Lisey's Story(111)

"No, me." He gestures to the trees. "Paul and I never saw the laughers up close, mostly just heard them. But we saw other things... I saw other things...there's this one thing..."

Scott looks toward the rapidly darkening masses of sweetheart trees, then at the path, which fades away quickly when it enters the forest. There's no mistaking the caution in his voice when he speaks again. "We have to go back soon."

"But you can take us, can't you?"

"With you to help? Sure."

"Then tell me how you buried him."

"I can tell you that when we go back, if you - "

But the slow shake of her head silences him.

"No. I understand about why you don't want to have kids. I get that now. If you ever came to me and said, 'Lisey, I've changed my mind, I want to take the chance,' we could talk about it because there was Paul...and then there was you."

"Lisey - "

"We could talk about it then. Otherwise we're never going to talk about gomers and bad-gunky and this place again, okay?" She sees the way he's looking at her and softens her tone. "It's not about you, Scott - not everything is, you know. This happens to be about me. It's beautiful here..." She looks around. And she shivers. "It's too beautiful. If I spent too much time here - or even too much time thinking about it - I think the beauty would drive me insane. So if our time is short, for once in your smucking life, you be short. Tell me how you buried him."

Scott half-turns away from her. The orange light of the setting sun paints the line of his body: flange of shoulder-blade, tuck of waist, curve of buttock, the long shallow arc of one thigh. He touches the arm of the cross. In the high grass, barely visible, the glass curve of the hypo glimmers like a forgotten bit of trumpery treasure.

"I covered him with grass, then I went home. I couldn't come back for almos' a week. I was sick. I had a fever. Daddy give me o'meal in the morning and soup when he come home from work. I was ascairt of Paul's ghos, but I never seen his ghos. Then I got better and trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Just me. I thought the aminals -  animals - would have ett'n on him - the laughers and such - but they din't yet, so I went back and trite to come over again, this time with a play-shovel I found in our old toybox in the attic. That went and that's what I dug his grave with, Lisey, a red plastic play-shovel we had for the san'box when we 'us very wee."

The sinking sun has started to fade to pink. Lisey puts her arm around him and hugs him. Scott's arms encircle her and for a moment or two he hides his face in her hair.

"You loved him so very much," she says.

"He was my brother" is what he replies, and it is enough.

As they stand there in the growing gloom, she sees something else, or thinks she does. Another piece of wood? That's what it looks like, another crate-slat lying just beyond the place where the path leaves the lupin-covered hill (where lavender is now turning a steadily darker purple). No, not just one - two.

Is it another cross, she wonders, one that has fallen apart?

"Scott? Is someone else buried here?"

"Huh?" He sounds surprised. "No! There's a graveyard, sure, but it's not here, it's by the - " He catches sight of what she's looking at and gives a little chuckle. "Oh, wow!

That's not a cross, it's a sign! Paul made it right around the time of the first bool hunts, back when he could still come on his own sometimes. I forgot all about that old sign!" He pulls free of her and hurries to where it lies. Hurries a little way down the path. Hurries under the trees. Lisey isn't sure she likes that.

"Scott, it's getting dark. Don't you think we better go?"

"In a minute, babyluv, in just a minute." He picks up one of the boards and brings it back to her. She can make out letters, but they're faint. She has to bring the slat close to her eyes before she can read what's there:

TO THE POOL.

"Pool?" Lisey asks.

"Pool," he agrees. "Rhymes with bool, don't you know." And actually laughs. Only that's when, somewhere deep in what he calls the Fairy Forest (where night has surely come already), the first laughers raise their voices.

Only two or three, but the sound still terrifies Lisey more than anything she has ever heard in her life. To her those things don't sound like hyenas, they sound like people, lunatics cast into the deepest depths of some nineteenth-century Bedlam. She grasps Scott's arm, digging into his skin with her nails, and tells him in a voice she barely recognizes as her own that she wants to go back, he has to take her back right now. Dim and distant, a bell tinkles.

"Yes," he says, tossing the signboard into the weeds. Above them a dark draft of air stirs the sweetheart trees, making them sigh and give off a perfume that's stronger than the lupin - cloying, almost sickly. "This really isn't a safe place after dark. The pool is safe, and the beach...the benches...maybe even the graveyard, but - "

More laughers join the chorus. In a matter of moments there are dozens of them. Some of the laughter runs up a jagged scale and turns into broken-glass screams that make Lisey feel like screaming back. Then they descend again, sometimes to guttering chuckles that sound as if they're coming from mud.

"Scott, what are those things?" she whispers. Above his shoulder the moon is a bloated gas balloon. "They don't sound like animals at all."