Faulkner dug his hands into his back pockets. Adios, amigo. “
I took in a breath. All I could smell was the faintly pine scent of my cologne. Maybe I had escaped it. Maybe I had dreamed it all. Maybe it wasn’t-
Then, from far off, I heard a wailing, a low, guttural keening sound, almost like something crying. But these weren’t tears of sorrow. It was as if an animal had had its prize ripped away. My heart shuddered to a stop. I swallowed, but nothing moved down my throat. Ice curled around my spine. “Did you hear that?”
Faulkner paused and looked around, then looked back at me, blank. “Hear what?”
“I think … I think it’s looking for me.” Why was this happening? Why couldn’t I just go back to worrying about stupid crap like ripping out a fart just when Ms. Walker called on me in math or splitting my shorts doing a jumping jack in front of the entire freshman class? I’d give anything to be humiliated in school instead of hunted like a wounded antelope on the Sahara.
“What’s looking for you?”
But I didn’t answer Faulkner. The thing was screaming again, louder, angrier, more insistent. Faulkner just stared at me as if I were an idiot. “I don’t hear anything. Dude, you’re muy loco.”
But I really did hear it. In fact, I could almost feel it, in that kind of connection that came from being so close, as if I were within touching distance, feel it reaching for me in my head, sending out mental tentacles.
My heart skittered to a stop for one long second, then started again, hammering fast.
Soon, I knew, somehow I knew, it would find me. And if it couldn’t drag me back itself, it would find someone to do its dirty work for it-my mother.
Next time, I might not be so lucky to have a rope and Faulkner at the top of the well. Without even bothering to say goodbye to my brother, I turned and ran.
The boy had escaped.
He should have taken him when he’d had the chance. But no, he’d been stupid and he had paused. Anticipated.
Toyed with him.
But it had been so long, so very, very long, since he’d had any fun like that. Anything to pursue, other than the occasional rat, or a bird that lost its way and fluttered into the darkness. Some spiders, bugs. The occasional idiot human. And then there were the meals that the other one fed the creature.
None of it was the one person he needed. All the things he’d eaten up until now had given up too soon, fallen apart in fear. No fight in them. Disgusting.
They weren’t real quarry. The boy, though, he was a chal lenge, the kind the creature could circle and tease, delighting in the scent of his fear, the thumping of his heart. The power of terror.
He-that human, the one with all the control-he had kept him down here, kept him under his thumb, kept him from the world. And now the creature finally had a way out, something that would give him back all that he had watched wither away. And that something had a name.
Cooper.
The boy’s name rolled off his tongue-or what was left of his tongue-like candy. He said it again and again, breathing it in and out. Oh, he’d have him soon. Have him back in the well.
And next time, he wouldn’t hesitate.
But until then, he had to eat. It wasn’t the meal he needed, the blood that would give him freedom again-freedom to escape, to walk among the world, and finally, to exact his revenge on the one who had tortured him like a spider pinned on a board, who had raped the very land the creature loved-but it would be enough to sustain him, until he could have Cooper. And then …
Oh, then his old life would return. A few more days until the moon rose on the exact eve he needed, the anniversary date he had waited so long for, and then he’d climb out of this hellhole and walk among people again. Reclaim his birthright-steal it from the one who sat at his table, drank his wine, walked his grounds.
All the others had treated the creature with compassion. Had acknowledged his gift to them. To these lands. But not this one.
No. This one needed to pay for the way he had sneered at the creature. Thrown him a pittance of food. Thumbed his nose at the wealth the creature’s sacrifice had given him. Ripped down his home, replaced it with that eyesore, then laughed, actually laughed, at the creature’s pain and loss.
Vengeance would be sweet. Sweeter than the blood he would soon drink.
He concentrated, though it hurt now to do it because he was so weak, so damned weak, and then he heard sounds from above. From the world of light.
Singing. Drunken slurring.
He laughed. Vineyard workers dipping into the product again. Crouching low into himself, he poured everything into his thoughts.
Come closer. These grapes are the best, the sweetest. Taste from this vine.
The song grew louder. Shuffling of leaves. Breaking branches.
Hungry? Take one bite. just one.
The creature pressed on his own head, his fingers sinking deep into what had once been flesh and now was as soft as moss, nails scraping at what no longer even looked like skin. He concentrated harder, sending out his thoughts and reaching his vision up and over the walls.
One man. Old, with gray hair. Skinny, slow.
The creature nearly stopped in disgust. But no, the decrepit human would have to do. For now.
He pressed again on his temples, his fingers lost inside the mush above his neck. His head pounded, stabbing pain arcing through his body, but then his telepathic power began to work, and the slime on the wall grew outward in a quickly multiplying vine, over the walls and toward his prey.
The creature saw with that third mental eye acting as the extension of his reach and then with an agonized surge of effort, his thoughts joined with the land and became physical manifestations. Became real. The green web reaching out, wrapping around the man’s legs, yanking him down to the ground. The geezer let out a shriek of surprise. His stupid song stopped. Finally.
