Karen was still a sweet, loving woman who seemed happy for our company, but she had grown visibly weaker in the last year. We had found out during that year’s summer trip that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and while she was hopeful that the chemotherapy would help, her chances for recovery were slim. The house we loved, that had always seemed so filled with laughter and fun, now seemed coated with some kind of…residue. A taint of sadness and loss and worry that put a heavy film on everything. We would talk to Dad every night for a few minutes on the phone, and we tried to sound positive because of how sad he had been lately, but by the third day we were spending most of our time outside despite the cold and the wet. Exploring the woods and playing games outdoors seemed the easiest way of keeping our mind off all the bad things that were going on.
Then one day we stumbled upon the monster.
We had headed off into the woods with an ill-defined game in mind. Whoever spotted an animal first got a point. If they could name specifically what it was, and the answer matched the little pocket wildlife book we had brought from the house, they got four extra points. Whoever won got full control of the t.v. remote that night, as Karen had taken to lying down early most evenings. Despite the fact that I was eleven to Rusty’s fifteen, the game was actually biased toward me, as he knew I had the better memory and was more interested in animals and stuff like that. Still, he was four points ahead when we entered an unfamiliar clearing and saw the monster that lived there.
Except at first we didn’t realize it was a monster. It looked like a dust devil, or in this case, a leaf devil, as it seemed to just be a small whirlwind of leaves and grass twirling around a relatively open space buried in the midst of a deeper part of the woods. We laughed and watched in amazement as it moved around, both of us expecting that it would peter out or wander away after a few more moments, as those kinds of natural phenomena tend to do.
But after several minutes it was still going strong, and while it was moving around a good bit, it never seemed to leave a certain space in the middle of the clearing. And, as was becoming increasingly clear, it was unlike anything natural we had ever seen.
“Maybe it’s a ghost!” Rusty offered, not taking his eyes off of it as I stepped closer to him.
I considered it before shaking my head. “Nah, I don’t think so. Papa said there’s no such thing, and why would a ghost be out here anyway? Maybe it’s a freak nature thing like lightning out of nowhere or those places where fish start raining from the sky.”
I saw him frown slightly at that. “Fish raining from the sky doesn’t sound like a nature thing.”
I shrugged. “There’s a scientific explanation for it though. I bet there is for this too. I wish we had a video camera.”
Not wanting to let it go at that, Rusty was about to say more when he realized the same thing I just had. The leaf devil had stopped moving. It was just hovering—an ever-shifting swirl of forest detritus that was at the closest point to us that it could reach and not travel further out than it had gone so far. Almost as though it couldn’t go further out, which was a troubling thought on its own, but which was temporarily eclipsed by something I was thinking just as Rusty said it.
“I think that fucking thing is looking at us.”
I wanted to laugh, to make a joke or otherwise dispel the sense of wonder and fear that was steadily growing in my belly, but I couldn’t find words that wouldn’t sound hollow. He was right. Though it had no eyes or face that we could see, I had the distinct impression that the leaf devil had noticed us and was now studying us with great interest. Swallowing, I looked up at Rusty. “What do you think we should do?”
When he glanced down at me, I could see he was worried, but I could also see excitement flickering in his eyes like a living flame. He looked happier and more himself in that moment than I had seen him since Mom had left, and I think at that moment I would have went along with whatever he said next. As it was, his suggestion was fairly tame.
“Let’s move around a bit. See if it follows us. But be ready to run. If I say go, we run away fast as we can. You know the way back?”
I nodded and he gave my shoulder a squeeze. “This is really cool, but no need for us to be dumb about it.” Looking back up, he puffed out a breath. “Okay. Let’s see if this is just a pile of blowing leaves and we’re both dumbasses.”
Moving slowly with Rusty to the right, I clamped my hands down on my brother’s arm as the leaf devil followed us slowly, seemingly tracing the perimeter of some invisible circle. When we went back the other way, it followed us again, silent except for the quiet rustle of leaves twirling against each other in its inner turbulence.
“Holy shit.” Rusty looked more excited now, but I could tell by the way he was licking his lips that he was more nervous too. Maybe even scared, and I didn’t know if I’d ever seen Rusty scared before. Looking at me again, he pried loose my hands from his forearm. “Tommy, I want you to listen to me now. You go stand at the edge of the clearing. I’m going to go up a bit and get a better look. See if I can tell what it is and what’s got it trapped in there.” He licked his lips again as he glanced back up. “If it’s trapped. I don’t know. It could be a big trick. But you see how it’s been moving like it has an invisible wall or something keeping it from going any farther?”
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s like a force field or something.”
He returned my nod with a shaky smile. “Yeah. Well, if it can’t reach us, then it may be safe to come back here. Visit it again. But if it’s just playing possum, or if it can shoot something out at us or something…well, I want you to be farther away and go run for help if anything happens, okay?”
“But why don’t we just go and…” Rusty was already shaking his head.
