Infestation

by Heidi Lang

  “My mom’s loosened up a tiny bit,” Rae said. “Honestly, I think the way Patrick pitched the internship program to her helped a lot. Also, Ava talked to her.” Rae sighed. “She actually listens to Ava.”

  “Why are you both grounded?” Nate asked.

  Rae and Vivienne exchanged looks. “It’s classified,” Vivienne told him, grinning. “We could tell you…”

  “But then we’d have to kill you,” Rae finished, laughing.

  “All three of us are supposed to be a team, you know,” Nate huffed.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Vivienne waved a hand. “Speaking of being a team, my mom told me she’ll be out front in half an hour to pick me up, so we’d better hurry.”

  “If I were a dead body, where would I be?” Rae studied the fountain. Water spouted from the goat’s horns, and its eyes seemed to stare right through her.

  “Obviously in the ground,” Nate said.

  “Someone still sounds a little sulky,” Vivienne said.

  “I am not being sulky.”

  “Are too.”

  Nate sighed loudly. “I’m going to stop this now, because one of us needs to have a little maturity.”

  Vivienne stuck her tongue out at him.

  Rae laughed. “Anyhow, I know dead bodies would be in the ground. I meant where in the square should we look? It’s not like we came prepared with shovels.”

  “I have a shovel.” Vivienne patted her giant backpack.

  Rae’s eyebrows shot up. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “We’ll get in trouble if we start digging here,” Nate said.

  “What about over there? In the trees?” Rae pointed. “That’s where I’d want to start looking anyhow.”

  “Why?” Nate asked.

  “See how those trees are smaller than the others? They’re young, freshly planted probably in the last decade or two. If I were trying to cover up the bodies I hadn’t felt like digging up, I’d consider planting trees over them.”

  Nate stared at her.

  “What?” Rae asked.

  “Are you sure you’re not a serial killer?”

  “Like she’d admit it to you.” Vivienne looped her arm through Rae’s. “Let’s go.”

  They strode across the grass, avoiding a couple of middle-aged runners and a woman out walking three pugs before reaching the trees. As soon as they were under those tangled branches, Rae started second-guessing her plan. Did she really think they could meander around and just stumble onto a skeleton? What was she thinking?

  There were plenty of mysteries in Whispering Pines. Rae was sure they could find something else hidden in plain sight. But there was something about this one that tugged at her. As she stepped over roots and ducked beneath branches, she felt a growing sense of premonition. It was like the knowledge that your phone was about to ring a second before it did. And she knew she would find something here.

  She separated from Vivienne and walked slowly over the ground. There were wide spaces in between trees, like bald patches on a person’s head. One of those spots did look a little loose, almost as if someone had been digging there recently.

  Rae moved closer, noticing lines in the dirt. Like something heavy had been dragged across it.

  “Hey, Rae-Rae?” Vivienne called.

  Rae turned.

  “I think I found—”

  The ground underneath Rae gave way, and she fell, screaming, through the damp earth.

  10. CADEN

  Caden followed Gary the Goatman into the Watchful Woods, his thoughts drifting back to his most recent experiences in this forest. Like the time he, Rae, and Vivienne had been chased through the trees by the Unseeing. Or later, when he ran through the woods to save Rae, accompanied by the ghostly presence of his brother. It felt a little like those times now, and tension thrummed through his body like a plucked guitar string. At least today he had really strong backup: his mom was with him.

  Caden glanced at her. She had changed into a pair of jeans and tall hiking boots; the ticks in Connecticut were no joke. She was wearing her most expressionless face, her mouth a sharp line, and she’d put all her inner shields up in an impenetrable wall. Which meant she absolutely did not want Caden to guess what she was feeling.

  Definitely not a good sign.

  Gary, on the other hand, had fear leaking from him like pus from a yellow, festering wound.

