The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe (2 page)

THE TRAIL OPENED onto an upwardly sloping meadow. Gabe continued on, listening to the chirping of frogs and the wind through the trees.

His grandmother’s house was a brick building, over a hundred years old, that sat at the crest of the hill. It had been built by Gabe’s great-great-great-grandfather Mordecai Temple. The gabled roof rose sharply from the walls like the bent wings of blackbirds, the many pieces of dark slate overlapping like armored feathers. A white wooden extension grew from the right side of the house—two stories high and full of windows. Those rooms contained art supplies and canvases, and had a view that overlooked the town. The sky was almost entirely dark. At this hour, it was a disappointing sign; summer was packing her bags and getting ready to go.

Gabe recognized the tall, trim silhouette standing halfway up the meadow. It was his mother, Dolores. Her dark brown hair lifted in the breeze. Her skin was several shades lighter than the shadows and a touch more olive-toned than Gabe’s, who’d inherited some of his father’s European paleness. “It’s almost eight, young man,” she said, her accent barely detectable. Since she’d moved to New England for college, her Spanish had taken on hints of Bostonian.

“I’m sorry,” Gabe answered, running now to meet her. “We got stuck in our game.”

She wrapped her arm around his shoulder. “And what game is this?”

“Just something Seth came up with a few days ago. We’re princes who’ve formed a sort of special-ops task force.” He blushed as the words came from his mouth. It suddenly sounded so childish. “Today we were looking for a cannibalistic baby snatcher called the Hunter.”

Dolores shivered dramatically. “I don’t like that. Creepy.”

“You’d rather have me sit inside and stare at the wall all day?” Gabe asked with a teasing smile.

“It’s not my fault that your father’s mother doesn’t have a cable connection—”

“
Or
the Internet—”

“Or the Internet,” Dolores conceded. “But
I
didn’t have the Internet when I was your age. Do you know what I used to do when I was little?”

Gabe sighed. “Eighth grade is not little.”

“You’ve got a few days left before school starts,” she went on. “Until then, you’re
little
. Do you know what I used to do?”

“No. What did you used to do?”

“I would read books. You’ve heard of those, right?”

Gabe laughed, his voice echoing out into the calm of the evening. “Nice try.”

She sniffed, disappointed. “You promised: just
one
book before the end of summer.” And quickly, glossing over how Gabe’s books had been lost in the fire, his mother went on, “You know your grandmother has a whole library.” They came closer to the house. Light glowed from the dining room window, spilling out onto the grass below. Silhouettes moved behind the sheer curtains—Glen, Gabe’s dad, and Elyse, his grandmother. Gabe’s baby sister, Miriam, was most likely perched in her high chair, sucking on Cheerios and smearing banana on her face. “She’d be happy to lend you a book. Especially the ones she illustrated the covers for.”
Dolores climbed the few stairs up to the house’s rear patio. “She’s a pretty famous artist, you know.”

“I know, I know. That’s what everyone in this town keeps telling me. Famous. Just like Dad.”

Dolores was quiet for a few seconds, and Gabe immediately regretted bringing up his father’s work. Like the books Gabe had owned, his father’s workshop had been destroyed. She cleared her throat, dispelling bad thoughts. “Like mother, like son, I suppose,” she chirped as she reached for the screen door.

Elyse wouldn’t allow Gabe to sit at her dinner table until he’d scrubbed his arms all the way up to his elbows. He didn’t blame her—he’d been crawling through the forest floor all afternoon. “Were you in those woods again?” she asked him before he’d had a chance to pull out his chair. She squinted at him intently from her place at the head of the table, her eyes like X-rays. His father sat beside her, fiddling with his cloth napkin.

As far back as Gabe could remember, his grandmother had dressed in dark colors, even before her husband passed away. She still dyed her hair a shimmering raven color. Gabe had never seen her without bright red lips and high-arched eyebrows, with a cat’s-eye wick of black that lifted off from the edge of her eyelid.

Gabe felt his face flush without even knowing why. No going into the woods behind the house? Was this a new decree? “It’s really pretty out there,” he said, hoping that his nonchalance would put a cap on the subject. “You should walk with me some time.”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said with a small shudder, as if someone had splattered something disgusting onto her nose and she was trying to shake it off.

“Why not?” asked Dolores, drying her hands on her jeans. She
was a pro at pretending Elyse didn’t frighten her. She slid her chair out from the table to be next to Miri, who offered her mother a slobber-covered piece of cereal.

Elyse licked her lips and glanced at the ceiling, considering the answer as if she had several to choose from. “The woods are dangerous,” she said after a long moment.

Gabe sighed. He knew Elyse was right, in a way. On his first day in Slade, he’d discovered how for himself.

After the movers had left, Glen and Dolores had begun organizing their new bedroom. They’d asked Gabe for space, and the shadowed forest at the bottom of the sloping meadow had called to him. At the edge of trees, Gabe happened upon several wide and mysteriously well-worn paths that seemed to circle in upon themselves, echoing the stone walls that also crisscrossed the forest. He’d followed one of these trails down the hill, deeper into the woods, and found himself surrounded by a stillness that was unique to this place. No wind. No sound. The feeling of isolation made his heart race. In his old town outside of Boston, there was a constant whine of traffic, of children playing, of neighbors’ televisions blasting from open windows. But the woods were so peaceful that when he closed his eyes, his pulse slowed and the memory of the past few weeks disappeared. Through this simple act, he’d traveled to another world—a world where he had never been the
Puppet Boy
, a world where he’d never wished for everything bad to fall away.