“I have to see more. This thing is like a miracle or something. We might never run across something like this again our entire lives.” He paused and his expression grew sadder as he went on. “There’s a lot more of life like what Dad and Aunt Karen are going through than cool shit like this. If you want to head on back, I’m cool with that. And I won’t ever make fun. But I have to see this while I can, okay?”
I said I understood, and I think even then it was the truth. But either way, I wasn’t going to leave him alone, so I told him to be careful and stepped to the edge of the clearing. The leaf devil didn’t move as Rusty approached, and my brother’s every step was slow and deliberate as he crept closer. Suddenly he stopped.
“There are rocks in the ground. Like big ones buried in the ground it looks like. They go all the way around.” He started moving left in a large circle, and as he moved, the leaf devil went with him. I couldn’t see the rocks between the distance, the angle, and the grown-up grass, but it was clear that it was moving along some invisible perimeter as it followed Rusty. It was alive, and it seemed to be trapped somehow.
Over the next week, we spent most of our free time in the clearing. Our first day back I had felt sure it would be gone, but there it was, floating near our side of its prison as though it had been waiting for us or knew we were coming. Rusty had brought a tennis ball with us this time, and after we went over the safety rules in case it suddenly did something different, we started experimenting with what it could do.
We’d roll the tennis ball into its circle, and without fail, it would pick up the ball in its restless winds and push it back out towards us. We’d toss it underhand or even throw it overhand, and so long as the ball passed through the circle of stones, it would snag the ball and send it back to us like a game of catch. Every day we would try new things, and while we were having trouble communicating beyond simple games, it wasn’t for lack of trying. It either couldn’t talk or chose not to, but we had still spent several hours peppering it with questions and telling it more about ourselves.
We named it Harvey after the old movie about the invisible rabbit, or “pooka” as Rusty would correct me, and every day we spent with it, the more it felt as though we truly had a new best friend. And while it d
idn’t speak, it did seem to understand at least some of what we were saying. It knew the difference between the two of us, as demonstrated by where it went when we asked it to “go to Rusty” or “go to Tommy”. It seemed capable of remembering things and understanding the more complex rules of games we made up to test the limits of what it could do.
To an outsider, this would probably look like stupid kids playing with something dangerous, or at best, a juvenile and amateurish science experiment. And in many ways, those descriptions would be right. But it was more than that too. The strangeness of it all, the amazing rush of excitement at interacting with something so unknown and magical, elevated it beyond just a game or a childish attempt at solving a mystery. I think it felt like we were touching the Divine, and in turn, it was touching us. By the end of the week we didn’t just feel special, we had accepted that we were special, because who else had such a special friend?
That pride and misunderstanding is what ruined us from the start. We had made a friend that transformed a few hours out of every day into something magical, and naturally we wanted more. So we slipped into Aunt Karen’s shed and found two sturdy shovels before sneaking back out to the woods.
And then we let Harvey out.
Part Two
The shovels sunk in around the stones almost eagerly, and when I lifted the first dirt away, the dark, loamy earth that was revealed reminded me of an open wound. I shuddered slightly at the thought but pushed it aside as I went back to digging. It didn’t take us long to realize that the two stones we were digging at weren’t just two stones. It was the top layer of what at first looked like a rectangular box made of rock about two feet tall. This wasn’t a natural formation, but rather the sides were all fused together somehow from flat pieces of dark stone that actually reminded me of volcanic rock I had seen at the Smithsonian two years earlier.
At first we focused on just gently digging out the rocks, periodically reassuring Harvey that we were there to help him get out as he rustled close by with what I imagined was some combination of curiosity and impatience. Weeks later I went back and broke open one of the rocks to see what was in there. The inside of the stone rectangles that formed the bars of Harvey’s prison were layered like a cake—dark igneous rock followed by brown crystalline rock followed by more igneous, etc. There were a total of nine layers counting the top and bottom thicker outer layers, and the stony containers had been sealed well enough that the crystal layers—what I figured out was rock salt when I checked Aunt Karen’s old encyclopedia set—had not dissolved away over however many years it had been buried in the ground.
Those details became important later on, but when we were setting Harvey free, we were so high on a mixture of excitement and fear that we could hardly think at all, much less focus on anything not directly related to the task at hand. We hadn’t discussed what came next much, although I think there was an unspoken understanding between myself and Rusty that we wanted to take Harvey with us when we left Aunt Karen’s to live with Dad again. It was as though we imagined ourselves characters in some charmingly dim-witted children’s movie where the kids find a friendly monster, fend off the villain that wants to kill/capture/etc. the beast, and ultimately either find a way to keep the monster permanently or say a tearful and heartfelt goodbye after their adventures have run on for ninety minutes or so.
The problem with stories like that is how unrealistic they are. Not because they involve monsters—as should be obvious by now, I can’t dispute that there are strange creatures in the world that I don’t think can be explained, at least not within the framework of what is commonly known and accepted. No, the problem lies with how the monster is treated.
