The residual piece of slack is able to move. I slip it free and pull my hand out, my heart clenched. My pulse races.
I grab the lantern and trample down the center aisle to the emergency door at the back of the bus. I try the latch, surprised when it moves, shocked when the handle gives. The door swings open, and I step outside.
NOW
52
Using the lantern to light my way, I climb out the emergency door at the back of the bus, stepping on a pile of wooden planks—slowly, carefully. But my foot slips, propelling a plank upward. The plank clanks down, freezing me in place.
I hold my breath and count to ten before moving again, hopping down onto a clear patch of ground. The ringing starts again—the pay phone, from inside the bus. I look through the door, half tempted to go back and answer it so he doesn’t know I’ve managed to break free. But I maneuver around a collection of hubcaps instead.
It’s still dark. The air smokes out my mouth in one long, puffy swirl, making me feel exposed. The lantern does too, but I keep it low, by my knee.
A stack of tires stands to my right. I go to avoid it, smacking into something—hard. A workbench. Its steel leg meets my shin, and I hold back a wail, biting into my fist. Did the collision make a sound? All I can hear is the hammering of my heart; it penetrates my ears. I can feel it pulsing beneath my skin.
Is the phone still ringing?
Are those crickets chirping?
I begin counting again—up to twenty—scooting around the tires, following a meandering path as I make my way to the fence. My teeth chatter—a mix of fear and cold. I look back toward the bus, unable to even see it now. It’s too dark. I’m too far.
The tinkling of wind chimes cuts my nerves like a knife. I picture the chimes like sharp metal blades hanging from a hook somewhere close by. If only I had one in my hand. I scan the piles of debris for a weapon: broken bricks, a mountain of bicycle tires, a collection of fixtures (sink faucets, shower nozzles, door handles), and a heap of pipes, as though for plumbing. Most of the pipes appear long and cumbersome. Still, I go to grab one when I notice something better—a metal stake like the kind for camping. It’s smaller (about eight inches), easier to conceal, and has a pronounced point. I slip it into my pocket and continue toward the fence.
I count the steps to get there—thirty-six. It appears to be at least ten feet tall—too high to climb. Where was the panel that had been curled up at the bottom? On the other side of the yard. Do I even want to look for it? What other choice do I have?
I take a step back, trying to get a perspective. A tugging sensation tightens my chest, cinches my ribs. Meanwhile, the stench of decay is all around me, like something died. I can practically taste it in my mouth; it crawls to the back of my tongue, pokes a hole in my throat, and I let out a gag—a loud retching sound. I peer all around me, checking and rechecking to see if anyone heard—if anyone’s here.
I can’t really tell. I don’t really know. I take another step back to reassess the fence.
And that’s when I notice.
The panel to the left looks slightly different—a whole lot wider. Two posts stand between it and the next panel (the one directly in front of me).
My gaze travels upward, and I spot a latch.
This must be a gate.
A chain lingers like a snake on the ground. Is it to secure the panels closed? Did someone unlock it?
I move closer, spotting the glimmer of a fire in the bordering woods. I blink hard, assuming I must be seeing things, that the flames are inside my head.
But still they remain. The embers float up toward the sky, time-traveling me back to Bailey Road. A flurry of lights shines behind my eyes.
With jittering fingers, I pull the latch upward and draw the gate open, just enough to allow me to slip through.
Now what? Save myself, as I did in the house fire? Or try to find Peyton? What would my parents want? How would they advise me? I take a deep breath. Inside my head is a high-pitched blare.
The flames in the woods lap in the wind. Sparks snap up into the air. But still, it appears to be a contained fire, as though for camping, exactly like the image inside the bus.
What are the odds that I was meant to escape? That this is part of the hunt? Why else would the gate be unlocked? Why would the emergency door to the bus not have been welded shut? Why wasn’t a chain, rather than a zip tie, used to secure me to the handrail?
What if I’m supposed to hunt for Peyton?
While someone else is hunting for me?
NOW
53
Beyond the gate, I find a parting in the trees where there appears to be a trail. I follow it, keeping focused on the campfire, which looks to be about thirty yards away. Branches reach out and scratch my legs. Something long and viny gets tangled in my hair. I keep moving forward on a dirt path, listening for any approaching sounds.
I can smell the fire from here, like smoked meat and burning pine needles. I can hear it too: the crackling of sticks, the snapping of twigs.
When I near the end of the path, I tuck myself behind a thick, leafy bush and peer out the side, making sure the coast is clear. I can make out part of the flame. Boulders are positioned around it as though for seating. I swipe a handful of branches from in front of my eyes.
The fire is in full view now, about eight feet away. Beyond it, I spot something. My nerves steel as I look closer. Someone’s sitting on the ground, with their back toward me and their knees bent upward. The person is wearing a robe of sorts. The hood is drawn over the head, but dark wisps of hair lap out the sides.
“Peyton?” I call; my voice shakes.
Did the person’s hand just flinch?
Did they let out a moan?
I inch forward. The fire is only a couple of feet away now, but it looks contained. It is contained, I remind myself. There’s no possible way it could ignite these woods.
