“What’re you so afraid of?”
“Losing you … obviously,” he said.
“Act like you care about my feelings, then. Like you’re hearing me. Like you’re my friend. John does that.”
“I’m doing that. I’m trying.”
“You’re failing,” she said. “You were my best friend.”
Doug became full of stone, the boldness he’d known with Tiffany Dennys. “No, he’s the one—he wants us to all to … Can’t you see how close we are to dying? He has nothing to lose. He’s making us crazy—just like him. I care about you. I just—I won’t follow in his shadow anymore.”
“That’s between you and you.”
He thought to pull out the note left in his locker this morning. It wouldn’t rattle her. Its cryptic message might have the opposite effect, and E. didn’t need another crusade.
“I’m sorry,” Doug said without conviction, his strength used up, insides vaporous. He should’ve described his love. Instead he’d fought her.
He went in for a hug, to show her by never letting go.
“Please—” E. planted a hand against his chest, pushed “—don’t be anything for me.”
She walked up the street. The breeze lifted her crimson hair, muddled it with the evening dark. Doug watched the front wheel of his downed bicycle spin so slowly it was imperceptible unless he stood perfectly still. Headlights streaked past; others’ loved ones returned home from work. His opportunity to stop E. was gone. That wasn’t all. The suburbs were quiet. With unmistakable and resounding certainty, he heard it. He’d lost her forever.
4
Doug went to the Grove the next day. And the next. With a pair of heavy binoculars, he hunted the flash of reflective vests through the brush. Crouched behind trees, he listened to the murky squawks of radios and jotted discernable words. He traced the courses of bobbing hardhats on an area map Alex had made, sometimes forgetting to record the time of day, but sure to mark the storage sheds, portable toilets, and machinery that blocked his route. By the end of the week, Doug had scouted the entire breadth of the woods on all fours, from 115th to the archway.
He hadn’t said a word to E. since their fight. Knowing about it as he knew all things, the Dead Man had separated them. Doug was put on surveyor patrol with Greg, Tiffany, and Josué. Meanwhile, E. schemed each evening with Alex and John. Doug saw them—all Upper Palos kids—when he stopped at camp to refill water bottles between shifts. Maybe that didn’t mean anything, though Doug was feeling pretty unworthy. Huddled beneath the Big Tree, the three of them talked nonstop, but didn’t laugh. None of the group laughed as much as they used to, since accepting “The Work,” which, so far, included the risk of assisted suicide and arrest for eco-terrorism.
Seeing her there, drafting war plans and making impassioned speeches under John’s influence, he thought E. could go ahead and kill herself already, for the dead guy or her dead sister or to prove whatever to whomever still cared. He no longer did. Later, fiddling with his binoculars, on his belly, being eaten by ants, all he thought of was being by her side to save her from herself. And doing so. E. seeing the good in him. Then he wanted to quit her, finally and completely. She’d chosen. Doug had lost. It was her life to throw away. She was the stupidest smart person in the world. E. didn’t deserve someone so devoted. But that devotion wouldn’t accept his arguments and only seemed to reinforce why she so desperately needed him.
Was this love? It was sick. Doug felt diseased. Every hour without her near passed in agony, didn’t stab his heart or plague his mind so much as threatened to end him, a bodily collapse. It was worst at night with his bedroom curtains open to an empty street and the humorless eye of a crescent moon. Her loss—his failure—made him curl on the floor, fevered and weak, as if a venom coursed his veins. He couldn’t sleep. Finally, a few minutes of relief graced the boy. Sobered after a good cry, he pulled himself up to the windowsill, movements languid, though not lazy, as if not Doug, but something beyond him were in masterful control.
The solution seemed obvious. He would have to lose everything to move on. They all would. His friends’ lives depended on it. Why did he have to do anything for them? The second-guessing and pain resurfaced. They didn’t see what he saw. The responsibility was immense, and he couldn’t forget it. As the days ticked to Friday, Doug began to will himself the guts to do what they couldn’t—to tell his dad or a teacher or the police about the woods and once and for all stop John H. Walker.
