I’ve written enough short stories to recognize the truly bad ones, and of the few redeemable ones that remain, I’m working on dressing them up and getting them ready to meet the world.
They’re very shy stories. They’ll need some convincing.
Having finished the three stories already uploaded (“Dream Machine,” “Dead of Night,” and “6 Volts”), the story I next want to finish is called “Overgrown.” I wrote this story, which currently clocks in at about 14k words (though that also includes a few thousand words of notes), in 2020, and since then it has haunted me with its whispers of childhood and lost innocence.
It’s about a boy named Danny who, riding on bikes with his three friends in the New England countryside, gets separated and winds up in the home of a strange family who harbor a terrible secret. I’ve included the first half or so below—the length is certain to change as I revise.
When “Overgrown” is finished, I’ll upload it in full. I have an idea in the back of my head about finishing enough short stories to total 50-60k words, then packaging them as an anthology with cover art and illustrations. A plan or a pipe dream? That remains to be seen.
For now, I’ll content myself with telling Danny’s story—and trust he has the courage to share it.
Happy reading.
Overgrown—Part 1
Years later, when they had all moved away and the house had long since collapsed in on itself like a dying star, Daniel—who had been Danny then—would sometimes find himself absently running a finger up and down the long scar on his calf, his eyes glazed with memory.
It happened most often in late summer, when the air was thick and the cicadas were droning from the tops of the trees. He could feel the memory coming like a caffeine rush, and he would close his eyes and hold onto whatever was nearby: a steering wheel, a windowsill, the edge of a desk. He would clench his teeth and clear his mind of all thought by force of will, letting the feeling ride over him, hearing again the rattle of the bike chain and the rumble of the thunder.
It’s over, he would tell himself, recalling the events of the intervening years—college, several moves, the divorce of his parents, a litany of entry-level jobs until he finally landed a gig as an assistant in a publishing house, marriage, the birth of his son—and resisting by force of will that magnetic, irrational pull to go back again, the way a book flopping open may turn to the same page over and over without any apparent reason.
But he was powerless to resist the dreams. Sometimes, on those hot summer nights, he would swim up from a formless sleep and find himself clutching his wife hard enough to leave bruises, holding onto her the way a shipwrecked sailor holds onto a piece of flotsam in a blind and storm-tossed sea.
After apologizing and doing his best to explain the incident away to an increasingly-skeptical audience, he would shut himself in the bathroom and, sitting on the floor and resting the back of his head against the door, think about the others:
Brandon, now a computer science technician at MIT, living so fast time would never catch up with him;
Em, Brandon’s older sister, married and practicing psychology at Cornell;
And Robby, Daniel’s older brother—but he did not like to think of Robby. Robby was not the same. Robby had come back for him, and Daniel sensed that some part of his brother would forever be riding up and down that lonely stretch of road as the trees tossed in the storm, calling Daniel’s name only to hear it swallowed by the wind.
Daniel could hear that wind now—just beyond the crickets and beneath the thunder, at the edge of thought and memory.
And, without his knowing, his hand stole down to touch the scar on his leg.
* * *
The first time Danny saw the house he was sitting on his bike at the top of a hill, waiting for Robby to give the signal. Em perched on her own bike beside him, snapping her hair into a tight knot behind her head as she glared down the narrow dirt road that plunged steeply and then twisted into the undergrowth far below them.
Danny stirred uneasily. It was a steep hill, and he knew that once he set the bike in motion he would have no more control than if he were to jump off a cliff. But he couldn’t say no, not when a girl had dared him.
The four of them, two pairs of cousins, were reaching an age when Em did not fit in with the boys the way she used to, and Danny sensed she made up for this by proving at every turn that she was just as capable as any of them. They would have all raced down the hill together, the four of them astride on their bikes, but the rain had cut deep channels into the gravel and the riders on the edges were likely to hurt themselves.
Even thirteen-year-olds took precautions on occasion.
“On your mark!” Robby shouted, solemnly holding his hand high in the air. Behind it, the clouds hung hazily in the milky air.
“You’ll never live it down if she beats you,” Brandon said merrily from the other side of the road, pushing up his smudged glasses.
“Hurry up before we all get eaten alive!” Em snapped, swatting at a deer fly that kept circling her head, landing just long enough to provoke a reaction before flying away.
