The Creeping

My hands wrap around my ankles and I squeeze, willing away dread. “Okay. You’re kind of scaring me.”


He hazards a quick smile that doesn’t reassure me. “It’s just that Zoey cornered me last night and had a million questions about the summer Jeanie went missing, and I realized I kind of left you guys high and dry without talking to you. Saying I’d tell your dad and all . . . well, it was a dick move. Snitches get stitches and all that.”

I smirk and relax. “Did you learn that from a Jay-Z song?”

“Probably.” He smiles at the joke, but the lightness of his expression fades fast. “I remember hunting monsters.” I’m instantly angled forward. “I told Zo last night I didn’t want to talk about it. I wouldn’t give her answers. There’s a reason for that. There was so much in the year leading up to Jeanie that you guys are too young to remember.” His face is thinner and sharper than usual; his cheekbones like blades as he continues. “Boys always talk about supernatural shit. In the second grade we’d yell ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in the mirror. At the beginning of third grade a couple of kids saw two bums beating on a mangy-looking dog in the woods. It inspired all kinds of crazy stories. Kids were going on about camps full of drifters who were cannibals or dog eaters. That same year Jeremy Bellamy—he was that kid who walked with a limp from shattering his right leg when he was a toddler?” He pauses and I nod. Jeremy graduated last year from Wildwood. “Anyway, he pissed his pants in the woods behind the elementary school and came out crying about a ghost with empty wet sockets instead of eyeballs. For weeks we tore through the trees, searching.” He takes a deep breath. “None of it was true. Boys want to hunt shit and we didn’t have anything real, so we hunted make-believe.”

I bob my head encouragingly. None of this is new; it’s more detailed than Sam’s account, but there’s nothing earth-shattering. “The spring before Jeanie started that same bullshit way. We—Daniel and me—overheard his dad talking to a ranger buddy about some town legend no one remembers anymore.” His chin juts out, giving him a slight underbite as he thinks hard. “This ancient animal thing lived in the woods. There was some history to it, I think. I couldn’t remember what, and I went to the library the other day to see if they had any folklore-type books about Savage.”

I’m leaning forward, practically falling from the couch I’m so intent. “Did they?” I whisper.

“No. The librarian looked at me like I was high.” He snorts. “Ironic, ’cause it’s the only time I’ve ever been in a library when I wasn’t.” A clipped chuckle. “So anyway, it was springtime, and we started hunting this monster in the woods. We made spears and bows and arrows. I mean, we really got carried away. And it was more fun than doing it with the boys at school because you, Zoey, Sam, and Jeanie were only six.” A bolt of pain snaps across his features at admitting how young we were, and I realize where this is going. Caleb suffers from guilt over how he contributed to Jeanie’s disappearance, and he wasn’t even there. “You all got really into it. And at some point, we forgot that it wasn’t real.” He sniffs. “Or maybe kids know what’s real better than adults do?” He focuses on my expression. “Maybe we were smart to believe in what lives in the dark?” My pulse is in my throat. He gives his head a jolt and starts massaging his hands with the look of someone trying to rub the cold out of his knuckles.

All the years fall away, and there’s this childish quality about him sitting sunken in the recliner. He’s been skipping meals, and his black bomber jacket swims on him. His skin is pale porcelain; a lattice of blue veins shows through on his neck. No, not childish, fragile. “So that’s what we did all spring and into the summer, until Jeanie was taken,” he says. “We hunted the monster.”

“Caleb, why didn’t you tell anyone this? Why not tell the cops once Jeanie disappeared?” It isn’t that I think it would have made a huge difference; Jeanie was gone, and who would believe a nine-year-old crying about monsters?