Friday came and he’d done nothing. That night, their flashlights found the Grove’s defenses battered from the ridge trail down to the Big Tree. The campfire revealed a second drawing left on the scorched trunk beneath Erika’s shoes: all seven kids engaged in sex acts that composed a pornographic totem pole. What disturbed Doug most were the intimate details that the killer had used: Doug’s glasses on the tip of his nose, genitals replaced by a tiny hammer, and walking blindly into—E. in a pointed witch’s hat, nursing a skull with blonde hair as she looked up lustily at John, curled at his feet beside—Alex in nothing but a sweater vest, notepad in hand which read NUMBERS; and so on, topped by the Dead Man, his arms outstretched, face as haggard as a wooden Jesus. The vile drawing proved that the killer could identify each in public from having watched their gatherings, Alex noted—the observation obvious and infuriating to Doug, who’d warned about this from the beginning. Most likely, Alex added, the killer used binoculars from a safe vantage. Since the developers had arrived, the kids had been traveling in pairs or packs to and from the woods through the less public, but more dangerous route down the train tracks and across the miles of dense woodlands along the river. They quickly decided they would need to carry weapons, each of them at all times, in and out of the woods.
“Wait—this is supposed to be scary?” Tiffany said of the image.
“Dude, I’m scared,” Greg said.
“That’s clearly his intent,” Alex said.
Tiffany kissed Greg. Then she kissed Alex, whose cheeks flushed after.
“Jealousy is a bitch!” she shouted to the cliffs silhouetted against a backdrop of stars.
“He is out there now, yes?” Josué said, hips pivoted, as if on a word he would sprint to find their tormentor.
E. dropped the half-burnt log she’d used to smudge out the image. “Maybe we should wait on the ritual.”
“And let evil win?” John said.
E. glanced aside at Doug. Her face didn’t reveal doubt. But her caution, that she’d even looked over, said she hadn’t totally lost her good sense. “Maybe. At least until our defenses are back up, we—”
“Tonight’s mine!” Tiffany called and bolted.
“Listen—” Doug jerked forward, tethered to her shoulder after a sudden grab.
“Don’t.” She looked back hotly and made his hand recoil. “Not ever again. Cool?”
“The killer—he could—”
“No one’s stopping this bitch.” Tiffany’s top hit the grass, and she darted behind the tree as if to tackle somebody.
The kids backed away and spread around the fire. They locked hands, compelled by the ritual’s momentum. This time, they glanced over their shoulders instead of up at the heavens, muscles tight, flinching against a slashing assault from the shadows.
Which would do nothing to slow his blade, Doug thought. Do something.
Tiffany must’ve been naked before she’d climbed. One moment, the tree limb was dreary and shadowed. The next, her body glowed there. She glided forward, one foot in front of the other as if on the balancing beam at school. Above their heads, almost past the fire, Tiffany’s arms shot up, then her hips wriggled in a showy way. The kids couldn’t tell if she’d almost lost control or if she writhed deliberately, aware of being exposed to those below and to the killer hiding in the dark.
In the slow, dance-y motion was a taunt meant to wound them, and her skin prickled as Tiffany was reminded that her body was a thing sought by so many people. Her heart pumped hard with the power of
being here, beyond reach. She spent so much time reacting to what others wanted from her and returning pleasure or harm, as her father had taught her, that she didn’t know if there was anything else, having thought so little about what she wanted from this blue whir of possibilities in outer space.
Doug was the first to notice the girl’s shoulders slacken. Her arms remained up in the air, suspended as if from invisible wires attached to the stars. Only her hair moved. The perfectly even ends swayed in a wave, then straightened again. Her arms lowered. Tiffany stood in the tree for the longest time, alternately gazing into the void of space and at the pinpricks of light, back and forth, being with nothingness, until purple-bellied clouds lowered like a movie curtain over the view.
