The Pricker Boy (10 page)

“Not me,” he says. “Why did I have to be the first one cut?” He covers his cut with his free hand, then scuffs with his shoe at the spot on the ground where he had seen the blood fall. “I don’t want it to be me, not my blood.” His foot works furiously, trying to dilute the spot of blood with leaves and dirt.

“Don’t you start,” I say. “We’re all together. Nothing’s going to happen to you. And look.” I show him a scratch on my own arm. “I got cut too. We’ll all get cut a dozen times before we’re out of here. Don’t sweat it.”

“But that’s my blood on the ground,” he pleads.

“So he’ll get you first,” I say. I’m joking. Kind of. Part of me wants to see the expression on his face, and he doesn’t disappoint.

“Me first? But I don’t wanna be first.”

He’s so pathetic I have to fight the urge to laugh. But I’ve tortured him enough. “Okay, we do it like we did as kids. If you think he’s after you, then you leave, I dunno, your favorite comb in the Hawthorns. And then he goes away. Widow’s walk. Simple, right?”

Ronnie nods. “Okay. But I don’t like this, Stucks. I don’t like the way my story is turning out.”

The farther we get from the Hawthorns, the thicker the thorns get. As they get thicker, they have more opportunity to do their work. Emily and I are wearing jeans, so we’re more protected than the others. Ronnie is wearing long pants, but he can’t keep them clean, and he’ll catch hell
from his grandfather when he gets home. Robin and Vivek are wearing shorts. They both get cut quite a bit.

We’re all having a tough time, but Robin thinks that she’s having the worst of it, I can tell. I see her sweating. I’m sweating too, but she’s sweating more. I think it’s stinging her eyes. She’s the only one who winces when her skin gets hit by a thorn. And she keeps looking around as if she expects something to dive out of the woods at her. I look around too, but not because she’s looking around. I just want to see what there is to see. I’m not scared.

We’ve been walking for about a half hour when the path begins to slope downward. When it levels off, the ground becomes muddy. Pools of still water dot our path. As we approach the puddles, slippery things—things that will one day be frogs when their legs form—flip and skitter to hide in the moist leaves.

The path begins to rise again, but not before it is blocked by a large, still puddle. It is only eight feet across, but it stretches into the thorns on either side of the path like a long, dark worm. I look down into it to see how deep it is, but the water is as black as oil, and all I see is the reflection of the tops of the trees and the sky above.

“I’m not stepping into that,” Ronnie says. “No way.”

“Yes, you will,” I say.

“It’s disgusting. You don’t even know what might be in there—leeches or snails or worms. No way.”

My hand snaps forward and grabs him by the wrist. I
yank him toward the puddle. The action is so quick that I even startle myself.

“Hey!” Vivek shouts.

But it’s already too late. Ronnie’s foot has sunk shin-deep into the muck. Emily grabs me and pulls me away from him. My heart is thumping quickly.

“What are you doing?” she whispers to me, then steps forward into the puddle alongside Ronnie. She takes his wrist. He pulls away. It occurs to me that I grabbed the scarred one.

“Why did you do that?” Ronnie asks me. Sniffling, he makes his way across the puddle. Emily stays with him until he reaches the other side. Ronnie’s pants are covered with black mud halfway to his knees.

Emily slogs back through the puddle. She helps Vivek and Robin through, then comes out again on my side. Her jeans, like Ronnie’s pants, are thick with slime. I move forward toward the water, but she places her hand on my chest. “That’s not going to happen again,” she says quietly.

“It got him across, didn’t it?” I say. I try to push past her, but her hold on me is surprisingly strong.

“That’s not going to happen again,” she repeats, looking me directly in the eye.

“You’re in charge now?”

“If I have to be,” she says, then releases me.

As I turn away from her and step into the puddle, I swear that I smell cigarette smoke from somewhere nearby.

*  *  *

“I think we’ve been going through poison ivy,” Robin says.

“Cousin, you wouldn’t know poison ivy if your own name was written on the leaves,” I tell her.

“Okay, Mr. Woodsman, how about I pick some and use it to write the word ‘ignoramus’ on your back? Then we’ll see if it’s poison ivy or not, huh?” She begins searching the ground for vines and mumbling something about following in her father’s footsteps.