Robby’s hand remained raised in benediction. “Get ready!”
And then Danny saw it peeking through the trees ahead of him, a gray-walled structure swallowed up in all that wilderness: two rectangular windows, a door, and a teetering chimney. The walls had a greenish tinge to them that looked unnatural to Danny, as if they were as much a part of the forest as the trees themselves.
Did anyone really live out here? Robby had said the next house wasn’t for miles, which was part of the fun of coming out here and—
“GO!”
With a crunch of gravel, Em was gone. Danny pushed off a moment later. He went cautiously at first, adjusting to the pitch of the hill. Em, however, pedaled fearlessly forward, head down. One of the boys shouted from behind them, but whether it was a cry of excitement or warning, Danny did not know. The wind was in his face and his organs had all climbed up into his throat, and he found himself not so much riding as clinging—
Clinging the way he had to the mirrored, fingerprinted bar at Six Flags that kept him from spilling out of the roller coaster, Robby beside him shouting with jubilation one moment and then, noticing his little brother had transformed into a gargoyle, shouting to Danny to just relax and let the ride do the work.
‘Let the ride do the work’—his very words, echoing back now through memory. Something irreversible had been set in motion, and the best thing Danny could do was to give up changing what he could not change.
So he relaxed. He let the bike do the work, interfering only when a large stone or a dip in the road threatened to turn his tire, and for a moment he felt himself pulled up and back from his body until he was watching the boy on the bike below. The boy below looked fearless. The boy below—
At the sudden blare of a horn, he shot right back into his body and felt his hands gripping tightly to the handlebars again. A short distance below, where the road disappeared around a sharp curve, a baby blue pickup had materialized, kicking up a cloud of dust. Em jerked her bike to the side moments before she would have collided with the vehicle, disappearing into the dust, and then the truck was bearing down on Danny in a game of chicken—a game in which Danny had far more to lose than his counterpart did.
Shouts as faint as whispers trickled down from the top of the hill behind Danny. In front of him, the truck’s engine growled a warning that told Danny it was not stopping any time soon. But he was paralyzed again, just as he had been on that roller coaster, only this time there was no Robby next to his ear to reassure him.
The truck ate up the distance, its grill a greedy mouth. Danny had a vision of striking that grill and slipping beneath the undercarriage, smothered by the hot darkness…
And then, with a slight shift of the wrist, the driver turned the truck just far enough to roar past Danny without running over him. Danny caught a glimpse of the driver—beat-up baseball cap, long and greasy gray hair—and then the mirror struck his shoulder and, before he knew it, he was on his side in the dirt, his right arm too numb to tell him what pain he should be in just yet.
Danny lifted his head to watch the truck dart between the two boys, who mounted their own bicycles and came swooping down the hill. Then Danny put his head down again and stared up at the hazy clouds.
Tut-tut, looks like rain, he thought.
“Danny!” Robby cried, leaping off his bike before it had even come to a full stop. “Danny, you okay? That stupid bastard could’ve killed you!”
Danny pushed himself to his feet, wincing as he took a look at his right arm. It was bruised, and there were a few beads of blood like milk seeping through cheesecloth, but all in all he was hardly the worse for wear. Even his left shoulder, where he’d struck the mirror, only gave off a dull ache.
“I guess we know who’s the chicken now, don’t we?” Danny said as Robby began brushing dirt off Danny’s jeans. Robby looked at him, wide-eyed, and then he started laughing. Danny grinned, pleased with himself.
“Where’s Em?” Brandon asked suddenly.
Danny looked down the road. There was no sign of Em.
“She must’ve gone around the bend,” Robby said, but there was a note of worry in his voice. Danny knew him too well to miss it.
“Em?” Brandon called, sounding uncertain of himself. Then, more loudly: “Em!” He pushed his bike along, trotting beside it, and Robby and Danny picked up their bikes and followed. Danny, however, being the youngest and the shortest of the group, soon fell behind, and he watched with a growing sense of unease as the two older boys raced around the bend and out of sight.
He wanted to shout for them to wait, but he too was worried about Em. He came around the bend, racing as fast as his legs could carry him, just in time to see the boys’ bikes tip over, unattended, as Robby and Brandon pelted toward the trees that grew thickly along the road. They struggled for a moment with the vegetation, and then the forest swallowed them.
