“Professor?” Joe’s voice came through the tinny speakers of my office phone. “I’ve gone and done somethin’ tremendously stupid. Respectfully, I may need your help again.”
So was the message he had left on my answering machine at work. I played it back three times before I cancelled my class, hopped in my Prius, and made the long trip back to the Greenhill estate. I didn’t bother to bring a weapon.
Joe wasn’t at the trailers. There was a young girl about 10 with gap teeth and freckles there, using a stick to draw stuff in the dirt near the flower beds. She had picked one of Joe’s flowers, a vivid, yellow one, and stuck it behind her ear. I asked her if she had seen him.
“He’s in the house,” she said, whipping her stick up and pointing it at the decrepit family house. “Fixin’ it up. That’s where he said he’d be and to not bother him.”
“Thanks, kid,” I said, turning away.
She tsked. “My name is Miss Mabel, sir. You will show me the respect that name deserves.” I could only stare at her. “What’s a matter? Are you hard on hearing?”
I scanned the thing she was drawing in the dirt:
GET FUCKE-
“Don’t you have anything better do to?” I asked her, eyeing the curse.
She gestured at the circle of dense vegetation around the clearing and scowled. “Do what? Go where? Mister, you ain’t from around here are you?”
“Thanks, Miss Mabel, I’ve got to go.”
Up close the house gave the impression of being the half-decayed corpse of an animal, all sagging wood and peeling paint. It didn’t look as scary as it had at night, just gross and dangerous. Houses like this exist all across America — farmers leave them on their property instead of tearing them down. Too much trouble, or too expensive, usually they just build a new house and leave the old one to rot.
The porch stairs didn’t squeak as I climbed them but they did sink with each step I took. The front door was jammed in a crooked doorframe and I had to lift it to slide it out of the way. The floor inside had given way in some parts, revealing the dirt in the crawlspace beneath, and small shrubs were growing in the dappled sunlight where it came through the holes in the ceiling. A simple staircase that looked like its steps had just been redone with fresh, unstained wood lead to the second story.
I heard a voice from somewhere upstairs. Joe’s voice. I carefully climbed the stairs and found doorways leading to three abandoned bedrooms. One of them was blackened from soot, the roof missing or burned away, the interior rotting. The next room Joe was inside, standing with his back to the doorway, looming over something.
“Joe?” I said, and he spun around.
“Professor,” he said quietly. “Glad you’re here.” He stepped aside to reveal Boy Blackthorpe crouched against the far wall, hands around his knees, thousand yard stare on his face.
My heart started pounding at the sight of him and I took a step back.
“Woah, now, don’t go anywhere just yet,” Joe said, coming forward and wrapping his arm across my shoulders. “I got him away from his father, and he’s harmless now.”
“Is he?” I asked, and swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Yes, and we’re gettin’ along pretty well, ain’t we Boy?” Joe pulled me forward and I got a closer look at the child — or rather, the man. He looked even smaller all scrunched up like he was. His eyes were red and tears had streaked his malformed face. One of his ears was swollen and caked with dry blood.
“I didn’t do that,” Joe said. “Boy had that when I picked him up. His father beats him.” He paused a moment. “I think.”
“‘Picked him up’? Joe, you kidnapped him.”
Joe released my shoulders. “First off, he ain’t no kid. Second, he came with me willingly. All that boy wants to do is get away from his awful father. Look at ‘im!” He gestured to Boy. “He can’t defend himself. Makes you pity him.”
“We saw him defend himself at the Blackthorpe house the other night,” I said. “We know what he’s capable of.”
Joe scoffed. “He only did that because his father forced him to.” He crouched down next to Boy, who drew back from him. “What I think is, he don’t like using magic, but his father makes him do it. He can’t talk, but the poor boy understands what’s goin’ on. There’s intelligence in that there head. ” He poked him in the center of his bulbous forehead, causing him to flinch.
I couldn’t read his emotions; I think there was a paralytic element to his deformities, something similar to John Merrick’s. Joe unwrapped a granola bar and held it out for him, and Boy took it, snaked it under his flaps of skin to find his mouth.
“See? You’ve just got to show him some kindness.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “You took Boy, and Noah Blackthorpe is going to come looking for his son.”
“My plan” Joe said, watching Boy eat, “is to convince him to bring back my sister.”
“Joe…”
Joe pointed a look at me, his smile gone. “I aim to bring Leanne back, no matter what I have to do.”
“We don’t know if that’s something he’s even capable of.”
“He can alter reality, professor. You’ve seen him do it!”
I thought back to the men writhing and changing inside that cloud, the meat plant sprouting from them. “I don’t like this. The things he can do are dangerous. You’ve got to let him go.”
Joe smirked. “Well, it’s not like I can bring him back to his family, now can I? Come on, all I need is for you to distract his father. They don’t know where he is yet, maybe you can misdirect them before they get here. You’re good with words, ain’t ya? Get out there and slow the reverend down so I have time to figure out Boy’s magic.”
I took a deep breath. “No.”
