“I think I see tracers!” Abby said, twinkling her fingers optimistically.
“You’re not seeing tracers,” Margaret sighed. “For the nine millionth time.”
Abby shrugged and went back to flipping through Margaret’s shoebox of tapes, trying to find something to play.
“Are you seriously doing homework?” Margaret barked at Glee, who was sitting against her bed and seriously doing homework.
“This is boring,” Glee said.
“What about the Proclaimers?” Abby asked.
“No!” Margaret snapped.
“That one song is good?” Abby ventured.
Margaret flopped back in her armchair.
“This blows,” she groaned. “Seriously, I’m not feeling anything. Do you guys want to get buzzed? Glee, stop doing your homework or I’m going to hurt you.”
Abby looked down the room. Gretchen was at the far end, staring out the window, putting braids in her hair, then taking them out. Abby went over and stood next to her.
“What’re you looking at?” she asked.
“Fireflies,” Gretchen said.
Abby looked down into the side yard. The only light in the bedroom came from a few candles, so it was dim enough to see out the windows and all the way across the yard to the black treeline.
“What fireflies?” she asked.
“They stopped,” Gretchen said.
“I’ve got a ouija board,” Margaret volunteered. “Y’all want to talk to Satan?”
“Did you know that Crest toothpaste is satanic?” Glee asked, looking up from her Trapper Keeper.
“Glee . . . ,” Margaret said.
“It is,” Glee said. “If you look at the side of the tube, there’s a picture of an old man with two horns and the hair in his beard makes an upside-down 666. And he’s got thirteen stars around him. Ouija boards are made by Parker Brothers, who make Trivial Pursuit.”
“So?” Margaret sighed.
“So,” Glee said. “If you want to communicate with Satan, you’d be better off brushing your teeth than doing ouija.”
“Thanks, nerd,” Margaret said.
The dim room got quiet. Gretchen hid a yawn in the crook of her elbow. Someone had to rescue the night. As usual, it was Abby.
“Let’s go skinny dipping,” she said.
“Fuck that,” Margaret said. “Too cold.”
“Just for a minute,” Abby said.
The idea of being outside sounded nice.
“I’ll go,” Gretchen said, pushing herself up off the window sill.
“Let me finish this trig,” Glee said.
Margaret walked over to Glee and clapped her notebook shut.
“Come on, spazmo,” she said. “Don’t chap my rooster.”
The four of them rumbled down the three flights of stairs, flipped on the yard lights, and spilled out into the backyard.
“Turn out the lights,” Gretchen said. “So we can see the stars.”
“Abby,” Margaret said, “the switch is by the back door.”
Abby tromped back up the stairs, found the switch behind the microwave, and the backyard went dark again. Instantly, the sky got lighter and the crickets got louder. A fat orange moon hung on the horizon, right above the treeline. The night felt like it was listening to them as Abby tiptoed back down the stairs.
“So pretty,” Gretchen was saying.
They watched the moon for a second, each of them willing herself to trip, but the moon just hung there being a moon. Then Gretchen pulled off her T-shirt.
“Bodacious ta-tas!” she shouted, and then she ran into the darkness headed for the dock, shedding clothes, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra, her long legs taking leaps that ate up the grass as she disappeared into the shadows.
“Hold up!” Margaret called. “It’s low tide.”
Gretchen didn’t slow down. They heard her feet thumping fast along the wooden dock.
“Gretchen!” Abby yelled. “Don’t jump!”
They ran after her, Margaret and Abby in the lead, stepping on Gretchen’s shorts and underwear in the grass. Ahead of them came the sound of a shallow splash.
“Shit,” Margaret said.
In the moonlight, they saw that the tide had gone out and the creek had been reduced to a tarnished ribbon of silver water that ran between two high mud banks. For a moment, Abby saw Gretchen hitting the pluff mud and shattering her kneecaps, or landing in three feet of water and slashing her face open on a hidden oyster bed.
“Gretchen?” Abby called.
No answer.
She and Margaret had reached the railing at the end of the dock. Glee trotted up behind them.
“Where’s Gretchen?” she asked.
“She jumped,” Abby said.
“Shit,” Glee said. “Is she okay?”
They looked up and down the creek but Gretchen was gone. They called her name a few times, their voices echoing across the water.
Abby bounced down the ramp to the floating dock.
“There’s alligators,” Margaret warned.
“Gretchen?” Abby called across the creek.
No answer. Abby realized she was going to have to go in.
“Do you have a flashlight?” she called up to Margaret. “We should put in the boat.”
“And run over her head?” Margaret said. “Genius.”
“Then, what?” Abby asked.
“She can hold her breath like a bone,” Margaret said. “Wait for her to come up.”
The water oozed around the floating dock, rocking it up and down.
“What if she hit her head?” Abby said.
“Are there really alligators?” Glee asked.
Something moved in the marsh grass and Abby jerked. Was it an alligator? What did an alligator sound like? Were alligators nocturnal? She didn’t know. Why didn’t school teach them anything useful?
