Gerard must have been working for a while, because the next entry was months later:
Sad day. Found Ma’s dead body near the woods. Looks like she fell in a sinkhole, though we haven’t seen any of those hereabout before. Also strange-her body was covered in vines. A mysterious death. But we must go on without her.
There were many entries after that detailing the family’s grief over the loss of the mother and their determination to make a go of it on the land nonetheless. Then this:
Found an old well at the back of the property. The grapes by the well are the sweetest yet.
He’d eaten those grapes? I wouldn’t have touched anything near that thing, but then again, maybe he hadn’t seen what I’d seen.
An entry a few days later stopped me cold.
Hearing a voice calling my name. It seems to follow me everywhere Igo. And always, it brings me back to that well.
I even found out about the origin of the painting I had seen in Sam’s secret room:
Father seems drawn to the well, too. Had a portrait painted of me and Auguste standing in front of it. Says it is the heart of the jumel vineyard.
Gerard wrote for weeks, months, about the voice, trying to figure out what it was. As freaked about it as I was. It was weird, seeing some two-hundred-years-ago teenager the same age I was going through the same thing.
But that meant the thing in the well was-
Two hundred years old? That was impossible. Like legendsof-Bigfoot impossible.
I gulped and turned the page.
Voice is getting more urgent. Told me this land has taken Mama and will take the rest of us, too, if we don’t make a proper sacrifice soon.
I kept going, skimming now, looking for more information. I didn’t find anything until October i, 1809.
It has told me something I find abhorrent but know I must do. Auguste must be sacrificed.
Sacrificed? As in, thrown down there?
Just like me?
I slammed the book shut and sat back against the bed.
That meant Sam’s great-great-great-great-relatives had been in the same situation as I was. Someone trying to toss Auguste down the well. Someone who was supposed to love him. Someone being controlled by that thing.
But how? And why?
I started to open the book again when another fact hit me. If Sam had had this book all along, then he knew everything. He knew about the well. He knew about the creature. He knew what it could do.
Did he also know what it was doing to my mother? To me?
I flipped the pages back to where I’d left off and found more written by Gerard on October 8. His handwriting had grown more and more sloppy, his sentences choppier, as if the thing taking over his mind had also made it harder for him to concentrate.
Land needs him. Every two hundred years it asks one thing. Sacrifice. With Auguste, the … land gives back. Lets us … live.
Lets them live?
Fear snaked through me. What would happen to my mother, my brother, if this “sacrifice” didn’t happen? If I didn’t do what the creature wanted? Would they …
Die?
I turned another page. October 9, r 809.
Will use Auguste’s love for Amelia … make him see why … must do this.
Amelia. The name rang a bell in my head, and then I remembered. Megan had said the old lady that used to live in the abandoned house, her family had grown up on the vineyard property. Had Amelia-with her piano and sheet music-been that thing’s girlfriend?
Oh God, Megan.
I turned to the last entry.
Today, Auguste … the sacrifice.
October io.
The anniversary of Jumel Vineyards. Two hundred years of business.
My birthday.
The day of the sacrifice.
Now I knew what all this was leading up to. Why I was still alive, and why I had to stay that way.
I had one day left. One day until I was going down there. If I’d had any doubts before who the sacrificial lamb was in this little scenario, I didn’t have them now. It was me. I’d become this generation’s Auguste.
Part of me wanted to run, to head for the nearest train out of here, but another side knew I had to stay and deal. So I went back to the journal.
Gerard had skipped a few spaces, then started writing again, clearer, more concrete, as if now he was fine.
It is done. And someday, Auguste will thank me. For saving them. For saving him. When he has paid the price demanded, the chosen one will take his place. And then Auguste will walk the earth again, living the life of an immortal.
That thing would get out once I was dead? Walk around? Be free? Forever?
No way. No way. That would not happen-over my dead body.
Damn. That might be true.
I turned the rest of the pages, looking for a clue, an answer as to how to kill the thing, but found nothing. No solutions. All I knew was that I was next on the list.
The chosen one.
Why? Why me? I wasn’t anyone special. Cooper Warner, ordinary high school freshman, who didn’t even have good enough grades to stay on the football team.
Apparently that didn’t matter. I was going to become the next monster in the well. Happy birthday.
I’d never felt more lost or out of control.
I put down the book. The wine bottle rolled across the bed. I picked it up. It lay heavy in my palm, the golden liquid inside seeming to almost …
Shimmer.
What was it with this wine? Sam had once told me, when I’d dared to go near a bottle, that it was his and his alone. That all vineyards had a special owner’s-only brew. Something the owner kept under lock and key, drank only on special occasions.
I turned the bottle over and over in my palm, thinking, remembering Sam uncorking, pouring a glass. Freaking out completely when I had pretended to take a sip from my mother’s glass once, then Sam at the dinner table, reaching for the bottle of red and leaving the white for my mother-
The truth hit me. So hard, I nearly fell over.
I pulled Faulkner’s cell out of my pocket. The thing was almost out of juice, though, so I had only a second. I called the house.
