Than led the way around the small valley, his stick beating a slow rhythm on the cold ground. Hippie walked behind Cohen, and he felt a bit like a prisoner in a war movie, the one forced to walk in between his captors. But Hippie was kind—she was no captor—and she asked him questions about where he lived and what his family was like, her voice coming up to him from behind like a pleasant memory.
Than stopped and turned, waiting for them. He looked at Cohen and rolled his eyes, shook his head. “This way,” he muttered, plunging stick first into the briars that lined the bowl-shaped depression in the woods.
At first Cohen wondered how they were supposed to make their way through. He held back so Hippie passed him, and as she did she looked up into his face, and he saw something different there in those green eyes, something foreign. He gave a weak smile and followed her.
That’s when he realized there was a path. The narrow trail struck into the briars at an angle that made it easy to miss based on the direction he had been circling. Sometimes he had to raise his arms straight up above his head to avoid the reaching thorns, and sometimes he had to turn sideways. Than plunged ahead, disregarding the reaching stems, some of them clinging to him as he passed, then springing back. Hippie’s movement was more like a glide than a walk, and the blackberry briars seemed to brush off of her as if they were feathers.
As they descended through the thickets, as the path circled around the hill, lower and lower, the smell of smoke got stronger. The odor of charred and blackened life. The wind came back, sweeping through the branches and clinking them all together, and some old branch that had long ago broken off but had still somehow been entangled finally fell to the earth, crashing into the undergrowth.
Than whipped around, facing the crash. Hippie’s face went straight to the sky, her hand shielding her eyes from the glaring winter white-gray, and she ducked. Cohen felt his heart thudding in his chest and froze. What were Than and Hippie so afraid of?
Cohen couldn’t move. He wanted to turn and run, but he couldn’t even do that. He glanced back and forth, from one side of the depression to the other, waiting for who knows what. The wind that had first started high in the branches now dropped in among the tree trunks and flowed through the vast expanse of thickets like water. The long, red-black stems of the blackberry bushes rose and bowed, swayed from side to side, as if the presence of the children disturbed them.
“C’mon,” Than hissed, moving ahead at a trot. Hippie glanced back at Cohen, and he saw she was nervous. She nodded, a small kind of encouragement, and it loosened his body from that fearful paralysis. He nodded back, a smaller, less determined gesture, took a deep breath, and followed the two of them down the hill.
The blackberry thickets went on for a long time, but they thinned out in the small yard around the mobile home. The only real reason you could call it a yard was that there were no trees, the thorns were few and far between, and there was some semblance of grass, but—and this was true especially in the winter—it was sparse and tan and brittle.
Littering the space outside of the trailer, like supports strategically placed to help weeds grow, were various plastic things for children. A small blue plastic swimming pool, cracked and upside down. A miniature plastic slide, orange with teal-green steps. A red tricycle with flat black tires. But what made these things seem even stranger was the fact that they were all in various stages of melting. Those closer to the blackened section of the trailer were almost unrecognizable; those farther away were less obviously melted, but the subtle nature of their deformities felt odd, somehow scary. The slide, for example, was farthest away and at first glance seemed unharmed, but the steps sagged ever so slightly.
It was as if the entire world was melting there in that hollow, as if something so powerful had passed through so as to affect even the basic molecular structure of things. Cohen wouldn’t have been surprised to look over and see Than’s face half melted, or Hippie’s feet slowly dissolving into the ground.
What he did see when he finally pulled his gaze from the warped playthings was Than approaching the door, the very same one that was still banging open and closed, open and closed. It hung on by only one hinge. There were no real stairs, only cement blocks that had been stacked in a haphazard half pyramid like some kind of Mayan structure. They were blackened from the fire.
Hippie stood with her back to the trailer, looking up and away, slowly turning as she watched the crest of the hill closely. Cohen was transfixed by her.
“What’s your name?” Than hissed, startling Cohen.
Embarrassed that he had been caught staring at Hippie, he tried to sound nonchalant. “I told you. Cohen.”
“C’mon, Cohen,” Than said, coughing up his name as if he thought it was a pseudonym.
Cohen made his way through and around the melted plastic remnants. “What are you guys doing here, anyway?” he asked.
Than shushed him.
“Sorry,” Cohen whispered. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Than glared at him. Hippie walked to the door, and soon the three of them were standing there in a small huddle, Than up on the seared cinder-block stairs, Cohen with his back to the mobile home, Hippie with her back to the forest but still looking up into the sky. She was always looking up.
Than grabbed the door and held it motionless. The absence of the slapping sound it had made while swinging back and forth caused a deep silence to descend. Cohen hadn’t even realized how much of a comfort that repetitive sound had been, but standing there with nothing now to separate him from the sounds of the forest or the smell of the burned house, he felt exposed.
