The Missing (5 page)

He sat on a rock that hung high over a shallow stream, and suddenly felt bad. He didn’t like being alone all the time. These woods were too quiet. Some- times he thought about sneaking into Danny’s room and putting a pillow over his face, and then doing the same to his parents. Then he could have a new family that didn’t frown when they looked at him.

James climbed out on the overhang and laid across the rock. In the water he saw his reflection. A boy with blond hair and blue eyes. A good-looking boy with a mean streak. He threw a stone, and the water rippled. When it got clear again, his reflection was different. His skin was pale, and his eyes were black. It looked familiar, and James thought for a second that it was the bad thing that lived inside him. The thing that liked to do harm.

It is always hungry; it is never satisfied
, he thought, even though he didn’t know what that meant. His re- flection winked at him, and he jumped. It was alive, even though it was just a reflection.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Do you want to play?”

The woods got darker suddenly, like it was going to rain. The reflection went dark, too.
James,
a voice whis- pered. The sound echoed through the dead trees.

He looked around, but he couldn’t see anyone. In his pants, he got what his brother called a stiffie. You were supposed to get them when you looked at girls, but

James only got them when he was scared or doing something wrong. If he tried to wish them away they got worse, so mostly he just ignored them.

I’ll play with you, James
. The voice was watery, like it had slithered up from the bottom of the river and wasn’t used to being on the surface. He didn’t know if it belonged to a man or a woman, which was doubly bad, because that meant he was getting stiffies from men’s voices, too. But he couldn’t help it!

He jumped off the rock and peered in the direction of the voice. Another breeze blew, and he saw a trail. Birch tree branches jingled as they opened before him. The branches were pointed like fingers showing him the way. It reminded him of a cartoon he’d seen on televi- sion when he was little—the enchanted woods leading Little Red Riding Hood to Grandma’s house.

He followed the sound of the voice down the path. It opened into a clearing, and when he reached it, the path closed behind him with that same jingling sound. His heart pounded: There was no way he’d find his way back.

James
, the thing gurgled.

The chiggers had stopped biting all of a sudden. The animals were missing, too. Even the worms and moss and mushroom fungi were gone. Maybe the thing in the woods had hurt them. He could understand that.

The dirt was as black as squid ink, and the hot ground warmed his toes even though he was wearing rubber-soled Nikes. It was the same kind of warm as the fire that had been in his stomach when Gimpy died. So cold it was hot, and it burned in all the wrong ways.

He knew what he needed to do. The voice told him so. He picked up a sharp rock and broke the black dirt.

The wind picked up a little at first, and then a lot. Branches jingled like music appreciation on caffeine; out of tune and heedless.
That’s right, James
, the voice said, only the voice wasn’t outside him anymore. It was crawling inside him. Slithering between his ears. Peer- ing at the woods from behind his eyes. He blubbered a little and slapped his face. “Get out!” he shouted, even though a part of him liked it, too.

Don’t hide from me, James
, it said.
I know you
. The voice was like Gimpy’s tongue, soothing and ticklish. He missed Gimpy. He missed being touched. The thing moved inside him, and nestled in the space between his ears. How long had it been since a friend had come over to play? A month? No, longer. Not since last year. In school they called him the pee eater.

I know you, James, and I like you anyway
, it said. James smiled, because in his mind the thing showed him a picture of Gimpy, twitching, and he knew it was true.

He stopped slapping and started digging. The dirt was hot and inky between his fingers. It felt wrong, like it had been cooked. He lifted a fistful, and then an- other. The hole got bigger. He dug for a long time. He dug until everything hurt, and then he dug past that until there were new, worse hurts. In his mind the thing showed him pictures. They were bad pictures, but he liked them.

He dug past the pain in his back, his aching legs, and his bleeding fingers. Dug past his own heavy breathing, past when he remembered what he was doing, or why. The voice lulled him, like being tucked into a warm bed. It didn’t talk anymore, but he could feel it inside him. He thought about Gimpy, and his family, and Miss Lois, whom he wished on that first day of school

hadn’t asked him in front of the whole class: “I see you’re older than the others, James. Does that mean you require special attention?” And then, after a while, he thought about nothing. Everything went dark. He fell asleep even though he was awake, just like that time with Gimpy. Still, he kept digging.

He woke up in the dark, to someone shouting his name. He was standing in a deep hole, digging. How had it gotten so late so fast? Just five minutes ago the sun had been high in the sky. Now there were stars. His hands were bloody, and his back and legs hurt so bad he couldn’t bend without moaning. For how long had be been digging?

“James!”
a voice cried from far away. Was it his new friend? The voice sounded angry, and too loud. “
Can you hear me, James?
” it shouted again, and it was ter- rifying because he recognized it. Miss Lois had come back looking for him. Only this time, she’d brought his father. Miller Walker was calling to him on a mega- phone. “
Come here right now!
”

James took a deep breath. His chest was so sore that his lungs ached. A vise of muscles in spasm clamped tightly around his back until he hunched over. His bleeding fingers hurt the worst, and he blew on them to take his mind off the pain.

An eye opened inside him, and winked.
Keep dig- ging, James
, it told him.
I know what you want. I’ll give it to you.
Yes, James thought. It knew the truth. He was bad. He was that boy from the water, pale skin and black eyes. He’d killed his own rabbit.

He lifted another handful of dirt. And another. Maybe Gimpy was down here, waiting for the bad thing to be undone. If James worked hard enough, maybe he could undo it. Sure, he knew it was impossible. But

then again, this place was supposed to be magic.

