“I should’ve asked you first, about Tiff—Tiffany,” Greg said. “We got burgers the other day. She actually talked about you. Said you were the best dude she ever met. No shit. She said you two weren’t dating. I still should’ve asked first. That would’ve been the right thing to do, right? Today we went to the park, hung out on the swings. You know … I don’t know—I thought maybe she was flirting. Maybe that’s how she is. I didn’t touch her or anything. I wanted to. You’d have to be crazy not to want to. I mean, the girl is … She’s not Erika. She tells you what she’s thinking, in a good way. Doesn’t hide anything. I like that about her. But, hey—you got dibs on her, man, and I’m not messing anything up. Shitty people do shit like that. It’s easy to. That’s not me. So, what’s up? Is she your girl? Did you two date or what?”
“No,” Doug said.
“That’s what you wanted?”
“It’s just … what it is—was. It’s whatever. Nothing.”
To face the others back at camp as a blubbering mess would make Doug look even less manly beside Greg. So Doug watched the stiff trees on the other side of the stream and waited for their branches to wave in a breeze. It was difficult to say if he would’ve rejected the ritual and the vision of the Dead Man as a real-life Christmas tree angel if Tiffany had taken his hand instead of Greg’s that night. Maybe because of it, he couldn’t hate Greg. He wanted to. Then again, Doug doubted Tiffany would ever be anyone’s girl but her own. Which was good for her. But Doug expected never to have anything he wanted. Greg might get hurt worse.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Yeah? Think I got a shot?”
“More than me.”
“Right on.” In a jump, Greg was on his feet.
The guy offered his hand. Doug took it. The boys returned to their spot along the stream. Greg showed him how to throw a line and tug up fish. They lost a few worms and several times nearly slipped into the water. Doug almost enjoyed hanging out with Greg. That’d likely been John’s intent all along, to remind them of their friendship to prevent a break in the group. By reassuring Greg that he’d done no wrong, Doug had once again dumbly played into John’s masterminding. It wasn’t the Dead Man’s fault that Tiffany had gone cold after Doug had pleaded with the group not to confront the killer, but it felt good to hate him for giving her another reason to. Doug didn’t want to hate John or anyone. He wanted the guy to quit ruining his life and vanish already. The Dead Man wouldn’t be wished away. Doug had tried, many times. Now, with the rituals, he couldn’t be waited out, either. The single course of action left was the most difficult. Emotionally exhausted, without Tiffany or E., if Doug wanted to keep them from dying, he would have to break John’s mind control with words.
“Are you seriously going to? … walk tonight?” Doug stammered.
“We all are.”
“John wants us to … obviously.”
“You don’t want to, man?” Greg said.
“It was John’s idea—just saying.”
Doug snagged a line, and Greg took the pole out of his hands. He pulled and the line popped.
“It kinda was.” He reeled in swiftly. While he tied another hook, he said, “It’s sorta dangerous.”
“Right! I mean, yeah—this whole thing is dangerous.”
“We all swore to do it,” Greg said. “We swore to each other.”
“John had us do that, right? But what if you fall? Or Tiffany? Someone could be hurt—I mean, seriously die.”
“There’s way more dangerous things out there,” Greg nodded upstream, “that we could be doing other than playing in the woods.”
“But we’re not playing,” Doug said.
Greg stole the sawed-off pop bottle. He shook the extra dirt around the bottom, aggressively fingering for worms. It was empty. His mouth opened before he spoke, inhaling in frustration. He looked straight at Doug.
“You’re scared.” His voice trembled like a plea, then toughened. “I am, too. But I won’t let these guys down. Not Tiff or John or J. They’re doing it, I’m doing it. You’re going to do it, too.”
He left Doug on the water to find more worms. But he paused on the embankment and said:
“We’re becoming a family. You don’t turn your back on family like a total shithead.”
