November 29 was a Wednesday.
Two days short of December, the final month of the year. Something happens at that break point between November and December. There is a quickening, a shift in movement; days that formerly shuffled along as though in bedroom slippers begin to sharpen their pace into a measured clip like the staccato rap of boots on asphalt. Soon the end, and then a new beginning. Hurry, hurry along and wind the old year up so that the new one may begin.
November 29 in Modesta broke through a week of overcast skies as a bright, blue day, as blue as the shade of David Brewer’s eyes. A sharp, whining wind arrived with the dawn; it dropped to a lull in the middle of the day and rose again toward evening. People built fires. Along Locust Street and Elm Street and Maple Street, along First Street and Second and Third, rows of chimneys emptied columns of smoke into the skies, and the wind caught them and twirled them and sent them riding upward in a soft, gray haze, which hung like a blanket over the town.
Mrs. Rheardon cooked venison for dinner that night. Bart Rheardon had killed a deer on his hunting trip. The meat was stringy and tough with an odd, wild taste that made Jane gag, but she ate it anyway, washing it down with water. Her father was in a good mood. She wanted to keep him that way.
“I have to go over to Kristy’s tonight to study for a history test,” she told him.
Tammy Carncross’s mother fried hamburgers.
Paula Brummell’s mother served spaghetti with canned sauce. She’d done eight heads of hair that day, one of them a frosting. She was tired.
Paula excused herself early to get started on cleaning up the kitchen so she could go next door to Erika’s and get some help with her math homework.
Erika Schneider announced at dinner that she’d need to use the car to drive over to Barnards’ Pet Emporium to pick up a new breeding cage.
“They aren’t open at night, are they?” her father asked her.
“They are until nine. After I leave there I have to stop at the Carncrosses’ to get the application forms for the science fair. I need to get those filled out before the end of the week.”
The dinner hour ended. Here and there throughout the town, doors opened to let young girls step through them, out into the early winter darkness.
Holly Underwood had to go to church to practice the new organ pieces for Sunday’s recessional.
Ann Whitten and Madison Ellis were going to the apartment of one of their teachers to work on an art project.
Kelly Johnson and Tammy Carncross and Kristy Grange all had work to do at the library.
Parental voices. “You’re not going to try to walk, are you?”
“No—no—of course not. I’ve got a ride with Erika”—“with Kelly”—“with Holly.”
“Did you get your note, Pete?” Kristy called back as she left. “I left it on your dresser.”
“Who’s it from?” Niles asked. “Another hot admirer?”
“Madison.”
“Oh, well, there’s no difference. Love note?”
“Nope. It’s weird. I don’t get it,” Peter said. “It doesn’t sound like her. Even the handwriting’s different. Scrawly. As if she were in a hurry or mad or something.” He held out the paper for his brother to read. “What do you make of it?”
“ ‘Meet me at the creek. Seven thirty. Very important. M.E.’ ” Niles grinned. “It sounds to me like she’s finally coming around.”
“Not Maddie. Not like this, anyway.” Peter frowned. “She never wants to meet me anywhere. I always pick her up.”
“Maybe she wants her own set of wheels so she can take off when she feels like it.”
“That’s what worries me. Do you think she knows about Laura?”
“No way,” Niles said. “How could she? That fat bag isn’t going to go around telling people. You should have seen her Saturday night. She was a basket case.”
“You shouldn’t have gone over there.”
“Why not? It was worth a try.”
“She’s not like that.”
“How was I supposed to know that? If she’d put out for one guy, she might for another.”
“You could’ve asked me first,” Peter said. “You’d have saved yourself a bloody mouth.”
“Win a few, lose a few. I’ll admit I was pissed, but hell, that’s life.” Niles shrugged. “The point is, she’s got nothing to brag about. You’re back with Madison, and Laura’s out. That’s not the kind of thing a girl broadcasts around school.”
“No kidding,” Peter agreed. “Besides, I don’t think she’s been to school this week at all. So where does that leave us? That damned Maddie, always finding some way to keep me off-balance!”
“Well, you’d better get a move on if you want to find out what’s up,” Niles said. “She wants you to meet her at seven thirty. It’s past that now.”
“Damn,” Peter snorted in frustration. “Trust Kristy to wait till the last minute. I bet that note was sitting there for hours.”
Pointer’s Creek ran along the southern edge of the town. Pointer’s Creek Road followed it along its north shore, then crossed by means of a narrow bridge and continued along the wooded south shore, winding as the creek did in a series of gentle dips and curves. At one point west of town, where the creek cut across the southeast corner of Dave Brewer’s property, the road swerved away for a time, returning again a mile or so later to reunite with the strip of moving water.
