Doug stood in front of him, backpack slung over one shoulder and slightly hunched, with the potent stillness of an enraged person about to charge. He didn’t look the guy in the face. He spoke with intensity into the space between them. “I want things to be normal again, safe. I want to get help.”
“I hear your fear talking,” John said. “Life in the woods is more real than back in that bubble. You’ve already started down the path. Just wait till you walk the ritual. You’ll see. We can be brilliant here. Together, nothing can hurt us.”
Doug kept his head lowered a moment. He appeared beaten, drained in spirit, as if he might collapse under the weight of his bag, but also like he might strike anyone who touched him. Doug pointed at the smudged drawing on the tree.
“Nothing?”
John smirked. A thrill warmed his fatigue over something he saw in Doug. “I know the road is difficult to see,” he said. “Walk with me a little longer. There’ll come rain for both fires, inside and out, and the smoke will clear.”
A kick of thunder. An all-consuming flash. In the x-raying white of the lightning, Doug saw through the Dead Man’s skin to the decrepit skeleton beneath, gray and eyeless. Or seemed to. So when the others cried out in great wonder that the guy had said the word “rain” and heavy drops began to spatter their faces and chests through the canopy above, softening the earth, and they scurried home with their belongings, Doug left unfazed by John’s feigned supramortality, fixed on that vision of what he’d become: death seeking an end to itself.
5
Doug didn’t sleep well all weekend. It wasn’t from the storm that beat the windows. Or the lightning that snapped rapidly without roar across the vacant house, lights out, the night of Tiffany’s walk.
He’d stood in the hallway awhile, soaked, and listened for the footsteps of the killer, imagining his family strung up like cattle, wet with blood in the kitchen twenty feet away. Simultaneously, he hoped his mother would come down from bed to fuss at him about the time of night, usher him into the laundry room, and pull off his shirt. Neither happened. Doug stripped his clothes into the dryer, pressed a few buttons, and sat on the cool machine. The heatless fluorescent was bright overhead. The dryer lid warmed his shivering body. Doug hardly noticed any of it, so resolute he was never to return to the woods.
His dad and mom and little brother had been to the discount theater. They came in on him with a towel around his waist, headed to his bedroom, the hammer in hand, just in case. They didn’t notice the weapon. They were too excited about the thriller they’d seen, a hunt for a serial strangler of college girls. Doug lingered and listened to the many near-fatal run-ins with the fictional murderer that’d kept his family on the edge of their seats, conscious that only an hour ago he wouldn’t have been surprised to find them hanging dead from the ceiling. His dad noticed the hammer only as Doug walked away. He praised his son for being extra careful while home alone. “And smart,” Mom added, “unlike that Summerson child.” His dad chastised that it wasn’t a fair thing to say of the poor girl. “Poor in judgment. In the woods with boys at night? And drinking.” To which Dad accused her of “passive-aggressively bitching” about his drinking.
Doug retreated to his room. He’d become someone they didn’t know, an effect of the woods’ isolation, he was sure. The true power of a secret is to bind those who know it, which wasn’t friendship, but something like alienation. He was kept awake in bed that night, imagining what the group would’ve done to him if not for E.’s intervention. While he stuck around for E. and questioned their actions, his life was in jeopardy. She might’ve endangered herself by protecting him.
That night he dreamed of the ritual. E. was radiant in the branches of the Big Tree. She wore her hair around her head like a crimson crown. The group circled the trunk, five in number, hands linked, unmoving even as Doug sprinted over the creek bridge in slow motion, as was his luck. He shouted her name to halt the moonlight baptism. There was no valley, just an endless gray plain, though he heard water slapping the side of a log or still boat. Nothing would come out of his mouth but garbled quacks and puffs of smoke. E. got up on one foot, frightened of the smoke as it rose and crackled with tiny lightning on either side of the branch. Doug’s hands went numb when he touched any member of the group to break them. They kept their heads lowered, in prayer or asleep. Through the sparking haze above, E. walked the branch. Doug quacked again for her to stop. The smoke doubled. Unable to see, E. slipped. Her leg went over one side, and she grabbed a thin branch. Slowly she pulled herself upright and crawled forward on all fours. Then her body slid as if sucked through the gray sky. From her hair down to the pink bottoms of her limp feet, she disappeared into the clouded heavens.