Doug adjusted his glasses. He looked downstream, big feelings expanding. Small round leaves dappled against the sunset like scattered puzzle-pieces. The intensity of the cars on the nearby highway rose above the stream for a moment. Doug wanted to run. He felt beaten, not by Greg, but the Dead Man. It wouldn’t be hard. He could escape back to the real world, save himself. He couldn’t ever return, might never see these friends again. E. was already lost to this other world, a priestess of a strange tribe, a stranger to him, and Doug began to feel stupid to have believed he’d ever had a chance against John. If, during the ritual, Greg and E. and the rest fell from the high branch, it wouldn’t be Doug’s fault. It wouldn’t, he told himself. It wasn’t enough to absolve his concern for them, who were on the whole smarter, stronger, and more able to change the group’s direction. If only they’d seen the cloaked killer in the dark—
A hiss sounded at Doug’s feet. The thick, knotted body of a water snake lay piled at one end of the trunk. He couldn’t tell where the creature began or ended. Doug searched the churning length for a face. One blunt, seemingly eyeless end jabbed forward, elongated up the trunk toward his legs. Doug couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t will away his weakness, the familiar, paralyzing fear of impending death. The snake was inches away. He stepped back. The trunk dipped under his shifting weight. The snake sloughed into water, then himself.
The stream wasn’t deep. He kicked at the slippery stones, frantically clopping for the embankment. Greg’s open hand waited to help him up. Doug didn’t accept it.
“Did you see that? A huge snake …”
“No, man.” Greg gave the water a skeptical skim. He called after Doug: “Where you running?”
“I’m warming up at camp.”
“But John said—”
“Go ahead. Walk for him, bark for him,” Doug muttered.
He trekked back, wet and alone. His heartbeat raced at the thought that the Dead Man was only getting started in his plans.
The group laughed when they saw Doug sopping. He mumbled about falling in. Josué welcomed him with a place at the fire he was building. Tiffany bent and kissed his cheek, then wandered down the creek for Greg. E. brought a blanket. “Same old Dougy,” she said. The group smiled, relieved that their jester had returned.
“You’re a good person,” he said to E.
Her gladness shifted with discomfort. She’d started to put the blanket around his shoulders and froze, caught off-guard by his sincerity. He took it from her hands and wrapped himself. To check that she wasn’t suspect of some wrongdoing, she met his eyes, which pointed up at her from behind his thick glasses.
“You sure you’re OK, Dougy?”
“Doug,” he said without blinking. “Just Doug.”
“He’s named the fire in his soul,” John intervened. The guy sat straight-backed at his place in front of the Big Tree. He didn’t have to raise his voice for the group to hush and heed him. “We can all respect that.”
“I didn’t mean … Of course,” E. said. Whether to John’s request or his own, Doug didn’t know. He wished he did.
She returned to the cookout equipment. She glanced back once, as if to verify that the ripple between them had originated not from her, but him. Then she crouched in the deepening shadow to prepare dinner, and her face blanked.
From across the campfire, Doug felt John’s gaze commanding him to acknowledge he’d been granted a favor by his power. Doug focused on the fire and the liquid-like current beneath the logs. He heard the burn’s hollowness, much like the ribbed streams of gas that blew in the body of his parents’ furnace. They kept the thermostat low all winter, and though he often huddled over the living-room floor vent to keep warm, a comforter
pulled over his head and resembling a lumpy ghost, Doug was invariably sick two or three times a cold season. He’d never spoke up to his parents about changing it. But, at his age, he could say something.
“Did you and Greg get along all right?” John asked.
E. and Josué didn’t look over. They slowed in their labor to listen.
“I thought you knew everything,” Doug said.
Josué chuckled. He quit as soon as he’d started.
Doug refused to look up and mark John’s reaction. He had that power at least.
2
John’s number-two performed the ritual on Saturday night.
Alex stooped and hugged the trunk at the top, struck motionless by the height as badly as Yiaya, who refused to trust escalators at her favorite department stores or to climb stairs to attend the cries of grandchildren. The result: a whole elevated world the woman couldn’t access owing to an exaggerated fear of human failure.
Closing one’s eyes didn’t help. The group seeing you naked was also of last concern so high up. Below, a ring of vague, upturned faces shone like six candles. Alex braved a peek at the sky. The moon was new—was dark—wasn’t there. In its place, Saturn oversaw the ritual. The amorphous glob of faraway light resembled how Alex felt, indistinct of form and lovely because of it—all the sentiments Tiffany had expressed last week converging into fact. The compulsion to walk along the bough of the Big Tree wasn’t Saturn’s doing, however, but the great space beyond’s. Alex and the Earth were put into perspective thanks to the planet, their solar family, to which every atom of one’s body and mind was related, linked distantly to those twinkling cousins way out there, and the incalculable, no, unfathomable space above and below that was part of one’s being, too, which Alex fathomed, inwardly and outwardly, endlessly, striking awe, which was everything and—up there—enough.