Faulkner picked up on the first ring. “Dude, thanks for getting Mom out of the woods today,” I said. “You saved my life.”
“Coop, thank God.”
He sounded glad to talk to me. What was up with that?
“Listen, I have something to tell you.” I cupped my hand around the receiver. Even though I was still in my old room, I didn’t want to chance waking up my father. Explaining all this weirdness to him-a man who thought the answer to any problem could be found in a book-would only make things worse. “Don’t let Mom drink that wine-you know, the wine. Sam’s special crap. There’s something in there that’s … I don’t know, making her act the way she is.” I wanted to tell him about the journal and the grapes, but I figured if he hadn’t believed me before, he really wasn’t going to believe me now, not until I could show him the journal.
“I can’t do that,” Faulkner said, and his voice shook on the last two words, shook like San Francisco after an earthquake. “It’s …”
The phone hummed. “What? It’s what?”
He started to breathe heavily, and I wasn’t sure, but I think he might have been crying. “It’s too late, Cooper. Oh, man it’s too late. For all of us.”
Then the phone went dead. And Faulkner was gone.
Empty.
The StepScrooge Sam mansion stood empty in a way that went beyond no people being there. The rooms echoed. They smelled musty, as if-
As if the well had been here.
Night hung heavy behind me, our street silent as a tomb. I could feel the ticking of a mental clock. I had only until my birthday to get rid of this thing if I wanted to live. And if there was any chance Megan was still alive, I had just that long to find her.
I stepped inside, flicked on the lights, and started to look for my brother. Except even with
all the lights on, the house still felt dark. Heavy. Ominous. “Faulkner? Hey, Faulk. Don’t play any games, dude. It’s not funny.”
But there was no answer.
“Faulkner!”
I opened every door, dread multiplying with each knob I turned. But he wasn’t behind any of the six-panel oak doors. He wasn’t in the kitchen. The bathroom. The laundry room. I stopped at the entrance to the basement and decided to hold that for later. Instead, I turned to make my way upstairs.
And stopped. Swallowed my breath.
One of the well’s evil vine men. Waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
If this thing was now outside the woods and inside the house, it must mean the creature had gotten stronger. Because the day was getting closer for the sacrifice? Because the thing was getting more anxious? Either way, it didn’t look good for me.
My legs nearly went out from under me, but I grabbed the banister and told myself it was just a bunch of sticks. I could take a bunch of sticks. I could beat this thing. I had to.
Because this wasn’t just about me anymore or saving my own skin.
It was about Megan. And Faulkner. And my mother.
“You don’t scare me!” I screamed. I could lie to it and myself.
The vine-and-twig man opened its stick mouth and laughed.
“I’m coming up there!” I swiped one of my mother’s megasize candlesticks from the hall table, then started up the stairs. Still holding on to the banister, because if I didn’t, my legs weren’t going to climb.
The thing waved its arms and clapped its hands, like a baseball catcher waiting for me to send him a fastball.
Were there others in the house?
Oh God, what if there were a hundred? What if it had gotten the whole damned vineyard to turn into those things and they had taken over the whole house and they were coming to get me and take me back to the well and I was going to die before I could rescue Megan and find Faulkner and-
Get a grip, Cooper. Get a grip or you will die.
At the top of the stairs, the vine-and-stick man rocked on its heels and kept swinging its arms, laughing some more. Waiting. Like this was the funniest, most entertaining thing to happen in weeks.
Like it was all a game.
I raised the candlestick higher-that sucker was heavy, made of some kind of metal that needed polishing all the time-and picked up the pace. Five steps away now. Four. I could see its eyes were made of grapes-grapes so shiny, they almost had irises in them. When I was three steps away, it crouched, then pointed to its chin, as if saying, Go ahead, take your best shot.
When I’d been five, my father had signed me up for Little League. I had hated him for doing it. He’d dragged me down to practice, kicking and screaming.
But once I was there, I found out I liked baseball. I made some friends-Joey and Mike, for starters-and stuck with the league until high school. I had a hell of a batting average and a pretty decent pitching arm. Coach Harding had already talked to me about trying out this spring for the varsity baseball team at Maple Valley High.
I knew that.
I didn’t think the vine guy did.
And I wasn’t in a sharing kind of mood right now. When I was one step away, I paused, shifted my feet to widen my stance, then let go of the banister. I waited until the stick guy started laughing again. God, I hated that laugh, and I let that hate boil into a fury that I could control, a rage that I could feel travel down my arm, burn into my fist.
I curled my grip tightly around the makeshift bat, raised it onto my shoulder, then swung, hard and even. “Shut up!”
The candlestick bat connected with the side of its head, smacking into the twig figure, solid enough to kill a guy. Its nature head exploded into pieces, bursting like a cartoon sun, and it stumbled back. I started to move forward, to finish the job, when the pieces of its head began to lift up from the floor and started to swirl in a circle, then-to my horror-knit themselves back together.
It laughed again and said something I couldn’t understand. Even though the words had made no sense to me, I knew what they had meant. It could have been speaking Mandarin and it wouldn’t have mattered, because its words were spoken in the language of the playground.
