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It rains the next week, really bad. It starts early in the afternoon and stays thundery. But worse, it also stays humid, and all of the kids are drooping. Chas shuts the windows and turns on the air conditioning, but it doesn’t help the mood.
Brenda makes it over, but not Tom. She and Chas decide that, so long as the air is on, they’re going to fire up the oven and bake something for Brenda’s mom’s birthday. Maxy, Rob, Davey, and Johnny are playing a game of Pictionary when the safety gate at the top of the stairs falls down, and Baby Mark goes with it.
“Marky!” Chas shrieks, but Brenda’s the first down the stairs. Baby Mark is wailing and even though the stairs are carpeted and short--there are only eight steps to the landing--there’s an ugly cut on his arm. Chas and Brenda take Baby Mark into the bathroom and Rob goes to inspect the gate.
From outside the kitchen door, there’s a sudden and loud meowing.
“Where are the twins?” Davey asks.
Maxy doesn’t realize he’s almost running until he hops the last step down the stairs and nearly crashes into the wall. The TV is on in the game room, but no one’s there. The curtains are still pulled.
Maxy calls out, “Aaron? Nicholas?”
From the game room door, there is a sudden and loud meowing.
Johnny peeks into the game room and announces, “I’ll check the bedrooms.” Maxy checks the laundry room and then the library, which is really a spare room with older furniture and old books in it. The library, like the game room, has windows that look out at the deck and the backyard, and the curtains aren’t pulled in here.
Sitting out in the rain is the big blind cat. Maxy stares at the cat’s sockets. It really doesn’t have eyes.
There’s a sound from the wall behind him, and Maxy turns. The room on the other side of that wall is the actual storage room, the one the kids aren’t allowed to play in because it has a lock on the outside. Maxy leaves the library and shuts the door behind him.
The storage room door is locked. Maxy tries not to think of the bathroom door shutting and locking on its own.
“Maxy?” Johnny calls down the hall. “Did you find them?”
“Check Chas’ room,” Maxy orders, and twists the storage room’s doorknob. The lock clicks open and Davey touches Maxy’s arm.
“They wouldn’t play in there,” he says. “They’re scared of it.”
“Who locked this door?” Maxy asks. He thinks he hears another sound behind the door, and is suddenly very angry.
“I locked it. Aaron asked me to,” Davey says. The knob is getting cold under Maxy’s hand and he feels, or maybe imagines he feels it start to turn. He pushes the button in the middle of the knob and locks the door again.
“They were up in the kitchen with Chas and Brenda,” Johnny calls down the stairs. “Maxy? Davey? Did you hear? They’re up in the kitchen!”
“What does evil mean?” Maxy asks, letting go of the doorknob. It’s gotten very cold.
Davey answers, “It means inhuman.”
Rob has to go loot a few more things from his house, and he asks Maxy to help him. They bring the twins along to keep Rob’s mother busy.
“Do you have any video games or anything?” Maxy asks, ducking under a branch and directing Aaron around a burr bush, rather than through. “I only ask because I hate Monopoly.”
Rob says, “You hate Monopoly because you lose.”
“I give up; I don’t lose. Monopoly takes hours.”
“So do video games.”
“But in video games, you get to blow stuff up.”
At this point, there is a sudden and loud meowing. Maxy snatches Aaron and Nicholas up in both arms before he even fully registers the sound.
There is the big blind cat, even though it’s a sunny day and early in the afternoon, and its tail is swishing. Under one wicked paw is the heaving chest of a black puppy, almost as big as the cat but definitely the loser. One ear is torn almost to shreds and it’s bleeding from several bites and scratches.
Rob reaches for a big, stout stick. “Get out of the way, Maxy.”
Maxy, still holding Aaron and Nicholas, backs up and Rob heads for the cat. At first, it looks like the big blind cat will stand its ground, but Rob has a good swing and perfect aim. Without so much as ruffling the dog’s fur he’s whacked the cat across its blind face.
