Sacrifice (22 page)

“Yeah, let’s.” Her eyes narrowed.

He led her out of the cafeteria to the relative quiet of the hall. When he turned she was flushed with anger.

“Get it over with,” she said. “Tell me we’re not going to the prom.”

Jeff nearly hit the floor. “How did you…”

“You never wanted to go,” she said. “How many times did I have to ask you to get fitted for your tux? How many times did you cancel going to pick out a corsage?”

“But I did all that.”

“And still you’re running out, hours before the prom. I should have known. I’ll be the punch line of the evening when I don’t show up. ”

“I want to go, really. But something’s come up.” Jeff had a family-oriented excuse at the ready.

Their argument began to garner stares from people passing in and out of the cafeteria.

“Something with your stupid friends,” she spat. “Tell me it’s not.”

Blindsided, Jeff could only summon the truth, and he
was
going to be with the Half Dozen.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

Katy slammed her hand against the wall. “Son of a bitch!” Jeff had never heard Katy swear. “I saved forever for my dress! I put together the seating at our table, talked friends into it despite the fact that your pig friend Paul
had
to be there. This is the event of my senior year and you have FUCKED IT UP!”

She shouted the last three words so loudly the cafeteria went silent. Everyone in the hall froze in place.

She pulled Jeff’s high school ring from her pocket. Jeff hadn’t seen it anywhere but around her neck from the day he gave it to her. She hurled it down the hall.

“Never, never talk to me again!” She whirled and marched back into the cafeteria. Olivia greeted her with a look of approval.

The rest of the student body stared at Jeff. He wanted to spare himself the humiliation of retrieving his discarded ring, but the damn thing cost a bundle. He made the walk of shame and plucked his ring from the floor. The cafeteria broke out into a low murmur, punctuated by a few loud laughs.

Rather then reenter the arena, Jeff headed for his next final. He had no idea how Katy had known he was going to have to cancel their prom date, but she knew. She’d hit him with both barrels loaded. He hadn’t expected her reaction to be so violent, immediate and permanent. His heart felt torn in two.

They had been together over two years, which had to be the longevity record for the Whitman High Class of 1980. She couldn’t—
they
couldn’t—throw it all away now, now that they were about to start real lives away from Sagebrook.

He slipped his ring on his finger. It felt alien. He realized he’d never worn it. The day he got it, he handed it to Katy. Her eyes had sparkled so when she took it.

He took off the ring and put it in his pocket. He didn’t want to get used to it.

When the end of the day finally arrived, Jeff could barely remember taking any of the exams. He knew there were physics and English and history tests, but he could not recall a single question or any answer he had given. All he knew was the loss he felt within him, the hollow echo in his chest that said for the first time since it started to matter, he was alone. These finals were supposed to salvage his grades for entrance into SUNY Albany. He could kiss that goodbye.

How could his whole future go so wrong so fast?

Chapter Fifty

The Half Dozen decided to take the risk and briefly split up after the last final exam. Each needed to gather their contribution to the night’s ritual and provide a decent cover story for their late night out. Then they would wait in separate locations until the appointed hour when they would meet at the mill. Standing together, the plan sounded great. Once they were alone, they had too much time to ponder the magnitude of their mission.

Jeff stood at the workbench in his garage and ran a hand file over the edge of an iron magnet clamped in a vise. There was an old horseshoe on the wall and a bunch of gardening items around, but the magnet was the only item he was sure was made of iron. Killing the Woodsman wasn’t the time to be guessing about metallic composition.

A little pile of black specks grew as he took long strokes across the magnet’s end. If the stuff had to burn, it needed surface area, so he felt much better delivering the iron in grains. This little ritual at the mill had to work.

He could barely focus. There was an emotional emptiness within him he knew he would never fill. He was supposed to be getting ready for the prom tonight. How the hell had it turned into hunting a killer ghost? He was never going to make this up to Katy. Skipping out on the prom was one step below skipping out on your own wedding.

He banged the file against the bench to clear the grooves and started another set of passes on the metal.

Maybe he could explain it to her. He’d go to the Venetian and tell her the truth, about watching Josie Mulfetta eat the side door of a Mustang, about the Woodsman trying to kill his friends, about a plan to exorcise a demon in the middle of the night, a demon only he and the Half Dozen could see.

He could feel her slapping his face about one sentence into the explanation. It even sounded like a load of crap to him, and he knew it was all true. No wonder Clark Kent never told Lana Lang about Krypton.

A quarter of the magnet was ground into grains. He swept them off the edge of the workbench with his finger and into a white envelope. Was that enough? The fortune teller needed to give better instructions.

Life will be normal again, he thought. We’ll do this tonight and I can get back to the last hours of being a senior. We all graduate on Sunday. I’ll explain it to Katy and get the Half Dozen to vouch for me. We’ll all have a Senior Summer blast, hang with Paul down at the beach, hit Great Adventure amusement park in Jersey. It will be that easy.

His kitchen freezer didn’t have a light when you opened the door, but Bob didn’t need one. He reached into the far left-hand corner and pulled out a lump in aluminum foil. It hit the kitchen counter like a rock. Bob tore off the foil to reveal a whole bluefish.

He’d caught it this spring off the town dock when he and Paul had decided to pull out their dusty fishing poles. He brought it home to much fanfare from his mother. She promised to cook it up in celebration that night. It was still in the refrigerator the next morning and Bob stuck it in the freezer.

Just the glug of the coffee pot broke the silence in the house. Bob’s mother was long asleep, and he had lit only the light over the stove to keep from waking her.