Danny slowed. An artery was beating wildly in his throat like a worm thrashing around under the skin. In front of him, the road gave way to moss and then to muck. Pools of algae pockmarked the ground. Deer flies swam in the heavy air, touching down on Danny’s head and rising again before he had time to swat at them.
Em’s purple bike lay twisted against a massive rotten log, the handlebars wrenched at a severe angle. Danny had an image of Em being launched missile-like through the trees, over the pools, far into the depths of that forbidden place.
Thunder grumbled. Danny felt an instinctive urge to close his eyes—an heirloom of early childhood—but he knew it would do no good. The taint of swamp water broiled in his nostrils, grounding him in this unpleasant moment. He thought of the greasy-haired man in the truck and the jarring rattle of the runaway bike; then, casting his mind further back like a fly fisherman working the middle of a river, he tasted the acidic sweetness of that morning’s orange juice and the shriveled saltiness of the sausages his dad had overcooked in his haste to get ready for work, and how Danny had scared Margo the cat because he was kicking his legs beneath the table.
Kicking like a child without a care in the world.
An idea surfaced, taking shape by the moment: a police car rolling slowly along the road, so slowly that Danny could hear the crunch of every individual stone beneath the tires as the officer scanned the woods with a spotlight. And it occurred to him then that the world was a big and greedy place—greedy like that baby blue truck, greedy like these trees looming over him now, rasping their hands together in the wind…
“Just terrific,” a voice said.
* * *
Startled, Danny turned toward the rotten log against which the bike had crashed. A thin, pale arm protruded from the far side of the log, waving a muddy sock like a flag of surrender. Then a second hand appeared, grabbing a wet fistful of rotten wood, and Em’s head and shoulders appeared as she dragged herself upward. Leaves and bits of bark clung to her hair like ornaments on a wind chime.
“You’re alive,” Danny said, not quite realizing until that moment that he had suspected otherwise.
“Of course I’m alive,” she said, frowning as if he were stupid. “What did you think happened to me?” Without waiting for an answer, she began slithering over the log, which left a dark smear on the front of her shirt. At the same time, the two boys burst from the trees and stopped to stare in undisguised wonder at Em.
“Em!” Brandon shouted, darting forward as if to embrace her. At the last moment he pulled up, looking unsure of himself. He settled for giving her shoulder a playful shove instead.
“Look what you did to that poor bike,” he said. “Dad’s gonna be so mad.”
“Not as mad as I am,” Em said, hopping in place as she tried to slip the muddy sock back on. Her foot was as white as a daisy, though Danny doubted it smelled quite as lovely. At last she gave up and cast the sock into the weeds in disgust.
“That truck was going too fast,” Robby said, frowning up toward the road, an expression that made him look much older than his fourteen years.
Brandon had stood the bike up, and now he pushed it back and forth. “I guess it’ll work. But we’d better get it cleaned up before Dad sees it.” Brandon and Em lived alone with their dad, a source of never-ending curiosity for Danny, who had the privilege of knowing both his parents.
Brandon picked up a handful of dry leaves and began scouring the bike.
“We should get back,” Robby said with that same grownup frown. There was now a note of worry in his voice, too. He was staring up at the clouds—hazy, heavy, a sight that reminded Danny of a phrase from a poem he had come across in his literature book: ‘ghostly galleon.’ The poem had been talking about the moon, but Danny thought the description was fitting here, too.
“If we sneak back behind the house,” Brandon was saying, lost in his own world as he gathered a fresh handful of leaves, “we can hose it off. Maybe Dad won’t even notice.”
“Is there supposed to be a storm?” Danny asked his brother. Ordinarily he liked storms—all that raw power—but out here the idea of getting caught in a storm felt much less appealing.
“I don’t know,” Robby murmured. “Sometimes when it’s hot like this, you get a cold front rolling in and—”
“Oh my god,” Em said. Danny had been so focused on the clouds, he’d all but forgotten she was still there—and judging by the reactions of the other two, it seemed they had as well.
At first Danny couldn’t tell what Em was staring at. Then he spotted it: Just down the road, an overgrown dirt path split off to the left. A sun-washed sign swarming with briars stood sentinel at the entrance. It took Danny several moments to puzzle out the letters written on it.
