The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe (19 page)

GABE WAITED FOR HIS GRANDMOTHER to continue. She licked at her lips and brushed at her robe but said nothing more. Not immediately. Clutching the blanket closer to his chin, Gabe finally blurted out, “But what
happened
to him?”

Elyse stared at the floor. “I told you, no one knows. Not now that Verna Hopper is dead. A car accident, many years later.”

“You think Verna did something to him?”

The tilt of her head told him she wasn’t sure. “The next morning, after my guilt caught up with me, I told my parents what I’d seen in the barn. Of course, they called the sheriff’s office. When the officer arrived at the Hoppers’, Verna showed him what had become of her rooster and shared who she thought was the culprit. She claimed that hours earlier, Mason had snuck back to the barn, gathered what was left of his stuff, and taken off. She said she didn’t know or care where he’d gone.

“Later in the week, Verna called my parents and told them what she’d found in her hayloft—my drawings of Mason’s monsters. Turned out, she’d kept one to show them.”

“The Witch Queen?” Gabe asked, appalled.

Elyse nodded. “It was the first time I saw how spiteful a person could be. Needless to say, they weren’t happy.

“My parents sent me away to the Nettleburn Academy for Girls, a boarding school in New York State. I left Slade in a smoke cloud of shame.

“More than anything, I wished to see Mason again. To ask
him what
really
happened that night or, at the very least, to say good-bye. I did try to find him. Unsuccessfully of course.

“I returned to Temple House on holidays. But it no longer felt like my home, just another stopping place where I was lucky enough to have a bed and a roof over my head. I spent many of those holiday breaks doodling in my notebooks, trying to re-create the sketches that Verna had forced him to feed to her furnace.

“The Hoppers’ two sons returned and took over the house. The oldest boy married soon after that and his wife gave birth to a boy, who grew up, I believe, to become your friend Seth’s father.

“A lifetime later, after my father’s funeral, I never would have imagined that, when I stepped through Temple House’s front doorway, I would be overcome with a sensation that I mustn’t leave, that it was imperative I make this house my home once more. It was not a bad feeling, merely a voice insisting it was time for a change.

“I packed up my apartment in New York City—every prize I had acquired over the years—and came home.” She smiled, looking inward, seeing the picture of her story. “Only recently have I understood what truly called me back here.” Elyse paused. “Do you know what it was?”

“I-I have no idea.” Gabe grew tense.

“It was
you
,” she said.

“Me?”

“You and your sister and your parents. If I hadn’t returned to Temple House, I most certainly would have sold it to one local nincompoop or another. Do you realize what would have happened then?”

He shook his head, confused.

“After the fire, you would have had no place to go. No place to start over. The apartment where your father grew up wasn’t
nearly large enough for all of us. Oh, I’m sure he’d have found
something
for you. But here, you have space, an okay school, friends. You have every advantage I had when I was your age.” For the first time since she’d come into his bedroom, his grandmother took Gabe’s hand and held it firmly. “But as you know, I didn’t visit your room tonight to give you a pep talk.” He tried to control the sudden trembling that was creeping down his arm. “I came because you found that drawing in the book I did with Nathaniel all those years ago. The one of the Hunter.”

Gabe wasn’t sure if he was ready to hear the rest. “Wh-what about it?” he forced himself to ask.

Elyse squinted at him, as if into a clouded mirror. “You say you’ve been playing this
game
with that boy Seth. Somehow, your game is all mixed up with my memories of Mason’s stories—Howler’s Notch and whatnot.”

Gabe nodded cautiously.

“Now, your mother was correct in thinking that Seth or his brother could have read the old book of ghost tales and mythologies. The local library has a copy of it, I’m sure. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that those boys based their game on my drawing and my memories.” Elyse squeezed his fingers. “But I have a feeling that’s not quite it.”

Gabe couldn’t control himself any longer. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” he blurted out. Her lips opened with a crisp smacking sound. “The shadow by the woods,” he continued. “The thing that hides just inside the line of trees.” To his surprise, she remained silent. Not a denial. “That’s what you meant when I found you in the library that night—you said you like to watch the night because sometimes the night watches you back. But it’s not the
night
that watches. It never was the night, was it?”