Abby scanned the creek one more time, hoping to spot Gretchen because she really didn’t want to jump in the water. Across the creek, something moved again in the marsh grass. Abby strained her eyes and saw a shadow separate itself from the darkness and drag itself toward the water. She stared hard. A shape that wasn’t human slithered through the pluff mud, making a dead plop as it slipped into the black flowing river that led out to the sea. A sharp wind blew off the water. Summer was over. It was getting cold.
“Gretchen!” Glee shouted.
“Where?” Abby asked.
“Down there,” she said. “Where I’m pointing.”
“I can’t see you pointing in the dark.”
“To the left,” Glee said. “Where it curves.”
Abby looked downstream, using her hand to block out the bright orange moon. Far down, where the creek bent toward the ocean and disappeared around a curving bank of marsh grass, was a pale shape, long like Gretchen, picking its way through the pluff mud toward the treeline. Abby cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Gretchen!” she shouted.
The figure kept moving.
“How do we get down there?” Abby called up to Margaret.
She heard a lighter snap above her and smelled menthol.
“See,” Margaret said. “She’s fine.”
But Abby knew she wasn’t fine. Gretchen probably didn’t know how to get back to the house. She had zero sense of direction, and she was naked. She might have kept her sneakers on, but Abby had her clothes.
“Do you have a flashlight?” Abby asked.
“Spaz down,” Margaret said. “She’ll be back in five minutes.”
“I’m going to get her,” Abby said, heading up the ramp. “Give me one of those.”
Margaret slid a cigarette out of the pack and handed it over. Orange light flared in Abby’s face and then she was seeing spots and sucking me
nthol. She didn’t want to tell them, but her heart was hammering.
“I’ll be right back,” Abby said.
“Watch out for snakes,” Margaret called after her helpfully.
Abby picked her way through the long grass and plunged into the trees. Instantly, the woods cut her off from the house, from the stars, from the sky, and she was buried beneath dark branches. All she could hear were the cicadas shrieking, the sound of her own footsteps crunching leaves, and the occasional close-up whine of a mosquito in her ear. She had the feeling that something was listening to her walk. She moved as quietly as possible and stayed close to the river. To her left, the woods were pitch black.
By the time Abby emerged into the little clearing where the river bent, her Merit had burned down to the filter. She tossed the butt in the water, hoping it would bring Gretchen running out to tell her she was hurting Mother Nature.
Nothing.
“Gretchen?” Abby whisper-called into the darkness.
No answer.
“Gretchen?” she tried again, slightly louder.
A path of crushed marsh grass and churned-up pluff mud showed where Gretchen must have crawled out of the water. Abby lined herself up at the top of the bank, where Gretchen would have emerged, and looked into the black woods. Leaves sighed as a high wind blew through the treetops. The cicadas kept screaming. Far off there was a single hollow knock that made Abby’s heart squeeze tight.
“Gretchen!” she said in her normal voice.
The woods didn’t answer.
Before she could wimp out, Abby walked into the trees, following a straight line, pretending she was Gretchen. Where would she have gone? Which way would she have turned? Within seconds she was deep in darkness. Her eyes had nothing to hold on to and they were spazzing out, her vision sliding helplessly over the shadows, trying to force them into shapes. Keeping one hand in front of her face so she didn’t walk into a tree and break her nose, Abby made her way deeper into the woods.
Up ahead, the trees thinned and moonlight shone dull gray on something square and black planted in the ground. Abby slowed as she walked into the clearing. It was a ruined blockhouse, just a simple one-room rectangle, its thick tabby walls burned black, the roof collapsed. A single blind window stared out, and it was impossible to shake the sense that something was looking out at her. That’s when she saw the darkness inside the blockhouse start to move. That’s when Abby realized the cicadas had stopped screaming.
Her heart shifted into fourth gear. She didn’t know where she was. She had never heard about any buildings back here. There couldn’t be anything inside it, but something in there was moving and Abby couldn’t look away. The darkness inside was deeper. She could see it through the window, twisting around itself, squirming, rolling, undulating. And something was buzzing, a sinister sizzle she could feel through her feet, humming deep underground. Abby tightened her grip on Gretchen’s shorts and shirt. She heard the sound of a far-off hunting horn.
This had to be the acid. It was finally kicking in, after all. She just needed to turn around and walk away. Nothing was going to hurt her. It was a powerful drug, but it had never caused any harm to anyone except maybe Syd Barrett. All she had to do was turn around and go. There was nothing to worry about because none of this was real.
That’s when a man called her name.
“Abby,” a voice said from inside the house.
It came out of the darkness—no weird sound effects, nothing scary, just a normal man, saying her name in a normal voice.
Her hands went cold; something snapped inside her brain and Abby ran. She panicked, she stumbled, she ran face-first into a tree because someone was right behind her and any minute she would feel him grab her T-shirt and drag her back to that dark house. So she kept running.
Abby steered toward the lighter part of the woods, spinning off tree trunks, tripping over logs, stumbling through bushes. She ran as thorns hacked at her shins, as branches whipped at her eyes, as something caught her hair and yanked her backward. But she kept running and she felt her hair rip at the roots. Up ahead, the darkness was thinning. She could see where the trees ended. She was close. A whine rose up in her throat, and a light smashed into her face.
