by Jeremy Bates
Rex didn’t say anything for a few long moments, then: “I have to get the Mazda.”
She stood next to him, alarmed. “You can’t leave us, Rex.”
“I can be back in twenty minutes. We can be out of here.”
“We’ve already tried that—”
“And would have gotten away Scott-free if we didn’t get spooked and turn around.”
“He’ll know, Rex. He’ll expect us to try to get to the car. He’ll be watching the cabin. As soon as you leave—”
“You’ll have the gun, Tabs. You’ll be safe until I get back. Besides, he won’t know I’ve left. There’s a root cellar beneath the cabin. The trap door’s in the other room, beneath the rug. There’s another little bulkhead door that leads from the root cellar to outside, the back of the cabin. I’ll leave that way. He’ll never know I’m gone.”
She considered this. “Let us come with you then. The kids and me. We’ll go together.”
Rex was shaking his head. “We can’t go straight to the road. We have to go through the forest for a bit until we’re far enough away from the cabin not to be noticed. The four of us will make too much noise. It’s best I go alone. When I reach the road, I’ll sprint. I’ll be back before you know it.”
This plan frightened Tabitha to her core. The last thing she wanted to do was split up. But Rex was right. They couldn’t just sit here like bugs beneath a rock, hoping the rock wasn’t turned over. They had to do something unexpected.
“He’ll hear the car,” Tabitha said, even though she knew she had already conceded to Rex’s plan, but wanting to exhaust all avenues of argument nonetheless. “He’ll try to get us before we get in it.”
“I’ll drive it right up to the door. You just have the kids ready. Have the gun ready.”
“It’s risky,” she said. “He could shoot you.”
“We don’t even know if he has a gun. He probably only has a knife. That’s all he’s used so far. And how’s that going to help him if we’re in a car?”
“But he could have a—”
“He’s just a man, Tabs,” Rex said, taking her bloodied hands and squeezing them between his. “We can do this. We can be out of here in twenty minutes. It will be over.”
His words were too tempting for her to not believe, or to not want to believe, for Tabitha had never desired anything more in her life than for this night to be over with.
She nodded.
CHAPTER 14
Rex yanked back the throw rug with the flourish of a magician, revealing the trap door that hid beneath. Even had it not been covered by the rug, it would have been hard to see, as it was flush with the floor and made from the same thick planks of solid timber. There was no handle or latch, so he slipped the blade of the serrated knife he’d taken from the kitchen into the crack between the edge of the hatch opposite the hinges and the floorboards. He pried, and the hatch lifted easily.
Rex clicked on the police officer’s flashlight and shone it into the hole. A short ladder descended four feet to hard-packed dirt. Stale, earthy air wafted up, carrying with it the scent of neglect and age.
“There’s not much room down there,” Tabitha said warily.
“It opens up,” Rex assured her. “The ground slopes toward the lake. When you get beneath the front room, you can almost stand.”
He shifted onto his butt, dangled his legs into the hole, then hopped down.
“Be careful, Rex,” she said.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said.
Squatting, he swung the flashlight from side to side, scanning the dark cavity that opened away from him. The air was damp and cool. The ground, like he’d told Tabitha, sloped toward the lake, following the natural lay of the land. He crouched-walked forward, using his free hand like a third leg to balance himself, until he was able to stand, though he had to hunch forward so he didn’t whack his head against any of the beams or joists that supported the subflooring above him.
Rocks of all different sizes lined the root cellar’s walls to help keep the cold air in and the warm air out during mild winter days. Wooden shelves eighteen inches deep protruded from the walls. In Rex’s great grandfather’s time, before the proliferation of refrigerators and canned food, the shelves would likely have stored apples, sweet corn, potatoes, and perhaps root crops such as beets, turnips, and carrots. Now they held rusty tools, broken toys, musty books, dented paint cans, camping gear, a set of dumbbells, and other miscellaneous junk, all of which was covered with dust, spider webs, and grime.
