The Fall of Never(77)

Hands in the pockets of her coat, head down, she walked the circumference of the hillside in quiet deliberation. Several yards off the side of the town road rested the jumble of small hut-like shacks which she recalled seeing the night she’d been driven up the hillside. Too small and depreciated for anyone to actually live in, they looked like a manic depressive’s idea of a gingerbread house. There were maybe a half-dozen shacks spread out along the stretch of road, most of them windowless, their roofs in the process of collapse. A handful of young children played at the foot of the road, bundled in their winter clothes, and Kelly assumed the neighborhood kids had fashioned these little shacks into rather sufficient clubhouses.

She smiled at the children as she passed by. There were five of them, each packaged to the neck in stiff winter clothing. As she passed they turned their heads to watch her go—five cherubic snowmen with rose-red cheeks.

“Buy some lemonade?” one of the children said. He held up a pitcher with one mitten-clad hand.

“Lemonade?”

“One dollar,” chimed a second boy.

“I have no money,” she said, pausing at the side of the road. “And isn’t it a little cold to be selling lemonade?”

“We make it hot,” said the first boy. One of his friends snickered. “We heat it up.”

“We got lighters,” said a third.

She half-frowned, half-smiled. “Do any of you kids know Becky Kellow?”

They shook their heads.

She pointed to the row of shacks. “Whose houses are these?”

The children appeared to consult one another. One of them had a rubber ball on an elastic string and was bouncing it in the road.

One of the younger-looking boys said, “The skeleton-man lives in one.”

“Skeleton-man, huh?”

“I seen him.”

“He has, lady,” said one of his friends.

“Who’s the skeleton-man?”

Again, the five boys huddled together in consultation. And again, the younger-looking boy poked his head up. “We don’t want to talk about the skeleton-man,” he said.

“You’ve seen him?”

“Jessie Halloran at school saw him. Said he walks around with no skin on and lives in one of those houses. We play there but not at night. At night is when the skeleton-man comes home.”

“Oh,” she said. “Where’d they come from, these houses?”

“We made them,” said the youngest boy. “We made them with wood that we bought and we even hammered some of them together.”

“Is that so? How come?”

The boy shrugged. He turned his head and looked at his friend, perhaps in hopes of acquiring an answer.

“Dumb, stupid houses,” said the boy.

“He’ll getcha, lady.”

“Give us a dollar for some lemonade?” one of the boys asked again.

“Sorry, I have no money with me.”

“It’s good. It’s hot. It’ll warm you. Good.”

“Maybe I’ll come back later.”

“Sure,” the boy said, but she knew he didn’t believe her.




During lunch with Gabriel at a small café in town, Kelly said, “Do you remember anything strange about growing up here?”

Gabriel just shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Anything at all bizarre.”

“I don’t know.” He grinned. He was very handsome. Kelly suddenly considered what it would be like to run her hands through his hair, to graze his lips with the tips of her fingers. She’d loved him as a child—loved him in that pure, unquestioning way children are capable of loving other human beings. Had he ever loved her? She thought maybe he had.

“Oh,” he said, “Reverend Taylor from the Lutheran church was arrested for selling narcotics to some of the altar boys. You remember that? That was a pretty big thing back then. My father knew him. I remember when the police came and arrested him. I remember he started crying and it scared me.”

Indifferently, she stabbed at her salad. “What about me?” she said then. “Do you remember anything strange about me?”

Gabriel suddenly looked concerned. “What is it, Kelly? Something’s bothering you. Tell me what it is.”

“I don’t know. It just feels like this whole place is pushing down on me, trying to crush me under its weight.” She shook her head. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not this place at all and I’m just going crazy. I felt like this for a while back in the city, too.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish something made sense to me right now but nothing does. I’m scared to death for my sister, yet I feel like I’m the one falling apart. I don’t know what it is.”

“This sounds serious.” He looked genuinely concerned.

“God,” she said, not looking up from her plate. “What about those three hunters?”

“Who?”

“Some detective was at the house, said something about three hunters that disappeared in the woods here last month. Do you know anything about that?”

He dropped his head. “Yes,” he said, “I confess, I killed them, I forced them into the wilderness and fed them nothing but each other’s buttocks—”