The Body of Christopher Creed

  Alex looked totally confused, like he'd had this pat little theory going and I had foiled it, but he still didn't want to give it up. His mouth was moving in a panic, and his lips were all shaky.

  "Well, Renee was right there in front of him, and she thinks he was dead serious. I'm just concerned about you. I need to know. Did he tell you this beforehand? And did you think he was joking? Because if you thought he was joking, then you're not an accessory to—"

  I hauled off and slapped him, sending him flying into a tree. "You guys are not stupid! You know that was a joke! What the hell are you guys trying to pull?"

  Alex screamed in my face, "Richardson wasn't joking about the second thing he popped out with—about Chief Bowen and Mrs. McDermott! So we don't think he was joking about the first thing, either! I'm just trying to save your ass! You've got to tell me that Richardson merely told you, and you thought he was joking—"

  That stupid cell phone went off again. I stared at it, in awe of this girl's superhuman nerve. I tried to talk louder than it.

  "Damn it, Alex! I'm telling you, I thought of the thing about shooting Creed off the top of my head!"

  "No, no, no," he muttered around that ringing. I thought of Mrs. Creed in the cafeteria. "No, no, no ... Christopher did not write that note..." He stared at the ground. He couldn't look at me. I wanted to put his head through a tree.

  "Why can't you believe me?" I shoved him again. "What, does it destroy your whole version of reality, Alex? Let me tell you reality! Renee is pissed that Bo spewed about her dad's sex life! She's pissed at me for standing up for him! Maybe she can't admit the truth to herself, but she just wants revenge! She knows a goddamn joke when she hears one!"

  "No, no, no," he just kept saying.

  "Well, guess what? You're in as big a state of denial as Creed ever was!"

  "I'm just trying to help you!" he hollered back. "Renee just told the cops that Bo confessed to her. She told them I heard it, too! I'm just trying to save you from—"

  I thought if that phone rang one more time I would go insane.

  "Goddamn it!" Alex yelled. He punched the line all wide-eyed and confused, and said, "Hello?"

  "Give me that thing!" I snatched it from him, despite him hollering, "No—"

  "Renee, what the hell are you trying to pull? You are so goddamn selfish, why don't you wake up?"

  "What are you doing there?" She recognized my voice somehow, though I don't think I ever screamed at her before.

  "I'm here. Why don't you drag your ass over here and say your stupid lies to my face? You know that was a joke, that thing Bo said!"

  "It was not a joke." Her voice cracked, and for once she didn't have any attacks. She just let the silence hang, and I could hear sniffing and crying.

  I was glad. "Go ahead and cry. It's your guilt making you cry, you lying sack of—"

  She blasted out a string of what I could do to myself. "You can go to hell! I'm telling the cops you knew! I'm telling them Richardson confessed to us, and Alex heard it, and we both heard you, too! Now get out of my life!"

  "You—" I was going to tell her she would never pass off a lie like that, but she had hung up. I watched Alex stare at me all terrified, and it struck me like an oncoming train that maybe she could pull off a lie like that. If she could confuse Alex, who had known me since forever, she could confuse other people.

  "I don't know what to believe," he said. His voice was cracking like he might cry. "I almost believe you, okay? But what ate you doing now, talking about some psychic saying Creed is buried in the woods? It sounds really fishy, Torey."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It sounds to me like you're warming up some cock-and-bull story so you can get the body found. Maybe because you know where the body is, and it's bothering your conscience too bad, and you want to get it found without it looking bad for you and Richardson."

  "Oh, go to hell!" I screamed. "You're insane!"

  He stormed off down the trail, leaving me heaving rocks and sticks after him Until a fire lit up in my shoulder socket. I flung myself down on the ground and bawled my eyes out.

  I wondered if I could go to jail. Even if I didn't, I knew I might live with that question mark hanging over my head in other people's eyes forever. Was Adams involved? Since there's no body, no evidence, how will we ever know for sure he wasn't? I stood up. I didn't even realize where I was going until I looked down at the flashlight in my hand and saw that I had turned it on.

