The Creeping (41 page)

During the day there are tourists hovering around the strawberries. They snap pictures and nudge the glossy green leaves with their shoes and pretend to prick their fingers on the thorny bramble. No one's ever brave enough to eat a berry. I'd eat every single one if
it would get rid of the tourists for good. You know how when some super-religious person spots Jesus's face in a grilled cheese sandwich? And all the other religious people from miles around come and stare at it? That's what these strawberries have become—that but opposite. The strawberries are proof that evil exists. An entire spectral tale's spun around them. I've come here a few times, wearing sunglasses that mask half my face, to listen to the awed whispers.
Why couldn't Kent Talcott kill them?
Are they possessed? Does the monster feed on them? Did nature send the bramble to protect the berries or snuff their life force out?
I swing the hatchet and swipe it left to right, its blade slashing through the web of vines with the precision of a guillotine. Branches snap as necks would.

The strawberries are innocent, as much a victim to the aftermath as we are. But there's no other way. Sam hammers the earth with the sickle; with each strike its curved blades puncture the hidden root systems of the vines and bramble. Zoey uses the shovel to uproot the thickest stalks from the dirt. We go on like this for ten or fifteen minutes. Berries red and round as inflamed eyeballs tremble on their stems. One after another they fall, popping, splattering their blood. We stomp them out. I drag my sleeve over my mouth. Sam's chest heaves; his eyes are as wild as a rabid dog's. I'm sure I'm foaming at the mouth too.

I watch Zoey's fervor. Her hair sticks to her slick forehead. Her lip gloss drifts to the corner of her mouth. She curses under her breath with the effort. I know Michaela thinks she's pursuing the glory that lasts and that Zoey's kind—the popularity, the social chairs, the prom crowns—is
transient. Zoey has something else, though. It's not that Zoey is as fierce as warriors used to be or as beautiful as an unscarred forest or as complex and wending as a tunnel that burrows to the center of the earth. She's all those things. Zoey is loyal, and there's no glory that outlasts that.

Ten days ago Caleb tore a piece from his T-shirt and stuffed it down his own throat. He suffocated on it as orderlies tried breaking down his door, where he'd wedged a chair under the knob. He left no suicide note, but I don't need a note to know that Caleb couldn't live with what he'd done to Zoey. Yesterday Zoey's mom had a memorial for Caleb. Dad, Sam, Mrs. Worth, Zoey, and I were the only ones who went.

I swing the hatchet faster, elbow straining, a pain shooting into my shoulder. Not surprising. The scar tissue throbs when I brush my teeth. There's wet earth rot in my mouth and nose. I tug a pair of black knit mittens from my pocket and jam my hands into them. I drive my fingers into the dirt where the stalks disappear, and their fat stems turn to colorless roots like obese earthworms. I claw deeper as Zoey does the same. We're up to our wrists in dirt. Finally, I feel where the roots turn from snakes to spindly veins. We pull every last one of them out.

I survey the pile of butchered vines. Only now am I aware of the pinprick stinging. Some of the thorns from the bramble embedded themselves in the fabric of my sweatshirt, their points sticking into my flesh. Rather than grimace, I smile down at the massacred shrub. It had to be done. I had to prove that there's nothing preternatural about this pile of sticks.

“I dare you to grow back now, you hose-beast,” Zoey pants to the ground.

I jam my muddy mittens into my back pocket and pull the Polaroid from my hoodie. We leave the garden sickle and hatchet on the heap. Let people see what finished off their supernatural berries. Next we move into the woods. The sun's just breaking over the horizon, giving everything a scrubbed-clean look. Jeanie's abandoned house fades from view as we hike deeper. Sam's arm is around my waist. The brittle grasses crunch under our feet; it hasn't rained for weeks. Moss like tinsel garlands frost tree branches sucked dry of green. Oak leaves scatter the ground with the look of dead cockroaches curled in on themselves. Prehistoric crane flies hover in the shade, their droopy legs twitching.

Zoey ducks each time one flies near. “I don't get why we couldn't have done this in Jeanie's front yard,” she whines. She glances over her shoulder, hand on her hip, an icy-blue eye blinking at me above dirt like warrior paint on her cheek. “It's uncivilized out here. And besides, it's not like Jeanie will know.”