He popped the fish in the toaster oven to defrost. Minutes later it was thawed to crunchy, which was good enough. Bob slapped it on the cutting board and carved away chunks of fish which he dropped in the sink disposal. It probably wasn’t any good anyway after all these months. All he knew was he wasn’t going to carry a stinking fish around all night.

Of all the fucked up shit in my life, he thought, I’d never have called this one. Gathering fish bones to send a ghost to hell. Bite me sideways.

The fortuneteller had told them it was dangerous to attempt the ritual. The warning was clear. But Bob knew how dangerous it was to innocent kids if they didn’t try it.

The list of things in Bob’s life that stirred his pride was pretty damn short. Paul had made varsity football. Ken and Dave had grades. Marc played music. Bob did dishes at a diner and in forty-eight hours would have a worthless diploma to hang on the wall. The rest of them were going on to bigger things. Bob didn’t see a way out of the diner and his mother’s morbid house. But if he could do this, if he could send the Woodsman packing, no matter how the rest of life unfolded, he’d have one great deed to his credit.

He dropped the bones into a baggie and folded the top closed. He unplugged the pot and poured himself a mug of coffee. He dumped in sugar and stirred. Couldn’t do tonight without a slug of stimulants. He gave the coffee a swallow. Despite the sugar, it still tasted bitter.

He shoved the baggie of bones into his pocket and headed out the door. He closed the front door behind him and locked it. He felt a strange sensation when he did, a feeling of finality. He walked to his car at half speed. He turned and looked at his house one more time and felt the need to let the image burn in long and hard into his memory. As if the next time he saw it, it would not be the same.

“Bullshit premonitions,” he said to himself. He got into his car and prayed he wasn’t channeling his mother’s superstitions.

It was all about to hit the fan. In hours Ken would know if this big plan would work.

He did not understand how he’d been elevated to a leadership role. The Half Dozen had always been a group of equals. But since the Woodsman’s return, Ken had been front and center.

Certainly the premonitions had something to do with it, given him hints on the direction they needed to take. But there was more to it. In the crisis, the rest looked to him to make the final call on what they all did next. How did that happen?

Seriously, what did he know at seventeen? He’d embraced the plan from a fortuneteller.
Jesus, that’s like a plot from a bad movie
. He was about to march his friends into Bad Mojo Central armed with feathers and seashells.

Speaking of which… He rummaged through the bottom drawer of his dresser, the catchall for items that had no place but he could not throw out. He found it under a torn T-shirt from a Kansas concert.

The rose-colored conch shell was a souvenir from a Florida vacation seven years ago. It fit in the palm of his hand. “Greetings from Ft. Lauderdale” was painted across its polished surface. Ken hadn’t seen a conch shell, or any shell for that matter, along the city’s sterile white beach. But he’d saved a few allowance dollars for souvenirs, and the conch had looked the part and made the cut.

An elementary school shell and a prayer from a dead saint.
Hell of a plan, Ken.
All he had to do was pull it off without his friends getting killed.

Paul had his contribution—holy water from St. Michael’s—at the ready. He’d siphoned the holy water from the church entrance. All he could find that would accomplish the task was a squeeze mustard container he’d taken from the refrigerator and emptied. So the sacred water of the Lord sloshed within a squat yellow container of brown spicy. It wasn’t reverent, but Paul hoped God understood the immediacy of the need.

Killing time at home, he couldn’t sit still. It was like waiting for a football game to start, but ten times worse. There was the same level of anticipation, but tinged with a sense of dread. This time the worst that could happen wasn’t a loss to some rival school. The worst that would happen was… He didn’t even want to consider it.

He wondered if his dad had felt this way before some of the big busts he’d made as a cop. Did his palms sweat and his heart race and his mind get filled with the thousand things that could go wrong? Paul doubted it. His dad was tough as nails in every situation, ready for the worst and able to handle it. His dad would be embarrassed to see how rattled all this made Paul, how alone it made him feel.

Then Paul realized it
was
like football. He wasn’t alone. When he faced an opposing monster on the line of scrimmage, he wasn’t afraid because he knew his team had him covered. He had guys at his sides ready to help block and tackle. Tonight he had the Dirty Half Dozen as his team going into the mill, and this team was tighter. The guys on the football team were great, but at the end of the last quarter, they were all individuals again. The Half Dozen were more than that. They were family.

Paul looked over at the picture of his dad, smiling that big grin and leaning against his police cruiser. He’d approve of the plan. People were at risk, so the plan was worth the risk.

Paul flashed back to an argument he heard from his bedroom years ago. His father and mother were in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning. He couldn’t hear it all as he cowered under the covers to try and make it go away. But he heard clear as a bell when his father shouted, “I’m a cop. Every fight is my fight.”

This fight was definitely Paul’s fight.

Dave opened the door to the parakeet’s cage. The bird cheeped and fluttered to one of the upper perches. He reached in and pulled two yellow feathers from the cage floor. He thought of a chicken.

Was he chicken? Hell, yeah. Unlike the rest of the Half Dozen, he was making this trip on faith. When the others saw the Woodsman, the whole supernatural thing turned solid as stone. All Dave had was their word on it that Marc had seen the Woodsman stalking some kid, that Paul had chased something other than a mermaid out into Long Island Sound. It was a hell of a leap to trust guys stupid enough to paint a water tower in a thunderstorm.

The whole situation wasn’t his problem. His family wasn’t threatened. He wasn’t one of the ones “gifted” to see the Woodsman. His life wasn’t any different than it was a few weeks ago when he didn’t know any of this existed. He could probably drive over to Katy’s in a tux and take the poor spurned girl to the prom. He could still be part of the normal world.

But that was not an option. He had five friends about to risk it all. It didn’t matter whether he could see the Woodsman or not. They could, and if they had a problem, he had a problem.