The Pricker Boy (11 page)

He keeps to the edges of the boulders and doesn’t walk
up to the foundation. I don’t think he can. “Okay,” he mumbles. “This is the Horror House. I mean, uh, it’s really called the Hora House. I heard about it from Stucks, who heard about it from his dad. I went to the town hall and the library and looked up a little about it. I found out that … uh, Stucks? Can’t I tell it at the next fire?”

“Come on, Ronnie,” I laugh. I want him to say it, if for no other reason than to try to freak out my cousin, who has probably heard about the place from her own dad.

“Well, the Hora House was built in the 1940s by Daniel Hora, who was a guy from New York who’d made it big in the … in the …”

“Hat business,” I say. I don’t know if it was hats, but I don’t want Ronnie to get stuck.

“Yeah, hat business,” Ronnie continues. “He wanted a cottage way off in the country, so he had one built deep in the woods. That’s where this path comes from. It’s what’s left of the road he had cut through the woods to reach the house.… It’s just the way I’d always imagined it to be.”

Emily keeps circling around the foundation, peering down into the bottom.

“He had a wife, and one weekend they wanted to get away. But he got held up at the … uh …”

“Hat shop,” I say.

“Yeah, so he sent his wife on ahead to meet a car at the train station. He showed up later that night, long after dark. As he approached the house, he heard laughter from inside.”

Robin goes pale. This was worth it all, all the bugs and the sweat and the blood, worth it all just to see that look on her face.

“Turns out that in the few hours she was left alone, the wife had gone completely insane. Completely. Spent the rest of her life in an institution, babbling about a monster that appeared out of the mist. Claimed that hollow-eyed little children danced in circles around the cottage while she went crazy inside. Daniel Hora never came back to the cottage. And when people asked him, he told them that the earth in these woods was cursed and that no one should ever walk there again.” Ronnie turns away, unable to look at the house anymore.

“And now,” I add, “the foundation of the Hora House forms a stone pit.”

“Like the Pricker Boy’s stone pit?” Vivek asks. “Uh, um, but you’ve got a bit of a time-line problem there.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the Pricker Boy was ‘born’ around when? A hundred years ago, so Ronnie says. But then hat man built his cottage in the 1940s, right?”

“So?” I ask him.

“So you’re making it fit because you want it to. The Pricker Boy couldn’t have lived in a stone pit that wouldn’t be dug for another fifty years or so.”

“Maybe the pit was here, and Hora dug his foundation around the pit.”

“Or maybe Ronnie can create magical places with his
mind! This is crazy. You hear a little of this and that and Ronnie writes his story around it, and then we find this place and you both try to make it all fit together. Just to scare us.” He stares at Ronnie and me. Emily passes by on her third trip around the foundation and smiles at Vivek.

“Okay, maybe Emily isn’t scared, but she’s as bonkers as a drunken bedbug. Look at me—I’m scared enough to puke. Look at Robin, bud. She’s your blood. Doesn’t that mean something to you? You just found a piece of your father’s and her father’s history, a second-generation discovery, and you’re using it to scare her silly. This could be really cool … but it isn’t.”

Robin folds her arms in front of her chest, gripping her elbows tightly. Despite the heat, she appears terribly cold. I’ll admit it, I’m enjoying her fright until, out of the corner of my eye, I see Emily leap down inside the foundation.

And immediately, without reason, I am as terrified as both Ronnie and Robin.

Her feet hit the half-rotted leaves in the basement of the Hora House, and things that have been sleeping down there for years and years now wake up and begin to spin around her ankles. Emily can’t see them, but I can.

She starts poking around the walls of the foundation. She trips over an old bottle and picks it up, holding it up to the sunlight. One of the things comes up with her wrist and wraps around her forearm before dripping back toward the ground. She pokes at a few old bedsprings. All the while, those things are waking up and swirling, rising around her,
flapping like mad birds. They are angry things, tiny things, young things that have been asleep for so very long and don’t like being woken from their nap.

“Get out,” I say.

