Haunted Worlds Read online

  At some point ten-year-old Christopher had wandered close to us, from where he had been playing alone in another part of the yard. He stood quietly behind me positioning and repositioning the limbs of the action figure he was holding, seemingly preoccupied—in that world of his own I could never quite imagine—but I felt he was also listening to Derek and Megan with the rest of us.

  Derek said, “There’s one grave, for this guy named Marmaduke . . .”

  “Marmaduke is a dog,” Christopher said behind me.

  “Shh,” I told him.

  “. . . and if you walk in a circle around Marmaduke’s grave ten times at midnight, then you kneel down and put your ear to the gravestone, Marmaduke’s ghost will talk to you.”

  “Christ,” Tracey said, hugging herself with a shudder.

  “And how did someone discover that?” Brad laughed. “Did Marmaduke tell them? But how could he tell them, if you didn’t do the ritual first to get him to talk?”

  Megan slapped his arm and said, “Listen, there’s more! Near Spider Gates, deeper in the woods, is another cemetery—a smaller one—and maybe you’ll find it once, but if you do you’ll never find it a second time.”

  “That’s it—I’ve got to see this Spider Gates,” Tony said.

  “Are you crazy?” his sister Angela said. “I wouldn’t go near a place like that.”

  “Come on,” Tony insisted, “we all need to go.”

  “Christopher can go to Spider Gates,” my brother said behind me. Back then he always referred to himself by name, instead of saying “I” or “me.”

  “You aren’t going, silly,” I shushed him. I always felt guilty for it later, but I was often afraid he was going to embarrass me in front of my friends. “Go play on the deck now, okay?”

  Dutifully, Christopher turned away and trudged off toward the deck where the adults were having their coffee.

  “I don’t believe any of it,” I finally said.

  “You’re just afraid to believe it, bitch!” Megan said. Best-friend talk—got to love it.

  “Okay, so let’s go right now,” Brad said, turning toward the woods at the back of my property.

  “Hang on,” I said. “If it’s such a long walk and we’ll be gone a while, my folks will get pissed.”

  “Afraid!” Megan pronounced.

  Tony asked Derek, “Just how far into the woods is it?”

  “Hey, I don’t know exactly. I just know it’s in the woods.”

  “You sure it’s these woods?”

  “Okay, look, I’ll talk to my brother about it again to be sure where it is. Then when we know more, we’ll plan a trip someday and we’ll all go explore there together—all right?”

  “Yeah, ask him,” Tony said, “because I really need to see this crazy place.”

  My cousin Angela tapped her brother on the side of his head. “The crazy place is right here.”

  Beth looked over at me then and smiled—that sad, pretty smile of hers that I envied so much, and which I can still see to this day, like a white stone set in the flowing brook of time.

  *

  The day of my party was actually quite cool for September, a prelude to autumn, and my father had used this as an excuse to light up our wood-burning stove for the first time since last winter. We could smell its smoke outside as the party broke up. The last of my friends to leave was Beth, waiting for her mother to pick her up, but she was late. The adults had all moved inside, and so Beth and I sat alone on the deck as the sun lowered behind the tops of the trees massed beyond the edge of our property. Christopher still played behind me in the yard.

  “I’ve been to Spider Gates one time,” Beth confessed to me.

  “What—you have? When?”

  “My father took me once. He heard about it, too, so he thought we should check it out. My dad’s cool like that. My real dad,” she stressed. “It’s in Leicester, like Derek says, but like on the opposite side of Spencer from here . . . there’s no way you could reach it from these woods.” She pointed past me toward the rear of the yard. “It’s not too far from Worcester Airport. You know how Derek said people hear demons roaring in the forest? It’s probably just planes taking off from the airport. You know how people like to let their imaginations go wild.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything when the others were here?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”

  “But is it really scary like Derek and Megan say?”

  “Well, I guess any cemetery is scary. Especially deep in the woods—and it is in the woods. But all those stories . . . wow. Like, it doesn’t really have eight gates—it only has one.”

