“I heard you,” Caroline said. “And Hudson. What’s going on? Are you okay, Charlie?”
“I want to go inside,” Charlie said. He let Caroline press his head against her hip.
“He’s been running,” Ben told her. “Running around. Out here. In the dark. I don’t even know for how long.” Ben could not remember ever being this angry. He didn’t know what to do with it. It was a river burning inside him with nowhere to go.
“You can’t be outside at night by yourself,” Caroline told Charlie. “We need to know where you are, okay? You know this, honey. You’re shaking, so go warm up. You’re filthy, too. Wash your feet before going into bed.” They watched Charlie run back to the house.
“What’s wrong with Hudson?” Caroline asked Ben. The dog was now barking at the forest. Ben still had a grip on the beagle’s collar, and it was hard to hear Caroline over the sound.
“I don’t know. Charlie has everyone worked up. He’s unbelievable,” Ben said. “I’m up in the attic and see this…thing sprinting across the field. I don’t know whether to call the police or The X-Files. But, no, it’s not a yeti, it’s my eight-year-old. He’s not even wearing shoes.”
“Neither are you,” Caroline said. She was talking about his feet, but she was looking him in the eyes.
Ben couldn’t read the expression on her face.
“Can we go inside now?” She sounded tired.
“This is really not normal. We have to do something.” Ben remembered the quirks of Caroline’s that he’d overlooked and knew all too well where ignoring them had gotten him. He could not live in a den of wolves.
“You know how he is. He just needed to be specifically told that he’s not allowed to go out alone at night. We should keep better tabs on him, anyway. We’ve been too lenient about letting him play out here by himself.”
After so many years of certainty, Ben was bewildered by what a puzzle Caroline had become. This was a woman who’d barely left her room for a day after he’d come home with a bucket of the wrong shade of ecru, so how was she not as upset about this as he was?
“It’s not only that,” Ben said. “At school, he drew this picture of the shed burning down, and there was this big black man in the smoke. Hudson!” The beagle leapt toward the forest, and Ben nearly lost his balance. “Calm down, buddy.”
“What does that even mean?”
“The smoke from the shed was made to look like a man. Arms, legs, a face. It was disturbing. I’ll show you the drawing.” They were nearly to the kitchen door. “I think he should talk to someone. A counselor. The school has someone they think might be able to get him to open up.” Ben knew this would be delicate territory for Caroline. She did not like therapists.
“Because of a drawing?” Caroline asked.
“It’s probably just his way of processing the fire, but they could help him work through it. One evaluation session.” Ben realized he was nearly pleading with her. “They’d pull him out of class for an hour. If everything’s fine, like we think it is, then that’ll be it.” Ben didn’t know if that was how it worked, but he needed her to agree to this.
“I don’t know, Ben,” Caroline said. She opened the door and held it for him. In the kitchen light, Caroline looked as tired as her voice sounded. Worn through.
“Please,” Ben said. “What harm could it do?”
As Ben ascended the steps, Hudson twisted out of his grip and bolted for the moonlit fields.
“Hudson!” Ben called after him. The beagle howled his hunting cry into the night. “Hudson!”
“Ben, I’ve got to go to bed,” Caroline said.
“I can’t leave him out here,” Ben said. “It’s too cold.” He had no idea how he was going to get the beagle back into the house. Hudson had never acted like this before.
“It’s too cold for anyone to be out,” Caroline said.
“I’ll get my coat and boots,” Ben said. He followed her inside. Maybe Hudson had sniffed out a coyote pack. This thought did not make him feel any better.
Caroline had already made her way to the tower stairs. Ben caught his reflection again in the glass. He was still thin and startled-looking, but now he seemed weary, too. And it was not the kind of exhaustion that could be fixed by a full night’s sleep.
26
Charlie ran up the steps to his room. It was warm here, yet he trembled.
He had to clean off the blood first, in case Mom checked on him. The blood had looked like mud in the dark, but Hudson knew the difference.
While the Watcher had left Charlie the gifts of many arranged creatures in the forest throughout the summer and fall, it had rarely let itself be seen. But twice Charlie had spied it by the lake from the blind that he’d constructed in the branches above the faerie circle. Both times it had been trying to catch fish with its hands but had been doing it wrong. Charlie knew this because The Book of Secrets had a chapter on all kinds of fishing. He’d left the book by the lake, with a bright maple leaf to mark the page. The book was gone the next morning, but the day after that, Charlie had found it placed in the center of the faerie circle, ringed with the heads of five raccoons.
The game he played with the Watcher had changed over the months. At first it had seemed like a kind of tag, or a treasure hunt, but now it was a game of hide-and-seek, in which they both hid and searched at the same time. Charlie thought the rules to their game had changed, but watching the blood slip down the bathtub drain, he wondered if there had been any rules in the first place.