She moved around the edge of the clearing, circling me. I stood dumbstruck, turning to watch her go.
She reached a tree and took hold of it, leaned against it, peering past it as if she were hiding, peeking, seeing what she was describing to me.
“They had bags,” she whispered. “They opened the bags. The guns were in them. I heard them whisper, ‘We are the angels of death.’ ”
I didn’t answer. I just listened. I couldn’t tell: Was this real? Or just another hallucination?
“Who was this, Jennifer?” I finally asked her. “Who did you see?”
At the sound of my voice, she gasped and turned, startled, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
“Who did you see?” I asked again.
“Demons. They had to be. They had to be.”
“Were they talking about Harry Mac? Was that the death they were talking about?”
She shook her head. “Harry Mac knew. He was going to tell the police. They decided to put him in a coffin. Under the tree. By the tarn. Send a warning to the others. Then they would be afraid. They would never tell. Then nothing could stop them.”
I shook my head. I didn’t understand. “Was this Jeff Winger? Jeff and Ed P.? Are they the demons?”
“They would be afraid,” she whispered. “Then no one could stop them. Because they would have the power.”
“The power,” I echoed her.
“The fire,” she said. “The explosion. So many dead.”
“What . . . ?”
I was about to ask more when there was a sound from the forest, a loud snap, a branch breaking. I looked toward the noise—Jennifer looked too—and I saw flashlight beams crisscrossing in the trees below us.
Our time was up. The police had come searching for us in the woods. Our tracks probably hadn’t been all that hard to follow.
They were already pretty close. I could hear them calling to one another in the distance:
“This way.”
“I’ve got the trail.”
“Looks like they went up this hill.”
Jennifer and I turned and looked at each other.
“They’re coming,” she said.
I nodded. “I know.”
“They’ll take me back to the castle, won’t they?”
“It’s not a castle, Jennifer. It’s a hospital.”
“A hospital, yes. Yes. I know that. I know that.”
“The doctors there will help you. You have to go back.”
“I know. I know.”
“Then when the medicine works, you can go home again.”
She nodded too, but she looked very sad, very forlorn. “Why did God let this happen to me, Sam?” she asked again.
And I told her again, “I don’t know. But he knows you’re in there, Jennifer. He’s right there with you. You won’t be alone.”
She held tightly to the tree. Even in the darkness, I could tell she was crying. “Will you be there too? Will you come to see me too?”
I went to her. I stood beside her. The crisscrossing flashlight beams passed over the trees, illuminating the branches.
“Definitely,” I said. “I’ll definitely be there. I’ll visit you. And when you come out of the hospital, you can visit me too.”
“You’re my magic friend, Sam.”
“That’s right,” I told her. “I’m your magic friend.”
Still holding on to the tree, she lifted her tearstained face to me. “You have to go now,” she said softly.
“Yeah. But I’ll come back.”
“You can’t let them catch you.”
I nodded.
“I won’t tell them it was you, Sam,” said Jennifer.
“Okay.”
Jennifer let go of the tree. I heard the voices calling to one another below us.
“There it is. Here. I’ve got the trail.”
“Over here.”
“I see it. Up the hill.”
The flashlights swept the woods.
Jennifer slowly, reluctantly took off my jacket. She ran her hand down over it once, as if she were caressing it. She held it to her face and breathed in the scent of it. Then she handed it to me. I put it on. I was glad to—it really was cold out there. As I did, Jennifer reached down and tugged my socks off—first one foot, then the other. She handed the socks to me. I stuffed them in the jacket pockets.
“Thanks,” I said.
Jennifer straightened. We looked at each other as the voices of the searchers got louder, closer.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered.
She gave me a little smile. “I can’t help it sometimes,” she whispered back.
I smiled too. “Me either.”
Now I could hear the feet of the searchers crunching on the brush and leaves of the hill as they moved toward us.
Jennifer shivered. She hugged her shoulders.
“You better call to them,” I said. “Let them know where you are before you freeze out here.”
She nodded. Her voice shook with the cold. “Goodbye, Sam.”
“I’ll see you, Jennifer. I will.”
She took a breath. Then she shouted, loud enough so that the searchers could hear her: “I’m here. I’m up here! I’m all right! I’m up here!”
That got their attention, all right. The sounds of motion quickened. Their voices became an excited babble, running together:
“You hear that?”
“There she is!”
“I heard her!”
“She’s up the hill!”
“We’re coming, Jennifer! We’re coming!”
“Keep calling, Jennifer!”
I gave a short laugh. “Like I said: you’re not alone.”
I touched her hand. Then, quickly, I moved away from her. I reached the far edge of the clearing.
“Sam!”
I stopped at her whispered call. I turned around. Once again the moon picked her out of the darkness, her pale face glowing. The flashlight beams swung back and forth on the tangle of branches behind her.
“They’re real, Sam,” she said. “The demons. They’re all real.”
“Are they?” I still wasn’t sure.
