The Narrows(6)

Matthew never had. Now, he looked across the Narrows and halfway up the neighboring mountain where the old plastics factory, now long defunct and abandoned, squatted low to the ground like an animal lying in wait. Its ranks of tiny barred windows looked like grids on a circuit board and its stone fa?ade was networked with thick cords of ivy. Two slender concrete smokestacks rose up like medieval prison towers at one end of the factory.

“Help me look,” Dwight said. He had a big stick now, which he used to thwack the overgrown grass.

Matthew glanced around. “How do you know we’re even in the right spot?”

“Billy Leary said it was down by the Narrows, between the Witch Tree and the stone bridge.” Dwight pointed to the overpass made of black stones that spanned the Narrows in a tight little arc, then he pointed over to the Witch Tree, a creeping, skeletal horror that clawed up out of a base of brownish nettles, its branches like flailing arms, the suggestion of faces etched into its ashy bark. Matthew knew countless stories and rumors surrounding that tree, the most sinister suggesting that the tree had once been a little boy who had broken into an old witch’s house and stolen all her sweets. The boy had thought he’d gotten away with it but the witch came looking for him later that night, her grotesque face peering right into his bedroom window. She kidnapped the boy and turned him into a tree so he could never steal things from her or anyone else again. Indeed, if you stared at the trunk of the twisted and gnarled tree long enough, there seemed to be a face—or many faces—within the bark.

“How much do you get doing your paper route?” Matthew asked.

“Fifteen bucks a week.”

“Wow. That much, huh?”

“Yeah.” Dwight wandered over to the stone footbridge, a semicircle of daylight winking out from beneath it. Beyond the bridge, one of the many footpaths described a winding walkway through the thicket. With the tip of his thwacking stick, Dwight chipped away some of the mortar between the stones in the bridge’s foundation. “Why?”

“You think maybe I can take it over for a week? Just till I get enough money to pay for the Dracula mask.”

“That wasn’t Dracula,” Dwight said, still searching the ground.

“Yeah it was.”

“No it wasn’t, dummy.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Just a regular old vampire.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Dracula is a specific vampire. Maybe even the lead vampire. He’s one guy, you know? Dracula is his name. It’s like saying all monkeys are called King Kong.”

“My sister says Dracula’s real name was Vlad.”

“You know what I mean, dummy,” Dwight said.

“And King Kong wasn’t a monkey,” Matthew said. “He was an ape.”

Dwight paused in chipping away the mortar from between the stones, propping the long stick over one shoulder. He winced into the sun as he looked toward Matthew. “What’s the difference?”

Matthew admitted that he did not know.

“Have you ever even seen Dracula?” Dwight asked, peering beneath the stone footbridge.

“He’s not a real person,” Matthew said.

“Not in person, dummy. The movie, I mean. Have you seen it?”

“Oh. Yes. I mean, no. I don’t know.” He couldn’t remember now. He’d seen a vampire movie on a cable access channel late one night over the summer after his mom and his sister had gone to bed. Had that movie been He couldn’t remember now. There had been a vampire who looked strikingly like the mask in Hogarth’s window. He’d suffered nightmares for several days after watching that movie.Dracula?

“It’s pretty boring,” Dwight said. “And it’s so old. It’s not even in color. The only creepy part is he lives in this big old castle, and there are candles on the walls and shadows everywhere.” Dwight pointed across the Narrows to where the old plastics factory appeared superimposed against the cloudy sky. “Sort of looked like that place.”

For some inexplicable reason, looking at it now, Matthew felt a chill radiate up his spine.

“Anyway, I can’t just have you take over my route, doofus,” Dwight continued. “You gotta get up crazy early, before school even, and if you oversleep and miss the route, I’ll catch hell.”

“I won’t oversleep.”

“And besides, I’m saving up my money to buy a new dirt bike.”

Matthew sighed.

“Oh damn,” Dwight said. The tone of his voice ratcheted up a notch with excitement. “Here it is! Take a look!”

Matthew turned away from the view of the abandoned plastics factory and found Dwight crouching in the tall grass, his stick planted like a staff in the ground. Dwight peered at something at his feet, a look of pure awe on his chubby face. From where Matthew stood, he could see there was something big down there in the grass, bending the stalks of the reeds and creating what appeared to be a crater in the earth.

Matthew sidled up beside Dwight…then immediately recoiled when he saw what Dwight was looking at.

“That’s…that’s not a deer,” Matthew said, his voice small. “Is it?”

The thing no longer resembled whatever it had been when it was alive. Matthew could make out the suggestion of long, muscular legs covered in short tawny hair and hooves like chunks of obsidian. Through what was left of its skull, he could see a whitish zipper of dull teeth along a tapered snout. The skull itself looked like a bowl with some pinkish fluid at its center.