The Creeping (32 page)

The
shwet shwet
of her knife slicing at the stick doesn't stop. “Don't know exactly. I don't put creed in thinkin' it's a force causin' accidents. Best I can describe it is this: It's an appetite, a creature bent on feedin'. It craves a certain kind of li'l girl, and if it can't get its hooks into what it wants, anyone in its path will do.”

My fingernails are blue from cold and gouging into the back of the wooden chair hard enough to leave claw marks. I chew the inside of my cheek, hoping to jolt myself awake from the nightmare I'm obviously trapped in.

“But what is it?” Sam prods. “Where did it come from? Is it an animal? A person?”

She shrugs, cool amusement playing on her face. “It might have started out as one or the other. But once it peeled the flesh from a babe's arm jus' to hear her blubber, it stopped bein' either.”

“Like the devil,” I murmur.

Griever appraises me, running her tongue over her gray gums. “There's no devil. Doesn't need to be, with what actually lurks high in those hills. Trust me, you don't wanna be after rememberin' it. When I was a li'l thing, folks in Savage wanted it kept secret. Maybe people are still after keepin' it quiet?”

“But why keep it a secret?” I sputter. “If parents knew, they wouldn't let their kids in the woods. The disappearances would stop.”

Griever waggles a splintered yellow fingernail at me. “You see, when folks knew 'bout it when I was a girl, there were those who preyed on their fear. Did things to li'l girls and blamed it on the Creepin', knowin' full well they'd get away with it. Sure, the critter sank its latch hooks into some of 'em, but men and women took others. Folks thought it was better to keep quiet 'bout the monster they knew than to unleash all they didn't.”

“That's why the graves in the cemetary were tampered with,” Sam says. “Someone didn't want future generations seeing all those graves of little children and investigating what happened, finding out about the creature if it had been forgotten. Betty Balco and the other girls went missing, and they never found who did it. And you're saying this—this
thing
took some of them, but people took others because
they thought they could hide behind the legend? And they were right. When this happened eighty years ago, they never made any arrests.”

“But that's not happening now,” I say. “If people were trying to cover it up, they wouldn't have let Jeanie's case go unsolved for eleven years, right? They would have found a viable suspect. Put the case to rest so people didn't ask questions.”

“Maybe they thought it would go away?” Sam says. “One little girl's an anomaly after so many years. But Jane Doe showed up dead and they figured it's happening again and they hustled all the charges on Kent Talcott. Rather than letting people know there's something in the woods, they're sending an innocent man to prison.”

“But how does anyone know about it?” I ask Griever.

She tilts her head back, regarding me. “Same way folks know 'bout anythin'. Someone told 'em. Stories passed down through generations. Even though a lot of the old families have died out or moved on, you got some who've lived here for years. I bet they know 'bout the Creepin'. How couldn't they know a monster's afoot with all those dead li'l girls turnin' up?”

Griever sets her jaw so her jowls twitch in the firelight. I want desperately to believe she's mostly crazy, brain turned to mush with age, spinning stories to justify a pathological violence against animals. Yet I don't.

I move out from behind Sam. “This
thing
is what took Jeanie? You helped her once, though, didn't you? You found her when she was lost in the woods a month before she disappeared.” I recall the good witch that Jeanie said helped her.

Griever licks her lips. “I seen you kids playin' at huntin' lots of times. I told you and your li'l redheaded friend to be careful what ya looked for, ya jus' might find it. Yous were stubborn li'l brats who didn't listen.” And there it is. A mystery solved. Griever warned Jeanie and me, and we didn't listen.

“You.” I struggle to keep my bearing. “ ‘If you hunt for monsters, you'll find them.' You told us that. Why didn't you tell the cops?”

“Police were lookin' for someone to blame. Someone to hold responsible for the missing li'l girl. I wasn't gonna admit to talkin' to yous out here alone.”

I run it through my mind until it's smooth and shiny. All these months since I read the case file I've been parroting what Griever said to shoo us from the woods. To keep us safe and alive, but we didn't listen, and Jeanie died for it.

I rub my damp hands on my jeans. “Do you know where to find it? Is it at Norse Rock? Is that where it spots its victims?”