“Remember that thing you saw?” Hippie asked.
“In the dark?” Cohen asked. “On the street corner? Yeah. I remember.”
Hippie’s eyes left Cohen and traveled around the trailer as if taking everything in for the first time. “It did this,” she said quietly.
“That shadow thing did this? I thought this was a house fire.”
Than sneered, laughed to himself, and shook his head. “No, man, the shadow thing, as you call it, did this. No ordinary house fire.”
“What, can it breathe fire?” Cohen joked, but the other two didn’t seem to find it funny. “C’mon,” he said. “Seriously. What is it, some kind of a dragon?”
“No.” Than turned and walked into the house. “It’s a Beast.” When he opened the door the whole way, it swung out and away from the house on its one lonely hinge before falling off entirely and crashing to the ground. Hippie didn’t give it a second look—she scaled the pyramid of blackened cinder blocks and disappeared into the house behind Than.
Cohen stood there, staring. He wanted to leave. Or at least most of him wanted to leave. He turned and saw the place where the narrow path scaled the small hill and wound its way between the thorny blackberry shoots. It was a winding way, and it was tempting. There were too many things here he didn’t understand, too many things he couldn’t put his finger on, but that was what kept him from leaving. He wanted to know more about what he had seen.
He walked up the cement block steps and they wobbled under him. The last step up, the one from the highest block and into the trailer, was a monumental step, and he had to reach up with both hands, grab the inside of the door frame, and pull himself in. No matter how much he told himself that he had chosen to go in, no matter how he reminded himself that he had climbed in willingly, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being swallowed.
The darkness inside the burned-out mobile home could be felt, like humidity. It was like its own environment—heavy, sticky—and even though it was a cold winter day, the darkness made him feel like he was sweating. He reached up and pulled the collar of his coat away from his neck to let in some fresh air. He cleared his throat and waited for his eyes to adjust, at least a little bit. Under his feet, with each step, was the grinding of broken glass. He had once stepped on the skeleton of an opossum in the woods, and the floor of the trailer felt like that, like a bed of old bones. He took another crumbling step.
A flash of light. He jumped back, raised his hands. Than laughed.
“Easy, Than,” Hippie said.
“We’re here to find something,” Than said to Cohen. “Hippie’s going to watch the door. Me and you, we’re going to look. Got it?”
“Okay. What are we looking for? I thought we were looking for the Beast.”
Than rolled his eyes and shined his flashlight into Cohen’s face again.
“Than,” Hippie said.
“Fine,” he muttered, lowering the beam.
Cohen’s eyes were dazzled, and it took them some time to readjust to the darkness.
“We’re not looking for that thing, not yet,” Than said. “We’re on the lookout. There’s a big difference.”
“So . . .”
“So,” Than continued, turning and walking toward the back of the trailer, “we’re looking for something someone left here. Something that will help us destroy it.”
Cohen looked over at Hippie in frustration. “You can’t tell me what we’re looking for?” he asked.
“We don’t know. Not for sure,” Hippie said quietly, never looking away from the hillside. “Than seems to think there might be something we missed, something useful.”
“You were here before?”
Hippie sent a glance at Than, and in the half-light coming through the door, it looked like a warning.
“I can’t tell you what we’re looking for because I don’t know what we’re looking for,” Than said, leading Cohen slowly back into the hallway.
“So how will we know . . .” Cohen began, but Than turned and shined the light in his eyes again.
“Just. Look.”
“Fine, fine,” Cohen muttered, shielding his face with his hands.
“You start in this room,” Than said, turning into the first room on the left. He walked brashly through the small space and flung up the blind that covered the window. Daylight eased its gray way in. He stomped out and went back to the hallway, his flashlight bobbing from side to side as he walked.
Cohen looked around. The back half of the mobile home hadn’t been as affected by the fire. The rooms still smelled of smoke, and a few of the walls had turned brown due to the heat that had climbed up the other side of them, but they were intact. There was a small single bed with a pink blanket, a side table with a lamp that had a white shade, and a pale green rug spread on the floor over the top of the nasty tan carpet that stretched wall to wall through the trailer. He lifted the mattress and peered between it and the box spring. He opened the closet door warily, but it was empty. He stared hard at the ceiling, the light fixture, and even pulled up the heat register in the floor. Nothing.
What was he looking for, and where would he find this unknown thing?
Cohen approached the window. There was a thin, stained white sheer tacked into the wall with pushpins above the window frame. He pulled it to the side so that he could look out into the front yard again. He saw the melted toys. The bramble-covered hillside. The naked trees, tall at the top of the hill, dark against the gray sky. He scanned the blackberry thorns for any movement, any sign of the Beast.