A lump formed in Rex’s throat at the sight of Stretch Armstrong, his once beloved gel-filled action figure, poking out of the top of one toy-filled bucket.
“You okay down there, Rex?” Tabitha called, her voice sounding far away.
“Yeah,” he called back.
Pushing aside a life jacket that dangled from an iron hook, which would have originally been used to hang smoked meat, Rex aimed the flashlight beam at the door that led outside. It was made of vertical wooden planks and was about three quarters of the height of a regular door.
He started toward it—and had the scare of his life.
***
The suddenly molasses-thick air slowed down time and made it difficult to breathe. Rex stared at what lay against the rock wall in shock and dismay as a decades-old memory clawed triumphantly free from the depths of his subconscious where it had been buried for the last thirty-eight years.
Rex working on his Lego castle on the floor of the cabin when the door burst inward and his mother appeared, wild-eyed and ashen-faced.
“Hide!” she told him in a voice so panic-stricken he barely recognized it as her own.
Rex leapt to his feet. “What happened, Mom?”
“He got your Dad,” she said, and Rex noticed that her knees, bare below the cuffs of a pair of yellow shorts, were dirtied with mud, and her hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Who got Dad, Mom?” he asked, his voice rising to soprano level.
“I don’t know! We were just walking and he got ahead of me…and he screamed… I didn’t see what happened… He was too far ahead. He just told me to run, I didn’t see what… I didn’t see…”
“Is Dad dead, Mom?” Rex asked, feeling as though his insides had just been scooped out with a giant spoon.
“I don’t know, pumpkin, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” She shook her head and seemed to snap out of the paralysis that had gripped her. “You have to hide!”
“Where’s Logan?”
“Logan?” she said, turning in a circle, as if just realizing he wasn’t there. “He was with me. He was right beside me. Logan? Logan, baby?”
A moment later Logan staggered through the door. Rex thought he was smiling, perhaps about to burst into laughter (maybe tell him this was all a prank), but then Rex realized it wasn’t a smile he was seeing on his brother’s face; it was a grimace of pain. And then Rex noticed that Logan’s hands, pressed against his tummy, were red with blood.
“Logie?” their mom said. “Logie? Baby? You’re bleeding! What happened?”
“I tried to help Dad…” His voice was a whisper.
“Logie!” their mom all but screamed, dropping to her knees. She made to touch his wound, but hesitated, as though fearful to hurt him. “Is it bad, baby? How bad is it, baby?”
“It hurts,” he moaned.
She started to lift his torn shirt. He cried out.
“Sorry, baby, sorry.” She stood decisively. “You boys hide. Right now. Hide.”
“Where are you going, Mom?” Rex asked.
“Take your brother, Rex, and go hide right now. You boys are good at that.”
She went to the door.
“Mom!” Rex cried. “Don’t leave us!”
“I have to lead him away.” She pushed her dark hair from her dark eyes, which were looking at Rex but didn’t seem to be seeing him.
“Hide with us,” he pleaded.
Attempting a smile that trembled and became a
frown, she left the cabin, closing the door behind her.
Rex turned to Logan, whose mouth was twisted in pain. “Did he have a knife?” he asked.
“It wasn’t a person,” Logan mumbled, and then he began sobbing.
“What?”
“I’m scared, Rex.”
“What was it, Loge?”
“I don’t know!”
Although Rex was the little brother, he knew he was going to have to make the decision where to hide. Logan was acting way too weird.
Upstairs under their beds was the first spot that came to his mind. But he quickly dismissed this possibility. That was the first place where people looked when they wanted to find where you were hiding.
In the chimney?
Rex grabbed Logan’s hand and all but dragged him into the connecting room. He stuck his head into the fireplace’s firebox and looked up. The flue was too narrow. Neither of them would fit. When he pulled his head back out, Logan had already thrown the little rug back to reveal the trap door to the root cellar. Rex and Logan used to play down there. But then at the beginning of the summer their dad found that a family of raccoons had moved in and told them it was off limits, and they hadn’t been down there since.