A wet snort. “I ain't tellin' you. You go up there”—she points at the west wall—“you won't come back. You ain't monster enough to survive.”

“But Mr. Talcott confessed yesterday,” I say, taking a step toward her. “No one's looking for it anymore, and I have to prove it wasn't him.”

She juts out her chin, examining the sharp tip of the wooden dagger she's whittled. “Grief does funny things to folk,” she says thoughtfully. A moment later she rises hastily. “It's time for yous to leave. Out with ya.” She waves her hands like we're flames she'll fan out.

“But he can barely walk.” I rush to support Sam as he stands unsteadily from the chair, wincing to put weight on both legs.

“Not my concern. You've brought too much trouble round already. Be off.” She waves the pointed stick in the air. Sam takes my hand, coaxing me along as he limps to the doorway. We move surprisingly fast through the hall and back into the night. My eyes take a minute to adjust, and for a while we're in pitch blackness. Who knows what beasts could be stalking us from the shadows? I help Sam over the busted steps and we start toward the path.

“Girl,” Griever hisses from the mouth of the shack, “best you jus' move on from here. Take your fella and thank your lucky stars it wasn't you.”

With Sam's arm slung over my shoulders, I can see only her head as I glance back. A floating head with black holes under her brow where her eyes should be.
I should listen to Griever. But I am stubborn, and stupid, and brave.

I
t takes ages for us to get back to Sam's car. Fear nips at my heels with every step, and I get the sense that we're being watched, followed, hunted even. The white disk of a moon casts enough light for us to see a few steps ahead, and the bramble on either side is black and impenetrable.

“We're okay, Stella. There's nothing out here,” Sam murmurs when I whimper at the nearby crunch of leaves. Yards past the old Victorian house, the lane's only streetlight shines as a second moon.

Somehow we make it to the station wagon without being attacked by night creatures. I help Sam into the passenger seat and sprint to the driver's side. Once inside I slam my hand down on the door lock—that little click of the car doors being secured the most comforting sound in the world. The car rumbles to life, and I pitch it into drive. I accelerate down the lane and only slow when we hit downtown.

We don't speak the whole way home. Sam's arms stay braced
against the door and center console. His breathing is an erratic and harsh melody filling the cab. I'm sad and relieved for different reasons when I round my street corner and see Dad's car still missing from the driveway. “Can you stay with me tonight?” I ask, turning into the driveway.

“What about your dad?” he asks.

I point to the digital clock reading 2:05 a.m. “If Dad works past midnight, he crashes in his office.”

Our second night together couldn't be more different from our first. I help Sam into a pair of Dad's sweats, bring him four Tylenol to ease the pain, and help him into my bed. He tells me three times that it's not too bad before I stop asking if we should go to the emergency room. Before I can say I want to compare my time line from last night with what Griever told us, his breathing has evened out.

I pore over it myself. I confirm that the accidental tragedies with corresponding animal disappearances occurred forty or more years ago. Those sacrifices must have been made by the backwoods families Griever said are no longer alive or living in Savage. Griever said she and her family only sacrificed animals when it seemed like the Creeping had taken victims. In the last few decades, the animal disappearances correspond with hikers and campers vanishing, what was assumed to be a bear attack, and Jeanie Talcott's kidnapping. Those recent sacrifices must have been the work of Griever and any relative of hers alive at the time.

Satisfied that I've gotten to the bottom of the animal disappearances, I change into a tattered T-shirt and slip into bed. I stare at
the thin lines of light like pale chalk between the slats of my blinds. Somewhere out there a streetlamp is burning white and steady, guiding moths out of the night to its warmth while I'm shaking as the cold in my bones freezes me from the inside out. For the first time it occurs to me that remembering might be too . . .
too everything.
What if I witnessed more than Jeanie being taken? What if I watched as her insides, neatly tucked and coiled under thin pink skin, were pulled from her body? What if I heard the crackle and snap of her scalp's tissue parting from her skull? What if once I remember I can't stop replaying it, and it becomes all I hear? Jeanie's whimpering. Jeanie's bones breaking and her cartilage crackling. The hiss of Jeanie's last breath. What if it's so much
more
and I'm not strong, or certain, or able, or
enough
, and it breaks me?

