Crooked Hills

by Cullen Bunn

  Wind buffeted me as I stepped outside. Bits of dirt flew in my face, stinging my skin, and I held my hand up to shield my eyes. Clouds of fog drifted across the yard, swirling, taking spectral shapes. In the distance, dark clouds covered the sky, and lightning streaked down to the earth, chased by a peal of thunder. The moon was blanketed by the clouds, and only a few feeble rays of light stretched down to the yard. A storm was brewing, but it wasn’t raining yet.

  Another jagged bolt of lightning lit the sky, and in the flash I could see the animal pens. The goats stood at the edge of the fence, their hourglass-shaped eyes reflective in the sudden flashes of light. They stuck their heads out and cried, their tongues wagging in their mouths.

  “B-baaaaa-aa!”

  Behind the goats, chickens dashed back and forth in a nervous frenzy. They were supposed to be locked in the henhouse during the night, but someone had obviously let them out. The door to the chicken coop slammed open and closed, the hinges shrieking, the door battered against the frame by the wind.

  I didn’t see any sign of my brother.

  I rushed to the animal pens and started to undo the gate. I planned on herding the chickens back into the coop before the storm swept across the yard. But as I approached the gate, I noticed something ghastly.

  None of the chickens had heads!

  They ran back and forth, their wings flapping, like they had just gotten the axe. But they never flopped over and lay dead on the ground. And somehow they made a wet cackling sound, even though they had no mouths!

  I stumbled away from the gate.

  No way was I going in there with a flock of undead chickens!

  Lightning jumped across the sky, closer now, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned around, and saw an old woman scuttling across the yard. She wore a filthy robe that flapped behind her like bat wings. Her hair was white and stringy, falling into her eyes like a cobweb mask. She carried a baby goat under one arm—and my brother under the other!

  “Alex!”

  Before I took a step, a mangy yellow dog jumped out of the darkness to block my path. It snarled and barked, drool dripping from its jaws.

  Its eyes looked like the eyes of a person.

  The old woman leaped into the air and landed on top of the sagging shed. A ruby red ring gleamed from one of her fingers, like fire blazing through blood-slathered glass. She scrabbled across the top, the sagging roof creaking beneath her feet, then jumped into the air again and vanished into the fog. Alex looked back and reached out for me.

  “Charlieeeeeeeee,” he cried.

  And he was gone.

  The dog jumped on me and clamped its slobbery jaws around my throat.

  I woke up.

  A dream! My heart pounded in my chest, but I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t usually have nightmares, but with everything I’d been thinking about lately—unwanted vacations, annoying little brothers, headless chickens, freaky dogs, and hideous witches—it didn’t surprise me much.

  I glanced over at my brother—

  But Alex wasn’t in his bed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE BRIEF MOMENT OF UNCERTAINTY PASSED. Although Alex was gone, just as he had been in my nightmare, his bed was neat and tidy. Instead of the ghastly glow of the moon, bright light streamed through the window. I squinted and rubbed my eyes. I looked at the clock and gaped in surprise at the time. 11:00! I never slept that late! Usually, I liked to rise early and squeeze as much out of school-free days as I could.

  Thinking of the dream, I shuddered. Despite the warm morning light, I felt cold and shivery, like I’d been walking barefoot through snow on a wintery day. I had heard people usually forget their dreams pretty quickly. I wished that was the case! I had a feeling I’d remember the awful dream about Maddie Someday for as long as I lived.

  I touched my fingers to my throat, half expecting to find a ruined mess of chewed, bloody flesh. For a second, I could have sworn I felt slobber from the dog’s jaws on my skin. No, I realized, not slobber, but my own clammy sweat.

  All I wanted to do was throw the covers over my head, bundle up, and nap for another couple of hours—without nightmares, of course. I still felt pretty groggy. But I couldn’t stay in bed all day, not if Marty and I were going to talk to Lisa.

  I jumped up and straightened the covers quickly. Compared to Alex’s perfectly made bed, mine looked pretty messy, but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I ducked my head into Marty’s room (his door was open) and saw he was already up and about. His bed hadn’t been made at all, so I felt a little better about my rush job.

  A quick shower helped wake me up a little, and I spent a few minutes putting aloe lotion on my itching legs. I’d gotten a bit of sun the day before, and my nose and cheeks were bright red. With my luck, my skin would probably peel. I dressed quickly—this time wearing jeans instead of shorts.

  Climbing the stairs, I heard a peculiar noise—clickity-click-clickety-clickity—from down the hall. I didn’t see anyone around, so I traced the sound to Mom’s room. The door stood open just a crack, so I knocked lightly and stuck my head in.

  Mom lay on her belly in bed, her legs kicking slowly up and down behind her. Her laptop computer lay in front of her, and she typed happily away. Dressed in jeans and a baggy tee-shirt, she looked like a kid doing homework. Looking up, she smiled and said, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

  “Morning.”

  “You must have had a late night.” She smirked at me. “You never sleep in.”

  “Huh?” Did she know about me sneaking out with Marty? How could she? I decided to play dumb. “Uh, not really. I... I guess I was still just really tired from the trip.”

