Mountain Madness (13 page)

He squeezed his eyes shut and blindly flipped off the light, but for a long time afterward, bolts of purple lightning streaked across his vision like something out of a science fiction rainstorm.
Stupid
, Davy thought, knowing he should have been prepared for the shock of the light after so much time in the dark and that he should at least have pointed the flashlight away from himself before turning it on. He blinked his watering eyes and waited until the lightning storm died down.

Okay
, Davy thought. He left the bowl on the floor, deciding he probably wouldn’t need it anymore, and kept the flashlight instead. It seemed a little strange, Mr. Boots leaving the flashlight on the floor that way, where it could get kicked and maybe broken, but Davy guessed Mr. Boots wasn’t any sort of normal. He let himself out of the house, a rectangle of light and his own long shadow beating him through the doorway.

Since the car crash, Davy’s back had been a little sore when he twisted it too much or tried to move too fast. The wood chopping, which for Davy had actually consisted mostly of carrying armload after armload of quartered logs from the chopping block to the wood pile along the side of the house, and endless hours spent lying on the skimpily covered floors probably hadn’t helped. As he moved through the back yard, Davy felt the twinge just above his bottom and tried to ignore it.

He stepped out of the pooled light and into the darkness, flipping on the flashlight again, not looking directly at the beam this time, pointing it ahead of him, into the woods. The ax jutted out from the tree stump where Mr. Boots had left it. Beyond stood a wheelbarrow that might not have been used in a million years, its front tire flat and almost completely hidden by the grass grown up tall around it. Davy passed these things without a second thought and hurried into the trees. Whenever his beam of light found a sharp rock or a pointy-looking stick on the ground, he moved carefully around it, mindful of his bare feet.

He hadn’t paid much attention when they’d come to the house for the first time, had been worrying more about the stranger with the wormy lips than about which direction was which or where they’d left the truck. Now, hurrying deeper into the woods, Davy wasn’t really sure
where
he was going, but it didn’t matter. Even if he’d known where the truck was, he couldn’t drive it. He was just a kid, with legs so short they wouldn’t have reached to the pedals, and he didn’t know the first thing about driving except that it was something mommies and daddies did. Not little kids. He’d never planned on heading for the truck. The first thing to do was get himself far far away from Mr. Boots. Then he’d worry about roads and directions.

He stepped up onto a fallen tree. The crumbling bark shifted beneath his feet, and for a second, it almost felt like walking through sand at the beach, until he stepped off again and onto hard dirt, pine needles, fallen leaves, and low-growing brush. His flashlight danced in his hands, shining from tree trunks to the ground ahead, from the limbs above to those low-hanging ones that tried to smack him in the face.

Once, he thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes tracking him from the shadows, but when he turned his flashlight in that direction, the eyes were gone and he told himself they’d probably never been there at all. He heard some sounds he knew, hooting owls and croaking frogs, and others he didn’t.

It was August, almost Davy’s birthday, as a matter of fact, and although it had been warm inside the house, it was a little nippy out here in the mountain breeze. Davy wished he’d changed into a pair of pants and maybe a long-sleeved shirt, but he hadn’t exactly had a lot of planning time. And if he was wishing for things, he might as well wish for a pair of shoes too, and hey, why not a laser gun and a team of trained tigers so he could run
at
the house instead of away from it and shoot Mr. Boots into a thousand little screaming pieces of tiger food?

The flashlight shone on the white trunk of a gnarled birch, and for a second Davy thought he was looking at a ghost. He flinched away and stepped on something sharp that cut the heel of his foot. He slid to a stop, flicked the flashlight’s beam to the white tree again to be sure it really
wasn’t
a ghost, set the flashlight down on the ground, and rubbed at his stinging foot.

If he hadn’t stopped just then, he might never have found the clearing, might have kept on running until either some dark woods monster got him or he found someone to help him and bring him away to safety.