“Can you even spell ‘ignoramus’?” I ask her.

“She could probably miss a letter or two and still get her point across,” Vivek offers.

“Has anybody thought that maybe it’s time we went home?” Ronnie says timidly, avoiding eye contact with me. “I missed lunch, and I didn’t tell my grandpa that I would miss lunch, and when he sees me like this I’ll be lucky if he lets me out of the house again all summer.”

“We haven’t seen any ‘boulders larger than Whale’s Jaw,’” Emily states.

“See?” Ronnie says to the rest of us.

“I’m not agreeing with you, Ronnie. I’m saying that, geologically speaking—”

Vivek stops her. “Emily? Dumb-guy language, please.”

“You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be,” Emily responds. “But I’ll play along. Whale’s Jaw was dropped in these woods over ten thousand years ago by a receding glacier. It’s called a glacial erratic. And we’ve been looking for more glacial erratics—boulders larger than Whale’s Jaw—since we left.”

“Whether you believe it or not, I’m too dumb to look for glacial erratics,” Vivek says. “I’ve just been looking for ‘big rocks.’”

“The point is that it’s strange, very strange, that we haven’t seen any. Whale’s Jaw wouldn’t be out here all on its own. And according to Ronnie, the Pricker Boy’s stone pit is marked by other erratics. But so far there are none.”

“Still, it’s getting late,” Ronnie says.

“I’ll go back with you, Ronnie,” Robin offers, trying to be oh-so-pleasant, though I think it’s just an excuse.

“We’re not going to split up now,” Emily says. “We’ll take a vote.”

Robin sighs. “I’ll admit it. I want to go back.” She wipes sweat from her brow and swats at a mosquito that’s buzzing by her ear.

“I was hoping we’d see something by now,” Vivek says. “Clouds of bloodsucking bats. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Godzilla. Ronnie’s grandfather in a black cape. Something scary. I’d hate to turn back now without something to show for it.”

“We could just come back tomorrow,” Robin offers.

“If we come back tomorrow, we’ll have to fight through all that again,” I say. “We need to keep going.”

All eyes turn to Emily. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of red pistachios. She begins cracking them and tossing them into her mouth. Very quickly her fingertips begin to turn red. “Well,” she starts, and then pauses, looking up at the trees and tossing pistachio shells
into the bushes. “I’m still interested. If for nothing else than to find an explanation for what we haven’t found.”

“Sometimes you talk like a mental patient,” Vivek says.

“I suppose so,” she responds.

“Okay,” Robin says. “But I need to … visit the bushes.”

“Let me go with you,” Emily says. They strike off toward a weak break in the brush. The three of us guys stand together awkwardly for a few minutes. Ronnie opens his mouth to say something to Vivek but then decides against it. I don’t think he wants to look at me. He stares at the path that Emily and Robin have just gone down.

“Are you trying to look at the girls while they go wee-wee?” Vivek asks him.

Ronnie’s face goes red. “Nuh-no!” he stammers. “I wouldn’t … of course not!”

“You little perv!”

“Stop it!” he shouts, his voice wavering. “Don’t you start picking on me too!”

Vivek chuckles. “I’m just trying to make you laugh, bud. You look a little tense.”

Ronnie smiles as if the joke has suddenly dawned on him. A moment later we hear Robin screaming.

Without hesitating, all three of us lunge into the brush. I can hear Robin calling out to us. I can’t hear her well, but she sounds desperate, as if she and Emily are in danger.

We’re all stomping through the brush toward them, and I feel a bit of a thrill. I guess that the other guys feel the
thrill too. We’re guys. It may seem old-fashioned, and my mother would kill me if I ever admitted it to her, but every guy gets a little rush of adrenaline when he has the opportunity to run to the aid of a damsel in distress.

“You guys gotta see this!” Robin yells. Suddenly she and Emily don’t sound like they’re in trouble at all. In fact, if my cousin thinks it’s cool, it’s probably not something that you need to rush to see.

Then I see the first one, just off to my left. A boulder as big as a tractor trailer. Then another, even larger one just beyond it, and still another on the right. It’s almost as if we’re running through a shallow valley made of stone.

We find the girls. Robin can’t stand still. She hops up to us. “Can you believe it?”

“Look!” Vivek shouts. “A glacial erratic! I mean, a big rock!”

