Four

DAYLIGHT’S ALMOST GONE, stranding us in murky charcoal twilight that blurs perception in the woods. Pines press close, their smell sharp and cloying, and it’s too dark for this, but we’re going anyway, a small band of us, because the boys made the dare, and how could we respect ourselves in the morning without putting our heads in the same lion’s mouth?

Kincaid’s down the trail somewhere, wearing his question-mark smile, sheer magnetism pulling me through the dark after him, my feet catching on unseen roots, risking a branch snapping back in my face. My hands imagine finding his shoulder blades, my fingertips exploring the rough wool of his coat, discovering what he smells like. Bree is here beside me, silent, and I wonder if she’s feeling half of what I’m feeling, even a quarter.

A yell, and someone grabs us both. I’m so amped up that I scream, a real girly scream I didn’t know I had inside me. Humiliating. Bass laughter and a gust of Trace—draft horse sweat, shock of peppermint—as he shoulders between.

“Asshole, how’d you get behind us?” Bree turns on her phone flashlight, shining it in his face.

He winces. “Jesus. That’s not fair.” He grabs the phone, holding it easily out of her reach. “I don’t have a light.”

“Give me my phone.”

Giggle. “You get so mad.” He tosses; she fumbles; it lands on the ground. Not that Trace is there to see—he’s already barreling off, trying a leapfrog boost on the shoulders of a boy with hair spiking out from under a knit cap and drumsticks in his back pocket, who laughs, nearly falling.

Bree wipes her phone on her fleece, swearing. “I am so buying a tranq gun and putting him down.”

“Do you think they sell, like, extra-large-rhino strength?” I ask. We look at each other and laugh, and click, I fit a little more, in this night with these people, with Bree, whose humor is a little off, a little black like mine.

This was a real trail system once. The phone flashlight catches an occasional stripe of blaze orange on a tree trunk, left by some Ranger Rick for wholesome hiker types, and there are offshoots everywhere, footpaths through the undergrowth beaten down by use. But there are bags of trash here and there, too, ditched by people who didn’t want to pay for a dump sticker. Bedsprings, wadded paper towels, beer cans scattered through the brush. Sage’s laughter carries back to us, and somebody’s singing, or calling out a rhyme.

The stink is the first sign that we’ve arrived: a dark, sulfurous blossom that brings our hands to our noses. The trees have thinned out, and I catch glimpses of open area, dusky sky. This must be the marsh.

It’s tidal, this place, the water at low ebb, baring acres of muddy flats fringed by more pitch pines and mountain holly, wooded hills in silhouette against the sky. Footpaths wind down the weedy, crumbling embankment all the way to the flats, though I can’t imagine walking down there or why anyone would want to try.

Bree says, “That’s one of the better ones,” pointing up.

Above us, the ledge has turned to granite. A broad slab to our left is marked with hot-pink paint, old, faded by the elements. A three-foot-high anatomical picture of a heart, done with a brush, ventricles spurting fat drops of pink blood. The words beside it read Bury my heart at Mumbler’s marsh.

Bree trains her phone on the embankment as we follow the sloping grade; the light catches more graffiti crisscrossing the rocks, more paintings, a few so good they must be by the same artist who drew the heart. An interpretation of The Scream with green pot leaves where the figure’s eyes should be; a jack-o’-lantern with a mouthful of vicious teeth and a rat lifting the lid by the stem, revealing a glimpse of a human brain inside. I want a closer look—but not badly enough to fall behind.

Everyone’s gathered up ahead, multiple phones glowing in a vigil.

Kincaid leans against the rock. He doesn’t hold a phone, so his face is lost, only a glimpse of his hair and the sinew of his neck visible as he inclines his head. “Here.”

Everyone trains their phone on the rock face. What at first looked like a broad, shadowed crevice flattens, revealing a mural taller than any of us, maybe twelve feet high, black paint spread into a hulking silhouette.

A hunched man—something like a man, anyway—in profile, stooping as if to pick up the whole wooded ledge. Only the slightest indication of a head, the hair wild. It’s the man’s hands that make me stare: squiggling, wriggling fingers like a nest of eels, each fingertip a ball of splattered, dripping paint, like the artist held the spray can in place and just blasted.

Beside it, the message again, tall, spindly letters like I’d seen on the overpass. Fear Him.

It takes me a second to find words. “Who did this?”

“Nobody knows. Nobody’s supposed to know.” The smile in Kincaid’s voice is like an electrical current, raising fine hairs on my arms and neck, unseen coils warming to orange, then red. “Guerrilla art. Make your mark and bounce, right?” As he turns, that precious sliver of him vanishes into ink. It’s nearly full dark now, and the only bright spots are the faces of the people holding phones: Sage, Trace’s arm around her shoulders again; Bree; two girls who look like identical twins in combat boots and kohl liner; and the drumsticks boy, standing in a carolers’ semicircle on the path. “It’s a signpost.” Kincaid’s voice travels behind them, and I turn slowly, tracking him. “Here there be monsters.”

“You think he lives in the marsh?”

“Some people think so. Under the bridge, or in the woods. I say he burrows in the mud like a big-ass catfish. Hibernates eleven months out of the year, then hwwwaahh”—he makes a rushing, roaring sound, a whoosh of his arms ripping the air—“comes busting out in October, hunting kid meat.”

Sage starts the song, spoken-word style, glancing at the others, and I recognize the rhyme I caught snatches of on the walk here: “Mumbler, Mumbler, in your bed.”

Bree picks it up, holding Sage’s gaze as she sings: “Mumbler, Mumbler, take your head.”

“Eat your nose—”

“Gobble your toes—”

All of them, in a chorus: “And bury you where the milkweed grows!” They laugh, whistling past the graveyard, all of them, but not Kincaid. He doesn’t laugh; he smiles. I can feel it.

The name of the game is chase. I have foggy memories of something like it from elementary school recess, boys and girls running after each other on the playground, exploring first crushes, any excuse to touch. This is that game on ’roids.

First, the boys blow past us on the trail, taking off into the dark, whooping and yelling and being so ridiculous Bree and Sage and I collapse against one another with crazy giggles, even with the foul breath of that place at our backs, and the fact that I think none of us can get out of there fast enough. Then they swoop out at us again, no faces, just hands and warmth and boy-smell, somebody tickling my side, making me yell, “Hey!” face burning in the night and wondering, Who?

“Oh, it is so on—” With a rebel yell, Sage charges the trees, swallowed up by the night, leaving us.

Bree links her arm through mine. “This way. Hurry—”

I can barely see my feet hitting the overgrown side trail, but Bree holds her phone out and we glue together, stumbling and laughing, hearts pounding so hard it seems like they must echo through the woods, giving us away as we hear what sounds like the boys ahead. Bree switches off her phone, and we blitz attack with a scream.

Bree’s braver, colliding with someone, while I waver in the dark, breathing hard, wanting Kincaid but hearing Trace instead—“Body slam! Body slam! Ohhh”— and a mad crunching of dried leaves and brush.

“Bree?” My voice sounds shrill, and I fumble for my phone, are you okay on the tip of my tongue, but thank God it never escapes because I hear her swear, half laughing, to my left, which gets me laughing, too, and the danger is fun again.

She takes my offer of a hand-up, wiping her face with her sleeve. She says, “Let’s kick their asses,” and we’re off down the trail, witches on broomsticks, propelling down a tree tunnel faster than we have any right, faster than our feet could ever take us.