“I don’t need you anymore, you hideous troll,” the creature said, then reached for Sam and yanked him onto the edge of the well.
Sam’s eyes widened in surprise, then anger. “If I die, you die!” He grabbed Auguste around the neck and plunged the knife into the creature’s heart. The two of them hung there for a moment on the edge of the well, caught in the vines’ hold. The creature clawed at Sam and Sam stabbed him back, each of them roaring in fury and agony, before the vines finally gave way and they both disappeared, falling down, down, down, into the inky darkness of the well.
Silence. And then the call of a bird. The flutter of wings, the scuffle of squirrels in the trees. The world slowly coming back to life in the forest.
I looked around. The trees had gone back to their places, the disruptions in the earth looking like freshly turned soil. A few branches and leaves smoldered in piles here and there, quickly becoming ashes. My mother stood beside me, breathing hard. “Are you okay, Mom?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
I nodded.
She drew me to her side and breathed in the scent of my hair, placing a soft kiss on my forehead. “I love you, Cooper,” she said, her voice the one I knew, the one I remembered. “And I’m so, so sorry. For everything.”
I leaned into her. This was my mom. Really my mom. Whipple came up beside us and pressed his body to our legs, giving his seal of approval. “I love you, too, Mom. And it’s okay. It’s all okay.”
We stood like that for a long moment. I think one of us cried.
“Do you think that thing is gone?” my mother asked.
I took the torch she’d fashioned out of branches, feeling a hundred times more grown up than I had two weeks ago. “Let’s make sure it is.” I walked over to the well, lighting all the champagne-colored grapes that grew along the perimeter, then firing up the vines crawling over the edge, letting the flames carry down and into the dark depths. Then together we grabbed a second branch, lit it afire, and threw it down, watching its path. We saw the flames flicker, then go out. And we heard …
Nothing.
No laughing. No scratching. No movement.
Then we laid the torch to more dry autumn leaves. Just as they began to catch and turn the woods to bright orange, my mother took my hand and together, with Whipple trailing behind us, we ran home.
It was over.
Mr. Ring.” My father let out a sigh. “Tell me you have something intelligent to say.”
Mike grinned. “I can tell you that, but it doesn’t mean it’s true, Mr. Warner.”
My father rolled his eyes and went back to the chalkboard. He started writing, causing a mini snowstorm to start falling onto his shoes. “Don’t forget your final papers for Hamlet are due tomorrow-“
Collective groan.
“And since you all loved Hamlet so much, I thought we’d do another Shakespearean classic for our next selection.” He wrote seven letters on the board in his precise script. “Macbeth.” Then he turned back to us and beamed, as if he’d announced we’d be reading comic books.
“Dude!” Joey said, elbowing me. “Will you talk to your father? Get him some happy pills or something? The guy is torturing us.”
I smiled. “Joey, you don’t know my dad that well. He is happy right now. He could be a walking ad for sunshine.” Lately my father had been singing in the shower, cooking pancakes in the morning, smiling on the way to school. And all because my mother was back home. Things were back to normal, which meant Faulkner barely talked to me, my parents read the paper together every night, and we all lived in the house near the playground and down the street from Megan.
It was as if the past two years had been erased. Almost, anyway. When I went to sleep at night, I could swear I still heard laughter and my name being called, but those were nightmares, and what was happening during the day was just too perfect to worry about a few leftover bad dreams.
Joey shook his head. “You are so weird lately. What has gotten into you?”
“Nothing.” I traced the outline of “Ken Luvs Lisa 4-Eva” on my desk with my fingernail. They still loved each other, and that meant the world was still all right. I tugged a pencil out of my backpack, and beneath Ken’s permanent declaration, I leaded one of my own.
Cooper Luvs Megan.
Forever.
“Mr. Warner?”
I popped my head up. “Yeah?”
“Do you have anything meaningful to add to this conversation?” my father asked.
I thought for a second. “Does Macbeth end better than Hamlet? I’d like to see the good guy live in this one.”
My father grinned. “You have a point.” He turned back to the chalkboard and swiped away the seven letters. “Let’s rethink that choice, shall we?”
My eyes met my father’s. He might not be my dad by blood, but heck, when had that ever counted? Where it mattered was where it mattered. In my head, in my heart. “Yeah, Dad. Let’s do that.”
Joey slapped me on the back, called me a hero.
He had no idea.
After class, Megan caught up to me. She slipped her hand into mine. Her touch felt right, perfect. I squeezed her hand and gave her a smile.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” I grinned. Like an idiot. But come on, I was still a high school freshman. I hadn’t exactly grown a lot of new brain cells overnight. “Megan, I need to ask you something.”
She paused midstep. The red bandanna was in her hair today, and I was half tempted to reach out and touch it. “What?”
I paused. Ever since that day last week when we’d climbed out of the well, our relationship had been in a holding pattern. We’d been together-but not officially dating, as if neither of us wanted to disturb the status quo. I had avoided asking her out again because I wasn’t so sure she wanted to date a guy who was related to a creature that ate people.
I mean, that’s not the kind of thing you put on the family tree.
But if there was one thing the past couple of weeks had taught me, it was that life was too short and too weird to spend it not taking risks.
