The files were thick with notes and interviews. A few were given by the missing girls’ friends and relatives. Although none witnessed the abductions, they were with them in the minutes before. The interviewees spoke of a quiet falling over the woods, except for rushes of movement in the undergrowth. They said their friends felt they were being watched for days leading up to their vanishing. The detective concluded that the men stalked their victims before taking them. Several more interviewees, neighbors and adults, mentioned a legend they grew up hearing. It told of a predator living in the woods, craving a certain kind of little girl. Another recounted almost verbatim the Norse story Shane’s grandma told him. Dottie Griever, Old Lady Griever’s mother, told the detective that Betty wasn’t the first to go missing. She said another was taken when she’d been a girl; the detective could never substantiate the claim.
As Shane and I pored over those yellowed case files, I kept thinking about him telling me that the monster’s only real if I let it be. That’s true, you know. Caleb gave it life. Griever gave it life. Even Daniel allowed it to breathe a little. Shane did more digging on the suspects. The same warehouse had a file on the schoolteacher. On his deathbed he confessed to all six kidnappings and killings. I decided not to give the monster life even before Shane told me.
Zoey and I are wearing black, because you obviously wear black while sneaking around town like phantom menaces charged with restoring modern-day sensibility. Sure the hatchet I took from Dad’s toolshed looks medieval, Sam’s toting what amounts to an iron sickle, and Zoey has a shovel, but we’re here in the name of reason. Caleb’s arrest and Daniel’s death caused a unique sort of aftermath; a distinctly different shape from the lost years.
Someone has to stop the monster hunters and tourists from flooding our small streets with busloads of “believers” fresh from whatever haunted amusement park or Sasquatch safari they’ve come from; the hour-long news specials airing about Savage; the tabloids printing salacious front-page stories about “Monster-Gate” and “the Savage Killers.”
Dad and Shane say people aren’t always rational, and the sensationalist news coverage is whipping up fervor for horror stories. Sam got all historical: “Think about McCarthyism or the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties. If you can make people think their neighbors are communist super spies and their teachers devil worshippers, it’s also possible to make them believe there’s an ancient monster in Savage, feeding on redheads.” He has a point.
What really gets me is that the hysteria came after we proved that Daniel and Caleb were responsible for the recent deaths. Newspapers picked up the story of the manhunt while I was in the hospital. Headlines read SAVAGE TWO RESPONSIBLE FOR MURDERS OF THREE. At first most of the coverage was about Daniel. Then Caleb was found, and as he stood before a judge who would gauge his competency to stand trial, he muttered about the monster. The judge declared him unfit and committed him to a mental health hospital in Minneapolis. A reporter bribed someone there and interviewed Caleb. The next day all hell broke loose. In the article Caleb swore the monster exists; he claimed to have seen it; he said Jeanie’s body was taken by it; he ranted about it killing Jane Doe and Daniel. I think Caleb held fast to his conviction because without the monster, without the need for a sacrifice, the boys were just unjustifiably and unforgivably guilty.
We crouch halfway up the drive and listen. There’s only the repeated lilt of birds and deserted front lawns. There’s no one to see us commit murder. “Let’s go,” I whisper. We start forward, slower this time and doubled over to make ourselves smaller.
It wasn’t long after Caleb’s interview that tabloids joined the ranks of the reporters in Savage. At some point the officially unsolved disappearances from the 1930s were uncovered. The archivist who pulled the articles at the library for Sam gave copies to reporters. Front-page stories were printed about the multigenerational murders of redheaded girls. Newscasters called it proof of an inhuman force ravaging Savage’s youth. The police were backed into a corner. They couldn’t make the case files available without making the interviews available. A judge forbade them from coming out with the deathbed confession on the grounds that it was hearsay, since no charges were ever filed against the teacher and you can’t try a dead person for a crime. All the police could to do was attempt to control the panic and go on record that there was no willful cover-up.
