The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe Read online

  “Why not?” asked Dolores, drying her hands on her jeans. She was a pro at pretending Elyse didn’t frighten her. She slid her chair out from the table to be next to Miri, who offered her mother a slobber-covered piece of cereal.

  Elyse licked her lips and glanced at the ceiling, considering the answer as if she had several to choose from. “The woods are dangerous,” she said after a long moment.

  Gabe sighed. He knew Elyse was right, in a way. On his first day in Slade, he’d discovered how for himself.

  After the movers had left, Glen and Dolores had begun organizing their new bedroom. They’d asked Gabe for space, and the shadowed forest at the bottom of the sloping meadow had called to him. At the edge of trees, Gabe happened upon several wide and mysteriously well-worn paths that seemed to circle in upon themselves, echoing the stone walls that also crisscrossed the forest. He’d followed one of these trails down the hill, deeper into the woods, and found himself surrounded by a stillness that was unique to this place. No wind. No sound. The feeling of isolation made his heart race. In his old town outside of Boston, there was a constant whine of traffic, of children playing, of neighbors’ televisions blasting from open windows. But the woods were so peaceful that when he closed his eyes, his pulse slowed and the memory of the past few weeks disappeared. Through this simple act, he’d traveled to another world—a world where he had never been the Puppet Boy, a world where he’d never wished for everything bad to fall away.

  “Watch out!” called a voice. Startled, Gabe tripped on a tree root and snagged his T-shirt on a prickly bush. A skinny blond-haired boy with a sharp nose and wide eyes, who looked even more panicked than Gabe felt, emerged from behind a cluster of small trees. “I’m so sorry,” the boy said, reaching out to help Gabe untangle himself from the thorns. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just…You were about to step into my trap.” The boy nodded at the ground a few feet away where a patchwork of leaves, sticks, and mud lay like a dirty welcome mat. “I covered up a hole to see if I could catch a rabbit.” Sheepishly, he added, “I wasn’t expecting anyone to come by. Mrs. Ashe doesn’t usually let people wander around on her land.”

  Gabe managed to release his shirt and brush himself off. “She’s my grandmother. I didn’t think she’d mind.”

  The boy looked surprised. “I didn’t know she had any family,” he said. “Me and my mom live in the cottage at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of this forest.” He wagged his thumb over his shoulder.

  “I’m Gabe. We’re staying with her for a little while.”

  “Seth Hopper,” said the boy, with a wry smile.

  Dangerous, his grandmother had said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far, Mother,” Glen replied. “The woods behind Temple House are no different from anywhere else around here.”

  “The trails are great,” Gabe offered. “It’s like a park.”

  “I know what it’s like,” Elyse said. “I was born in this house, remember?” She wore a look of disdain. The rest of them sat at the dinner table watching her quizzically. Silence bounced around the dining room for a moment. Then Miri laughed and slapped at the high-chair tray.

  The sudden sound broke whatever spell had fallen upon the family. Everyone jumped. Gabe slowly released his breath, unaware that he’d been holding it. Elyse shook her head and glanced at him, flustered. “I’m sorry,” she said with an apologetic grin. “I just don’t want you to get lost out there. That’s all.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Very good.” Elyse folded her hands and lowered her head, but she couldn’t hide the groove of tension between her eyebrows. “Now say grace, Gabriel.”

  “Grace, Gabriel,” Gabe whispered as his mother smiled and his father threw him a dirty look.

  WHEN GABE AWOKE from a dream of the fire, he found himself tangled in sweaty sheets. He kicked them off.

  A breeze blew in from the open window, and he caught his breath. Even after weeks of sleeping nightly in his new bedroom, he still sometimes woke in a panic, wondering where he was.

  His previous room didn’t even exist anymore, but his brain continued to hold on to the image of his superhero figurine collection that had stood on the shelf over his old bed board, his abuelita’s quilt that he’d hung on the back of his desk chair in case he got chilly at night, his father’s bullfighter marionette that had dangled from a hook above his dresser.

  Sometimes when he awoke in this new house, his pillow was damp with tears. He thought of what Father Gideon had said to him afterward—a quote from the Bible about leaving childish things behind. We still have one another, his mother had added. But Gabe wondered, if you have nothing left besides your family to remind you of your childhood, did it mean you had grown up?