Emily looks up at me. “Excuse me?”

“Get out. Now.”

“But this is interesting,” Emily says, completely unaware of what is twirling around her torso.

“You have to … you have to get out. Climb, now! It isn’t safe!”

“We should go,” Robin says. “Please! This doesn’t feel right!” I’m amazed that we’re actually agreeing about something, and I wonder for an instant if she can see what I see.

“But how often do you get the chance to—” Emily protests.

“Get out now!” I scream, and Emily climbs out of the cellar.

She looks me up and down as if I’m some kind of specimen wiggling in a dish. “Are you okay?” she asks.

I look down into the cellar. Whatever lives down there begins to settle in again.

“We should get on with this,” I tell them, and I begin to head back. I don’t look over my shoulder. As soon as I feel the Hora House disappearing into the trees behind me, as soon as that nest of boulders is no longer visible, I feel better, like I’ve once again woken up from a terrible night vision.

My heart calms down. My head is clear. I’ve learned enough for today. I’m ready to go home.

A
s soon as the weather was warm enough for us to sit in a boat without freezing our asses off, Pete and I would get up early and gather our gear and sneak through the woods to Ed Giles’s cottage. Ed Giles is a loudmouthed retiree who winters down in the Florida Keys. He spends the whole summer asking us year-rounders how the winter was, just so he can tell us how warm the water is in the Keys at Christmastime. Overall, he isn’t a bad guy, though.

We’d grab the hull of Ed’s Sunfish and take it down to the pond. Ed wouldn’t be up to his place for a few months yet, and we figured that he wouldn’t mind if we borrowed his sailboat for a few hours. Actually, we didn’t care whether he minded or not. What was important was that he wouldn’t know.

We couldn’t get at the sail or the rudder, so we always
nabbed two canoe paddles from under his cottage. We’d slip into the water and paddle quietly down past our houses and into the cove, where our parents couldn’t spot us. Once in the cove, we’d let the Sunfish drift, guiding it with only the lightest paddle strokes, moving so slowly that we would barely ripple the smooth water.

Pete usually chose our fishing spot. I still don’t know what led him to pick one place over another, but whatever spot he chose for us to cast into was sure to bring fish. The ones he reeled in were always bigger than mine, and to this day I don’t know why he was a better fisherman than I was. He’d even let me use his rod, reel, and bait, and he’d use mine. He still got bigger fish. Bass for him, crappie for me.

One April morning a couple years ago, we were out on the water just after dawn. Pete brought a couple hot dogs, and I grabbed some worms from Nana’s compost pile. We coasted into the cove, baited our hooks, and cast out into the pond. The early morning sunlight made the bugs flying over the water light up golden. Sunset is nice on Tanner Pond, but there’s nothing like sunrise. The water at sunset isn’t usually calm, and even if it is, you can sense people up and moving around and talking, even if they don’t come out of their cottages. In the early morning, though, most everyone is still asleep, and the water and the light and the fish are only there for the privileged few. Those fishing and those reading, and not many others.

Except Hank Paulding. On that particular day, Hank was up too. He’s a year-rounder, like us, a harmless guy
who hasn’t quite reached middle age, but he’s missed his window of opportunity for getting married, and he behaves accordingly. Pete and I once left ten bars of soap on his doorstep as a joke. I guess it was a little mean. But it was funny too.

Hank came down to the pond, stepped out onto his wobbly rock pile, and called out to us across the water. Pete held up his finger. “Quiet, Hank,” Pete called back, keeping his voice as low as possible.

“Oh yeah, fish,” Hank replied, still too loud. For some reason Hank has never learned that sound carries over water. On a morning like that one we would have been able to hear two people having a normal conversation from clear across the cove. Secrets don’t stay secrets if you let them get too close to the water.

“What you boys fishin’ for?” Hank asked us.

“Fish,” Pete said.

“Pike?” Hank asked. “Bass? Bream?”

“Fish!” Pete said.

Hank looked at the water as if he were trying to spot fish and shoo them over our way.

