Gravediggers (14 page)

“There are two . . . but.” Her face goes superserious. “But we need more than that. And I have an idea. But you've got to have an open mind about this, okay?”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Well,” she says, “I've been gathering specimens from our journey so far in a couple of jars. And I have peanuts and coffee beans from the stone wall. Those will provide us a little protein. But . . . look, the easiest way to get protein is by eating meat.”

“You want us to go hunting?”

“Not exactly . . . another great way to get protein is eating insects. Lots of tribes in the rain forest eat bugs. And . . . I do have those termites from the dead tree.”

“You want us to eat termites.”

“I don't
want
us to do anything,” she snaps. “But we don't have many options.”

Find a pile of human bones in the basement. Get chased by dead people. Almost lose your best friend to zombies; instead lose him to some tunnel-digging forest creature. And now, for a bedtime snack . . .

Why not?

Kendra pulls the jar out of her pocket. At the bottom is a thin layer of peanuts and coffee beans, and all over them are termites, so white they're almost see-through, crawling over each other. Just the thought of their little bodies in my mouth makes me want to puke my guts out, but I can't because my guts are completely empty. I'm starving, and beggars can't be choosers, so . . .

“All right,” I hear myself say, “let's eat.”

She unscrews the lid and holds it upside down. Three big, fat, pale termites cling to it, shaking, like they know what's coming.

“You first,” she says.

“Why me first?”

“Because . . . because you're a boy,” she says. “Maybe this is sexist, but you've probably eaten bugs before.”

It's like she knows about that worm when I was five. I was just
curious
.

“Okay,” I say, and pinch one of the white antlike bodies between my fingers, its head and legs wriggling, and you know what, this isn't the
worst
thing in the world; this is what wolves do, they
survive
, and moments like this are what separate the wolves from the poodles, so it's time for Ian Buckley to man up and face the—

Crunch.

Oh God, it's
awful
. Every leg moves the
entire
time
it's in my mouth. There's this flash of a sweet jelly flavor, almost pineapple-y, and then it's layers of bug shell stuck in my teeth and twitching legs on the back of my tongue.

“Well?”

“Delicious,” I choke out. “Your turn.”

She takes her termite and pops it fearlessly into her mouth, then grimaces at me. “It's
horrible
,” she gurgles. “You
lied
to me!”

“Gotcha,” I say, and then reach for another termite.

 

 

Chapter Fourteen
Kendra

W
e are going to see a movie, PJ and Ian and I, in a theater in the side of a forest-covered mountain. We hold hands as we hike to the theater, as though we've always been good friends. Coach Leider, resplendent in a camouflage tuxedo, takes our tickets, and we buy popcorn and soda from a wrinkled old woman whose hair covers her face. There's only one other person in the theater, a thin man in a black suit with his back to us. I cannot see his face. Once we're seated, the screen flutters to life, displaying a twelve-point buck, then Ian and me getting angry; and it soon becomes clear to me that we are watching the video from PJ's handheld camera. But when I turn to PJ to ask him how he's projecting his footage onto the big screen, his eyes are gone, his face is gray, and when I say his name, he snarls at me with a mouth full of termites and reaches out for me with cold, stiff hands—

My body reels, my fingers dig into the dirt beneath me. Someone screams. I decide it must be me.

There's light. It's cool out. Everything is wet.

Wait, stop. Take a deep breath, Kendra. You just had a bad dream. Count to ten, and exhale. Now look around.

Morning. Sunlight, gray from the overcast sky, illuminates the scene. I lie next to Ian at the base of a big oak tree with a low-hanging bottom branch that covers us like a canopy, the soft, dangling leaves splitting the light into a million white dots at my feet. Around us are poorly constructed noise-making traps, dried leaves stacked precariously for maximum crunch, rocks suspended over piles of smaller rocks. They look foolish in the harsh light of day, though they seemed expertly constructed last night. In fact, the whole forest appears benign without shadow and moonlight draped over it. The tree branches covering us shudder lightly with a mountain breeze, feathery wings that last night seemed like grasping claws. The air hangs with a refreshing mistiness that would've seemed clammy and creepy a few hours ago.

My foot rattles something—my specimen jars.

My belly gurgles. Blecch.

If last night's dinner doesn't earn me some kind of research cred, then I am at a loss. Ian and I are probably two of the few people this side of the Congo who know how bad an aftertaste termites have. Still, I feel better with the nutrition they gave me. Going to bed on a full stomach, no matter how scarce and repellent the food was, did us some good. As I rub my eyes and stretch, I feel renewed.

Ian mumbles something in his sleep and rolls over. When he's not conscious, he's almost cute—pet cute, not boy cute. There is nowhere for all that arm and leg to go, and so he bunches it up into his chest. Of course, I have to ruin everything by waking him up.