They spelled TONGSTONE.
“That’s where it happened,” Em said in a low voice.
“Where what happened?” Danny asked. He had no idea what she was talking about, but the seriousness in her voice worried him.
Brandon dropped the leaves and brushed his hands together. “The Donovan twins,” he said, stepping forward to get a better look at the dirt path.
“Who?” Robby asked.
“They went missing around here a few years ago,” Em said. “You didn’t hear about it?”
“They played soccer,” Brandon said.
“Were they any good?” Danny asked, hoping to insert himself into the conversation. Em gave him a puzzled look before turning back to Robby.
“They found them in a creak,” she said.
“Well, the cows found them,” Brandon said.
“They were lying there in the mud like two little porcelain dolls, with that bluish color you see in the snow sometimes. No clothes or anything, like they were just born that way. Stillborn.”
“When the baby’s already dead,” Brandon said with solemn, knowing eyes.
Something like electricity ran through Danny’s body, tingling as it went.
“I never heard about it,” Robby said, straightening. “Probably some story a kid made up at school.”
Brandon shook his head earnestly. “It was on the news—I saw it myself. They said something about the person responsible being large.”
“At large, dummy,” Em said with a sidelong glance. “It means they don’t know where he is.”
“Oh, so it’s a he?” Brandon said, bristling at the insult.
“Most of them are.”
“If you know so much, why don’t you just solve it yourself and save the police the trouble?”
“Maybe I will.”
This suspense was more than Danny could take. “What happened to them?” he asked.
Em shrugged as if the answer were of little consequence. “My guess? They went into those woods and found something they shouldn’t have. And when it got tired of having its fun with them, it got rid of them. If you’re so curious, Danny, why don’t you go in there and find out for yourself?”
Danny peered along the dirt path. He could not see far: Pine branches crowded in on either side, and rose bushes shot up to choke the way. But, looking, he imagined the two children pushing through the weeds, and he thought of Hansel and Gretel and the trail of breadcrumbs. If he were ever to wander into the woods like that, he would bring his jar of seashells—an enduring treasure from a trip to the Atlantic some years ago—and lay them out one by one. He had never heard of birds eating seashells.
Thunder grumbled, and Danny looked up to see that a bank of clouds the color of dishwater was fast approaching. There was an odd stillness to the forest; the air felt frozen, lifeless.
“Nobody’s going down that path,” Robby said. “We’re all going home—before this storm cracks open on our heads.”
“Afraid it’s still in there?” Em asked, a mischievous look in her eye. “Whatever got those twins?”
“I don’t think I want to find out,” Robby said. Danny, studying his older brother’s face, saw more wariness than fear, as if somewhere along the way Robby had learned that some things were best not put to the test.
Em looked ready to respond, but just then the wind picked up. It came whooshing through the trees like a giant’s breath, somersaulting leaves and tickling the hairs on the nape of Danny’s neck. It was a cool wind, a wind from a faraway place, and no sooner had it swept through than a spattering of raindrops sprinkled in Danny’s hair.
“I think it’s starting,” Brandon said, moving back toward the road and the bikes. “We’d better—”
Before he could finish, they all heard it: an audible hush, as if a great voice were telling them all to be silent. The hush rolled toward them and took form: a gray wall carried on the cool wind, too fast for them to outrun. The water beat down on them in fat, clinging raindrops, and then they were all scrambling to find their bikes. They folded their kickstands and mounted up and pushed off and rolled down the hill, not returning the way they’d come but continuing on, completing the circle that would lead them back to Em’s and Brandon’s house.
Em was ahead of the pack, but she slowed to let the other three catch up. Water ran in rivulets down her cheeks and plastered her hair to her face. She looked at Brandon, and then they both burst out laughing and Danny joined in, too, feeling that the danger was past and all good things were ahead of them. Only Robby remained serious, his eyes fixed on the road as if it were his responsibility alone to see them all safely home.
As he no doubt believed.
“Come on!” Em shouted, leaning forward and ravaging the pedals as she shot from the pack. Brandon slapped Robby on the shoulder and, with a wild whoop, galloped after his sister.
Danny could see the excitement building on his brother’s face—it was infectious. Older brother or not, Robby was still just a kid himself, and he could not easily turn down a challenge among friends.
