Took (7 page)

“What's going on?” Dad shouted. “Are you all right?”

With a burst of strength, Erica broke away and ran to Mom and began a sobbing account of what happened. “I was playing in the woods,” she cried, “and all of a sudden Daniel grabbed me and started dragging me home. He said I wasn't allowed to be in the woods. He made me leave Little Erica there—she's lying on the ground all by herself.”

Dad and Mom looked at each other. “You take care of Daniel,” Mom said to him. “I'll get Erica into the house. She's hysterical.”

“No.” Erica began struggling again. “I have to get Little Erica. I can't leave her there!”

“It's almost dark,” Dad said. “We'll get the doll tomorrow.”

“No, no! I'll never see her again.” Erica thrashed about wildly, more like a cat than before.

“Take her to the house, Ted,” Mom cried. “I can't hold her!”

Dad got a firm grip on Erica, picked her up, and carried her toward the house. Her shrieks finally stopped when the back door closed behind Dad.

Mom turned to me. “What's this about? Why wouldn't you let her get the doll?”

“There was something in the woods, something dark and scary.” Words tumbled out of my mouth. I didn't think about what I was saying. I didn't try to stop myself. “I had to get her away from it.”

Mom looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. “What are you talking about?”

“I don't know. I saw it. I was scared. I thought it was going to grab Erica. She was just standing there, like she was paralyzed or something.”

Mom put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “Daniel, how often do I need to tell you? No one is going to take you or Erica. No one is going to disappear.”

I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I wanted to believe Mom. I hadn't seen anything in the woods. Neither had Erica. It was all my imagination. Selene Estes had disappeared, but she hadn't been taken by Bloody Bones. He was a legend, he wasn't real. I couldn't have seen him.

But no matter what I told myself, I knew I'd seen something. I couldn't explain it. I didn't know what it was, but it had been there.

After Erica cried herself to sleep, I talked Dad into going to the woods with flashlights to look for the doll. I didn't want to leave the house, but I felt bad about leaving Little Erica in the woods. That doll was just a hunk of plastic to me, but to Erica she was almost a real person.

When we opened the back door, a gust of wind blew leaves into the kitchen. They skittered across the floor and settled in corners as if they'd been waiting to come inside.

It took all of Dad's strength to pull the door shut behind us. The night was biting cold. An almost full moon lit the field.

At the edge of the woods, we turned on our flashlights. The wind tossed the trees, and their shadows danced over the path, crossing and crisscrossing the ground, making it hard to see.

I stayed close to Dad and aimed the flashlight at the ground. Nothing looked familiar. It was as if we'd taken a different path, one you could find only at night. I heard noises in the undergrowth. I imagined creatures you'd never see in daylight scurrying through the dead leaves. I kept my eyes on the path so I wouldn't see anything in the shadows on either side of me.

After we'd walked for half an hour or so, Dad stopped. His flashlight probed the dark, picking out one tree, then another. An owl was caught in the beam for a moment, its eyes huge and shining. Without giving me time to identify him, he flew soundlessly into the woods.

“Are you sure we're going the right way?” Dad asked.

“I think maybe we passed the clearing,” I admitted. “I don't remember it being this far.”

“I told you we should wait until morning to look for that doll.”

I shone my flashlight behind us. “It all looks the same in the dark.”

“So I noticed,” Dad said.

We turned around and walked back the way we'd come. Dad studied every tree, every boulder, every fallen log.

He asked the same questions over and over. “Is this it? Does that tree look familiar? Do you think we're close?”

My answer was always the same. “I don't know.”

After a while, Dad came up with new questions. “Did you scare Erica on purpose? Why didn't you stop and let her get the doll? Were you teasing her? Bullying her?”

“No,” I said. “No. I saw something, Dad. I thought—”

He shook his head. “You
saw
something. All this because you
saw
something. What's wrong with you? I've been all over these woods and never seen anything out of the ordinary.”

