‘Hey,’ I said, though Peter had already stepped onto the dirt and was strolling, fast and purposeful, down the hill. ‘Peter,’ I called after him, though I followed, of course. The Macks were beside but no longer near me. ‘When’s the last time you saw him? Mr Paars?’
He turned around, and he was smiling now, the smile that scared me. ‘Same time you did, Bubba,’ he said. ‘Two years ago tonight.’
I blinked, stood still, and the wind lashed me like the end of a twisted-up towel. ‘How do you know when I last saw him?’ I said.
Peter shrugged. ‘Am I wrong?’
I didn’t answer. I watched Peter’s face, the dark swirling around and over it, shaping it, like rushing water over stone.
‘He hasn’t been anywhere. Not on 15th Street. Not at the Black Anchor. Nowhere. I’ve been watching.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t live there anymore,’ Jenny said carefully. She was watching Peter, too.
‘There’s a car,’ Peter said. ‘A Lincoln. Long and black. Practically a limo.’
‘I’ve seen that car,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it drive by my house, right at dinner time.’
‘It goes down there,’ said Peter, gesturing toward the trees, the water, the Paars house. ‘Like I said, I’ve been watching.’
And of course, he had been, I thought. If his father had let him, he’d probably have camped right here, or in the gazebo under the bell. In fact, it seemed impossible to me, given everything I knew about Peter, that he’d let two years go by.
‘Exactly what happened to you two down there?’ Kelly asked.
‘Tell them now,’ said Peter. ‘There isn’t going to be any talking once we get down there. Not until we’re all finished.’ Dropping into a crouch, he picked at the cold, wet dirt with his fingers, watched the ferries drifting out of downtown toward Bainbridge Island, Vashon. You couldn’t really make out the boats from there, just the clusters of lights on the water like clouds of lost, doomed fireflies.
‘Even the grass was weird,’ I said, remembering the weight of my sopping pants against my legs. ‘It was so wet. I mean, everywhere was wet, as usual, but this was like wading in a pond. You put your foot down and the whole lawn rippled. It made the eye look like it was winking. At first we were kind of hunched over, sort of hiding, which was ridiculous in all that light. I didn’t want to walk in the circle, but Peter just strolled right through it. He called me a baby because I went the long way around.’
‘I called you a baby because you were being one,’ Peter said, but not meanly, really.
‘We kept expecting lights to fly on in the house. Or dogs to come out. It just seemed like there would be dogs. But there weren’t. We got up to the gazebo, which was the only place in the whole yard with shadows, because it was surrounded by all these trees. Weird trees. They were kind of stunted. Not pines, either, they’re like birch trees, I guess. But short. And their bark is black.’
‘Felt weird, too,’ Peter muttered, straightening up, wiping his hands down his coat. ‘It just crumbled when you rubbed it in your hands, like one of those soft block-erasers, you know what I mean?’
‘We must have stood there ten minutes. More. It was so quiet. You could hear the Sound, a little, although there aren’t any waves there or anything. You could hear the pine trees dripping, or maybe it was the lawn. But there weren’t any birds. And there wasn’t anything moving in that house. Finally, Peter started toward the bell. He took exactly one step into the gazebo, and one of those dwarf trees walked right off its roots into his path, and both of us started screaming.’
‘What?’ said Jenny.
‘I didn’t scream,’ said Peter. ‘And he hit me.’
‘He didn’t hit you,’ I said.
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Could you shut up and let Andrew finish?’ said Kelly, and Peter lunged, grabbing her slicker in his fists and shoving her hard and then yanking her forward so that her head snapped back on its stalk like a decapitated flower and then snapped into place again.
It had happened so fast that neither Jenny nor I had moved, but Jenny hurtled forward now, raking her nails down Peter’s face, and he said, ‘Ow!’ and fell back, and she threw her arms around Kelly’s shoulders. For a few seconds, they stood like that, and then Kelly put her own arms up and eased Jenny away. To my astonishment, I saw that she was laughing.
‘I don’t think I’d do that again, if I were you,’ she said to Peter, her laughter quick and hard, as though she was spitting teeth.
Peter put a hand to his cheek, gazing at the blood that came away on his fingers. ‘Ow,’ he said again.
‘Let’s go home,’ Jenny said to her sister.
No one answered right away. Then Peter said, ‘Don’t.’ After a few seconds, when no one reacted, he said, ‘You’ve got to see the house.’ He was going to say more, I think, but what else was there to say? I felt bad, without knowing why. He was like a planet we visited, cold and rocky and probably lifeless, and we kept coming because it was all so strange, so different than what we knew. He looked at me, and what I was thinking must have flashed in my face, because he blinked in surprise, turned away, and started down the road without looking back. We all followed. Planet, dark star, whatever he was, he created orbits.
‘So the tree hit Peter,’ Jenny Mack said quietly when we were halfway down the hill, almost to the sheds.
‘It wasn’t a tree. It just seemed like a tree. I don’t know how we didn’t see him there. He had to have been watching us the whole time. Maybe he knew we’d followed him. He just stepped out of the shadows and kind of whacked Peter across the chest with his cane. That black dog-head cane. He did kind of look like a tree. His skin was all gnarly, kind of dark. If you rubbed him between your fingers, he’d probably have crumbled, too. And his hair was so white. A tree that was way too old.
‘And his voice. It was like a bullfrog, even deeper. He spoke real slow. He said, “Boy. Do you know what that bell does?” And then he did the most amazing thing of all. The scariest thing. He looked at both of us, real slow. Then he dropped his cane. Just dropped it to his side. And he smiled, like he was daring us to go ahead. “That bell raises the dead. Right up out of the ground” ‘
‘Look at these,’ Kelly Mack murmured as we walked between the sheds.
‘Raises the dead,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I heard you. These are amazing.’
And they were. I’d forgotten. The most startling thing, really, was that they were still standing. They’d all sunk into the swampy grass on at least one side, and none of them had roofs, not whole roofs, anyway, and the window slots gaped, and the wind made a rattle as it rolled through them, like waves over seashells, empty things that hadn’t been empty always. They were too small to have been boat sheds, I thought, had to have been for tools and things. But tools to do what?
In a matter of steps, they were behind us, between us and the homes we knew, the streets we walked. We reached the ring of pines around the Paars house, and it was different, worse. I didn’t realize how, but Peter did.
‘No lights,’ he said.
For a while, we just stood in the blackness while saltwater and pine-resin smells glided over us like a mist. There wasn’t any moon, but the water beyond the house reflected what light there was, so we could see the long, black Lincoln in the dirt driveway, the house and the gazebo beyond it. After a minute or so, we could make out the bell, too, hanging like some bloated, white bat from the gazebo ceiling.
‘It is creepy,’ Jenny said.
‘Ya think?’ I said, but I didn’t mean to, it was just what I imagined Peter would have said if he were saying anything. ‘Peter, I think Mr Paars is gone. Moved, or something.’