Danny, wishing to release his brother of his duty, said, “It’s okay! Don’t wait for me.”
Robby went on peddling for several seconds, saying nothing. Then Brandon shouted something indistinguishable back at them—an invitation, a challenge, and Robby squeezed the handlebars.
“Try to keep up, okay?” he said to Danny, shouting to be heard above the rain.
Danny nodded. He was not sure he could keep up, but he was not about to say so. He watched as Robby leaned forward and took off, sailing ahead of him. Danny did indeed try to keep up, but no matter how hard he pushed the bike, the gap between him and the other three continued to widen.
Em and Brandon had slowed their mad pace, but when Robby shot past them, hollering, they redoubled their efforts. Brandon didn’t gain much ground, but Em did, and soon she and Robby were at the front of the pack, riding neck-and-neck along the winding hills with reckless disregard for any oncoming vehicles that might appear out of nowhere like the baby blue truck had. Brandon fell to third place, a few bike-lengths behind the first two, the whites of his sneakers flashing in the furious cycle of his pedals.
And last of all came Danny, legs burning, heart throbbing, the sky flashing at the edges of his vision. Thunder rolled across the unseen horizon. He stared at Brandon’s sneakers and tried not to pay attention to how tired he was. He imagined the distance from here to home like a pair of walls closing in, and he had only to keep moving his legs and soon he would be able to leave the bike in the weeds and climb the porch, where he and Robby would drape towels around their necks and watch the storm while playing Risk or chess or maybe seeing if there were any movies on AMC.
Hard as he pedaled, however, he felt himself falling behind. He shouted to Brandon, but just then the thunder growled again, overhead this time. Brandon glanced over his shoulder, and for a moment Danny sensed rather than saw that Brandon was staring at him. Danny felt a spark of hope—surely Brandon would fall back and ride with him. It didn’t matter if they got back a minute or two behind the others. They could tease him the rest of his life for being the slowest, so long as he didn’t have to ride this deserted, storm-tossed road alone.
But Brandon did not slow. He merely gestured at Danny to catch up, and then he untwisted and bent back to his task. The distance between them grew until Brandon was no more than a blurry shape barely visible through the driving rain. Then Danny lost sight of him altogether.
Fear shivered through Danny.
Come on, he told himself, gritting his teeth. Come on!
He bent forward just as Brandon had and pumped his legs as hard as he could. An ache was swelling in his right thigh, and his hands were sore from clenching the handlebars, but these pains were far-off and unimportant. All that mattered was getting back within sight of his friends. So long as he could see them, he was tethered to them. But back here, in the darkness and the lashing rain—
A gust of wind broadsided Danny and the bike shuddered beneath him. The handlebars shivered back and forth…and then Danny was crashing into the weeds at the side of the road, prickers ripping along his arms and tearing at his shirt, until the bike struck something solid and slipped out from beneath him.
Rain pattered on his face as he lay there, panting, one leg pinned under the bike. Peering through the tall stalks of the weeds that trembled around him in the onslaught, he saw what he had struck: Three strands of rusted barbed wire ran low to the ground, one line of which looped above the weeds and then submerged again. The front tire of the bike had rolled over the wires; the pedals had not.
Still, he was alive. His arm itched from where the prickers had ravaged it, but otherwise he seemed to be unscathed—a lucky thing, considering the speed at which he’d been moving.
Lying on his side, tangled with the bike and the wires, Danny thought of the hydrogen peroxide his mother would undoubtedly use when she saw his cuts. He hated how it bubbled and stung, as if it were eating away his flesh. Em had said doctors used to put leeches on cuts to cure diseases, but Danny doubted this was true. Em liked to say things just to get attention.
They’ll come back, he thought. When they see I’m not behind them, they’ll come looking for me.
He imagined the wonder on their faces when they saw his cuts, the respect. They would help him back up and lead him home, surrounding him like a pack of admirers around a conquering hero. And when his parents saw him—
The wind picked up, casting hard pellets of rain on Danny. The tops of the evergreen trees swayed…and as he watched, something began to climb down through the branches of one of the trees, a steady vertical movement in contrast to the thrashing horizontal motion of the tree. It jumped when it was halfway down, disappearing behind the screen of weeds.
Danny’s heart, already at a steady trot, now broke into a gallop. Could there be monkeys in this forest? It seemed an absurd notion, and yet…
The weeds moved, pushing against the wind. Something was tunneling its way toward him.
