The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  “Fine,” said her brother. “Let’s go back to that diner and get sandwiches. With fries,” he added hungrily. The smell outside the diner had just about drilled a hole in him.

  “But they’ll ask questions! And what’ll we say?”

  “OK! So let’s just leave, then. Let’s forget about eating and head out to Uncle Alex’s.” The diner called, but fear called from the opposite direction.

  “But what if we have to walk a really long way? We’ll faint, David!”

  He threw up his hands.

  “Besides,” added Katie with affected casualness, “we don’t know Uncle Alex.”

  Here was a new one. David stopped walking and his eyebrows lifted. “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Meaning we don’t know him. Like, now that we’re getting close I’m just thinking about that, that’s all.” Still her brother stared, and she stumbled on.

  “You have to admit it’s unusual,” she said, “him being a hermit and all. I mean, what kind of person does that?”

  “I dunno. A person who had a really bad fight with his girlfriend a really long time ago. That’s what Mom and Dad told us, anyway. Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Though by the way, if we do find him? We’re not going to ask.”

  “Give me a little credit.”

  “And what if it turns out he’s weird?” Katie continued, not replying. “What if he’s—what if he’s not nice? What if he won’t help?”

  “Now you say it.”

  “I know. I know! It’s just that now that we’re getting closer I’m realizing—”

  “That he’s a total unknown.”

  “Right! Who doesn’t like to be around people. And here we are, dumping ourselves right on top of him. Two kids, with a really big, really important problem.”

  So they wandered, neither deciding to eat nor deciding not to; neither fleeing to their uncle nor abandoning the plan. Five o’clock became five thirty and five thirty became six. It was summer, they were in the north, and the days were long. But even so, they knew that night would come. And their hunger tightened like a screw and their spirits sank.

  They were beginning to pass people they’d already seen once or even twice before, and they were beginning to draw looks. They knew it, but they felt so low in body and mind that they almost did not care.

  Then they rounded the wrong corner. Spying a quiet, leafy block lined with neat wooden houses where they had not yet been, they turned onto it with slow footsteps. Katie let her fingers trail along the top of the low picket fence surrounding the first house.

  Then her heart was slammed into her throat. An enormous dog—head low, fangs bared, and jaws slavering—tore snarling across the front lawn straight for them.

  The creature threw itself at the flimsy fence in a frenzy of barking. A hoarse scream burst from Katie’s lips and she stumbled backward, falling against her brother and nearly knocking him down.

  The instant the dog hit the fence it jerked sharply back. Now the children could see that it was tethered to a long chain that would not let it off the property. But the damage had been done. Perhaps at another time they would have laughed off a scare like this one, but not today—not on top of all their other troubles.

  So they freaked. Clutching each other they turned on their heels and fled, and when they reached Route 24 they didn’t stop. They ripped around the corner and kept running, up the sidewalk to the end of the block, across the street, and up the next block as well. By the time they paused to catch their breath, they had decided what to do.

  They’d had enough of Melville. They were hungry and they were scared, but it was time to move on. Whoever he might turn out to be and whatever he might turn out to do and regardless of what awaited them along the way, it was time to find their uncle Alex.

  “It sounded close; that’s the problem,” said Katie wearily. “It’s the way the directions sounded.”

  “Right,” said David. “That plus a little machine called a car. When Mom and Dad did this, they always drove.”

  They were both right, and they knew it. But it didn’t really matter. Nothing changed the fact that the trail to Alex’s, which they had always assumed you picked up right outside of town, was not right outside of town.

  They were supposed to remain on the road through Melville until about half a mile past the first bridge. Then they were supposed to find the rock that had been split by lightning, turn off the road, and head up the mountain. After that it was easy: Left at the creek and you’re there.

  It sounded like nothing. But that first bridge! It was now almost seven in the evening and they still hadn’t passed it. Soon it would be dark. In fact, in this hilly country the sun had already slipped behind a rocky peak, throwing them into shadow.

  They continued to walk, and their road began taking them more and more steeply uphill. Until this point, David had not really put it together that because their uncle lived on a mountain, they would be climbing, and that climbing was hard. His huffing breath and trudging feet fell into a rhythm, and he tried to concentrate on that instead of thinking about his stomach. Step—unh—step—unh—step . . .

  They would eat when they got to Alex’s, David told himself. Assuming they found him, that is. And assuming he fed them, and assuming their arrival didn’t make him mad, and assuming he didn’t turn out to be just too weird for them to get anywhere near him.

  Step—unh—step—unh—step . . . For as Katie had pointed out back in Melville, being a hermit, there was a fairly high probability that Uncle Alex would be as weird as a . . . as weird as a . . . as a—“What’s that noise?” David demanded, cutting off his own thoughts.

  “Water.” Katie’s head was down and she kept her answer short. She, too, had found a rhythm that she didn’t want to break.

  “Water! It is! Katie, where there’s water there might be a bridge!”

  “Not very smart, are we, David?”

  He was too relieved to take offense. Just knowing the bridge was ahead of them put fresh energy into his step, even as his nerves buzzed with something that could be excitement or could be fear. They were close. They were very, very close after all.