Emily is staring straight up the side of a thirty-foot-tall rock face. She calmly reaches forward with her finger and pokes it as if she’s testing to see if it’s real. Satisfied that it’s solid, she starts to eat her pistachios again.

“See?” I shout. “I told you! I told you it was real!” I punch Ronnie lightly on the shoulder. He winces and rubs the punch away.

The rock’s at least twenty-five feet long, and it seems top-heavy. Looking up at it makes me dizzy, makes me feel like the whole thing is about to fall over on top of us. This place is like a dream. Giant stone monuments form walls all around us. We’re under tall, slender pine trees, so
there’s not much brush. The trunks look like thin supports holding up a solid ceiling of intertwined pine branches.

And the strangest thing of all … it feels peaceful. My first thought is that I’d love to camp right here under the protective pine roof, right up next to this wall of stone. I’d love to wake to the sun speckling the orange pine needles on the ground. I can’t explain it. Here I am deep into the Pricker Boy’s territory, and I’ve found a place so calm and quiet that I’d rather sleep here than in any other place in the world, even my own bed in my own home.

I’m not tired, but still I could curl up right now at the base of one of these trees. If I did, I can almost believe, really believe, that the pine needles would give way slightly, as if they were covering not the hard ground but layers of soft blankets.

I shake my head clear of thoughts of peace and sleep.

Off to the left side, a wide path hooks around between this stone and another, smaller one. Ronnie walks over toward the path. “That almost looks like … it’s wide enough to be a road between the boulders.” He runs up to see what’s behind the stone. “Oh no.” He stumbles backward. I catch him before he falls on the rocks, then walk up to see what he’s discovered. I feel the others come up behind me.

My father has been telling us for years about an abandoned house that he and my Uncle Bill had once found way out in the woods. He said that the place had been empty for ages. The walls were covered with black mold
both inside and out. Inside, you had to watch the floorboards because if you stepped onto the wrong ones, you’d fall right through into the basement. It was full of rickety furniture and shattered glass and decaying mattresses and plates and pots and pans. They used to spend hours out there poking around. He found a broken pocket watch one time, and Uncle Bill found three silver-dollar coins.

One day, they found some papers in a desk with the name “Hora” on it. From then on, they called it the Hora House. When Dad told us about it, we didn’t hear him correctly, so we called it the Horror House. He corrected us, but we called it the Horror House anyway.

One summer day when I was about eight, my father disappeared into the woods. He was gone for three or four hours. When he came back, he told us that he had gone off in search of the Hora House. He had wanted to take us back there and show it to us. He thought we’d think it was cool. And it would have been. I’d have gone back into the woods with my dad. Sure, it was heading into Pricker Boy domain, but I was littler and I figured it’d be okay if I was with my dad. I mean … he’s Dad. When you’re a little kid, what more do you need to chase the monsters away than your dad?

But he couldn’t find it. He said he searched for hours but came up with nothing. I remember him being really down about it. Like there was a piece of his childhood that he wanted to share with us, but it had evaporated over the years. Like it never really existed at all.

But it does exist, and I know because I’m staring down at it right now. The Hora House is right in front of me.

Or what’s left of it, which is not much. Most of the wood rotted away long ago. The only things still standing are a tall stone chimney on the right side and a small portion of the far wall. In front of us is a hole cut sharply into the ground. It looks like a giant knife blade reached down and sliced out the earth. The basement walls are built of flat stones laid without any mortar. Laid well, I guess, considering they’re still holding up long after the wood above them has rotted away. A single white birch tree grows straight up from the bottom of the cellar.

My heart pounds, but I don’t think it’s from fear. This is a discovery, our first real discovery, considering we already knew about the Hawthorn Trees and the offering stone. I jump down a slight, stony incline until I’m level with the house.

“Ronnie?” I ask. “I seem to remember you mentioning this in the story a few years back. You haven’t brought it up in a while. Why don’t you tell us again?”

“I can’t,” he says. “Not right now.” He wipes his hand across his brow, and I can see his fingers shaking. He’s had this place woven into the story for years. Sometimes he includes it, and sometimes he doesn’t. But I’m not sure he ever really believed in it. Now he’s face to face with it, and he can’t deny it.

“I think now is the perfect time,” I insist.