She came down still naked. Tiffany swept wisps of hair out of her eyes, clothes clutched to her chest, not guardedly, and said, “Ta-da!” The kids laughed. Doug couldn’t believe their stupidity, as if in going through with the ritual while defenseless they’d accomplished something like a victory. Their laughter didn’t stop short, but grew with every breath, Greg with his hands on his hips, and Josué folding over one of the logs that faced the woods, almost heckling the killer, until the group roiled as one body with aggressive lows and celebratory birdcall trills and splashes where one’s breath died and rejoined the whole. It was an orgy of laughter. Doug hadn’t ever been to an orgy, of course, but his idea of one fit the group’s sanguine and lusty pleasure, embracing or half-embracing each other freely, until Doug thought that the killer hadn’t painted a gross caricature of the group, but an accurate portrait of their souls.
With an arm around E.’s shoulders—who grinned up like a puppy at her master—John asked Tiffany to rejoin them around the fire and share her experience. She sat among them in her underclothes and talked enthusiastically about what it was like to be “up in space.” Tiffany apologized if she hadn’t taken it seriously enough and completed the ritual too quick. She was surprised when Alex said she’d stood in the tree unmoving close to fifteen minutes, the longest walk yet. “Really?” She made her wincing smile, a bit embarrassed, but proud, too.
Tiffany said she had a great idea and then balanced a half-full bottle of brown liquid on her palm. She apologized for the selection—it was one her father wouldn’t miss. This confused the others because the golden label and square cap made it look regal, a treasure recovered from a Spanish ship bound for the New World. In appreciation of her fervor or caught up in the moment, E. took a sip. Only John and Doug passed. When it went around again, Tiffany reseated beside John, almost in his lap, and insisted he have one drink with her to celebrate. E. touched John’s leg from the other side. Couldn’t he? she asked. The guy refused, no explanation needed considering his illness, yet added that alcohol “fogs the mind.” Doug took a gulp. No one noticed. He immediately felt awful. Not from the booze. From trying to make a statement to E. or anyone.
Tiffany said she could respect that and then thanked John.
“It’s like I’ve been given the greatest gift, or something,” she said. “Except … I have less than I did before?”
“It’s a taking away, not a having,” John said.
“Wow,” she said. “Yeah.”
They all thanked John for making The Work possible. Then the four members of the group who had already performed the ritual confessed how the experience had broadened their understanding of who they were, who they’d thought they were. They’d communed with something up there, beyond words, each insisted. It really was something, at least from below—the firelight glistening their edges, bodies mostly dark but for a touch of celestial light on their chests and faces, eyes locked, as if following the call to join God on high with the soundless and surreal step of a sleepwalker. “Soon you’ll see,” they said with shining eyes. E. and Josué expressed excitement over their rituals drawing near, that they wished they could walk right now. “You feel this, too, yes?” Josué said to Doug, as if needing to hear that, if nothing else, they shared this common desire, and gave him the room to say as much, guessing he hadn’t spoken up out of humility or timidity. Even if Doug had converted into one of John’s sheep, the ritual would still terrify him. He was so clumsy that, if anyone would surely die up there, it would be him. If given a choice between the two, he would rather take his chances on the ground against the killer.
A stick snapped across the creek bridge. The group rose with bladed and blunt weapons. They formed a deadly crescent, prepared for frontal assault.
The breeze rushed in.
“Where is the fucker? I’ll …” Tiffany started.
Alex popped on a flashlight. The yellow eyes of a possum met the beam. It scampered downstream.
“Anyone without heart couldn’t do what we do.” John motioned for his friends to sit before he did. In the comment, Doug heard criticism for his not acting thrilled about the ritual. “Like summiting a great mountain,” John said.
“A red mountain?” Doug’s question from outside the circle resounded with challenge. Even the boy looked surprised by what’d come out of his mouth.
John was muted by shock. He lurched forward as fast as he could.
Doug backed around the fire. “Huh?” he said, a bit buzzed from the liqueur. Neck hot and suddenly overcome, his face broke with upset.
“How do you know that?” John said.
Doug’s eyes watered as he recalled the strange note in his locker. Spittle flew from his lips as he returned, “How do you?”