  They reached a short stone wall covered in moss and stretching in either direction before disappearing beneath the pines. Caden knew this wall wove all around the forest. Its stones were dark with age, dating back to the colonial days. Most people in Whispering Pines believed it was meant to separate property, but his mom had told him that a coven of witches had built it as some sort of protection against the supernatural. Supposedly its pattern shifted daily. Caden believed that. There was something a little strange about this wall.

  He put his hand on top of it, feeling the soft moss, and beneath it, a faint vibration. Like he was in a car speeding down a smooth road, only the barest hint of movement noticeable.

  Gary scowled. “These walls. Supposed to help, did you know that? Fat lot of good they did.”

  “Help with what?” Caden asked.

  “Keeping us safe from the things that don’t belong here.” Gary shook his head. “My nephew was messing around with this wall recently,” he told Caden’s mom. “He couldn’t have… you know, ruined anything?”

  “I doubt that. The spells set in this stone are very strong.” She put both hands on top of it and closed her eyes, concentrating. “The wards are still up.” She opened her eyes. “But this wall was only ever meant to be a fail-safe. Not a first line of defense.”

  Gary sighed. “I know. That’s why I had the goats.” He hoisted himself over the wall. “Coming?”

  They walked through the woods for what had to be a good hour. Caden tried not to be anxious. “Are we close?” he finally asked.

  Gary frowned at Caden’s mom. “Told you we shouldn’t have brought the boy. This here is a job for adults. Not scared little kids.”

  “I’m not nearly as scared as you are,” Caden said, annoyed.

  Gary glanced sidelong at him. “That’s just ’cause you haven’t seen it yet.” He sighed and added, “And it’s not too much farther. I like to keep my goats close to water, so we’ve just got the creek to cross, and I’m in the clearing on the other side.”

  Everyone in Whispering Pines knew that the size and shape of the Watchful Woods shifted constantly, much like the walls woven through it. Maybe the creek wasn’t just a place for Gary’s goats to drink. Maybe it also served as a landmark, so he could find his way back home.

  And maybe Gary wasn’t the only living thing in these woods using that creek as a landmark…

  “What did you say it was that attacked you?” Caden asked.

  “I didn’t say. It’s one of those things you need to see with your own eyes to really believe.”

  Caden glanced at his mom, but she didn’t seem concerned. He supposed that in her line of work, most things were probably unexplainable until they were experienced firsthand. If this became his line of work, he’d have to get used to that, too.

  Just thinking that made Caden feel like he were being stuffed in a box, his whole life contained within this tiny town full of people who didn’t understand him.

  Rae had understood him, though. She’d known what it was like to have rumors destroy your reputation and separate you from your friends. And she’d been one of the few people who also recognized the strangeness running underneath the surface of Whispering Pines—recognized it and didn’t turn away.

  When Patrick had asked Caden and Rae to sign up for his internship, and they had both been united in their refusal, Caden had realized how much it meant to him to have a real friend. A solid ally. Before Rae, he’d only had his brother, and Aiden would always be about his own interests first.

  But then Rae had changed her mind. Even though Caden had promised to help her find her
dad, she’d decided to turn to Patrick and Green On! instead for their assistance. So obviously she didn’t feel as strongly about their friendship as he did.

  Caden ducked under a low-hanging branch, the echo of that betrayal clinging to him like campfire smoke. But underneath it for the first time he recognized another emotion: fear.

  He was afraid of Patrick.

  Was that the real reason he’d decided to block out Rae? Was he really that big of a coward?

  “Creek’s just through here,” Gary said.

  Caden blinked, and now he heard the sound of flowing water and the faint rustling of animals nearby. It was a comforting noise; animals usually went quiet when they sensed danger. He pushed his way through some scratchy bushes, and there it was.

  It was a small creek, the kind that ran dry in the summer and flooded after a large rain. Right now it was still pretty shallow, barely more than a trickle since the fall storms hadn’t come yet. Caden followed his mom and Gary across it and over to a large grassy clearing. In the center stood a tall canvas yurt, the sides the same deep, dark green as the forest, the roof a charcoal gray. Next to the yurt stood a long, sturdy wooden goat pen. Inside, a trip of goats milled noisily about, eating the grass and watching the intruders.

