Wicca, or something? You worship trees, and hills, and that kind of thing?”
He jumped to his feet, his face grown almost as red as his hair. “Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything. Just playing. A game. That’s all. A game.”
He ran past me, back the way I came from.
“That didn’t look like any game I’ve ever seen,” I called after him.
“Just a game,” he yelled back, then disappeared over the rise of the bluff and down the other side.
I looked back at the circle of stones and laughed out loud. This was too great! I could have a lot of fun with this one. What would he give me not to tell his dad about his little ceremony in the woods? My head swam with all of the possibilities, all of the different ways I could torment him with this.
I laughed all the way back to the house. I even managed to almost forget that for a long moment there, I had been sure that something had been coming toward us. Something summoned by Trevor’s ritual.
3
“Why didn’t you want to go to Europe with your parents?” the boy asked, sitting down beside me on the steps. It was the kid with the pointy nose from breakfast the previous morning. Esau said his name was Harry or Harvey or something like that.
“What’s it to you?”
He shrugged. “Just wondering.”
“Maybe you should stay out of other people’s business.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be such a jerk.” He stood. He took a few paces back toward the house, then stopped and looked back at me. I continued to gaze at the cracked fountain but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. “Helen said we would be getting a new person come to stay with us,” he added.
“Who the hell is Helen?”
“She’s the maid. Only she seems to have gone missing. I can’t find her anywhere, and Esau won’t answer any question about her.”
“And I’m supposed to care, why?”
“She knew you were coming before Esau did.”
“Maybe she was in the wrong profession, then. Maybe she left to go tell fortunes.”
Harry or Harvey or Whoever-He-Was stalked back toward me. I could tell he was getting flustered. His nostrils flared and he had that obstinate look in his eyes that people got around me. I have a talent for getting under people’s skins, you could say.
“You went out by the well yesterday?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. You keeping an eye on me?”
“Anything?”
“Anything, what?”
“At the well?”
I stared at him, and I could tell something was making him nervous. He kicked absently at the stone steps and kept shuffling his weight from one leg to the other. “What was I supposed to see at the well?”
“You didn’t… see anything? Hear anything?”
I could tell he was trying to choose his words with great care, but I had no idea why. It was just a stupid well. My recollection flashed back to that moment when I thought I had seen a snake or something rippling across the surface of the water far down below, but that couldn’t possibly be what he was so worked up about. Or was he talking about the kid?
“You mean Esau’s little brat?”
That rattled him. “No. What about him?”
“Nothing.” This conversation was making me dumber. I could almost see the IQ points leaking out of my ears and cresting away on the breeze. “The kid’s a nut, is all. But if there’s something you want me to know about the well, just spill it or leave me alone.”
“Nevermind,” he said, and stormed off. Good riddance to him.
I watched the sun set, then returned to my room. Drury Manor was nothing if not boring and stupid. Other than the little circle of stones, the forest was unexciting and offered nothing spectacular. The lake held promise, but it was too cold to go swimming, and there was nothing out there but a dilapidated old wharf and some old boathouse that was little more than a crumbling wooden enclosure one good gust of wind away from falling completely over. I tried exploring the house, thinking that surely an old mansion should be a fun and creepy thing to wander about in, except it wasn’t. Just a bunch of hallways dotted with busts of old dead guys, a lot of empty rooms, and a lot of money wasted on tacky furnishings. I kept hoping to discover an ancient dungeon or arcane markings that would somehow point the way to some great mythical beast. Anything to make these next three months interesting.
But nope. Drury Manor pretty much sucked. Other than the constant patter of feet up and down the hallway the whole night, the place was completely void of anything of interest. Although I will say, the footsteps in the hallway were kind of strange. I thought for sure there were a bunch of kids running around outside my door, but every time I crept over to it and threw it open, I found the hallway deserted. Rats, maybe? They would have to be some big rats, I suppose, but that was the only other thing I could think of that it could have been.
I went to my room, closed the door, and laid across the bed with a book. It was an imported copy of a Japanese novel in which a bunch of grade school kids are forced to kill each other on a remote island. There was enough death and bloodshed on its pages to satisfy even a cynic like me, and more than once I imagined myself on that island, fending for myself, battling for survival, against all odds. I would rise to the top. I knew I would. If I could just get my hands on a bow and arrow, I would be a force to be reckoned with. I’d kill them all.
I heard footsteps in the hall again.
Except, this was not like last night. Only one set of footsteps, and these at the measured, calculating pace of somebody trying to be quiet, as opposed to what I had heard last night, that sounded like children playing and running about. As I listened, the steps went right past my door and kept going.
I paced to the door and opened it slowly, peering out just in time to see Trevor disappear into the last room at the end of the hall. Trevor’s room was on the other side of the house, next to that of his father, so I wondered what he was doing over here. I checked my watch and found that it was after midnight. I always did lose track of time when reading; several hours had passed since I splayed across the bed.
I crept to the last door on the left side of the hallway, meaning to catch the boy unawares. He had clearly waited until he thought everybody was asleep to come over here, so he was obviously up to something. I thought about how I had caught him doing that little ritualistic chant in the forest yesterday, and I would have bet anything he was up to something similarly weird tonight.
He had not latched the door, but merely pressed it almost completely shut. Probably to avoid the unnecessary noise of a latch catching. But what was convenient for him was also convenient for me, because that meant I could open the door silently and see what was going on.
I pushed the door open slowly.
An old bookcase lined one wall, but few books remained on it. There was a large recliner in one corner, covered in clear plastic, and an old crib adjacent to it, also covered in clear plastic. The carpet was stained, the wallpaper peeling down off the walls, and it was immediately clear this room had not been used in a very long time.
I had a good view of the boy’s back. He was standing near th
e window, slowly rocking. After a moment, I realized what he was doing.
He was dancing. If you could call it that. He was also faintly humming. The light of a single candle on the floor behind him cast his shadow on the wall, and for only the briefest of moments when I opened the door, I thought I caught a glimpse of additional shadows, as though there were several other people in the room, but these crawled along the walls and vanished as soon as I spotted them. It was an eerie sight to behold for sure, but I discounted it as a trick of the light due to the flickering flame.
I tiptoed to the boy, chose my moment with great care, then grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and screamed, “Boo!”
He must have left the floor a full foot when he jumped. The look of pure shock, the grunt of surprise, and the terrified look in his eyes as he spun around and fell on his butt was truly one of the most satisfying moments of my life.
“Got you, you little lunatic,” I said, laughing. “Up to more of your bizarre rituals?”
It started as a single trickle of a tear, but after a moment the boy was crying. I relished the moment, smiling down at him.
“Crybaby too, huh? I must have gotten you good.”
He wiped the back of one trembling hand across his face to brush away the tears, but new ones immediately replaced the old, so it was a fruitless gesture. “I’m not crying for me, Seth,” he said.
“Oh really, who are you crying for, then?”
“You.”
Something pushed me hard from behind. I grunted, unable to help myself, and sprawled out on the floor next to Trevor.