Keeper, The Read online

He stood. His winter coat was browned by mud from the rain and puddles. “You pooshed me!” he slurred. His pupils were wide and out of focus.

  The hollow feeling inside her returned: Something was very wrong. “Come here,” she said.

  He tried to walk but stumbled drunkenly. She caught him in her arms. There was something warm and wet on her fingers, and in her mind she said a silent prayer to the Virgin Mary that the obvious had not happened. But when she turned him around, she found a jagged cut along the back of his scalp. Three-inch-long flaps of hairy skin hung loose on either side of the wound, and she could see the white of what looked like his skull. Blood gushed down his back. The snow where he had fallen was diluted into red whirls like a cherry Italian ice.

  She bit down on her lip and tried not to let him know from her expression how bad this was. Head wounds, they tended to bleed a lot, right? Buckets, even…That didn’t mean he was going to slip into a coma or anything, right?

  She pressed hard against the flaps of skin with both hands. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Matthew, come on, I’m sorry. I did a stupid thing. How do you feel, are you dizzy?”

  His eyes rolled upward like he was trying to see his own brows. “Huh?” he asked. He didn’t look like her son right then. He looked empty. The little boy she loved, she realized to her horror, was pouring out all over her hands.

  She took him inside, grabbed the set of keys she had left on the kitchen counter, and took off for the hospital in Corpus Christi, eight miles south of Bedford.

  On the ride, she took off the turtleneck under her sweater and wrapped it around his head like a turban, continually shaking him, afraid he would fall asleep. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? She wasn’t sure. On the highway she made a conscious effort to drive slowly. The way the rain fell against the windshield was like standing underneath a waterfall.

  She parked in the area designated for emergencies and carried him inside the sprawling building marked Mid-Maine Medical. A nurse hurried toward them and showed them the way to an examining room. Georgia laid him down on a long padded table, her hands still pressing hard against the wound.

  “Can you hear me?” Georgia asked. There was too much of it to be sure, but it looked like the flow of blood was waning. “Matthew!” she shouted, unaware that she had become completely hysterical.

  “Um,” he muttered. His eyes were almost closed.

  The doctor came in and pushed her aside, unwrapping the bloody turtleneck-shirt from his scalp. He was a short, stocky man with gray-yellow hair. “How’d this happen?” he asked.

  “Well, actually,” Georgia admitted, “he was jumping and I got in the way—”

  Matthew rose from his stupor. “Fell, thassssall,” he slurred with his eyes now completely closed. The doctor shrugged, turned back around, and began his examination.

  “Just some coffee, thanks,” Georgia told the woman behind the register at the hospital cafeteria. The woman was small and wore a blue smock that snapped at the sides as part of her uniform. She craned her neck to see into Georgia’s face, then took in her bright red hair and massive body. Georgia realized she must look a sight with her wet, bloody clothes. Like a Viking come home from battle. Georgia pointed at the coffee on the counter.

  The woman shrugged, then added up the sale. Georgia paid and found a seat.

  The doctor had told her that Matthew was fine, possibly a mild concussion, the kind of thing that happens all the time. The bleeding wasn’t out of the ordinary—in fact he’d lost only a pint or two. By the time they’d gotten to the hospital it had pretty much clotted. The confusion he’d had on the steps was just shock. Still, he would have to stay overnight as a precaution. Fortunately, he was insured by Clott through her father. “Don’t worry,” Dr. Conway had said, patting her on the back, “They’re not made of bones, these kids. They’re all cartilage.”

  Georgia had stayed for the stitches. He was too tired to cry, or even object when she held his hand. Afterward, the Demerol worked its magic and he fell asleep. She finished filling out insurance forms, then left a message for her father, telling him that Matthew was fine, nothing she couldn’t handle; she’d see him tonight and explain.