Panicked, Danny pushed himself up on one elbow and tried to drag himself free of the bike. He was stuck, however—the bike would not let his trapped leg go.
The wind whipped the branches of the trees back, exposing the silver undersides of the leaves. The entire forest seemed to be in motion, as if it were not solid but liquid, a swirl of colors like a can of paint as it is being mixed. Crumpled leaves somersaulted past, and the wind blew cold against the back of Danny’s neck.
Summoning his courage, Danny turned his head to look behind him, deeper into the forest. A figure was leaning one hand against a tree, a fixed point in all that leafy chaos.
Staring at Danny.
A scream rose and died in Danny’s throat. In a burst of movement, he slipped both hands beneath the bike and lifted it. At the same time, he drew his leg back. He felt his shorts tear, and then there was a sharp pain as the teeth of the barbed wire raked through his skin as if it were paper. As he tried to stand, his foot got caught, the laces of his sneaker snagging on the barbed wire. He fell hard, slapping his hands on the wet leaves.
And then a cold hand grasped his ankle.
* * *
Danny kicked—it was the only thing he could think to do. He squirmed, he thrashed, he screamed for help at the top of his lungs.
“Robby! Robby, help! Somebody!”
None of it mattered. The big man holding Danny’s ankle didn’t let go or offer a word of explanation or even look into Danny’s eyes. His face, wrapped in a hood that was doing little to keep the rain at bay, bore a vacuous expression that appeared to have set there overnight.
Danny wanted to plead with him, to say he had parents and a brother and they would all be worried sick about him, but the words died in his throat. He felt an overwhelming uncertainty that it didn’t matter what he said—this giant of a man would not hear him.
Could not hear him, perhaps.
In all Danny’s wriggling, he’d gotten himself tangled up in the barbed wire again. The man patiently pried it away, freeing Danny inch by inch. Then, bending the strands of wire up to form an arch, the man dragged Danny beneath it.
A sense of inevitability pressed itself down on Danny. He didn’t fight any more, didn’t scream. Whatever was going to happen, it would happen. He might as well have been bound to train tracks; the rails were thrumming, the engine was snorting in the distance.
Danny’s body glided over the slick leaves, bumping along roots. Then, as he entered the shelter of a gnarled oak tree, the man set Danny’s leg down. He didn’t drop it, but rather bent down to lay the leg in the leaves, as if it were fragile.
Valuable.
Danny lay there in silence. There had been something rhythmic in the impact of the rain and the brush of leaves against his back as he was dragged along, and the rhythm had hushed him. He felt as if he had fallen into a dream with his eyes open, yet all the pieces of the dream—the cold spatter of the rain and the damp clinginess of the leaves, the circlet of that strong hand around his ankle before it released him—seemed as real as breathing. It was only in their totality that they became unbelievable.
The man pressed both his hands against the small of his back and stretched. Then, sighing, he sank down against the trunk of the oak, his hood slipping back as he did so. He plucked something from the leaves—a magazine, by the look of it. It was warped and dog-eared, as if it had long borne the brunt of another’s love.
As Danny studied the man, he was struck by a strange realization. This was not a man at all, but a boy—an oversized boy, yes, a boy nonetheless. Not much older than Danny, perhaps.
As Danny’s heels thumped to the ground, the figure fell back against the base of the oak and plucked a magazine from where it lay in the leaves. He was not a man at all, Danny realized, but an oversized boy not much older than he himself was. His thick knees, which cradled the magazine, were the off-white of almond milk, but his forearms and neck were a shade darker, though not as dark as Danny’s. His hair was short and uniform, a home cut if Danny had ever seen one; a bit long in the back and a bit frayed around the ears, with sideburns that dropped nearly to the bottoms of his ears. His face was a wide expanse with few features: the eyes and mouth small, the cheeks round and hairless, the nose a prominent mountain range in a barren wilderness.
The older boy’s lips moved soundlessly as his finger traced the words. So lost was he in his reading, he seemed to have forgotten Danny altogether. He might not even notice if Danny were to sneak away, grab his bike, and ride on home.