As she sighed, her thin rib cage expanded visibly beneath her silk robe. “No. It wasn’t.”

GABE LEANED FORWARD. “You never believed Verna that Mason just up and left Slade.”

“No. I didn’t,” Elyse answered.

“So, then, what happened to him?”

Her eyes flicked back and forth, as if she were searching for an answer written on the ceiling.

“Did he
stay
in those woods?” Gabe went on. “Did he grow up there, hiding out?” These questions were bizarre, he knew. But not impossible. “What if
Mason
is the one who’s been watching from the shadows.” What if there was no monster, no magic, no conjuration from the burned journal of an adolescent boy, but merely Leesy Temple’s old friend. In the flesh. Out there in the woods. A man who’d lived in the forest for years and years, teaching himself how to survive, learning the land better than anyone in Slade.

In Elyse’s eyes, Gabe saw the girl she’d once been, that quiet girl in the cafeteria who’d taught herself to stare at clouds and see things in them that others could not. He was suddenly certain she believed, somehow, that he may be right. So when she shook her head no, it felt to Gabe like a sharp poke in the chest.

Elyse reached into the deep pocket of her robe and removed several small black notebooks. With a slight tremor, she laid them on the bed, opening their covers so Gabe could see inside. Dark pencil drawings filled every page. She’d written dates for each of them, going back several years. He looked closer and recognized the images she captured. Every page, every drawing, the shadow within shadows, the shape that had watched him from the darkness
of the woods. The similarities between these sketches and the drawing she’d done for the Olmstead book were unmistakable. This was Mason Arngrim’s Hunter.

“I started these books almost as soon as I came back to Slade,” she said. “At first, I didn’t know why, or where the ideas were coming from. But then I realized. Every time I looked out over the forest toward that old barn at the bottom of the hill, I remembered him.”

What his grandmother had collected on these pages was not simply her newest project, but a strange compulsion, a record of a lingering hurt. She’d told him the story of her past in order to make him see how it was affecting his present. Mason. His tales. Her drawings. Dots that, when connected, made a bigger picture. And now the picture was becoming clear.

“If you never believed that Mason left Slade,” Gabe whispered, “then what happened to him?”

“In my heart of hearts, Gabriel, I never thought Mason survived that storm.”

“And these,” he said, his hand hovering over the notebooks, “what do
they
say to your heart?”

Elyse stood. “I suppose they say that I’m right. That
we’re
right. We’ve both seen something out there. Who knows what it is or how long it’s been around?” She shook her head, as if astonished at herself for thinking it. “I wonder if Mason had seen the ‘something’ himself. And if so, had this
thing
inspired Mason to write in the same way it inspired me to fill these pages?” She nodded at the books.

“I’ve wondered for ages what happened to Mason that night. I’d heard him tell Verna that the Hunter had killed her bird. Of course she’d scoffed. But what if he’d told the truth? And worse…what if Mason encountered his monster when he ran off into the woods?”

Gabe suddenly felt very small. “Y-you believe the Hunter is real too?”

“Funny. When I was a younger woman, I might have seen a priest or a doctor for even considering something like that. But after I started working with Nathaniel Olmstead, I saw things differently. When I was hired to illustrate his first book cover, people whispered to me that he was crazy, that he believed the monsters in his books were real. I figured
he’d
constructed the rumors to market himself, but the closer we became, I realized that he really did believe.”

“Mr. Olmstead told you that monsters lived in his town?” Gabe asked.

“Oh yes,” said Elyse. “And he was scared of them too. He never actively tried to convince
me
, but once, I discovered a note shoved between a few loose manuscript pages he’d sent me. It was a list of seemingly unrelated items, and at first, I thought he’d accidentally tucked in his grocery list. I reread the note several times before I understood its meaning. The items were all from his books. They were what his characters had used to defeat his monsters. Chicken bones, wind chimes, marbles. Little talismans like that.”

Gabe thought of the library downstairs, packed with strange objects. He wondered if she’d begun the collection before or after reading the note.