Newspapers and tabloids reported more on the origins of the “imagined” monster than on the real crimes committed by Caleb and Daniel. Even though Caleb never denied that Jeanie and Mrs. Talcott died at the hands of Daniel, there are still those who insist that the Savage PD is trying to keep the existence of the monster quiet by forcing Caleb and Daniel to take the heat for the murders. Daniel must have told Caleb what I said 255 times the day Jeanie was taken, because he shared it in his interview. Zoey said she didn’t, because it wasn’t her secret to tell. Predictably, tabloids used it in the headlines of articles “proving” the monster’s existence. Reporters also learned about Mrs. Griever. She disappeared before they descended on her cottage and the miniature graves of the sacrificed animals. Wherever she is, I hope she doesn’t find peace.
Mr. Talcott, on the other hand, deserves a new start; I hope he gets it in Portland, where he’s living with his sister. When Kent Talcott was released, he told Shane that Daniel had admitted to killing his mother and Jane Doe the day before he walked into the station and confessed. He saw how broken his son was and felt that he’d failed him. He took the blame after making Daniel promise that he’d leave Savage and never hurt anyone else. Savage’s district attorney decided not to prosecute Mr. Talcott for the false confession. I bet we’ll never see Jeanie’s dad again.
The mob of a town is just as hungry for the monster as they were for Mr. Talcott. Sightings of beasts in all shapes and sizes are reported regularly. The rosaries and talismans against evil have popped back up on front lawns. People want to believe in hazily imagined beasts rather than accept that someone who looks like you and me could be capable of monstrous things. They’d rather believe in what goes bump in the night.
Yes, there are loads of serious newspapers that dismiss Caleb’s stories as the rants of a sick boy. But here’s the thing about whack-jobs who believe in monsters: They don’t read serious newspapers. They read the stuff that claims to be uncovering the truth others are hiding from you; they search for yeti footprints.
The strawberry vines and bramble take shape a few yards away. Somehow they stand out in the weak light. They’re all sharp angles, wild loops, and jagged fringes, like the outline of a dragon or the Creeping itself. I sniff. The Creeping is the name Griever gave the creature, but I can’t think of it by any other. I pull my hoodie tighter around my neck as the wind picks up. It’s only July, but the suggestion of fall is in the air.
“How do you want to do this?” Sam asks, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
Zoey lifts her shovel above her head in a stretch. “I’m going to harpoon this beast.”
“Make sure we get the roots,” I say. The silhouette before us shudders like an animal preening its fur. A squirrel squirming in its nest or the wind, I’m sure. Instinctually, I move to a crouch. Something primal runs from the cold, wet soil into my hot fingertips, like I’m hunting prey, like I can feel the earth’s memories of people in this exact spot and position creeping up on a predator eons ago. I can practically hear the wind singing in a silken whisper, Do it. Do it.
During the day there are tourists hovering around the strawberries. They snap pictures and nudge the glossy green leaves with their shoes and pretend to prick their fingers on the thorny bramble. No one’s ever brave enough to eat a berry. I’d eat every single one if it would get rid of the tourists for good. You know how when some super-religious person spots Jesus’s face in a grilled cheese sandwich? And all the other religious people from miles around come and stare at it? That’s what these strawberries have become—that but opposite. The strawberries are proof that evil exists
. An entire spectral tale’s spun around them. I’ve come here a few times, wearing sunglasses that mask half my face, to listen to the awed whispers. Why couldn’t Kent Talcott kill them? Are they possessed? Does the monster feed on them? Did nature send the bramble to protect the berries or snuff their life force out? I swing the hatchet and swipe it left to right, its blade slashing through the web of vines with the precision of a guillotine. Branches snap as necks would.
The strawberries are innocent, as much a victim to the aftermath as we are. But there’s no other way. Sam hammers the earth with the sickle; with each strike its curved blades puncture the hidden root systems of the vines and bramble. Zoey uses the shovel to uproot the thickest stalks from the dirt. We go on like this for ten or fifteen minutes. Berries red and round as inflamed eyeballs tremble on their stems. One after another they fall, popping, splattering their blood. We stomp them out. I drag my sleeve over my mouth. Sam’s chest heaves; his eyes are as wild as a rabid dog’s. I’m sure I’m foaming at the mouth too.
I watch Zoey’s fervor. Her hair sticks to her slick forehead. Her lip gloss drifts to the corner of her mouth. She curses under her breath with the effort. I know Michaela thinks she’s pursuing the glory that lasts and that Zoey’s kind—the popularity, the social chairs, the prom crowns—is transient. Zoey has something else, though. It’s not that Zoey is as fierce as warriors used to be or as beautiful as an unscarred forest or as complex and wending as a tunnel that burrows to the center of the earth. She’s all those things. Zoey is loyal, and there’s no glory that outlasts that.