Danny’s heart fluttered as he sat up, pulling out a handful of leaves that had worked themselves into the back of his shirt. He kept his eyes on the older boy to see if he responded, but the older boy’s gaze remained fixed on the page. If he noticed Danny’s movements at all, he gave no sign.
Relieved by this anonymity, Danny studied his surroundings for the first time. The shaded area of the oak had the look of a boys’ clubhouse. There was an old rusted bicycle, a metal pail turned upside down for a seat, a bed composed of a tattered quilt spread over a heap of leaves, several sticks of uncertain merit, a deflated basketball, and a cone of stacked tires. The area was roped off with strands of twine tied to adjoining trees.
If Robby could see this, Danny thought. Robby loved this sort of thing. He would have a thousand ideas for how to improve—
Danny felt a flash of panic at the memory of his brother. Were Robby and Brandon and Em out in the storm that very moment, calling his name? How much time had passed since he last saw them?
He had to get back. He pushed himself to his feet, wincing at the pain in his leg. He looked down to see a long, jagged cut on the outside of his left calf. Part of the wound was already dark and clotted, but still a thin trail of blood ran down into his sock. He tried to tell himself it would be a cool scar…but he was not sure he wanted any scars from this day.
He swallowed hard, his stomach uneasy at the sight of the blood. Just don’t look at it, he told himself. Just start running and don’t look at it.
Standing at the edge of the oak’s protective umbrella, Danny watched the rain crash through the leaves and listened to the roar of the storm. It was getting dark. He could not see the road, or any other landmark or feature he knew, and this made him feel small and alone.
What if he got lost?
You can’t get lost, he told himself. Just keep walking and you’ll eventually get to the road. Then you can take the road home, easy-peasy. That’s what Robby would do.
Fortified by this reassurance, he was about to step out into the rain again when the older boy spoke.
“The peepers will be real loud tonight.”
Danny turned back and was startled to see the boy standing a few paces behind him, the magazine curled in one hand. Danny hadn’t heard him approach.
“Sometimes you can hear them even in the basement,” the boy continued in a detached monotone, his eyes fixed on the forest. “Jane calls it the basement, but Joe calls it the cellar, but Jane says the cellar is for vegetables, and we don’t have vegetables down there, ‘cept of course the mushrooms. But I don’t touch mushrooms—only the little brown ones you step on and they shoot dust everywhere. But you have to be careful not to get any of the dust in your nose or they’ll grow inside you.”
Danny felt a strange mixture of curiosity and unease. He realized now that, until that moment, he’d been haunted by a vague fear that this boy intended him harm. Now, however, doubt crept in. He could not have said why, but he sensed that this boy had no interest in harming him and probably wouldn’t even conceive of such an idea.
“Why did you drag me over here?” Danny asked, screwing up the courage to speak.
The boy’s eyebrows pulled together as if the answer were self-evident. “On account of the rain.”
Danny pondered this logic and said nothing.
“That barb-wire fence has been there forever,” the boy went on. “Once I was playing hide and seek and I tripped over it, and I cut my ankle.” He swung his right leg up and planted his foot against the tree, revealing a small white scar just above his foot.
The boy lowered his leg. “I’ve got lots of scars,” he said with a knowing nod. “Once I fell out of a tree and hit my head, and now there’s a little spot where the hair doesn’t grow. See?” He twisted around and gestured at the back of his head. Danny could not identify the spot the boy had mentioned, not in that tangled jungle, but he nodded nonetheless.
“And this one is from an old can I cut open with my knife,” the boy continued, showing his right index finger, which had a long white mark on the side. “But I’m not supposed to have a knife any more.” He trailed off, sounding unhappy. His hands found each other and began to wrestle like a pair of snakes.
Danny had the sense that if he did not take advantage of the silence, the older boy would find another favorite topic and be off before Danny could stop him. So he said the only thing that seemed to matter just now.
“I have to go home.”
A few moments passed. The boy blinked at the storm, his face blank as if he hadn’t heard.
“The chain came off,” he finally said.
“What?” Danny asked, puzzled.
“On your bike. The chain came off. You won’t be able to ride it. But I can fix your bike. I can fix all kinds of things. And there’s a phone at the house, too. You can call your family. And then, when your bike is done, you can go home.”
The boy’s voice had gone monotone again, his hands continuing to wrestle, and this made Danny uneasy. Danny hadn’t realized the chain had come off. Then again, he hadn’t looked closely at the bike—he’d been too distracted by the giant man-child pulling at his leg.
