Black Creek Crossing

“When I was a little kid,” Seth replied. “The first time I read it. I still don’t know what most of the words mean, but they just sound good.” His eyes drifted to the book. “But most of these are real words. Or anyway, they sound like real words.”

Both of them gazed at the strange book that lay on the table between them.

“What should we do with it?” Angel asked. “It’s got to be really valuable, doesn’t it?”

“I guess,” Seth replied, his eyes still fixed on the book. “Maybe I can find out about it on the Internet.”

“But what do we do with it right now?” Angel asked. “You think maybe I should take it home?”

Seth shook his head. “I think we should keep it right here. At least until we can find out what it is.”

“Here?” Angel echoed. “What if somebody comes and finds it?”

“Look at this place,” Seth said. “Nobody’s been in it for practically forever. I bet nobody but us even knows it’s here — I mean, I’m practically the only one who ever comes out here anyway, and I didn’t even know about it.”

“But if we just leave it here and somebody does come—”

“Look!” Seth uttered the word so sharply it startled Angel into silence, and she turned to look where he was pointing.

Houdini was no longer on the hearth. Now he’d moved around to the right side of the fireplace and was pawing at one of the stone blocks just above the floor. The cat moved aside as soon as Seth and Angel went over to get a closer look. Seth crouched down, felt around the rock the cat had been pawing, and a moment later found just enough of a groove for him to grip it. He pulled, and the rock slid out, revealing another cavity, a little bigger than the one in which they’d found the book an hour earlier.

“Still think he’s just a cat?” Seth asked as he went to the counter and picked up the old leather-bound book.

As she watched Seth slide it into the cavity in the wall of the fireplace, Angel tried to tell herself that it was just a coincidence, that the cat couldn’t possibly have been showing them anything. But even as she tried to convince herself, Houdini rose to his feet, went over to the book, and sniffed at it.

Then he looked up and his glowing golden eyes seemed to bore straight into her.

And Angel knew that not any of it — finding the book, the cabin, and the niche in the fireplace — was a coincidence. “It’s for us,” she said, her voice so soft that Seth could barely hear her. She turned to face him, and Seth saw her eyes glowing almost as brightly as those of the cat. “Don’t you see?” she said, her voice edged with the excitement growing inside her. “It’s for us. That’s why he led us here! He wanted us to have the book, and he brought us here! But what are we supposed to do with it?”

“First we have to find out what it really is,” Seth said. “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll hide the book here, at least until we can find a better place for it. And tonight I’ll look on the Internet. Or maybe tomorrow night we’ll meet at the library and see if we can find out what it is. Okay?”

Angel hesitated. What if someone did find the cabin and the book? What if they came back tomorrow or the next day and it was gone?

But before she could say anything, Seth slid the book deep into the recess inside the fireplace, and replaced the rock that hid the niche. The stone block slid perfectly into position, leaving no sign that anything could be concealed behind it.

Angel stared at it for a long time, trying to see any hint that the rock that now hid the book was not set firmly into the chimney.

There was none.

The book would be safe.

A few minutes later they left the cabin. When they’d climbed once more over the mound of rubble in front of it, Angel turned to look back. Just as Seth had said, no trace of the cabin was visible at all. From where she stood, all that could be seen was the face of the bluff.

Houdini too had vanished.

“How are we going to find our way back?” Angel asked, knowing there was no way she’d remember all the twists and turns they’d taken while following the cat through the woods. “Are we lost?”

Seth shook his head. “All we have to do is head west, and we should come to Black Creek Road. We should be a little farther out than your house, but not very far.”

He started through the forest, and Angel followed him, still not certain they were going in the right direction. But no more than three minutes later they came to what looked like a path. The floor of the forest appeared worn, and here and there she thought she saw marks on the trunks of trees. By the time they came out on Black Creek Road — almost exactly where Seth had told her they’d be — she was almost sure that if she had to, she could find her way back to the tiny cabin by herself.

Almost sure, but not quite.

She was not alone.

Angel could feel it. She’d felt the first twinge of the peculiar sense that there was someone nearby when they turned away from the cabin and began picking their way through the forest, following the path that for a while only Seth could see. At first she thought it must be the cat, but Houdini had performed another of his vanishing acts and was nowhere to be seen.

Besides, the feeling wasn’t quite like the one she’d begun to recognize whenever Houdini followed her to school, walked home with her, or curled up in her room when her father wasn’t around.

This was a different feeling, as if an unseen being were hovering just beyond the fringes of her senses. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling — not like the creepy feeling when someone was watching her, when the hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she could almost hear people whispering about her. No, this new feeling was almost like having an unseen companion who was there to watch over her.

She must have glanced back over her shoulder three or four times, almost certain there was someone there, following them through the forest, but she’d seen nothing, though she was pretty sure Seth felt the same thing she did.

He kept stopping to look around, but when she asked him what he was looking for, all he said was that he thought he’d heard something.

She had heard nothing.

It was just a feeling, which she was certain would pass as soon as they were out of the forest.

It hadn’t. In fact, it had grown stronger, and as she turned off Black Creek Road and started across the patch of unkempt lawn around the little house, it became so strong that she was almost certain Seth was behind her. But when she turned to look, he was on his way home, just disappearing around the bend in the road.

Her father was at the kitchen table, an open bottle of beer in front of him. When he looked at her, Angel could see by the ruddiness of his complexion that it wasn’t his first beer.

“Where you been?” he demanded, his bleary eyes narrowing to suspicious slits.

Angel thought quickly. “I–I stopped at church on the way home,” she blurted, telling herself it wasn’t quite a lie; she actually had gone to church yesterday, and she hadn’t actually said that she’d gone today.

“You sure you weren’t with that boy?” her father pressed.

“He’s not even Catholic,” Angel replied, again not quite telling a lie by avoiding the question.

“I don’t like him,” her father said. “I don’t want him hanging around here anymore. You understand?”

Angel nodded, knowing better than to tell her father that after what had happened the day before yesterday, Seth was almost too frightened even to come into the house that afternoon. “I’ve got some homework to do,” she said, turning away to hurry upstairs before her father could say anything else.

In her room, Angel dropped her backpack on her bed and went to the window. The sun was starting to drop toward the horizon, and the shadows of the huge trees across the street were creeping across the lawn toward the house. She looked to the right and, just above the trees, could see the top of the bluff whose ramparts concealed the tiny cabin in which they’d hidden the book.

The book.

The book whose cover was the same bloodred shade as the lipstick whose markings had been on her mirror.

The book that almost seemed warm the first time she touched it. Had it actually been hot, or had she only