Logan jumped into the hole. “Come on!” he said, his head poking up above the floor.
Rex hesitated. If he went down too, who would put the rug back in place? Someone needed to, or the man who attacked their dad would easily find them (Rex couldn’t believe that the person coming after them wasn’t a person).
He started swinging the hatch back in place.
Logan stopped it with one of his hands. “What are you doing?”
“I need to put the rug back.”
“Where are you going to hide?”
“I’ll find a better spot.”
Logan held his red-stained hands in front of him. “Am I losing too much blood, Rex?”
Rex shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“Just hide. Mom will be back soon.”
Rex closed the hatch and pulled the rug back in place. With his heart beating so fast and loud in his chest he could hear it in his ears, he tried to think of a place to hide. In the stove? He was too big. Under the sofa? That was as bad as under the bed. In the closet? No room with the shelves. The bathroom? He could lock the door. No, the attacker would just break it down.
Outside, he decided. There were way more places to hide outside than inside.
Rex left the cabin. It was late afternoon, the sky dull and gray. The forest seemed especially quiet and still. His mind raced through all the places where he had hid before when he and Logan played Hide and Seek—
His mom screamed.
She sounded like she was near the Sanders’ place, which was next door but still far away. Maybe she was going there for help? No, it was late summer, and Rex and his family were the last people remaining on the lake. She understood that. She was just leading the attacker away—
(and he caught her)
Rex grimaced. His first instinct was to go and help her, but he knew he would be too late and too small to help. His second instinct was not to hide but to run. He could try to get to the highway, and then to town. Even though nobody was on the lake, there were always cars on the highway. If he could reach it, someone would drive by and pick him up and—
***
“Rex?” Tabitha called. “Rex? What’s happening?”
Rex couldn’t look away from the small skeleton that lay alongside the wall a few feet away from him. It was dressed in clothes he recognized from his childhood. Logan’s green KangaROOS sneakers with the zipped pockets where he used to carry his pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Logan’s Hawaiian tiki-print jeans cinched around a non-existent waist. Logan’s fluorescent green tee-shirt clinging to his sunken chest, outlining the ribs beneath and revealing his denuded arms poking out from the short sleeves.
Perhaps the worst sight, the most ghastly, was Logan’s skull. It had turned brown and brittle with age. The skin that still clumped to it was cracked and shriveled. Hair sprouted from the dome. Dried detritus filled the eye sockets. The unhinged jaw gaped unnaturally wide, revealing gaps in the teeth where an incisor or canine had fallen free of the rotted gums.
All at once Rex felt hot and sweaty and sick. He bent over, his stomach cramping, thinking he would throw up.
“Rex?” Tabitha called yet again, sounding frightened now.
A deep breath dispelled some of his nausea, and he replied more sharply than he’d intended, “What?”
“Why weren’t you answering me? Is everything okay down there?”
“Fine,” he said absurdly, still focused on the skeleton, thinking, It’s really you, Loge. You’ve been down here all along. Right down here, in the root cellar, the goddamned root cellar. Dead. Lying here dead for forty years while I’ve been going about living my life. Jesus Christ, I’m sorry, Loge. I’m so sorry.
“Rex? What’s wrong? Rex? You’re scaring me. I’m coming down.”
Rex pried his eyes away from his brother’s remains and shone the flashlight back the way he’d come. He saw Tabitha’s legs dangling through the trapdoor.
“Stay there!” he shouted.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m at the door.” For some inexplicable reason he didn’t want Tabitha to see the skeleton. He didn’t want her to freak out. But more than that, he wouldn’t allow his brother’s remains to become a spectacle to elicit horror and pity, like some schlock horror movie prop.
With a final glance back at Logan, telling himself he would mourn his brother properly at a later time, Rex went to the small door. He pushed against it but found it locked. He shoved harder. The latch and mini padlock on the other side of it, which he glimpsed between cracks in the timber, rattled but held firm.