  I think half of it was a rational thought. If Chris Creed's body was found, just maybe there would be a huge suicide note in his pocket in his own handwriting. Or maybe whatever he used to kill himself had his fingerprints all over it. Or maybe a time of death could be determined, and if Bo and I were both covered at that time ... maybe, maybe, maybe. The psychic said I would be alone. Well, I was alone.

  Twenty-one

  I didn't understand how a dead body could appear at a spot where it had not been earlier. I don't think I understood anything, except that I was more scared of living people than dead people. I needed dead people to help me fight living people.

  The back of my house shone in front of me, almost like a cartoon drawing, something that wasn't real. It's like the whole world wasn't real, except those three rocks. I cut across a few yards of woods until I was running up the trail to the burial ground. The psychic's voice was banging in my head like some tape I couldn't stop ... "You will find him shot through the head on a primitive grave ... marked with three large rocks ... He's ready. He will be seen now. Just remember ... Be very careful about your actions. A person's liberty is at stake..."

  I stopped.

  The same trail that Ali and I took so easily in daylight lay in front of me, dense with shadows, nearly black. I stood huffing. Not Bo's liberty. It was my liberty she was talking about...

  "Oh my god," I muttered, and new questions choked me up. How will it look if I find the body after everything Alex just said? He thinks I know where the body is. How will it look if I say, "A psychic led me to this place"? People will think I'm lying. I'll wind up in jail if I find that body...

  I mushed tears off my eyes so I could see my way home. I turned slowly around to go back. The eyes that met mine sucked me into a hypnotic return stare. Brown eyes that burned some fire of emotions while not being threatening ... begging me for something. I watched in stunned fascination as the Indian moved past me down the trail, then stopped and stared at me again. He carried the same bow and wore the same feathers in his Mohawk as when I'd seen him when I was seven. But he wasn't aiming at me with that bow ... he was beckoning me with it.

  I shut my eyes. Torey, you are messed up; you're losing it; you know it because you're seeing things again like a seven-year-old. When I opened my eyes they were so filled up I could see only a blur ahead, but a black silhouette seemed to disappear into the burial ground. Oh Christ, you really are losing it ... I wiped my eyes and could hear a bunch of gasps and chokes, and I realized it was me, choking on hypocrites and selfish people and lies.

  I kept moving toward that burial ground because it was the only real place in the world. Everything else was a vapor. I turned off the path in a trance, half expecting to see the Indian on the rocks. I saw only darkness and the outline of the rocks in black. I could hardly feel my legs moving. It seemed more like the rocks were floating toward me. The sad sound of crickets rose to a moan as those rocks got closer and closer.

  Three huge rocks floated up to me. When they were so close I could have kicked one, I raised the flashlight with a wrist that shook like it was broken.

  The light beamed slowly across the rocks in shaky flashes. Shaky but sure. Flat, smooth, shining. There was nothing to break the air except an orange beam across flat, smooth rock. I stood there, shining the beam, waiting for I-don't-know-what—a ghost to appear, Creed to fall from the sky. The longer I waited the more tense I got, the more irritating those crickets sounded.

  I finally sprang up on top of the rocks and shined the
flashlight all around the clearing. Grass, sand, pinecones, trees, branches—all in shaky jerks—sky. My legs were rubbery from this combination of anger and relief. I didn't want to see a dead body, but I needed to find Creed with a definite suicide note, a definite cause of death, a definite time of death. He was not here.

  But instead of leaving, I felt the strong need to stay and think about all this. I had seen something that could not have been real. An Indian ghost. When I was seven years old, I could shrug it off after a day or two. You're not a little kid now, and you're seeing things, Torey. Which means you're some sort of nuts. Are you totally crazy or just in shock over being knifed in the back by your friends? I hated Alex all of a sudden.