  The water beneath the bridge was bright and cold and so good that it almost felt like food. David crouched on a flat rock by the stream, his cupped hands full of the icy stuff. He had never tasted such water before. He splashed some over his face and it felt great. Their success with this part of their journey had restored his sense that things were working out and, David-like, he had entirely regained his good humor. He stretched out on his back and closed his eyes.

  Katie, on the other hand, was concerned. She had never really worried about the bridge. She’d known they would find it. But that rock! There were rocks everywhere. Split by lightning—what would that look like?

  “It’s getting dark, you know,” she said.

  “Right. Cooler,” David commented, his eyes still closed.

  She didn’t reply, and he sighed. She was going to go nuclear again, just when he was starting to feel OK.

  David opened his eyes and sat up. “We have flashlights, Kat. And they should last us to Uncle Alex’s. We’ve been pretty good about the batteries.”

  “Little, tiny flashlights. We have little, tiny lights that throw little, tiny beams. There are thousands of boulders, David! We can’t be looking with little flashlights for lightning cracks in thousands of boulders! And after we find it—if we find it—then what?”

  “We climb through the woods.”

  “Which way? Straight between the two peaks, right? Are you going to find them with your flashlight?”

  “It’s ten after seven. We have another hour of daylight. An hour and a half, maybe.”

  But Katie stood, dried her hands on her shorts, and started clambering back up over the rocks. For a few long moments David continued to lie still. Then, resentfully, he rose to follow her.

  But Katie had set a driving pace and by the time he caught up, she had stopped walk
ing. She was sitting by the side of the road. Her back rested against a massive boulder, round like a ball but taller and wider than a house.

  The boulder’s soft, sloping sides were covered with mosses and lichen, and shrubbery sprouted from crevices in its crumbly surface. It looked as if it had sat on that spot since the glaciers receded a couple of ice ages ago. But inches from Katie’s right arm the rock was sliced wide open. A great slab of it had fallen away, revealing two perfectly straight, perfectly flat cut surfaces. It looked as if a knife had been taken to a ball of cheese.

  David gazed at the slashed stone. “Lightning,” he said briefly.

  Then his eyes roved to the side of the rock and he saw it. Had he not been looking for it he would certainly have missed it. It didn’t look like trails do in pictures. It wasn’t at all like the trails he had walked with his family, when he and Katie and their parents had gone exploring in the park or the country on weekends, back in their other lifetime. It was so faint, it almost could not be called a trail at all.

  But curving around the fallen piece of rock—suggested by a bent branch, signaled in a smooth patch of earth—was the barest, faintest suggestion that someone had walked there before.

  There could be no question who that walker was.

  “I guess this means he’s real,” said David. Katie did not ask who he meant.

  They had thought the light would fade gradually away. They had thought they would have time to prepare for the total darkness—to tighten their shoelaces one last time, to check David’s watch, to orient themselves with one final look toward the peaks that were their only guide.

  But that was not how it happened. Darkness dropped like a curtain. One moment they were squinting for the faint traces of their path, and the next they were in utter blackness. Beneath the thick cover of the trees there was not even moonlight to guide them.

  “We should never have headed into the woods when it was almost night,” said Katie when they realized what had happened. “Now we’ll have to wait. We’ll have to stop, and sit, and walk again when the sun’s up.”

  “I’m not ‘sitting’ anywhere,” said David. In the dark, his voice made the angry little quote marks that his fingers could not. “And we ‘headed into the woods’ because we wanted to get where we were going. I’m hungry, Kat, and I’m thirsty, too. I’m not waiting while all of that gets worse.”

  “You’re going to walk all night?”

  “I’ll rest at Uncle Alex’s, after I’ve eaten. I won’t rest in a thornbush”—angrily, he dragged a bramble from his hair—“when I’m starving.”

  “We’ll get lost. The sun will come up and we’ll look around and we’ll have no idea where we are.”

  “We’ll figure it out. We have flashlights. It’s not that complicated.” David snapped on his light and Katie caught a glimpse of his scratched and weary face before he turned it on the bushes in front of him. “There!” he announced angrily, waving the beam at a barely discernable gap between two shrubs. “See that hole? That’s it—that’s the way.” And he ducked, shouldering his way in.

  “Oh—that’s ridiculous! That—that is such a bad idea!”

  But David did not stop. So with deep misgivings Katie followed him.

  Neither of them knew just how long they labored up the hill, but they knew hours passed. Worse yet, neither of them believed they were headed the right way.

  Within minutes, they forgot where the peaks lay. After that they tried aiming uphill, on the theory that they were supposed to be climbing. But there wasn’t just one way up. From some spots the ground would seem to rise around them in all four directions, and in others it seemed to drop down.

  Continuing to walk under these conditions was absolutely wrong, and by now they both knew it. But somehow they could not stop. They just kept hoping that each new footstep would correct the last bad one. Back over there—they had surely done that part wrong. But surely now they were doing it right. And so they wore themselves out, walking in a circle for all they knew, and beating at the bushes with sticks as if they could beat away the knowledge that they had traveled all this way just to find themselves alone on an unknown mountain in the middle of the night, friendless, hungry, lost, and on a fool’s errand.