“Come on!” he said, throwing his shoulder into the door. Wood splintered and cracked, and the door swept open. Rex’s momentum propelled him into the storm. The driving rain splashed off his head and shoulders. The gale-force winds lashed his exposed face and hands and pulled wildly at his jacket.
Wiping rain from his eyes, Rex scrambled into the dark mass of forest that surrounded the cabin, his feet making little noise on the soggy leaf litter. He didn’t think the night could get any blacker, but it did when the towering, swaying trees closed around him.
Moving blindly, he felt his way forward with his hands, pushing water-logged branches and other vegetation aside. He tripped over what he guessed to be a large rock, his arms pin-wheeling. Pain ripped across his forehead as he plowed face-first into a wall of prickly pine boughs. When he shoved free, his fingers probed a fresh wound above his brow. It was tender and bleeding but didn’t seem too deep.
Wiping more rain from his eyes, he considered turning on the Maglite so he could see where the hell he was going, but he didn’t dare. He was too close to the cabin. Anyone watching it might spot the light and know someone was afoot.
Rex bumped into a large solid structure. At first he thought it was the outhouse before realizing it was the little lean-to where his father had kept a stockpile of split firewood.
On the far side of it, the ground sloped downward, and he descended carefully. Somewhere nearby, where the soil had eroded along the declivity, was an exposed slab of rock that stretched for fifteen or so feet. Rex and Logan had spent countless hours sliding down it atop a patina of leaves and pine needles and moss, challenging each other to see who could go the farthest, or who could climb back to the top the quickest.
There had always been something forbidding about visiting the rock—
Poison ivy, he thought. Both he and his brother had been severely allergic to the plant’s oil. It had never seemed to matter how carefully they crept through the poison ivy patch, or what precautions they took to avoid their skin touching the sea of almond-shaped leaves (such as wearing gum boots that went to their knees, or tucking their pants into their socks
), they developed an itchy, painful rash each consecutive summer.
During one afternoon visit to the rock, they brought a bucket of water, in the hopes of making the rock’s surface especially slippery. They got in a fight about one thing or another, and Rex ended up dumping what remained of the water over Logan’s head. In retaliation, Logan plucked some poison ivy plants by the stems, pinned Rex on his back, and rubbed the leaves all over his face.
Rex ran back to the cabin screaming bloody murder. Getting poison ivy on his arms and legs, or between his toes and fingers where the skin blistered and oozed fluid, was bad enough. But on his face!
His mom lathered his skin with Calamine lotion and made him wear a pair of winter mittens she found in the cupboard so he didn’t scratch where he would soon begin to itch. Nevertheless, when he woke the next morning, half his face was puffy and inflamed, while one eye was swollen shut. The rash must have lasted three weeks, ruining a good chunk of his summer, and the only silver lining was that he had been allowed as much ice cream as he wanted, which he always made sure to savor in front of his brother.
“Bastard,” Rex mumbled quietly to himself, a sad smile ghosting his lips.
He trudged onward, already exhausted from pioneering a path through the dense, wet forest. The terrain flattened out again at the bottom of the small glen. The trees thinned and opened up around him. Yet this slight reprieve lasted for only one hundred feet or so before he found himself climbing the far side of the concavity, struggling with each step to gain reliable footholds in the mud. For every few feet of progress he made, he slipped half that backward. Frustrated but determined, he grasped recklessly at saplings and branches and whatever else he could use to help pull himself up until finally he reached the plateau.
A few paces later gravel crunched beneath his feet, indicating he had reached the neighbors’ driveway. Leech had been their surname, if he wasn’t mistaken. They had a big Alaskan Malamute that barked constantly most days. Rex was amazed he remembered so many of the lake’s summer residents given that as a child he had barely met any of them more than once or twice. But he supposed when you’re five or six, and your world is not much larger than the size of your residence, everything in it holds extra significance.