“Ian?” His eyes crack, blink, and then he leaps up to his feet, his back to the tree, gasping for air. “Relax,
calm down
, Ian, it's Kendra. We're okay.”

“Sorry,” he pants. “Long night.”

“The longest of my life.”

He lowers himself back to the ground and rubs the sleep from his eyes. I pass him the remaining water—the rest of my purification tablets must have fallen out when we ran from the lynx—and he chugs it gratefully. He stretches and groans, mumbling about how tree roots make lousy pillows. We share a granola bar, the sugar and carbohydrates energizing us further. Then I open Deborah Palmer's diary to the map page and outline a plan.

“I still think we have to find this central path,” I tell him, tracing the thick black line with my finger. “We'll have to climb this rockface again, but I think that's doable.”

“But where are we heading?” asks Ian. “And what about the zombies?”

“The . . . creatures will have to be avoided, or dealt with however possible,” I say. “As for finding PJ, I think it's pretty clear from the diary and the map that this old mountain woman or someone related to her took him. We've got to reach her hideout.”

Ian nods, but then he frowns and rubs his forehead. “No, hold up. That person in the video didn't look like an old woman. I've never heard about witches living in underground tunnels.”

“Maybe this woman has some kind of henchman,” I say. “In folklore, witches use dwarfs and hunchbacks as familiars—”

“What else does the diary say?” he says. “Can I see it?”

“You wouldn't understand it. It's in another language—even I can't read it.”

“Let me take a look at it.”

Don't do it, Kendra. Ian Buckley comes across as the boy who handles library books and peanut butter sandwiches at the same time. This is a boy who once tried to put the class hamster in his mouth to “see what would happen.” Maybe a compromise will placate him
. “Why don't I take it out, and we'll look at it together?”

He laughs and shakes his head. “I'm not six years old,” he says. “I'll be really careful.”

Against my strongest gut feelings, I take the diary from my backpack and hold it toward Ian. He snatches our precious clue out of my hand and flips through it errantly, leafing through the final pages until he reaches the section with the drawings and the strange writing, at which point his eyes grow wide. “Whoa. This is . . . different.”

“Exactly. I don't recognize it as any alphabet I've ever seen.”

“Yeah, me neither.” He stares into the pages intensely. “Huh.”

Once again, Kendra, it's up to you. Go over the facts: Corpselike creatures attacked you in a cabin. A book found in said cabin contains a first-person account of supernatural forces and an evil woman of some kind. The book then changes into a series of strange drawings seemingly designed by a different hand. Last night, a stranger saved your friend from certain death, which argues against said stranger being an old woman, so maybe there's another variable, maybe this is one of the Pine City Dancers who survived and learned to fend for him- or herself out in the wild.

“This one letter that looks like a backward
R
comes up a lot,” says Ian.

Think, Kendra. You want to do field research, fine, but eating termites is only half the job. What are you not seeing here?

“And this one that's like a backward
E
.”

Come on, Kendra.

“And this one that's like a backward
S
.”

. . . oh.

Kendra, you fool. Today, Ian Buckley beat you at a mind game. You should be ashamed of yourself.

“Hey!” says Ian when I take the book away from him, study the last pages, and yes, see the pattern.

“Do you have a mirror?”

Ian looks dumbfounded. “Why would I have a mirror?”

“I need a reflective surface.”

“Uh . . .” Something in his mind finally snaps into place, and he points at the book with a childish smile. “Oh, cool, I get it now! Uh,
uh,
water! Water's reflective, right?” He runs off into the woods for about a hundred yards, stops, raises his nose into the air, and then darts in a different direction, calling for me to follow.

“You can't actually smell the water, can you?” I yell.

“What, you can't smell it?” he yells back.

Ian finally stops and points. At the base of the rock wall sits small pool, a puddle bordering on becoming a pond, being fed by some kind of tiny rivulet burbling out from underneath the stones.

I open the book and lean carefully over the water, my fingers tight on the pages so as not to drop it and seal our fate. The scribbling on either side of the dream catcher drawing reflects back at me in perfectly good English:

 

Follow the marked path

Find the web of dreams

Reach the witch's lair

Burn the wicked totem

Destroy her evil power

Break down the walls

Set us free

 

“How about that?” says Ian. “You were right.”

Actually,
you
were right
, I refuse to say. “Deborah must have written this backward, just in case it fell into the wrong hands,” I tell him.

“Makes sense,” says Ian. “Mountain folk probably aren't big on secret codes.”

“This proves, though, that if this witch took PJ, then we need to get him back soon, and that if we can, we need to free the Pine City Dancers from her power.” I flip to the next page and study the map. “If this is the marked path, it should still be at the top of the wall. Ready to climb?”