  I looked around the clearing with the flashlight one more time. As the beam turned up more branches and grass and normal stuff, I felt very close to Creed. I could feel all his confusion over what was real and what was made up in his own head. I felt his wish for make-believe to come alive, for some sort of control over the universe so that if life started to suck, you could just imagine something else into existence. The air buzzed all around my head like it had in my basement that night. Like bunches of eyes burned behind me, burning a hole through me, begging me for something. Maybe there were a thousand Creeds out there. Begging for hope, for understanding, maybe.

  I figured I could understand someone wanting to take his own life. If the world stopped making sense. If people became convinced that lies were true. This was the most dangerous kind of lying, it struck me, the kind that was happening to me now—where people need the lie so badly they become convinced the lie is true. It's dangerous because they can tell the lie with so much belief that it sounds like the truth, and they can make other people believe it.

  Creed had lied, too—he had made me believe his diary. Renee's type of lying was different from Creed's diary, though. Renee's was meant to do harm, and Creed's was only meant to save himself from a life that seemed unfair and didn't make sense. I figured I knew why I didn't find him here. My mother's words echoed through the darkness. I knew that Chris was leaving to survive, not leaving to die. All that grinning he had done his whole life—it was like the diary. He might have believed he was superpopular every day. But he only did what he had to do in order to keep going. To be normal and be popular and have fun and have a girlfriend. He made real life mere shadows in comparison. When his make-believe world finally caved in last week—God only knows which twig finally broke the camel's back—he saw reality clearly. But he didn't survive years of abuse from other kids and lack of understanding from his parents so he could go die in the woods. I believed it totally at that moment. Creed was alive.

  I felt some deep canyon of regret that I had sat ten feet from him through most of our years in grade school and could never see that he was a tortured person. I was so alone here, and maybe it was because I alone was meant to know. I could have screamed the truth to Alex—I could have breathed fire and burned down a couple trees—and Alex wouldn't have believed me. People only see as far as they are able, and the rest of the truth is lost on them. A kid in the midst of us led a tortured existence. Bo Richardson wants to be everyone's mother. Christ died naked.

  I had some sort of peace. There's something peaceful about what you know to be the truth. I had it, so much that I would rather be in jail with the truth than living a lie in the historic Towne of Steepleton. I stood up to leave.

  "He's alive," I muttered to myself, to the dead Indians, to the choir of crickets. "He's alive, and someday I will find him."

  I stepped to the edge of the rock with the lip that hung over. As soon as the rock faltered, I remembered the space underneath it and, too late, realized I was now heavy enough to tip it over if nothing was underneath that lip.

  I flew headfirst onto the ground, flipped around, and stared wide-eyed as the huge rock met air underneath it, then came over on top of me. I clambered backward, which kept it from hitting me square in the chest, but it slammed down on my leg. I heard a crack.

  I don't think I even yelled out at that point. I was shocked and messed up and couldn't feel anything. A slight burning hit the center of my calf as I tried to work my leg out from under the rock, but nothing more. The rock must have weighed a couple hundred pounds. The thought of Digger Haines losing his leg flitted through my mind, and reminded me of benching a couple hundred during football seasons. But benching, and sitting straight up and pushing a rock straight forward are two different things.

  I felt my first jolts of pain as I rocked the thing across my bones a couple of times before heaving it on a roll to the side. I sat there huffing, shining my flashlight on this gash in my jeans. I could see blood and torn skin and a white, shiny thing poking through. Bone fragment. I stared in shock at this mess, wondering why a broken leg burned but didn't really hurt. It should hurt more than it did, I realized, and that scared me.

  I tried slowly to get my good foot under me, and when I leaned forward, the beam of the flashlight from the other hand fell on a black hole.

  I gazed at this black circle that the rock had covered, no bigger than a garbage can lid. Slowly I brought the flashlight closer and closer. I eased myself up on my good knee, gazing at this hole like my eyes were glued to it. I was hypnotized almost, feeling myself being sucked into it. I bent down very slowly but without hesitating, beyond being scared. My head penetrated the edge of the hole, and I brought the flashlight slowly in, so I could see a dirt floor maybe four feet below. Dirt and something shiny beneath it. Rock. Old Indian cave.