  Then the moment came when they could beat away these thoughts no more. It happened when their flashlights, having glowed faithfully through thick and thin, finally faded, quivered, and went out. David’s went first. Katie’s was not far behind it.

  “We shouldn’t have turned both of them on at once,” David said, amazed that they had been so dumb. “If we’d used them one at a time they might have lasted until morning.”

  “What difference does it make?” Katie dashed hers to the ground and sank to the earth cross-legged. Without their small lights, the night was staggeringly black. She was consumed by despair. “David? Just tell me one thing, David. Why are we here?”

  He did not reply, so she went on.

  “I know why we’re here,” she said. “And I know it was my idea, but it wasn’t my fault. We didn’t have any choices.” For some reason it was terribly important—now, when they were down to zero—to know there was nothing they could have done differently. Katie concentrated, thinking back. “We could have starved to death in the old house with the rats, or we could have come here, where maybe we’ll starve on this mountain.”

  “The mountain’s better,” said David. “Even if we do starve, I’d a thousand times rather be here than where those people—those Katkajanians—might have come back and gotten us again. If I’m going to die,” he added grimly, “I’m just going to die, that’s all. I’m not letting those freaks kill me and I’m not letting them watch.”

  But Katie wasn’t really listening. “And I guess we could have told the police,” she said, still thinking. “But they’d have gone straight to our house to talk to Trixie, and they might have believed her, and then Mom and Dad and Theo would have been killed.”

  “That’s really why, you know,” said David.

  “Why what?”

  “Why we’re here. You were asking? We’re here because of Mom and Dad and Theo. We’re here because we weren’t ready to write them off. We wanted to try to save them. We were hoping we could fix it, get everything back—you know.”

  “Was that dumb?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said, reflecting.

  “I guess I don’t think so either,” she agreed. “I mean, I think it made sense then—it made sense to try, so we did. But you know what? I think at this point, we’d probably better figure out what we’re going to do if we fail.”

  With this, a long silence fell between them. And into this silence, sounds began to creep: the sounds of the night. It was still very dark, but their eyes had adjusted just enough for them to see vague shapes and shadows in the faint moonlight. A soft, fitful breeze rustled the leaves overhead and a mosquito whined in Katie’s ear. She slapped at it, missing. Cicadas whirred in the distance and somewhere a branch snapped as something pounced in the underbrush. From far away, the low notes of flowing water warbled softly beneath it all.

  David sat with closed eyes. He knew he should be thinking of a plan, but his mind was simply too exhausted to do anything but float. For a few moments it floated on the soft music of the water. His mind rode on the water as if on a carpet, a beautiful floating carpet. Must be a creek, from the sound of it, a sparkling, rippling creek like a carpet unfurling through the wood—

  A creek. He sat bolt upright. “Katie, that’s a creek—listen. Don’t you hear it?”

  “Yes, and I’m thirsty too, David. But I’m not going anywhere right now. Not even for a—”

  “I’m not talking about drinking! Think a minute. What were we looking for, walking up that hill? Where were we supposed to turn?”

  “The creek. Oh! Oh, David. Do you think that’s it?”

  But he was already scrambling to his feet. “It has to be. And we can hear it, Katie. We won’t need our flashlights; w
e can follow our ears.” He looked wildly around in the direction of the sound, then plunged into the surrounding underbrush.

  “David, wait!” But once again she got up and followed.

  It had been maddening to try to make out a nearly invisible trail with two tiny flashlights. Nonetheless, it was even worse to chase a fitful, dancing, and distant sound through an obstacle course in near total blackness. Sometimes they thought the sound was actually getting fainter and once, despairingly, they lost it altogether. But after a long while—it was impossible to say how long—the rippling and burbling of the water began to grow stronger.

  Either they were getting closer, or they were now so hungry and tired that they were hallucinating. In a confused way Katie realized this was possible. She had never before known such hunger. She felt as if an iron fist were balled up in her stomach, and she knew the pain and weakness it caused were playing strange tricks on her mind. She began to feel as if her parents could see and hear her. And then she found herself staring at her mother’s face. Worse yet, she didn’t mind. She could not stop gazing at it: dark and oval-shaped, with the deep black eyes beneath the black hair, the warm, slow smile. It presented itself to Katie’s exhausted mind as vividly as if her mom were right there, and it helped.

  Katie’s stomach twisted in agony. Without even thinking she stripped a fistful of leaves off a passing branch, shoved it into her mouth, and bit down. The bitter taste made her gag and spit, shattering the vision of her mother’s face.

  She could have been poisoned!

  “Katie!”

  As David’s voice broke through her thoughts, she heard the water once again. This time there was no question that it had grown louder.

  “I think this is it! I think we’re just about there!”

  The bushes around them were now ferns—Katie could feel their long fronds—and the sound of the water was very near. She suddenly realized that she was desperately thirsty. David was plunging down a slope; she could hear him beneath her. Then she heard a new sound in the water. She heard splashing. He was there.