The Dead Boys (10 page)

Sloot patted them on their backs as they joined him and Teddy in the faint light. “Joey and Oliver, this is Teddy. He's here to help us.”

Teddy gasped. “The other boys from the cemetery!”

Joey and Oliver nodded, but didn't speak. Joey fidgeted, while Oliver wiped blood from his nose with his shirtsleeve.

“Not too chatty, I'm afraid,” Sloot said. “But they're very glad you've finally come here, believe me.”

He smiled. It was an odd, crooked smile.

“But where is here?” Teddy swung the halogen around. All he could see was blowing sand in all directions. He'd been taken too far from the A-house to see the old home in the darkness.

“Halfway between,” Sloot said. “Not bright like life, not black like death. Just . . . dim.”

Teddy didn't push it. By now he cared less about where he was than about how to get out. But whatever was after him had clearly brought the other boys to this place. Maybe they could tell him what it was if they could all get to someplace safe to talk.

“Where are Albert and Walter,” Teddy asked, “and the last one? It's Lawrence, right?”

Joey and Oliver looked at each other. They murmured as though they knew something.

Sloot waved the boys silent. “Lawrence is in the tree. We weren't sure you'd be coming.”

Teddy checked the dangling cord from the halogen to his backpack to make sure it wouldn't catch on anything again.

“Seriously, we should all go,” he said. “But I don't want to leave without everyone. And who were those dark people that attacked me? Was it Henry Mulligan and his friends?”

The boys shot furtive looks at one another again. It made Teddy nervous.

“Servants of the tree,” Sloot answered finally.

As he spoke, a low, loud groan rose behind Teddy. Sloot glanced upward, looking fearful and angry at once.

“He's here, isn't he?” Sloot shouted up into the swirling dust and darkness.

The hairs on the back of Teddy's neck stood on end. He pointed the halogen up to the sky, revealing a massive shadow, which towered over them.

It was the tree.

The sycamore was so big that Teddy had simply mistaken it for a wall of darkness. But now it was revealed by the light in all of its horrible glory. The ragged trunk twisted skyward, more than fifteen feet wide. Its thick bark was crusty and cracked with open scars that oozed inky sap. Overhead, gnarled branches jutted in all directions, their tips well beyond the reach of Teddy's light. Its deep bass groans echoed in the blackness and shook the ground.

The boys ducked out of the spotlight, and Teddy backed away, trying to protect them with the lamp.

“Take the light off it,” Sloot warned. “You're making it angry.”

Before Teddy could respond, he heard a softer moaning from above. He moved the light to the left, and, to his horror, he saw a body hanging in lower limbs of the tree.

It was a tall boy he didn't recognize, but since it wasn't Albert or Walter, he had a chilling idea who it might be. “Is that Lawrence?” he gasped.

Sloot nodded, unsurprised.

The clawlike branches cradled Lawrence, holding him in place while writhing leaves plastered his body like leeches seeming to suck out his energy the way a normal leaf might suck in the sun. The leaves shrank from Teddy's beam, however, then popped off of Lawrence's skin, leaving hideous red welts. Teddy continued to shine the light on the tree, and the branches themselves retreated, releasing Lawrence. The tall boy plummeted to the ground.

Without thinking, Teddy darted forward to drag Lawrence out of reach. He kept the light pointed up at the grotesque tree to keep the branches at bay.

As he pulled Lawrence away, Teddy turned to Sloot. “It uses you as . . . fertilizer?” he sputtered.

“Ah, you get it,” Sloot said. “It's so much better when we don't have to explain it, like we do with stupid kids.” He glanced at Oliver. “There's not much light for it here in the dimness, you see. It needs energy, and we've got it. As long as there's a new source provided every ten years or so, no one has to get completely drained. We take turns.”

“What?” Teddy yelped. He began to back away from both the tree and the boys as the weirdness of the past three days became suddenly, terrifyingly clear. The snags waiting for Albert in the river, the roots that grabbed Walter in the sewer trench, the knothole that held Sloot like a puppet. The tree wasn't stalking the dead boys—it already had them. And it was using them to lure a new victim . . . him.

But Teddy hadn't gone in the river, the trench, or the knothole.
I never took the bait
, he realized.