The cat yowls and moves to attack him, but Rob golf-swings at it, knocking it up into the air and six feet back. Not an easy thing to do, with a cat as big as a small to medium-sized dog. He moves quickly, picking up the puppy and brandishing the stick at the cat again.
The cat, having landed hard, gets up and hisses. The hiss is worse than the meow. But it turns tail and walks away, giving up its prey.
“Come on, let’s hurry over,” Rob says, and Maxy puts the twins down but keeps a grip on each one’s hand.
Rob pesters his dad into taking them all down to the vet, after Maxy calls Chas to let her know what’s going on. The puppy is pronounced okay, given a few shots, and Rob adopts it before the day is out.
“Maxy,” Rob says proudly, holding up the little guy, “meet Jasper.”
Jasper is enthusiastic in his hellos, and Maxy feels a sudden wave of sadness, remembering Nero. Jasper is just as friendly to the twins, and to the rest of family when they all go back to Chas’ dad’s place. Rob makes a vague remark about making it home, but spends the night at Still Creek anyway.
Jasper, even though it’s agreed that he’s Rob’s dog, takes to sleeping in front of Chas’ door. When she lets him in, he starts to sleep under Baby Mark’s crib. His guard dog instincts don’t stop there, though. Whenever anyone takes a bath in the first floor bathroom, Jasper saunters in and waits patiently on the throw rug in front of the sink for them to finish.
Jasper’s paws are huge, and Rob thinks he’ll grow very big, very quick.
He was a mutt, some kind of black lab and gigantic mutant dog mix. He slept wherever Baby Mark slept and watched whatever Baby Mark did, and no matter what kind of inventive torture Baby Mark put him through (chewing on his tail, pulling on his ears, sleeping on him every once in a while), Jasper seemed to love it.
It makes me suspicious, though, because how can it not? I mean, after Summer the Third, and what we found out then.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I’m not the best bus passenger, anyway; I get motion sickness now if I run too fast. And that’s going to make things difficult, because running became a big part of our lives when Peter Brandle started looming up so large in them.
Take the second expedition to the creek. Brenda and Tom, more eager than anyone else to get back in the good fight against Peter Brandle (especially since hearing of Rob’s defeat of the big blind cat), want to take a trip out to the creek and see what’s what. Maxy has told them about the shared dream, and Davey’s warning, but Davey’s warning as the same odd effect on them that it had on Maxy and Rob: they want to go and see what all the fuss is about.
Rob stays home this time, helping to watch the kids. Maxy leads the way out to the creek, wondering what the heck they think they’re playing at.
Brenda says, “The line’s spread out here, look.”
And it has. The dead plant line hasn’t come much farther into Still Creek, but it’s pushing past it and closer to Cherrywood. This makes Maxy nervous; it was bad enough when it was a perfect circle, but at least that meant Peter Brandle’s power, whatever it was, was checked on all sides by one side. Now it appears it isn’t checked at all.
They all skirt the line, trying not to step over onto the autumn side.
The creek is the same as it was before: innocent at first, but then Maxy sees that the water seems to be flowing faster and deeper. He walks ahead while Brenda and Tom are still trying to peer up-creek and heads for the pond.
The pond is black and stinking.
Maxy rears back when he gets the first whiff and calls out, “You guys!” Brenda is at Maxy’s shoulder in an instant, gasping, and Tom follows.
“Holy shit,” Tom says after a moment. Brenda, keeping her eyes on the pond, leans down to grab a stick.
Maxy creeps forward and, despite the watering of his eyes as the smell gets worse, finds that the pond is actually a dark green. It’s filled with slime. A rock by his foot suddenly shifts and croaks; it’s a toad, and Maxy jumps back with a curse.
The toad waddles forward and pitches headfirst into the water. When it hits, there are barely any ripples, and it sinks like the stone Maxy thought it was.
“Guys!”
