The Hike

  As he neared the veer in the path, he saw a faded billboard next to one of the ghost houses:

  COURTSHIRE ESTATES! NEW CONDOS STARTING AT JUST $350,000!

  This was Courtshire. Courtshire had nothing.

  Stupid old lady.

  His shoes were growing intolerable: wet and sweaty and stinking from all that running and fleeing and magic seed throwing. These sneakers weren’t accustomed to Ben being quite this active, and now they were falling apart like a lemon rolling off the used car lot. He kicked the shoes off and stripped away his socks, now flattened and brown (how did the bottoms of the socks get so dirty while contained within a pair of sneakers?). Then he mashed his feet into the sand and dug around. A piece of dead dune grass pricked his toe like a syringe. Stupid grass. Stupid path. Stupid goddamn everything.

  After a mile-long drag, the path finally took a left, leading to yet another ghost beach house, this one a story taller than the rest. Maybe this one has new shoes. Ben dropped his shoes and socks in the sand, then made the turn and ran barefoot up the sandy front-porch steps. The parallel lines in the beach spread wide like an open mouth and faded away, giving him permission, at last, to safely explore an entire property. The house was unlocked. The people who had fled Courtshire—if any people had ever lived here—must have been in a hurry.

  Another empty living room and kitchen. The faucets: dead. The closets: barren. He searched around for supplies and clean socks and shoes, but it was no use. Near a picture window looking out onto the surf was a small end table with a big glass vase on it. The vase was empty. Ben grabbed it and hurled it through the window. If he couldn’t talk to anyone, he would express himself in other, more violent ways. He ripped the cabinet doors off and smashed them on the floor. There were pipes snaking up from the bathroom toilet and he tore those out of the wall. Anything that could be broken, he broke. Who was gonna see? Who was gonna care? He broke it all. Then Ben went upstairs and tore the bedposts off their frames, the wood splintering and the loud cracks soothing his terrified soul. When it was all over and the place was trashed, he sat down, ate some bread from his pack, and passed out on the hardwood floor.

  Twenty minutes later, he let his eyelids split a quarter open and noticed a staircase going up to the third floor. This was the only house in the row that had an extra level, and the path had led him here. Of course, this had all been a massive cosmic troll job. Ben fully expected to walk up those stairs and find a giant papier-mâché middle finger waiting for him.

  He took his time getting up, still sore to the bone. Buildings have been constructed with more haste. These were the only unfinished stairs in the house. The rest of the place had scrolls of dull tan carpet going up to the second floor and down to the basement, the carpet you see in any new suburban McMansion that’s been thrown up by a contractor in under three months. But this upper staircase was just a bunch of old planks. There was a flimsy door at the top and Ben could sense a presence behind it. There was a thing there. There was something the path was trying to get him to discover.

  I need a weapon.

  Bereft of the powers to summon a wolf (more of those seeds would have been nice), he rooted through the backpack and found Mrs. Blackwell’s cheese knife. It wasn’t much, as weapons went. A bazooka would have been handier. The knife was about eight inches long, with a teak handle and a curved fork at the end. It probably wasn’t even all that great at cutting through a cheese block, much less a psychotic murderer. Hopefully, the only thing Ben would confront behind that door was an angry wheel of Brie.

  The door beckoned. There was no alternative. No other place the path led. It would take him to the attic, and then give him further instructions. Any deviation from that would result in death. Besides, he had to know what was behind the door now, regardless of how terrible it was. It goaded him on: a scab you know you shouldn’t be picking at.

  One step closer to the staircase and Ben could feel the door pulsing above him, the bolts just barely keeping it from flying open. And with his first step on the rickety planks, he heard something.

  He heard the scratching.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ATTIC

  “Hello?” He was getting tired of shouting out “HELLO” to no one.

  The scratching continued.

  “I have a knife!” he cried. “But I’m not here to hurt anyone. Is it okay to come up?”

  The scratching grew fevered. It sounded like a bunch of kids were gouging the door with forks.

  And then it stopped. Did I cause that? Ben thought. No. No, he didn’t. Whatever was behind that door stopped scratching because it felt like it, and not because of the white guy holding a cocktail knife. At home, Ben could cut an intimidating presence. You can say a lot with silence and a scar. His kids called him Scary Dad whenever he got mad, and he would use that to his advantage when he needed them to listen. You guys don’t want Scary Dad, right? So please put on your shoes. He could turn into Scary Dad all too easily, and hated himself for it. But Scary Dad worked. Scary Dad could get them to fall in line. But that was with small children. It would not be as easy to make whatever was behind that door quake in fright.

  The scratching came back, and then it went silent again, and then it came back, and then it returned, off and on. It’s the wolf. It didn’t get me at the tower, and now it’s here. Perfectly logical conclusion. He listened for growling, but there was only the scratching and scraping.

  He waited for a random gap in his mounting terror: that lull that sometimes occurs in your brain whenever you psych yourself out for something, like jumping into a cold pool. He found it, took a deep breath, and walked raggedly up the staircase, as if he were dragging along an unwilling participant. Then he seized the knob and turned it before he could change his mind. He pushed the door open.