“Whoa!” Margaret said.
Abby fell out of the woods and landed on her hands and knees. Margaret and Glee were standing in the waist-high field. They were far from the river, farther than Abby had realized.
“Behind me!” she said, pushing herself up off the cold grass.
Margaret whipped her light off Abby’s face and ran it over the wall of tree trunks that were dirty and small and not scary at all in the flashlight beam.
“Did you see someone?” Margaret asked.
“Where’s Gretchen?” Glee asked.
“She’s not with y’all?” Abby asked, panting.
“Shit,” Margaret said.
Margaret and Glee started walking up and down the edge of the woods, shining their light into the trees, calling Gretchen’s name. Abby realized that she only had Gretchen’s shorts in her hand. She must’ve dropped the T-shirt somewhere in the woods, and that made her feel inexplicably sad, like she’d broken something expensive that couldn’t be replaced. But there was no way she was going back to find it. There was no way she was going back in those woods for any reason whatsoever.
After a while her panic passed, and soon she started to walk the treeline with Glee and Margaret. And then they thought maybe Gretchen was at the house, and Abby didn’t want to split up, so all three of them went back but it was empty. They picked at pasta salad, and smoked, and tried to figure out if they should call the police. Then they found batteries for two more flashlights and went back outside.
“Gretchen!” they called, walking the property. “Gretchen? Greeeetch-ennnnn!”
When the sky started to soften and every step was like walking through concrete they decided to bite the bullet. They had to call the police.
“I’m so fucked,” Margaret said.
“She might be dead,” Abby said. “Or kidnapped.”
“It could be a cult,” Glee suggested. “Like Satan worshippers.”
“Shut the fuck up, Glee,” Margaret moaned. “Before I ruin my life, we’re going to search the woods.”
Even with dawn turning everything gray, Abby couldn’t handle the idea of going back into the woods.
“No way,” she said. “We should call the police. Someone might have taken her.”
“Who?” Margaret asked, switching off her flashlight. It was light enough to see their faces without it. “Who would want her? No one fucking took her. Before we call the police and I’m grounded for the rest of my life, we’re going to look one last time.”
Margaret had a way of making you feel like a stupid baby, so Abby meekly followed her and Glee out of the safe, open field and back into the maze of trees.
“We’re not going to a party,” Margaret said. “Spread out.”
“This is how they always get in trouble on Scooby-Doo,” Glee said, but she obeyed and, reluctantly, so did Abby. The three of them spread out through the woods, but Abby kept her flashlight on, even as the sky lightened. At first she tried to stay near the treeline, but the thought of Margaret cursing her out for being a coward, coupled with the thought of Gretchen lying injured and unconscious somewhere, forced her to go deep. The loblolly and palmetto trunks kept her from walking in a straight line, lured her in, turned her around, pulled her farther from the treeline. When they finally led her to the concrete bunker again, she wanted to scream.
Instead she took a deep breath and forced herself to be cool. In the grimy morning light the blockhouse looked depressing, covered in graffiti where kids had carved their initials and weird symbols that might be pictures of perverted sex: “Eat Fuk Preps,” “The Uncalled Four,” and “Nuke the Killer Whales.” Abby felt the pressure of som
eone watching her, and she spun around.
Nothing but tree trunks. She turned back to the building and saw a pale figure standing in the window, staring at her. It had shadowy holes for eyes and a ragged black rip for a mouth. Abby’s flashlight thumped to the ground.
“What time is it?” Gretchen asked.
Her throat was scratchy, her voice was raw. Then she disappeared from the window and came around the side of the house, stark naked except for her sneakers, smeared up to her thighs with scales of pluff mud, filth streaked over the rest of her body, hands black, leaves in her hair. She stepped into the light and the rising sun was reflected in her eyes. For a moment they were cold silver discs.
“Where were you?” Abby asked.
Gretchen brushed past her, heading out of the woods.
“Gretchen?” Abby called, then hurried after her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m peachy,” Gretchen said. “I’m cold, I’m naked, I’m starving, I spent all night in the fucking woods.”
The reply threw Abby. Gretchen never cussed. She held out Gretchen’s shorts.
“I found these,” she said. “But I lost your shirt.”
Snatching them from Abby’s hand, Gretchen stepped into her shorts, her joints cold and stiff. She pulled them up and then crossed her arms over her chest, tucking her hands into her armpits.
“We thought you were lost,” Abby explained. “We’ve been looking for you since you jumped off the dock. Margaret was about to call the police.”
Gretchen leaned over, arms hiding her breasts, skin rough with goose pimples, and she kept bending until she was crouched like she was going to pee, and then she froze, hair hanging over her face. It took Abby a second to realize she was crying, and then Abby crouched beside her, wrapping her arms around Gretchen’s ice-cold back.
“Shh, shh, shh,” she said, rubbing Gretchen’s back. “It’s okay.”
Gretchen leaned into her awkwardly, and snuffled and shook for a full minute before she made a complicated noise in her throat.
“What?” Abby asked.
“I want to go home,” Gretchen repeated.
“We are,” Abby said.
My Best Friend's Exorcism Page 5