The Creeping

Satisfied that I’ve gotten to the bottom of the animal disappearances, I change into a tattered T-shirt and slip into bed. I stare at the thin lines of light like pale chalk between the slats of my blinds. Somewhere out there a streetlamp is burning white and steady, guiding moths out of the night to its warmth while I’m shaking as the cold in my bones freezes me from the inside out. For the first time it occurs to me that remembering might be too . . . too everything. What if I witnessed more than Jeanie being taken? What if I watched as her insides, neatly tucked and coiled under thin pink skin, were pulled from her body? What if I heard the crackle and snap of her scalp’s tissue parting from her skull? What if once I remember I can’t stop replaying it, and it becomes all I hear? Jeanie’s whimpering. Jeanie’s bones breaking and her cartilage crackling. The hiss of Jeanie’s last breath. What if it’s so much more and I’m not strong, or certain, or able, or enough, and it breaks me?


Ultimately, though, I swallow the fear so it roosts somewhere smaller, darker, deeper in me, because of the whistle of Sam’s breath between his teeth. Sam is here. Sam will help me bear it. I gently brush aside the hair sticking to his forehead. His long lashes are clumped together in little starlike sharp points. He got hurt tonight because of me. I dragged him there like I’ve dragged him everywhere, tethered by some invisible rope he calls love. Sam’s uncovered nearly every piece of evidence that proves there’s a creature lurking in the woods. That there’s something so much more—or less—than human.

My hand hovers just above his forehead, so close my fingertips imagine the flutter of hair on their pads. A flutter of something else in the back of my head. It was Sam’s idea to look for past disappearances in library archives, to search the graveyard, to investigate what we were doing in the woods as kids. Every hunch he’s had yields blizzards of clues, and all that evidence has led me to one impossible conclusion: the Creeping.

My hand retracts carefully as I’m shaking my head into the swell of the pillow. No, no, no, what am I getting at? This is Sam. Too patient, too kind, too forgiving, too-good-to-be-true Sam Worth. I’m clinging to the edge of the bed before I realize I’ve rolled away, put space between us. I must be losing it if I’m even thinking . . . What am I thinking? That six-year-old Sam had something to do with Jeanie’s disappearance? That now he’s steering me away from human suspects by inventing monsters, by fabricating evidence and leads? Sam isn’t just my Sam. He was six. But is there something he’s steering me away from? Sam’s been eyeing the supernatural all along. How could he have known?

I know Zoey and Caleb were home with chicken pox when Jeanie was taken, and Daniel was home with his mom, but I don’t have a clue where Sam was. I’ve never asked. I figured he wasn’t there because it was a girly playdate, but isn’t it weird that it’s never come up? I’ve heard loads of kids who barely knew Jeanie talk about where they were that afternoon. Everyone wants to claim a piece of history for themselves—even the Jeanie-shaped history of Savage. How has Sam never mentioned that he was sipping lemonade poolside, or thumping a ramshackle birdhouse with a hammer at Scouts, or taking a dreamless nap when Jeanie was abducted?

Suspicion sends my thoughts shrieking backward, bashing along memories like speed bumps until I reach the Day of Bones. Me: in the cemetery lying on the stone bench, eyes closed. Sam’s head in place of the moon as my lids snapped open. No crunch of his footsteps, no blurry form coming into focus between the graves. I didn’t see the direction he came from.

I twist farther from Sam as I wag my head no, no, no. He doesn’t have anything to do with Jeanie or Jane Doe. But I didn’t see where he came from. What if he was traveling from deeper in the cemetery? What if he stumbled across me after offing another little redheaded victim, and he’s smart as hell, so he pretended to have followed me?

My hands drop limp at my sides. This is insane, crazeballs, nutso, borderline betrayal that as Sam sleeps vulnerable and unguarded a foot away I’m trying him of murder and finding him guilty. I need a straitjacket if I’m actually thinking that six-year-old Sam had anything to do with Jeanie and that now he’s hungry for more. I push my palms against my eyes until fireworks take the place of the mangy scrap of skin that was Jane Doe’s scalp.

A moment later I feel for the furry lump on the carpet, the stale polyester smell of my bunny’s fur in my face and lungs as I squeeze him tighter, my whole rib cage cradling him. My eyelids are fat and heavy. I went grave digging tonight. An old woman warned us about an ancient monster that kills little girls. She accused Savage of trying to keep it a secret years ago; she warned that it might be happening again. I rock Bunny. That’s all it is: exhaustion, ragged nerves, imagination drunk from the blurred line between reality and nightmare. Sam would never hurt anyone.

Before I let myself fall asleep, I list every time I hurt Sam in the last five years. Times I rolled my eyes when he wished me happy birthday or asked how my day was going in fourth-period biology. Times when I ignored him for other guys. Times when he was about to ask me out and I made an excuse—which we both knew was bogus—to dodge him. The list goes on and on. It could fill a book. And yet Sam has never injured me back.

Right then and there I swear that I won’t doubt Sam. I’ll accept that he really is as good as he seems, and I’ll spend however long it takes, forever even, making all the times I hurt him right. After that sleep comes easier.