The creek was many things to many people. To farmers like Dave, it was a source of irrigation. To fishermen, it was a fly caster’s paradise. To the children of Modesta, it was a foaming highway for canvas rafts and inner tubes, and to their worried mothers, a summertime ogre waiting with dripping jaws to devour their young.
Dan and Lil Carncross, Tammy’s parents, had courted on the shore of Pointer’s Creek. Holly Underwood’s parents had become engaged there. It was on a footpath along the creek’s edge that Kristy Grange’s mother had walked and dreamed during the lonely months when her husband-to-be was overseas fighting a war. As a toddler, Kelly Johnson’s sister, Chris, had almost drowned in the creek when she wandered away during a family outing, and a few years later, Paula Brummell had broken her foot there jumping on rocks. As this new generation grew to young adulthood, they, like their parents before them, began to come as couples to the sweet, dark privacy of the wooded banks. It was during a summer picnic there that David Brewer had looked at the slim, brown-haired girl beside him, bent in concentration over her sketchpad, and thought—This is my love.
Peter Grange was no stranger to Pointer’s Creek Road. He drove it this night with the ease of long familiarity, anticipating each curve before it appeared in the glare of his headlights. Nor had he been confused by the brevity of the message. “At the creek” could’ve meant any spot along a ten-mile stretch of water, but to Peter it meant only one. There was a particular place where the road jogged abruptly south and the creek was lost to view behind a curtain of trees. Here, with the entrance half-hidden by branches, there were dirt tire ruts that led a hundred yards through the underbrush to a clearing.
“Our place,” he and Madison called it. He had taken her there on their third date. It had been springtime then, and the creek had been full to the brim, splashing and frothing in a silver rage as it tumbled over roots and rocks and leaped wildly at tree limbs.
Madison had been beautiful in the moonlight, more beautiful even than she was at school. The long, bright hair had felt like damp corn silk beneath his fingers as he turned her head in his hands to look down into the small, exquisite face.
He had told her he loved her. It was the first time he’d said this to any girl, and the sound of his voice speaking the words had filled him with terror. It was as if with one statement he had been stripped naked, leaving himself vulnerable to any blow she might wish to give.
But she hadn’t laughed or done anything to hurt him. Her face had gone soft, and whatever words she murmured had been lost against his mouth.
Later, Niles had asked, “How did you hook that chick when every guy in school was after her?”
“With pretty words,” Peter had told him. “Girls are like Google—enter in the right search criteria at the right time, and click!—you get back what you want.”
Niles had liked that, and for weeks he’d gone around repeating it. Each time he did so, he’d throw Peter a conspirator’s grin. Peter would smile back, cool and superior, bestowing the benefits of his advanced experience on an admiring younger brother. Never did he admit to Niles—or to himself, for that matter—that those words spoken by the stream might have been true.
As soon as they started going out, he knew he was out of his element. He couldn’t handle Madison; he couldn’t control their relationship. She kept him continually off-balance with her combination of sensual femininity and hard-core toughness. Her self-centeredness matched his own; her self-confidence was awesome. She was smarter academically, getting A’s in subjects in which, the year before, he had struggled for C’s. Her career aspirations were concrete and attainable; she didn’t need him to direct her future or to give it meaning.
When he walked through the halls with Madison on his arm, he felt like the King of the World. Two minutes later he might find himself deserted, left staring at the back of her bobbing blond head as she went racing off to speak to one of her many girlfriends or to participate in some activity that didn’t include him. She wouldn’t go all the way with him. She teased and kissed and cuddled until he was weak with excitement, then left him feeling sick with longing and frustration.
The worst part was keeping up a front before his friends. All of them thought they were doing it. He couldn’t admit the truth, even to his brother; Niles had been screwing around with girls since he was fourteen.
Twice, he’d attempted to break up with her. When they parted for the summer, he’d determinedly shoved her from his mind and set out to hook up with every pretty girl at the lake. For a while, he’d thought it was working. His days and evenings were always full, and he slept too soundly at night to dream. Then school had started. On the first day, he’d passed Madison’s locker, and there she was, wearing one of those skintight T-shirts, flipping that shining hair back over her shoulders in that familiar way. All the air had gone out of his lungs, and his legs had gotten weak, and a moment later he had been beside her saying, “Hey, Maddie, which way is your next class?” And they’d been walking together. And his hand had found hers. And it was all back the way it had been, as though there’d been no interruption.