  “But is it really a spiderweb gate?”

  “The designs looked more like metal wagon wheels to me.” She wiggled her fingers. “Though the spokes are kind of wavy, like spider legs I guess.”

  Despite having become nervous by the end of Derek’s story, I felt disappointed at Beth’s description. Of course all that creepiness had been too good to be true. “So I wonder what’s really back there in our woods, if you go in far enough.”

  Beth shrugged again. “Same as any woods if you go in deep enough. You come out the other side, where there are just more people.” She said it as if that was the greatest disappointment of all. More people. Well, they say hell is other people.

  Beth looked beyond me again, and her gaze seemed to latch onto something. “Hey . . .” she began.

  I twisted around in my seat and sighted Christopher in the purplish gloom, looking distant and indistinct at the edge of the grass where it met the trees. He was peering into the woods as if he intended to step over the bordering wall. “Christopher!” I shouted to him. “Get back over here right now! I’ll tell Mom if you go in those trees!”

  He turned around—his small pale face seeming to float—and started crossing the grass slowly toward the deck.

  Facing Beth again, I explained, “One morning we all saw a deer come out of the woods, and Christopher was all excited about it. So he always talks about deer in the woods back there. But you know, he kind of mixes real stuff with stuff he sees in movies or dreams up. He does what they call ‘scripting’ . . . a lot of the stuff he says is lines from movies he’s memorized. He can memorize every word and even the sound effects from a Disney movie or whatever. When he watches them he’ll say the dialogue before the characters do. But anyway, he always tells us he sees a white deer back there in the trees.”

  “Like an albino?”

  “I guess.”

  “Was the deer you all saw an albino?”

  “That time? No, it was a regular deer. Anyway, sometimes Christopher takes part of a sandwich or crackers or something and brings it back in the yard because he says he’s going to ‘feed the white deer.’”

  “That’s cute. He’s just playing. It’s make-believe.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as Christopher was still making his way toward the deck, “but he gets a little carried away with it. He says the white deer talks to him.” I chuckled, embarrassed by my own admission, but Beth only listened without scoffing or a wiseass comment, as one of my other friends might make.

  She even asked, “What does it say to him?”

  “He’s never told me that. He just says it whispers to him, and it’s a girl. I think it must be from something he saw in a movie—Bambi or something.” I thought about that. “Well, Bambi isn’t white, but you know . . .”

  “Well, I did think I saw him looking at something back there a second ago.”

  “Huh? You saw what?”

  “That’s why I said ‘hey,’” Beth said. “It caught my eye. But it wasn’t a deer. It looked like a person.”

  “A person?”

  “A girl, I guess. I thought he was talking to someone in your family.”

  I twisted around in my chair again. I saw only Christopher, close to mounting the steps to the deck. No one in the far shadows of the yard.

  “Where did she go?” I
asked.

  “I think I must have imagined it,” Beth said meekly, sounding as if she was sorry she had mentioned it.

  I gave her a look, trying to gauge if she were messing with me, but she appeared sincere and I couldn’t imagine her pulling a joke like that. I heard my brother’s sneakers clomping up the wooden steps.

  “Hey, Christopher,” I asked, “who were you talking to back there by the stone wall?”

  “Christopher gives birthday cake to the white deer,” he mumbled, walking past me and letting himself through the sliding glass door into our house.

  *

  In October, Beth disappeared.

  Her mother reported her missing to the police. Her father drove down from Maine, where he’d moved a few years earlier. And Beth’s stepfather shot himself under the chin with a shotgun in the basement of their home.

  I guess we all put two and two together after that.

  But the police never found Beth. Her mother held out the hope that Beth had just run away after what had apparently happened with her stepfather, off to California or someplace, too ashamed and hurt to face anyone who knew her. But I think her mother was the only one who believed that. The rest of us felt we knew better.