The slack of the robe ripples in the breeze. “Peyton?” I repeat, standing just behind the figure now.
The glow of the lantern casts over the side of the face: dark skin, a pointed chin. I move around to the front, finally able to see.
A blank face. No eyes. Colorless lips.
A mannequin.
I step back, and peer all around, eager for an explanation, noticing something else. About ten feet from the fire, stuck between two of the boulders … I go to check it out, positioning the lantern beside it; the object has a flat, rectangular shape like an old album or book.
I pick it up.
My stomach churns.
I know what it is without even having to look—the weight, the texture, the size and width …
The Forest Girl and the Wishy Water Well.
It looks exactly the same, with its frayed ends and dirty, beaten corners. I open up to the middle as dirt sprinkles out. I can smell the dirt too—on the pages, the musty scent.
“Hello, Terra.” His voice sends shivers all over my skin.
Wearing dark clothes and a black ski mask, he emerges from between a couple of trees. His shoes have some sort of protective plastic covering them, secured at the ankles. What is it for? To hide his treads?
“Well done on surviving the plot twist. I imagine you saw my red herring.” He nods to the mannequin. “Have you come for the climax?”
My fingers tremor, and I drop the book.
“Has a cat got your tongue?” He sticks out his tongue—the same red dart, through the hole in his mask—and waggles it back and forth as he did that night. “I see you found my book too.”
As he comes closer, I recognize his eyes—the pale blue color, the hooded lids …
“I’d expect no less of my starring character.”
I swallow hard—a mouthful of bile.
“You never told me what you thought of my story.” He runs his gloved hand over the cover of the water-well book.
I retreat two steps.
“Going so soon? Not yet.” He smiles. “Please, have a seat. Did you like th
e William doll I left for you?”
Left for me? Is he talking about the troll doll inside the well? Or the ceramic garden gnome on the back deck?
“How about the cuddly blanket?” he asks. “I was more than generous with my gifts, don’t you think? Leaving the lid open during the rain … Giving you moments of light … I even threw you a bone.”
A sparerib bone.
My body chills.
“I wanted you to have a fighting chance,” he continues. “So we could continue our story.”
“Where’s Peyton?” I ask him.
He scratches his head as though in thought.
“Is she even real? Was it Peyton who called me?”
“Are you implying that it could’ve been someone else?” He smirks. “An actor, for instance, playing the role of Peyton? Perhaps one had used one of the many high-tech voice-changers on the market. Did you know some of the more sophisticated models can completely alter pitch, tone, and volume of a voice?”
“Is that the case?”
He reaches into his pocket. There’s something in there. A gun? A knife? More of the stuff that put me out? “I used to love story time as a kid,” he says. “I lived for it—literally. Stories were my passion: reading them, role-playing them, writing fan fiction … But you were the same way, isn’t that right?”
The same way?
“The possibilities are endless. Put a character in a hole and see how she behaves. Does she fight for what she wants by climbing out? What obstacles lie in her wake? Limited light, lack of tools, hunger, thirst, pure fatigue … And let’s not forget the heroine’s backstory too. What lurks in her past? How reliable is she as a result? What motivates her to act? To make things even more interesting, give the character a magical tool—something that gives her a superpower.”
A superpower. “Like the power of invisibility,” I say, his identity becoming clear.
“Exactly.” He removes his glove, revealing his hand. On his fourth finger is the mood ring I won in Dr. Beckett’s class.
“Charley.”
“Miss me?”
It’s been years since I’ve seen him. He’s taller now. His voice is deeper. But his eyes look the same—bold, piercing, icy blue. After he left Emo, his number no longer worked, and I didn’t know where he lived. When I asked Ms. Melita what’d happened to him, she said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss other students, then added that smallish places like Emo couldn’t provide the resources that larger institutions could. I assumed that meant Charley needed something more. But how much more? What kind of “more”? And would he be coming back after he got it?
“I’ve missed you,” he says. “Our time in the quiet room, escaping into plotlines…”
“Charley,” I repeat, feeling the ground beneath me tilt.
“I hated leaving Emo so abruptly, not having the chance to say goodbye.”
“Why did you?”
“I started over at a new place, one with more rules, less freedom … But now I’m back.” He grins. “And do you want to know why?”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you’re the perfect heroine: an unreliable narrator, motivated by the guilt she feels for surviving a fire that took her parents, not to mention the guilt she feels about other things, a secret she shared. Remember…? You tell me your secret, and I’ll tell you mine…”
I do remember.
Freshman year, in the quiet room, not long before Charley disappeared for good, I wagered a deal: if I told him my biggest secret, he’d have to tell me his. Charley agreed. And so we tucked ourselves behind the corduroy sofa—the one with the cigarette burn holes in the fabric—and I confided something I’d never shared with anyone. In retrospect, I’m not even sure why I made the deal in the first place. Because I simply had to know his backstory? Because I wanted to bring us closer? Or because on some subconscious level, I needed to reveal a truth about myself to someone whose own truth was, quite possibly, even more unspeakable than mine?