Maxy turns; Brenda’s stick is sucked violently from her hand and goes flying down the creek to land in the pond, where it, too, sinks. Tom inspects Brenda’s hand. There’s a welt from where she had tried to hold onto the stick and it was pulled violently away from her.
“I guess it’s hungry,” Brenda says, and laughs unsteadily. Maxy turns back to the pond and falls backwards with a startled cry; something’s rising from the pond. The water is slipping soundlessly but thickly from the vaguely oval, green-slimed dome. It’s bigger than a soccer ball, almost as big as Maxy’s torso.
“What is that?” Tom asks, revulsion strong in his voice. The smell gets sharply worse and the three of them step back, lifting their hands to their noses. The mass revolves slowly in the water and something like a leg comes into view.
“It’s the cat,” Maxy says, and he starts laughing in much the same way as Brenda had before. But he can’t stop, no matter the terrible smell in the air, and is soon wheezing and gasping for air, tears pouring down his cheeks. Brenda and Tom each grab one of his arms as the cat’s head lifts up out of the slime. Thick water pours from its sockets as it turns its face to the children.
“Home,” Brenda says firmly, over Maxy’s gasping, and she and Tom turn him around violently. Behind them, as nonchalant as can be, stands Peter Brandle, just over the autumn line.
“M-Mr. Brandle,” Brenda says weakly. Tom shakes Maxy, but Maxy can’t stop wheezing. “I--you--”
Peter Brandle raises an eyebrow and uncrosses his arms. An almost amused expression lights on his face, briefly, and he opens his mouth as if to answer her. Instead of speaking, however, a stream of green-black water gushes from his lips.
“Oh god,” Tom chokes. Brenda’s mouth drops open, and Maxy’s hysterical laughter is killed, stone-dead. He’s still breathing hard, limbs trembling from the rush, and he hears the slow, phlegmatic progress of the cat through the pond. Caught on either side, unable to go forward or back, Maxy’s breath slows to almost nothing.
“Motherfucker!” Brenda gives a sudden, eagle-screech scream and launches herself forward, sweeping a thorn bush from out of its bed around the pond and lashing it across Peter Brandle’s face before anyone can blink. Then she runs past him, tossing back over her shoulder, “What now? I’m on your land, sucker!”
And the sound that comes from Peter Brandle’s throat isn’t quite human when he lurches around, one hand up to his eyes. Tom yanks Maxy around and they jump over the creek, ducking around errant branches as they run back to Still Creek. Meowing breaks out behind them, but neither look back to see if anything is gaining.
As they clear the trees, they do hear something still crashing through. Before they can look back, though, Brenda barrels between them, laughter drifting behind her. “Come on, slowpokes!” she calls back, not slowing down at all. She’s in the house before they can reach the deck.
“You didn’t see it, Chas,” Brenda says. She crosses her arms right back at them. “He’s not human. And that damn cat--”
“Watch the language,” Chas warns. Her voice is low. “And keep it down. The babies don’t need to hear this.” The babies are across the room, in front of the television.
“The babies don’t need to be around for this,” Maxy says. He’s as surprised as anyone else to hear himself speak up, and about such a topic, but he presses on. “Maybe I should call Linda.”
“Do you really think she’ll take them home?” Chas asks. Her tone is flat, and Maxy knows exactly what she isn’t saying.
“But he’s got a point,” Tom argues. “We can’t stay inside all the time, and there’s even something going on in the house. I hear the thing in the storage room, too.”
“The thing in the storage room,” Chas repeats, and her voice is low and angry. She turns around and stalks out of the game room, stomping past the storage room and up the stairs. None of the children go after her. Even Rob has lost his authority, and waits silently with the rest.
Chas reappears moments later with the fireplace poker in hand, but she doesn’t return to the game room. She stands outside the storage room door and looks back, over her shoulder.
“Move the babies to a bedroom and shut the door,” she says. Her knuckles are white. Maxy looks down to find that Aaron and Nicholas are standing at his side, and even Baby Mark and Adam are looking to the older kids, rather than the television.