Ten days ago Caleb tore a piece from his T-shirt and stuffed it down his own throat. He suffocated on it as orderlies tried breaking down his door, where he’d wedged a chair under the knob. He left no suicide note, but I don’t need a note to know that Caleb couldn’t live with what he’d done to Zoey. Yesterday Zoey’s mom had a memorial for Caleb. Dad, Sam, Mrs. Worth, Zoey, and I were the only ones who went.
I swing the hatchet faster, elbow straining, a pain shooting into my shoulder. Not surprising. The scar tissue throbs when I brush my teeth. There’s wet earth rot in my mouth and nose. I tug a pair of black knit mittens from my pocket and jam my hands into them. I drive my fingers into the dirt where the stalks disappear, and their fat stems turn to colorless roots like obese earthworms. I claw deeper as Zoey does the same. We’re up to our wrists in dirt. Finally, I feel where the roots turn from snakes to spindly veins. We pull every last one of them out.
I survey the pile of butchered vines. Only now am I aware of the pinprick stinging. Some of the thorns from the bramble embedded themselves in the fabric of my sweatshirt, their points sticking into my flesh. Rather than grimace, I smile down at the massacred shrub. It had to be done. I had to prove that there’s nothing preternatural about this pile of sticks.
“I dare you to grow back now, you hose-beast,” Zoey pants to the ground.
I jam my muddy mittens into my back pocket and pull the Polaroid from my hoodie. We leave the garden sickle and hatchet on the heap. Let people see what finished off their supernatural berries. Next we move into the woods. The sun’s just breaking over the horizon, giving everything a scrubbed-clean look. Jeanie’s abandoned house fades from view as we hike deeper. Sam’s arm is around my waist. The brittle grasses crunch under our feet; it hasn’t rained for weeks. Moss like tinsel garlands frost tree branches sucked dry of green. Oak leaves scatter the ground with the look of dead cockroaches curled in on themselves. Prehistoric crane flies hover in the shade, their droopy legs twitching.
Zoey ducks each time one flies near. “I don’t get why we couldn’t have done this in Jeanie’s front yard,” she whines. She glances over her shoulder, hand on her hip, an icy-blue eye blinking at me above dirt like warrior paint on her cheek. “It’s uncivilized out here. And besides, it’s not like Jeanie will know.”
I look down at the Polaroid. I’ve left sweaty thumbprints on the glossy finish. “I know, Zo. But this just feels right.” I shake my head to clear it. If I’m going to find the right spot in this expanse of woods, I have to focus. Even though I don’t remember exactly where it happened, my body wants to move in a certain direction. I’m trusting instinct. “I think we’re too far west.” I pause and survey the copse of trees around us. “Yeah, let’s move east,” I call up to Zoey.
“Okay, Wilderness Slut, which way is east?” Her head turns from side to side.
“Left,” Sam says without missing a beat. He gives my hand a light squeeze. The broken blood vessels like red spiders against the white of his eyeballs are gone. He had trouble sleeping for a couple of weeks after I got home from the hospital. He was afraid that the nutcases spilling into Savage would come looking for me. There are knocks at the front door and letters from those who believe Daniel and Caleb are innocent, urging me to come clean about the beast I saw make off with Jeanie. But we’ve managed. Dad works from home most days, and Shane checks in when he doesn’t. I sneak Sam into my room most nights to hold me under the covers. I think Dad and Sam’s mom are onto us but have decided to give us a pass.
Zoey flurries her pink polished fingertips at us. “Sam’s going to have to do the digging, because I’ve already chipped two nails.” Sam. Not the King of Loserdom. Only Sam. She turns for a beat, like she can sense what I’m thinking, and grins at the two of us.
She wades into a sea of electric-green ferns. In a forest of waning brightness, they illuminate the ground under a tightly woven canopy of hemlock. I grip the photo—the one of us kids on the monster hunt—a little tighter as their fronds brush against my thighs, the topsoil and our feet disappearing.
“You okay?” Sam’s head is level with mine. His owl eyes flick over me.