With brittle words and a face as burning as the hottest flame, I dredged the secret from the vault inside my gut, the place where I’ve always felt sick, and spewed it into the air. And when I was done, I opened my eyes, bracing myself for a look of repulsion. But instead, his face puzzled, and he didn’t utter a sound.
“Say something,” I told him, my voice riddled with tears.
“I didn’t hear you.”
Had I not spoken the words aloud?
He slipped the mood ring onto my finger. “This will make it easier.”
Oddly enough it did. The ring made me feel invisible, so I was able to confess again: “I started the fire, the one that burned down my house, that killed my parents.” The words, out loud, made my head spin. The air in the room spun too, making it harder to breathe, to catch my breath. I let out a gasp as tears ran down my face. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Charley’s face showed neither repulsion nor surprise.
“It was an accident,” I told him, suddenly realizing that I’d been rocking back and forth, that a spittle of drool hung off my lower lip. “It’d been so cold in my room. I’d gotten up and gone downstairs. The wood-burning stove was still on. But that was normal. The house was old, and it didn’t have a good heating system. I’d been allowed to feed wood into the stove ever since I’d turned thirteen, with a clear set of rules.”
Charley patted my hand. It wouldn’t stop trembling. My lungs felt like they were collapsing.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
I shook my head. It wouldn’t ever be okay. More tears came. Charley handed me a tissue, but his face remained expressionless, as if my secret weren’t enough, as if somehow his was even more horrific than mine.
I slipped the ring off my finger and slid it onto his. “Your turn now.”
Charley took a deep breath and started to utter something: the words sister, stolen money, and wilderness community. “I told myself it would all be okay, that nothing bad would happen,” he said. “But when I woke up…”
“What?” I asked.
“It was all my fault.”
“Wait, slow down, what was?”
He didn’t answer. He just stood up. His upper lip quivered, and there were splotches all over his neck. “Tomorrow,” he said, leaving me with the burn marks.
“Terra?” His voice snaps me back to present day. He removes the mood ring from his finger once more—like déjà vu—and sets it down on a rock. “Take it. It’ll help you disappear. Remember?”
“I don’t understand. We were friends,” I say, though after sharing my secret all those years ago and not hearing his in return, it felt as if I’d been violated somehow, as if something inside me had died.
“More than friends. You were like a sister to me.”
“So, then why are you doing this?”
“Role-playing, creating stories, constructing my own reality? It’s what I’ve always done. Nothing much has changed, except that I’ve started using real players as inspiration for my work. I’ve also been writing my stories down.” He puts his glove back on. “The water-well book was my first attempt at seeing a project all the way through. Now, I want to write your story, with you as my main character, taking creative liberties as I see fit, twisting plots and altering storylines as needed.”
I shake my head. I still don’t get it.
“I’m already writing the story,” he continues. “You’re already starring in it. You got out of the hole, only to face a plot twist: You were captured again. Now what?”
I take a step back, doing my best to search the area: the grouping of trees he appeared from, the mannequin, the heap of dirt a few feet from the fire … But no matter where I look, the answer sinks in.
The truth becomes clear.
The Peyton I knew doesn’t exist, never existed.
“It seems you’re having a hard time focusing, am I right? Would you prefer to talk about a different story? One about salvage yards, perhaps? Or a story about a family living off the grid in the middle o
f the woods, free from greed and possessions? We should all get unplugged, don’t you think? Spend some time in nature, away from all things materialistic.”
His words jog my memory, because I’ve heard them before—on the chat site.
“Are you Darwin12?” I ask him.
“You’re such a skillful storyteller.” His smile widens. “Able to detect unnatural dialogue when you hear it. Just another reason you make a worthy heroine.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell him again. “Why not just befriend me again? Why take me from my aunt’s house? Why put me in a hole?”
“For play,” he says as though the answer is simple. “Like old times, like we used to do. Now, take the ring. Use it for its power of invisibility. The ring made me disappear, didn’t it? And then I used it to make you disappear.”
I grip the lantern. It has a heavy base; the batteries must be inside it. A thick plastic dome surrounds two vertical lights. I imagine smashing him with it—at least ten pounds of metal, plastic, and glass coming down on the crown of his head.
“So, now that you’ve caught me again?” I ask.
“Let’s continue our story.”
“How does it end?”
“We’ll have to keep going to see. I’ll resume the role of the villain who enjoys the hunt, and you’ll continue to be my prey. Who will win?”
“Except I don’t want to be hunted. I don’t want to play.”
“Deep down you do. You saw the Jane Anonymous poster. The message spoke to you—the part about going from a victim to a victor.”
“You put that poster in the library.” And lured me here by creating Peyton.
“You logged on that very night. It took virtually nothing to engage you. Now, what do you say? I’ll give you two minutes.”
I grip the stake, trying to hold it all together despite my desire to lash out. “Two minutes?”
“If you agree to play, you might get your way. Then you’ll be free, free, free for eternity. Do we have ourselves a deal?”
“What do you mean? What kind of deal?”
“You got away once. Then you got away twice. If you get away a third time, I’ll have to play nice. If you use the ring to escape into the night, the heroine will win, and I will do what’s right.”
The Last Secret You'll Ever Keep Page 22