The Narrows (3 page)

“This is stupid,” he responded, though he was already testing his footing on one of the large white stones. Slowly he descended the hillside, using the stones when he could to secure his footing; when he couldn’t, he crouched low to the ground, hoping that the muddy earth wouldn’t betray him and send him tumbling down the rest of the way. At one point, startled by the growl of a heavy engine whipping along Route 40 directly above his head, he nearly lost his balance and tumbled down. Dwight, having seemingly materialized beside him like a guardian angel, managed to snag a handful of Matthew’s shirt and prevent the fall.

At the bottom of the valley they crossed over to the concrete lip of the Narrows and peered down. The water level was still very high, the water itself black, swirling and fast moving. Cattails spun out of rents in the concrete and crickets chirped happily in the tall grass. Dried mud covered everything, further evidence of the flood that had so recently besieged their hometown.

Matthew had heard stories of fishermen pulling three-eyed rockfish from the Narrows, or kids catching uniquely colored frogs with extra appendages. Before his father had left, Matthew had asked him if these stories were true. Hugh Crawly, who had evidently been just months away from leaving his son, daughter, and wife, had told the boy that he couldn’t vouch for the stories of others, but that he had once personally witnessed a two-headed turtle sunning itself on one of the footpaths down by the creek. He’d been with some other friends that afternoon and claimed that one of his buddies had suggested they catch the thing and call the Smithsonian in D.C. Someone else volunteered that they should make soup from it, though the notion of eating a creature as so clearly deformed and unnatural as this one did not sit well with the rest of the men. Finally, in the end, no one wanted to touch it. “It’s because of the old plastics plant,” his father had concluded that afternoon. They had been out by the garage, where his old man had been working on the family pickup truck, wiping down one greasy gadget he’d removed from beneath the pickup’s hood. “Before that plant closed down, people would see all sorts of funny-looking critters down in the Narrows. The water there is still polluted with runoff from the plant. You should never swim there.”

Matthew never had. Now, he looked across the Narrows and halfway up the neighboring mountain where the old plastics factory, now long defunct and abandoned, squatted low to the ground like an animal lying in wait. Its ranks of tiny barred windows looked like grids on a circuit board and its stone façade was networked with thick cords of ivy. Two slender concrete smokestacks rose up like medieval prison towers at one end of the factory.

“Help me look,” Dwight said. He had a big stick now, which he used to thwack the overgrown grass.

Matthew glanced around. “How do you know we’re even in the right spot?”

“Billy Leary said it was down by the Narrows, between the Witch Tree and the stone bridge.” Dwight pointed to the overpass made of black stones that spanned the Narrows in a tight little arc, then he pointed over to the Witch Tree, a creeping, skeletal horror that clawed up out of a base of brownish nettles, its branches like flailing arms, the suggestion of faces etched into its ashy bark. Matthew knew countless stories and rumors surrounding that tree, the most sinister suggesting that the tree had once been a little boy who had broken into an old witch’s house and stolen all her sweets. The boy had thought he’d gotten away with it but the witch came looking for him later that night, her grotesque face peering right into his bedroom window. She kidnapped the boy and turned him into a tree so he could never steal things from her or anyone else again. Indeed, if you stared at the trunk of the twisted and gnarled tree long enough, there seemed to be a face—or many faces—within the bark.

“How much do you get doing your paper route?” Matthew asked.

“Fifteen bucks a week.”

“Wow. That much, huh?”

“Yeah.” Dwight wandered over to the stone footbridge, a semicircle of daylight winking out from beneath it. Beyond the bridge, one of the many footpaths described a winding walkway through the thicket. With the tip of his thwacking stick, Dwight chipped away some of the mortar between the stones in the bridge’s foundation. “Why?”

“You think maybe I can take it over for a week? Just till I get enough money to pay for the Dracula mask.”

“That wasn’t Dracula,” Dwight said, still searching the ground.

“Yeah it was.”