  Now, she sat in the cafeteria. She would drive home after the shaking in her body subsided. This was nothing new, just an inevitable progression. Last year, he broke his arm trying to climb through his bedroom window for no other reason than he’d wanted to see if he could do it. When he was three, he swallowed a bottle of his grandfather’s digitalis because it was candy coated and that had been really fun: pouring ipecac down his throat and watching him throw up all night, hoping his heart wouldn’t explode.

  She sighed. It was probably something she should be used to by now. If he turned out anything like her, he’d be coming home drunk from junior high dances, or else he’d wander the Puff-N-Stop hours after curfew, so stoned he thought he saw God in the lines of his hand. Or maybe he’d even get a girl pregnant and decide to be a father in more than name. Now that would be cosmic justice.

  Georgia finished her coffee, slurping up that last bit of sugar at the bottom, and thought about how much she’d like a merchant marine to help her out right around now.

  FOUR

  The Thing in the Woods

  Earlier on that same Thursday in March, Liz Marley rubbed her eyes and rolled over in her bed. “I’m up,” she called out to her mother, who had shouted her name from the floor below. For some reason her legs ached, and her head was pounding. She felt like the sandman had visited her during the night and slapped her with a twenty-pound bag of cement.

  She buried her face beneath her red quilt, and wondered if her mother would believe that for the third time this month she was suffering from a mysterious twenty-four-hour flu and needed to stay home from school. Not likely.

  She’d had a nightmare last night, a pretty bad one. But she couldn’t remember it anymore. Something about her father, and Susan. Something so scary that she must have cried in her sleep, because her eyes were wet and her throat felt raw. She remembered snow, and blood, and the red roses on her father’s grave. If she thought about it, she could probably remember the rest. But she didn’t want to think about it. So instead she counted slowly: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…twenty Mississippi until the veil of sleep lifted, and her thoughts returned to the day ahead of her.

  The house was quiet and she could smell eggs frying in the kitchen. Her room remained as it had been before she fell asleep. Eels and White Stripes posters cluttered the walls. Jack White mugged at her from across the room. “Hi, stranger,” she grumbled while looking at him with one eye still shut. On her desk was her trigonometry homework, which, damn, she hadn’t started, and this would be the third time in two weeks that she got a zero. Yes, this was life as usual. High school still sucked, and so did Bedford. But at least there was Bobby, and maybe now that basketball championships were over, they could go to the Dugout and eat imitation neon cheese fries after school today.

  She got out of bed and pulled on her robe. The rain had started today, which meant that spring was on its way. And after spring came summer, and after summer fall. Soon, she’d be in college. Soon, her bags would be packed. She’d hop the Greyhound to Orino, and never look back. Hooray! Feeling almost back to her good old self, she skipped her way into the bathroom, oblivious to the icy linoleum floor against her bare feet.

  But then, in the mirror, she saw. What was this? She stood on tiptoe and leaned over the sink. She didn’t want to look. A part of her knew already what this was. There was a giant red splotch across the center of her trachea. Fingerlike red tentacles spread out and around the sides of her neck. Hands. The splotches were shaped like hands.

  She leaned against the cold glass and closed her eyes. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Calm down, she told herself. Just calm down. There’s enough bad stuff in the world, stop inventing more. You’re going to fai
l home economics if you don’t sew that retarded sweatshirt, you know. And even if it is a stupid class and you totally should have taken art instead, you’ll still lose your scholarship to UMO and then you’ll never see Bobby because he’ll be in college and you’ll be waiting tables. Stop making things up!

  “Liz? You’re going to be late!”

  “I’m coming!” Liz cheerfully answered in a voice not entirely her own. Six Mississippi. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, but she managed to stifle them. She had three options. She had gone crazy on the anniversary of her father’s death, and was now imagining bloody sisters instead of little green men. She had dreamed this. It really had happened.

  She chose the least frightening option. She had dreamed this. Right. It had all been a dream. But what about her throat? Maybe she was coming down with a cold. Had wrapped her fingers around her neck in her sleep because she’d been trying to scratch away the soreness. Or maybe she’d had an allergic reaction to the sheets. Or, well, who knew?