I rub my thumb along the curve of his jaw. “I was just thinking about how lucky I am to have you.” His lips brush my cheek. I think about it a lot lately. I used to measure love in terms of Daniel’s love for Jeanie. I thought Daniel’s limitless desire to figure out what had happened to his sister was the product of a love unbounded by this world or the next. Jeanie could have been dust and Daniel would have found her, made her whole again.
I was wrong. Daniel could have put Jeanie to rest years ago by coming clean, but he was too worried about the consequences for himself. Now I’ll measure love differently: in terms of Zoey and Sam. I’ll love them come hellfire, monsters, secrets, and Weirdowood—and they’ll love me the same.
We’re looking for the spot where Daniel shot Jeanie with the arrow; where I sat with her until she died. I want to bury this picture, the nearest thing I have to something that belonged to Jeanie, in the dirt that might still be coppery with her blood. It’s as close to a funeral for Jeanie as I can get. A tribute to Jeanie was Shane’s idea. He thought focusing on her being in a peaceful place would give me closure and help me stop imagining her face everywhere. Shane’s the only one I’ve shared that with. He’s as haunted as I am. When I told him I wanted to do it where Jeanie died, his cheeks puffed out like a blowfish until he whooshed with resignation.
We invited him along, but he has his hands full. The police are worried that with the amount of news coverage the crimes and the monster are getting, there will be copycats, sickos hoping to prove the monster’s existence by committing crimes, and pedophiles flocking to Savage in order to pin their dirty work on phantom beasts.
As we pass over the edge of the goblin ferns, I freeze. Sam’s side presses to mine. Zoey turns when she doesn’t hear our footsteps following, the wind rustling her short hair. With the light behind her head and her hair like that, she could pass for Caleb.
“Is this it?” Sam prods gently. Zoey is there on my other side in a flash, and before I confirm or deny, she has the shovel in her hands and she’s thrusting it into the parched soil. Eight unchipped nails be damned.
I release Sam and crouch down with my palms pressed to the earth streaked with red clay. It’s cool and soothing against my skin. The clearing extends ten or twelve feet wide and long, with a fallen tree div
iding it. From where I squat, I see shiny black beetles scurrying over the trunk, plump brown mushrooms with caps like umbrellas, nodding white flowers like a picnic blanket of snow tinged with lavender, and a luminous blue-winged moth fluttering by. I don’t know how, but I know I’ve been here before.
“Yeah, this is where it happened,” I murmur. For some reason I expected death to be thinly veiled here: trees shriveling, decomposing animal carcasses, crimped spider legs, a sulfur stench, and a bank of moss growing over her skeleton. I thought I had to face this place for Jeanie. Stare it down to tame it. Put her to rest. Find her bones to bury. It’s where it all happened. But it’s already peaceful.
“Her body isn’t here,” Zoey says, out of breath.
Sam frowns, scanning the clearing. “Animals likely dragged her away. It’s been years,” he says. “I’ll dig.” He reaches for the shovel and Zoey hands it over, her forehead shining with sweat. She stands behind me, hand resting lightly on the crown of my head, playing in my hair as I let the peace of the place sink into me, loosen the knot in my chest. When the hole is wide enough for the photograph and about three feet deep, I lean into the earth and place the picture at the bottom of the grave.
In the instant it leaves my fingers, I see. I see petunias nodding in the breeze, their fuchsia and gold funnels big as teacups. A pile of lizard tails scattered around a crumbling pinecone castle. The cicada chirp of the TV through the open windows of Jeanie’s house, where her mom is snoring on the couch. Jeanie and I go tearing through the jumble of strawberries. The ruffled hem of my skirt rips as I climb over a fallen trunk, but I don’t care.
We run full speed toward the witch’s lair. Jeanie wants to see her cast a spell, but I told her good witches don’t cast spells. Halfway there I squat down to watch a glistening black centipede roll an acorn between my sneakers. One of my laces is untied, and it takes the crawly thing forever to roll the acorn over the obstacle of the lace. I look up to see if Jeanie’s watching, but she’s bending over a fallen sparrow’s nest, a cascade of multicolored candy beans exploding from the depths of her pocket. I pop up to see if there are eggs in the nest.
The Creeping Page 31