After rubbing at his sole enough to cake dirt into the wound and stop the bleeding, he let go and stepped down. The foot throbbed a little, but Davy thought he’d be able to go on. He reached for the flashlight but didn’t pick it up right away. The beam shone just past the birch and into the empty space beyond.

Davy stared.

He guessed these woods probably had a lot of clearings, although he hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, had pictured himself wandering deeper and deeper into the forest with endless trees stretching out in every direction except behind, where Mr. Boots slept in his sprung cage.

Davy would have picked up the light and continued his escape, except he thought he saw something there beyond the ghostly birch, something unnaturally shiny. He grabbed the flashlight and pointed it in that direction. The light came back to him from the many shattered pieces of what first appeared to be a broken mirror.

Davy moved closer, the flashlight poked out in front of him like a gun or a sword, his cut foot burning with every step. Not until he’d passed the twisted, white tree did he realize what was really out there in that otherwise empty space, and by then it was too late to unsee it.

The station wagon had taken quite a beating during its run in with the moose and the roadside trees, so much so that it hardly looked like a car anymore. Davy had gone with his mommy once to an art show at the college downtown and looked at a room full of things she’d called
apstract sculpsure
, or something close to that, things that had looked trashy to Davy but that he’d pretended to be interested in because she’d brought him down there without Daddy or Georgie for a fun mommy-son day. The station wagon looked like one of those pieces of art to Davy, something somebody might have made out of a bunch of broken pieces of washing machines and toasters and lawnmowers.

He stood looking at the car for a long time, wanting to go over and peek inside but wanting at the same time to run away as fast as he could. Eventually, curiosity won out, and Davy limped across the clearing.

Overhead, the moon shone out from behind a bank of wispy clouds. It was just a thin thing, pale, a fingernail clipping. Without the canopy overhead, Davy could almost see without the flashlight, but he left it on just the same and watched his reflection swim across the surface of the station wagon’s intact windows.

They were all inside. Davy swung the beam from the front seat to the back, then to the ground, and he threw up his tomato soup. The vomit was red, bloody looking; Davy wiped away the last dangling strand and dared another look into the car.

More windows were missing than were left, and the smell from inside was worse than the potty bucket and Mr. Boots’s armpits combined. If Davy hadn’t thrown up before gagging on the horrendous stench, he certainly would have after.

Daddy. Mommy. Georgie. Manny was in there too, his bloated head twisted to the side and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, so thick and gray it might have been a piece of uncooked sausage. Davy’s stomach twisted again, but there was nothing left inside to come out, and he ended up coughing hard and spitting up nothing more than a mouthful of saliva.

Mommy and Daddy sat in the same seats they had during the crash, their bodies strapped in place by their seatbelts, but both leaning inward so that Mommy’s puffy head almost touched the empty bowl where Daddy’s brain used to be. One of Mommy’s eyes was twice the size of the other and about to pop out, and although Davy tried not to look at it, he couldn’t seem to turn away.

This was his mommy, the same mommy who’d taken him to the
apstract sculpsure
show, the same mommy who tickled him when he pretended to sleep and called him a silly goose. He retched again, but his mouth had gone completely dry, and this time he spat out nothing but stinky air.

He shone the trembling light into the back seat across the bodies of his brother and his dog. Manny lay up against the backrest, his too-big head and sausage tongue in Georgie’s lap. Georgie, his mouth open wide and full of flies and wriggling maggots. Georgie, whose t-shirt and flesh punched out in the middle of his tummy where he’d been pinned to the tree that rainy night a week ago.

Spread throughout the car were the remains of their camping supplies: a sleeping bag (
the one he’d peed in?
), a skillet, torn clothing and toiletries
—
everything covered in blood and mud and insects.

Davy hadn’t realized he was crying until the sopping neck of his shirt slid down his chest. He dropped into a sitting position, pressed his back against the car’s wrinkled back door, pulled his knees to his chest, and sobbed.

His family. All gone. Left in the car to rot, all gross smelling and icky looking and dead.

