Christopher opened his eyes.
At first, he didn’t understand. The minute he closed the door to David’s tree house, he expected to open the door and see the woods again.
But he was back at home.
In bed.
At night.
Christopher looked around his room. Everything seemed normal. He turned to the antique bookshelf that smelled like baseball gloves. The one his mother filled with his very own books. Everything looked to be in perfect order. The picture of his father rested safely on top. His closet door was closed. The door to his bedroom was locked from the inside. He was in the imaginary world. It was night when the imaginary people were supposed to wake up. But he felt perfectly safe. Christopher breathed a sigh of relief. He threw off the blanket and sat up, getting ready to swing his legs to the floor.
That’s when he heard the breathing.
Coming from under the bed.
Christopher froze. He looked at either side of the bed, waiting for a hand. A claw. Something to reach out and pull him under the bed by his ankles. But nothing came. The person just waited. Breathing. Licking its lips. Christopher thought he could jump and run out of his bedroom. But the door was locked. Not to keep anything out. Locked to keep him in.
Scccratch. Scccratch. Scccratch.
The noise startled Christopher. He looked at the window. The tree in his backyard had somehow moved closer to the house. The tire swing hung like a noose. The tree reached an old withered branch to the glass. Scraping back and forth like an arthritic finger.
Scccratch. Scccratch. Scccratch.
The breathing got louder under the bed. Christopher had to get out of here. Right now. He stood on his bed and brought himself up to his tiptoes. He looked out of his bedroom window into the backyard. He thought he could jump off his bed, land, and climb out.
But the entire backyard was filled with mailbox people.
They stood like laundry drying in the breeze. A hundred deer waited next to them. Lying on the ground. Lurking in the shadows.
Scccratch. Scccratch. Scccratch.
Christopher frantically looked around his room for a way out. His bedroom door was locked. The backyard was filled. He had nowhere to go. Christopher quieted his mind. The nice man said he had powers here. Use them!
Christopher saw a hand reaching up from under the bed.
Christopher jumped off the bed just as the hand grabbed for him. He landed off balance and tripped. He turned back to see hands crawling out from under the bed. The hands were not attached to bodies. Just voices screaming from the shadows.
“COME HERE, CHRISTOPHER!”
They grabbed his feet and ankles and began to pull him back under the bed. Christopher twisted blindly, shaking the hands loose like spiders off a back. A dozen screams erupted as Christopher kicked the hands back to the darkness. He struggled to his feet and ran to his bedroom door. He reached to unlock the doorknob.
Until it began to turn from the other side.
“Can he hear us?” the voices whispered.
Christopher froze. He backed away to his bedroom window and looked down into the backyard. The mailbox people moved the strings linking them together from the right hand to the left. Then, they took their free right hands and reached up like synchronized swimmers to unzip their eyelids at the same time. The metal gleaming in the moonlight.
The mailbox people were waking up.
Christopher turned back into the room to find his bedroom door open. People stood next to the bed with their arms folded behind their backs. They smiled. Chunks of the wood door still stuck in their teeth.
“Hi, Christopher,” they said.
They brought their arms in front of them. Their arms were stubs. Rounded flesh. Chopped off and cauterized.
“Where did you put our hands? Thief!”
They started running at him. Christopher threw open the bedroom window. The deer circled the backyard like piranhas in a tank. If he jumped down, they would tear him to pieces. There was nowhere to go…
…but the roof.
Christopher grabbed the ledge of the bay window and pulled himself up just as the people behind him jumped at him. They reached for his feet, but their bare arms betrayed them, and they slipped, falling into the backyard.
The deer were on them in seconds.
Biting. Ripping. Clawing.
Christopher climbed onto the roof and hid behind the chimney. The first sliver of the blue moon rose above the horizon as night descended. He looked out over his neighborhood. The grey concrete of the street was slowly turning red. The pavement looked squishy. Like after a rain. But this was not rain. It smelled too much like a copper penny. And it ran down the street like a waterslide into the sewers.
The street was bleeding.
He saw the man in the Girl Scout uniform.
Waking up.