  He wished that he hadn’t.

  Inside the attic was a cave cricket. He knew the species well from the basement of his Maryland home, with their sickly, mottled brown shells, and their creepy extended hind legs, and their probing antennae, and their curved, larval backs. They didn’t bite. They weren’t poisonous. They just jumped. Constantly and chaotically, without rhyme or reason. Before you hit them, they would leap in great bounds out of the way: past you, behind you, over you. It was like they could teleport. They would come jumping through the heat ducts and terrify the whole family. He and Teresa would suck them up with a vacuum, but you had to get them on the first try, otherwise they knew you were coming for them, and they would never stop hopping. They made him jump. One time, a cave cricket came at him and he jumped so high he bashed his head on the ceiling. It hurt for a week.

  This cave cricket in front of Ben in the attic was over six feet tall.

  It was in the back of the attic, facing sideways. Behind it was some kind of control console that Ben couldn’t make out, because there was a very large cricket in front of it. Ben wanted to die. He turned and reached for the door but that was an enormous mistake, because the cricket got spooked and jumped up, landing on him and knocking him to the floor.

  “Oh my fucking God.”

  He could feel its slimy underbelly rubbing against him. Then it jumped again and smashed him in the head with one of its hind legs. Ben started screaming, yelling out nonsense and cursing as loudly as possible to scare it, and to make himself feel as if his voice were a separate companion in the room, there to aid him.

  The cricket jumped again and landed on him. Its round black eyes loomed over him. They were unreadable. Maybe it wanted to kill him. Eat him. Gut him and lay eggs inside him.

  He stabbed the pathetic cheese knife upward at the cricket and the blade bounced off its exoskeleton, breaking off at the handle. It was drooling on him now, secreting some kind of noxious syrup that coated him and was gradually immobilizing him. Ben was flailing and screaming and the cricket leapt around some more, battering his midsection and knocking him over one, two, three more
times.

  Ben reached into his sack and yanked out the loaf of bread, throwing it to the back of the room. The cricket seized on it hungrily and Ben felt little choice but to mount the distracted insect, with the bare cheese blade still wrapped in his right hand. He was clenching it so tightly that it cut through his palm, but he couldn’t feel it digging in. The cricket leapt again and smashed Ben against the ceiling. He grasped at its antennae like they were reins and brought the blade down into its hulking black eyeball, slicing across the lens.

  White ooze gushed out of the eyeball. The cricket’s jumping became more furious. It was like a stuck bull now. Ben fell off and dropped the knife in the process. He could discern a pattern to it now. Four jumps: one forward, one sideways, a short one back, and then sideways again. He could time it. He dodged the cricket’s leaps and found himself facing its blinded eye. With one swift motion, he plunged his fist into the eye socket and buried his arm shoulder deep in the cricket’s head, punching through its brain. The cricket finally came to rest in the center of the room and collapsed, the white fluid seeping down Ben’s side and soaking him entirely. Hysterical, he fled down the stairs and ran out to the front deck, so he wouldn’t have to look at the thing again.

  He sprinted from the deck, fell to the sand, and screamed until he was wheezing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CONTROLS

  Once Ben could scream no more, he began to talk. He couldn’t hold it back any longer. Teresa was gone but he spoke to her through his tears as if he were speaking to God. “Teresa, please help me. . . . I love you so much. I just wanna be home. Please Teresa. Please God, help me find my way home.” The sides of his mouth turned down like levers and his jaw quivered uncontrollably as he opened his mouth and wailed, giving him the face of a Greek tragedy mask.

  His hand was bleeding and began to throb. He grabbed a bit of cheesecloth from inside the backpack and wrapped it around the wound. The cloth turned red in an instant.

  He was gonna have to go back up to the attic. Whatever was behind that cricket was his “prize” for besting it. Better go claim it. But he didn’t want to go back. The idea of seeing the thing again paralyzed him . . . seeing its innards spilled out on the floor, watching it come back to life because why wouldn’t it at this point? Why should anything make sense now? Why wouldn’t it reanimate and pounce on him and gobble him right up? Throw the dogfaces in there while you’re at it, God. Be that much of a prick.

  He remembered burying his knife into the monster’s eye and threw up into the sand nearby, covering up the pile of vomit. Then he lay back down and hyperventilated. When his youngest son, Peter, was a year old, the pediatrician said the little boy’s head was too large. The doctor took out the charts for weight and height and head size—those baseline curves that they always used to tell if your boy was bigger than other children (Well done, boy!) or smaller than other children (Good thing he won’t be fat!). As the doctor drew the growth curve of young Peter’s head for Ben and Teresa, his pen left the paper. Peter had broken the percentiles. The doctor explained that there may be water building up in Peter’s brain. They were going to do a scan on his head and if they found anything, a neurosurgeon would have to drain the water by cutting it open and breaking apart the plates of his skull.