It is viewed, to a large degree, as an object. Something to want, something to keep, something to value because of its uniqueness. At best, it is elevated to the status of a pet—a living creature, but one who’s will and desire are, if not irrelevant, at least considered far less important than our own. At worst, they’re just a face and a name to try and trap our fear of the unknown, containing it with a ring of words that will make the undefinable more defined, and by definition, easier to control or destroy.
Even now, knowing all of this, I often think of Harvey as “the monster”. Less because of what it did than what it is—something that we didn’t understand and that we should have been terrified of.
****
It took digging up three stones before Harvey could move through the space, and I remember the thrill of fear when it did so. I felt like we had snuck into a circus and opened up the lion’s cage. Except as it passed the threshold of its prison, it wasn’t a lion, or even a leaf devil any more.
Now it was a large hedgehog.
It was far larger than any regular hedgehog, being roughly the height of a medium-sized beagle, and its appearance was vastly different as well, but that didn’t change the fact that it had gone from being a largely invisible force to a fantastic version of a cute woodland creature. Its face and paws seemed to be hewn from some kind of light, living wood, and its spiny back was a tightly woven thicket of leaves and sticks. When it moved, you could hear a light rustle not that different than the sounds the leaf devil version of Harvey had made.
The fact that it looked like a very cute and non-threatening animal, while a relief, did give me a bit of pause even then. Either that was its natural form or it was an appearance that was deliberately chosen. If Harvey had chosen to look that way, was it because it wanted to be appealing and ease our fears, or because it wanted us to let our guards down?
Whatever the answer or our reservations, we were both delighted by Harvey’s new form as well. We were both greeting and talking to him like an old friend we were picking up at the airport, or possibly like an online friend we were seeing for the first time. Because in some ways that was true. Harvey looked more like something familiar now, and he had a face—a cute face with large amber eyes that sparkled with intelligence and understanding. He wasn’t talking to us, but he did have expressions and body language as we spent the afternoon with him, and in a hundred different small ways I could feel us growing closer to Harvey now that we could interact with him in a way we could more easily wrap our head around.
In some ways, I think that day was the best day of my life. I never wanted to leave, and I could tell that Rusty felt the same. It was well after dark when we finally forced ourselves back to Aunt Karen’s house, and I felt a stab of guilt when I saw her frail form standing on the porch looking at us with worry and relief. She hugged us tearfully as we drew near, kissing our cheeks and making us promise to never do that again, to always be home well before dark. We promised, and it was one promise that we kept during the short time we had left together in her home.
Still, if my regret over worrying Karen had cooled my excitement a little, it had done nothing to stave off my fears. Harvey had seemed very content to hang out with us in the clearing that afternoon—we had played games, petted his strange pelt, and told him more stories of where we were from and what life was like there. But how likely was it that he would still be there the next day? We still didn’t know what he even was, but if he was like most people or animals, he would probably want to be far away from the place he was trapped for so long.
The next morning we were out of the house at sunrise, and as soon as we were out of sight we broke into a desperate run back toward the clearing. I felt my stomach drop when we arrived and saw no sign of Harvey. We started walking the area, calling out to him, but there was nothing. If the day before was one of my best days, that one was one of my worst. We spent hours combing the woods, but there was no sign of Harvey anywhere. By late afternoon we were bone-tired and heading back to the house when Harvey found us.
He waddled up to us like…well, like a giant magic hedgehog I guess, and it was clear that he was happy to see us. We knelt down and hugged him gently, after which Rusty started explaining to Harvey how he shouldn’t worry us like that. How we had been looking for him all day and we ough
t to be mad at him, but he forgave him.
Something stirred in the back of my head at that, though at the time I didn’t recognize it for what it was. It was growing dark again, so we reluctantly said good-bye, though this time Rusty told Harvey to follow us close to the house so he would know where we lived and could meet up with us more easily next time. That we would be back at the edge of the trees near the house the next morning. Again, a slight tickle in the back of my head that made my stomach uneasy, but I tried to ignore it as I waved bye to Harvey and followed Rusty back to the house.
The next few days were fun and exciting, and in many ways it was like we were living in some kind of fairy tale. We would get up early, spend the day with Harvey, and then come back home in the evening tired and full of anticipation for when we got to see him again. But as happy as I was, I had come to recognize the little twinge I would get in the back of my head from time to time.
It was worry. Not worry that Harvey was going to hurt us—that was always a possibility, but he’d had plenty of chances if he wanted to do so—but worry that Rusty was…well, he just seemed different somehow.
We had never had pets growing up because my mother was so allergic, and while I loved cats and dogs, my only real exposure to them had been in public or when I was over at a friend’s house. I had even less exposure to how Rusty was around them, but the few times I had been with him when we met a dog or cat, he had been the way he always was—gentle and kind.
But some people are different with their own animals, and some people view pets less as a friend or companion and more as an object to be used or…well, even abused. I never saw him actually be mean to Harvey—he never hit him or anything like that—but I found myself growing more concerned with how he was treating him just the same.
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