The rain didn’t let up Saturday, drizzled in the afternoon and poured again that evening. The group had better sense than to allow the girl to walk a slick branch. The rising creek would flood the Grove and make camping impossible. Doug thought up many reasons they would cancel E.’s ritual. Accepting that E. was in danger would force him to leave his room and attempt something bold and, probably, play into another of John’s schemes, which Doug wasn’t going to do. He was finished with John Walker and his followers in the woods.
Too anxious to lose himself in video games, Doug spent most of that day on his bed reading Franny and Zooey, the book E. had given him long ago. He missed the old E. and sought her in those pages. He found her in the character of Franny—a smart and odd girl, horribly depressed and desperate for answers, but too stubborn and withdrawn to receive them from the boy who cared about her most. Which was her brother. Still, the analogy lit like a lighthouse beacon across the fear that fogged Doug’s mind, and he couldn’t quit reading until he’d discerned whether or not E. was the kind of person who would risk the ritual tonight if John were to say she was meant to.
By 8 p.m. Doug was a wreck. He paced the room, hyperventilating, his heart flabby from nostalgia. Delirious, he gripped the exhausted book, as if to tear it in half. He gritted his teeth and squeezed as hard he could, unable to live without seeing her another moment, which did nothing but make his gums and fingers quiver and ache in both relief and pain. A moment later, he wanted to shout in her face for getting them involved with the Dead Man, which he knew wasn’t fair. Stress stretched him beyond reason and back again. He passed two hours in this manner, waiting for his parents to finish what started as a dispute over the broken vacuum cleaner, their eyes on the television or the dishes or the book in Mom’s lap, their voices never raising more than that of a placid observation about the weather, Dad stating they didn’t have the money to buy a good one until he landed a job, and Mom remarking he was apparently too busy looking to fix anything around the house. “What else is broken?” he wanted to know, a beer or two later. “The entire house is falling apart,” Mom said, which was why she’d be voting for Prop #1, to offset the decline in property value. Dad countered that she was being socially irresponsible if she thought a blue-collar town needed a golf course instead of those peaceful woods. Peaceful? Their bedroom door muffled the rest. Doug went out the front in his father’s baggy raincoat.
The rear tire kicked up about as much rain as what fell on him as Doug biked to E.’s house, indignant now, ready to give her a final warning. He was going to tell everyone about the woods. She could get her story straight and save herself by agreeing with him that the whole thing had been John’s idea, or she could go down as the guy’s accomplice, obstructing justice and aiding a potential murderer.
From the street, her second-floor window was dark. If he rang the doorbell and she’d snuck out of the house, she’d be in trouble with no chance to choose her fate. He wasn’t doing that to her after how she’d defended him in front of the group. “He loves us all very much.”
Just you, he wanted to tell her.
She could have turned in early. Doug rode a figure eight in the wet concrete before her house as he pedaled away and back again, unable to leave without knowing. He hefted her father’s aluminum ladder
against the brick as quietly as he could and, for a minute, weighed the fear of slipping to his death against the amount of effort E. had ever made in being his friend, told it to fuck itself, and climbed the ladder up to the landing in front of girl’s window.
He crouched and peered inside. His luck—it was too dark to see anything but a thin gap of light beneath the bedroom door. He cupped his hands over the glass. She was either lying very still or her bed was empty and she was walking the ritual at John’s command, voluntarily killing herself in the same place her sister had died. What scared him most was that her bedroom had changed. The bookcases were missing, condensed down to a single shelf beside the door. Her walls were bare of posters with grandiloquent quotes. Her long mirror was gone, the rugs, too. The room had always been tidy, but for lack of clutter. It was ascetically so, now. She no longer called this place home. He barely knew her anymore.