I look down at the Polaroid. I've left sweaty thumbprints on the glossy finish. “I know, Zo. But this just feels right.” I shake my head to clear it. If I'm going to find the right spot in this expanse of woods, I have to focus. Even though I don't remember exactly where it happened, my body wants to move in a certain direction. I'm trusting instinct. “I think we're too far west.” I pause and survey the copse of trees around us. “Yeah, let's move east,” I call up to Zoey.

“Okay, Wilderness Slut, which way is east?” Her head turns from side to side.

“Left,” Sam says without missing a beat. He gives my hand a light squeeze. The broken blood vessels like red spiders against the white of his eyeballs are gone. He had trouble sleeping for a couple of weeks after I got home from the hospital. He was afraid that the nutcases spilling into Savage would come looking for me. There are knocks at the front door and letters from those who believe Daniel and Caleb are innocent, urging me to come clean about the beast I saw make off with Jeanie. But we've managed. Dad works from home most days, and Shane checks in when he doesn't. I sneak Sam into my room most nights to hold me under the covers. I think Dad and Sam's mom are onto us but have decided to give us a pass.

Zoey flurries her pink polished fingertips at us. “Sam's going to have to do the digging, because I've already chipped two nails.”
Sam.
Not the King of Loserdom. Only Sam. She turns for a beat, like she can sense what I'm thinking, and grins at the two of us.

She wades into a sea of electric-green ferns. In a forest of waning brightness, they illuminate the ground under a tightly woven canopy of hemlock. I grip the photo—the one of us kids on the monster hunt—a little tighter as their fronds brush against my thighs, the topsoil and our feet disappearing.

“You okay?” Sam's head is level with mine. His owl eyes flick over me.

I rub my thumb along the curve of his jaw. “I was just thinking about how lucky I am to have you.” His lips brush my cheek. I think about it a lot lately. I used to measure love in terms of Daniel's love for Jeanie. I thought Daniel's limitless desire to figure out what had
happened to his sister was the product of a love unbounded by this world or the next. Jeanie could have been dust and Daniel would have found her, made her whole again.

I was wrong. Daniel could have put Jeanie to rest years ago by coming clean, but he was too worried about the consequences for himself. Now I'll measure love differently: in terms of Zoey and Sam. I'll love them come hellfire, monsters, secrets, and Weirdowood—and they'll love me the same.

We're looking for the spot where Daniel shot Jeanie with the arrow; where I sat with her until she died. I want to bury this picture, the nearest thing I have to something that belonged to Jeanie, in the dirt that might still be coppery with her blood. It's as close to a funeral for Jeanie as I can get. A tribute to Jeanie was Shane's idea. He thought focusing on her being in a peaceful place would give me closure and help me stop imagining her face everywhere. Shane's the only one I've shared that with. He's as haunted as I am. When I told him I wanted to do it where Jeanie died, his cheeks puffed out like a blowfish until he whooshed with resignation.

We invited him along, but he has his hands full. The police are worried that with the amount of news coverage the crimes and the monster are getting, there will be copycats, sickos hoping to prove the monster's existence by committing crimes, and pedophiles flocking to Savage in order to pin their dirty work on phantom beasts.

As we pass over the edge of the goblin ferns, I freeze. Sam's side presses to mine. Zoey turns when she doesn't hear our footsteps
following, the wind rustling her short hair. With the light behind her head and her hair like that, she could pass for Caleb.

“Is this it?” Sam prods gently. Zoey is there on my other side in a flash, and before I confirm or deny, she has the shovel in her hands and she's thrusting it into the parched soil. Eight unchipped nails be damned.

I release Sam and crouch down with my palms pressed to the earth streaked with red clay. It's cool and soothing against my skin. The clearing extends ten or twelve feet wide and long, with a fallen tree dividing it. From where I squat, I see shiny black beetles scurrying over the trunk, plump brown mushrooms with caps like umbrellas, nodding white flowers like a picnic blanket of snow tinged with lavender, and a luminous blue-winged moth fluttering by. I don't know how, but I know I've been here before.

“Yeah, this is where it happened,” I murmur. For some reason I expected death to be thinly veiled here: trees shriveling, decomposing animal carcasses, crimped spider legs, a sulfur stench, and a bank of moss growing over her skeleton. I thought I had to face this place for Jeanie. Stare it down to tame it. Put her to rest. Find her bones to bury. It's where it all happened. But it's already peaceful.