“Do you …” I paused. “Do you …”
She grinned and parked a fist on her hip. “Don’t tell me, Cooper Warner, that you’re afraid to ask me out after all you’ve gone through?”
“Of course I’m not afraid.” But I hesitated again. Would she really want me after all this? Want to kiss me? Want to be with me?
“Well?” She arched a brow. The crowds of Maple Valley High kept moving around us in a wave. Faulkner came up behind me and bounced off my back.
On purpose. In the way only an obnoxious older brother could. Tor favor, hermano, ” he said, then looped an arm around Shelley.
“Hey!” I said to him.
He grinned. “Check your pocket, dude. Su padre le dio un regalo.”
Him and the Spanish again. I was about to deport him. “What?”
He rolled his eyes. “Dad gave you a gift. Said if you flunk your Hamlet paper, he’s taking it back. Told me to tell you that you, of all people in his class, should get Hamlet.” Then he tugged Shelley closer and whispered something in her ear. She giggled and leaned into him before the two of them headed down the hall.
I dug in my back pocket, where Faulkner had reverse pickpocketed me, and pulled out a shiny new cell phone. A grin spread across my face so wide, I thought it might explode. “I never thought I’d say this, but my father is cool.”
Megan smiled. “He’s always been cool. Your mom, too.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “They’re not too bad for parents.”
The warning bell rang. Megan arched a brow again, still waiting for me to get to the point.
Oh yeah, that. I had, like, thirty seconds to ask her before someone else did. “Will you go to the Freshman Fall Dance with me on Friday?” The words poured out of me in a jumble. “And be my girlfriend again?”
She grinned. “I thought you’d never ask, Cooper.” Then she stood on her tiptoes and gave me a kiss. A
nd sent my world into a tailspin.
This had to be the best day ever.
I hurried off to my next class, still thinking about Megan, not really paying attention to anything else. I headed down the hall by the front offices and nearly ran into Sergeant Ring.
“Cooper. A word?”
I ducked into the principal’s office with Mike’s dad while the gossip mill got busy in the hall. Seeing me get pulled into the office with a uniformed cop would be enough to keep people talking about me for a year.
“We found your stepfather,” Sergeant Ring said as soon as the door shut behind us, taking a seat on the corner of Mr. Hinkley’s desk. Mr. Hinkley wasn’t there-probably out busting tardies. “At the bottom of the well.”
“Was he … ?” I let the sentence trail off. The last time I saw Sam, my mother and I had called the fire department as soon as we had left his land. But by the time the firefighters arrived, it was too late. The fire had moved extremely quickly, and the entire Jumel grounds were burned to a crisp-the woods, the winery, the McMansion, everything. Strangely, the inferno hadn’t spread beyond the bounds of the Jumel property. It had taken them nearly a week to sort through the rubble.
Mike’s dad nodded. “We found the skeletons of his workers down there, too. Looks like he might have been respon sible. He must have realized we were putting two and two together with the disappearances and leaped to his death.”
“He had been acting really weird lately.” Understatement of the year.
Sergeant Ring leaned in closer. Human lie detector. He stared at me for a long, long moment before drawing back. “And that well-it wasn’t like a regular well. It had a tunnel in it. Very odd.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Sam never told me anything. He didn’t like me much.”
Sergeant Ring just nodded. He ran a hand through his hair. “Hey, that wine from your stepfather’s office-it was bad or something,” he said. “Tasted like crap. Made me sicker than a damned dog. I swore off drinking after that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I had some last night, and I tell you, I don’t know why people said that vineyard was so good, because that stuff was awful.” He closed the gap between us, back in menacing-cop mode. “You are going to keep that between us, though, right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Mike’s dad had drunk the wine last night. After all of this had ended. Maybe everything had been true, and once the Jumel legacy was over, the wine spoiled, too. If it sobered up Mike’s dad, hey, maybe there was one bright side to this whole thing. I toyed with the dictionary on the shelf. Tried to act cool. “Did you, ah, find anything else down there?”
“No. Just your stepfather and the skeletons of the dead babies he’d `lost’ and the six missing workers. Nothing else. I’m sorry about your stepfather.” Mike’s dad went on about contacting my mom for funeral arrangements or something, but I wasn’t listening.
There’d been no other skeletons, no other bodies.
Meaning they hadn’t found the creature.
Had he disappeared, like the vine man I’d obliterated on the stairs, when he died?
Or had he survived?
My gaze went to the window. The warm day suddenly felt cold. No one could have survived that fall, the stabbing by Sam, the fire …
Could he have?
But he had lasted two hundred years, when any ordinary thing would have died …
No, he was dead, I decided and started to turn away.
My new cell phone rang, and I dug it out of my pocket. Who could have the phone number already? Even I didn’t know the number. I flipped the top and put it to my ear. “Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello?”
And then a sound started. At first I thought it was the chatter of static, the hum of a bad connection. But the noise intensified and began to grow in volume, and a chill ran down my spine.
There was only one sound like that in the world. The quiet, evil undertow of-
Laughter.
A. J. WHITTEN is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling author Shirley Jump writing with her teenage daughter, Amanda. A shared love of horror movies and a desire to spice up the Shakespeare stories that are required reading in high school led to their collaboration on The Well. Learn more at www.ajwhitten.com.
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