  In his new room, the breeze cooled his damp skin, and Gabe was chilled. He knew if he tried to sleep, embers would drift up once more into the darkness behind his eyelids, arms of molten plastic reaching for him, marionette strings blazing. A chorus of voices whispering, This is your fault.

  Gabe needed a distraction. He kicked at the mattress, annoyed that his parents insisted on charging his phone in their bedroom so he wouldn’t stay up late playing with it. He grabbed his T-shirt from the floor at the side of his bed.

  Downstairs, Gabe crept toward the back of the house through the labyrinth of dark halls. He found the door he’d been searching for and pushed it open. Inside was a small room. Moonlight shone through a paned window at his left, throwing a strange prison-bar pattern onto the Persian rug at his feet. Outside, the leafy tops of the trees glistened in the silver light. High above, the moon was nearly full.

  Down the meadow slope, something caught his eye. Standing a few yards from the edge of the forest was a tall, broad-shouldered man. The figure was a mere shade lighter than the deepest shadows, but Gabe could see the silhouette clearly. The shape stood unmoving. Was it a tree? A large shrub? The idea that someone was watching him from the darkness outside made his stomach squirm. The woods are dangerous…. But there had to be an explanation. Wasn’t there always? Gabe blinked and the silhouette was gone. Must have been a trick of the light, he thought. Or of the dark.

  He switched on a table lamp, and the world outside the house disappeared. Now, reflected in the window glass were the shelves that lined the walls of the small library. But not every shelf held books.

  From the moment Gabe had stepped through his grandmother’s front door, he understood that her house was like a museum, crammed with odd objects and strange artifacts. In this room sat tribal-looking sculptures and masks made of wood and bone. There were tiny framed pictures of odd circus performers, dangerous plants pressed behind glass, postcards from places that no longer existed. A taxidermy display of small rodents dressed in children’s clothing stood beside a collection of old tin robots. There was a darkness to the selection—an indication of what lived inside his grandmother’s mind. Gabe focused on the strange books instead. Decoding the Pyramids, The Secrets of Practical Mysticism, Abandoned Mansions of the Hudson Valley. And more. Much more. He didn’t know where to begin.

  In the corner of his eye, something moved. When Gabe turned toward the window, he realized that he’d seen the reflection of something in the room with him. He froze. A shadow shifted near the office door. There was a small creaking sound. A thump. The long feet of a rocking chair hit the floor as the person who’d been watching him finally stood up.

  “CAUGHT YOU.” A shadow slithered forward onto the carpet.

  Gabe backed against a bookcase, jostling it hard enough to topple a few books off the shelves. They hit the floor with a whoomp. He heard his grandmother’s chuckle and felt his face burn. The moonlight illuminated Elyse with a ghostly phosphorescence. Her floor-length black satin robe was tied tightly at her waist. The rocking chair continued to sway, brushing at the backs of her thin legs. She’d been sitting alone in the dark.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Gabe managed to say after a moment.

  “So you thought you�
��d do some snooping?” she teased, raising an eyebrow.

  “Mom said you have a lot of books.” He nodded at the shelves.

  “To say the least.” His grandmother stared at him. She looked different—softer than usual. At first he thought it was the strange light, but then Gabe realized that her face was clean of makeup.

  “May I borrow one?” he asked.

  “Of course. That’s what they’re here for.”

  Surprised, Gabe turned to the closest shelf. “Mom said you might have a few of the ones whose covers you illustrated?”

  “You don’t have them already?”

  “Dad got me copies when I was younger. But the fire…”

  “Of course,” she said. “The fire.” Elyse motioned for him to follow her toward the window. “Here they are.” She nodded at another bookcase. Gabe examined the books’ spines. One name leapt out again and again.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of Nathaniel Olmstead.”

  Elyse raised an eyebrow. She pulled a thin volume from a shelf and brushed off the cover. “Yes. The creepiest author of the past thirty or so years.” A smile spread across her face. “I always tell people that, since he was my bread and butter. I illustrated almost all of Nathaniel’s covers. At one time, his stories made us both pretty famous.” She handed the book to Gabe. He ran his hand across the title. The Revenge of the Nightmarys. “The publisher asked me to create a set of trading cards for this one, way back when kids still cared about that sort of thing. I hear that now you’re all collecting and trading electronic things. ‘Stuff’ doesn’t even exist anymore. That, to me, is spooky.”

