The Well

by A. J. Whitten

  She nodded. “The monster was keeping him as”-she swallowed-“bait. In case something happened to me. I heard him telling that to someone else.”

  I rushed forward and broke open the wooden bars that formed the cage holding my dog. Whipple bounded into my arms, thinner, dirtier, but as overjoyed to see me as I was to see him. He licked my head, my neck, my arms, anything he could reach, his tail wagging so fast that I thought it might pop off. I held him to my chest and stroked his head. “My mother said he was dead.”

  “I don’t know, Cooper. He was here when … when that thing brought me down here.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

  “Let’s go,” I said, drawing her against me with one arm. “We’ve been down here long enough. All of us.”

  Megan nodded, then brushed away her tears. “Thank you.

  “For what?”

  “For coming to get me.”

  “I’m sorry it took so long.” I held her tightly and wasn’t sure I could ever let her go again. “Seems I’m always late picking you up.”

  Megan laughed. And it was the best sound I’d ever heard.

  It took us nearly an hour to get out of the well. My shoulders were shot, and Megan was weak from spending two days down there, with nothing more to eat than a granola bar she’d had in her pocket. She’d refused the creature’s offer of the special grapes. Thank God.

  When I finally climbed over the edge, I expected to find Faulkner’s body exactly where I’d left it. He was gone. Who had taken him? My mother? Sam?

  The creature might be dead, but danger possibly still lurked out there. I stood up and scanned the woods. The sun was just beginning to rise, casting everything in shades of pink. Even Megan. “Don’t move,” she said.

  “We have to-“

  She took her bandanna off my wrist and wrapped it tightly around the worst of my cuts. “Take care of you before we do anything else,” she said, finishing my sentence. She gave me a light kiss on the cheek and a tender brush against the scrapes running along my arm, her face full of concern.

  The vine army was gone. The woods were back to being normal woods. Maybe I’d imagined that feeling back in the well, that feeling that something was undone. The thing was dead, and Faulkner had come out of whatever coma he’d been in and had gone home. That was what I told myself, anyway.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Megan asked.

  “Yeah, fine.” I was beat up, cut to hell, and in need of a truckload of aspirin, but I had Megan back, she was safe, and that was enough. “Totally fine.”

  “Okay,” she said. And smiled.

  Megan’s mother came screaming out the door when we walked up the front walk of her house. Megan made up something about getting lost in the woods, hitting her head, falling down the well, and being knocked out, and I chimed in with a little fiction about finding her. Mrs. Garrett barely heard a word we said because she was bawling so hard and hugging Megan so tightly.

  We both left out the part about the homicidal creature. Megan and I figured Mrs. Garrett didn’t need that in her perfect little Betty Crocker world.

  “Hey, I almost forgot.” Megan smiled. “Happy birthday.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I had really done it, hadn’t I? The big day had arrived, and I had killed the creature before he had taken me.

  A shiver chased up my spine. I shrugged it off. I didn’t have anything to worry about anymore.

  Megan gave me a kiss, then drew back, her eyes dancing, the rising sun casting sparkles over her face. “See you later, Cooper.”

  All I could do was nod. Because my brain was completely fried after that kiss.

  I was tired. I was hungry. And all I wanted to do was go to bed, wake up, and find Faulkner at the kitchen table, throwing Cheerios at my head.

  But Sam was still out there, and so was my mother. And I didn’t know whether the creature’s death would end everything-

  Or just ramp up the game.

  The farther I got from Megan’s house and the closer I got to Sam’s McMansion, the more uneasy I felt. As if I were on the edge of something more.

  I kept telling myself to relax. There was no laughter in the air, no crazy vines springing up around me. No voices in my head. Everything was back to plain old Maple Valley.

  People were walking their dogs and paperboys were delivering newspapers. All of it as ordinary as vanilla ice cream.

  Faulkner was probably home in bed, snoring away, while I was stressing over nothing. Except that nothing found me slowing up as I walked home, not quite anxious to get back.

  I found my father parked across the street from Sam’s house. He had his hands on the steering wheel, looking as if he was trying to make a hard decision. I knocked on the window and he jumped, then opened the door and got out. “Cooper! Oh, thank God. Where have you been?” He hugged me tightly, then drew back, looking me over. “What have you been doing? You’re filthy.”

  I let out a long sigh. “You don’t want to know, Dad.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and leaned down until his eyes met mine. “Yeah, Cooper, I do.”

  For the first time maybe ever, I got the feeling that my father was there. Really there. Ready to listen to me. Not to what I had to say about Hamlet. Or my English essay. But to what was going on in my life. And right now, I was so tired and so lost.

  What if this wasn’t over after all?

  What I needed right now, more than anything, was an ally. A grownup on my side. Somebody to tell me what to do. To help me make sense of it all.

  Somebody to tell me it would all be okay.

  Most of all, I needed my father. Maybe I’d always needed him, but I hadn’t known that until now. “It’s complicated, Dad.”

  “That’s all right, Cooper. I have time.”

