The Bargaining (30 page)

The soft melody turns again to the tiny girl's giggle, then to the clogged, gurgling choke of something old, something not at all funny.

When a head appears, its mouth is what I see first, a jaw unhinged, a bottom lip drooping so low it practically hits the dirt floor of the crawl space, exposing a cavernous, rasping hole. Pale blue eyes roll upward into whites so enormous I'm not sure I'm looking at eyes at all. The bottom lids droop to the floor, red flesh exposing itself. The singing has turned to humming, but it's vacillating frantically between the childlike tone and the older, gurgling one.

And then the girl drops the flashlight, and the beam falls on the ragged ruffle of a dress, a spindly leg poking out underneath, the same cracks practically splitting her skin apart. The thin, pale hand lands on the dirt floor, dragging long pointed fingers across the ground, and her head lumbers forward, and this thing that might have once been a little girl is crawling toward me.

I bolt around the corner and past the overturned car with its dead spiders and the table set with animal parts, and I practically knock the door to the shed off of its hinges as I flee.

I can hear the singing growing louder behind me. I run back through the clearing with the rope swing and set it swaying on its creaking branch as I sail past. I slap branch after branch out of my way, and I'm maybe halfway through the thicket leading to the house when I hear my own voice, almost unrecognizable in my ear.

“Help!”

Then, suddenly, I'm hoarse, and at first I think it's because I'm out of breath, but soon I realize it's more than that—I'm not out of breath. I'm being robbed of it.

It's the same heaviness from the rest stop. The thickening corrosion that fills me up, slowing every movement, every intake, every pull of oxygen. Soon, I'm only able to sip at the surface of air. The rest of me feels as though it's sinking into the ground. And when I look down, I see that the needles of the forest floor are parting to expose fresh mud.

“Help,” I try again, but I can barely breathe, let alone speak. I feel my foot slip through the ground, pushing hard on my ankle. And then I feel something else. Rough fibers close over the bridge of my foot like fingers from under the
ground. My other foot sinks in an instant, and the trees suddenly feel taller than they were a moment ago.

“No!” I manage to squeak out despite the burning in my lungs. My heart is throbbing behind my chest, and I flail for something to hold on to.

Through the pounding in my ears as I struggle for breath, I hear it again, the humming of that song on the little girl's voice. The fibers tighten across my feet and tug, and less than a second later, the mud and needles cut across my knees.

The singing grows louder, and soon I hear the soft padding of feet approaching from behind me. I try to twist my body around, but I can't move enough to turn that way. The padding turns to dragging. The song fills my ears, the ­giggling spilling out of the cracks of the melody, dislocated from the voice that's singing.

“SOMEONE HELP!” I finally manage to scream, but the grip on my feet pulls harder. I brace my hands against the soft ground, but this is a huge mistake. The mud begins to take them, too, and my heart is pounding so hard against my frozen lungs I'm afraid one of them will splinter under the force.

“Penny?”

I almost don't hear her at first.

“Penny? Where are you? Call out again!”

“Here!” I try to say, but it only comes out in a haggard rasp.

More feet padding on the ground, but I can't tell which direction they're coming from. I hunch my shoulders and prepare for whatever it is. I'll do whatever I have to do. I don't have my hands or my feet, but I have my teeth, and I'll bite the shit out of whatever comes for me.

“Penny?”

The padding grows louder, and soon it's a full-on run. I squeeze my eyes shut and let out my last sound, a scream that rips the air in half.

“Penny!”

April is holding my face, inches from me, her pale blue eyes wide and wild.

“Pull me out!”

“What?”

“Pull me the fuck out of the ground!” I scream, jerking my head out of her hands, but she grabs my hands before I can flail, and I look down to see my clothes caked in dried dirt, a thick pile of gnarled tree roots erupting from the ground beside me. She's struggling to keep me still, her eyes searching me for danger when they should be searching behind me.

I look behind me into the woods—nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I look down at my legs again, my boots barely visible underneath their brown shell of dried mud.

“She was just . . . behind, and the ground, there was something under the . . . back in the shed, she . . .” I keep trying. I try to tell her, try to clear that fog of confusion and panic from her face—the fog of fear and disbelief from my brain. I try to remember all that I vowed to tell April as I fled from the little wooden shack.

The camera.

Linda is lying on her side a few feet in front of me, a wounded soldier down. I push past April and rescue my camera by her strap, calling up the menu to advance through the last pictures taken.

Then I see her. See
it
. Or at least enough to know it's real.

“Here,” I say, thrusting the camera into April's hands.

April stares at the image, her head shaking slowly at first, then faster.

“I don't know what I'm looking at.”

“That's her. Or it. Or whatever. That's what I saw in the shed back there,” I point behind me, then drop my hand as soon as I see it trembling.

“All I see is a shadow of someone's hair, maybe a stick or a—”

“Hand,” I interrupt. “Her hand. And I've seen her before. I've
been
seeing . . .”

I can't even bear to look at April. The risk that I'm taking in telling her. The one person who hasn't given up. I could be burning my last hope to the ground in confessing to her now. But after what just happened—after what would have happened if April hadn't come running when she did—it's not possible to stay any longer. Whatever these kids want, whatever they're screaming into the vacuum of the woods, we can't stay to hear it.

“There's something out here, April. I just got an up-close-and-personal look, and it's seriously fucked up, and we need to figure out—”

“Come back to the house with me,” April says.

“April, we have to leave.”

“I know,” she says, and despite my dizziness at the effort to regain oxygen, despite the adrenaline and terror still coursing under my skin, I'm surprised to hear her agree so quickly.

