Once, he thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes tracking him from the shadows, but when he turned his flashlight in that direction, the eyes were gone and he told himself they’d probably never been there at all. He heard some sounds he knew, hooting owls and croaking frogs, and others he didn’t.
It was August, almost Davy’s birthday, as a matter of fact, and although it had been warm inside the house, it was a little nippy out here in the mountain breeze. Davy wished he’d changed into a pair of pants and maybe a long-sleeved shirt, but he hadn’t exactly had a lot of planning time. And if he was wishing for things, he might as well wish for a pair of shoes too, and hey, why not a laser gun and a team of trained tigers so he could run at the house instead of away from it and shoot Mr. Boots into a thousand little screaming pieces of tiger food?
The flashlight shone on the white trunk of a gnarled birch, and for a second Davy thought he was looking at a ghost. He flinched away and stepped on something sharp that cut the heel of his foot. He slid to a stop, flicked the flashlight’s beam to the white tree again to be sure it really wasn’t a ghost, set the flashlight down on the ground, and rubbed at his stinging foot.
If he hadn’t stopped just then, he might never have found the clearing, might have kept on running until either some dark woods monster got him or he found someone to help him and bring him away to safety.
After rubbing at his sole enough to cake dirt into the wound and stop the bleeding, he let go and stepped down. The foot throbbed a little, but Davy thought he’d be able to go on. He reached for the flashlight but didn’t pick it up right away. The beam shone just past the birch and into the empty space beyond.
Davy stared.
He guessed these woods probably had a lot of clearings, although he hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, had pictured himself wandering deeper and deeper into the forest with endless trees stretching out in every direction except behind, where Mr. Boots slept in his sprung cage.
Davy would have picked up the light and continued his escape, except he thought he saw something there beyond the ghostly birch, something unnaturally shiny. He grabbed the flashlight and pointed it in that direction. The light came back to him from the many shattered pieces of what first appeared to be a broken mirror.
Davy moved closer, the flashlight poked out in front of him like a gun or a sword, his cut foot burning with every step. Not until he’d passed the twisted, white tree did he realize what was really out there in that otherwise empty space, and by then it was too late to unsee it.
The station wagon had taken quite a beating during its run in with the moose and the roadside trees, so much so that it hardly looked like a car anymore. Davy had gone with his mommy once to an art show at the college downtown and looked at a room full of things she’d called apstract sculpsure, or something close to that, things that had looked trashy to Davy but that he’d pretended to be interested in because she’d brought him down there without Daddy or Georgie for a fun mommy-son day. The station wagon looked like one of those pieces of art to Davy, something somebody might have made out of a bunch of broken pieces of washing machines and toasters and lawnmowers.
He stood looking at the car for a long time, wanting to go over and peek inside but wanting at the same time to run away as fast as he could. Eventually, curiosity won out, and Davy limped across the clearing.
Overhead, the moon shone out from behind a bank of wispy clouds. It was just a thin thing, pale, a fingernail clipping. Without the canopy overhead, Davy could almost see without the flashlight, but he left it on just the same and watched his reflection swim across the surface of the station wagon’s intact windows.
They were all inside. Davy swung the beam from the front seat to the back, then to the ground, and he threw up his tomato soup. The vomit was red, bloody looking; Davy wiped away the last dangling strand and dared another look into the car.
More windows were missing than were left, and the smell from inside was worse than the potty bucket and Mr. Boots’s armpits combined. If Davy hadn’t thrown up before gagging on the horrendous stench, he certainly would have after.
Daddy. Mommy. Georgie. Manny was in there too, his bloated head twisted to the side and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, so thick and gray it might have been a piece of uncooked sausage. Davy’s stomach twisted again, but there was nothing left inside to come out, and he ended up coughing hard and spitting up nothing more than a mouthful of saliva.
Mommy and Daddy sat in the same seats they had during the crash, their bodies strapped in place by their seatbelts, but both leaning inward so that Mommy’s puffy head almost touched the empty bowl where Daddy’s brain used to be. One of Mommy’s eyes was twice the size of the other and about to pop out, and although Davy tried not to look at it, he couldn’t seem to turn away.
This was his mommy, the same mommy who’d taken him to the apstract sculpsure show, the same mommy who tickled him when he pretended to sleep and called him a silly goose. He retched again, but his mouth had gone completely dry, and this time he spat out nothing but stinky air.
He shone the trembling light into the back seat across the bodies of his brother and his dog. Manny lay up against the backrest, his too-big head and sausage tongue in Georgie’s lap. Georgie, his mouth open wide and full of flies and wriggling maggots. Georgie, whose t-shirt and flesh punched out in the middle of his tummy where he’d been pinned to the tree that rainy night a week ago.
Spread throughout the car were the remains of their camping supplies: a sleeping bag (the one he’d peed in?), a skillet, torn clothing and toiletries— everything covered in blood and mud and insects.
Davy hadn’t realized he was crying until the sopping neck of his shirt slid down his chest. He dropped into a sitting position, pressed his back against the car’s wrinkled back door, pulled his knees to his chest, and sobbed.
His family. All gone. Left in the car to rot, all gross smelling and icky looking and dead.
Dead.
And Davy knew what worms-for-lips, gap-toothed, boots-wearing monster had left them there. He slammed his fist into the ground beside him and wiped his eyes and running nose with his shirtsleeve.
He thought about the things he’d lost: his family, his real life, his freedom.
Except…no, he hadn’t lost that last one. Not yet. He’d gotten his freedom back, hadn’t he? He’d escaped.
Davy, still crying but gaining control of himself, pushed away from the car and up onto his feet. He walked away from the station wagon without looking back. The moon above him disappeared for a second behind an especially thick cloud, then reappeared and shone its sputtering candle’s light.
Davy had almost re-entered the woods when the beam from his flashlight arced across the birch once more, showing him again the ghost’s face he’d thought he’d seen earlier. Except this time the face wasn’t in the tree, it was in front of it, and it wasn’t a ghost at all.
Mr. Boots uncrossed his arms and smiled.
Davy wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there and watching, and he guessed it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t run away now, barefoot and still feeling sick to his stomach; he wouldn’t get twenty feet.
The flashlight. He realized too late that it had given him away, that he might as well have been running through the forest shouting at the top of his lungs and covered in glow-in-the-dark paint. He could try turning it off, or throwing it in one direction and then running in the other, but he didn’t think that would fool Mr. Boots for very long, and probably not at all.
Instead, he gave up. Mr. Boots was a grown-up, and Davy was just little. He didn’t know how he’d thought he could get away in the first place. He walked to the man with his head hung low and handed over the flashlight.