  A white goat with a wide brown patch over one eye picked its way to the edge of the enclosure. “Baaa,” it called.

  “Did you miss me, Blueberry?” Gary scratched the goat behind her ear, and she tilted her head back, her eyes closing happily. The yellow cloud of fear that had been bubbling out of him vanished for a few minutes, replaced by a pink mist of affection, so bright and warm that Caden thought it might actually be visible to everyone.

  But then Gary dropped his hand and the fear came back in a rush. “This way.” He led them around the back of the goat pen and over to a small shed hunched innocently next to the tree line. He unlocked the shed and threw the doors wide, flooding the space with afternoon sunlight, then reached along the side of the wall and flipped a switch. An overhead light flickered on, chasing away any remaining shadows and illuminating something large and lumpy covered by a rug in the center.

  “I had to drag it in here,” Gary said. “It made my goats nervous.”

  “Let’s see it,” Caden’s mom said.

  Gary bent down and gripped the edge of the rug. He paused, and then in one quick motion, he yanked the rug off.

  Caden stared. For a few seconds he wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was looking at. Whatever it was had hundreds of jointed legs, all curled inward. “A… giant bug?”

  “Near as I can tell,” Gary said. “Although I’ve never in my life seen a bug like that before. And living out here, I’ve seen my fair share of insects.”

  “Where did it come from?” Caden craned his head for a closer look, keeping his feet firmly planted outside that shed. The creature was almost as wide as a person, its exoskeleton an oily black like wet pavement. It reminded him of one of the prehistoric centipedes he’d seen in a science book. The kind that used to get seven, eight, nine feet long.

  “From the woods.” Gary wiped his hand on his jeans, as if the rug covering the thing had been contaminated.

  “Did you decapitate it?” Caden’s mom asked.

  Caden wondered what Gary should have done with it instead. Kept it as a pet? Sure, the goats wouldn’t have been amused, but it would have made one heck of a guard dog…

  “Had to,” Gary said. “First it attacked my goats, then it went after my nephew. Luckily I keep my axe nice and sharp.” He bared his teeth in a smile that almost masked his worry.

  “Did it hurt your nephew?” Caden’s mom crouched, not touching the insect, just looking at the edge where the axe had split it. Some kind of strange goop had hardened around the wound and glistened sickeningly in the light overhead. Something about it just looked… wrong to Caden, and he knew it didn’t belong in this world. It had come from somewhere else. He could feel the truth of that knowledge just as sharply as the fear still leaking from Gary.

  “My nephew was fine. Scared him away from the outdoor life, though.” Gary shrugged. “Probably for the best. I’d been trying to get him to go back home for weeks.”

  “He was living with you?” Caden glanced at the yurt. It didn’t look that big.

  “Yeah, it was a tight fit, but family is family, right? I couldn’t exactly kick him out. He’s doing well now, though. Last I heard he got placed in some fancy internship or something.”

  “Internship? At Green On!?” Caden’s stomach sank.

  “Where else?”

  “Where else indeed,” Caden’s mom said. She stood up, frowning. “Sorry about your goat.”

  “My goats are just fine too. I gave Waffles away to my nephew. Poor thing was too shook up to stay out here, but I got another one—”

  “One of them is missing.” Her frown deepened. “Or did I miscount? I only saw eight.”

  Gary’s eyebrows lifted, his forehead turning into a map of wrinkles. He turned and ran for the goat pen.

  “How many is he supposed to have?” Caden asked, amazed that his mom knew one was missing.

  “He needs nine if he wants to live safely in the Watchful Woods.”

  “Why? What happens if he only has eight?”

  She pursed her lips. “Possibly nothing. But…” She looked up at the sky, where the sun had started slowly sinking. “Hopefully he can get himself a ninth goat before sundown so he doesn’t have to find out.”