“Don’t open it,” Aaron says. Nicholas takes Maxy’s hand, and that’s how Maxy knows he’s afraid; Nicholas doesn’t initiate physical contact with anyone but his twin.
“Move the babies to a bedroom,” Chas says again. Rob moves like he’s caught in slow-motion, picking up Baby Mark in one arm and settling Adam in the other. Maxy doesn’t move. He can’t. The muffled sounds have gotten stronger from the storage room and he knows that part of the infestation there is because of him. He can’t be standing with Aaron and Nicholas when that door opens. Something from inside of that room will head straight for him.
Eventually, Tom takes the twins, pulling them along behind Rob. Brenda and Johnny form the second line behind Chas, and then Maxy and Davey. After a moment, Maxy grabs the nearest weapon: a heavy frame.
Chas twists the knob, and pushes the door open.
The smell from the storage room sends them all reeling back. Maxy had thought the creek smelled bad. Chas recovers after two steps but something is already coming out of the storage room. Something is creeping forward, slimy fingers scrabbling for purchase on the carpet. A twisted face leers up at them, disfigured by death.
It’s Eddie, and he’s not under the shed anymore.
The horror of it is so intense that Maxy doesn’t realize Chas is screaming until the poker lands on Eddie’s head, driving into the skull. “This is my house! This is my home! Get out!”
The poker falls again and something solid and black shows under Eddie’s brittle skull. Chas brings the poker down on Eddie’s reaching hand and then stabs him through the brain with it. Creek water, slimy and green-black, is pouring from his mouth.
“Get out of my house! You’re not real! You’re not welcome! Get out!”
The miracle is happening, though. The smell is going away, and Maxy knows it’s not a smell he could get used to so it’s definitely fading. The bright, animal intelligence that originally showed in Eddie’s dead button eyes is gone; they’re marble-flat, and then they’re closed. Chas drops the poker and puts both hands out, as if trying to stop a runaway cart, and there’s a flash. It’s like the world got brighter for an instant, but just around where Chas is standing, and then it spread out in front of her and left a little brightness in each inch it traveled.
Eddie’s gone.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Chas says, and falls over.
It’s not a good thing that all of us took a smart step back. But I don’t think any of us could bear seeing her like that. Chas was the closest thing we had to a grown-up, and we needed her to be grown-up. We couldn’t handle her crying. We needed her to be all right.
When Chas stops her furtive crying, she picks up the poker and walks out of the house. Maxy and Brenda follow, after ordering Johnny and Davey inspect the storage room. Maxy doesn’t think there’s anything in the storage room after that, but he can see that Chas is still in a mood. He doesn’t want Johnny and Davey going where he thinks Chas is headed next:
The pond. Chas marches along like she’s going to war, and Brenda and Maxy trail after her. Maxy smells the pond from the edge of the woods, and hears the thick sound of it soon after. It’s rippling in the still afternoon.
“Chas,” Brenda says weakly. Her face is pale, and she looks ready to be sick--a far cry from the fearless sprinter earlier. Maxy can’t believe this is all happening in a single day.
“I won’t have it on my land,” Chas says. She lifts the poker in both hands, high above her head, and does something that Maxy could not have imagined her doing in his worst nightmares: she hops into the pond.
The movement is lightning fast, and at first Maxy thinks it must be a nightmare. It can’t be real. But when the slimy water closes above her head, he moans, and falls to his knees. The pond is only supposed to be, at most, two feet deep.
There is a sudden and loud meowing. It’s coming from the pond.
“Chas--” Brenda chokes out, grabbing Maxy’s arm. Her nails sink into the flesh and he flinches, the pain of it so sudden and sharp that, for a second, he thinks that’s why the world has flashed, has gotten brighter.
The meowing turns into screaming, full-out cat-screeching in that split second of light. It’s so loud that it still rings in Maxy and Brenda’s ears in the silence, when Chas is straightening from a crouch in the pond, clear water dripping from her hair.