Ultimately, though, I swallow the fear so it roosts somewhere smaller, darker, deeper in me, because of the whistle of Sam's breath between his teeth. Sam is here. Sam will help me bear it. I gently brush aside the hair sticking to his forehead. His long lashes are clumped together in little starlike sharp points. He got hurt tonight because of me. I dragged him there like I've dragged him everywhere, tethered by some invisible rope he calls love. Sam's uncovered nearly every piece of evidence that proves there's a creature lurking in the woods. That there's something so much more—or less—than human.

My hand hovers just above his forehead, so close my fingertips imagine the flutter of hair on their pads. A flutter of something else in the back of my head. It was Sam's idea to look for past disappearances in library archives, to search the graveyard, to investigate
what we were doing in the woods as kids. Every hunch he's had yields blizzards of clues, and all that evidence has led me to one impossible conclusion: the Creeping.

My hand retracts carefully as I'm shaking my head into the swell of the pillow. No, no, no, what am I getting at? This is
Sam
. Too patient, too kind, too forgiving, too-good-to-be-true Sam Worth. I'm clinging to the edge of the bed before I realize I've rolled away, put space between us. I must be losing it if I'm even thinking . . .
What am I thinking?
That six-year-old Sam had something to do with Jeanie's disappearance? That now he's steering me away from human suspects by inventing monsters, by fabricating evidence and leads? Sam isn't just my Sam. He was six. But is there something he's steering me away from? Sam's been eyeing the supernatural all along. How could he have known?

I know Zoey and Caleb were home with chicken pox when Jeanie was taken, and Daniel was home with his mom, but I don't have a clue where Sam was. I've never asked. I figured he wasn't there because it was a girly playdate, but isn't it weird that it's never come up? I've heard loads of kids who barely knew Jeanie talk about where they were that afternoon. Everyone wants to claim a piece of history for themselves—even the Jeanie-shaped history of Savage. How has Sam never mentioned that he was sipping lemonade poolside, or thumping a ramshackle birdhouse with a hammer at Scouts, or taking a dreamless nap when Jeanie was abducted?

Suspicion sends my thoughts shrieking backward, bashing along memories like speed bumps until I reach the Day of Bones. Me: in
the cemetery lying on the stone bench, eyes closed. Sam's head in place of the moon as my lids snapped open. No crunch of his footsteps, no blurry form coming into focus between the graves. I didn't see the direction he came from.

I twist farther from Sam as I wag my head no, no, no. He doesn't have anything to do with Jeanie or Jane Doe.
But I didn't see where he came from
. What if he was traveling from deeper in the cemetery? What if he stumbled across me after offing another little redheaded victim, and he's smart as hell, so he pretended to have followed me?

My hands drop limp at my sides. This is insane, crazeballs, nutso, borderline betrayal that as Sam sleeps vulnerable and unguarded a foot away I'm trying him of murder and finding him guilty. I need a straitjacket if I'm actually thinking that six-year-old Sam had anything to do with Jeanie and that now he's hungry for more. I push my palms against my eyes until fireworks take the place of the mangy scrap of skin that was Jane Doe's scalp.

A moment later I feel for the furry lump on the carpet, the stale polyester smell of my bunny's fur in my face and lungs as I squeeze him tighter, my whole rib cage cradling him. My eyelids are fat and heavy. I went grave digging tonight. An old woman warned us about an ancient monster that kills little girls. She accused Savage of trying to keep it a secret years ago; she warned that it might be happening again. I rock Bunny. That's all it is: exhaustion, ragged nerves, imagination drunk from the blurred line between reality and nightmare. Sam would never hurt anyone.

Before I let myself fall asleep, I list every time
I
hurt Sam in
the last five years. Times I rolled my eyes when he wished me happy birthday or asked how my day was going in fourth-period biology. Times when I ignored him for other guys. Times when he was about to ask me out and I made an excuse—which we both knew was bogus—to dodge him. The list goes on and on. It could fill a book. And yet Sam has never injured me back.