“No it wasn’t, dummy.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Just a regular old vampire.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Dracula is a specific vampire. Maybe even the lead vampire. He’s one guy, you know? Dracula is his name. It’s like saying all monkeys are called King Kong.”

“My sister says Dracula’s real name was Vlad.”

“You know what I mean, dummy,” Dwight said.

“And King Kong wasn’t a monkey,” Matthew said. “He was an ape.”

Dwight paused in chipping away the mortar from between the stones, propping the long stick over one shoulder. He winced into the sun as he looked toward Matthew. “What’s the difference?”

Matthew admitted that he did not know.

“Have you ever even seen
Dracula?”
Dwight asked, peering beneath the stone footbridge.

“He’s not a real person,” Matthew said.

“Not in person, dummy. The movie, I mean. Have you seen it?”

“Oh. Yes. I mean, no. I don’t know.” He couldn’t remember now. He’d seen a vampire movie on a cable access channel late one night over the summer after his mom and his sister had gone to bed. Had that movie been He couldn’t remember now. There had been a vampire who looked strikingly like the mask in Hogarth’s window. He’d suffered nightmares for several days after watching that movie.
Dracula
?

“It’s pretty boring,” Dwight said. “And it’s so
old.
It’s not even in color. The only creepy part is he lives in this big old castle, and there are candles on the walls and shadows everywhere.” Dwight pointed across the Narrows to where the old plastics factory appeared superimposed against the cloudy sky. “Sort of looked like that place.”

For some inexplicable reason, looking at it now, Matthew felt a chill radiate up his spine.

“Anyway, I can’t just have you take over my route, doofus,” Dwight continued. “You gotta get up crazy early, before school even, and if you oversleep and miss the route, I’ll catch hell.”

“I won’t oversleep.”

“And besides, I’m saving up my money to buy a new dirt bike.”

Matthew sighed.

“Oh damn,” Dwight said. The tone of his voice ratcheted up a notch with excitement. “Here it is! Take a look!”

Matthew turned away from the view of the abandoned plastics factory and found Dwight crouching in the tall grass, his stick planted like a staff in the ground. Dwight peered at something at his feet, a look of pure awe on his chubby face. From where Matthew stood, he could see there was something big down there in the grass, bending the stalks of the reeds and creating what appeared to be a crater in the earth.

Matthew sidled up beside Dwight…then immediately recoiled when he saw what Dwight was looking at.

“That’s…that’s not a deer,” Matthew said, his voice small. “Is it?”

The thing no longer resembled whatever it had been when it was alive. Matthew could make out the suggestion of long, muscular legs covered in short tawny hair and hooves like chunks of obsidian. Through what was left of its skull, he could see a whitish zipper of dull teeth along a tapered snout. The skull itself looked like a bowl with some pinkish fluid at its center.

The entire torso of the animal had been demolished, reduced to a bloody, sizzling vomitus that rotted in the heat of midday. White ribs poked like bicycle spokes from a ragged tear in its side, through which Matthew could see its purplish organs and banded, milky pustules of fat. At first glance, he thought he could see the organs behind the ribs working, as if the thing was somehow still alive…but on closer inspection, he realized the movement he was seeing was the wriggling of maggots that had infested the carcass. The entire thing hummed with horseflies.

“Sure it is,” Dwight said, though Matthew could hear the skepticism in his friend’s voice, too. “What else could it be?”

“Whatever it is, it’s disgusting,” Matthew said.

Dwight cocked his head, as if to examine the thing from a different angle. He pointed to the thing’s tattered hindquarters, where the ragged hook of a two-toned tail curled stiffly out of the brown weeds.

“It’s a whitetail,” said Dwight. Sweat beaded his forehead.

“What do you think happened to it?” Matthew looked up to estimate the distance between the carcass and Route 40 at the top of the hill. “Do you think a car hit it?”