  My father was an EMT then in addition to the security job, and he volunteered for one of the search parties. He and some other men even ventured into the woods behind our own property. I asked if I could go along to help, but he said no. “I know you’re worried about your friend,” he said gently.

  So I sat out on the deck waiting for my dad to return, watching the trees that stood like drawn theater curtains at the end of my yard, and remembered sitting out there with Beth only a few weeks earlier. I hugged myself against the chilly air, but my mother couldn’t get me to come inside. At some point, though, I dozed off in my chair, because when a hand touched my shoulder I awoke with a gasp to see my father leaning over me, his cheeks ruddy red.

  I was startled, but glad he’d awakened me. I’d been having a strange dream . . . of pushing open a wrought-iron gate, its rusted hinges squealing.

  My dad told me he and the others hadn’t found a thing.

  As I stood up to go inside where it was warm, my father’s arm around my shoulders, I asked him, “Dad, what’s in the woods back there? I heard there’s an old cemetery.”

  “Old cemetery?”

  I felt stupid for it, but nevertheless I said, “Spider Gates?”

  “Oh,” he said, “you mean the Friends Cemetery? That’s what it’s really called. No, honey, that place is in Leicester. There’s no cemetery in the woods behind our house.”

  But I now know that a thing can exist in two places, and in two forms, at the same time. In what we consider its true form, and in a dream version we build in our minds. And sometimes, that fantasy construct draws so much power from our imaginations that it becomes real in a different way.

  *

  One year later—again in October—Christopher disappeared, too.

  My mother was hysterical, all the more so because she blamed herself. She had let him play in the back yard without close supervision while she cooked spaghetti in the kitchen. It was a Saturday afternoon and my father was filling in for someone at the abrasives company, but she called him home from work. She called the police, too.

  Megan was at my house—we had been in my room talking about the latest boys we liked, not keeping an eye on Christopher either—and we rushed out onto the deck. My father hadn’t arrived home yet, and the police were still on the way. But I knew I had to start searching, and I knew where to start: that stone wall bordering our back yard. My friend and I thumped down the deck’s steps and raced toward the far edge of the property.

  “Oh my God, look,” Megan said when we reached it, kneeling down and picking something up from where it rested atop one of the mossy stones in the wall. She held out her open palm to show me. It was a chocolate chip cookie.

  “He went into the woods,” I said, my voice edging toward hysteria, too. “He must have seen that deer again . . . or he dreamed he did.” I stepped over the wall then, into dense bushes growing in the almost unbroken shadows of the pine trees. “Come on, Megan, we’ve got to start looking for him.”

  But she reached out to me, as if afraid to follow me over the wall, and tried to take my arm. “Wait until the police get here! They’ll know what to do.”

  “No!” I cried, tears flowing now. “We can’t wait for that! He might be scared! He might be hurt!”

  “They’ll be here any minute!”

  “No!” I screeched. “What if it’s a serial killer, Megan? What if Beth’s stepfather didn’t really kill her?”

  “You’re just talking crazy now. Stop it!”

  But I was beyond listening to reason. I whirled around and plunged straight into the woods, yelling my brother’s name.

  *

  I crashed through low-hanging branches that slashed at my cheeks. Once, racing across the slippery bed of rusty red pine needles, my feet went out from under me and I fell heavily onto my back, thumping my head. I cried all the harder, but more from the mounting fear than the pain. My sense of loss was like a chasm that had opened beneath my feet, into which I plummeted with arms and legs flailing. But my arms and legs were only flailing as I ran, screaming Christopher’s name until the back of my throat tasted like blood.

  Then I thought I heard a voice call out, either another searcher shouting Christopher’s name or an echo of my own voice. I stopped to listen for more, keeping perfectly still, and that was when I sensed movement between the trees off to my right. Just a peripheral glimpse, gone as soon as I had turned my head fully to look, but it had appeared to be a large animal. A pale something against the shadowy murk.

  “Christopher!” I sobbed. “Please!”