Something smelled bad in the dirt all the sudden. It was like rotten eggs. It came out in a spray of fog from the hole, and filled the woods. Still, he kept digging. After another handful, he touched something hard and hot. He scraped the dirt from its sides until he could pull it free.
Smart boy!
the voice said to him, and he smiled, because the voice sounded proud. He
was
smart, wasn’t he? He’d guessed about the Hulk without anyone’s help.

The thing was brown and hard. Lighter than a rock. Longer than a ruler. He dropped it on the ground above because it made his hands hurt like frostbite. A bone, he realized. The bone from an animal’s arm. No, not Gimpy. Too big to be Gimpy. It smelled so bad his eyes watered.
It’s everything you want, James
, the voice said, and James knew he didn’t care about Gimpy any- more. He wanted the thing that was buried. He wanted to see the face behind the voice.

His dad was still shouting into the megaphone, but it was too late to turn back. Miss Lois would never for- give him, and since he’d become a left-back, Miller Walker stopped looking him in the eye, or calling him “good buddy.” He kept digging, and pulled out another bone.

His fingers were cramped into loose fists. He was so thirsty that his mouth had dried out and he couldn’t move his tongue. He’d lost a fingernail. It had torn from his pointer finger, and he hadn’t even noticed. There were more bones. He traced their edges until they were free. His bloody fingers dripped as he eased the bones onto the inky soil outside the hole. There was a skull, and toes. He smiled. The skull was human.

He piled the bones in a red heap. He was bleeding a

lot now. There were cuts all over his hands and arms that he didn’t remember having gotten. The wind picked up. Dead trees gnashed against each other until the sound wasn’t music; it was screaming.

Sweat dripped from his brow, and his face was set as still as a plaster cast. His blood laced the bones. Marked them with color. It didn’t hurt. A part of him, most of him, was sleeping. Something hot was in James’s trousers. Another stiffie? No, not a stiffie; he’d wet his pants.

He saw, he didn’t know how he’d missed this before, that along the edges of the clearing were dead animals; skunk, squirrels, birds, and deer. Their husks piled the rim of the expanse like stacks of wood. The buried thing had done this. It had gotten inside their minds and told them to attack each other so it could taste their spilled blood from under the ground. It wasn’t ink that had made this dirt black.

James felt the wrong emotion. He couldn’t help it. He clapped his hands together and laughed.

Everything you want
, the thing promised, and James knew it was true. In his mind’s eye he saw his parents gored bodies. In his mind’s eye his brother, Danny, was the mental cripple, and James sat on the Walker family throne.

A raccoon from the woods approached. Its teeth were bared, and its eyes were black. More came. Their fat- tened bodies wobbled toward him. They swayed on small legs like they were sick, and they smelled so bad that he cupped his raw hands over his mouth and stopped breathing.

They’ve gone mad
, he thought,
just like me
.

He knew what was going to happen. The thing whis- pered it in his ear. If he’d been a sane little boy he might

have run. The swerving raccoons gnashed their teeth. His blood spilled, and laced the bones, and he thought about Gimpy. He knew then, during the last moments, how his rabbit had felt.

PART TWO
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INCUBATION

T H R E E
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Splitting Atoms

O

n the Tuesday morning that James Walker went missing, Meg Wintrob was crawling underneath

the foundation of her house. The paper boy had missed his mark with the
Corpus Christi Sentinel
again, and she got on her hands and knees to retrieve it. Her hips shrieked in protest, and she bit down on her lower lip through the pain. Bursitis. Sure, she kept in shape and dyed her hair jet black with the help of Miss Clairol, but stuff like this made it hard to forget that she was middle-aged.

The crawl space was about two feet high and ran the width and length of the entire house. The
Sentinel
wasn’t far out of reach, but as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could also make out her son David’s lost Sit ’n Spin from fifteen years ago, a cluster of three-leafed plants that looked suspiciously like poison ivy, and a collection of aging
Sentinel
s from days, months, and years past. Jack Frost had peed on this morning’s pa- per, and its pages adhered to one another in a soggy clump. She shook her head full of tight black curls and thought:
For once, just one frickin’ year, could the town hire a paper boy who didn’t throw like a sissy?

She’d only been in this crawl space a handful of times.

Spiders were down here, she was sure. At this very mo- ment she could feel one of their thick webs flossing her cheek. The wooden beams down here looked sturdy, and there wasn’t a single crack in the concrete base. Every- thing was in order, which was reassuring, she guessed. But disappointing, too. She wanted a reason for the way she felt.

Soggy paper in hand, Meg turned onto her stomach and crawled out. As she shimmied toward the steps, poison ivy brushed against her faded terry-cloth robe. Their leaves shone like plastic. She wasn’t allergic, but she knew she should avoid the stuff. Still, it was one of those instincts, like waiting until the last minute before swerving around a beer bottle in the road, that came from a place deep down. She wanted to feel the ivy, rub it on her fingers, taste it on her tongue. Eat the white poison berries, just to see what happened. So she picked a few, and put them in the pocket of her robe.

Then she climbed out and sat on the stoop. The town, along with her family, was still sleeping. Red-orange rays of the coming dawn filtered through the dense pine trees in her yard. Not a single car or neighbor was out- side yet. Back in the house, coarsely ground coffee was percolating over a gas flame. Eggs needed to be poached. Appointments had to be scheduled. Theoretically, the day was full of promise.

She’d been feeling blue since her son, David, had left for his sophomore year at UCLA two weeks ago. He bleached his hair and eyebrows now, and wore sparkly coral necklaces that made him look . . .
pretty
. He was either going for the surfer look or working up the cour- age to tell them he was gay. She suspected the latter. Though he’d never said so, she knew Fenstad blamed her. She’d been too affectionate, made her son a mama’s boy. He alluded to it every time she and David went for