The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe (26 page)

GABE WAS HIGH ABOVE THE FOREST that separated his grandmother’s property from the Hoppers’. Not floating or flying; he simply existed there. Like a low cloud on a windless day. He had a view of the houses and the town and, if he squinted, he could also see the water of the bay off in the distance. The sun was shining. The trees were green. This was another time. Another season. The past or future, Gabe was not sure.

The screen door at the Hoppers’ porch slammed shut. A boy raced down the front steps onto the driveway, then turned toward the woods. It was David. He looked furious and terrified. With barely any effort, Gabe swooped down, following David as he crossed into the woods, barreling like a wild animal up the old horse trail, unaware of Gabe’s presence. After a few minutes, the boy stopped, hunched over, his hands resting on his knees, struggling to catch his breath.

“You have to leave him alone!” he shouted, as if to the trees. “Take me if you want, but don’t touch him. If I’d known what you’d planned, I’d never have—” A rustling sound moved steadily through the woods. David spun, his chest heaving still. His eyes flicked back and forth, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. Someone out there was laughing, that familiar harsh chuckle, the same one that Gabe had heard in the darkness at the edge of his bed.

Grunting, David catapulted himself into the brush, crashing through whips of foliage and lashes of tree limbs. Moments later, he came upon the small hillock. The trunk of a tree rose from the
earth and twisted, leaning precariously toward the forest floor, as if it were about to topple over. There was no altar here now. The only stones nearby were the ones that made up the wall beyond the mound.

David froze. A figure stood before him, holding on to the lowest branch of the pathetic tree. A tall, lanky boy, with big hands and long fingers, was dressed in dusty overalls speckled with the brown, dried blood from a long-dead rooster. The boy smiled. His eyes were vacant, amused, curious, like a child who’d just plucked the leg off a grasshopper and was waiting to see what it would do next.

Gabe tried to speak, to warn David to stay away. But he had no voice.

“Mason,” David said, direct and calm. The panic he’d displayed minutes earlier was tamped down. Hidden. “See? You
can
be yourself. You don’t have to be the monster all the time.”

“But if I’m not the monster,” said the boy by the tree, his voice plaintive and low, “you won’t play the game with me. And I’ll be alone again.”

“No, you won’t. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Not true,” said the boy. “I heard you tell your brother that you wanted him to stop playing. You think I want you both dead.”

“I only said that because…you’ve been a little…intense. The Hunter’s a fun adversary, but only in the game. It’s not so fun for me and Seth if the Hunter is real.”

“I’m
real
,” said the boy, his voice dropping further to a frightening register.

“Yes, of course,” David answered quickly. “And that’s why I’m not going anywhere.”

The boy was quiet for a moment. Then he shook his head. “You’ll grow up. You’ll get old. You’ll forget.”

“I won’t forget. I promise.”

“People believe they’ll be one way, but then they transform. They don’t even mean to. I’ve seen it happen. To everyone. And when you’re the one who’s forgotten, who’s left behind, it hurts.” He paused. Shook his head. “You have no idea how much it hurts.”

Gabe thought of his grandmother’s story—her ruined friendship with him. Of course Mason would have felt abandoned, not only by Leesy, but by his parents, by his horrible aunt and uncle. Being discarded was pretty much all he’d ever known. What had he been willing to do to change that?

“I’ll leave your brother alone if you do one thing for me,” said Mason.

“What is it?” David asked.

“Come here.” When David stayed put, Mason waved him forward blithely. “I want to show you something.” David shuddered, then made his way up the shallow slope, crunching dead leaves and fallen sticks, until he stood beside the tree trunk.

Gabe stayed close. He peered at Mason, whose pinkish face was flecked with dirt. A mole marked his cheek just below his left eye. His hair was greasy and unwashed. He blinked and scratched at his arm and bit at a loose piece of skin on his lip. Except for the old blood that had dried onto his clothes, he looked like he could have been one of Gabe’s own classmates. As human as anyone.

This boy was no
revenant
, was he?

“What did you want to show me?” David asked, his voice now shrunken.

“I never told you about what happened to me,” Mason said. “Aren’t you curious about how I got this way?”

This way?
Did he mean dead?

David paused. “You’ll leave Seth alone if I say yes.” It wasn’t a question.

Mason pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. With a smirk, he nodded.

“Okay, then,” David answered. “Yes.”

They were standing several feet from the base of the tree. Mason simply pointed at the ground. David looked down, confused. But Gabe knew what he was meant to see. There was no dirt beneath David’s boots, only a couple of wooden planks. David glanced back up at Mason, but Mason was no longer there.