  The illustration on the cover was a sketchy pen-and-ink image of a shadowy attic room. A group of girls clothed in tattered dresses stood in a line, reaching out with clawlike fingernails. He thought it was pretty cool that his grandmother had been able to come up with something so macabre.

  “Go on. Read it. I dare you.”

  “Thanks,” said Gabe, tucking it under his arm. “I think.” He wasn’t sure it was the sort of book that would help him get back to sleep, but he didn’t want to offend her.

  Elyse moved toward the window and stared out at the moonlit meadow, turning her back on him.

  He realized that this was the first real conversation they’d had since he’d come to stay at Temple House. She’d been so busy helping with the baby, with the organizing, with the stress. “Why were you sitting down here in the dark?” he asked.

  “You weren’t the only one who couldn’t sleep,” she said, glancing at him from over her shoulder. “When I’m up late, I come in here and watch the night.” She sighed. “Sometimes it watches me back.”

  Gabe shuddered. “And that doesn’t, like, freak you out?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “Freak me out?” She smiled, nodding at the collection of oddities that filled her shelves. “In case you can’t tell, it takes quite a lot to ‘freak me out,’ Gabriel.”

  “Where did you get all of it?” Gabe picked up a stone figurine from a small collection. The humanoid figures all wore long cloaks. Their postures were static, erect, almost monklike.

  “Here and there,” said Elyse. “New York thrift stores. Massachusetts junk shops. Flea markets and yard sales all over New England.”

  Gabe held up the figurine. “I think Seth Hopper has one just like this,” he said. “I saw it at his house the other day. Standing on a shelf in the spare bedroom.”

  Elyse was silent for a moment, then said, “How funny.” She deliberately took the object from him and placed it back on the shelf. Gabe felt like he’d made a mistake by mentioning it. “A couple years ago, I remember purchasing five of these little men at a comic book store where I was doing a signing. But now, there are only four. Apparently, one simply walked off.” She gazed directly into Gabe’s eyes. “Isn’t that the strangest thing?”

  “Yeah,” said Gabe. Was she implying that Seth had somehow taken it from this room? How was that possible? Seth had never mentioned entering Temple House. “Really strange.”

  Elyse nodded at the book under Gabe’s arm. “You found what you were looking for. Better hurry back to bed, before the monsters under your mattress realize you’re still awake.”

  AFTER THE ROBBER PRINCES RETURNED the blonde baby to her parents, the kingdom of Haliath rejoiced, but Wraithen and Meatpie only allowed themselves to feel a fleeting victory. They were certain that the Hunter was still out there in the dark forest of Howler’s Notch, watching, waiting, plotting to lure them into the shadows once again.

  And so, early the next day, they met at the forest edge, where Wraithen’s territory gave way to wilderness. The morning air was warm and damp. A canopy of silvery leaves towered high above, providing a cool, if temporary, shade. The boys listened to the woods. Critters scurried through ground brush. Birds called playfully to one another from across the rocky cradle of land beyond which stood the Kingdom of Chicken Guts. That the forest was so vocal was a good sign. No animals were hiding from predators.

  “I received a tip,” said Wraithen, shouldering his pack and starting into the forest, “from an archer who went to retrieve a lost arrow.”

  Meatpie followed reluctantly. “Why would an archer risk entering these woods for a stupid old arrow?”

  Wraithen threw him a dirty look. “I don’t know why. He just did. He said he found an altar of some sort—a pile of rocks next to a tree with a crooked trunk. He thinks the altar might be where the monster works his magic.”

  “So the Hunter is magic now?”

  Wraithen stiffened, but continued onward. “If we destroy the altar, we may destroy some of his power.”

  “Okay,” said Meatpie. “So you’re suggesting we take apart his pile of rocks.”

  “His altar. Yes. We destroy it.” Wraithen stopped and pointed. “There.”

