The Children on the Hill(47)

“Are you all right, Violet?” Gran had asked. “You seem a little preoccupied.” That was an understatement. Every time she looked at Gran, Vi imagined her helping Dr. Hicks, and it made her head hurt and her stomach ache. Sometimes, when Gran looked at her, Vi was sure she was just waiting for her to confess, that any second she was going to pull the flashlight out of her pocket and say, “Care to explain this?”

Vi forced a smile. “I’m fine, just thinking about Iris. About how frustrating it must be to not remember anything.”

Gran nodded, began putting things back in her purse. She lit a cigarette with the gold lighter. Vi focused her eyes on the flame. “Perhaps…” Gran had said, letting the flame go out, then flicking it on again. Vi smelled the lighter fluid, studied the yellow and orange dancing together over the butterfly, which seemed to twitch its wings in the flickering light. “Perhaps some things are best not remembered.”



* * *



“I KNOW WHAT I saw,” Eric said now as they all huddled together in the clubhouse. “It was real.” He held his sketchbook on his lap, drawing while he talked. They had candles lit and an old camping lantern blazing, which made the inside of the clubhouse feel warm and cozy and protected. But Vi kept looking out the window, thinking that if there was something out there, having the building all lit up was like turning on a flashing sign outside a motel: Come on in!

Eric kept looking up from his drawing at the window, too. Iris was chewing her lip, tilting back in her chair, unable to sit still.

“Last night I saw it at the edge of the woods in the yard.” Eric’s face was all pinched up and serious. “It had a loping sort of walk. A pale blank face. A hooded cape. It stopped and was just looking at the house, watching. I think…” Eric paused, looked up at both of them. “I think it was looking for us.”

“For us?” Iris said, her voice higher than usual. She thumped the feet of her chair back down onto the floor.

Eric nodded. “Maybe it knows. Knows about the club. About the monster hunting.”

Iris gave one solemn nod. Swallowed slowly, like her throat was dry.

“Okay,” Vi said, still trying to piece things together. “So why didn’t you say anything last night? Or this morning? I mean, you’ve known about this for over twenty-four hours and you’re just now telling us?”

It didn’t make any sense.

He rolled his eyes. “Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” His voice was whiny. “I knew I needed proof.”

His proof—a Polaroid he’d taken earlier—was sitting on the table in front of them.

“So when it came back tonight, I was waiting. I told everyone I was going to bed early, then I sneaked back outside with my camera. I was hiding in the old rabbit hutch in the backyard.”

“Ew!” Vi said, thinking of all the rabbit pee. Had the hutch even been swept out or was it still full of shavings and old fossilized poop? She pictured her little brother there, flat on his belly in old hay and rabbit shit, waiting for the monster to come back.

“It was the perfect hiding spot,” he explained. “I knew he’d never see me in there.”

“He? He who?”

Eric turned the drawing he’d been working on so Vi and Iris could see it. He’d drawn a humanoid with a blank white face, huge dark eyes, and a heavy black grim reaper–style hood.

“The Ghoul,” Vi said, reading the neat block letters Eric had penciled in at the bottom. The creature’s eyes seemed to pull her in; I know you. I’m coming for you, they said. “So it’s like a ghost or something?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it’s one of the undead. A demon. But it saw me, Vi! When I snapped the picture and the flash went off, it looked right at me.”

Vi picked up the Polaroid, squinted down at it. The truth was, it was hard to tell what she was looking at. She could see a form at the edge of their house. If she looked at it the right way, she could see a black-draped figure, a pale face. But it was so blurry, it was hard to make out the details.

“Tell me what it did again,” Vi said.

“It came out of the trees and went right over to the house, started looking in the windows. I think it was looking for a way in.”

Iris came to stand next to Vi and stared over her shoulder at the photo. She was trembling, her whole body vibrating like a whacked tuning fork. “So what do we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Vi said. She licked her lips, thinking. Waiting for one of the gods to whisper an idea, but they were all silent. Scared off by the Ghoul.

She felt a headache coming on. She’d been getting them more and more often.

“We need to do a spell of protection,” Eric said. He picked up the monster book, flipped through its pages until he found what he was looking for. “We wash the doors of the house with water steeped with sage and thyme, and put kosher salt across all the thresholds, maybe surround our beds with it. Crosses can’t hurt, either. Holy water, if we can get it.”

“Right,” Vi said. “Where are we going to get holy water, Eric?”

“St. Matthew’s?” Eric suggested.

“So we’re just going to bike on over and tell the priest we need holy water to help protect us from a ghoul?”