Joe stood and faced me, puffing his chest out. “Well, why not?”
“I’m an outside observer, I came here to learn about you and your magic, not get involved in your… schemes.”
“Why don’t you go take a look in the room next to us, professor? Tell me what you find there. Maybe it’ll change your mind.” He returned to Boy, whispering to him and stroking the few strands of hair sprouting from his head like Boy was his child. I stepped back out into the hallway and considered leaving but my curiosity got the better of me and I went to the final room.
Here the structure of the house was at its healthiest, with a roof, windows that hadn’t been blown out, and a nice view down into the clearing with the trailers and gardens. It was a child’s playroom, a few toys scattered around that looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades — a wooden duck here, a pile of knockoff Lego in the corner, a closet of musty tea towels. It wasn’t what was inside the room that was interesting though, it was the walls of it: the walls were completely covered in drawings. Near the bottom stuff was drawn in crayon and looked rough, but farther up the wall the drawings grew better, switched to pencils and markers, and eventually even paint. They were old but had remained relatively intact over the years.
They were beautiful drawings, rivaling what many adults could do.
At the far wall one crayon drawing stuck out to me thanks to its crudeness and overzealous use of color. In the space between the window frame and a detailed painting of a wheatfield at dawn, there was a drawing of two stick figures standing on the bank of a bright blue stream. They both wore backwards caps and colorful clothing, and the artist had even drawn them with smiley faces. One had long blonde hair, the other short black hair.
A Greenhill and a Blackthorpe.
I blew a puff of air out from between my lips. A different child had drawn this one, that much was obvious. I think the sight of all this had the effect Joe had been intending, because I went back to him and asked him about the drawings.
“She came here to draw sometimes, away from everyone else. I taught her how to do it, know that?” He waved his stump in the air. “Can’t no more, of course, I fucked that up good.”
He sat in his jean shorts on the floor of that room with his back to me and told me the whole story in an uncharacteristically soft voice.
Joe had been a teenager when Leanne vanished in 2003. She was just 12 years old. Now, most kids could watch themselves at that age, especially out there on the Greenhill property because there was nothing and nobody around.
Nobody except the Blackthorpes. That complicated things a little.
Leanne had befriended the Blackthorpe child, Tobias, and they played together in the woods all the time. Joe’s family didn’t like that, and neither did the Blackthorpes, but Joe thought it was alright. (“They’re just kids! What do kids know about fightin’ and feudin’? That’s an adult thing to worry about.”)
When the two of them vanished Joe resented himself for it. He took a lot of the blame from the family. He accused the Blackthorpes of using the children’s friendship to lure Leanne, and then kidnapped her and used her for some nefarious, satanic purpose (“Probably to give Boy his powers, now that I think about it a little.”) The old generational feud restarted suddenly and violently, with the two sides accusing each other of taking the children. Eventually some of the Blackthorpes snuck onto the Greenhill property and set the house afire, and even though they were able to put it out before it took the whole structure, Joe’s grandfather had “burned up and died in the very house he was born in.”
Joe, by his own admission, fell into a pattern of self-destruction; drinking, fighting, fucking whomever. Eventually, he sobered up long enough to join the military, deployed to Afghanistan, and acted like an even “bigger fuckin’ fool” over there. “I thought the discipline of a soldier’s life would bring out the best in me — like my ancestors — but it only made mw worse.” He would do stupid stuff like rush into danger, leave people behind, get himself into precarious positions with the enemy. “Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was like I was tryin’ to atone for something.”
One day his Humvee hit an IED and flipped, the thing rolling on top of his arm and crushing it, and that was that.
While he still doesn’t know how he got his powers for sure, he speculated that he experienced so much trauma and spent so much time being destructive that he finally gained the ability to create. It was like God had personally come down from heaven and thanked him for his service. And what did he do with this beautiful gift? “I tried to make money off it, used it to impress women, and turned most of it into moonshine.”
I stood there, listening to him tell this story, making connections in my head. At last he turned around and addressed me directly. “I’m a fuck-up, professor. Always have been and could have always been. But I got a chance here now to figure out Boy’s powers and use them to right some of those wrongs in my life. This child can alter reality itself! You understand what I can fix with that ability? I’ve just got to get him to talk so he can tell me his secrets!”
I cleared my throat, wiped the tears that had formed at the corners of my eyes. “I can’t help you, Joe. I can’t help and I think you should let him go. You’re sister is—”
“Then get the fuck off my property.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the venom in his words was obvious. I left him there, still sat in front of Boy, and went outside onto the grass, lighting up a cigarette, staring up at that old house. Maybe I could go find Timothy, convince him to talk Joe out of it. I coughed, spitting out some phlegm, and wandered around behind the house.
About a dozen headstones were laid in the grass here, raw blocks of stone with hand-made inscriptions in them. They were well cared for, with grass that had been recently trimmed and the inscriptions mostly legible. I crouched by one of the oldest ones, reading off the names and dates: “Albert James Greenhill, 1780-1813, Soldier and Father.” This man had died right after he came back from the War of 1812. Another headstone: “Theodore H. Greenhill, 1921-1948”. Likely another young soldier, dead shortly after the end of World War II.
