The Creeping (36 page)

“It
needed
a sacrifice,” Caleb whispers—the sort of whisper you use for telling vile, dirty secrets. “It was hungry for more than some flea-bitten mutts.”

Daniel's lips press into a puffy, uneven seam. I can't tell if he's grimacing or smiling. “You and Jeanie were in the woods. We were shooting arrows. Caleb said we needed to leave the thing a little blood.” He gives Caleb a look that could make a tree wither and die. “I aimed an arrow at you. It was just supposed to nick you.” He stands rigid over me, his chin on his chest as he looks at his hand. There's blood on it from my shoulder. He rubs his fingers together, staring at the human smear—most likely contemplating the universe's
symmetry that here we are and he finally has a bit of my blood for what we hunted.

“But the arrow hit my sister,” he continues in a distant way. “It sank into her stomach.” His eyes cut from the blood to me. “I told you to stay with her. You didn't. We couldn't lead my mom back. The woods were too big, and without you to mark where she was . . . You showed up an hour later at the house . . . sniveling.”

I can't hold Daniel's eye contact anymore. He's too removed from the pain of Jeanie's death; his stare is too hungry for something I can't identify. “But Caleb, you couldn't have been there. You were home with the chicken pox. Zoey had it too.” I'm arguing more with myself than with Daniel or Caleb. I know what I saw in the light of the flashlight. It doesn't stop me from needing to see it again. This is
Caleb
.

I pick my way over the rocks to him. I lift Caleb's hand to my face, wipe the smattering of blood away, and squint through the moonlight. It becomes all so horribly clear. I've seen the faded scars a million times before. They were seething red blisters when he held Jeanie's head. Now they're almost unnoticeable. Everything seems larger when you're a kid. Kids make monsters out of everything.

“The wood connects your two houses,” I say. “You snuck out and snuck back in without anyone noticing.” How could I have been such an idiot? Believed even for a minute in something that couldn't possibly exist?
There's no such thing as monsters
. Only bad people. Shane told me: You can be
that
wrong about people. He said you can miss what's really inside. He was right.

“Caleb . . .” Saying his name brings on a deluge of memories: Caleb building blanket forts; Caleb boosting me up to look at the bird's nest in the porch eaves; Caleb grinning through the window as he idled in front of Mom's house last December—staying with him felt like being home. “Why did you come over earlier? Was the whole thing an act, Caleb?” I shove his chest, try to force him to look at me, but he won't. “You wanted to know what I knew?” I scream into his ear. “You want to know what I know now? You fucking lied to me. You're my family.” I hammer my fists into his chest, but he never raises his head, and eventually, I can't bear both the pain in my shoulder and the pain in my heart. My hands drop to my sides. At some point I start to cry. Tears trickle down my cheeks like icebergs carving their way through the North Sea.

Finally, Daniel answers for Caleb. “We needed to know if you were letting it go after my dad was arrested or if you were going to keep being a problem.” I played right into Daniel's hands. I told Caleb I wouldn't stop; I swore I'd remember everything.

My tears slow. I have to pull it together if I'm going to survive this. I have to outthink them or devise a way that makes it okay for us to walk out of the woods together. Jeanie was an accident. A tragic
accident
. “Why didn't you tell the cops it was just an accident?”

Daniel paces, hand raking through his hair like he means to pull it out. His eerie calm has blown over and the storm's returned. “There's no body, no proof that it was. But really, my mom kept it from the cops because she thought we did something so bad to Jeanie that we
had to hide her body. I couldn't even prove that I hadn't meant to hurt my sister, because
you
didn't stay with her like I told you to.” He swallows like he's going to be sick.

The Talcotts' stares, all those years stuffed full of them, were never because I survived and Jeanie didn't; they were watching me like a slow-motion car wreck, guessing at what I'd seen Daniel do to Jeanie, wondering when I'd remember, when I'd steal their other child away with what was lost inside my head.

“My mother never looked at me the same,” he says louder, planting his feet on the rocks. “And then Jeanie was everywhere. She was a vindictive little bitch at six. Always disagreed with me. Never shut up. I tried to
teach
her.” His empty hand fists at his side, and I know I've heard similar words before.
Don't make me teach you.