  “Liz, do I have to come up there?”

  “I’m awake, Mom!”

  In the shower, she counted slowly. Fifty Mississippi. A dream. Just a dream. By the time she dressed, pulled a turtleneck over the bruises, and came down for breakfast, thanking her mother for such delicious eggs, the dream was forgotten. Only its feeling, the mood it had carried, remained. Forget it. Let it go. Stop making things up!

  By the time she walked to school in the light morning rain, a tree could have fallen down in front of her, a bus could have careened off the road, and she would have looked at the sight with only a hint of surprise. She would have kept walking, repeating the same refrain over and over in her head. Tap your ruby slippers three times and say it with me: It was only a dream. It was only a dream. It was only a dream.

  At lunch in the cafeteria at the Bedford High School, her boyfriend, Bobby, asked her if something was bothering her. “Nothing,” she told him with a too wide grin.

  “You sure? You look wiped out,” he said.

  “Next week on The O.C. Ryan’s getting back together with Marissa and she’s such an attention whore with all that closet drinking. I can’t even deal with it.”

  “You’re so weird,” he told her.

  By fifth period, while her teacher talked about the function of imaginary numbers when building bridges (“See, they do have a use!” Mrs. Adams chided the class. “Nothing is truly imaginary.”), she found herself thinking about Susan. How long had it been since they’d seen each other? What if the dream was a portent? She remembered the blood in the snow, a circle growing larger, and her brow started sweating.

  Before eighth period, she stopped Bobby in the hall and told him, “I need to visit my sister tonight. Could you drive me?”

  Juggling his books in his hands (for efficiency’s sake Bobby believed in visiting his locker only twice a day), he asked, “Seriously? I thought we were going to the Dugout. Is something wrong?”

  She grinned at him, a pretend grin that worked on her mother, but never on Bobby. “Top secret. They’ll boil me in oil if I tell you.”

  “Who?”

  “The Mormons. They’re very violent. It’s all those wives. They don’t know how to handle them.”

  He frowned. Equipped with Liz Marley radar, he always knew when she was hiding something because, truth be told, she was always hiding something. “You’re weird, Liz.”

  “No, really. I want to visit my sister. Pick me up tonight. Around eight.”

  After school let out, and all the buses had left, and she told Bobby that she wanted to walk home in the rain instead of riding with him (No offense, Bobby. I just feel like walking. I know, it’s raining really hard. If I get pneumonia it’s all my fault. You’re right, Mr. Martin totally sucks. You could light the guy on fire if you took a match to his breath. I’ll see you tonight.), she found herself walking, not home, but to the cemetery.

  Ridiculous, really. She knew it had all been a dream. A fevered nightmare caused by too many late-night Cheetos. But still, she walked. At her father’s stone she saw no roses, just his small marker. Gales of rain flattened her hair and plastered her jeans to her body. She’d forgotten her mittens, and the bars along the metal fence were cold. She peered between them.

  The woods were dark. The backs of the pine trees were bent like crippled old men by the weight of the snow. She wished that she’d asked Bobby to come with her, because these woods weren’t normal. The dioxins that came from bleaching pulp had killed a lot of the river animals and even some of the birds, but that didn’t explain the way these woods made her feel. There were rumors that something lived out here. Something that watched.

  The rain made a plinking sound as it fell on her vinyl hood. Her teeth chattered. She wanted to go home. But she had to know if there was any truth to her dream.

  She scaled the fence. The posts at the top were sharp, and as she straddled them, she got the idea that if someone gave her a good hard tug, she would be impaled. Liz Marley, split in two, the Corpus Christi Sentinel would read: She went mad, and was looking for a dream she’d misplaced. It’s true she had a better half. It was her left. Less freckles.

  But she got to the other side without incident, jumping down off the high fence and landing squarely in a snowdrift. The thick trees overhead blocked much of the drizzle, and she could hear the soft patter of the rain as it plinked against wet leaves. It felt funny being in these woods. It felt like being inside an animal’s mouth.

