JOE AND MELISSA AND HOPFROG AND PATTY GLASS ARE KIDS —AND THE FEELY BARN IS DARK
In those days, more than twenty years before the disappearance of Billy Hoskins, the rain tasted clean and good. (Joe stuck his tongue out to catch a few drops. He closed his eyes.)
"Come on." Hopfrog's crackly voice was insistent.
Joe opened his eyes. He was standing beside Melissa Welles, whose light brown hair was plastered to the sides and top of her scalp from the downpour. She looked frightened, so he took her hand in his.
"It's Patty," Hopfrog said, and pointed towards Old Man Feely's barn.
Melissa squeezed Joe's hand. "Joey," she whispered, and he could barely hear her, so he leaned into her, close to her face. "Joey, I'm scared. What if she got caught? What if he's gonna do something bad to her."
Joe grinned, shaking his head. "Aw, nothing bad's gonna happen. It can't. We're just lads."
"He had a gun," Melissa said. "Even if he's not supposed to use it. Maybe he shot her."
"Old Man Feely, he went inside," Joe reassured her.
Hopfrog waited at the edge of the gray barn. Three cracked and broken boards created a small opening into the barn. Hopfrog slid another board to the side, and glanced within.
Joe was shivering. He told himself it was the cold. But it wasn't the cold, and it wasn't just because Patty Glass had cried out.
It was because he was getting a feeling like he had maybe once before in his life (when a strange man looked at him funny at the Esso gas station when he was about six years old). It was a feeling that someone was talking to him, only he didn't quite know who it was or where the voice was coming from. He didn't like to think about this voice too much because he was afraid it meant he was nuts; and the voice had only spoken once before. Worse, the voice didn't seem to say anything that Joe could understand. It just whispered.
Suddenly Joe shouted, "Hopfrog, don't go in there!"
Hopfrog looked at him funny, and then went between the space in the old boards, into the barn.
"Melissa," Joe said, "something bad's in there. Something we're not supposed to play with."
"Give me a break," she said, and let go of his hand, following Hopfrog's lead. "I'm not five. Patty may be hurt."
As Melissa Welles ducked beneath the rotting wood, she said, "I wish you weren't so chicken sometimes, Joey."
That was it. Weird feeling or not, Joe ducked in and around the boards. When he stepped inside the barn the first thing he did was gasp. The second thing he did was wet his pants, but they were already soaked from the rain, so nobody was going to notice.
"Holy," Joe was about to say, "shit," but it was a forbidden word, and even though he heard it enough from other kids, he wasn't the kind to say it; but he could think it.
The barn was dark, except for a ring of light which came from its center.
Hopfrog was standing in the shadows, outside the light.
Melissa hung back, waiting for Joe. She said, "What is it?"
"It's a well," Hopfrog said. He picked up the cross that straddled the rim of the cylindrical opening. He looked at the cross as if he'd never seen one before, and then set it back down in its place.
"That's not a well," Joe took a few steps forward. When he reached Melissa he was shivering so badly he didn't want to touch her, lest he convey his fear (and he very quickly needed to prove to her that he was no chicken).
Hopfrog stepped into the ring of light. The emanation from it seemed to turn Hopfrog's rain-shiny skin to gold. Hopfrog held his hands in front of him. They shone. "Maybe its radiation," he said.
"You're being nuked!" Joe shouted. His voice echoed in the barn.
Melissa shushed him. She whispered, "Look." She pointed up to the rafters.
Joe looked up and saw crucifixes and Egyptian symbols drawn in some kind of fluorescent chalk all over the barn.
"It says something." Hopfrog knelt down and put his fingers on the side of the gold cylinder. "I can't read it, but it says something."
"Maybe we shouldn't touch it," Joe said. He was getting that feeling again, and not just from fear; he felt a weight in the barn, a presence.
"I wish you were a little more like Hopfrog," Melissa said, and went towards the golden light. Joe, striking out in the bravery department, hurried over to them.
He looked down the cylinder; it was dark inside.
"It's some kind of a well," he said. "Listen."
The sound of gently splashing water, as if an eel were moving through its waters.
Joe called out, "Patty!"
With his shout, the ground beneath his feet seemed to rumble, but it was only his voice echoing down the well.
And then, Patty Glass, from somewhere down there, said something. Joe couldn't tell what she'd said, but it was as if she'd heard him and tried to say something back, only she was too far away.
Melissa and Hopfrog were staring strangely at Joe.
"She fell down there," Joe said.
Melissa put her hand up to her mouth; Hopfrog's mouth opened, but he said nothing.
"It's Patty," Joe said.
And then he knew that there was something behind him, something just outside the golden circle of light, something ...
He turned and saw what appeared to be a boy taller than he was, made up entirely of blood.
The blood boy reached out and wiped its hand across Joe's face.
3
But this happened so long ago that sometimes Joe felt he had dreamed it, or had not seen it right, whenever he remembered it. He had only a vague remembrance, anyway, of seeing something strange and frightening when he'd been a boy, something that made him not like Colony at all.
Joe and Melissa and Hopfrog made a pact after that, a pact that they would never tell anyone what they had seen in the barn, because if they did, they knew it would open something up that should stay in the barn until the end of time.
They kept their vow of silence, but every now and then through the years, at thirteen, and then fifteen, and finally at eighteen, they looked at each other and briefly remembered. But then packed the memory back into the murky area of the brain where all of childhood might be lost.
By the time Joe Gardner returned to Colony, in his thirties, the memory was a bad dream that was confused with a hundred or more other nightmares about his hometown.
From the journals of Joe Gardner / when he was twelve:
This is a story about a boy who is a hero.
He went into a barn and saw a big well. He was going to save a damsel in distress.
When the blood dragon attacked him, he took out his sword of fire and drew a line across the grass. "You cannot pass this line," the boy said, "or you will blow up."
The blood dragon wiped its dark claw across the boy's face and in a voice of lava said, "One day, boy, I will come and get you, but not today. Today you are strong. But one day, when I am stronger, and you have forgotten, I will skin you alive and drink your blood from a golden cup."
The boy laughed at the dragon. He married the damsel and when the dragon returned, the boy cut the dragon with his sword of fire and the dragon blew up real good. The damsel, now called Princess Melissa, told the boy that he was the bravest in the kingdom. He was known as King Joe Dragonheart and he and the princess lived happily ever after. The end.
From the journals of Joe Gardner / when he was eighteen:
This is not the end of it, but I have to leave. I have to get the hell out of this place before I go crazy.
I have to stop the voices in my head.
From the journals of Joe Gardner / before dinner, his first night back in his hometown:
I'm back.
Shit.