With the stiff, but forceful slam of a horror-movie mummy, John thrashed Doug against the trunk of the Big Tree. Everyone hopped up, said, “Whoa!” and other exclamations of concern. The group didn’t know what to do. The guy’s cool was beyond lost, and he grabbed Doug’s shirt for another slam. He weighed no more than the boy, though, who twisted and brought John down on top of him. They rolled a few feet. The Dead Man seized his collar as if to shake Doug into speaking.
“How do you know Red Mountain?” he said.
Doug bit the guy’s hand. John staggered backward with a cry, and E. went to him. The others remained passive on the sidelines, between the fighters. Their consciences battled what they knew to be true about both boys to figure out whom and how to help.
“Tell them,” Doug said, propped on one elbow. He wiped the blood from under his nose. John’s head had whacked him nearly senseless during the fall. “You left that note in my locker.”
“What note?” John started toward him again. E. held his arm.
Doug explained that a note had been left in his locker days ago, calling him “Dougydearest” and asking what was going on “under Red Mountain.”
“You can prove that?” John said. “You have the note?”
Doug absently patted his hips. He said that he couldn’t remember, that it didn’t make any difference.
“Those two words were inside the book we dug up at this spot,” John said, “the only two words in English I saw, in the margins, in red ink. No one but me ever had time to look over the book carefully enough before it was stolen—before you watched it get stolen and our camp was burned.”
Doug curled to sit up. Josué stepped on his shoulder and planted him prone.
“Sorry, amigo,” he said with pleasure.
“The only people who could know those words are me and the killer,” John said from behind Josué.
“Hey—don’t—it’s you who—” Doug stammered, unable to conceive of a useful rebuttal.
Greg stepped up beside Doug’s head. “It can’t be the genius. Can it?”
Alex asked why not, why Greg thought the killer couldn’t have been any one of them this whole time.
“You think?” Tiffany asked. “Could he really …? No.”
“I’m asking Greg to give me one reason why Doug is beyond guilt,” Alex said.
“I mean, no offense, but look at him,” Greg said. “But who knows?”
Alex added that Doug had naysayed their work in the woods on several occasions, giving exact dates and example
s.
“He could do it,” Josué said. The kid’s face was shadowed and unreadable above.
The air seemed to have chilled around Doug. They were going to hurt him. His righteous anger froze. “No, I have it … here—somewhere. I swear …” Doug felt his pockets. He couldn’t remember where he’d put the note. He might’ve thrown it away in Ms. Whitehead’s class. Doug checked his back pocket a second time. He found the note flattened. He offered it to Josué, who handed it reluctantly to John.
“Is this Doug’s handwriting?” Alex waved E. closer to the fire. Except for his guardian, the group huddled away from him.
“I’ve never seen him write in all caps like this,” she said. She walked back to Doug. Josué stepped aside. “It doesn’t matter. I know he didn’t kill my sister.”
“How?” Alex asked, ready to record her response.
“He wouldn’t do that to me.” E. stood at his feet, not in an imposing manner like the others. Her palms were upturned at her sides. She spoke with great sympathy. “He loves us—us all—very much.”
“I got carried away.” John shook his head as he came over. “Doug, I want to be the first to apologize for doubting you. It was wrong. I’ve said it myself that no one here is to accuse a member of the group. Our faith in one another is our pact. Just those words … I want to rid the world of that evil—together.” He extended his hand. “Tell me what I can do to prove my faith in you.”
“Tell them the truth.” Doug stood without his help. “You did it—the note. You made E. not trust me. You made up this whole thing so we would—”
“Buddy, you’re still a bit shaken up. You’re not making any sense. Why would I do that?”
“Alex was right.” Doug kneeled at his bag and packed his things. “I think we should leave the woods. We don’t belong here. No kids do.”
“That’s what the killer wants,” John said. “This note you’ve brought us proves that. He’ll reclaim this place and defile it again. His sacrifices … Is that what you want?”
Into that Good Night Page 21