  She turned in every direction, but there were no footprints, no signs of struggle. No blood. “Hello?” she called softly. “Susan? Is anyone here?” No one answered, and she grew bolder. “Hello?” she said. “HELLO?” she bellowed, because even though she was scared, bellowing is kind of fun. But still, there was nothing.

  She smiled self-consciously. Nothing up her sleeves, kids. Nothing behind the trees. Had she really dreamed the whole thing? Maybe so. A relief on one hand, on the other hand, an indication that she needed some serious headshrinking. But this was good news. She could have found something a lot worse than proof of a restless night’s sleep out here. This expedition could have been a disaster.

  She took one last look between the trees. “Susan? Hello?” she called out once more, if only to reassure herself that she’d tried her best to solve this strange mystery. Nothing answered her. Only the patter of the rain. She let out a sigh of relief, and started for the fence.

  Just then, out of the corner of her eye, something blurry whizzed between two trees. It was pale, and its body shined in the dark. She jumped, getting almost two feet of air between herself and the ground in a way that would have made her basketball-playing boyfriend proud. Then she backed up against the fence and faced the woods. “Who is that?” she called, then winced at the way her voice sliced through the silence.

  She waited, watching between the trees, with her back pushed up against the fence. Her pulse pumped audibly in her ears. But she didn’t see anything. After a while she laughed at herself, silly girl. Probably just a white fox, or maybe even a falling branch.

  When she turned to climb the fence, she heard a branch break behind her in the direction of the trees. She swung around and listened. This time she didn’t call out. This time, just in case there really was something out there, she didn’t want to invite its attention.

  The branches that bridged the gap between the two trees expanded and contracted in a quick burst. Her heart skipped a beat and then started playing the mambo. The trees were about fifty feet away from her, and she could tell they hadn’t been blowing in the wind. Something had pushed them. Something big. A bear?

  Oh, shit.

  She backed further against the fence until the bars pressed through her coat and into her skin. She stood as still as she knew how, hoping that this thing would not see her. She slapped both hands over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breath.

  “Huuuhh-huuhhh,” she heard behind the trees. She listened closely and it came again: huuuuh-huuhhhhh. She
did not want to believe what she was hearing. It wasn’t the kind of sound a dog or even a bear would make. It was deep and rasping.

  Okay kiddo, she thought. Shake a leg.

  Just as she was about to turn around and climb the fence, the branches between the two trees opened up. The thing came out from between them—

  “Huuuuhhhh-huuuhhhh.”

  —It was big, maybe six feet tall. It was still too dark to see clearly, but she saw glimpses of its pale body. It didn’t have fur; it had skin. It looked human.

  “Huuuuhhhh-huuuhhhh.” Its breath was thick and wet. Its body was all out of proportion. Its knuckles almost reached the ground, and its massive chest was balanced over a pair of skinny legs. It lumbered, like it was sick or just too hulking to move quickly. It dragged itself toward her by its arms. She wanted to turn away but she couldn’t. What had happened to this thing? What was this thing?

  Its skin was white, like all the blood had been drained from its body. Something shined. Its eyes. They were intelligent. They were watching her. It pulled itself along by its arms, and when it met her eyes, it smacked its lips. Like it was hungry.

  She spun around and lurched for the first crossbar, but her foot missed the mark. In a panic, she tried to squeeze herself through the fence. She pushed as far as her left knee, which got stuck so that her foot waved at her from the other side.

  “Dammit!” she whispered. Its breath was getting closer. Its panting was more labored: huhh-huhh-huh. She wiggled, and her leg plunged deeper through the hole so that her entire thigh was stuck in the fence. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she could feel the thing closing in on her.

  She tugged on her leg, but the intricate design of wrought iron held her as firmly as human teeth. “Huhh-huhh-huh.” It was so close that she expected to feel hot air on the back of her neck. She tugged and tugged, but her leg was lodged between the bars.