Ferocious

13. Blind Man's Blood

We didn't speak during the car ride. Not that there wasn't anything left to say, but neither of us wanted to point out the obvious; going to the farmstead was a mistake. It was a mistake every year, and sooner or later it was going to catch up with us. I clenched my teeth and balled my fists. The closer we went, the sooner I might know more, but we were serving ourselves up on a platter. It would be a buffet if the kidnapper showed up. The ride out there was about half an hour, the last part on an unpaved trail through the woods that rocked Alicia's little Saturn. Nausea threatened to make me sick.

"Do you have the necklace?" Alicia asked, rolling into the clearing.

"Yeah." The river rock necklace she gave me at lunch was in my pocket.

She parked near the dilapidated house. It had been lived in up until the 1970's, the roof and walls continuously propped up with lean-to sheds and ply wood by various tenants. The building was collapsing now, though. The porch sagged and was pitted with broken boards, the windows were half shuttered with bits of old glass sparkling beneath them, and the door gaped wide open to show its black, rotting innards. The well had been filled in and covered by a metal plate ages ago.

Of course there were all sorts of macabre stories about the house and the well. That the place was haunted, that the first farmer here murdered his wife and unborn baby a 150 years ago, that strange noises had come from the well before it was filled in.

And this is where we would come to explore the lake front and play Blind Man's Blood after Alicia invented it. We would streak down the trail on our bikes, yelling and laughing. We were disgustingly oblivious to the pain and death right below the surface. We were naive. Maybe I still was.

Trespassing on a murderer's property, attracting attention with our regular visits, and throwing stones on the metal lid that surely covered evil secrets as much as it covered the dirt thrown in the well. Anyone or anything that wanted to hurt us knew where to find us. Before my friends disappeared, we mocked evil. We thought it couldn't touch us and that we were invincible.

God, we were so wrong.

Later, the stories of the hauntings made me wonder if there were others in the town who saw things that couldn't exist. I didn't think I saw dead things, at least not ghosts. But I didn't know what it was – my mind playing tricks, or picking up echoes from the past, or something else. And more than ever, I believed that Alicia was hiding too much from me.

The sun was already behind the trees but there was light. It wouldn't last long this time of year, and the forest was growing dark. We opened the car doors to the shrill buzzing of insects and moist lake-side air.

"Where is the cave you found?" I asked.

Alicia pointed vaguely towards the lake as she walked to the house. There were bluffs near the lake; the whole area had caves.

"Did you take Sean and Levi there before you guys came here?" She had always said the brothers were near the house when the kidnapper showed up, but police couldn't find evidence one way or the other about the location.

She wasn't listening. Standing at the crooked porch steps, she curled and uncurled her fists.

"What you said about finding a way to Sean and Levi, opening paths," I said, then paused. The two worlds at the diner filled my mind. "We are the same, you and me. Aren't we?"

"Hardly," she scoffed. "We are opposites. That's why we are perfect together."

"Admit you see the things I see. Tell me the truth about what happened, who took them."

"Anything else?" she asked. She began a slow march back to the car to get something from the trunk.

Reflexes made me scan the ground for a rock or branch I could use as a weapon. Just in case.