A jolt of panic surged through him. Was he alone? Had the other two left him? It was the same feeling he had walking up the stairs at night, when he was certain a hand was preparing to seize his foot.
He turned and trod over the throw rug, the worn tan carpet, and peeked into the hallway. He glanced into the living room, but Hippie wasn’t there.
“Hippie?” he said, his voice swallowed quickly by his fear. Or had he even spoken out loud? Had he only called for her in his imagination? He was finding it difficult anymore, identifying the line between what was hard, concrete, real, and what was not.
“Than?”
He heard a rustling sound farther back in the trailer, deeper into the shadows. He took a few steps into the hall, passing a pitch-black bathroom. It smelled like bleach and bug spray and feces. The next room was almost as small as the bathroom, but it had a window.
“Hippie?” he called back over his shoulder.
He thought he should leave. But there in the small room, under the window without a curtain, was a leaning desk. One of the back legs was missing, and it had been propped up against the wall. Gray winter light glared off the light wood. Besides the desk, the room was empty, not that there would have been room for any other furniture. The floor was some kind of fake laminate made to look like hardwood. It creaked and moaned under his feet.
Dirt smudged the window in round dots, the dusty remains of some other day’s raindrops. Cohen ran his hand over the desk’s smooth top. An urge came over him, and he opened the top right drawer. It made a scraping sound as if the runners were broken. There were some old receipts there, disorganized, torn. Balled-up gum wrappers. An empty cigarette pack.
He pushed the drawer closed, looked over his shoulder, and opened the bottom drawer. Empty.
“Than?” he shouted over his shoulder. He could still hear Than in the back bedroom. It sounded like he was sliding metal hangers along a clothes rack. “Hippie?”
Cohen opened the top left drawer, the smallest of all. There was another empty cigarette pack. He picked it up and looked inside, the plastic crinkling in his hands. He set it down on top of the smooth wood, pushed the drawer closed, and opened the bottom left drawer. He stared down into its depths.
This drawer was full of envelopes stuffed with old yellowed things like coupons, more receipts, and paper clips. It held a pair of scissors, a stapler, a yellow fly swatter, and blue glass cleaner, now leaning and leaking onto all the other things. And under it all, buried in the mess, was a shoebox.
He gently removed everything and stacked it in a line on the desktop. He handled each and every object as if it was part of a bomb that would explode with any jarring, any shaking. The plastic bottle of glass cleaner was sticky on the outside. He hated that. He hated having a mess on his fingertips. The fly swatter still had insect guts on it. The stapler was jammed—he knew because he tried to shoot a staple out into midair.
He pulled the shoebox out with two hands, placed it on the desk among everything else, and stared at it for a moment. He was convinced, for no particular reason, that something living resided on the inside, and he waited for this unknown thing to move the lid. The box was navy blue with an American flag on the front and back. The lid had a single white stripe down the middle, and the corners were worn and broken so that it didn’t sit quite right on the box. He pushed the lid aside.
Inside the box were random, unmatched socks. Children’s socks and adult tube socks. Dress socks and even a few long women’s stockings. He pushed them here and there, hesitantly stirring them in the box with his index finger to better see what else might be inside. He was worried that a mouse might have made its home there. But as he moved them to the side and his hand went deeper into the shoebox, he felt something cold, something hard, something that was most definitely not a sock. He grabbed it and lifted it out. It was heavy and dangled from his hand, and he held it like a live thing.
He had never held a gun before, unless you count the BB gun he almost never used, the one propped in the back of his closet. He stared quietly at it, wondering if it was loaded. He took it in the palm of his hand, the black metal curving. He pointed it at the window and closed one eye, lining up the sight with the other eye. He imagined seeing the Beast and following it in his sight as it crept down the path among the briars. He found its head there somewhere in its shadowy mass.
Bang.
“That’s it,” Than said, startling Cohen, who jumped and nearly dropped the gun.
“Hey!” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “Why are you sneaking around like that?”
“That’s it,” Than said again. “You found it.”
“This?”
Than nodded. He held out his hand.
Cohen gave him the gun without thinking twice. Than flicked out the cylinder and spun it. Each chamber was empty, like a vacant eye socket.
“In there?” Than asked, motioning to the shoebox full of socks.
Cohen nodded.
Than shook his head and laughed to himself, and he seemed less a boy than a wizened old man. “I looked in that desk last time,” he said, laughing again. “But I didn’t look in the shoebox.”
He reached into the shoebox and felt around beneath the socks. Cohen heard the sound of metal things clinking together like a wind chime. Than pulled out a handful of bullets. He stuffed one in each empty chamber, and they clicked into place.
