The Creeping

“It needed a sacrifice,” Caleb whispers—the sort of whisper you use for telling vile, dirty secrets. “It was hungry for more than some flea-bitten mutts.”


Daniel’s lips press into a puffy, uneven seam. I can’t tell if he’s grimacing or smiling. “You and Jeanie were in the woods. We were shooting arrows. Caleb said we needed to leave the thing a little blood.” He gives Caleb a look that could make a tree wither and die. “I aimed an arrow at you. It was just supposed to nick you.” He stands rigid over me, his chin on his chest as he looks at his hand. There’s blood on it from my shoulder. He rubs his fingers together, staring at the human smear—most likely contemplating the universe’s symmetry that here we are and he finally has a bit of my blood for what we hunted.

“But the arrow hit my sister,” he continues in a distant way. “It sank into her stomach.” His eyes cut from the blood to me. “I told you to stay with her. You didn’t. We couldn’t lead my mom back. The woods were too big, and without you to mark where she was . . . You showed up an hour later at the house . . . sniveling.”

I can’t hold Daniel’s eye contact anymore. He’s too removed from the pain of Jeanie’s death; his stare is too hungry for something I can’t identify. “But Caleb, you couldn’t have been there. You were home with the chicken pox. Zoey had it too.” I’m arguing more with myself than with Daniel or Caleb. I know what I saw in the light of the flashlight. It doesn’t stop me from needing to see it again. This is Caleb.

I pick my way over the rocks to him. I lift Caleb’s hand to my face, wipe the smattering of blood away, and squint through the moonlight. It becomes all so horribly clear. I’ve seen the faded scars a million times before. They were seething red blisters when he held Jeanie’s head. Now they’re almost unnoticeable. Everything seems larger when you’re a kid. Kids make monsters out of everything.

“The wood connects your two houses,” I say. “You snuck out and snuck back in without anyone noticing.” How could I have been such an idiot? Believed even for a minute in something that couldn’t possibly exist? There’s no such thing as monsters. Only bad people. Shane told me: You can be that wrong about people. He said you can miss what’s really inside. He was right.

“Caleb . . .” Saying his name brings on a deluge of memories: Caleb building blanket forts; Caleb boosting me up to look at the bird’s nest in the porch eaves; Caleb grinning through the window as he idled in front of Mom’s house last December—staying with him felt like being home. “Why did you come over earlier? Was the whole thing an act, Caleb?” I shove his chest, try to force him to look at me, but he won’t. “You wanted to know what I knew?” I scream into his ear. “You want to know what I know now? You fucking lied to me. You’re my family.” I hammer my fists into his chest, but he never raises his head, and eventually, I can’t bear both the pain in my shoulder and the pain in my heart. My hands drop to my sides. At some point I start to cry. Tears trickle down my cheeks like icebergs carving their way through the North Sea.

Finally, Daniel answers for Caleb. “We needed to know if you were letting it go after my dad was arrested or if you were going to keep being a problem.” I played right into Daniel’s hands. I told Caleb I wouldn’t stop; I swore I’d remember everything.

My tears slow. I have to pull it together if I’m going to survive this. I have to outthink them or devise a way that makes it okay for us to walk out of the woods together. Jeanie was an accident. A tragic accident. “Why didn’t you tell the cops it was just an accident?”

Daniel paces, hand raking through his hair like he means to pull it out. His eerie calm has blown over and the storm’s returned. “There’s no body, no proof that it was. But really, my mom kept it from the cops because she thought we did something so bad to Jeanie that we had to hide her body. I couldn’t even prove that I hadn’t meant to hurt my sister, because you didn’t stay with her like I told you to.” He swallows like he’s going to be sick.

The Talcotts’ stares, all those years stuffed full of them, were never because I survived and Jeanie didn’t; they were watching me like a slow-motion car wreck, guessing at what I’d seen Daniel do to Jeanie, wondering when I’d remember, when I’d steal their other child away with what was lost inside my head.