“You sure about this?” he says. “You had trouble reading the last map. No offense.”

The comment . . . stings, but I let it slide. “That map had hundreds of trails on it and we couldn't find any of them,” I reason. “This has one.”

“Good call,” he says.

Climbing up the levels of the rock wall in front of us is harder without the motivation of a crowd of hungry attackers, but we make do—I give Ian a leg up on my shoulders, he helps pull me up; we repeat on the next rock level. In no time, we've reached the top, a cool breeze blowing through my hair. As I brush myself off, Ian turns and looks out onto the forest below us.

“At least we get a nice view from up h—” His arm snags mine and yanks me to the ground. “Get down. Now.”

“Ow! Ian, that hurt!”

“Look,” he says, pointing. “You can
see them
.”

In the distance, there's a break in the canopy of trees, and in it sits the cabin, the lights still glowing inside, the generator humming faintly. And at its edges stand a smattering of figures lurching aimlessly around the porch, shoulders hunched, legs stiff.

“They're still hanging around the cabin,” says Ian. “Some of them must be
that
slow, huh?”

“No,” I tell him. “They were on us in full force last night. They must have gone back there. It attracts them for some reason.”

We watch the stiff silhouettes hobble around the clearing for a few minutes, and I think of how strange and wonderful a research opportunity this is. Shane, the boy from Queens from the forum at ravenousminds.org, would love this—he's into all that punk rock morbidity (mental note: make
morbidity
a vocab word).

Memories of last night come flying back to me. Fascinating or not, those things were trying to kill us. “Let's forge ahead,” I tell Ian. He nods, and we leave.

By day, the hike is easier. The sun is barely there through the blanket of low-level stratus clouds, but being able to see anything is much better than last night's near-complete lack of visibility. The closer we get to the path, the more the mountain sinks beneath the forest, the ground turning into jagged rocks fuzzy with moss and dangerously loose layers of fallen brown pine needles. Quiet rows of gray-brown trees stretch off endlessly around us, but as we climb farther, the grappling gray branches and fresh spring leaves of the deciduous trees are replaced with sturdy evergreens that don't creak or sway but loom like columns in some massive maze.

All is silent except for our footsteps. No birds squawk; no insects chatter. At first, the lack of noise is nice and lets me consider our rescue plans, but soon it becomes maddening. No sounds, no signs of life—it's just us and, somewhere off where we can't see,
them.
The thought makes my teeth chatter and my skin prickle.

Ian always finds his way, though, brushing past sticker bushes and clambering over slippery stones. He's probably
ideating
(there's four) some kind of action- movie story for himself, and I suppose with a kidnapped friend and a horde of ravenous creatures stalking us, it's not too far from the truth. His face is streaked with dirt, and his sneakers are coated in a scummy film of muck, but none of it fazes him.

The never-ending silence of the woods wears on my nerves. My eyes settle on Ian, and I think of my dad—
Make some friends! Have an adventure!

Well, Kendra, you've been given Ian Buckley. No greater adventure than becoming friends with him.

Think. You two must have something in common.

“I can't wait to get home,” I say.

“I. Hear.
That
,” moans Ian, rubbing his eyes. “I was all psyched for this trip, but after this, I doubt I'll ever go camping again. I keep thinking about the first thing I'm going to do when I get home.”

“And that is?”

“Cheeseburger,”
he says, his hands gripping a phantom burger before his eyes. “Cheddar, lettuce, tomato, loads of ketchup. Undecided on bacon. It's not going to know what hit it. You?”

I close my eyes and let my mind wander to my ultimate fantasy at the moment: “Hot shower” is what comes out. “For maybe an hour. Maybe more. Then my laptop. But shower first.”

“Good answer,” he says. “I think real food beats a shower for me. Gotta get the taste of termites out of my mouth.”

I consider offering him the remaining granola bar, but something off in the woods catches my eye, a blotch of red in the expanse of green and gray, and when I close in on it, my mind immediately leaps back to the past week's studying.

“Here,” I say, grasping a red segmented droplet and tossing it to Ian. “These are wild red raspberries. They're still not ripe yet, but they're flavorful. They should do the trick.” I pop one in my mouth and it's sweet, juicy, if a little bitter. Its tartness is a jump start, waking me up a little bit more.

“Oh man, these are amazing,” he says through a mouthful of berry. “Did you remember those jars with the termites in 'em?”

We empty the remaining termites out of one jar—we now have plenty of food without resorting to entomophagy (
it could never be a vocab word, Kendra; when else would you use it?)—
and fill it with raspberries.

“How do you know all this camping stuff?” he asks me as we hike and snack.

“I took out a book on Montana wildlife last week,” I say. “I wanted to be prepared for this trip.”