The roar of a bully. The taunting you-think-that-hurt dare.
It started toward me again and I raised the candlestick and swung harder this time.
“Get back!”
Again, its head erupted in a starburst, then zipped back together, as if it was the Road Runner, down for only a second.
“Get away, you freak!” I took another swing and another, this time hitting it in the legs and the arms, but then at one point the candlestick just went through its legs. I took a step back, stunned. “What the hell?”
It laughed again, then reached forward and swung at my head with the branches of its arms. I ducked. It swung again, this time lower, faster. Faster than me.
The blow hit me squarely in the gut, blasting my breath out of my lungs and sending me flying down the stairs, somersaulting like an Olympic gymnast, except with a dismount that sent me landing on my wrist.
I screamed. The twig thing yowled and danced at the top of the stairs.
I cradled my wrist against my chest and tested it, gingerly moving it back and forth. It hurt like hell, but it moved, so it wasn’t broken. A sprain. A bad one. Either way, I didn’t have time for the pain.
I needed a way past that thing to make sure my brother wasn’t upstairs somewhere, trapped. I picked up the candlestick again, in my other hand, and realized there was no way I could hit it using my left arm. For one, my lefty batting average was zero. For another, hitting the thing hadn’t gotten me anywhere. This one didn’t have the green webbing that had coated my school desk and my computer, but it had the regeneration abilities of a starfish on steroids.
Then I saw what had been sitting next to the candlestick on the hall table and knew another way to take out a vine man. I ran back upstairs again.
It was still laughing when I reached the top of the steps. I stood in front of it, raised the candlestick again.
“Yeah, real funny, isn’t it? Everyone wants to be Jon Stewart. Why not try torch singer for a career!” Then with my right hand, I flicked my mother’s Bic lighter. I brought the candlestick together with the lighter, then thrust both at the vine-and-twig guy. My wrist screamed in agony, but not as loudly as the stick man did.
Because I knew one other thing this vine guy didn’t know.
Dry grapevines go up like kindling when you light them on fire. Without the web coating, he was as dry as paper. In seconds, he was toast.
So were the hall drapes, but I figured I’d deal with those later.
I headed down the hall, lit candle in one hand, lighter in the other, opening the rest of the doors and calling for Faulkner. No more vine guys up there.
But no Faulkner, either. Or Mom. Or Sam.
Night carpeted the yard. A few lights ringed the back, accenting Sam’s ridiculous plants, painting his pretty land scaping picture, and giving me just enough light to see there weren’t any vine guys on the lawn, either, thank God.
But what if they were in the woods? Just waiting for me to leave the house?
I stopped at the last door in the hall, the one that led to the attic. I turned, ran for my room, opened my closet, and tore it apart until I found the binoculars in the small storage bin in the back, left over from a camping trip with my dad last summer. He’d bought them for me in case I had wanted to look for birds.
I’d used them to scan for girls on the beach at the lake down the road.
But now I took them up the stairs to the attic and used them to look out the tiny window facing the woods.
At first all I saw were trees and more trees. Then the trees parted, like curtains. They wanted to show me something?
The well.
No. Someone at the well. A tall, lean figure. From here, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The night sky kept me from discerning mu
ch. Too tall to be Megan or Faulkner. Too skinny to be Sergeant Ring.
One of the vineyard workers, maybe? Or Sam? My mother?
The person was holding something close to his or her chest. I leaned forward in the window but couldn’t make out what it was. Then the person raised up the bundle, held it for a long second, and let go.
The blanket unfurled-small, white, square, the kind they used in hospitals. Whatever had been wrapped in it dropped into the well.
So hungry. So hungry. Give me more.
I scrambled back from the window, the binoculars crashing to the floor. One of the lenses cracked. My breath panted in and out and I ducked down, even though it was impossible for whoever was at the well to see me back here.
What the hell had I just seen? And heard?
Someone feeding that creature?
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Oh. My. God.
I crawled back, poked my head over the window ledge, then dragged the binoculars up and took another look. The figure had turned and paused in the woods, as if the person was listening, the blanket tucked under one arm.
I focused the binoculars again just as the clouds shifted past the moon, and a shaft of light fell onto the woods and revealed the person.
Sam.
In his doctor scrubs.
With dark crimson stains down the front.
I fought the urge to hurl. I knew now for sure what that bundle had been. Sergeant Ring’s words came back to me.
The hospital is looking into your stepfather’s track record with deliveries … Infant mortality …
Was that because he’d been feeding that thing …
Babies? The ones that died when he was delivering them?
Like my twin brother?
My stomach rolled and pitched, and I had to look away again for a second. When I turned back to the window, Sam was gone.
Instead, I saw Faulkner, sitting at the base of the well, slumped over. Someone had tied him in place, leaving him there, waiting to be sacrificed, like that kid Isaac in the Bible.
The creature dragged his body across the well’s bottom and screamed his fury. Again, the one who fed him had come, and again, he’d done almost nothing to repay Auguste for all he had given him. No gratitude. Nothing but disdain, hatred.
The Well Page 16