The creature pressed harder, and his ropelike snare twisted tighter, winding around the man’s flailing legs, wrapping him into a ball like a spider’s prize. Worthless creature. He had barely put up a fight.
The vines inched upward, tighter, tighter still, crushing organs and bones in their boa-constrictor grip. With each death crunch the creature’s anticipation for the meal grew. He forced the last of his mental energy out with one agonizing cry, and the man came tumbling over the wall of the well and down, down, down, in a splashing ball of crumpled skin and oozing blood.
Once a man. Now a means to an end.
Soon, the creature thought. Soon he’d have the real lifeblood he needed.
Cooper.
Where’s nothing like sitting in Freshman English on a Monday morning to remind you the real world does go on. And just to make things worse, it smacks you with a book report.
“Three pages, typed and double-spaced, on the symbolism found in the play within a play in act three of Hamlet, by Wednesday,” my father said to the class. He stood at the front of the room, wearing a tweed jacket like he was Doctor freakin’ Zhivago, the tips of his fingers white with chalk and his shoes covered with dust from erasing first period’s notes.
The class groaned. “Dude, your dad is like a prison warden.” Joey Deluca slammed his five-subject notebook shutthe only notes in it being ones from girls-and plopped his feet on the floor, making Mike Ring’s chair, where Joey’s feet had been resting, shake. Mike turned and glared at Joey. “Cooper, can’t you talk to him? Tell him this is high school, not Sing Sing?”
My father put his back to us and wrote the assignment on the board with the kind of penmanship that would have made my third grade teacher shout hallelujahs. Then below that, he stacked up a bunch of bullet points we had to be sure to include in our essays. Another collective groan blew through the class.
“I’m failing my own father’s class,” I whispered back to Joey. “He isn’t going to listen to me.”
He never had. That was half the problem between my father and me.
A note slid across my desk. “From Mega
n,” whispered Drue Macy, who was Megan’s best friend. She gave me the evil girlfriend eye and turned up her nose before looking away.
I glanced over my shoulder at Megan, and my heart did that funny little flip-flop thing. It always did that when I looked at her-always had for as long as I could remember. We’d been going out for six months now, but it felt like forever. In a good way. As though she’d always been my girlfriend and always would be. I had a hundred images in my head of Megan and me together, and I couldn’t imagine a day without her.
People had started calling us “CooperandMegan,” as if we were one person. It had been nice, real nice. And then yesterday, I’d made plans for a fancy dinner. At a good restaurant and everything, to celebrate our six-month anniversary. Until the well got in the way.
I unfolded the paper. Megan’s small, tight writing in blue pen filling only three lines. “I waited for you yesterday. Where were you?” she wrote. “Why ask me out if you were going to stand me up? And on our anniversary, too.” She’d underlined anniversary. Four times.
“Dude, seriously,” Joey went on. “I’m supposed to go out with Lindsay Beckham tomorrow night. I don’t have time for Hamlet and his screwed-up family.”
I folded the paper and stuffed it into my jeans. What was I going to tell her? Sorry, I know this was a big deal, but my mother had plans to feed me to some monster in the well in the vineyard behind our house?
Yeah, she’d believe that. I’d have better luck telling her I’d been sucked into the mother ship.
I tipped back in my chair, pretended to stretch, and glanced at Megan out of the corner of my eye. She had her head down, her hair a velvet brown curtain swishing forward around her notebook. She was taking notes.
I’d known Megan since kindergarten. When my mother and father were still married, Megan was the cliche-the girl next door. Back then, we were friends, part of the neighbor hood pack that rode bikes to the playground, traded off yards for catch and swimming, stuff like that.
But then one day, something changed. A switch turned on in my brain and I stopped noticing Megan as one of the others and noticed her as Megan. I started paying attention to the way she walked. Talked. To her perfume. Her hair. Her eyes. Her body. Especially her body.
Then I got nervous around her. I couldn’t hang out with her, even with everyone around, without becoming the stammering idiot Hulk.
It took three months before I got Braveheart enough to do something about it and finally blurted out, “Want to meet me at the movies on Sunday night? Just you and me?”
She’d rewarded me with a yes and the most amazing smile I’d ever seen. I’d thought my life was pretty damn sweet-
Until I’d ended up at the bottom of a well instead of at Vincenzo’s Italian restaurant with Megan in one of those curtained booths.
Megan quit writing and looked up. Her eyes met mine. I tried on a smile, but it didn’t quite fit. Her face hardened, spelling you’re a jerk, and she looked away.
I took out her note and scribbled, “I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything later, I promise,” on the bottom. I thought a minute, chewing on the end of my pen. I needed something more, but it’s not as if they hand out a manual on this stuff at freshman orientation. In the end, I just underlined the “I promise,” signed my name, and sent it back to Megan via Drue the carrier pigeon.
Mike leaned his head back into my space. “I got a solution,” he said. It took a second for me to realize he was talking to Joey. “Pay Maria to do your paper. That’s what you did with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “
“No can do. She hates me.” Joey wadded up a corner of notebook paper and finger punted it into Mike’s hair.
“You’re a loser.” Mike brushed at his head, but the looseleaf soccer ball stayed put.