  “Hey, it’s your vacation.” She sat up. “You get to spend it however you want.”

  I wondered if that included sneaking out late at night to hunt down a dog with human eyes.

  “If you want to sleep late,” she said, “I’m not going to blame you. That’s what vacations are for.”

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Alex went into town with Mary and Shorty. Marty should be around here somewhere. He said he didn’t want to go without you, but he didn’t want to wake you, either.”

  I felt a stab of disappointment. I would have liked to get a look at town, too. But I guessed that’s what I got for oversleeping.

  “What are you doing?” Craning my neck, I glanced at the laptop screen. “This is your vacation, too, remember? That looks like work to me.”

  “Not really,” she answered. “This is a lot more fun.”

  “So what is it?”

  She smiled and blushed. Mom blushing! I never thought I would see the day. Now she really did look like a kid.

  “If you must know, Mr. Nosy, I’m writing a book—a novel.”

  “Really?” I asked. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a love story,” she said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  She was right. I was more into robots, rocket launchers, and radioactive mutants than romance. Still, it was exciting seeing Mom doing something like that. Imagine, in all my years I never knew my mom was a writer at heart.

  I could tell she was eager to get back to her book. She kept glancing at the laptop screen and fidgeting with the keyboard keys without even knowing it.

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to work,” I said. “I’m going to go find Marty and see if I can get into some trouble.”

  “All right,” she said. “Are you having an all right time?”

  “Yeah. It’s not quite as awful as I thought it would be.”

  “I’m glad.”

  I stopped before I walked out the door. “Mom,” I said. “Good luck. With the book.”

  She scrunched up her nose the way she did when she was pleased with something. “Thanks.”

  Still a little heavy-eyed and thick-headed, I stumbled around the house in search of my cousin. In the kitchen, I found a plate half-full of frosted cinnamon rolls. Must have been leftovers from brea
kfast. I figured, and helped myself to one. Even cold, it tasted pretty good, super sweet and sticky. Deciding Marty wasn’t in the house, I headed outside.

  The goats, watching from their pens, reminded me of the nightmare, and suddenly I didn’t feel like finishing the roll. I cocked my arm back and hurled it like a sugar-coated baseball into the pen. The chickens took off after it like outfielders chasing a pop-fly.

  “Nice throw,” Marty said.

  I jumped. After a night full of horrible dreams, I didn’t like anyone sneaking up behind me. Marty came out of the shed, a half dozen cats circling his feet.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked him.

  “You needed the sleep. We’re probably in for another late night. Besides, I had a bunch of chores to do, and I figured you’d rather sleep than help.”

  Couldn’t really argue with him.

  “You look pretty worn out yourself,” I told him. “You’ve got dark circles around your eyes.”

  “Bad dreams.”

  I jumped like someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of my shirt.

  “Nightmares?” I asked. “About the witch?”

  Marty gulped and nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I dreamed about her, too. It was terrible. She kidnapped Alex.”

  “In my dream, she was chopped into six separate parts, but spiders crawled all over her, and they were using their webs to stitch her back together. The whole time she was cackling at me.”

  His dream sounded even worse than mine.

  “I think Alex might have been dreaming about her, too.” I was starting to talk too fast, one word running into the next, the way I did when I was nervous. “When I went back to my room last night, he was talking in his sleep, and I heard him say her name.”

  “That’s mighty strange,” he said. “Wonder what it means.”

  “Might have something to do with the Bleeding Rock. Her ghost could still be haunting that place. Maybe we’re all having bad dreams because we visited the place where she was killed.”

  “You’re the expert on ghosts and such,” Marty said, “so I reckon you’d know more about that sort of thing than I would.”

  “But you know all about Maddie and all the other local legends.”

  “We make a pretty good team, then.” He walked across the patio and picked up his trusty backpack, already loaded and waiting for him. “You about ready to get moving?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we’d hike into town, see if we can find Lisa.”

  Lisa was in town? For some reason, I expected to find her in some woodland cabin, what with her being such a tomboy... and a respectable tracker to boot.

  “If I had gotten up a little earlier, we could have ridden with your mom and dad.”

  “And your brother,” Marty added. “I thought you wanted to leave him out of this.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  As we started down the dirt path, I remembered something.

  “Was the dog in your dream, too?” I asked.

  “Come to think of it, he was. He was just sort of standing off to the side, watching with these menacing, glowing eyes. I figured I dreamed him up just because we’ve been talking about him.”

  “Maybe.” But something gnawed at the back of my mind. “We need to find out if Alex dreamed about the dog, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he doesn’t know anything about the dog. We never told him. If the dog was in his nightmare, that means it might somehow be connected to the witch.”

  “Connected how?”

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet,” I said, and that seemed to satisfy my cousin. He wasn’t worried with the details. He only wanted to be there when everything came together.

  We cut through the woods again, this time heading toward town. We stopped along the way and picked wild blackberries until our fingers were swollen from briar stings and our fingers and tongues were black with berry juice. I grew tired a lot more quickly than Marty, who was used to hiking back and forth all over the county. I think he got a little aggravated with all the stops for me to catch my breath.