Bumbling and stumbling ahead of me, Dad thrashed at dry weeds and dead vines with a stick. Everything was my fault—my fault Erica was hysterical, my fault the doll was missing, my fault we couldn't find the clearing, my fault we were wandering around in the woods freezing our butts off.

“I give up,” Dad said. “The doll's gone, and your sister is heartbroken. You should feel really great about that.”

Dad had never talked to me this way. He got mad so easily now. So did Mom. Erica was unhappy and secretive and strange. I was miserable in school. And lonely. Nothing was right.

Without speaking to each other, Dad and I left the woods and trudged across the field. In the cold and windy dark, the house looked warm and inviting. Lights shone from the windows, smoke rose from the chimney, but it was like a mirage. Up close, inside the house, the warmth and happiness vanished.

No one spoke at breakfast. Mom slammed bowls of cold cereal down in front of Erica and me. She and Dad had already eaten and were getting ready to leave for work.

Before she left, Mom hugged Erica. “Please don't look so sad, sweetie. You and Daniel can look for Little Erica when you get home from school. In the daylight, you're sure to find her.”

Erica didn't say anything. She sat with her head down, her cereal untouched, tears trickling down her cheeks.

“Erica, I promise I'll find her,” I said. “I don't know what got into me. I thought—”

“That's enough, Daniel,” Mom said. “Forget about what you thought you saw in the woods. You're just making matters worse.”

“But Mom—”

Outside, Dad blew the horn, already annoyed.

“I have to leave.” Mom grabbed her purse and fumbled with the zipper on her parka. The horn blew again.

“All right, all right,” Mom muttered. To me she said, “Find the doll. Erica's very upset. She cried all night.”

The door slammed shut, and the van drove away, its tires spraying gravel. I took Erica's untouched cereal and put our bowls and glasses in the sink. “We have to leave in ten minutes,” I reminded her.

She nodded, but she didn't move from the table.

“Aren't you going to brush your teeth?”

No response. I did what I had to do in the bathroom and returned to find Erica sitting exactly where I'd left her.

I took her parka and mine off the hook. “Here, put this on.”

Erica got up slowly and allowed me to help her with her jacket. “You should at least comb your hair,” I told her. “You look terrible.”

“Who cares what I look like?” Erica pulled on her mittens and a knit cap Mom had made for her. “Everyone at school hates me.”

“Where are your schoolbooks?”

“I don't know.”

I looked around and saw her book bag on the floor by the front door. From its weight, I knew her books were inside. “Did you do your homework?”

“No.” Erica slipped the straps over her shoulder and followed me outside. The wind was cold and damp and smelled of winter.

Silently we walked down the driveway. Now that the trees were bare, we could see farther into the woods, all the way to the road.

“Erica,” I said, “did you see anything in the woods? A sort of dark shape, a shadow maybe?”

“No.”

“But you were sitting on that log, staring into the woods as if you were talking to somebody. And then you got up and walked straight toward whatever it was.”

She shook her head. “That's what
you
thought I was doing.”

“Well, what were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

I wanted to shake the truth out of her, but I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and finally said, “You told me you had a secret. Is it something you do in the woods? Someone you see? Or talk to? Do you still hear whispers in the dark?”

Erica looked at me at last, her pale face closed tight. “A secret is something you don't tell anyone, Daniel. That's what it means.”

“Does Mom know?”

“I just told you. It's only a secret if you don't tell anyone.” With that, Erica ran down the driveway ahead of me.

I picked up a stone and threw it into the woods as far as I could. Thonk. It hit a tree and bounced off. I was frustrated. No matter what I asked, Erica would not give me an answer. Somehow, my seven-year-old sister was getting the best of me.

I caught up with her at the end of the driveway. Shivering in the wind, we waited silently for the bus. I'd given up talking to her. What was the point?

As soon as we boarded the bus, Mrs. Plummer noticed Erica's mood. “What's the matter, sweetie? You get up on the wrong side of the bed or something?”

Or something
, I thought.