  I moved the beam across the smooth wall that was maybe thirty feet away. The beam moved down to the floor, to some sort of long bundle wrapped in a reddish blanket. There was another bundle a few feet closer, and another about ten feet from me. I froze, realizing what was in those blankets. They were wrapped with some sort of leather crisscross ties and covered with specks of gold, like jewelry or charms. I wished I had paid more attention to Lenape history in school.

  If you entered a grave, you might feel that you were insulting the dead and making them not rest in peace. I had none of that feeling. I would have sworn there was a feeling of relief in there. I couldn't explain it, but even when a little breeze swooped down, I felt a sense of peace and only a mild ache in my leg. The breeze made a terrible groaning sound against that smooth wall, like it had not entered here in years. Before my eyes, one of those red blankets turned colors. I wondered if I was imagining it, or if the light beam from the flashlight was faulty. The blanket seemed to be turning slowly from red to brown.

  My heart started to bang a little, and this weird feeling began to raise the hair on my arms. I moved the light beam off the blanket to keep myself calm. And that's when I spotted a body that was not wrapped neatly in blankets or even covered with one. It looked out of place in this shrine. There was nothing sacred about this body: sneakers ... blue jeans ... T-shirt ... blond hair ... face turned into the rock wall ... gun pointing straight up the wall...

  "Oh Jesus Christ..." I breathed.

  My worst fear. Somehow I pulled myself into the hole and slithered to the ground, staring hard through the shaky beam of the flashlight. It was not like a horror movie, where the body might spring out at you or come back to life. This body was dead, and it was going to stay dead and never move a muscle again. That's what horrified me the most, the finality, the stiff hardness, the unmoving whiteness of those fingertips. The look of no return. I eased over to it slowly, wondering why there was no smell of death in here. I had never smelled death, but I knew instinctively that death should smell bad. It was hard to breathe, and there didn't seem to be any smells except a slight mustiness that was making me dizzy. I shined the flashlight on the side of his face. He had on a mask, I thought at first. What looked like black tar covered everything from his ear forward so you couldn't even see his expression. It got very thick around a black hole above the ear. Blood. Blood turned black.

  I could feel my stomach heaving, and I shut my eyes.

  "Chris,
why?" I moaned, and it sounded like a thousand voices in that cave. "I would have helped you, I would have, I'm sorry..."

  The air rushed through again in a way that reminded me of the barbecue gas grill lighting, that FFFFFFFF-FOOOOOM!, and I actually thought I smelled a barbecue gas grill all of a sudden. My heart banged wildly, and all at once, my broken bone started to burn like someone had stuck it on a spit.

  I started to holler in pain, but the yell stuck in my throat. Another sound, almost like crackling, made me stay quiet and listen. It sounded like the place was on fire. A scorchy smell wafted up my nostrils. I beamed the flashlight around, but the other bodies lay calm and peaceful in their brown blankets. I tried to figure out where that crackling sound was coming from, but my own pain was deadening my thoughts. I beamed the light on the wall and down, until it crossed the gun and rested on Creed's hand. Before my eyes, the skin turned from white to brown to black and started to peel back, like layers of burning paper. It peeled from the ends of his fingers, flipping back almost like curling ribbon, revealing red layers that turned black, then more layers, and then specks of white. His bones. The gun finally dropped and lay pointed straight at me, in a pile of bones, with the black flesh still sizzling and shrinking.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs. This body was burning right in front of me, only with no flames. It was like an invisible fire was eating Creed away to nothing and eating my leg away, too.

  All I know is I screamed and screamed until I couldn't scream anymore. And somehow I had gotten outside into the blackness again, though the scorchy stench had followed me out and my leg still felt on fire. Red lights were flashing in my eyes and people were running all around me, screaming, too. I heard Renee Bowen's voice, I thought, but Ali's face was staring at me in front of a huge flashlight.