“Her body isn't here,” Zoey says, out of breath.

Sam frowns, scanning the clearing. “Animals likely dragged her away. It's been years,” he says. “I'll dig.” He reaches for the shovel and Zoey hands it over, her forehead shining with sweat. She stands behind me, hand resting lightly on the crown of my head, playing in my hair as I let the peace of the place sink into me, loosen the knot in
my chest. When the hole is wide enough for the photograph and about three feet deep, I lean into the earth and place the picture at the bottom of the grave.

In the instant it leaves my fingers,
I see
. I see petunias nodding in the breeze, their fuchsia and gold funnels big as teacups. A pile of lizard tails scattered around a crumbling pinecone castle. The cicada chirp of the TV through the open windows of Jeanie's house, where her mom is snoring on the couch. Jeanie and I go tearing through the jumble of strawberries. The ruffled hem of my skirt rips as I climb over a fallen trunk, but I don't care.

We run full speed toward the witch's lair. Jeanie wants to see her cast a spell, but I told her good witches don't cast spells. Halfway there I squat down to watch a glistening black centipede roll an acorn between my sneakers. One of my laces is untied, and it takes the crawly thing forever to roll the acorn over the obstacle of the lace. I look up to see if Jeanie's watching, but she's bending over a fallen sparrow's nest, a cascade of multicolored candy beans exploding from the depths of her pocket. I pop up to see if there are eggs in the nest.

I hear a laugh, and then an object buzzes through the air, stinging my arm as it whooshes past. I spin around as Jeanie staggers back, mouth pursed like she's sucking a lemon drop, hands red with finger paint. She lands on the ground like a pinned butterfly, wings spread and quivering, an arrow sticking from her tummy.

Caleb and Daniel charge through the trees. I don't know where from. Daniel spits and shouts. Caleb cries. The ferns are tall, their fiddleheads swimming at my waist. Jeanie disappears under them,
her cry sharp, loud, whiny as a fire engine. Daniel tugs on the arrow as Caleb holds her head still, winding his fingers in her hair. Jeanie cries louder, so I clamp my hands over my ears. “Take it out,” I shout. “Take it out. Take it out.” Once I start, I can't stop. Jeanie's got a splinter. Jeanie's hurt bad. Worse than skinned knees. Her mom will be mad. Daniel and Caleb jostle and shove.

“We gotta leave a little blood for the monster so it doesn't come outta the woods,” Caleb bays, still gripping Jeanie's head. “We gotta feed it.”

Daniel shoves him off her and lunges at me; he grabs my shoulders and squeezes until his dirty fingernails make me whimper. “Stay with Jeanie or I'll make you eat worms.” His fingernails dig into my skin and I nod. He drags Caleb away by the shirtsleeve and hollers for his mom as they run toward home.

I tiptoe closer to Jeanie. I want to see if she's sleeping. She isn't. She stares back at me, glassy eyes blinking as she spits up. Red liquid curls down her forehead from her scalp, and she smells like pee. A triangle of geese fly over us, and my head snaps up at their honking. I look back to Jeanie—Jeanie has a parakeet, she likes birds—but she's crying. I crouch and let the ferns tickle my face. I close my eyes and listen for the boys. The forest is humming with life. We left a pile of berries for the monster last week, but it must not have worked. Daniel says it's getting hungrier. Caleb says it'll come out of the woods.

Then there's a sharp
pop
from behind, like one of Daniel's cherry bombs. I hop up, craning my neck to stare at the dense thicket across the clearing. I take two steps and stop. Everything's gone quiet—the
birds, the wind, the brush, even Jeanie's gulping. The thicket's fronds knit together in a wall, and there's the hazy outline of a form crouched behind it. I whimper—can't keep it in. Daniel says the monster smells us when we're out here; it smells Jeanie's blood. There's an abrupt rush of movement behind the fronds, and the shadow flits a few feet to the right.

“It's hungry,” I whisper to Jeanie. My chin quivers. I turn to see that Jeanie's whole front is soaked red; the paint's dripping onto the dirt. She makes dying animal sounds, turning screechy.

“Shhh,” I whisper as I back away from her and the shadow in the thicket. “It'll hear you.” Her gurgle-choking gets louder. The shadow shifts. “Jeanie,
shhh
.” She wails.