“You have to stop them.”
I didn’t know how to answer. “I’ll try,” I said.
The first searcher’s flashlight came into view.
I ran off into the woods.
First, the alarm woke me up. Then the police came. And I knew I was in more trouble than ever before.
I had not been home for very long. The journey back from the hospital had been slow and dangerous. Luckily, everyone had been so busy looking for me and Jennifer in the woods in back of the hospital, no one had found my bike in the woods out in front. I made my way to it quickly. With the glow of the police flashers visible from the nearby hospital driveway, I threw my leg over the saddle and started to pedal away down the two-lane.
It was slow going. The police were everywhere along the road. I had to listen for them—to listen for any traffic that might be them. Whenever I heard a motor approaching, I had to—quick—pull off into the woods, lay down my bike, and duck behind the trees until the gleaming white headlights went by and the red taillights faded into the darkness. Only when they were out of sight did I feel safe enough to take up my ride again.
It was nearly three in the morning by the time I got back to the rectory. As worked up as I was, I half expected to find the police waiting for me right there on the front lawn. Jennifer had promised not to tell them about me. But to be honest, I didn’t think she’d be able to keep that promise. She was so sick, so confused, I figured once they started questioning her, she’d probably tell them the name of her “magic friend” without even meaning to.
But it seemed I was wrong. It seemed Jennifer had been as good as her word. At least, there weren’t any cop cars waiting for me on the lawn when I got home. The lights were out in all the windows. Mom, Dad, my brother—no one even knew that I had gone.
I put my bike in the bike port and snuck inside as quietly as I could. Crept upstairs as quietly as I could. In my room I was dropping my clothes to the floor even as I staggered to the bed. I dropped onto the bed like a falling tree—
plonk
—face-first into the mattress. The last thought I had was:
“They’re real. The demons. They’re all real. You have to stop them.”
A second later, I was asleep.
A second after that—or at least it seemed like it was only a second—the radio alarm went off and music was banging through the room, banging in my ears. I don’t think I’d moved at all since losing consciousness. I barely moved now. My hand just reached out and hit the clock radio button to turn off the music. Then my hand fell and I just lay there, my face still plunked down into the mattress.
My thoughts picked up right where they’d left off the night before:
“They’re real. The demons. They’re all real. You have to stop them.”
I didn’t know what to think when she said that—and I still didn’t know what to think.
Were
the demons real? Was that possible?
After all the trouble I’d gone through to get to Jennifer, I still didn’t really know the answer to that question. I’d been too busy worrying about the police to think about it much on the way home. And when I got home, I’d fallen asleep so fast I hadn’t had a chance to think about it at all.
Now, though, lying there in that half-sleep state, I
did
start thinking about it. I thought about all the stuff Jennifer had told me last night in the woods.
“I heard their whispers. In the night. In the dark. In my room. I heard their footsteps. And I followed them.”
It was the same old story, wasn’t it? The whispers in the night. The demons out in her hall. Just the same old hallucinations. Just like before.
“I followed them down the stairs and out the door. They went behind our house. They gathered there in the little shed. They whispered to each other.”
Slowly I rolled over onto my back. I fought off sleep. I forced my eyes wider. I lay there staring up at the ceiling.
Is it?
I thought.
Is it really the same old story?
I mean, the stuff that Jennifer told me last night—it
could’ve
happened, couldn’t it? If you left out the demon part, what she was telling me wasn’t really that crazy at all. Let’s say Jennifer was lying in her bed awake one night—well, she
could’ve
heard whispers out in the hall, couldn’t she? Footsteps. She could’ve peeked out and seen something. And okay, so it wasn’t demons, but it might’ve been . . .
I sat up. Oh, I was awake now. Yeah, I was wide awake.
Something had just occurred to me, something that had never occurred to me before. I thought back to what my dad had said when I asked him if Jennifer might be having visions of the future like one of the prophets in the Bible:
“The world is not a magical place. The things that happen are pretty predictable, and they can usually be explained in ordinary terms.”
I knew that was right. There’s always a practical explanation for the things that happen in the world.
But that doesn’t mean that’s the
whole
explanation, does it? That doesn’t mean that things happen with no reason or rhyme.
“Who did you see, Jennifer?”
I remembered asking her that in the woods.
“Who did you see?”
“Demons. They had to be. They had to be.”
But what if . . . ?
I thought.
When I considered it, it was pretty obvious that Jennifer really
was
suffering from some kind of mental illness, like everybody said. Schizophrenia—or something—whatever . . . It was obvious she really
was
having hallucinations. But what if she was having hallucinations about something that was also real? Something that was in her mind, say, that she didn’t want to think about, that she couldn’t bear to think about in any other way. What if Jennifer had forced all these unhappy thoughts down to the bottom of her mind, but when the schizophrenia gave her hallucinations, the hallucinations were full of the things she didn’t want to think about? That made sense. It wasn’t “magical.” It could really happen.