Daniel said it to Jeanie when he thought no one was listening. I can see the afternoon as if I'm there, reliving it. He had that rusted coffee tin, the tiny holes in the lid so the bloated spiders could breathe. The three of us—me, Daniel, and Jeanie—were just beyond the strawberries. Daniel wanted us to search for owl pellets, the gut-shaped masses of bone fragments and membrane that owls vomit. Daniel liked to dissect them, to reconstruct the tiny skeletons. Jeanie told him we wanted to play dolls instead. In response he pushed the tin into her arms like she'd been begging for it. She bit back tears. Now I recognize it as the same tin Jeanie wore on a string as a necklace in the Polaroid. I recall that nothing frightened Jeanie as much as spiders did.

I was six. I didn't understand it was Daniel's way of punishing her, of
teaching
her to do what he wanted.

Daniel snorts. “Guess I'm not shocked she's fucking with me in death.” He says it like he's watching the memory play in my eyes. “I see Jeanie everywhere. Crowds of people wear her face. I catch her reflection standing behind me. I hear her froggy little voice. She's taunting me. She's waiting for me to get mine.” He closes the distance between us, hovers over me as I shrink back. “She's waiting for you to remember,” he shouts. “It gets worse near the anniversary. I can't close my eyes without her there. She's wherever I am, laughing, watching me, walking down the sidewalk alone . . . .”

He straightens up. Something's changed in him. He's bigger against the inky sky, as though he's drawing on its vastness. “You can't imagine all the times I worried about what you knew or suspected or dreamed.” He raises the branch so the barbed end is inches from my face.

“For years I tried to make you tell me; I tried to frighten you into keeping your mouth shut. Then I realized something. You would remember. There was no if, only when.” He tilts his head and continues in a whisper, “I needed to beat you to it. Reopening the case was my only shot. You were going to remember and tell them what I did.” He makes me sound like I'm the villain, the killer out to steal his life away. “I needed to come back here. I needed to find Jeanie's body. Never finding it had me fucked up. It's somewhere.” He nods. “It's in the woods where
you
left it. Or Griever took it, buried it. I thought if I could find it, prove that Griever had it all these years, the cops would arrest her. No one would give a shit about a memory you came up with in the face of physical evidence.”

He angles closer, the branch's spike nudging my temple. “Do you know my mother blamed me once the redhead showed up in the cemetery? She didn't believe I wasn't responsible. Some neighbor called to tell her that a body had been found. She was waiting for me when I got home, hours after the bonfire. She was going to tell the cops what she thought we'd done to Jeanie. Can you believe that?” His mouth twists in disdain. “Her own son. She wasn't even going to wait until morning. She just wanted to tell me to my face first—she cried that she owed me that. Jane Doe was all the proof she needed that I was the pervert she always thought.”

Daniel muffles a wet sob that comes out of nowhere and draws the branch back like he's winding up to strike me with it. I recoil, but at the last second he hurls the bloody stick into the lake. “I begged her to listen. Dad was sleeping.” His fingers rub hard against his cheeks, contorting his features.

This is the moment when I realize that there's no going back; the three of us aren't walking out of these woods together. It's so much more than Jeanie and the accident.

“She had the phone, she was crying hysterically. And then . . . then she turned her back on me, dialing the cops. Weird how hard it was to keep the phone cord around her neck,” he says, almost as a side thought. He covers his own neck with his hand and mimics strangling her. “She was stronger than she looked.”

My mind races.
This can't be happening
. Not Daniel. Not Caleb.
Especially not Caleb
. “But my hair . . . it was braided.” It's such a stupid thing to say. As if that one little detail can save me; as
if I can prove to Daniel he didn't do it and we can all return home.

“Mom got you to shut up,” Daniel says. “You were blubbering from being lost. She didn't figure on your mom noticing. But now I've spent too much goddamned time worrying about what you suspect or what you remember.” He smirks lopsidedly with the admission. “You're a loose end. Zoey was a loose end.”

