in weak, somehow dreamy smears. ‘I’m gonna go look for it’
I don’t think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to get up,
Chris and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with him, but our
muscles had been turned to cables with fear.
‘Let me up, fuckheads!’ Teddy hissed, struggling. ‘If I say I wanna go look for
it, then I’m gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the ghost! I wanna see it –
‘
The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife with
a crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddy–if he’d been a flag, we would
have looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo Jima. The scream climbed
with a crazy ease through octave after octave, finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge.
It hung there for a moment and then whirled back down again, disappearing into an
impossible bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was followed by a burst of what sounded like mad laughter… and then there was silence again.
‘Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,’ Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going
into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled
up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been
tenting in Vern’s field–where our folks thought we were–we probably would have
run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse
of Ray Brower was equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha’ant out
there in the woods–what my dad called a Goosalum–and it wanted us, it would
probably get us.
Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that. We
flipped for watches and Vern got the first one. I got the last. Vern sat up cross-legged by the husk of the campfire while the rest of us lay down again. We huddled together
like sheep.
I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleep–a light, uneasy
sleep that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its periscope up. My
half-sleeping dreams were populated with wild cries that might have been real or
might have only been products of my imagination. I saw–or thought I saw–
something white and shapeless steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory
bedsheet.
At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were
swimming at White’s Beach, a gravel-pit in Brunswick that had been turned into a
miniature lake when the gravel-diggers struck water. It was where Teddy had seen the
kid hit his head and almost drown.
In my dream we were out over our heads, stroking lazily along, with a hot July
sun blazing down. From behind us, on the float, came cries and shouts and yells of
laughter as kids climbed and dived or climbed and were pushed. I could hear the
empty kerosene drums that held the float up clanging and booming together–a sound
not unlike that of churchbeils, which are so solemn and emptily profound. On the
sand-and-gravel beach, oiled bodies lay face down on blankets, little kids with
buckets squatted on the verge of the water or sat happily flipping muck into their hair with plastic shovels, and teenagers clustered in grinning groups, watching the young
girls promenade endlessly back and forth in pairs and trios, never alone, the secret
places of their bodies wrapped in Jantzen tank suits. People walked up the hot sand on the balls of their feet, wincing, to the snackbar. They came back with chips, Devil
Dogs, Red Ball Popsicles.
Mrs. Cote drifted past us on an inflatable rubber raft. She was lying on her
back, dressed in her typical September-to-June school uniform: a grey two-piece suit
with a thick sweater instead of a blouse under the jacket, a flower pinned over one
almost nonexistent breast, thick support hose the colour of Canada Mints on her legs.