I went to the freshest gravestone, no need to crouch to read it. It was bigger than the rest, and professionally done: “Marigold Greenhill, 1963-2003, Mother, Sister, Daughter. Taken suddenly and far too soon”.
It should be obvious by now that Joe wasn’t alone in how he dealt with problems. There’s a self-destructive gene in the Greenhill DNA, a predisposition to accept blame for the bad things that happen to the people they care about. Likely the only thing keeping Joe alive post-sister and post-military was the weird magical ability he didn’t fully understand, giving him a new purpose in life, a chance to make things a little better for his family.
I sucked back the last of the cigarette, filling my lungs with tar. It was getting easier to smoke these things. I didn’t want to discard it on the graveyard though, so I went to the edge of the property where the ravine was, and tossed it down there. It was deep, its walls too steep for trees to find purchase, and a small stream of water gurgled over the rocks at the bottom. I wondered if it was the same stream I had heard over at the Blackthorpe property.
Seems these two families were linked by more than just a blood feud.
You know, a lot of people have the wrong impression about the field of anthropology. They think it’s all digging up native burial sites and excavating ancient skeletons. But I’ve only dug up one skeleton before, a child’s. In ancient times children sometimes vanished without a trace, usually because they slipped away into the woods or drowned in a shallow river. And if the forest was thick enough their tribes would never find their bodies, so they would create myths and legends to explain the disappearance: witches stealing children to bake into their pies, trickster spirits leading them off the trail, faeries laying claim to their souls and dragging them to the fae realm. It was a coping mechanism, a way to explain away their disappearance that didn’t place blame on anyone in the tribe. It allowed them to grieve the loss of a child without a body.
I took a deep breath and stepped over the side of the ravine, grasping a tree root to lower myself down. I jammed the toes of my Oxfords into the soft side of the wall, finding a little purchase there. It was a slow process, climbing all the way down to the bottom, and one false move would have been the end of me. But I splashed down into the stream feet-first, a little scratched up from the brambles and rocks, but ultimately okay. My shoes filled with water and soaked my socks. I ached from the effort of the climb; years of academia had turned my once-fit body into a flabby shell of itself.
My cigarette butt wasn’t the only piece of trash down here, the Greenhills having evidently used it as a dumping ground for years. I moved past the trash heaps, following the ravine down-stream. The sun was blotted out by the trees that grew overhead, their canopy stretching from either side of the ravine to cover the sky. It was dark down here, and quiet aside from the sound of water over pebbles.
It was the kind of place two children might play if they didn’t want to be caught by their families.
I scanned the banks, looking for I-don’t-know-what. I reached for another cig and stopped myself. It felt wrong to do something so dirty in a place as pristine as this. Even if this forest wasn’t as ancient as it appeared because Joe had grown it out with his magic, it still felt ancient, sacrosanct.
I was far enough down-stream from the garbage that when a piece of cloth caught my eye I immediately went to it. Here the stream was still shallow, but it had widened out into a field of pebbles and mini-streams, with pools where water collected during dry periods. I was unsure in my footing with all the loose rocks, and I was careful not to stumble. If you fell and knocked yourself out in a place like this it would be easy enough to drown in the shallow water.
The cloth had faded from years of exposure to the elements, but not yet fully deteriorated. It may have been blue at one point in time, and was wrapped around something.
Like I said, I have only uncovered one child’s skeleton before this, but I’ll never forget the little skull and tiny bones, so small and light, like a bird’s. It’s rare to find something fully intact, and that was no different here. The pale, faded polyester cloth was wrapped around a child’s ribcage, spine and skull. The limbs were gone, long since torn off and dragged away by wildlife.
Leanne had been here for some time.
We can only speculate on what happened, but my best guess is that some kind of accident happened with the children while they were playing down here. Maybe Leanne stumbled and tripped, hitting her head on the rocks and falling face down into the stream. Maybe Tobias pushed her. Maybe there was a scuffle or maybe there wasn’t. Unable to help his friend, Tobias had rushed home and either couldn’t vocalize what had happened or was too scared to. Tobias had fallen into the same trap Joe had: he blamed himself for Leanne’s death. That self-blame had manifested in terrible ways for him, his connection to whatever mystical forces swirled around this place matching Joe’s. His guilt would keep him short and stunted, altering him into an ugly, diminutive form of a child that could never grow up. And it would twist his face into something ugly too, either intentionally or unintentionally castigating himself with his new magic. Noah still blamed Joe for Tobias’ disfigurements and his strange powers, but I would say no one was to blame for what he had done to himself — not even Tobias.
They had just been kids, after all.
Boy had a different name now, but he was still that kid, stuck in time right after the moment his friend had died.
I was cutting through the last of the thick brush near the Greenhill property, attempting to find an easier way back than scaling a ravine wall, when the first of the screams rang out.
It sounded like Timothy.