I couldn’t help glancing back longingly at the beach we had just left. We’d been at sea for less than a minute, and already I was homesick. Jack-Jack must have sensed my uneasiness about the voyage.
“Don’t worry, my friend. We will be back. And when we come back, we will come from the west. I’ve seen it in a dream”
I smiled for his sake, although I was still scared. I kept looking back at the land we were leaving behind. The Island got smaller each time I looked. Eventually I couldn’t see it at all.
THE BAD THING AT THE END OF THE ROAD
Nobody knows what the deal is with Chester Road. Grandpa says that he remembers when they first paved it back in 1953. Chester branches off of Bender Lane about a mile from downtown and comes to a dead end after 1,200 yards. Grandpa is certain about that--1,200 yards. He measured it back when he was a kid. He used a yard stick. I can’t imagine the patience it must have taken to move that stick one yard at a time. Beyond the end of the road there is an open field that goes on for about 30 feet (my own estimation; Grandpa never measured it). Beyond the field there are some woods.
One time when I asked Grandpa why the road was put there, leading off to nowhere, he said he thought he remembered something about some new houses that were supposed to have been built along it back in ’53; for some reason the houses were never built. Mr. Jackson, whose even older than Grandpa, says that that’s not it at all--the road was supposed to lead to a new factory, but the company changed its mind and located their plant elsewhere. Mr. Sanderson, who is older than Grandpa but younger than Mr. Jackson, said that the road was supposed to lead to a big Shop-Mart that never got built because the chain went out of business at the end of ’53. So like I said, nobody really knows why that road was put there. Last summer me and some of my friends started using Chester Road to play street hockey. It was great, because we didn’t have to worry about a car coming along and creaming somebody.
It was Grandpa who warned me not to go near Chester Road any time after dark. He said that it was fine to play there in the daytime, but not when it was dark out. At first he wouldn’t give me a reason; he just said that he’d better not catch me or he would tan my hide. I obeyed and stayed away from Chester Road after dark, but I kept pressing him for a reason. Finally, after about a million years, he told me the story of the time he measured the road with a yard stick soon after it was abandoned and left unfinished. He had told me the story before, but there was one part that he had always left out.
Back then, in the autumn of 1953, a twelve year old boy decided to measure the weird new road in town. It was weird because it ended in the middle of nowhere in a dead end. The tool he chose to measure the road with was an old yard stick he had found in the cluttered garage a few weeks before. He started his measuring project on a Monday. After school let out the boy came home and did his homework, then told his mother that he was going to his friend Stevie’s house to watch television. Instead of going over to Stevie’s he smuggled the yard stick out of the garage and went out to Chester Road. As he measured, yard by yard, flipping the stick end over end a hundred times, then two hundred, then three hundred and so on, he lost track of time. He didn’t even notice that it was getting dark. When he finally reached the end of the road, he smiled a smile of satisfaction. Now he knew something that no one else did, and if any of his friends happened to ask, “Say, I wonder how long that road is”, he could tell them, “Why, it’s exactly twelve hundred yards”. It was about then that he realized just how dark it had gotten, and he thought he should probably be heading home, and hopefully his mom hadn’t called Stevie’s house to check on him. That’s when he heard a noise in the woods beyond the end of the road. At that time the grassy field that separated the road from the woods was just a field of loose dirt. The boy squinted into the shadows, trying to see what was moving around in the woods. He could see branches moving, and hear fallen branches breaking underfoot. And then he saw…something.
Grandpa wouldn’t tell me what he had seen, no matter how much I badgered him about it. Just stay away, he told me. Don’t go there after dark. But a boy’s curiosity is a powerful thing, and eventually it got the best of me. I went down to the end of Chester Road one night about three months ago; I even borrowed the same excuse that Grandpa used all those years ago, telling my mom that I was going to Peter’s house to play video games. For a while nothing happened, and I was beginning to think that Grandpa had played a dirty trick on me. But then I heard something rustling in the woods. I won’t lie; I was pretty scared, but I stood my ground. I just had to see.
And I saw. I ran all the way home, jumped into bed and hid under the covers. It was terrible; take my word for it. I thought about telling Grandpa that I had seen it, too, but I knew he would get mad at me, and maybe even make good on his threat to whup me good. You know how these old geezers are; they grew up with whuppings, and they don’t see anything wrong with it. So I kept quiet about it. I didn’t even tell my friends.
It felt weird to know what I knew and not do anything with that knowledge. Secrets are no fun when you can’t do anything about them. But I thought about it for a while and came up with my brilliant idea. Kenny Beck was always giving me a hard time at school for no good reason. I never did anything to him; he was just a jerk. So I told him that I had something cool to show him, and that he needed to meet me out on Chester Road right around when it started to get dark out. He got kind of mad when I wouldn’t tell him what it was that I wanted to show him, but he finally agreed when I told him that he could pound my face in if he didn’t think it was the coolest thing ever. He agreed a little too quickly, if you ask me; I think he just wanted an excuse to beat the crap out of me.
So I guess now Kenny knows about the thing at the end of the road, too. Or at least he knew, for a very short while. I promised myself that he would be the only one, but then Peter told some kids at school about the time I wet the bed when I slept over at his house last year. I thought he was my friend, but what kind of friend does a thing like that? So I showed him what was at the end of Chester Road, too. And then there was Fred Phillips, but I don’t like to talk about that. I admit that I shouldn’t have done that to him. He was just kind of bugging me that day.
It’s been in the papers. Three kids missing. People are worried that there’s some kind of pervert child killer stalking the town. I’m no pervert, and I’ve never killed anyone. I just took some kids out to Chester Road at night. All right, maybe I also gave them a good shove at a bad time, but I didn’t kill anybody.
Sometimes I think Grandpa might suspect something. I see him giving me weird looks sometimes. I think I’d better lay off for a while. No more taking anybody to Chester Road until the heat dies down. I don’t think Grandpa will say anything to anybody. And if he does? I guess I’ll have to try and find a way to get him out to Chester Road.
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