The envelope was outlined in gold leaf and addressed in Gothic script. Nothing else that came in the mail that day was of particular interest. Bills with plastic windows. Three unwanted record club selections. Catalogs selling button-down oxford shirts for men, in colors like yucca, furze, and jungle burgundy. There was considerable curiosity about the Gothic letter by the time Gregory Buchanan ripped it open.
Later that day, he showed it to his friend Brian. They were having burgers.
“Look what I got.”
“What is it?” asked Brian.
“Invitation,” said Gregory. His mouth was full. “From my uncle Max up in Vermont.”
“Why all the gold lettering?”
“He’s strange, Uncle Max.” Gregory shook his head. “Probably insane. He lives in kind of a different world from the rest of us. You know? The kind of world where electricity is a lot of invisible spiders. The kind of world where there’s organ music that gets louder when he eats refined sugar.”
Brian smiled and nodded.
“So,” said Gregory, “I’m supposed to go up to his place in Vermont for a while. To visit him and my cousin Prudence.” Gregory squelched some ketchup onto his plate. “The letter says I have to bring ‘a companion.’” Gregory opened up the note. “Well, it says, ‘a companion for your amusement, so long as he be of solid reputation and respectful and unspotted demeanor.’” Gregory handed the note to Brian. He explained, “You’re the only one of my friends who’s house-trained.”
Brian, pudgy and dark-haired, looked at the letter through his glasses. He read, half-muttering, “‘…to enjoy the salutary effects of the bucolic landscape and air untrammeled by the effluents and insalubrities of the urban crush.’”
“You’re the smart one,” said Gregory. “Can you translate?”
“I think it means that the countryside is healthy and the city is dirty. Does he always talk like this?”
“I don’t know. I only met him once.”
“I’d,” said Brian, shrugging, “I’d like to go.”
“I’m inviting you. You don’t need to be timid.”
“I’d like to.”
“I’m warning you, he’s strange.”
“It will…I guess…it will be an adventure.”
“Oh, sure. It’ll be weird. Very weird.”
Brian smiled. “I don’t want to miss it.”
“Okay,” said Brian. “Okay. Now I’m going to order another Fanta.”
They couldn’t know what an adventure it would be. Already, things were waiting in the hills. Things were hiding in the bushes by the dingy lights of rural Halt’N’Buys, traveling on their strange and lonely pilgrimages.
Things had issued invitations.
Gregory Buchanan and Brian Thatz had been best friends for many of their thirteen years. No one could figure out why, or how. The differences between the two were obvious at first glance: Gregory was slim and fair-haired, with a smirk that suggested his flippancy and wit; Brian was stockier, with wire-framed glasses and dark hair, and a quiet frown that suggested he was the more thoughtful and pensive of the two. Gregory was popular, even though (or perhaps because) almost nothing he said made sense. Brian made a lot of sense, but hardly anyone but Gregory ever heard what he had to say. Others didn’t see how they got along. Gregory said it was like they were two lobes of the same brain.
When they were in groups, at school or out with the rest of their friends, Gregory kept up a steady flow of talk. Brian hung back shyly, but he often saw things no one else saw. They were inseparable. It was assumed they would spend their school’s October vacation together.
Very soon, they had made arrangements with their parents to travel by train up to Gerenford,Vermont, where they would be picked up by Uncle Max for two weeks’ stay in the Green Mountains. Mrs. Thatz, Brian’s mother, could only comment that, “At this time of year, the view will be lovely! You’ll be there for the changing leaves!” She then lapsed into an autumnal rapture about oranges and reds and fading yellows while Mr. Thatz passed out more mashed potatoes.
So three weeks after the letter arrived, the two were standing in North Station in Boston, waiting for the 8:47 train. The sun was particularly bright that day as the two squinted down the tracks, standing by their overstuffed suitcases. Brian examined the various stickers on Gregory’s suitcase. He asked, “Hey—you’ve never been to Algiers. Have you? Or Sri Lanka? Or Salzburg?”
“No,” said Gregory. “Actually, this is my cousin Prudence’s. You’ll meet her up at Uncle Max’s. She lives there and takes care of things for him.”
“Whose side of your family are they on?”
“Uncle Max isn’t on either side,” Gregory explained. “He’s not related. Prudence’s parents—my aunt and uncle—died when she was seventeen or so. Uncle Max was a good friend of my real uncle. After her parents died, Prudence went to live with him. Before that, though, she traveled all over the world.”
“Is she nice?”
“I guess so. I like her, but she’s very boring. She doesn’t really make jokes. That’s one thing you’ll notice about her. Really nice, and has the sense of humor of a brick. But, you’ll meet her.”
Brian nodded, scuffled his sneaker on the concrete, then peered down the track.
The 8:47 arrived at 9:23. With a hiss and a screech, the train slowed to a halt and shot its doors open. The acrid smell of burning rubber and oily steel drifted through the air. There was quite a large crowd waiting to get on. Seating was tight in the train cars. Finally, they found two seats facing each other and heaved their luggage up on the rack above them. With a jerk, the train rolled off to the west.
For about an hour, Brian occupied himself with a 1930s detective novel in which people fired off rounds in alleyways and spoke out of the sides of their mouths, saying things like, “I’m falling for that dame real hard, like a bicyclist in a big, spiked pit.” Gregory played handheld Foosball.
The train rumbled on through Massachusetts and Vermont, passing far western towns whose names were, to Bostonians, merely legends. The vistas grew more and more expansive, the landscapes continually more rolling and uneven, until finally the Green Mountains rose into sight. The train wound through vast wooded valleys, past cliffs that had been blasted from the stone to make chasms for the dwarfed highways. Through the window they could see nothing but unending forests and pine-covered hills, mellow in the glow of early fall.
When Brian next looked up, the train was almost empty. People had stepped off at earlier, more suburban stops. There were only a few people left.
One of them was staring straight at him.
Brian looked up meekly and tried to see the man’s face. The man was hiding slightly behind an old lady’s plastic rain-hood. He was dressed in an old tweed overcoat, a black leather cap pulled down over his forehead. His face was thin, his eyes sunken.
Brian nervously dropped his gaze back to A Dirk on Thirty-Third Street, where Archie Temple was hanging off the side of a hotel, pummeling a thug with one hand and reading his prayer beads with the other.
Out of the corner of his eye, Brian saw the man draw something out of his pocket.
Something that glittered with blades.