3
Doug found the first note in his locker on Monday morning:
LET ME IN, DOUGYDEAREST. WHAT’S GOING ON UNDER RED MOUNTAIN?
Left and right down the hallway, no one paid him attention between classes, as usual. Still, reading the note, he had the creepy feeling of being watched. He sighed, exhausted by the cryptic nonsense that’d appeared in his life since John. Doug crumpled the note and jammed it in his pocket.
His science teacher lectured the class about graduation, coffee in one hand, the other fixed to her hip like the handle of a much larger cup. Ms. Whitehead was a prim, gray-complexioned woman with a pouchy double chin and owlish glasses. She had an operatic voice that blared out of her peephole of a mouth. Today she warned that after next week’s graduation ceremony they would no longer be eighth graders, and in four very short months they would be high schoolers. Their worlds would be turned upside down. Mixed among students from neighboring junior highs, some better prepared and many much worse off, they would be given the opportunity to start their social lives afresh. Some were already undergoing transformations she sincerely hoped the public school system had equipped them to face. It was a confusing time that would only become more so as the repercussions of each choice lay ahead. They might not understand this, yet, but their attitude in facing these challenges would determine their character for the rest of their lives.… The woman opened class at length about changes in status and cliques and hormones and temptations too remote for the class to care about with summer vacation so near, certain to be just another well of timeless days spent lazily, generally inconsequential, and later hazy, indistinct from previous summers, but for rare amorous moments with equally transient special-someones, and, though a couple of students mindlessly scribbled notes as if the material would show on the big test, the break couldn’t come fast enough for them—all except for Doug, of course. Before then, he’d have to rescue his friends from becoming permanent residents of the woods.
E. was in his class. The girl sat severely straight, having adopted John’s holier-than-thou bearing. Really, she wasn’t in the room at all. She stared passed her classmates’ tottering heads with a faint smile at the overcast sky beyond. Doug guessed she wandered under the broad arms of the Big Tree, an outline of lesser darkness, receiving arcane transmissions from John H. Walker, who rattled about their work in the woods like a blind and mad prophet. It made sense to Doug now. The woods, John—these were replacements for her library hideaway and the wisdom of greater authors. More immediate, more distracting, maybe, but a similar kind of distraction, or abstraction. E. had longed to live in another world of immaterial substance. If John had beaten Doug in melting a cavern in E.’s icy heart, it was not because he was handsomer or stronger or wiser, but because he’d carved her dreams into existence, secrets and imagination and words of power, the only place the dead can live. Maybe she was truly happy. If so, she was stupid. Doug was the butt of the real world. He’d suffered rejection and humiliation more than anybody. He wasn’t running from it, though. Not anymore. His entire life, he’d been resigned to its mediocrity and to his own, he’d accepted the blows it doled out, accepted that the world couldn’t be any other way. Because he was afraid. A nobody that speaks out and stands ground, aware of the consequences, against the consequences, who Doug could be, there was no script for that role. E. could be that free, too, here, where it wouldn’t cost her life, where she was good enough to be loved, was loved. And Doug meant to tell her so. He had to try.
DEAR E., WHEN I SAID EARLIER YOU WERE A GOOD PERSON, I THINK I MEANT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE HAPPY. TO NOT RUN AWAY. PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT ANYTHING FROM YOU UNLIKE JOHN LOVE YOU HERE. I STILL LOVE YOU. I MEAN AS A FRIEND. AND MORE. BUT MOSTLY, I CARE ABOUT YOU, AND YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER. HELP ME HELP THE OTHERS ESCAPE THE WOODS BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE GETS KILLED LIKE YOUR SISTER ERIKA. PLEASE WAKE UP. WITH LOVE, DOUG, he wrote in an inky, redacted fury on a tear of notebook paper.
“Douglas—” the chemistry teacher reproached beside his desk.
The class rippled with laughter.
She ordered him to share the letter covered by his hands, what was apparently more important than his present company.
“Ms. Whitehead? It’s … personal.”
The class went silent. Doug wanted to believe it was from the shock of him standing up to a teacher, to anybody. More likely, they were eager for a glimpse of the private life of the dork, if only to laugh about later.
“I’m not asking, young man. You know the rules. Share your disrespectful scribbling, or you’ll spend the afternoon at the principal’s office.”