  “You need to toughen up if you’re gonna help me explore these woods,” he said, only half joking.

  Back home, I rode my bicycle just about everywhere, but bikes would have been useless in the woods. Even on the back roads, the bike wouldn’t be of much use. The gravel would mire the tires down and going a few yards would feel like a few miles, no matter how hard you peddled. Besides, according to Marty, the quickest route was always a straight line, and that meant avoiding the winding roads for the most part and taking short cuts through the woods.

  Soon enough, we emerged from the shade of the trees and came up behind the Crooked Hills High School football field. The school was abandoned for the summer, of course, and we walked right across the field. I could almost hear the cheers from bleachers full of fans on a cool autumn night. Back home, I never really cared for playing football—baseball was my game—but I enjoyed watching my school’s team take the field. The smell of the concession stand. The chanting of the cheerleaders. The ref’s whistle. I imagined in a town as tiny as Crooked Hills, high school football was about as exciting as it got on a Friday night.

  The high school itself was a long, red brick building, about half the size of the middle school I attended. The sign out front depicted a golden knight on horseback—the school’s mascot. The sign read, “See you in August, Chargers!”

  “So where’s your school?” I asked Marty.

  “Right here,” said Marty.

  “The high school? What, are you in an advanced class or something? Did you skip a few grades?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What about middle school?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  At first, I thought he must have been pulling my leg again. “You’ve never heard of middle school?”

  “We have an elementary and a high school. Nothing in the middle that I know of.”

  I guessed there weren’t enough students for a separate middle school. Students in Crooked Hills went to elementary school until fifth grade, then high school for the rest of their scholastic career. In fact, the elementary was right next door to the high school, Marty explained, so the young kids could ride the same buses as the older kids. Marty, of course, never road the bus, preferring to trek through the woods to get home every day.

  It was hard to imagine that if I lived in Crooked Hills, I’d already be in high school!

  I guessed the school set-up made a certain Hicksville sense, sort of a step up from the one-room schoolhouses I’d always heard about. It just wasn’t anything like what I was accustomed to. Funny how little differences made me feel like I’d been exiled to an alien world.

  We crossed the school’s lawn and started down the paved road. The summer sun baked the blacktop, and I felt the heat rising off of it, hot enough to cook a pizza. Soggy or not, my shoes were lifesavers. Marty’s pace was brisk. He was eager to continue the tour.

  Within just a few minutes, I got my first look at downtown Crooked Hills.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OUR FIRST STOP WAS THE CIRCLE Q Convenience Mart. A metal awning covered much of the Circle Q’s parking lot, giving customers some shade while pumping gas at one of the rusty-looking gas pumps rising from a concrete island. A man stood nearby, filling his pickup truck’s tank. As we walked by, he nodded and spat out a nasty stream of brown spittle. The tobacco juice bubbled on the pavement. A large, glass-top cooler sat just outside the shop. A jumping fish was painted on the side of the cooler, right above the words “Live Bait.” I looked through the glass and saw stacks of cardboard buckets. They looked like Chinese take-out containers, only these were full of crickets and grubs and worms. A few stray crickets jumped around the filthy case and clung to the sides.

  “That’s nothing,” Marty said. “Fishing’s a big sport in these parts. Almost every store sells night cr
awlers and such. Heck, even the dress shop has a barrel of worms out back. A buck ninety-nine for twenty-four squirmers.”

  “No way,” I said.

  Marty just grinned and went through the door. A little bell jingled as we stepped inside.

  A row of booths lined one wall. Two men—both white-haired, but one clean shaven and the other sporting a Santa Claus style beard—sat at one of the tables playing a game of checkers. Refrigerated cases along one wall held cans and bottles of soda. A pair of shelves ran down the center of the room, forming lanes of candy and chips and Slim Jims and mini-doughnuts. A glass case by the front counter was filled with fried chicken, potato wedges, and smoked turkey sandwiches, all under the glow of a heat lamp. My stomach rumbled. I didn’t realize just how hungry I was. I regretted throwing my cinnamon roll to the birds.

  The clean-shaven man stood up, leaving his bearded companion to consider his next move in what must have been a very serious game of checkers. He took a position behind the cash register and greeted my cousin like he had known him all his life.

  “Good to see you, Marty. How’s that daddy of yours doing?”

  “Same as always, I reckon,” Marty said.

  “Good to hear.” The man pursed his lips and peered at me. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is my cousin, Charlie. He’s come to visit from the city.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said as I browsed the aisles.

  “Oh, don’t call me sir,” the man said. “It just don’t fit. Name’s Hap.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, “short for Happy...”

  “Heck no, ask anybody around, and they’ll tell you I’m one of the crankiest so-and-sos you’re likely to meet.”

  “That’s a fact,” the bearded man added from the booth. He never took his eyes off the checker board.

  “You be quiet,” Hap called to him. “Nobody asked for your opinion, now did they?”

  Marty and I bought a couple of sodas, some bubble gum, and a handful of peppermints for Lisa.