Peter Brandle is standing on the other side of the autumn line, watching them.
Chas turns to him. She holds out the poker like a sword. “Not on my land.”
Peter Brandle says, “It won’t be yours much longer.”
No one in the world has ever stood taller than Chas when she says, “You won’t take another inch away from me.”
It’s from that moment, or so close to it as to make no difference, that a new line forms: a line of living plants that marks the edges of Still Creek, and Chas’ property.
Chas had made Still Creek into a fortress. We knew that Peter Brandle was still prowling around, and Tom still heard the cat sometimes--not often, as it had more reason to hate Rob--but we were content to stay within the bounds of Still Creek and, at times, even forget what had happened in our own house.
It sounds incredible, but we did forget. The storage room became just another room within days, and we even started catching toads out by the pond again, like nothing had ever happened. I can’t explain why we became so comfortable again so quickly, not for sure, but I can hazard a guess:
Chas had won a battle. She made Still Creek our tower. Peter Brandle left us alone for the rest of that summer because he knew it would be easier to wait the summer out, to finish what he’d started when we were divided, when some of us would have to leave the boundaries of Still Creek.
And I’m not just talking about Rob’s place, or Tom’s, or Brenda’s. He reached as far as Linda’s place that winter.
Maxy and the twins get home just in time to start school. The events of last year lead to Maxy’s sudden and complete isolation: he abandoned his old friends, after all, and wasn’t interested in making new ones. It had been enough, last semester, to call Rob and Chas and keep up with things on that end. But now Maxy is starting to feel the pinch of loneliness, and he can’t quite make those phone calls last long enough. Chas doesn’t have much time to talk, anyway, and even Rob starts to sound strange and distant.
“What’s going on?” Maxy says, one day, into the phone. It’s not a greeting; there’s too much urgency for that.
Rob hesitates. Then he says, “It’s just tough. I don’t know. Can we talk later?”
“Yeah,” Maxy says, after a moment in which he swears he won’t cry. He’s going to turn fourteen; he’s too old to cry, especially when it’s because someone’s a bit too busy now to talk to him. Rob sets his phone down and Maxy listens to the dial tone for a minute, staring at the couch until his vision blurs and he knows he’s crying.
It’s stupid. He can’t help it. He’s never been so lonely in his life.
He rests the phone on its cradle and wipes his eyes with his sleeve, swearing at himself under his breath. Something soft and warm brushes against the hand he leaves dangling, and a curious cat-noise makes Maxy’s stomach tighten like a fist.
He sees Nero, blurrily, preparing to make another pass under his hand. Maxy jumps onto the couch before he‘s aware of moving. His hands feel like ice.
There’s nothing there--no Nero, nothing else--when he looks again. Not even when he works up the courage to look under the couch, or peer around the house on his own. Maxy jumps when he looks around corners or hears his own breath catch, but there’s nothing.
Until it rains the next night, and Linda complains about the neighbors locking their cat outside.
“Can’t they hear that poor thing? Meowing all damn night,” Linda mutters. Husband #4 is shaking cereal into a bowl for Nicholas. When Maxy turns his gaze to the twins, knowing that his face is ghastly with fear, he sees the same expression mirrored on theirs.
In the car, Linda says, “Max. Is something wrong?”
Maxy can’t remember the last time she’s spoken to him without adding the ‘darling.’ “It’s nothing.”
“Something is wrong.”
He hates it when she thinks she’s smart. “Because otherwise I just hit people for fun?”
Linda drops him off at the house before heading back to work. “We’ll talk after work, Max.”
Max is almost fourteen. Nevertheless, he turns on the lights in the hallway, and then in every room, he enters, and finally waits for someone else to fill up their lonely house in his room. When he falls asleep, he has troubled dreams about something crawling out of the twins’ toy box.
Later, he finds out the twins have been having the selfsame dream.