Without knowing it, Doug’s teacher had presented him a way out. He could tell his story and be out of the woods forever. The end wouldn’t be entirely his fault. The group couldn’t blame him for that. He had to follow the rules of this world still, didn’t he? His burden of responsibility lifted. As if he’d been holding his breath, Doug’s lungs freed and swelled. He re-envisioned a future without John’s puppetry, likely as soon as this summer. They would all get in trouble. Better than getting killed. Well, Doug could only speak for the living. His chair legs raked against the floor as he stood, surprising the teacher, who took a reserved step back to allow room for a public reading.
Doug held the note close to his glasses for some time before he said anything. He couldn’t focus on it, except to watch his fingertips quake against the tight paper. His confidence drained as fast as the blood from his face, and he glanced at E. for confirmation that he was doing right. She gave him her full attention now. E. sat very still and looked as if she wanted to mouth the word “no” but was afraid to startle him, not concerned for him, but fierce and frightened of what he might say. Doug wanted to be brave for them both, then, to read the entire thing, crossed-out words included. Each had been methodically desiccated, a string of inky pits just beyond recognition. Having begun the note with his feelings about her seemed so sure to fail that he considered reading the lines in reverse. He looked at E. once more. She was no longer scared. Threat flashed in her eyes.
“I understand, Ms. Whitehead.” Doug balled the slip of paper. “But I can�
��t do that right now.” He popped the note into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. For once his excess of saliva was a perk.
Doug exited the room to an uproar before she could find the words to excuse him. It didn’t feel like a victory.
Minutes later, Doug was again on the verge of confessing. Principal Pope paced his office and probed the eighth grader for an hour about this acting out. He inquired about his home life and friendship with Erika Summerson’s “troubled” sister. The principal rephrased and reintroduced questions with anecdotes from childhood, himself raised in a modest town, not a suburb, not Palos, bigger, not in terms of residencies per square block, the streets cleaner and houses broader and lawns greener, each on a hill, it seemed, and no crime but for those who didn’t belong or chose not to, so that pride was never the ambition of its residents, but the foundation, a place like what Doug began to imagine the contractors would deconstruct the woods into. He listened to the man reminisce under the guise of reaching a boy in the dim office and after forty-five minutes hadn’t uttered one complete sentence, which Principal Pope must’ve realized then, too, because he stopped as if stunned before the slatted blinds overlooking the faded slashes of empty parking spots along the street, having talked himself into a stupor from which it took a minute to discern that he wasn’t fourteen and home again, but with a boy on the road to becoming a troubled young man, and a bit embarrassed that he’d confessed so much and couldn’t remember the student’s name. He raised the blinds. Yes, he was still here, many years later, in a town where young people who mattered died of cancer and deviants snuck out at midnight to do terrible things to themselves and others in the woods, like Lucky, his German Shepherd whom he’d brought home to make life separated from his wife more tolerable. A rescue, she was old, old Lucky, lucky at last to have a stable home, as miserable in health as he’d felt, and maybe she’d only wandered off his front porch to die and it was coincidence that the police’s investigation of Ms. Summerson’s murder had turned up that mass grave of dogs behind Homerding Hill, just a sixth sense, or maybe the deathly quiet called canines to the spot, or otherwise they were snatched for Satanic sacrifice by individuals who lived in opposition to the Pledge of Allegiance, the values of Palos Hills Junior High School, and plain decency. Somehow that, too, was Doug’s fault, the fault of deviants of the kind Doug would become if not purged of his rebellious spirit, and then, remembering his case exactly, the principal looked over the boy with distaste, as if he’d rather not go another minute alone with him. An admission of guilt was imperative to this child’s salvation, and Principal Pope clamped the back of Doug’s chair with both hands, fell silent, and waited for a response. Pressured into giving the principal something for his time, and despite an inexpressible loathing for the man, or maybe just his musky odor, Doug began to talk about his father’s recent layoff and his parents having more disagreements lately. He went on for several minutes, astonished from where inside he’d stowed all these worries, to the point of wondering if they were completely fabricated, until he said, “Maybe they’ll divorce.” He stopped, stunned by his own admission. The boy was hollow. He didn’t belong anywhere. The principal prescribed an after-school club to output his stress. “Start a chess team,” he’d said. He gave more sincere advice with the zeal of public service warming his otherwise stern face, but Doug hardly listened. He recalled the fanaticism in E.’s eyes. If he debunked the grandeur of John H. Walker too quickly, he would lose her forever. He now doubted he could live with that. Maybe. Even for her own good, he hadn’t the heart to betray her.
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