The thought gave him hope. Holding out the light, he spoke more bravely than he felt. “You're not gonna feed me to some plant!”

“It's not a choice,” Sloot said. “You're already here.”

“No way!” Teddy insisted. “It hates light, and I've got five hundred watts of tree-repellant power right in my hands.”

“Yeah,” Sloot said, “that's a bit of a problem.”

He motioned to Joey, who pulled out a well-worn Cub Scout pocketknife and grabbed the halogen's cord.

“Wait!” Teddy cried, but it was too late.

Joey cut the cord, plunging them all into dimness and swirling dust.

Teddy ran blindly. The grainy wind stung his eyes, and the deep sand pulled at his feet. He felt sure the boys were about to catch him, but then he heard Sloot yell from a distance behind him. “Let him go. The desert will send him back. He'll
want
to come back.”

Teddy tried to run straight to keep some sense of direction in the blowing dust. He sprinted until his breath came in gasps and his lungs hurt. When he finally felt he was far enough from the tree and the boys, he slowed to a trot so he could think.

Maybe he could circle back to the house. It was how he'd gotten here—through the window.

As he jogged, the sand gave way to a crunchy surface like gravel, but softer. He still couldn't see well in the dimness, so he slowed to a walk for fear of running headlong into something solid. He reached into his backpack for the small flashlight he'd packed. It was no 500-watt halogen, and the batteries wouldn't last forever, but it was better than nothing.

He clicked on the flashlight and shined it ahead—nothing but darkness as far as he could see. At least there were no trees or double-crossing kids. A wave of relief washed over him and for a moment he relaxed, at least until he pointed the light down.

In the bright beam, he could see the ground moving. Teddy gasped—it was an undulating carpet of bugs, all waving oversized pincers and upturned tails.

He swung the flashlight in a full circle around him, scanning the heaving swarm of poisonous creatures. There were thousands of them, and he'd run directly into their midst. He took a tentative step back, and his heel made a loud crunch. Scorpions skittered away in every direction.

No more than a bee sting
, he told himself, trying to stay calm.
But what would a thousand stings do to me?

The scorpions were now scuttling across his tennis shoes as the throng closed in again around his motionless feet. At first, Teddy tried to delicately tiptoe into the open spaces between the horrible little creatures. But they kept crawling toward him, flooding the desert floor and filling every gap. So Teddy began to trot again, crunching with every step, high-stepping like a football player running through tires at practice.

His legs pistoned up and down, feet smashing scorpions into bits of shell and white jelly with every step, but they never touched the ground long enough for his tormentors to climb aboard. It was exhausting—he was already tired from fleeing the boys, and he knew he couldn't stop or the scorpions would swarm over him in an instant.

But because he tried to keep the flashlight pointed straight ahead to see where he was going, he couldn't look down, and when the ground suddenly dropped away, he toppled into a hole.

The flashlight flew from his hand, its beam waving uselessly in random directions as Teddy plummeted for anxious seconds. It was just long enough to wonder if he was falling to his death, but then he hit the ground. Hard.

Teddy rolled over, groaning in agony. His left knee was throbbing—he'd twisted it in an awkward direction when he landed—but he desperately crawled for the flashlight, which had landed a few feet away. The horror of losing the light was stronger than the pain.

Luckily, he didn't feel anything crawl over his bare hand as he reached along the ground. And when he grabbed the light and shined it around, he was relieved to see that he'd fallen clear of the scorpions.

Teddy got to his feet, favoring his knee, and looked around to see where he'd landed. He found himself in a trench that was about five feet wide, with walls that rose straight up on either side of him—ten tall feet of dirt, rocks, and sinewy tree roots.

There was no way he could reach the top, and he didn't dare grab hold of the roots to climb—he certainly didn't trust them. But it didn't matter—a scorpion dropped over the edge of the trench, falling at his feet, and he suddenly didn't want to go up anyway.

As if on cue, dozens more scorpions began to pour into the trench after the first one, dropping to the ground behind Teddy. The path was clear the other way, so he turned around and limped away as fast as he could in that direction.

Even slowed by his injured leg, he outdistanced the scorpions. But if he paused to rest, even for a second, they quickly began to gather behind him again. So he continued along the trench with the unpleasant feeling that the creeping little things were herding him onward.