“It’s advised to take advantage of Skeliman’s blindness and get on his canoe, but only if you can hold your breath most of the ride.”
“Why should we do that?” Loki said.
“Skeliman can recognize the living by their breath. Usually, his passengers are dead, and he is alright with that.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Loki said. “How did all the other teenagers cross the Swamp of Sorrow?”
“This brings us to the other option,” Axel said, scrolling down his phone’s screen. “According to a post by another contributor in the forum, some teens figured a way around it. They’ve invented a secret way to cross without the ferryman detecting them. It’s a secret, so the only way to find out is to wait for some of the teenagers and follow them to see how they do it.”
“I don’t have time for this. What if we don’t find teens trying to cross over tonight?”
“I think we will. Boys and girls try to enter the Black Forest every night. They come to have fun, drink, party, and fool around. The cemetery adds to the drama and scare they’re looking for.”
Loki let out a long breath, looking into the dark of the road ahead. Now that they were close to the cemetery, the weather turned chilly. Loki refrained from asking Axel about the weather, because he knew Axel wouldn’t stop babbling and he needed him to focus. He kept silent, and caught a glimpse of Axel munching on the Sweet Sticky Bones out of the corner of his eyes. The closer Loki drove to the cemetery, the slower Axel munched, and the bigger his pupils turned.
“Do you fear the dark, Loki?” Axel broke the silence, staring at the road as if waiting for something to pop out from the ditch.
“At the dark too long stare and you’ll end up seeing what isn’t there,” Loki replied.
“Wise words, Yoda, wise words,” Axel nodded hypnotically then snapped out of it. “We’re almost there,” he said, pointing at grey tombstones, appearing out of the mist like spirits welcoming them from their graves. Behind it, Loki could only see silhouettes of dark upon silhouettes of darker.
They finally arrived at a desolate dirt road. Carmen complained, grumbling and rattling. Loki noticed the trees bending down and curving slowly, their branches tangling together in the dark, curving like snakes above them. A couple of them had appeared to have a single eye on the end of their branches to spy with.
“You see this?” Loki said.
“I—“Axel almost choked on his food, trying to bury himself in the passenger seat. “I read about those trees in the forum. They’re called Juniper Trees. It’s best to avoid them and pretend they don’t exist. They’re spies for the vampire princess.”
“I’m a bit skeptical about who posts on the forum,” Loki said, slowing down his Cadillac.
“Genius Goblin,” Axel whispered.
“Who?”
“Genius Goblin, he is the forum’s creator and its most prestigious contributor.”
“Did you ever meet this Genius Goblin?”
“Never had the honor, really,” Axel said. “But I’d like to. You think he’s a real Goblin?”
“How should I know?” Loki shrugged his shoulders, and watched the trees as they started to crawl away. Loki wondered if they were going back to the vampire princess to tell her she had company tonight.
“When I was a kid, my mind used to play tricks on me,” Axel began. “I used to wake up in bed in the middle of the night with the boogeyman standing on it with my bowl of cereal, gorging on it, laughing and pointing at me with a long finger. Whenever I blinked, he was gone. Blinking solved a lot of problems when I was a kid. You know what’s really strange about it? The boogeyman didn’t look like a boogeyman. He looked like a pirate.”
Loki struggled to find a safe parking place for his Cadillac. He wasn’t even going to bother to comment that no one had ever seen a boogeyman, therefore Axel could not realize the one he saw didn’t look like one.
But as annoying as Axel was, Loki related to his unstoppable need for talking—after all, Loki mumbled to himself all the time. Axel talked incessantly because he didn’t have friends to talk to. Loki was probably the first friend he’d ever made, and he decided that later he’d have to tell Axel that he wasn’t staying in this town. He wasn’t here to make friends. He was here to find his way back home, and sooner or later, he had to leave town.
“I wonder why you never snuck to see the princess yourself.” Loki probed as he stopped Carmen behind a mammoth bristly bush, just wide enough to conceal her from front to back.
“I’m too chicken, which basically means I’m smart,” Axel said. “I only come to Buried Moon Cemetery when I am lonely and want to watch the teens having fun, making out and stuff. But that’s it.”
“So you’re a Peeping Tom?” Loki laughed. “How about Fable, do you ever bring her along?”
“Of course, not,” Axel’s face went red. “She’s too young to watch teens make out. I have to protect her. She means the world to me.”