The man opened his eyes. He was at least forty or maybe even a young fifty. But his eyes were innocent. And he was happy. He yawned and rubbed away the sleep like a baby. Then, he stood and began to skip down the street, kicking blood puddles all over his bare legs. The man kept whistling a song. Blue Moon. He bent down to tie his shoes near the bushes. Whistling. And tying. And whistling. And tying.
Until two hands reached out and grabbed him.
The man let out a bloodcurdling scream. When Christopher saw who pulled the man into the bushes, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
It was the man himself.
They looked like identical twins. But the other man wasn’t wearing a Girl Scout uniform. He wore glasses that were missing a frame. And a whistle around his neck. He was bald and his hair was too thin to comb over, but he did it anyway. As the balding man ripped off the Girl Scout man’s uniform, Christopher finally understood the words he was screaming.
“GET ME OUT OF HERE! PLEASE!”
Christopher saw another man jogging down the street. Out of nowhere, a car turned the corner and ran into him, knocking the man into the grass. The car screeched to a halt. The car door opened to reveal that the person driving the car was the man himself. He held a flask. When he saw what he had done to himself, the driver ran back into his car and drove away. Then, the man who got hit with the car dusted himself off and stood up. He jogged back into the street. Out of nowhere, the same car turned the corner and ran into him.
“PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!”
Christopher looked around his neighborhood. Everywhere he turned, he saw people hurting themselves. Over and over again. He saw a man cheating on his wife with one of their neighbors. The man and woman were kissing, their arms intertwined like candles melted into each other. They couldn’t stop kissing.
“PLEASE! PLEASE! MAKE IT STOP!” the couple shouted, blood running from their lips.
The screams pounded Christopher’s mind. It felt as if someone had put earphones on his head and turned up the volume to 10. Then 11. Then 12. Up and up and up to infinity. He felt like his brain was cooking. It was beyond a fever. It was beyond a headache. It was beyond any pain he knew possible. Because it wasn’t his pain. It was the world’s pain. And there was no end to it. Christopher’s mind raced for answers inside all of this madness.
I was here for six days.
Christopher looked across the bleeding landscape. The mailbox people fanned through the neighborhood. Climbing chimneys. Gutters. Cable lines. Breaking glass and doors while the deer sniffed the bloody ground. Sniffing for him in the shadows. He heard screaming in the house next door.
“Stop! Don’t hit me, Mom!” a woman said to herself over and over in a little girl’s voice.
“Spare the rod! Spoil the child!” she replied in her mom’s voice as she pulled off her belt.
Christopher felt the woman’s shrieks as she hit herself over and over. The belt connecting to flesh. Christopher calmed his mind as much as he could. He pushed the screams out of his ears and thought quickly.
You have to get the key.
You have to kill the hissing lady.
You have to save the nice man.
He searched his mind for the nice man, but the screams came back, louder than before. Just when he thought his mind would crack in half, there was a great silence. It looked as if someone pushed the OFF button on the street. Every person went limp like a robot at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Every mailbox person. Every deer. Christopher stood, perched on the roof of his house. Waiting. Not breathing.
Something is coming.
What is it?
Suddenly, a familiar sound broke the spell. An ice cream truck was coming down the street. The truck was playing a song, but the little music box sounded warped. Like an old record left out in the sun.
All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the people
The monkey thought that it was a joke
Pop! goes the weasel.
The truck drove closer and closer. The doors of the houses opened, and little children started walking outside. Rubbing their eyes like moles. Squinting in the moonlight. The little children poured into the street and ran at the ice cream truck. They all wore different styles of dress. Some kids looked like old movies that he watched with his mom. Little boys in caps and suspenders. Little girls in poodle skirts. Some of the boys wore Amish hats. Some of the girls wore dresses like the Pilgrims. They moved to the ice cream truck, singing along to the song with their serpent tongues.
A penny for a spool of thread
A penny for a needle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop! goes the weasel.
The ice cream truck stopped. All of the children moved to it, clamoring for their treats with shouts of “Me! Me! Me!”
“Okay, kids,” the voice said. “Pay up.”
Christopher watched the children reach into their pockets and pull out two silver dollars. All of the children lay on the bloody street and put the coins on their closed eyelids. The ice cream man reached his burnt skeleton hand down to collect the money. When all the coins were collected, the hand went back into the shadows of the truck and threw the kids Popsicles and Screwballs and Push-Ups. But they weren’t ice cream.