“Well,” Than said, and that was it. Cohen kept waiting to see what was to come of this find, what it meant, where it would take them. But Than said nothing more.
“Where’s Hippie?” Cohen asked.
Than looked up at him, and most of the questions in his eyes about Cohen had left. But there were still a few in there, and they made him squint. “Outside.”
The two boys stared at each other, Cohen with his back to the window, Than with the gun in his right hand and a fistful of bullets in the other. They seemed to reach some kind of understanding, a mutual agreement that while they did not like each other, they had clearly been brought together for some reason.
Than seemed to soften. He looked over his shoulder before speaking. “Look, this needs to stay in here.” He paused. “In case we find the Beast. In case we need it.” He gave Cohen a knowing look. “Just in case. But the thing is, we can’t carry it around, and we can’t tell Hippie about it.”
“Why not?”
“She hates this kind of stuff. It will only upset her. Promise me.”
Cohen sighed. “So where do we keep it?”
Than looked around the room. The sun had dropped lower outside, and the whole trailer was beginning to feel more like a cave than a house. Long shadows of old trees leaned down the hill.
“Hey, where are you guys at?” Hippie shouted in through the front door. “We should get going. It’ll be dark soon.”
Than stared at Cohen as if waiting for him to suddenly shout out that they had found the gun. When Cohen didn’t say anything—in fact, he stood there holding his breath—Than shouted back, “Be right out.”
Than walked over to a small heat register in the floor, the kind that lifts up out of the hole. There were no screws holding it down and it came up easily out of its metal sleeve. He put the revolver down inside the vent, and Cohen heard it ping against the metal air duct. Than looked over his shoulder one more time. He put the remaining bullets inside one of the socks and lowered it down beside the gun, then slipped the register back into place.
“Got it?” he asked Cohen, and Cohen couldn’t tell exactly what he meant by the question. He could have been asking, “You understand not to tell Hippie, right?” or “You see where I put it, right?” or “You do know if you do anything I don’t like, I’ll shoot you, right?” But Cohen nodded, because sometimes the only answer is yes.
The two walked back out through the front door frame—the door was still on the ground—into the light of that gray day, and after the darkness of the trailer, even the slate sky seemed to glow. A cold wind swept through the forest, rustling the winter branches, moving the brambles to rasp against one another.
Hippie looked up at them.
“Nothing,” Than said quietly, brushing past her and starting back up the winding trail that split the thorns.
She looked at Cohen. He shrugged.
The three of them moved through the blackberry brambles like shadows. Once at the top, as they walked back through the woods toward town, Than moved ahead. Hippie slowed and Cohen drew up beside her.
“Was that your house?” Cohen asked Hippie in a timid voice.
Hippie nodded, staring off into the distance. She turned and looked at Cohen, and her eyes were like steel. “We have to find that thing. We have to stop it before it does anything like this again.”
Hippie’s glaring eyes startled Cohen, and he nodded without saying a word, his mouth hanging partially open. He licked his lips—they were suddenly dry, brittle in the cold. He swallowed. Hippie turned away from him, and the look on her face was both regal and childlike. Her pronouncement made her seem older than she was.
“We have to find that thing,” she muttered again, and Than looked back at them. He reached up and tried to hold down the unruly patch of hair at the back of his head, but as soon as he moved his hand, the hair stood back up.
By the time they got back to the train tracks and walked over them, back into territory Cohen was familiar with, he had drifted into the lead. Than had paused to stare up into the sky. The tops of the trees started waving again, this time in long, bowing motions as if they were sweeping the sky clean. Cohen hadn’t thought it possible when he had run up into the woods only a few hours earlier, but he was ready to go home.
The gun was part of the reason for this. He was glad for every step between him and it. He felt as though he had been given a head start, and now the gun would come after him, that shiny blackness, that cold, hard steel, those handfuls of bullets. They would come slowly out of the trailer after the sun had set, sneaking through the dark like a mean dog that had slipped its leash. Yes, he was glad Than had left it in the trailer. He only wished he would have found a screw to fasten the air vent in place. A screw, he thought, could have kept it there, could have kept the gun from following him.
But there was happiness inside him too, happiness that he had found friends. When his father had been found out, when they had left the church, Cohen lost most of the friends he had. And now Sundays were quiet and slow, or spent at a stranger’s burial while his father presided as funeral director.
He missed Ava. He still thought about her. It was good to have friends again. Even if one of them was like Than.
The wind flared up again, swirling the winter smells of cold, dead leaves and things waiting for spring. They parted without saying goodbye, the three young people, and Cohen found his bike and pedaled furiously for home.