  So we got into his car and I told him. I started at the beginning, and I kept going until I got to dropping Megan off at her house. My father didn’t say a word until I stopped. I stared at the worn gray carpet of his Toyota. “That’s it,” I said. “I don’t know where Faulkner is or if he’s okay.”

  “He’s all right. He’s at my house.”

  I spun in my seat. Whipple, who had curled into a ball in my lap and gone to sleep, lifted his head, dropped it down again. Relief exploded in me. Faulkner was okay. He hadn’t died. If my brother had been with us then, I would have hugged him, whether he liked it or not. “He is? How’d he get there?”

  “Your mother brought him over early this morning. Asked me to keep him at my house for a while.”

  “Whoa. Back the truck up. You talked to her? You saw her?”

  He nodded. “She’s at my house now. She told me a lot of the same things you just did. Let me tell you, that was a lot to swallow. This is the woman I was married to for eighteen years. And she’s telling me she thinks she tried to kill my child?” My father gripped the steering wheel. “It didn’t go over well, but when she explained how it happened, I began to understand.”

  “What? You understood? That she thinks she did this?” I wanted to shake him. To scream at him, to get him to wake up and smell the truth in his life. His ex-wife was a homicidal maniac. “Dad, she did try to kill me. I was there.”

  “I know, Cooper. But that wasn’t her. It was something acting inside her.”

  I let out a gust. I knew deep down it was true, but it still annoyed me that my father was defending my mother’s murderous actions. I reached for the door handle, but my father stopped me.

  “Cooper, listen to me. I know things between us haven’t been that great, and I know I haven’t been there for you like I should have. But this time, this moment, you have to listen to me.”

  I stopped, but I didn’t let go of the door handle.

  “Your mother loves you.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to believe that, but I’d seen different.

  “That wasn’t her acting like that. She’s fighting whatever is inside her. You have to believe me. She wants to talk to you, so she can explain.”
r />   I snorted. “I don’t want her to find me.”

  My father grabbed my arm. “Your mother loves you,” he repeated.

  I stared at the street until it blurred in front of me. “No, she doesn’t.”

  “She does.” My father kept holding on. “Come on, Cooper, you know your mother. Think back-think of all the times we’ve had together. The camping trips. The vacations. The game nights. That’s not her acting like that. There’s something else … something controlling her. I think it’s him.”

  “The thing. This Place. This land. It’s cursed or something.” The same thing that had controlled Gerard, that had whispered in his ear and had made him throw his own brother down that well.

  “No.” My father paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was filled with a hatred I had never heard before. “Him. “

  “Sam?” There was only one other person who would want me in that well. Whose self-interests would be served by having me become the next creature.

  My father nodded slowly. Once. I got the feeling that if Sam had been there right then, my professor father might have strangled him. For ruining his marriage. For ruining his life. For ruining his family. And most of all, for trying to kill his youngest son. “This is all my fault.”

  “Dad, you didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s the problem. I saw this coming. Let it happen.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Well, I didn’t see this, exactly, but I saw Sam was up to no good. Your mother … she just wanted to leave me so badly, and I didn’t want to upset her. I never wanted her to be …”

  “Unhappy.”

  He looked at me and let out a sigh that sounded as if it weighed more than the whole car. “Yeah.”

  “That’s the trouble, Dad. You never throw any rocks. Break a few windows. Get mad. Fight. It might do you some good.”

  It might have done us all some good. Might have headed this off. Kept Sam from invading our lives like a cancer.

  “I tried, you know,” he said. “After she first left, I was here every morning for a month.”

  “Here?”

  “When you were at school and Sam was at work, I was here, talking to your mother. I nearly got fired because I missed so much school. I kept thinking if I argued with her enough, she’d see the light and come back, but every time I talked to her, she was …” He raised his hands in defeat.

  “Like a cult member.”

  “Exactly.” My father shook his head. “I don’t know what it is about him. He has this … power over her.”

  “It was the wine,” I said. “He gave it to her all the time, and after she drank it, she got all weird.” With Gerard, it had been the grapes, but with my mother, the wine. A special wine made from special grapes.

  The monster’s crop.

  Wine was stronger than grapes, wasn’t it? Fermented, concentrated. Maybe that’s why Sam had used it. Because a mother’s bond was so much harder to break.

  “That makes sense,” my father said. “He gave her some, you know, when she was a patient of his. Back when she first saw him, just before she got pregnant with you. Some newpatient gift or something. She drank a little of it and acted really oddly. The reaction didn’t last long, but it was enough to really worry me. I dumped the wine down the drain. We had a huge fight. Your mother and I, we hardly ever fought. Every once in a while, Sam would contact her-a card, a phone call from his office-trying to get her to come back as a patient, but she never responded.”

  He’d been trying all that time to get her back under his thumb. But without her drinking the wine, it had been impossible.

  “One day, she went back to his office for a checkup. I don’t know why.”

  I thought back. To the weeks before this had begun. “He sent her a bottle,” I recalled. “With some flowers. I was home when the delivery guy came to the door.”

  “I didn’t know. The day I saw another bottle of that wine was”-my father looked out the window-“the day she left me for him.”

