The Judas Child (2 page)

Even from the distance of several yards, he could see all two hundred of her freckles jump as she laughed at him. He could still hear her laughing—like the maniac she was—as she sped around the clot of shrubs, turning off the road and into the Christmas tree lane. He was on his bike again and in motion, when her laughter stopped abruptly, not trailing away with distance, but ending, as though she had been turned off.

For the first time, he stopped his bike at the foot of the lane. On every other Saturday, he had pedaled on by in the pretense that he had some business of his own farther along the public road. Now he stared down that long empty space between the two rows of evergreen trees.

Where was she? The lane was a straightaway to Gwen Hubble’s house, and Sadie could not have covered all that ground so fast.

David stood with one foot planted on the road, rocking his bike from side to side. He didn’t want to look into the woods beyond the pine trees, for fear of seeing her there, writhing on the ground and holding her bloody intestines in her hands.

She had done that to him before.

Sadie went to entirely too much trouble to frighten him. If she only knew how much fear she inspired whenever he thought about actually talking to her—as opposed to merely stalking her on Saturday afternoons.

He rode on down the lane, but stopped halfway to Gwen’s house, a stately white Georgian mansion locked behind intimidating iron gates. The profile of a security guard and his newspaper was silhouetted in the window of the gatehouse. But the guard might as well be posted on the moon, for David rarely spoke to people—or girls. Anxiety and hysteria froze his vocal cords each time he tried.

The boy cocked his head toward the left bank of pine trees. He heard a faint and garbled slew of sounds coming from the woods on the other side. Of course it was Sadie—baiting him. If she was carrying a spare set of pig’s intestines from the biology lab, she would not want to waste them.

Well, he would play the fool for her if that made her happy.

He got off his bike and wheeled it through the tight brace of evergreens. One bough of prickly needles scratched his face in yet another blood sacrifice, and then he was standing in the woods, looking at the stark trees bereft of leaves, shrouded in mist and feathering out to hazy and indistinct forms in the distance.

Oh, this was Sadie country, prime for horror. She must be loving this, wherever she was hiding.

He stood very still, tensing every muscle in his body. At any moment, she would come flying around the trunk of an oak tree, perhaps with some new weapon, another trick to cleave his poor startled brain into equal parts of terror and delight.

Two small animals ran across his path. A gray cat crackled leaves and snapped dry twigs in pursuit of a squirrel. But this was not the noise he had heard from the lane. He listened for the sound of something female, ten years old and nearly human. He rolled his bike farther into the woods, and now he saw the small metallic swatch of purple.

Everything Sadie owned was purple, even her running shoes exactly matched her purple parka.

Her bike was partially covered by a gunnysack, dirt-encrusted and blending well with the dead leaves. She was probably in a hurry and making better time through the woods on foot. He could guess where she was heading, and that would explain why she had not gone all the way to Gwen’s. If they were meeting at the old boathouse, then Sadie must be in fresh trouble. The girls had not gone there since the last time Gwen’s father had forbidden them to play together.

Confident that Sadie was not planning an ambush, he relaxed and took his time walking his bike around the tree trunks and fallen branches. At the edge of the woods, his vista opened to the wide lawn of St. Ursula’s Academy. Grass rolled downhill to the lake, a calm mirror of the gray winter sky. The near shoreline was obscured by rock formations and foliage. He laid down his bicycle and drew closer to the boathouse. Now he could see part of the long wharf spanning the other side of the building and reaching far out on the lake. Its boards were worn smooth by the barefoot steps of generations of children.

St. Ursula’s Academy was very old, and over the past century, the students had marked every bit of it. The vast green lawn spreading upward from the lake was scarred with ancient rough trails where boys and girls had worn away the grass as they departed from the normal paths. And this departure was at the heart of the boarding school for not quite normal, and some said quite unnatural, children.

He drew back when he heard the sound of a door being pulled shut. Now a single loud bark came from inside the boathouse.

Had Gwen brought her dog along this time? She had never done that before.

David didn’t take up his regular post beneath the window; that might set the dog to barking again. He walked back toward the woods and sat down on a patch of ground behind the cover of shrubs. Here he resolved to wait until Sadie came out, so he could follow her home.

The dog barked again and kept it up for a long time. Then it stopped suddenly, the same way that Sadie’s laughter had ended in the lane—the dog had been switched off. Over the next hour, this was repeated three more times.

What were Gwen and Sadie doing to that animal?

Now there was another noise behind him. He shrank back behind the massive trunk of a centurion oak. A small blond girl was running through the woods. Gwen?

 

Gwen Hubble puffed white clouds of breath, and her legs churned faster. The child-pink locomotive with the flapping red scarf and blue jeans ran a weaving path, skirting the trees. Her running shoes, laces undone, smashed brittle leaves to powder. Dry twigs snapped with sharp cracks in sync with her heartbeat.

The printed message on her pager had been an odd one. “Urgent—boathouse—tell no one.” But that was Sadie’s style, the cliffhanger.

Gwen broke through a tight line of speckled trees at the edge of the wood. Her flushed face was scratched, and her socks fell in loose woolen rolls around her ankles. Breath came with ragged tears at her throat, and the bones of her shins were going to splinters with every hard pounding footfall. She rounded the side of the old boathouse, her thick blond braid thumping at the back of a red parka.

She stepped onto the wharf, and as she walked toward the boathouse door, her steps slowed. A rock lay on the boards amid the debris of splintered century-old wood, a rusted padlock and its crusty hasp. Well, perhaps the groundskeeper had changed the lock since Sadie mastered the combination.

The crude breakage would be an improvement on Sadie’s usual method of operations.
Yes, that must be it.
And Gwen approved. Now this was really scary.