  “Christopher is here,” a familiar voice behind me intoned, surprisingly close.

  I spun around, startled, and there he was. Christopher, with a bag of chocolate chip cookies in one hand. He did not look scratched or dirty like me, with pine needles in my hair. He didn’t look scared as I had imagined. If he looked a little nervous at all, it was probably due to my own frenzied state.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, I dropped to my knees and hugged him tight. Confused, he patted my back awkwardly to comfort me. “Don’t do that again,” I scolded him. “Don’t you ever go off alone into the woods again! Why did you do that?”

  I expected him to say then that he had seen his whispering white deer and had tried feeding it cookies. Had followed it. But instead, when I held him away to look into his face, he told me, “Christopher goes with Beth.”

  “What?” I said. “Beth? You saw Beth?”

  He nodded.

  A chaos of thoughts swirled in my head. Crazy thoughts—like Beth having spent the past year lost in a dense maze of trees, unable to find her way back over the stone wall in my yard. And more realistic thoughts, too, such as Christopher merely spinning fantasies from things he remembered—a person he remembered.

  “Honey, are you making this up or what?”

  He shook his head no. And he said, “Beth can take Christopher to Spider Gates.”

  I wiped the tears from my eyes on the back of my hand, to stare into my brother’s eyes more deeply. “You saw Beth in the woods . . . and she wanted to take you to Spider Gates?”

  He nodded again.

  “And did she? Did she show you Spider Gates?”

  Now he shook his head. “Beth hears you.”

  “She—she heard me calling?”

  Nodding.

  “And then she went away?”

  Nodding.

  I stood up and took Christopher’s hand. “Come on, honey.”

  “Christopher goes to Spider Gates?” he asked.

  “No!” I said. “I’m not taking you there. We don’t want to go there, Christopher. You understand me? We never need to go to Spider Gates.”

  *

  One day that November, when my parents were out to the Solomon Pond Mal
l with Christopher to begin some Christmas shopping, and I stayed home waiting for Megan to come over, I took the opportunity to go out into my back yard alone, to the ancient wall that hid in the bushes like a row of moldering teeth in the mouth of a giant, gaping wide and ready to snap shut.

  I stood at the very edge of the wall, gazing into the gray woods. Then I spoke aloud.

  “Beth,” I said, “I know you’re lonely. I know you’re sad. But don’t talk to my brother again . . . please. You know he can see things. You know he can see you. But he needs to be with his family. He needs to be with me.” My voice broke then, and I said, “I’m sorry, okay?” I started to openly weep. “I’m so sorry.”

  *

  Last month, my parents threw a party for my fortieth birthday at their small home in Worcester. My husband and son came with me, of course. My grandmother—still alive, God bless her—even made a ton of pizelles for the occasion.

  Christopher is thirty-five now, a little overweight and balding. He’s very sweet and funny, so he’s well liked at the Price Chopper. He spends most of his money on Xbox games and video game manuals, sometimes for games he doesn’t even own. He still buys the occasional Star Wars figure.

  When I arrived at my parents’ house, I didn’t immediately see Christopher, but it was easy enough to find him—hunched avidly in front of the computer in his bedroom. He was watching a video on YouTube. I could see over his shoulder that it wasn’t one of his usual humorous favorites, from questionable YouTube personalities like the “Tourettes Guy” or the “Angry German Kid.” It was a video shot in a forest somewhere, by a shaky handheld camera.

  My smile of greeting froze on my lips, a sudden frost coating the inside of my chest. I moved around to my brother’s side for a closer look, however afraid I was of what I’d see. I expected to view a secluded spot in the middle of a pine forest. There would be a wrought-iron gate with wheel-like designs, wavy arms inside them like tentacles.

  But instead—like the person who had shot this video—I caught a glimpse of something crashing off into the underbrush, startled. A pale fleeting shape.

  Though I quickly realized what it was the video’s creator had spotted, Christopher looked up at me to explain it. He was smiling.