“What gave me chills, though, was the postscript I discovered scrawled on the back of the page. It read something like,
Keep these at home. For emergencies only
. When I asked him about it, he only smiled mysteriously and questioned me about whether I’d collected the items.”

“And did you?” Gabe asked. “Collect them?”

“I did,” Elyse answered.

“Did you ever need them? For an emergency?”

Elyse smiled. “Thankfully, no,” she said, “not yet.” Glancing at the small clock sitting on the nightstand, she looked surprised. “Oh my. I think it’s about time we get some shut-eye. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

Gabe flinched. “After everything you just told me, I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep.”

“If that’s true, please don’t tell your parents on me.” She gathered up her notebooks and shoved them into her pocket.

Before she opened his bedroom door, Gabe sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He almost asked her to stay with him. “What do I do now?” he asked.

She turned the knob and pushed carefully, familiar with the room’s squeaks and squeals. “For starters, you can stay out of those woods.”

“And for finishers?”

Elyse blinked, her eyes filled with concern. “I’ll have to give that some thought,” she said. “You do the same. I’m sure we can figure this out.”

Gabe wished he could agree.

GABE ARRIVED AT SCHOOL in a daze, his grandmother’s story stuck in his mind. He’d never imagined that her past had contained such horror. At his locker, he stretched and groaned. His backpack was heavier than usual. Bending down, he unzipped the top pocket and removed the Olmstead and Ashe book. He shoved it quickly into his locker. Next he found Mazzy, who was at the water fountain near the gymnasium. He asked if she could meet with him after school. When she asked him if there was something wrong, he shook his head and promised to tell her everything later. “This’ll be between us,” he said, and after a pause added, “plus one other person.”

Gabe tried to focus on his classes, but throughout the day, the shadowy sketches from his grandmother’s black notebooks appeared in Gabe’s mind. These were followed immediately by visions of the figure by the woods—the dark man with eyes of icy flame.

He skipped lunch in the cafeteria with Felicia, Malcolm, and Ingrid, opting instead to hide out in the library. Since they’d laughed at his suggestion that they were all being haunted or hunted by something not human, he knew they’d never understand the story of Mason and Leesy, or where the Hunter’s game had truly begun.

Minutes after the last bell, he met Mazzy outside the wood shop classroom door. From there, they slipped out the side door and bolted for the driveway. Mazzy assured Gabe that she’d seen Felicia and the others heading to the auditorium for the PTA’s showing of
Frankenweenie
, but as he ran, his bag heavy again with
Elyse’s book, Gabe glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one followed.

“I heard people say they saw it again last night,” Mazzy said, when they crossed the street from the school. “The figure. I didn’t. Did you?”

“Sort of,” he said. The shadow hadn’t come into his room, but he’d certainly seen something out by the woods again. “I’ll explain when we get to your place.”

At the Lermans’ house, they found Seth sitting on the top step. He stood as they approached. After an awkward hello, Mazzy opened the door. Her mom was busy in her office at the back of the house. The trio crept upstairs. “She doesn’t like me having friends over during the week,” Mazzy whispered. “Homework policy.” Once inside her bedroom, the boys plopped down on the floor, while Mazzy sat cross-legged on her mattress. Reaching over to her radio-alarm clock, she turned on some music. “Keep quiet, okay? Don’t want to get you guys kicked out before I even know why you came.”

Everything in Mazzy’s room was yellow and bright, and in the late afternoon light, it all seemed to glow with a warmth that didn’t exist at Temple House. Gabe smiled at the large rainbow-sparkle hula hoop hanging on the wall over her bed, wondering if that was the one she’d used to win that championship she was so proud of.

“Is anyone gonna tell me why we’re here?” Seth asked.

Gabe pulled his bag close and unzipped the largest pocket. He removed the book he’d brought from home and laid it on the floor between them.

Mazzy leaned forward to see over the edge of the bed. “
Olmstead and Ashe’s Big Book of
…what does that say?”

Seth answered, “
Myths, Ghosts, and Monsters
.”

“I found this last night in my grandmother’s library. It’s filled with lots of useful information.” Gabe flipped open the cover and turned to page eighty-five. “And pictures.”