She pushed through the door and walked into the dark.

She braced herself for the assault. Would Sadie be waiting behind the door?

No—not this time.

Gwen’s eyes had adjusted to the light streaming in the door behind her. And now she made out the small body, the familiar head of light brown hair and the purple down jacket. Sadie was lying at the center of the floor. Gwen was disappointed. After the big production of the broken lock, she had expected something more imaginative. She knelt down beside her friend and shook her.

“Hey, I’m not buying it. Get up.”

The child lying on the floor made no response. Gwen looked up to see the lock on the boathouse phone box had also been broken.

“Sadie, it’s not funny. Sadie?”

 

David stood up and stamped his feet. They had gone numb while he sat hunched and hidden in the bushes. Now his toes tingled as they came back to life. The air was growing colder. He pulled up the collar of his jacket against a sudden rush of wind off the lake.

Sadie should have come out long before now if she expected to get home by dark. He walked out onto open ground, emboldened by curiosity.

He hadn’t heard the dog bark for a very long time. If Gwen had not brought her own dog, then where had the animal come from?

David moved closer to the boathouse, the better to eavesdrop. The window facing the shore was the source of all his Sadie trivia. He pressed one ear against the rough wood of the shutters, but there was no sound of barks, no giggles, nothing.

The grass and the trees were all melding into the same gray hue, and the sky was darkening. The boy walked around the side of the building and stepped onto the wharf. He popped off the balls of his feet and hung there in the air for a moment, hesitating. If they caught him spying on them, what story could he give?

Oh, sure.
Like he could actually get the words out. Well, he didn’t need a story. He had the strongest right to be here as a boarder at the school. The girls were only day students, townies.

David guessed it was close to dinnertime, and soon his housemother would be standing in the door of the cottage, calling out his name the way the real mothers did in the neighborhoods of Makers Village. But he couldn’t leave yet. He had to know what was going on in there, though he strongly suspected it was another one of Sadie’s traps set to scare him to death. He spotted the padlock and hasp on the wharf beside the door.

That was odd.

Sadie’s plotting had never been so elaborate. She always went for the swift shock. A slow build to terror, and now this violence upon private property—well, this was entirely too subtle.

He pushed the door open and went inside. Though the interior was black, but for a few feet of bad light from the open doorway, he knew immediately that the boathouse was empty. But the girls could not have gotten past him. No way.

David walked deeper into the darkness, memory leading him safely around the tarpaulined canoes, a sailboat and stacks of boxes. His two classmates were only impressions on the air. He sniffed the musty space to separate the smell of the lake water from the smell of dog hair and traces of girl in the faint residue of spearmint gum and talcum powder.

The boy’s head snapped to one side.

A queer, rude finger of ice stroked his spine. There it was again—a furtive shadow within shadows and the quick scratching of small feet. On some level, he knew it was a rat, but he would not believe in it. Although he owed his scholarship to a festering rat bite as much as to his IQ score, his brain was blind to vermin. They could not follow him here. They were all back there in the foster home. He had seen that place for the last time when a social worker had carted him off to the hospital. There were no more rats in the world. He would not believe in them.

The wind banged the door shut behind him, and his world went black. David stopped breathing for all the time it took to cross the wide room, to bang his legs against a wooden box and find the knob for the door. And then the boy was swinging into the air, holding on to the door handle and dangling over freezing water. He had opened the wrong door, and his long legs had overstepped the shallow stairs leading down to the sheltered boat slip. The wider door beyond this one was standing open to the remains of daylight.

David used his body, swinging his weight to bring the door close to its wood frame again. His feet, pedaling in midair, found purchase on the ladder, and he climbed back into the boathouse. With the dim light from the slip, he found the right door and stepped onto the solid planks of the wharf. He walked to the end of the building and stared at the lakeside doors. This was the only other exit—by water.

That must be how they had gotten past him, paddling behind the rocks and foliage along the shore. He could count the canoes to see if one was missing. But no—he was not going back in there, not for anything.

He walked out to the far end of the long wharf where it hung on stilts over the water. The lake had become a choppy agitation of whitecaps; wind-driven waves licked and slapped the pilings. There was no boat in sight along the shoreline. David turned back toward the massive redbrick building at the top of the hill, looming there like a great authoritarian parent, five stories tall counting the two narrow rows of dormer windows set in black shingles. His own cottage was left of the main building and farther back in the woods. He longed to go there; he was aching from the cold and very hungry.

The girls were probably home by now. It was almost dinnertime. But still he hated to leave this riddle undone. He headed back through the woods to look for Sadie’s bike. She would not have left it behind.

He found the gunnysack, but the bike was gone. So they had at least not drowned in the lake.

They were probably at Gwen’s house having a hot dinner.

Passing through the wall of pine trees, he entered the Christmas tree lane near the public road. Sadie’s purple bike was parked by the bus stop, propped up against a signpost, and this made no sense at all—nothing did. First a canoe and now a bus? Why would they take the bus so close to dinnertime? What new game was this?

David looked toward Gwen Hubble’s home at the top of the long cobblestone driveway. The lights were going on, one by one, as though someone were racing from room to room in a great panic, in absolute terror of the dark, turning on all the lamps in the house.

 

The purple bicycle lay in the middle of Miss Fowler’s broken picket fence. She stood on the front lawn, shivering in a coat she had pulled over her nightgown at the obscene hour of two o’clock in the morning. She frowned at the damaged fence slats while three men screamed in a hellish concert. The uniformed policeman was loudest, almost hysterically childlike when he reached a high C on the musical scale. And now the other two men had ceased to shout foul words at one another. They stared at him with something close to awe, and so did Miss Fowler. This young policeman might be one of very few Americans who could sing the more difficult notes in the national anthem.