  Ahead, a small tree stood upon an upraised mound that jutted slightly from the hillside. Its trunk grew from the ground at a sharp angle, leaning dramatically to the right. And just as Wraithen had described, a mound of stones—stacked at least five high—stood directly beside it, looking as though it were preventing the tree from tipping over. In a way, the site looked holy.

  At the crest of the slope, Meatpie placed his palm on the crooked tree. It released a faint vibration. He instinctively pulled away. Standing unaware beside him, Wraithen reached out and lifted a stone from the top of the pile. “Hunter, be gone!” he cried, and tossed the stone. It spun like a discus down the hill, hit the ground, and rolled, coming to rest at the edge of a small brook.

  Meatpie grabbed a stone too, but as he swung his arm back to throw, a harsh voice whispered in his ear, DON’T!

  Gabe spun. No one was there. Seth stood on the opposite side of the tree—not nearly close enough to whisper like that. Had he been so lost in the game that he’d imagined it? He felt someone watching them. He glanced up the hill, then down. As far as he could tell, no one else was around, just him and Seth…well, Meatpie and Wraithen.

  Seth continued to examine the rock mound, his shoulders pulled back in a regal stance.

  “You knew this tree was out here, right?” asked Gabe.

  “Only because the archer told me.”

  “Stop,” said Gabe. “Just for a second. Stop.” Seth blinked at him and Wraithen was gone. “Did you build this thing?” he asked.

  Seth sighed, frustrated. “You can’t keep doing that!” he said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Quitting the game.”

  “I didn’t quit,” said Gabe. “I hit pause for a second. But seriously. What is this?” He gestured at the makeshift altar. “It’s creepy.”

  Seth shrugged. “I told you. These woods are weird.”

  “You keep saying that,” said Gabe, planting his feet in the soft ground, even as it seemed to shift beneath his sneakers. “But it’s not an answer.” He remembered hearing heavy boots cross the path when he and Seth had been alone, and later, seeing that shadow at the edge of the forest from the library
window. He sensed that his grandmother had seen it too, and worse, that she might have been seeing it for a while. The woods are dangerous. And now, a voice had whispered in his ear. Loudly. “Someone built this ‘altar’ from pieces of the old walls. It must have taken a lot of work. Who would do that? Why?”

  “Who cares? We can use it for our game.” The game. Right. Of course. Seth added, “I noticed the altar from the path over there about a year ago. I remembered it this morning and thought exploring it would be fun.” Gabe stared uncertainly at the rocks. “High school kids mess around back here sometimes. Maybe they piled them.” Gabe raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Does it really matter?”

  “I guess not,” said Gabe. “It’s just…I thought I heard something.”

  He touched the crooked tree again and realized that the vibration he’d felt earlier had simply been the breeze echoing down the trunk from the top branches.

  “What kind of something?”

  “A voice. It whispered, ‘Don’t.’”

  “Don’t?” Seth laughed. “Don’t what?”

  Before he’d fallen asleep the previous night, Gabe had managed to read a few pages of the book his grandmother had lent him. In the morning, when he remembered the vivid imagery of the ghost girls, his stomach felt tight. He hadn’t been able to shake it. He’d had no idea that books could do that: dare him to finish reading. “I’m being a weirdo,” said Gabe, if only to stop Seth from staring. “I slept funny last night.”

  Seth smiled slightly. “You want to take a break?” Gabe nodded. “Come on. I’ll make us some peanut butter sandwiches.”

  Gabe checked the time on his phone. “Yeah, but I can’t stay too long.” He had to be back by noon if he was to make it to the pool party on time—the one Mazzy Lerman had said Seth wasn’t invited to.

  THE HOPPERS’ COTTAGE STOOD in a wide meadow at the bottom of the slope. It was a dingy white box of a building. A wide porch drooped from the front. Tall grass and weeds grew around its foundation. A gravel driveway stretched off into the woods on the opposite side of the wide yard, leading to the road that wound back up the hill toward Temple House. A ramshackle barn loomed over the driveway, and beyond it stood a small, empty stable. A large portion of the nearby yard was fenced in. Seth had told Gabe that they’d once owned a horse, that he’d learned to ride it through the trails in the woods. But they’d sold it a few years back. He didn’t say why.