  Then this whole nightmare had begun. I guess I’d always been the chosen one and Sam had always known. It wasn’t as if he picked me when I became an adolescent. Almost two years ago, Sam had started working on her, probably figuring he needed the extra time to keep it from being suspicious when I disappeared. If he had married my mother in September, and I disappeared a month later, the cops would have been all over him. But give him eighteen months of history with a troubled, ungrateful stepson, and he had a perfect setup for a teenage-runaway scenario. Gee, Officer, I don’t know what happened to that Cooper. We tried so hard to make him happy, and then one day, poof-he takes off

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “The police station. Mike’s dad picked him up for questioning.”

  “Questioning? For what?”

  “When your mother brought Faulkner to my house, she told me her story and her concerns about Sam. She also brought along something she found in the house that scared her.”

  It took only a second to connect the dots. The sickening images of the night before came hurtling back. “The bloody blanket and scrubs.”

  My father nodded. “I don’t know what he’s doing, Cooper. And I don’t think I want to know.”

  I didn’t say anything. There were just some things I decided to keep to myself. My father didn’t need that extra sucker punch of truth.

  “I want you to come stay with me,” my father said.

  “I’ll be …” I was going to say fine, then decided my father was right. “Let me grab some stuff and come over later. I want to see Megan again first.”

  My father shook his head. “I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here.”

  “I’m not staying, Dad. Seriously, I’m stuffing a few clothes into a backpack and then booking it for Megan’s.”

  “I’ll wait, give you a ride.”

  I laid a hand on his arm. “Take the dog and go home to Faulkner. Make sure he’s okay. I’ll be fine. That thing is dead. There’s nothing to worry about anymore. You said yourself that Sam is at the police station.”

  My father weighed that for a moment, then let out a sigh. “You’re determined, aren’t you?”

  “Just … stronger today than I was before.”

  “All right. But if you’re not at my house in an hour, I’m sending out the SWAT team.”

  I laughed for the first time in what felt like forever, then hugged my father. “It’ll be cool. Promise.”

  He held me tightly, tighter than he ever had before. “I’m so glad you’re safe, Faulkner’s safe, and Megan’s home. Now that Sam’s probably going to be in custody and your mother’s back to being Mom again, I think everything’s going to be just fine.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Still, even as he hugged me …

  I wondered. Was it safe, or did I just want to believe that? Either way, I put on a brave face when my father drew back and reassured him for the thousandth time that I’d be okay and would be at his house before he knew it.

  I got out of the car. Whipple followed me, refusing to stay behind. “All right, boy, let’s go,” I said to him. “Last stop on the train back to normal.”

  Turns out I was wrong about more than one thing that day.

  A birthday cake sat on the countertop. My name had been scrawled across the top in dark red icing. That was the first sign that something was wrong.

  With all the excitement of last night and this morning, my mother couldn’t possibly have had time to bake me a cake for my birthday.

  But someone had.

  Dread curled a vise grip around my senses. I backed up, away from the cake, away from the blood-red Cooper written on it.

  “Going somewhere?”

  I spun around. Sam leaned against the doorway, as casual as a golfer waiting for a caddy. “I thought you were at the police station,” I said.

  “Did you learn nothing from your little stay down there?” He pushed off from the wall and took two steps toward me. “Hire a good lawyer and they can’t hold you for long.�
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  I took a step back. At my feet, Whipple began to growl at Sam. “I’m staying at my dad’s tonight.”

  Sam smiled, a smile that held no warmth. “Why? It’s your birthday. You need to be here. With your real family.”

  A chill ran through the room and me. I had to get out of there. If I could distract Sam, maybe I could get out the door.

  I glanced around the kitchen, looking for something, anything, that would buy me enough time to make a run for it.

  Only one thing sat on the counter. I darted to the right, grabbed the cake, and threw it at Sam. The frosting exploded across his face and chest, coating him with white, then red, making him look like a clown in a really bad accident. He roared with anger, but I was already gone.

  Whipple kept pace beside me as I charged down the steps of the deck and onto the lawn. It was twenty yards, maybe a little less, to the driveway and then another fifty yards to the nearest neighbor. I was younger than Sam, faster. I could outrun him.

  Then I heard him outside, calling first my name, then screaming words I didn’t recognize. Speaking that same ancient, guttural language the stick man had used.

  I kept running.

  Then the earth shifted beneath my feet, Sam’s perfectly manicured lawn pushing up in a growing hill, then opening in a yawning hole, the grass tearing into pieces on either side of my feet. I tried to jump over the crevice, but the earth grew up and out, expanding like hands that reached for my feet, my legs.

  The grass fists came down on me, taking me to the ground like two cornerbacks. Whipple yelped and leaped to the side. I clawed at the edge, pushing with my feet, digging and moving, refusing to let them drag me down.

  I could hear Sam running, his feet pounding against the ground. In seconds, he’d be here. And then what would happen?

  Push. Now.

  The grass was rising again, growing, the blades reaching for my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

  With a scream, I shoved as hard as I could and broke the first of the two earthy holds on me. No time to pause, to think; I shoved again, and the second gave way. I scrambled to my feet and began to run again, brushing off still-clinging clumps of grass, their roots curling around my skin.