They turned and looked at the box sitting crooked and uneven on the rocks.
Conner nodded toward it. “We’re gonna have to open it up, weigh it down with some stones and then cut some holes in the sides so it sinks.”
“Who’s rowing out there?” Jonathan said.
“I am,” Conner said.
“You sure it will hold?”
“I’ve fished in it before. Had Brent out in it with me. I might get a little wet, but I’ll be okay.”
Michael looked to the sky. “Let’s hurry,” he said. Jonathan kept feeling the insides of the box moving back and forth like swamp mud as they had carried the case across the mountain, the way one’s body remembers the rocking of the ocean after a day on a boat. They all stood over it in a triangle with the makeshift coffin for Thomas Terrywile in the center like an all-seeing eye. The metal fasteners were covered in dirt and rust from a decade in the ground. The wind whispered through trees. Jonathan looked up into the forest but saw nothing. Everything had grown dark with cloud cover. He looked back down at the coffin.
“I want to see,” Michael said. They turned and looked at him, but he was focused on the box. He bent down and tried the first fastener, but it did not give. He took out a hunting knife and wedged the tip between the handle and the case itself and tried to wrench the metal latch upward – at first gently and then with a growing anger – until it squeaked and groaned as he unfastened the latch and lowered the metal hoop that held the lid to the body. He moved to the second latch and used his knife again and then moved on to the side latches. They all came unwillingly. Finally, the case sat unlocked, seemingly relieved of a massive tension.
Jonathan looked to the sky but couldn’t see the sun. His watch said 10:32 a.m.
Michael reached into the pocket of his coveralls and took out a camouflaged hunting mask that covered his whole head, mouth and nose. Michael and Conner buried their faces in their collars. They watched as Michael kneeled at the box and lifted the lid.
A great rush of gasses poured out of the case and rose into the air, dirty green and speckled with swirling particles like black stars. A wretched, humanlike scream rose up from the mountains, carried over the lake and echoed, so it seemed as if the whole earth were screaming in a terrified rage. The smell overtook them, sunk like liquid through the fabric of their coveralls, into their nostrils and down their throats. Jonathan gagged. His stomach tightened with nausea. He backed away for a moment, choking, hacking, and then, when his body stopped convulsing, he waited a moment and walked forward. He looked into the blackness of the coffin – the black sludge of what had once been a boy. It was so dark that no light escaped, and in it, he could truly see.
Jonathan felt his body drift upward, as if in a dream. He saw the three of them lying on the rocks, faces upward, pale and cold, the open box in the center, its contents still and dark. He felt himself rising away from his body, prone on the riverbed, like the stories told by men and women who have died, only to be brought back to life. He was drawn into the trees. The world twisted and turned like mirrors in a carnival funhouse. He was pulled by a great force through the forest they had just traveled – up the slope, across the meadow and plunged back into Coombs’ Gulch. He stood in the center of that strange, occult design, the white stone lines intersecting before him and firing out to the edge of the circle. He looked up at the perfect ring of sky. The clouds were stripped away as if erased by an unseen hand; the sun disappeared, and there was only the blackness of Thomas Terrywile’s melted body.
A face took shape in the darkness, merging together like spots of color behind tightly closed eyes. It gazed down on him, and its strange mouth spread wide as a severed throat. It shifted and changed and swirled. Now it was his own face staring at him from the darkness of the spaces in between, but it was distorted and strange, like a rubber mask slipping down from the skull of a child.
Jonathan suddenly found himself back in Collinsville at the Halloween parade. He stood alone among a thousand children, and they all wore a Jonathan mask, and they squirmed about his legs, pushing and shoving through, writhing like maggots, slippery and wet and covered in some kind of decaying slime. They were packed so tight against him he couldn’t lift his legs to move. He looked out over the whole town. The land itself seemed to move with those children, like so many ants bearing his face – skittering, running, moving together. Then they began to fall apart; a limb would drop, a leg collapse, the skin of a tiny hand slide off the bone to the ground – a thousand little lepers all falling to pieces. They did not make a sound; they did not take off their masks.
And as they fell apart and dropped to the ground, he saw one child still standing at the top of the
