“I’ve never seen him out here,” she said.
WHEN SID HAD ARRIVED at her house the following day, grumbling about spending the day before at his Aunt Gretchen’s house, Ashley filled him in on the monster boy in her backyard.
Sid sat at the kitchen table, finishing a bowl of cocoa puffs, an off-limits food in his house. He pushed his bowl away and glanced at the kitchen door.
“Do you think it’s like a zombie or something?” Sid asked, tilting his bowl and drinking the brown milk.
“Could be,” Ashley said. “It wanted to kill me. I can tell you that much.”
Sid nodded.
“Me too. Whatever it is. It’s bad.”
“I tried to find it yesterday,” Ashley said, not mentioning her encounter in the woods with Shane. “But I didn’t see anything.”
Sid grimaced.
“You tried to find it? That’s crazy.”
“I didn’t want to find the monster, just proof it had been there.”
Sid fidgeted in his chair and picked at a scab on his arm.
“Because you thought I was making it up too?” he asked.
Ashley glowered at him.
“No. I didn’t say that, did I?”
Sid shrugged.
“Did you check on the raccoons?”
“Yeah, I fed them later in the day. They’re okay.”
“Should we tell someone?” Sid asked, imagining his parents' faces if he and Ashley sat them down and revealed their near-deaths by zombie-forest boy.
Before she answered, he shook his head. “I’ll never be allowed to watch another scary movie as long as I live. My mom already took away all my horror comics after I had those nightmares about The Howling.”
“No adults would believe us,” Ashley agreed. “If we could get proof, but even then…”
“Like what? A photograph?” Sid stood and put his bowl in the sink.
Ashley leaned against the counter and chewed the side of her thumbnail.
“We’d almost have to trap it.”
“No way,” Sid shook his head from side to side so hard it made him dizzy.
“I need to think about it more,” she said.
Sid swallowed the lump in his throat, hopeful she’d abandon the idea all-together.
“Want to go to the pit?” Ashley asked. “It’s going to be like ninety degrees today.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
“Well, we’ve only seen it at night, right? It probably isn’t out during the day. Maybe it sleeps in the day like a vampire.”
“Yeah,” Sid agreed, rinsing his bowl. “I bet sunlight hurts it or something.”
Sid rushed home and put on his swimsuit, meeting Ashley back at her garage.
“Damn my tire’s flat again,” Ashley roared, kicking her bike.
Her bike was old, a hand-me-down that a neighbor had given her mother years before. The tires went flat at least twice a month.
Sid squatted down and touched it.
“It’s the rim.”
“I know it’s the rim,” she grumbled.
“Just ride on my hubs,” Sid suggested, delighted at the prospect. He loved when Ash rode on the back of his bike, hands on his shoulders laughing in his ear if he hit a bump.
“All the way to the pit?” she asked, squinting toward the midday sun, a fiery ball that seemed to swallow the cool blue sky in a single gulp.
It was gonna be a hot one and the pit would be their only respite.
Other kids in town had pools. Some of them swam at Higgins Lake, but most of those kids had boats. Ash and Sid would be stuck on the packed beach patrolled by Deputy Dingleberry. Technically, he wasn’t a deputy, just a park ranger who made it his sole duty to ruin everyone’s summer by yelling at kids who swam past the buoys or played chicken in the water.
Sid rarely went to the beach, and when he did go, his family accompanied him. His mother forced him beneath a giant umbrella and insisted he slather white zinc from forehead to toes. He looked like the Pillsbury doughboy.
The pit, a rock quarry abandoned decades before, was a kid only kind of place.
Sid’s dad had told him that fifty years before, a section of the forest had been cleared so trucks could travel in and out of the quarry carrying away huge chunks of gravel and limestone, but eventually the town had closed the quarry down. Nature had taken back the forest except for where the kids had borne footpaths through the weeds and created their own rugged oasis deep in the woods.
One side of the pit was rock and sandstone rising fifty feet high. The rock sloped down to a weedy ledge.
The water looked black year-round, though Sid knew it was only because the water ran deep, deeper than any of them could ever swim. It was a game he’d watched other kids play. They plugged their noses or held their breath and ducked beneath the dark surface. Down and down they’d swim, only to pop up twenty seconds later, gasping for breath and shrieking that it felt colder than a freezer down there.
Sid had never tried himself.
He preferred to stay in the deceptively warm layer at the top, floating on his back and gazing at the never-ending sky. When he imagined the same infinite space beneath him, his heart would beat faster, and he’d paddle to the shore to warm up. Really, he just needed to get out of the abyss, the space where monsters might hide, where something ancient might slumber in the icy quarry bed.
“Earth to Sid,” Ashly said. “Are we going to go or what?”
Sid nodded and hopped on his bike, waiting for Ash to climb onto the metal knobs jutting from the back tire. When her hands clasped his shoulders, he pushed away from the curb, standing as he peddled until he gained his balance.
There was no designated trail to the quarry, and Sid and Ashley had created their own. Sid stashed his bike beneath high ferns and followed Ashley into the trees.
They each picked up a stick. Ashley carried one in case the Thrashers showed up and for walking. Sid liked to pretend his was a sword, and he periodically sliced it against dead trees, which he and Ashley then pushed over.
Beneath the trees, the temperature was cooler, but the bugs descended like a flock of end-of-the-world locusts. They buzzed in their ears, landed on their bare arms and legs, and feasted on their young blood. The part of the woods they walked through had a swampy area, which inevitably gave rise to a horde of insects.
“Damn blood-suckers,” Ashley hissed, slapping a large one on her bicep and leaving a bloody smear in its place.
Sid swatted his ear where another had been trying to burrow into his skull. They ran the last few yards, breaking from trees into the hot noon sun.
8
The quarry stood empty. Not surprising, as most of the kids opted for the lake or pools, and it was early enough in the summer that the icy water held little appeal. Sid lacked bravery in most instances, but he prided himself on being one of the first kids in the water every year.
No road went to the quarry. You had to walk in. In summer, teenagers frequented the pit at night, building bonfires on the high cliff and smoking grass or drinking beer they’d scammed from their parents’ garage refrigerator.
Ash and Sid still had a few years before they’d be into such activities, but they often saw the charred remains left from the previous night’s gatherings: beer cans smashed and burned, a snack bag or two, cigarette butts.
Ash would swear and kick at the dirt, gathering up the garbage and putting it in a neat little pile. She hated litter bugs.
Sid hated them too, because Ashley did.
Ashley took off her tank top and tennis shoes, then her shorts, not hesitating as she ran down the high embankment of the quarry. Halfway down she cannon-balled off the cliff.