“It's my doll, Little Erica, you know—the one I told you about. My brother made me leave her in the woods, and now she's gone.”

Mrs. Plummer turned around and looked directly at me. “Why on earth did you do something like that?”

As usual, I was being blamed. “It's kind of complicated,” I said. “I thought, well, I won't tell you what I thought. It's dumb, and you wouldn't believe me. Let's just say I made a mistake, and I'm really sorry and I'll find the doll after school.”

“He won't find her no matter how hard he looks.” Erica turned her face to the window and pressed her nose against the glass. “She's been took,” Erica whispered to herself in a voice so low I scarcely heard her.

Mrs. Plummer looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What makes you think I won't believe you?”

“My parents don't.” She was slowing down to pick up Brody. With him getting on the bus, I couldn't tell her what I saw.

“Tell me later,” Mrs. Plummer told me.

As usual, Brody gave me a nasty look as he walked past. He was heading for a seat at the back of the bus where he and his friends sat.

Ignoring him, I looked straight ahead, and Erica looked out the window. We rode in silence all the way to school.

My day was no worse than usual. A B-minus on a history report because I'd gotten a date wrong. A bloody nose in basketball—an accident of course. And so on and so on.

The bus ride home was worse than usual because Erica still refused to speak to me. Without her to talk to, I had to listen to rude comments about my sweater, my haircut, my shoes, and who knows what. I wondered how the kids on the bus had entertained themselves before I'd had the bad luck to move to Woodville.

After Brody got off, Mrs. Plummer glanced at us in the rearview mirror once or twice, but she didn't have anything to say until she stopped at the end of our driveway. “I hope you find the doll, but be quick about it. It gets dark early, and I don't want you getting lost in the woods.”

She shut the door and drove away, heading home, I guessed, to her husband and kids. We stood at the side of the road and looked down the driveway. The trees were a tunnel of darkness already.

“Let's go straight to the woods and look for your doll,” I said.

“She won't be there,” Erica said in the flat little voice she'd been using all day.

“Yes, she will.” I took her hand to hurry her along, but she pulled away and ran ahead.

I chased her through the field's tall weeds and into the woods. In a few minutes I came to the dead tree, the clearing, and the fallen log. How had Dad and I missed it last night?

Erica waited for me, empty-handed. “She's not here.”

“She must be.” I ran around looking in piles of fallen leaves, under bushes, behind logs, even leaving the clearing to search the woods.

Erica stayed where she was, her arms folded across her chest, shivering.

“I don't understand it.” I pointed to the place where I'd last seen Little Erica. “She was right there.” I kicked at the leaves, scattering them, thinking the doll had to be under them.

Erica hugged herself as if she still held the doll in her arms. “She's been took.”

“‘Took'? That's how the kids in Woodville talk, not you and me. We say ‘taken.' And besides, who took her?”

“Selene.” The name dropped from Erica's lips like a stone. “The girl who lives on the tippity top of a hill with her old auntie.”

“Are you crazy or just a liar? Selene disappeared fifty years ago. Nobody's seen her since.”

Honestly, I wasn't as sure as I tried to sound. My feeling of being watched, the darkness of the woods surrounding the house, Erica's behavior, the tension between Mom and Dad, the unhappiness we'd all sunk into—everything was wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it all tied in with Selene Estes. Or something else—I didn't know what.

My brain was muddled. My hands and nose were cold, and I wanted to go home, light the fire, and play games on my iPad.

Erica stared into the woods, at the very spot where I'd seen, or thought I'd seen, the shadow thing.

“You saw something yesterday,” I said. “I know it.”

“Suppose I did?” Erica's pale face looked spooky in the dim light, her eyes too big for her face and shadowed with dark circles.

“What did you see?” I stood over her. “I want to know!”

“It's a secret. I made a promise, I—” She was crying now.

Angry and frustrated by her silent, secret ways, I pulled her to her feet and shook her. Not hard, just a little. “I'm serious. There's something going on, and I need to know what it is.”