  Caden glanced at the bug, then away again quickly. There was something about all those legs and how they were curled inward that seriously freaked him out. “Do you think it”—he jerked his chin at the thing—“came from the Other Place?”

  She shook her head, a strand of black hair sticking to her sweaty forehead. “It doesn’t feel like it.” She prodded the bug gently with one booted foot. “Honestly, I don’t know where it came from.” She turned her back on it. “I’m going to check on Gary.” And she left Caden standing there in the doorway of the shed.

  He made himself look at the giant centipede again, opening up his other senses to try to feel it out. He braced himself for the Other Place’s energy to roll over him like a wave at the beach, but nothing happened. Maybe his mom was right. But… where else could it have come from? Green On! had opened a rift to pull Aiden out, and their lab wasn’t far from this spot. The only thing that made sense was that this thing had skittered out with Aiden.

  Caden walked closer to the bug. Something else about this corpse bothered him, some other fact that niggled against his brain like a half-remembered song lyric. He knelt down near the head. Against the dark carapace, he picked out the details of a face. Almost humanlike, only with multiple eyes stacked one beneath the other, and a mouth full of pinchers.

  He could imagine that face scuttling toward him, pinchers wide…

  He stumbled back from the shed, almost tripping over his own feet in his rush to rejoin his mom and Gary.

  “—can’t get Waffles back,” Gary was saying. “That would break my nephew’s heart. But there’s a farm not far from here. They’ve been having some trouble with their own livestock vanishing, but I should still be able to get another goat from them.” He ran a hand through his hair, his expression bewildered. “I just can’t believe Priceless Art wandered off. I checked the fence this morning.”

  “Maybe she will turn up,” Caden’s mom said. “But the sun’s almost down, so…”

  “I know. I know. I’m going. Are you—”

  “We’ll be here for a little longer to search the area,” she said. “But we can’t stay long.”

  Gary looked up at the sky. “I understand. And… thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I’m not sure what I can do about this except hope it’s just a onetime occurrence.”

  Gary opened his mouth, then closed it again with an audible snap. Caden got a wave of emotion from the man, but it was a tangle as chaotic as a bag of yarn left in a room full of kittens. “If you find an
ything…” Gary swallowed.

  “We’ll let you know.” She smiled and rested a hand on his shoulder. “You did good, Gary. I know it wasn’t easy for you, coming to see me.”

  He nodded, then set off again through the woods without another word.

  Caden watched him vanish into the trees. “What’s with the goat names?”

  “Oh, he names them after their favorite food.”

  Caden thought about “Priceless Art” but didn’t ask. “What are we looking for?” he asked instead.

  “Gary… doesn’t like people. He rents out his goats, you know, to help trim weeds in yards, that sort of thing. So he’ll talk to the folks in town then. But otherwise he keeps to himself. And yet he came to me.”

  Caden frowned. “That corpse wasn’t fresh.”

  “Exactly. He killed it days ago. So why come to me now? And with such urgency?”

  “You think he saw more of those things?”

  “I think,” she said slowly, “that his goat isn’t lost in the woods.”

  Caden tried not to imagine more of those bugs skittering through the grasses. Suddenly he wanted to climb very high up a tree and stay there forever. “Did it eat the goat?” he asked, his voice small.

  “I don’t know,” she said sharply. “I’m not an entomologist.” She sighed. “Sorry, honey. I’m just… I’m not a fan of bugs.” She wiped her hands on her pant legs, then gave him a quick, tight smile. “So let’s do this search quickly and get out of here. I don’t want to be in these woods after dark, either.”

  * * *

  An hour of bushwhacking later, and Caden was ready to call it quits and go home. His stomach had started growling, his nerves were shot, and his legs felt ready to collapse. Plus, he was dirty and sweaty and scratched all over. They’d discovered a large hole dug under the fence of the goat pen, but other than that, nothing. Still, his mom insisted on combing through every inch of nearby forest. Part of him was impressed with her work ethic. But it was a very small part.