On the sill, inches from him on the other side of the window, he spotted the gift he’d brought the week her sister had died. He’d never seen it unwrapped. He’d not seen it, period, since he’d abandoned it in her trash can, realizing the gift served no useful purpose on her quest for wisdom and had been in poor taste for several reasons. She’d never said anything about it. But here it was: a clear glass candleholder in the shape of a skull. It was a morbid gift for a morbid girl’s bedroom, and it looked out at Doug with hollowed eyes. A stubby red candle stuck up from the notch on top of the skull. Dried wax unibrowed the forehead and crusted in one eye socket like the bloody shit of a large bird. Icy pleasure shot through Doug’s heart. He imagined her unwrapping the gift, turning it in her hands, thinking of him, maybe kissing it while she daydreamed. Or cradling the head as she might her sister’s, experiencing solace and a pang of gratitude to Doug for making some strange and momentary reconciliation possible. Or catching her distorted reflection while peering deep into the glass and stopping to reconsider how she was living her life, how she was treating the boy who’d only ever showed her love and respect. Or all those things. Or she’d just needed a candleholder.
The sliver of light beneath the bedroom door darkened—the shadow of someone walking by. It stopped. Doug turned away from the glass. He scanned the neighborhood, aware of how ridiculously visible he would be to a passing car, and told himself he wasn’t brave. He’d already been driven crazy and should scramble down the ladder before he got caught. He needed to see her. Doug risked another glance. The shadow remained there, as if fumbling with keys, except E.’s door didn’t unlock from the hallway. Maybe it was her mother, weeping alone or listening and waiting to be called out for. Like he was doing.
The girl didn’t need them. She did, only she didn’t think she did. Doug knew no solution for that except to continue with his plan. He would confess and let her face the consequences how she wanted, without the help of anyone who loved her.
6
WRITE ME HERE BY NOON DOUGYDEAREST OR YOU’RE NEXT I SWEAR. DID THE BOOK REVEAL THE RITUAL? WHAT MASTER DOES JOHNNYBOY SERVE?
This second note appeared in Doug’s school locker on Monday morning. He twice prevented his glasses from sliding off his nose as he reread the familiar red capitals on crumpled yellow paper before the obvious cut through his stupor: he was holding a direct threat from the killer.
Doug threw the note as if a snake had fallen into his arms. He was being watched. Nobody seemed to pay him attention up or down the hallway. Students mingled, adrift, in no rush to first period during their last week of classes before summer break. With some hesitation, Doug took up the note again, evidence his life was truly in danger. He considered how to respond: Don’t kill me. Please? My life has been too short and miserable, was all he could think to say. He tried to recall the first note, later pocketed by John or Alex—something about a mountain?
The first period bell rang. Doug ran past his science class to check that E. was alive. The girl’s hair was dark and wet, skin glossy, as if she’d spent all weekend in the pouring rain. She looked over her shoulder at his empty desk. Doug bolted from the doorway.
In the restroom, he locked himself in the far stall. Doug let his bag hit the floor. He sank against the wall. He was sweating in his hoodie and shorts, and the cold tile stung his calves, so he drew up his legs and curled into a ball. Inside, Doug worked to convince himself that the notes weren’t real. The killer couldn’t possibly know he was the weakest link, on the verge of squealing. It was a cruel hoax, John’s doing, the guy who’d orchestrated a secret dig and tethered six kids with friendship against common sense, who floated the hallways between passing periods enough to plant notes, who “knew things,” got in people’s heads and exploited their weaknesses. How would a threat like this get him to stay? The tormentor in the cloak with the long knife, backdropped by fire, was all Doug knew to be true. That person would reach out for kooky info and seek him at school, be closer than he’d ever imagined.
The bathroom door whined open. Heavy shoes clopped past the sinks. Doug didn’t begin to cry like he might’ve two weeks ago from the mere possibility that it could be John or the killer. His nostrils gasped. Otherwise, he didn’t move, to keep his sneakers from squeaking. He reversed his backpack and unzipped it quietly, telling himself a killer hadn’t followed him in, he was only losing hold of what was real and possible. Doug withdrew the hammer.
He unlatched the stall door. No one barged in.
Doug breathed deep and charged out to end it, himself, the pressure of living.
