“Max,” Shaw said in a flat voice.
“What?”
“Look straight ahead.”
Through the blowing snow I barely made out a shadowy boy standing about twenty feet away from us. He didn’t seem to have any features and I couldn’t tell if he was even wearing clothes. He was like a gray, featureless pencil sketch of a ten-year-old.
“Jesus, it’s him” Shaw whispered.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” I said. I looked at the woods but the snow whipped around us so fast and thick that I doubted we’d even come close to finding the trailhead. I looked back at the boy.
He was gone.
“Look,” I said, “if we try to get back to the trail right now we’ll probably get lost and we might not even be able to make it back to the fort.”
“So what do we do?” Shaw asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“We’re going to go into the fort, pack the entrance with snow, and wait this thing out.”
“But what if he comes in?”
“We’ll just have to take the chance that he can’t—maybe he won’t even be able to find it. Now come on, you crawl in first.”
Shaw dropped to his knees and crawled in the fort. I peered hard into the storm and caught a glimpse of the side of the boy gliding through the blizzard about ten feet away. I hit the ground and crawled inside.
The instant after I made it through the opening, Shaw started blocking it with snow. The two of us packed the snow up until there was just a sliver of space for us to peek through.
“Good job,” I said quietly. “Now we wait and see what happens.”
I crawled to the wall of the fort and sat with my back against it. Shaw did the same thing on the opposite side and we waited there quietly as the wind howled outside. After about twenty minutes I crawled over to the blocked entrance and looked through the opening. Nothing but blizzard.
I went back to where I’d been sitting, and after a few minutes I heard a light scraping sound against the roof—almost like a very soft, very weak pair of hands were digging into it. Shaw heard it too and he looked up. We stared at the ceiling, the noise got faster, and a second later a few bits of snow fell onto my face.
I crawled back to the entrance and peeked out. The blizzard had thinned out a bit and I thought I could see the open spot in the woods where the trailhead should be. Motioning to Shaw to come over, I pointed to the space in the woods and he nodded.
“At the count of three,” I mouthed.
Shaw nodded slightly and I held up one finger, then two, and on the third one I kicked through the snow and scrambled out of the fort. I didn’t look back but I could hear Shaw right behind me as I plowed through the thigh deep snow towards the trail.
“He’s coming!” Shaw yelled.
I looked back and saw the gray boy floating after us with his arms out and his wispy hands wide open.
“Just keep running!” I shouted back over the wind.
The trail was only another ten yards away and I looked back again and saw the ghost boy’s hands reaching out at Shaw’s neck. I grabbed Shaw by his jacket and dragged him up next to me. “Come on!” I yelled and the two of us dove onto the trailhead. I landed face first in the snow but I instantly looked back to see through my snow-blurred vision the ghost hovering at the edge of the trailhead.
We wiped the snow off our faces and got back to our feet. The boy stared at us and we stared back. After a few seconds he turned around and floated towards the mansion.
“That was close,” Shaw said.
“Yes, it was,” I said. I gave Shaw a big snowy clap on the back, “but not bad for a boring Wednesday, huh?”
“Not bad at all,” he said with a smile.
My dream had been answered! I was now the proud owner of my own restaurant in a small mining town in the Pacific Northwest. I was in a neat old building that was almost 200 years old with a huge basement with a dirt floor. I didn’t keep much down there, but I did have some equipment and supplies that occasionally needed to be checked on or hauled upstairs. The stairs were old and rickety—barely wide enough for one person to go up or down.
I had no problem going down there but some of my employees did. A couple of them refused to and I had to think about that one, but in the end I didn’t push them unless I had no choice. They said that it was “spooky” down there and, as I found out later, had the reputation of having a poltergeist or two that supposedly caused problems. Legend had it that they were known to tease and scare anybody who went down there.
I kind of checked this off to vivid imaginations and the desire to keep a local legend alive and well. I had been down there many times before experienced nothing. Then one night, I thought one of my employees was playing a joke on me. Usually I was the first one in to the restaurant and had to light the pilot to our pizza oven because it took about two hours to get up to temp. When I tried to light it, it didn’t light. I checked the lines and found there was no gas coming through. Then I checked the gas line shutoff to see if someone had mistakenly turned it off. It was on and the only other shutoff valve was downstairs where the main line came in.
I went downstairs and sure enough, it was turned off. I stood there scratching my head for a moment