The second breakup had been the recent one. This time, he’d tried to fill the gap with Laura. He wasn’t particularly proud of this. He would never even have started it if he hadn’t been in such a rage at Madison and if Laura hadn’t appeared suddenly right in front of him. Seeing her there on the sidewalk, he had pulled his car to the curb and called, “Hey, need a ride?”
“No, thank you,” she’d started to respond. Then she’d turned enough to see who it was. Her mouth had fallen open. It had been funny to see her expression.
“Oh…” she’d murmured. “Peter!”
“Hop in,” he’d said. “I’m headed in your direction. By the way, are you busy tonight? What about seeing a movie?”
He had taken her to the theater over in Adrian, and then, out of spite for Madison, to “their place” at the creek. And it had happened—the thing he had wanted for so long. At first he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t going to stop him. Later he wondered if perhaps she didn’t fully understand how fast things were moving and what the ultimate outcome would be. When it was over she’d cried a little, but she hadn’t meant it, because when he asked, “Can I see you again?” she immediately said, “Yes.”
From then on he saw her several times a week. There were times when he felt a pinch of guilt about the situation, but then he would tell himself, what the hell, she didn’t have to continue going out with him if she didn’t want to. When she began to pressure him for a public relationship, he had known it was time to end it. He’d told Niles and a few of his friends what was happening, making a kind of joke of it, but he certainly wasn’t ready to start appearing at parties with a girl who almost matched him pound for pound.
At about that same time, Madison was nominated for homecoming queen. A poster with her picture was up in the hall at school. Each time he passed it, he found himself turning to look. The eyes in the picture seemed to be waiting to catch his with a provocative, teasing glance that sped his heartbeat.
He began to have dreams about how she would look that night, wearing a crown, smiling and nodding to a room of adoring subjects. As far as he knew, she hadn’t been seeing anybody since their breakup, but if she were to start, that was sure to be the night. There wasn’t a guy in Modesta who wouldn’t kill to be her date. Rumor had it that Craig Dieckhoner, the captain of the football team, was going to ask her. So was Brad Tully. So was Trevor Hatchell.
One day he waited after school and caught her by her locker. He said some more pretty words. He meant them all. He had been lonely. He did want to get things back the way they used to be.
With Madison in his life again there was, of course, no more room for Laura. He knew that if he broke the news in any formal way there would be tears and recriminations. Peter hated scenes. He could see no reason for putting himself and Laura through this one. It wasn’t as though she had any real reason to expect anything of him other than what he had already given her. They’d shared an experience that had been fun for both of them. How many chances did a girl like Laura have to be romantically involved with someone like himself? A face-to-face breakup would be degrading for her and painful for him. It was far better, he decided, simply to stop seeing her and to let his absence speak for itself. That way she could invent her own explanations, kinder ones than he would be able to provide for her, and perhaps pretend that she was the one who’d made the decision that the affair was over.
And now, more than two weeks later, he still felt he’d handled things in the best way possible. Laura had been angry, Niles said, but that was inevitable and couldn’t have been avoided. At least she’d had the gumption to send Niles sailing out the door when he made a pass at her. Peter respected her for that and had no sympathy for his brother, who was a first-rate opportunist.
But what about Madison? What was this note about? It was out of character. They had a great time together at homecoming and had sat parked in Madison’s driveway for a long time after the dance was over, talking and really communicating in a way they never had before. The next day, her parents had invited him for dinner. The Ellises had always liked him and seemed happy to have him back on the scene. Then for the next two weeks, between Madison’s club meetings and schoolwork and his own basketball practices, he hadn’t seen much of her. When he stopped to think about it, she’d been acting a little weird in school, distant, as though she had something on her mind.
Maybe Laura called her? No—as Niles said—why should she? The only reason would be to hurt him, and Laura wasn’t a spiteful person. Besides, to hurt him would be to hurt Madison as well, and she and Madison were friends.
Peter’s mind had been working at such a fast clip that he’d hardly thought about where he was. The curve loomed ahead. His foot came down hard on the brake. He brought the car to a complete stop before twisting the wheel to the right so he could inch his way through the thicket of brambles onto the dirt trail that led to the creek. The wheels rotated slowly on the hard, dry earth, and branches were clutching fingers against the windshield. Then moonlight, silver and sparkling, struck his face, and he was in the clearing.