“I’ll tell you how to catch trouts!” Hank said.

Pete nodded. “Okay, later.” He tried to wave Hank off, but it worked about as well as it usually worked with Hank.

“You use corn!” Hank said.

Pete looked at me as if Hank was crazy. Hank was crazy, so I don’t know why Pete looked so surprised.

“See, all these trouts is stocked. They stock them
around Saint Patrick’s Day. And you know what they feed those trouts in their trout farms? Pellets! Pellets that look just like corn.” Hank looked at us as if he’d just shared secret military launch codes. “Those fish think corn is what they’ve been eating all along! You fish with corn, and you’ll catch tons of trouts, believe me!”

Pete picked up his oar and started pulling at the soft water. We glided away from Hank. I turned around and waved to him as we left. Hank was a nut, but he wasn’t a bad nut, and I didn’t want him to think we were just trying to get away from him, even though we were.

“Might as well drop dynamite down on them,” Pete said once we found a new fishing spot. “It’s not fair to the fish. It’s wrong.”

My line wiggled. I reeled in. I pulled in a little one about six or seven inches long, which was about usual for me. “Pumpkinseed,” I said.

“Bluegill,” Pete said. “See that blue spot just behind the gill? That’s how you know it’s a—say it with me—”

“A bluegill,” we said together.

“Pumpkinseeds have orange on them. Orange, you know? Like a …”

“A pumpkin,” I said. I could never tell them apart. I’d see a pumpkinseed with what looked like a blue spot on him and call him a bluegill. I’d see a bluegill with a slight flash of red on him and call him a pumpkinseed. They’re all crappie and I should’ve just called them that.

I reached down to take it off the hook. “Easy,” Pete said.

“I know,” I said. Actually, I didn’t care much about being gentle. I was going to grab that fish as tight as I could and hope that one of its dorsal spikes didn’t stab my palm.

“No, no,” Pete said, taking the fish from me. “You grab him like that and you’ll scrape off the slime. Then he’ll get sick, and he’ll be floating in a few days. Might as well whack him on a rock. And you twist the hook like this; otherwise, you’ll tear his mouth open and he won’t be able to eat.”

“Might as well whack him on a rock,” I said.

Pete laughed. “Yeah.” He dropped the bluegill over the side of the boat. It flipped and vanished.

I baited my hook with a worm and cast out again. “I hope I catch one of them trouts,” I said, and we laughed. I caught a few more crappie, and Pete picked up one decent-sized bass. We didn’t talk much. The pond was so calm, and with everyone still asleep, the only sound was the whizzing of our reels when we cast out.

“My dad hits me sometimes.” Pete said it so quietly that I barely heard, so quietly that not even the water could catch it.

I didn’t know how to respond. I know what I heard, though. He only said those five words, but there was more folded in with the words. “
My dad hits me sometimes. I don’t want anyone to know. I don’t want you to tell your dad or anyone else. And I don’t want to talk about it. But I want you to know that my dad hits me sometimes.
” The meaning was there, whether or not he said it out loud.

I couldn’t change the subject either, no matter how awkward the silence was. There was no way to make the change. And certainly no way to throw in a joke about “trouts.” It was up to Pete to decide what would be said next.

Luckily, a trout did grab hold of Pete’s line. Pete pulled him in and tossed him in our bucket. “Corn,” he scoffed. We went back to fishing, and within a few minutes I was able to let what Pete said drift away as easily as if it were paper I’d placed on the surface of the water.

I was only about twelve, so there’s no way I would have known what to say anyway. I might not know what to say or do today if Ronnie, Vivek, Emily, or Robin came and told me the same thing. I’d like to think that I’d come up with something or some way to help them, but I don’t know that I could.

Pete and I fished for a couple hours before sneaking back to Ed’s place and returning his boat.

The spring before last, we borrowed the Sunfish one last time before Ed came up from Florida, and when we put it back we left a note taped to the inside of the hull that read:
IGNORANCE IS BLISS, ED.