Dead.

And Davy knew what worms-for-lips, gap-toothed, boots-wearing monster had left them there. He slammed his fist into the ground beside him and wiped his eyes and running nose with his shirtsleeve.

He thought about the things he’d lost: his family, his real life, his freedom.

Except…no, he hadn’t lost that last one. Not yet. He’d gotten his freedom back, hadn’t he? He’d escaped.

Davy, still crying but gaining control of himself, pushed away from the car and up onto his feet. He walked away from the station wagon without looking back. The moon above him disappeared for a second behind an especially thick cloud, then reappeared and shone its sputtering candle’s light.

Davy had almost re-entered the woods when the beam from his flashlight arced across the birch once more, showing him again the ghost’s face he’d thought he’d seen earlier. Except this time the face wasn’t in the tree, it was in front of it, and it wasn’t a ghost at all.

Mr. Boots uncrossed his arms and smiled.

Davy wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there and watching, and he guessed it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t run away now, barefoot and still feeling sick to his stomach; he wouldn’t get twenty feet.

The flashlight. He realized too late that it had given him away, that he might as well have been running through the forest shouting at the top of his lungs and covered in glow-in-the-dark paint. He could try turning it off, or throwing it in one direction and then running in the other, but he didn’t think that would fool Mr. Boots for very long, and probably not at all.

Instead, he gave up. Mr. Boots was a grown-up, and Davy was just little. He didn’t know how he’d thought he could get away in the first place. He walked to the man with his head hung low and handed over the flashlight.

Mr. Boots took the light and tapped it against his pants leg like maybe he was thinking about something
—
maybe about smacking Davy in the head. Mr. Boots stared, the light swinging back and forth across his leather footwear, reflecting off the mud in a way that almost made the boots look like they were on fire.

Davy waited, half ready to pull back if a punch
was
thrown, half wanting to stand there and take it like the man he wasn’t. Maybe the punch would kill him, and he could be with his family after all.

Mr. Boots finally made a strange clicking sound in his mouth and stopped tapping the flashlight. He said, “Well, I guess I’d of done the same thing.” Then he nodded, as if happy with what he’d said, and motioned for Davy to lead the way back toward the house.

Davy did so, but not before taking one last look at the station wagon.

 He knew that someday he would become a man very
un
like Mr. Boots, and when that day came, it would be his responsibility to fix what had been wronged. His responsibility.

When the time was right, Davy would be ready.

He walked through the woods without bothering to dodge the sharp rocks and sticks, and by the time they reached the house, the bottoms of his feet were just about slimier and grosser than Mr. Boots’s cracked lips.

FOURTEEN

BETHANY WINSTON SAT
on the concrete patio behind her house, playing fetch with Alfred while the sun set and occasionally staring down at the pair of nubs under her t-shirt.

She was twelve years old, headed for the seventh grade, and still stuck with the training bras she’d had since she was nine. If she didn’t grow something down there soon, she thought she might as well run off with the circus and star in her own freak show.

Alfred trotted up to the patio with the oversized tennis ball in his mouth, his tail wagging so hard he was wagging most of his back end with it. Beth took the ball from his mouth and flung it across the yard for what must have been the thousandth time in the last half-hour.

Her mom had told her it was totally normal, that she herself hadn’t started to develop until after her freshman year of high school, but her reassurances hadn’t comforted Beth. Especially not after last weekend, when she’d heard a couple of boys snickering about her at the pool while she’d lounged on her towel and pretended to nap.

Alfred caught up with the ball before it stopped rolling and almost slid in the grass in his excitement to turn himself around and hurry back to the patio. Earlier, he’d spent a good five minutes exchanging barks with another dog somewhere off in the distance—Ms. McCormick’s collie, Jade, probably, though Beth hadn’t really known for sure—but whether it had been Jade or one of his other canine companions, Alfred had forgotten about it now and was engrossed in the game of fetch. Beth held out her hands.