He was here, as summoned, but where in the world was Madison? Was that a car parked far back from the stream in a pocket of shadows? Why would Madison park there, so far over? Or was it a car? He turned the key in the ignition, shutting off the engine. The silence of the wooded creek side seemed to close in on him. He pressed the switch to turn off the headlights and sat, quiet, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the pale world of darkness and moonlight.
In the brush to the left he caught a rustling movement. Madison?
He strained to see, but the bushes were still again. What was it there, concealed by dry leafy branches? A person? A girl? If it was Madison, what was she doing crouched so low to the ground, making no effort to rise and come to greet him? Was something the matter? Could she be injured? Could someone have followed her as she drove out from town, a beautiful girl alone in a car, headed down a deserted road, a girl who turned onto a lonely trail, its entrance half-concealed by foliage?
She’d wanted him to meet her at seven thirty. It was now almost eight. That meant she could’ve been here by herself for half an hour, defenseless against attack.
The thought made him sick to his stomach.
“Madison?” he called out softly. “Is that you?”
He opened the car door. The hinges squeaked; the sound sliced through the heavy stillness like a shriek of warning. Peter stepped out onto a withered carpet of decaying leaves and into the dead, brown smell of winter before it was softened and purified by snow. The clearing had become an alien place, a hundred years from springtime, a million years from the time that the creek had been running full and wild and he had fallen suddenly, violently, in love.
“Madison?”
Silence.
He took a step away from the car. Another.
“Maddie?”
She’d said she would be here, that it was “important.” Where was she? What could’ve happened?
Peter began to shiver. It was cold, of course, but not so cold that he should be trembling like this. The wind moved the higher branches, and the shafts of moonlight danced and darted in dizzying patterns on the ground. Peter’s pupils narrowed… widened… narrowed once more with the shifting light. His eyes couldn’t seem to focus. Tree limbs twisted and tangled, throwing strange, writhing shadows.
She wasn’t here. He was sure of that now. But something was, something that moved silently around him the way the wind moved above him. He couldn’t see it or hear it, but he could feel its presence, and his heart began to pound as it had when he was a small child and woke in the night to find that the door to the lighted hallway had blown closed.
“Madison?” He called the name one final time before turning back to the car.
Over in the shadows, something moved.
Peter stiffened, caught by the whisper of sound. And then he saw it, a human figure, black against the lighter darkness.
“Maddie, is that you? What the hell are you—?”
He started toward her and then, in disbelief, felt the strap around his throat. It caught him so suddenly that his feet went out from under him and he fell backward, held momentarily suspended by the neck. Immediately something came tight around him, binding his arms to his sides, and hands were on him, dragging him to the ground.
Somewhere a voice cried, “Peter!” High and shrill, cutting through the night like the screech of an owl. “Peter! Peter! Peeeeeee-ter!” The voice was filled with hatred. The voice—no, not one voice: two, six, a dozen! A chorus of piercing voices cried out his name as the strap around his throat cut off his breathing and he sank, sick with terror, into the rotting leaves.
“Peeeeee-ter!”
He couldn’t get air into his lungs; he couldn’t move his limbs. The terrible fear froze him and deadened his senses. The silence was gone now, and the night was filled with voices—a chirp, a growl, a twitter—a burst of high-pitched laughter. How could he have thought that the clearing was empty! It was alive with frenzied movement, as the faceless shapes milled about him, crazed creatures from some evil other alien universe.
A blast of white light struck him full in the face, and he recoiled, blinded by the suddenness and the intensity of the glare. He tried to raise his hands to cover his eyes, but they were anchored to his sides. His head was being forced forward, and the pressure at his throat lessened, only slightly, allowing a stream of icy air to enter his bursting lungs. His gratitude was so great that he felt hot tears welling behind his closed lids, and he dragged in small breath after frantic breath, oblivious to the clicking sound at the back of his head.
Snip—snip—snip.
His breathing slowed and his mind began to clear as he tried to piece together what was happening to him. Cold metal brushed his ear. Then a buzzing insect attacked his head and began to trace a jagged path back and forth, across his entire scalp. He felt a sting of pain as something pierced his flesh.
And then—he knew! Peter let out a horrified shout that emerged as a whimper. He began to throw his head back and forth from side to side, struggling and straining against his bonds. The contents of his stomach rose into his mouth and he gagged on it as, in response to his flailing, the pressure at his throat grew tighter. The world began to spin around him, so that he was no longer sure about the reality of this dream.
Because it was a dream, wasn’t it? What else could it be? Something like this couldn’t be happening to Peter Grange!