I really didn’t care about the conversation, but listening to Joey and Mike kept me from thinking about my own life-about Megan being mad at me, about the well, about how I’d spent last night sleeping in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town, seriously creeped out and awake until two in the morning. Joey hadn’t been home, and Mike’s mother wasn’t wild about his friends showing up and having an insta-sleepover. The whole camping-out-like-a-hobo thing had sounded like a good idea. Until I did it.
My friends were about as full of depth as an empty mayonnaise jar, but they made me feel as if things were normal. As though I could walk out of this building, hitch a ride on the bus to my house, and find a chicken in the oven and my mother standing there with a smile, instead of a knife aimed at my throat.
“Why does Maria hate you?” I asked.
“Her sister. Me. Hot date.” Joey put out his palms, shrugged, and grinned.
“Dawg!” Mike pivoted in his seat and raised a high-five hand. “She’s, like, a senior.”
“Mr. Ring!” My father’s voice, full of you-will-payattention authority.
Mike slid down in his seat and circled back around, like a puppy caught peeing on the gardenias. “Yeah, Mr. Warner?”
“What is the significance of Hamlet’s soliloquy at the beginning of act three?”
“Uh, what’s a solilo-key?”
My father let out a sigh. The kind that said he wondered why he’d gone into high school education when he could have been a college professor or opted to do lab research with monkeys. Something with intelligent creatures. “Never mind.” He turned to me. “Cooper?”
Every time he called on me in his class, he ended my name with this little lilt of hope, as if this time, I’d have the answer. This time, I’d have done my homework. This time, I’d make him look good. This time, I’d be the one who would show everyone that the Warner professorial gene had been passed along with a hefty dose of brains.
I glanced down at the play. We had been reading it aloud a few minutes earlier, with Joey playing Polonius, the fool. Mike had been the king, Megan had been the queen, and I had been suckered into reading Hamlet’s parts while the rest of the class had put their heads on their desks and slept. I squirmed in my seat, the words blurring on the page before me. I expected to struggle for an answer, to be lost for anything intelligent.
But for some reason, this time, I heard the entire thing again in my head. The whole “to be or not to be” paragraph replayed itself, as if someone else were shouting the words at me, as though Hamlet were sitting in the chair behind mine, yelling his little speech of indecision into my ear.
“I think he’s scared of dying,” I said. “But he’s got to make this big decision about what to do. About who to kill. And, well, you know, it’s not an easy thing to do. The, ah, killing thing.”
I looked up. The room was silent. I rarely said more than five words in English class if I could help it, and those were usually “Can I go to the bathroom?”
The entire class stared at me. Joey was grinning. Mike had a little thumbs-up going my way. Megan looked surprised and wore that smile I really liked on her face. But my father-
My father’s jaw dropped. He swallowed, closed his mouth, then opened it again. “Go on, Cooper. Go on.” He waved at me encouragingly. This big goofy grin was all over his face, and he kept pushing his glasses up on his nose.
“Well, I don’t know.” I shifted some more. Why had I said anything at all? Now my father would do this all the time, make me perform for the class like some kind of circus lion. I started to say I didn’t know anything else, but then I heard the soliloquy continue in my head-
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises ofgreatpith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.
The words began to make some weird kind of sense. “Hamlet’s tired, too. There’s been this kind of burden on
him for a while. He thinks these people are after him, you know? And he just wants it to be over. But he feels guilty for what he’s thinking about doing. Because-“
I stopped talking. I realized why I knew Hamlet’s thoughts. Why reading that soliloquy had seemed so familiar. It wasn’t just because I’d happened to be wearing that “Hamlet Had Issues” T-shirt yesterday when my mother tricked me into searching for the lost dog, then caught me by my collar, hauled me across the woods, and threw me down the well, into the clutches of something …
Something I didn’t want to think about right now.
Wearing the T-shirt had been a weird karmic coincidence.
This, though, was called identifying with the guy.
Hamlet had someone, or something, after him and knew he had to do something drastic, like murder. He had the dual problem of not wanting to pull a Tony Soprano. The age-old debate-to kill or be killed. To be or not to be-
Although mine was more to be or not to be eaten.
I slammed my book shut. Holy crap. No way was I going to read any more.
“What else, Cooper?” My father moved forward, his white hair sticking up in places, his tweed jacket making him look like a really tall leprechaun who had discovered the lucky jackpot right in front of him-a freshman who was paying attention. “What else do you see?”
“Nothing.” I lowered my head. Stared at the “Ken Luvs Lisa 4-Eva” carved into my desk.
“You’re on the right track. Tell me more.”
“I said nothing,” I repeated, louder. I wouldn’t look up. I traced the letters with my fingernail, trying to concentrate on something else, but then as I traced, the lines in the desk started to turn color under my nail, going from the pale tan of the desk to a deep, dark green slime.
My finger caught, held in a thick glue. I tried to pull it back, but it wouldn’t move. Then the smell hit me. Rotten eggs. Dead pigs. Maggots. Putrid, decaying flesh.
The Well Page 3