Still, broken bike or not, he could simply walk back to the road on his own two feet. The others would be waiting for him there: Robby, Brandon, Em. It would be a long walk pushing his bike all the way home, but it wouldn’t be so bad with the three of them for company. Or one of them could ride home, get Mom or Dad to drive out, and they could load their bikes into the van and ride home together.
Maybe Brandon and Em could even sleep over.
Either way, he would soon be safe in his bed, smelling the scent of his mother’s lavender candle from the hallway and hearing the scratch of Tiger’s claws as he patrolled from room to room. And all would be right in the world.
“It’s not so loud in the basement,” the boy said.
Danny looked at him, puzzled. Then it occurred to him that the boy was talking about the rain. Danny decided he had better make his escape before the boy’s motor mouth started up again.
“Well, I should get home,” he said, then hesitated. Obeying the rules of social obligation that had been drilled into him since infancy, he turned and tentatively stuck out his hand. “I’m Danny.”
The older boy turned his vacuous gaze on Danny. “I don’t like touching people.”
“Oh.” Danny’s hand fell back to his side.
“But my name is Brian Thatcher. You can call me Brian.” And then, in a sudden burst of friendliness, “Or B, if you want.”
“Okay,” Danny said. And you can call me D, if you want, he almost said, but staring into Brian’s wide, unthinking eyes changed his mind. He didn’t think Brian would get the joke.
He faced the forest again. The rain showed no sign of slowing down. He was already soaked, however, and besides, the run might warm him up. Mom would heat a clean set of clothes in the dryer, and he might even get a cup of hot chocolate, even though Brandon said you weren’t supposed to have hot chocolate if there wasn’t snow outside. Dad would be home, too, and maybe they could stay up late watching one of his shows, especially if Danny promised he wouldn’t have nightmares.
It seemed to Danny as if all of this lay just on the other side of these trees. A beautiful future was his for the taking.
His courage had been building all this time, and now it propelled him forward. He took a few halting steps, then burst into a jog, shooting a worried glance over his shoulder for fear Brian would try to stop him. But Brian was only standing there, watching him go, his eyes troubled and sad.
Danny hardly even noticed the pain in his leg as he fought through the weeds. The gray of night was coming on, thick as a murky pond. Suddenly he was at the edge of the road, a pale line in the darkness, and he knew he must have passed both the bike and the barbed wire without noticing.
But how was that possible? Shouldn’t he have tripped on the barbed wire?
Maybe part of it is covered up, he thought. Or missing.
Crossing his arms against the cold—the short sprint had failed to warm him—he looked left up the hill and finally right, all the way to where the road curved out of sight. He saw no one.
“Ro-bby!” he shouted. His voice broke on the name, and all at once he realized how desperately scared he was. The rain came on relentlessly, the darkness descended in all directions, and he was far from home and did not know the way back. He had a general idea, yes: up that hill and then the house would be somewhere on the left. But between the hill and the left were miles of possibilities, wrong turns and eyes glinting in the darkness and ferocious dogs straining against their chains and whatever other cruel surprises the night might disgorge.
He told himself to go forward, to climb that hill, but his legs would not move. Fear sprouted in him like a bamboo shoot. With every passing second he lost a year of his life until he was no more than a helpless toddler, lost and waiting for his parents to rescue him.
Surely they would find him. Surely someone would find them.
“Sometimes I sled down the hill in the snow,” a voice behind him said.
Danny turned around to see Brian standing at the edge of the road, his hood up and his hands in his pockets. Flowering ragweed brushed his thighs. His face had that far-off expression again as if his mind were untouched by anything around it: the storm, the night, the fading sound of Danny’s call.
“You can go really fast,” Brian continued, “and they almost never plow the road so there are no cars. I like to make jumps. But you have to be careful you don’t hit any trees. I have a scar from one time.”
Danny began to cry.
“There’s a phone at my house,” Brian said again. He approached Danny and mechanically set his hand on Danny’s shoulder and patted it twice.
“You can sleep in my room,” he said.
“I don’t want to sleep in your room,” Danny said, sniffling. “I want to go home.”
“Sure,” Brian said. “But just in case. Just in case.”
Leave a Reply