The Nixie’s Song (10 page)

Swamp Road was framed on both sides with scrubby wetlands and dotted with a few dilapidated houses.
The fourth had the correct number nailed to its sagging aluminum cladding,
although it looked long abandoned.

It looked long abandoned.

They walked across a lawn of sugar sand and patches of crabgrass to a tiny house with a rusted metal door.
The roof was sunken in the middle, and the siding hung off in sheets.
They heard a steady creaking, like an old door swinging in the wind.
Rusted rakes, buckets, and old tarps littered a ramshackle porch.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” said Laurie.
She walked up to the door and gave it a push.
“It’s open.”

“Don’t do that!” Nick grabbed her arm.
“Some nice giant expert might have lived here a bazillion years ago, but any creep could live here now.”

“Hello!” Laurie called, ignoring him.

There was no answer.
Laurie banged her fist against the worn wood.

A light shone where the yard sloped into
dense bushes.
Then the light jerked to one side.

“Jared,” Nick yelled, walking toward it.
“Is that you?”

Rain started to fall, hard, muffling the sound of his voice.

“Looked like a flashlight,” Laurie said, pulling up her jacket to cover her head.

They followed the glow down to where the mud started sucking at the bottoms of their shoes.

“Hello,” Laurie shouted.
“Please.
We just need some answers.”

Then the light started moving fast, like the person holding it had started running.

“Follow it,” Nick said.
They took off across the wetlands.
Laurie sprinted ahead, but even as fast as she was going, the light seemed to be moving faster.

Nick stopped, breathing hard.
The rain obscured his sight.
“Laurie!”

Something darted toward him and he shouted.
It seemed like a jellyfish swimming through the air, its center incandescent.
Two small stalks on its head might have been eyes, but the tiny wings at its back were far too small to keep it aloft.

The second light zoomed away from him.

“Laurie!” he shouted.
“They’re faeries!
Jared’s not out here!
Come back!”

When he turned around, nothing was familiar.
His tracks had already been absorbed by the soft, wet soil or turned to widening puddles by the rain, and he had no idea how to retrace his steps.

“Laurie?” he shouted.
He couldn’t see her in all the rain and dark.
“Laurie!”

Several more lights zoomed close, whirling around him.
Suddenly it seemed like the field
was full of glowing jellyfish.
They zipped past, turning him this way and that.
He tried to grab one and fell in the mud.

“They’re
faeries !
“

Rain fell on his face like tears.
There, as he looked up at the lights, a strange sense of serenity washed over him.
They seemed like a shifting kaleidoscope of stars.

“Nick?” Laurie called.
She sounded frightened.
He shook himself.

“Laurie,” he said.
“I’m here!
Come toward my voice.”

“Will-o’-the-wisps,” she called, collapsing beside him.
“I remember them from the book.
They could have led us off a cliff or into quicksand.”

“Good thing there’s practically no cliffs in Florida,” he said, but the goose bumps rose on his skin.

Laurie’s face was flushed, and mud streaked her
chest and arms.
One of her flip-flops was gone.

“I fell,” she said, by way of explanation.

“We’ve got to get out of here.
I think the house is back that way,” he said, but he couldn’t see it.

She shook her head and pointed through the rain.
“No, I think it’s over there.”

The lights darted in the distance, and Nick suddenly thought of how much worse it would have been to be lost like this at night, how they might have wandered for hours, deeper and deeper into the brush.

“It’s this way!” Nick insisted, starting to walk.
“It’s got to be.”

“Okay,” she said, following.
But she didn’t look convinced; she looked scared.
“Does this look familiar?”

He wasn’t sure.
They’d been running.
“Yes,” he said.
“This has to be the way.”

“I don’t think it looks like the way.”

“It’s the way!” Nick yelled.

A distant voice called something that sounded like their names from behind them.

Nick frowned.
“More faerie tricks?”

“Laurie!
Nick!” the voice said.

“It’s Jared.” Laurie waved around her arms.
“Jared!
We’re over here!
Keep yelling.”

They followed his voice back to the house, their feet sinking in the mud.
Nick didn’t admit he’d been wrong about the direction, and Laurie didn’t call him on it.

Jared stood on the slope of the backyard in jeans and a T-shirt, waving to them.
A messenger bag was slung over his shoulder.
Nick and Laurie scrambled up the hill.

“What were you guys doing?” Jared asked with a knowing smirk.

“We thought we saw something,” Nick said.
Laurie looked like she was ready to
open her mouth and tell him about the whole, embarrassing adventure, so he spoke as firmly as possible.
“But we didn’t.”

Jared stood on the slope.

Laurie pointed toward the house.
“I don’t think anyone’s home.”

“The door’s open,” said Jared.
“Maybe we could take a quick look inside in case whoever used to live here isn’t coming back.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

As they walked back to the front door, Nick thought about the odd, floating wisps and shivered.
Maybe Arthur Spiderwick’s correspondent had followed their lights, too.
Maybe he had never found his way back.

Laurie stepped onto faded linoleum, trying to keep her bare feet off the dirty floor as much as possible.
The first room was a kitchen.
A teakettle sat beside a huge crab pot on the stove, and a refrigerator hummed in the opposite
corner.
The electricity was still on, Nick thought.
Someone had to live here.

He followed Laurie down a narrow hallway, where only a calendar from 1971 hung.
To his right, something moved, and he turned, heart thudding, to find himself looking into a cloudy mirror.
Jared grinned at him in the reflection.

“Hey, come here,” Laurie called.

Nick forced himself to follow, although his instincts screamed for him to get out.
This wasn’t the kind of house a sane person lived in.

Laurie stood in the middle of a rickety living room.
An old chair with stuffing and springs popping out of it stood in front of a rabbit-eared television.
Laurie pointed to a door that stood partially ajar.

Nick crossed the living room to where she was indicating.
It was an oddly shaped
room, too small to be a comfortable bedroom, and it was covered in paper.
Drawings, documents, and pages of notes covered a small metal desk, carpeted the floor, and had been tacked up or glued all over the walls.
He stepped closer.
Illustrations of giants.
Dozens and dozens of them.
Some giants were bound with ropes.
Another had had its head cut clean off.
Articles about fires.
Newspaper clippings.

PARCHED BY DROUGHT, FLORIDA’S FIRES SPREAD, read one.
LARGE SMOKE PLUME OVER ATLANTIC.
LANDSLIDE CAUSE STILL UNEXPLAINED.
FIRE SUPPRESSION INEFFECTIVE.

“Um, this is kind of weird.” Nick held up an illustration of a giant with a rope connecting its ankle to its neck.
“Pretty smart, though.
It can’t stand up.”

Jared walked into the room.
“Whoa.”