In his place stood the monster. The creature from Grandmother Elyse’s drawing. A mass of muscle and bone, of pale, cracked, and bleeding hide. The thing smiled hideously. It lifted one immense foot and brought it down hard. The planks shattered. David fell. He twisted his body as he realized what was happening, reaching for the low tree trunk, but he wasn’t fast enough. He screamed as he fell.

In a blink, Mason—the Hunter—disappeared too.

Gabe could only watch. A sickening thump belched forth from the hole. Seconds later came a shriek that went on and on. He tried to cover his ears, to block out the sound, but he had no body, no ears to cover. Then he remembered he could follow David down into the earth. He hesitated before descending the shaft; this time, he was aware of the nightmare he would encounter below.

David lay on the wet ground. He struggled to stand, but he couldn’t move his legs. Gabe could feel David’s broken bones as if they were his own. His pain was immense, worse than anything he’d ever imagined. David breathed deeply, then glanced around. There was just enough light in the cramped space to see he’d landed on something, canvas or denim that had nearly rotten through. He clutched at what felt like a metal rivet—the kind of clasp you’d find on a pair of jeans. Or overalls. And inside the clothing were long, sticklike objects. Running his fingers blindly over the jumble of decayed things, he understood what Mason
had wanted to show him. Bones. David had landed atop the boy’s skeleton. “Help!” he cried out, through the agony in his chest. “Mom! Seth!”

“Shh,” said a voice in the darkness. David froze. A sticky mix of tears and blood and mucus leaked down his face. His arm hurt too much to lift from his side and wipe it clean.

“Why did you do this to me?” David asked. “I promised I wouldn’t leave.”

Chuckling. “Now I know it’s a promise you’ll keep.” A scuttling sound rushed up the well, and David knew he was alone again.

Someone would come, he promised himself. His thoughts began to race. A rescue team would find him. There’d be a television crew. There always was. Tomorrow at this time, he’d be lying in bed with a story to tell. Everyone would know his name. People would pay him just to show up places. He’d write a book about how he survived. Maybe he’d get rich. This fall could end up being a very good thing, he told himself.

“Hello down there.” A face appeared at the mouth of the hole, barely distinguishable through the network of tree roots. Still, David knew it was Mason. His heart turned to stone, his blood to ice. His bones may as well have been glass. Mason sounded cold, purposeful, resigned. “I’m up here.”

“I know that,” David whispered.

“Good. Because
this
is what I wanted to show you.” Mason, dressed in his phantom overalls, stared down at him for a few seconds. David saw that he was holding an object out over the opening, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “On the night that I was unlucky enough to find this pit,” he said, sounding almost robotic, “I’d done something really bad. But I’d done it to hurt a nasty person, so I felt kind of good. I don’t know if God punished me for taking pleasure in my sin, but I ended up where you are now. I too called
for help. I screamed and shouted over the rain and thunder, hoping that someone would hear me. There was this girl who lived up the hill. A friend. At the time, I wished that she’d been…” He paused, sounding for a moment like he could actually feel something other than anger. “But she wasn’t…And she didn’t…

“Someone else heard me instead. My aunt Verna came out here with a flashlight. She looked down at me just like I’m looking down at you. Then she snatched up a rock from one of the stone walls nearby, like the one I’m holding in my hands now. And she raised it over the mouth of this hole. And she stared at me for several seconds, full of spit and hate and spoiled blood. And I stared back, feeling the same thing. Then she let go of the rock. And it fell, just like I’d fallen several minutes earlier. Just like you’ve fallen today. My aunt’s rock came at me quickly, just like this rock will do when I let go of it.” The boy paused. “In a moment.” Then he smiled sadly and, with a wistful look, he tilted his head. “Are you ready?”

David shouted, struggling to raise his arms over his head. “No, Mason. Please! Don’t.”

“But
this
is what I wanted to show you,” the boy whispered, his voice somehow echoing in David’s ear. “And you said yes.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to see.”

“Don’t worry. Now, we’ll have all the time in the world for our game. You’ll be the good guy. I’ll be bad.”

And with that, Mason let go.

GABE CLOSED HIS EYES. He couldn’t watch. He waited for the horrific crunching sound to burst his eardrums, for a warmth to splash at his ankles. Neither came.

He opened his eyes as David released his hand. The blue flame that hovered in the poor boy’s palm diminished to the size of a small coin. They were back in the dungeon of Castle Chicken Guts. Wherever that was.

“I’m sorry,” Gabe whispered. “I don’t know what to say. You didn’t deserve to die like that.” He thought of Mason too, of his aunt discovering him at the bottom of the well on that stormy night and killing him simply because he’d slaughtered her rooster. Well, that and the fact that she was probably insane. “No one does.”