Zoey
. I figured Caleb's whole story had been a lie. An ugly ruse to draw me out here alone. “Caleb, where's Zoey?” My tone climbs with alarm.

Caleb's features are slack as he stares at me, a mournful ghoul's face carved up by long shadows. “I told her to shut her mouth. I warned her. She kept saying, ‘How could you keep this from me?' She wouldn't stop asking how. How? How? How?” The word is like the dying caw of a crow. He reaches for me, taking hold of both my arms, shaking me in rhythm to his quivering bottom lip.

I hold myself stiff under his tremulous grip. “Caleb, what happened to Zoey?”

“I—I didn't mean to hit her, but she wouldn't stop. In my face, drunk, brought me out back from the party, slapping me.” Caleb releases me, bringing his palm down hard on his cheek. “She said, ‘I know you.' She said it like she could see my insides. ‘I know what you're hiding.' ” His nasally pitch imitates Zoey. “ ‘I can see the guilt all over your face.' I didn't mean to hit her.” He's on all fours now, crawling away from the lapping water to the tree line. This isn't the Caleb who baited my fishing line when I was small because I couldn't stomach touching worms. Not the Caleb whose face is as familiar as a brother's.

I move to go after Caleb—Caleb, but
not Caleb—
but Daniel seizes my wagging ponytail and drags me to my feet. “What did you do to Zoey, Daniel?” I whimper.

He grins, turning me around on the sweep of rocky beach so that we're facing the water. “Nothing. She did it all to herself, and it's fucking beautiful. That nosy bitch wouldn't stop asking questions. Caleb hit her and she lost it. But then the most wonderful thing happened.” Daniel pulls me tight to his side. I look down the length of his extended arm. At the center of the lake is a small square dock for swimmers. I know that it's barely long or wide enough to lie on. Zoey and I sunbathed there freshman year when seniors took over the cove. We'd swim out and sit all breathless and bleary-eyed from the distance.

“She ran from us. Probably meant to run for help, but she was drunk, ran into the woods rather than away from them. I give her credit because the twat was fast,” he whispers the vile words right into my ear. “But then she ran out of land and went thrashing into the lake. Heard her gulping for air most of the way to the dock. Probably choking on her own puke, she was so hammered. Then nothing. She got there and passed the eff out. It won't take long for her to roll into the water.” He smiles wide and wet, with spit glistening on his chapped lips. “She'll drown.”

Y
ou're going to kill us both?” I try to be brave, but my strength crumbles and I sob. I drag my good arm across my face to wipe the snot away.

“No, sweetheart,
you're
gonna kill yourself.” Daniel tightens his hold on my ponytail, twisting my neck so I'm looking at him out of the corner of my eye. “It's simple. Swim to save her.” He exhales in my face, filling my nostrils with rancid breath. Hot, moist lips turning my skin green with their poisonous words. I run my hand over my gash. My hoodie is soaked with blood. I'm woozy on my feet, and I won't last long in the water. That's the point, though. That's why Daniel injured me, isn't it?

The light flashes in Daniel's eyes as he smirks. “You know what they'll say about the two of you? Zoey was a whore, always getting wasted at parties. No one will be surprised she swam out too far. You're her lackey, so of course you fell in the woods going after her, drowned trying to reach her. You're lucky that it worked out this way.
I wanted to jump you, make it look like that freak show that Caleb's pissing his pants over got you.” If I wasn't already shivering violently, I'd start after hearing their twisted plan. What's worse is that it will work.

“What if I won't do it?” I bluff.

Daniel raises an eyebrow. “That's your best friend, isn't it? All that sisterly love and pussy power. I tell you what. If you reach her—and it's a big if, since you're not looking so hot, princess—I swear we'll row out to get her,” he says, grinning wickedly, crossing his heart with his free hand.

“And me?”

“You we'll knock out and throw into the water. You drown no matter what.” He releases my hair and shoves me. I catch myself at the edge of the obsidian water. “Drowning is better than getting eaten or torn up or—what's your monster do to those little girls, Caleb?” Daniel laughs like it's all a big joke.