  Ben took Peter to the hospital and watched the neurosurgeon sedate him and feed him into the ghastly MRI machine, which looked like a container used on an alien spaceship to store kidnapped human specimens. The results took two weeks to get back to Ben and Teresa. They were negative. No surgery needed. Soon his body would catch up to his head and everything would be in correct proportion. The nurse on the other end of the phone delivered the news as if she were ordering a pizza.

  This nightmare . . . This is what that surgery would have been like for Peter. This is what it’s like to have your skull taken apart and rearranged. . . .

  “Hey.”

  Someone one the beach was talking to him. Sounded like an older man.

  “Hey, you,” the voice said.

  “Hello?”

  “Here. I’m over here, shithead.”

  Ben propped himself up on his elbows and came face-to-face with a small blue crab. It was up on its hind legs in the center of the path. There were no human beings behind it. Ben looked left and right to get a full panorama of the sandbar. The crab was the only living thing he saw.

  “Are you . . . the crab talking to me?” he asked it.

  “Yeah, amigo. I’m the crab.”

  “Why are you talking?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you talking?”

  Ben stood up and kicked sand at the crab.

  “Hey, stop that.”

  “Leave me alone,” Ben said. “Whatever my mind is doing to me, STOP IT.”

  “You should go back up in that attic and see what’s what.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why should I tell you anything else? You kicked that sand at me.”

  Now the crab dug down out of sight. Ben ran to the spot and started digging furiously.

  “Get back here,” he said to it.

  “Piss off!”

  Ben felt a hard pinch on his fingertip and yanked his hand out of the sand, yowling in pain. He stomped on the spot where the crab had dug in.

  “I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna fucking crush you!”

  “That’s not gonna work,” said the muffled crab voice. “Stop doing that. You’re being stupid.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Don’t dig down here again. You’ll be needing that hand to work the controls.”

  “Controls of what?”

  No reply.

  “CONTROLS OF WHAT?!”

  No reply.

  “GOD DAMMIT!”

  Ben sucked on his fingertip and whirled around to face the beach house. The cricket was in his head again—twitching, jerking, regaining its strength, becoming hungry. Menace on top of menace.

  “I can’t go,” he said to the crab. “I can’t go back in there alone.” He turned to the spot in the sand. Now that Ben had heard another voice—a benign voice, though not exactly friendly—he couldn’t bear to let it go. “Will you come with me?”

  No reply.

  “Please?”

  “Why do you need me?” the crab asked.

  “I need someone. Anyone, even if it’s a hallucination. I’m sorry I got pissed at you, all right? I can’t be alone one second longer or I’ll go mad. I know I’ve already gone mad, but I’ll swim out into the ocean and never come back if I have to be alone another moment.”

  The little crab popped back out of the sand.

  “You won’t fuck with me if I go?” it asked Ben.

  “I promise.”

  “’Cause I can take that whole finger off, you know. I’m just that strong and you’re just that clumsy.”

  “Deal.”

  They walked toward the house together, side by side.

  “What’s your name?” Ben asked.

  “I’m a crab. I don’t have a name.”

  “Well, where did you come from?”

  “Idaho. Where do you think I came from? The fucking sea.”

  “Do you have any friends?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Beats the shit outta me.”

  “I’m gonna give you a name.”

  “Don’t give me a name,” said the crab. “I’ve done just fine so far without one.”

  “Frank.”

  “I don’t want to be fuckin’ Frank. I’m a crab. Don’t go naming me or I’ll clip a toe off.”

  “Fine.”

  “If you call me Frank, I’m gonna call you Shithead.”

  “Okay, I got it. Understood. Crab it is.” br />
  Ben stopped at the sliding doors that opened to the deck of the cricket house.

  “How do you know what’s up there?” he asked Crab.

  “I took a look around once.”

  “Have you ever seen people on this beach?”

  “No. Apart from you.”

  “How did you know I’d been in the house?”

  “Because I saw you go in and then come screaming out like a fuckin’ horse on fire. It didn’t require any ace detective work.”

  “If you saw what I saw, you’d be screaming, too.”

  “What’s your name, buddy?” Crab asked.

  “Ben.”

  “That’s only a little bit better than Shithead.”

  “I take it back. You can go back to the ocean now.”

  “I’m just messing with you.”

  “Yeah, well, you picked the wrong time to be messing with me.”

  “All right, all right, I can ease up. So are we going in that house? Or are we just gonna stand here?”

  “We’re going. I just need a moment.” He turned to Crab. “Can you send someone a message for me if I don’t make it out of this house alive?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not your courier, dickhead. I’m just walking up here to see if you spaz out again.”

  Ben didn’t bother trying to move this particular bit of conversation forward. He walked into the house and over the broken furniture and went back up the flight of stairs, pausing at the bottom of the third-floor staircase. The door to the attic was still hanging wide open. Nothing up there made a sound.

  “I don’t suppose you’d wanna look up there for me before I go,” he said to Crab.

  “Eh, I got nothin’ better to do.”

  Crab skittered along the wooden toe-kick lining the staircase and zipped into the attic. He came back down seconds later.

  “There’s a big fucking cricket in there.”