David nodded. “When I had gone away from my body, I watched Mason cover the hole with new boards.” He spoke quickly now, rushed. “Then he stacked stones on top. Organized properly, the old tree’s roots supported the weight. Mason needed to hide what was left of me from the search parties that scoured the woods over the next few days. If they located me, he knew they’d take me away from him. Bury me properly. Put me ‘to rest.’ His ploy worked. When they came through, the people thought the stones were just part of another ruined wall. Mason laughed at me when I tried to call out to them. I didn’t yet know how to be heard.”

“Why didn’t
you
take the stones away? Let the people find you?”

“At first, I didn’t know how to do that either. When I refused to play Mason’s game, he refused to teach me what he knew about
being, you know, dead. And by the time I figured out how to direct enough energy to move objects like these stones, Mason had gotten to Seth. Manipulated him into rediscovering the old game. And Seth had talked you into joining him.”

“My grandmother’s figurine,” Gabe muttered, remembering. “The black stone that you and Seth stole. It was you who returned it to the library, wasn’t it?”

“I never should have taken it in the first place.” David sighed. “I brought it back there, thinking it might give you a clue about what had happened to me. I wish I could have done more to communicate, but I was still weak. I mean, the day you guys tried to dismantle the ‘altar,’ it took all my strength to whisper at you to stop. I was scared that if you uncovered the old well, you’d end up where I did.” He scoffed. “I was right. Tonight, when I realized that Mason had taken your sister, I would have done anything to save her myself. But he stood guard in the barn. Waiting for you. There was no way I could get by him, so I came up with a different plan.”

“The rock,” Gabe said. “The one you dropped at my feet in the barn. The one I used to smash open the door.”

“A clue.” David nodded. “To lead you to the well.”

“But why, if you wanted us to stay away?”

“Because Mason’s changed into something he can’t control. He believes he
is
the Hunter. Being down there, alone for all those years, well, conditions were perfect for his anger to boil, become molten. I don’t think he even meant to do it, but somehow, he turned himself into that monster.”

“A revenant,” Gabe whispered.

“After you’ve been hurt over and over, maybe it’s easier to become the villain.”

“Make people fear you,” Gabe said, thinking of Seth, of lunch periods, of Puppet Boys, “so you can control them.”

“I thought that tonight might be my only chance to warn you. The old well needed to be found, our bones buried. It’s the only way.” A soft rumbling shook the ground. David closed his hand, extinguishing the flame. “He’s here,” he whispered.

David clasped Gabe’s shoulder and leaned close. “Mason is going to ask you to join him. He knows that to keep you, he needs your consent, otherwise he’s stuck again with someone who will not be his toy. Like me. You must refuse, no matter what he promises. You know what happens if you say yes to him. Right?” Something knocked against the wall. Dirt tumbled to the floor from all around them. “
Do you understand?
”

Gabe felt himself trembling. “Yeah. I understand.”

“But most important,” David whispered, his voice barely audible, “you have to get out of the hole. I’m sorry I led you here, but you and Seth were the only ones who could see the truth. If you don’t escape, Mason will find someone else to play with. Someone else to haunt. To hunt. He’s already visited a bunch of other kids here in Slade. He’s got his eyes set on your friend Mazzy especially.” David paused, took a deep breath, then added, “Tell my brother and my mom that I love them…and that I’m sor—”

The earth shattered. Clods of dirt exploded into the room. Gabe screamed, fell back, landed on his side. A wide gap had opened in the wall. Hazy light filtered through a cloud of dust, revealing a massive silhouette standing in the shadows. Two flecks of familiar blue flame glowed where the head appeared to be, staring into the room with fierce glee. David was a mere outline now, a foggy figure fallen beside the beast. “Run!” he cried. With a twist of his forearm, the Hunter knocked him away.

David was gone. Shoved out of Gabe’s mind somehow. He was alone with the Hunter now, in the dungeon he’d invented, in a peculiar darkness that only he knew.

“Wake up,” Gabe said to himself. He slapped his own cheek. Hard. It stung the same way it would have if he’d been conscious and aware. Panicked, Gabe worried that if his body felt pain here, maybe it could die here too.

The Hunter stepped toward him. In the slight glow of its eyes, Gabe noticed its lips part. A grin. “I found you,” a voice rumbled so deeply, the sound was like a quake, like continents shifting. Gabe collapsed, every inch of himself aching. He struggled to lift his head and stare into the eyes of the massive thing that had once been a boy named Mason Arngrim. “Let’s play.”

“N-no,” Gabe said, forcing his sore jaw to move. “I want you to leave us alone.”

The creature’s mouth spread wider. The Hunter chuckled, then reached across its broad torso for the bow and arrows strapped at its shoulder, placed the arrow’s notch against the string, pulled the bow taut until it squealed, then directed it at Gabe’s forehead.

“
WAKE! UP!
” Gabe screamed.