They were frozen deer legs.
All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the people
The monkey thought that it was a joke.
Pop! goes the weasel.
The music slowed down as if stuck on flypaper. The kids wrapped their tongues around the frozen treats like snakes. Some kids got Screwballs that didn’t have gum on the bottom of the ice cream. They had eyeballs. Other kids got delicious vanilla soft serve with sprinkles on top. But they weren’t sprinkles. They were little teeth. There was only one kid who didn’t have any coins to give the ice cream man.
It was David Olson.
He stood away from the group. All alone. Christopher had never seen such a sad face in all his life. David Olson walked over to the other kids and gestured for a lick of their ice cream. The kids all pushed him away. David walked over to the truck, raising his hands up to beg for free ice cream. The skeleton hand reached out and smacked David’s hand away. Then, the truck started up and moved down the street, bringing the horrible music with it.
A penny for a spool of thread
A penny for a needle
When the ice cream truck was gone, the street came alive. The other children surrounded David and started to hiss at him. Like a pack of wolves surrounding a fawn. Their teeth exposed. Their eyes glowing. Christopher could feel David’s fear. The panic moved from his stomach to his throat. The pounding in David’s chest.
But there were no words.
For the life of him, Christopher could not read David’s thoughts. Every time he tried, his nose bled, and his eyes threatened to push their way out of his skull. A fever broke out on his brow. Sweat poured like the blood rushing down the street into the sewers, dark and filled with voices.
Without warning, the streetlights turned on. The street looked like an old amusement park right when the clangs and bells of the rides wake up. The light illuminated something slithering in the shadows.
It was the hissing lady.
She was perched on the roof above David Olson’s old house like a gargoyle. Surveying her kingdom. Watching the procession. The children walked in a circle, following David like the tornado after Dorothy.
“You better pray, prey.”
The children spoke in unison. A choir of voices repeating the same phrase like a Sunday mass. David faced them and hissed back. The others backed away, frightened and jittered. The fear only adding to the pleasure of their chase. They moved around him like a carousel, pushing David down the road into the cul-de-sac. His heels reached the very edge of the street.
Don’t leave the street.
They can’t get you if you don’t leave the street.
The hissing lady followed them from the rooftops. Watching. Waiting. Christopher wondered why she didn’t intervene since David was her pet. But maybe they were all her pets. Maybe David was just the runt of the litter, and she was going to let him be torn apart or starved by the others.
Maybe this was her version of dogfighting.
Or maybe it’s all a trap.
For David. Or for me.
Christopher watched David Olson step off the street and walk through the field. The children giggling behind him. Fifty yards away, hidden in shadow, Christopher saw the hissing lady move through the backyards and enter the Mission Street Woods from another angle. Like she was stalking prey.
You better pray, prey.
Christopher knew that it all could be a trap, but there was no other trail of bread crumbs left to him. The nice man was imprisoned somewhere. David Olson was his only friend left in this horrible place. And there was only one way out for all of them.
We have to kill the hissing lady.
We have to get the key.
Christopher backed away from the chimney and looked in his backyard. The deer were picking the last of the meat from the people’s bones. He couldn’t climb down, or he would be the next course. Christopher looked at the log cabin across the street. It was a far jump, but it was his only choice.
And he had been trained now.
Christopher closed his eyes and quieted his mind, priming his imagination like a water pump. In his mind’s eye, he ran as fast as he could to the front of the house. He planted his foot right at the gutter and jumped. He saw the street below him, covered in blood gushing down the sidewalk. Christopher landed on the log cabin’s roof, opened his eyes, and backed into the shadows. Almost slipping on the icy shingles.
He looked at the Mission Street Woods standing tall right in front of him. Branches swaying in the breeze like arms in the air on Sunday. He quickly turned his gaze down to make sure the lawn was clear. Then, he climbed down the gutter, landed quiet as a feather, and sprinted as fast as he could through the field. He looked back at the street as the mad carnival raged on. People hurting themselves over and over. Their screams falling like trees in the middle of the forest where no one was left to hear them.
Except Christopher.
He listened for a moment to make sure there wasn’t a trap right behind the trees. He checked his pocket for the dull, silver blade. Then, Christopher followed David Olson into the Mission Street Woods.