Maxy wakes up late that same night and the lights are off in his room. He panics briefly, fighting out of his blankets and stumbling to the door, but on opening it hears Linda’s voice:
“I just don’t think it would be a good idea to move them. The twins won’t talk to any of the kids at school, and the teacher wants them to stay back another year. They’re not ready for first grade, she says. And Max punched a kid in school today!”
“I heard, Linda,” Husband #4 says, and there’s a sound like setting down a coffee mug. “Do you want to keep the house here, then?”
“We can’t afford two houses. It can’t be done. Unless I can reach a deal with my boss…” Linda’s voice trails off. “Greg, what about--”
“We’re not going to dump our kids on someone else.”
“We don’t have another choice--”
“There’s always another choice!”
“We could take that loan my brother’s been offering.”
“We don’t need his charity.”
“This is about family, not charity.”
This is the first time Maxy has heard them fighting. He settles against the door post, listening closely.
“He’s already got the other two to worry about--”
“Johnny and Davey are doing magnificently at Still Creek; don’t you see? It’s a place they’re used to; it’s comfortable and stable. And it’s family; Greg, it’s better than splitting them up and moving them into separate apartments, and leaving the twins in daycare all day long. We can’t afford it, anyway.”
“Linda.”
“Greg! My brother had to rely on family once, too. Or do you think Chastity sprang, fully formed, from his forehead?”
Sometimes Maxy wonders if Linda’s crazy.
“Can we talk about it in the morning?” And that’s Husband #4’s defeated voice, and Linda will press on until he agrees with her, gives her whatever it is she wants from him. Maxy heard that voice only once before deciding that “Greg” wasn’t worth a remembered name.
“We’ll talk about it now, Greg.” Linda’s voice is like steel. “We have to make a decision.”
But Maxy doesn’t sit around to listen to what the decision is, or wonder any more about what they’re deciding on, because another door has opened and two little bodies are blocking the lower rays of a nightlight. Maxy moves out of his room and down the hallway to where Aaron and Nicholas are waiting.
“What?” he whispers.
The twins point in one silent, eerily motion, to their closet door. For a moment, Maxy feels like he’s in a dream: there is a piece of paper taped to the door, and on this paper there is an odd and compelling scribble. And from behind the door, there are distinctly storage room sounds.
Nowhere in Maxy’s soul is the depth of anger that allowed Chas to face whatever would come out of the dark. Maxy can only lead the twins back to his room, and sit awake until they’re sleeping, before he finally tries to close his eyes.
Maxy goes to the twins’ room on the last day. Their toys lay scattered around the room, but not in a way that suggests the twins have been playing with them. It looks more like each one has been thrown violently from its starting point, and that starting point would be the closet.
The door is shut. The room is silent as a grave.
Maxy says, “You can reach pretty far, but even you’re not strong enough to hurt me this far away.” The room remains silent, and Maxy starts to nod, smiling like he‘s baring his teeth. “You can scare us, but you can’t hurt us. Not this far away.”
From behind the closet door, there is a sudden and loud meowing. Maxy lifts his chin and smiles bigger; he strolls to the door and puts his hand on the knob. It’s not any colder to the touch than he is expecting. He opens it casually, knowing with a full and complete certainty that it’s too late for anything to be in there and waiting for him.
There’s a part of him that’s almost disappointed when the closet is empty. All of the twins’ winter clothing has been packed up to send to Chas’ place.
Maxy lets the closet swing shut again and turns around, catching the movement out of the corner of his eye: there’s something deep within the mirrored disc in the center of the mobile on the twins’ wall. Maxy walks up to it and stares at his own reflection in the glass, imprinting the look of his face in his mind.
“You can’t touch anything here anymore, because it’s not mine, and it’s not the twins’,” he says. “We belong to Still Creek now. Catch us there, if you can.”
The scribble on the closet door comes loose, sliding to the floor. Maxy walks out of the room and shuts the door behind him.
It’s mid-October. It’s time to go back to Still Creek.