Chapter Eighteen

The rocks were gone. All of them. Jeremy was down on his knees feeling in the dark with his hands. He was sure he’d piled them right here. He was sure. Who could have taken them? The night shadows whispered around him and he shivered with the chilliness the night had brought. He had to be very careful. Quiet. He didn’t want to wake his mom and uncle up. He’d caused them enough trouble today.

Where were those confounded rocks?

“Charlie,” Jeremy hissed out into the night. “You fink! You took them back, didn’t you? You Indian giver!” Jeremy finally came to the conclusion the rocks were really gone. If they’d ever existed at all, he thought.

He perched on the top step of the porch and rubbed his tired eyes. It was so dark out. Children laughed on a distant wind.

A breeze ruffled his hair and slapped his lightweight pajamas against his skin. It was so warm for April, it was what his mom had said that afternoon. But he liked it. It felt like an early summer.

What was out there? Had Charlie, like the sparkling rocks, been a figment of his imagination? He mulled it over as he tried to conjure the pale face up again in his mind’s eye. He drew a blank.

He couldn’t remember what Charlie had looked like.

His skin had been pasty white like stone, he thought. Or had it? Blue eyes? Or green? Jeremy could neither remember if the boy had been short or tall, fat or thin. Even the sound of his voice and most of their conversations were lost to him. Had he dreamed Charlie up out of his loneliness? He could have. Must have.

He bit his lip, fretting. No, Charlie had been there. Charlie was real. He couldn’t forget that. Some inner sense warned him never to doubt it. He remembered the fear. More laughter and voices rode the wind and brushed by his ears.

Jeremy sneaked back into the house and crept up the stairs to his room, still thinking about Charlie and the missing rocks. He suspected the whispers in the woods were evil…like Charlie.

Whose side was Charlie on anyway? It was a puzzle. The thing in the woods was bad. He was sure of it. It had killed people. Charlie had tried to frighten him. He knew it was Charlie who had chased him home and tried to batter the door down. Charlie had stolen the rocks. Charlie was evil, too. He stood at the window. A sudden wind rocked the glass pane. A face, or part of one, flickered in the darkness. Jeremy gasped and ran for his bed, pulling the covers over his eyes.

* * * *

The wind retreated to the cool woods.

It was brooding. Silent. It had tried to get them and had failed. It had tried to lure them out and had failed. It had sent one of its own to lure the bait to him and enable him to catch the woman. All had failed.

They always managed to escape.

It tried to think, what was keeping them from it? He roared his summons and from under every bush and tree-trunk tomb came those lost souls it had worked so hard to capture and enslave during the endless years. Charlie was but one among so many, many others. These were the ones too weak to resist its call, not strong with the glow like those in the house. The captive specters came and floated around it, each a translucent, anemic essence of the puny creatures they’d once been. It collected them like a crow collects shiny baubles.

It could taunt or torture them according to its whim. Sometimes it even promised to release them for services rendered, but never did. It liked to see them squirm and beg as they lingered here in its hellish limbo, never able to die or be at peace. Their punishment for being weak and their sentence for not obeying.

Evil. Yes, it was evil. It could roam the world and take what it wanted. So few could stand up to it, so the search was everlasting.

One good one. One good essence could appease its hunger and boredom for a time. After all, what else did it have to exist for, but the hunt and the kill? To find and destroy goodness was the only reason it existed.

Without goodness to fight, it would cease to be.

Glowing hideously alone there in its nocturnal domain, it herded its ghostly pawns before it like cattle. If it could, it would have smiled, at the meek way they danced to its tunes. But evil has no smile but death. It was bored.

Sometimes it forgot its own power. Sometimes it’d forget for long periods of time what it was after or whom. The lethargy would eventually pass and it would go on as before as if only a moment had passed. A second was a year and a minute, an eternity.

Time meant nothing when something could never die.

It slept then. Pulling into itself to solve its problem—how to kill them.

The woods sighed with the new peace and the trees embraced the dark sky as the world went to sleep.