A kid with a hall pass pissed along the row of urinals while fooling on his phone. “What the—?” he said, stopped mid-stream, and flashed a picture of Doug holding the hammer like a crazy person. The kid huffed, kept pissing.
Doug wanted to be a kid again. He was exhausted from acting disturbed and thinking disturbed thoughts. He didn’t know anything about a second book or John’s “master,” only that he wanted the psychological torture to end that he’d been subjected to ever since John H. Walker pointed him out among so many less emotionally beat-up kids and promised answers in the woods. Doug had learned enough already. Something about good intentions never being good enough. He bagged his hammer and walked home.
His dad sat on the living room rug in his underwear, a pair of work goggles strapped to his forehead. The vacuum cleaner lay disassembled in his lap, the plastic casing removed and wires exposed. Electrical gizmos and were gutted between his legs. Dad sat, leaned back as if mid-rappel.
Doug had to call to him to break his focus. The man waved distractedly.
“I’m home early,” Doug said.
“So you are.”
“I’m not supposed to be.”
“Doing any better now that you’ve skipped?” He glanced up from sorting wires. His mouth hung in a loose smile. He noticed his son’s fatigue and frowned. “You really aren’t feeling good.”
Doug had run the whole way, and he slumped against the wall as if glued there. Unconsciousness crowded his periphery. He hadn’t eaten much over the weekend, anxiety turning his stomach.
“It’s worse than that.”
“Aww, Duck, I’m sorry. I could use your help here for a second, if you’re not feeling too bad. Then you go lie down.”
Doug came over. His fingers grazed the furniture to guide his way, as he’d done countless times treading the dark out of Bachelor’s Grove. He was handed an unopened can of beer off the coffee table.
“Throw this damn thing away,” Dad said.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, son?”
He wanted to tell him everything. He would start with the child killer leaving death threats in his locker. An immense wave of shame slapped him in the face as he pictured explaining the woods and The Work and the ritual, all the sneaking out he’d been convinced at the time was brave, how stupid he’d been, and how he’d lost E. to a dead kid.
“You want this in the garbage or the fridge?” he said.
“Trash it. And the rest from the fridge. Then you get some rest, Duck-ster.” As Doug turne
d, his dad added, “Maybe you’re getting a little too old for me to be calling you that? What do you think about it?”
“Yeah.” Doug wished he could smile back.
“Good. A new man,” he said. “If you need me, I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere—not for a long while.” He dropped the goggles over his eyes and lifted a small hammer, claws-forward to pry at something.
“There is … something, actually.”
“Yeah, son,” he said and enthusiastically removed the goggles.
“How do you tell someone something?… that’s really … not easy.”
“You’ve got something important you need to say—to a special friend, maybe?”
“Sort of.”
“Good—well, I was timid when I met your mother in college. So I wrote her a letter. She actually didn’t get that one. Her roommate got to it first and told everybody that I’d written her a perverted love letter. Not because the roommate liked me—she hated me. She was obsessed with your mother. They had a really unhealthy friendship at the time, and I was a threat, you see. She actually held a kitchen knife to my stomach when I tried to talk reasonably to her. I swear she did. I wasn’t Gandhi, either. After this friend trash-talked me to everyone, including your mother, about what I’d supposedly said in this letter, I hung back for a few semesters. Luckily, smart people like Mom don’t let sick people hang around too long. My second attempt fared pretty good, I’d say. You know, I used to write her little notes and leave them for her to find all the time. Now, I don’t say much of what I’m thinking. I mean to change that, too. You should write this person, your friend. I’m not going to assume what’s bothering you has anything to do with Emily—”
“E.”
“A girl like that would appreciate a good letter, I think. You can say a lot more things writing them down, even to somebody who really knows you. Relationships are a hard business. It’s a project that never ends. Sometimes you need to let go of an unhealthy one. Time changes us, too. It’s still changing your mother and me. But you’ve always got to speak your mind. Especially you. You’ve got a good one in that noggin. Tell her—this person—everything you’re thinking. Not everything. Be kind. Just be yourself.”
Into that Good Night Page 22