“A car didn’t do this. It looks like something ate it,” Dwight suggested. He stood and prodded the corpse with his stick. One stiff leg rocked and there was a ripping sound as part of its gore-matted hide tore out of the grass.

Matthew wrinkled his nose. “Gross. Don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s—”

Both boys jumped back, startled by the massive beetle that spilled out of the whitetail’s snout and scuttled into the grass, its metallic green carapace glinting sunlight. Nervously, Dwight laughed. Then he tossed the stick onto the ground and withdrew a small boning knife from his backpack.

“What are you doing?” Matthew said. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “You’re not supposed to bring knives to school, Dwight.”

“You’re not supposed to blah blah blah,” Dwight parroted. “You’re such a sissy. Help me cut the tail off.”

“What? No way!”

“Don’t be a baby.”

“I’m not touching it.” Matthew took an unconscious step backward. “Why do you want that tail, anyway?”

“I’m gonna hang it from my bike.” The tone of Dwight’s voice suggested that Matthew was an imbecile for not understanding this.

“You do it yourself.”

“I need you to help.” Dwight stepped over what Matthew estimated to be the ropy, silvered spools of the deer’s entrails, then hunkered down again. Sunlight shimmered along the blade of the boning knife. “Either pull the tail straight out or keep the body steady while I cut.”

Matthew sucked his lower lip. He couldn’t pull his eyes from the dead animal decomposing and crawling with flies in the grass. He could hear their buzzing, an industrial, machinelike drone.

“Okay,” he said finally, “but on one condition.”

Dwight groaned and peered up at him from beneath his brow. It was the same look he shot Mr. Hodgson at school when asked to come to the blackboard and solve a math problem in front of the class. “What?”

“You let me take over your paper route, just until I have enough money so I can buy the Dracula mask.”

“It’s not a fucking Dracula mask…”

“Vampire mask, then. Deal?”

Dwight’s mouth twisted into a knot. He looked down at the dead deer’s tail, his longish hair damp with perspiration and curling over his eyes, then back up at Matthew. Before he even opened his mouth, Matthew knew he would agree to it.

“I can’t give you the route, Matt. I just can’t. But yeah, okay, I’ll lend you the money. You can pay me back through your allowance. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“But then I get to wear the mask sometimes too. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Swear on it.”

Matthew Crawly spit on the ground then said, “Swear.”

This seemed to suffice. Dwight nodded succinctly then jerked his head at the dead animal’s tail. Matthew tromped through the underbrush and squatted down beside Dwight. This close to the carcass, he could see with perfect clarity the maggots squirming within the pulpy gruel, fat and white, like overcooked macaroni. There was a sticky web of foam spilling out of the rent in the flesh, pinkish with blood and mucus.

“Come on,” Dwight said, prodding the rear of the animal with the point of the boning knife. Agitated flies clotted the air above them.

The tail jutted up at a perfect ninety-degree angle, stiff as a coat hanger. Matthew pinched its tip between his thumb and forefinger then pulled it taut. The fur was incredibly soft and, beneath the fur, he could feel the tapered, pencil-thin tailbone.

“Just hurry up and do it,” Matthew said.

Dwight placed the blade of the boning knife against the tail, at the point where the tail met the creature’s hindquarters, and proceeded to saw back and forth with disciplined alacrity. The sound was like twisting a leather wallet and the sight of the act turned Matthew’s stomach. He looked away, back up the opposite hillside where the undulating fields climbed toward the square stone shell of the plastics factory, partially masked behind a network of dead trees. A cool breeze issued down the mountain, rustling the prickly underbrush and causing the tall, yellow grass to blow.

A figure stood within the dark lee of the building, partially shrouded by trees. Matthew discerned the pale flesh of a phantom but could make out no discernible features. Not at first, anyway. As Matthew watched, the figure retreated back into the shadows until it was impossible to distinguish the figure from the weathered stone of the factory walls. It was only after the figure had vanished from view that something clicked over in his head, and he thought, okay, yes, he
had
seen who the person was. But could it be…?