But then I catch a glimpse of the shadows that have spread across April's entire face, creeping past the circles cupping the bottoms of her eyes. Her once peachy skin has drained of its former dew. Her chapped lips hide her usual smile, lost somewhere behind a mouth that never laughs anymore.

I think of all those nights she spent shuffling around.

“You know,” I say.

April squeezes my hand between hers but just keeps ­walking.

“Let's get back to the house,” she says, and for the first time ever, I trust the authority that's woven itself into her voice.

23

A
PRIL HAS TWO MUGS OF
steaming tea waiting on the side table in the sparkly new living room by the time I emerge from the bathroom by the kitchen, toweling the last drops of water from my hair. The dirt is gone. I watched the tail of a little mud tornado disappear down the drain. But even that set my body trembling as I unsuccessfully pushed the memory away of those roots closing around the tops of my feet. Pulling me down.

“How long?” I ask April, my shaking hands rattling the saucer underneath my mug a little too loudly.

April's eyes search me from the top of her own cup. She lowers it to the table and her eyes follow. “Probably as long as you,” she says. “I should have said something. I just wasn't sure if you . . . I didn't want to . . .”

I don't tell her she's right, that she should have told me. I'm not sure it would have been a comfort to know I wasn't imagining it. It certainly wasn't a comfort hearing it from Miller. I wanted to believe it was Rae for so long, I'm not sure how I could have kept from going fully insane if I'd known what I was seeing was real enough for April to see it too.

“The toilet,” she says, and I search her face for where she might be going with that. “It wasn't flushing itself.” I can barely hear her voice as she confesses her own horrible secret. And even though it looks like she might say more, I don't prod, and eventually, she just lifts her mug back up to her lips.

“There's more,” she says after a silence so long I'd almost forgotten we were sitting in the same room.

She sets her cup down with a clink, the sound of it filling the Carver House.

“The engineer,” she says, and I rifle through my brain for a connection. Engineer. Engineer. I'm drawing an utter blank.

“The structural expert,” she says, clearly noticing me struggle.

But I still can't fathom what could be so important about this stupid house's structural integrity that it would trump what we just shared.

“Wait, you can't possibly be considering staying here after all this, could you? You still want to fix this place up?”

“Wait,” she says, her hand groping the back of her neck, her fingers pressing into her skin. She closes her eyes. “You'll understand in a second.” She shakes her head, and her hand drops to her side. “No, that's not true. You won't. At least, I haven't been able to fully comprehend it yet.”

I want to be patient, but I feel like we have already spent far too much time sitting around in this house in the middle of these woods for me to be delicate.

“April, can we talk about this while we start packing or something? Seriously, we need to leave.”

“The engineer refused to assess the house,” April says, ignoring my request but picking up speed, her eyes wide open now. “But he was a little less coy than the others. Maybe he felt guilty, or maybe I just got fed up enough at being told no, so I lost it. And he took all of two seconds to crack.”

“April, I don't understand, can we just—”

“Your friend Miller told him not to agree to the inspection,” she says, the end of her story landing like a hammer.

“What?” My brain is so tired, it's a wonder I'm still able to form words. “What do you mean Miller told him not to? I don't understand.”

“See, that's the thing. I understood everything right then. He's been the one this whole time.”

April is pacing the floors now, step after step over the same moaning floorboard. She runs her hands through the hair that used to look shiny. Now it looks like straw.

“He got every contractor in town to refuse to do the work. The engineer had no choice but to refuse to inspect the house. I mean, really, what's there to inspect? No work's been done!”

She throws her hands in the air, her voice rising to a level just shy of hysteria.

“I'm two hundred thousand dollars under water, and a nineteen-year-old kid is holding my oxygen tank!”

Her eyes are wild, and while I know I should step in and steady her shoulders the way she's done for me, I am a little afraid to get in her path. I hardly remember the blinding rage I felt before pummeling that girl in the bathroom, but I suspect I might have looked a little like April does now in those sparkling seconds before my anger ignited.

But then her eyes clear of their flames, and she looks like she's shrunken a couple of inches. The boiling fury has eaten some of her already small size.

“I thought I was a better judge of character than that. All because I offended his uncle. What kind of grudge is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

I want to tell her so much. Words push one another out of the way, competing to go first. That his uncle Ripp had nothing to do with it. That Miller isn't protecting his uncle. He's trying to protect us. He knows how lonely the woods are, and he knows that no one should be living in this house, a place so close to a mouth that would devour it.

But I still see that flicker of rage behind April's eyes, and I remember now. I remember how badly I needed that feeling in those first months after the desert's bonfire had diminished to ashes. I needed something to fill the gaping hole that Rae left behind, and though the new flame of anger burned fast—and though it was ultimately ­destructive—it leveled the ground for me to begin building something new.

To extinguish that flame right now would do nothing to fill the whole of such a massive financial and career failure for April. I would rob her of the only thing keeping her from caving in on herself. The walls aren't mine to take down.

“Don't worry,” April says. “I already gave him an earful. Like that'll do anything. I should have put a brick through his window.”

I imagine April's murderous anger unleashed in the wake of the bell at Scoot's. I picture Miller standing there, taking the verbal bashing he had to see coming, given what he did.
He knew he would be maligned by the very people he was trying to protect, but he did it anyway.

Except I know the truth. And I can't leave Point Finney before he knows how grateful I am for what he did.

That's when I remember the jeep.

“Shit. The car needs coolant.”

“Dammit,” she says, forgetting to correct my language. “I meant to do that the other day.”

Clearly, April has been dodging her own preoccupations.

“If I go now, I can catch the convenience store before it closes, and you can start packing,” I say. “I'll help as soon as I come back.”

I leave out the part about planning to call Miller from the gas station. I can't exactly explain how I intend to thank the person responsible for screwing her out of her entire life's savings.