“Watch out!” called a voice. Startled, Gabe tripped on a tree root and snagged his T-shirt on a prickly bush. A skinny blond-haired boy with a sharp nose and wide eyes, who looked even more panicked than Gabe felt, emerged from behind a cluster of small trees. “I’m
so
sorry,” the boy said, reaching out to help Gabe untangle himself from the thorns. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just…You
were about to step into my trap.” The boy nodded at the ground a few feet away where a patchwork of leaves, sticks, and mud lay like a dirty welcome mat. “I covered up a hole to see if I could catch a rabbit.” Sheepishly, he added, “I wasn’t expecting anyone to come by. Mrs. Ashe doesn’t usually let people wander around on her land.”

Gabe managed to release his shirt and brush himself off. “She’s my grandmother. I didn’t think she’d mind.”

The boy looked surprised. “I didn’t know she had any family,” he said. “Me and my mom live in the cottage at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of this forest.” He wagged his thumb over his shoulder.

“I’m Gabe. We’re staying with her for a little while.”

“Seth Hopper,” said the boy, with a wry smile.

Dangerous
, his grandmother had said.

“I wouldn’t go that far, Mother,” Glen replied. “The woods behind Temple House are no different from anywhere else around here.”

“The trails are great,” Gabe offered. “It’s like a park.”

“I know what it’s like,” Elyse said. “I was born in this house, remember?” She wore a look of disdain. The rest of them sat at the dinner table watching her quizzically. Silence bounced around the dining room for a moment. Then Miri laughed and slapped at the high-chair tray.

The sudden sound broke whatever spell had fallen upon the family. Everyone jumped. Gabe slowly released his breath, unaware that he’d been holding it. Elyse shook her head and glanced at him, flustered. “I’m sorry,” she said with an apologetic grin. “I just don’t want you to get lost out there. That’s all.”

“I won’t.”

“Very good.” Elyse folded her hands and lowered her head, but she couldn’t hide the groove of tension between her eyebrows. “Now say grace, Gabriel.”

“
Grace, Gabriel,
” Gabe whispered as his mother smiled and his father threw him a dirty look.

WHEN GABE AWOKE from a dream of the fire, he found himself tangled in sweaty sheets. He kicked them off.

A breeze blew in from the open window, and he caught his breath. Even after weeks of sleeping nightly in his new bedroom, he still sometimes woke in a panic, wondering where he was.

His previous room didn’t even exist anymore, but his brain continued to hold on to the image of his superhero figurine collection that had stood on the shelf over his old bed board, his
abuelita
’s quilt that he’d hung on the back of his desk chair in case he got chilly at night, his father’s bullfighter marionette that had dangled from a hook above his dresser.

Sometimes when he awoke in this new house, his pillow was damp with tears. He thought of what Father Gideon had said to him afterward—a quote from the Bible about leaving childish things behind.
We still have one another
, his mother had added. But Gabe wondered, if you have nothing left besides your family to remind you of your childhood, did it mean you had grown up?

In his new room, the breeze cooled his damp skin, and Gabe was chilled. He knew if he tried to sleep, embers would drift up once more into the darkness behind his eyelids, arms of molten plastic reaching for him, marionette strings blazing. A chorus of voices whispering,
This is your fault
.

Gabe needed a distraction. He kicked at the mattress, annoyed that his parents insisted on charging his phone in their bedroom so
he wouldn’t stay up late playing with it. He grabbed his T-shirt from the floor at the side of his bed.

Downstairs, Gabe crept toward the back of the house through the labyrinth of dark halls. He found the door he’d been searching for and pushed it open. Inside was a small room. Moonlight shone through a paned window at his left, throwing a strange prison-bar pattern onto the Persian rug at his feet. Outside, the leafy tops of the trees glistened in the silver light. High above, the moon was nearly full.

Down the meadow slope, something caught his eye. Standing a few yards from the edge of the forest was a tall, broad-shouldered man. The figure was a mere shade lighter than the deepest shadows, but Gabe could see the silhouette clearly. The shape stood unmoving. Was it a tree? A large shrub? The idea that someone was watching him from the darkness outside made his stomach squirm.
The woods are dangerous….
But there had to be an explanation. Wasn’t there always? Gabe blinked and the silhouette was gone. Must have been a trick of the light, he thought. Or of the dark.

He switched on a table lamp, and the world outside the house disappeared. Now, reflected in the window glass were the shelves that lined the walls of the small library. But not every shelf held books.

From the moment Gabe had stepped through his grandmother’s front door, he understood that her house was like a museum, crammed with odd objects and strange artifacts. In this room sat tribal-looking sculptures and masks made of wood and bone. There were tiny framed pictures of odd circus performers, dangerous plants pressed behind glass, postcards from places that no longer existed. A taxidermy display of small rodents dressed in children’s clothing stood beside a collection of old tin robots. There was a darkness to the selection—an indication of
what lived inside his grandmother’s mind. Gabe focused on the strange books instead.
Decoding the Pyramids
,
The Secrets of Practical Mysticism
,
Abandoned Mansions of the Hudson Valley
. And more. Much more. He didn’t know where to begin.

In the corner of his eye, something moved. When Gabe turned toward the window, he realized that he’d seen the reflection of something in the room with him. He froze. A shadow shifted near the office door. There was a small creaking sound. A thump. The long feet of a rocking chair hit the floor as the person who’d been watching him finally stood up.