Hidebehind

Fifteen

Great Grandma decided to try to teach me how to play the organ Saturday afternoon. It wasn't that I was interested. I never once thought, "Hey, I'd like to know how to play a ginormous beast-of-an-instrument whose pedals alone sound like elephants in pain." But for some reason, she thought it'd be nice if there were a little music in the house. I suggested that she play the radio, but she didn't even seem to hear me.

"Now Robbie," she croaked, sitting next to me on the organ bench, "if you get good enough, maybe you can play at church. God knows Verlene could use a replacement. She's older than the hills."

I decided not to state the obvious and avoided talk of Great Grandma's age. Instead, I slumped my shoulders to show my disinterest and hoped she'd take the hint.

She didn't.

After she'd demonstrated about thirty "bells and whistles" the thing possessed, I began to think the organ was more an instrument of torture than of music. The minutes ticked by, most of them filled with her droning on about A's and C's and flats and who-knew-what else. She had me try a key here and a button there, and my complete lack of excitement would have discouraged anyone else, but Great Grandma didn't even seem to notice. I started to get antsy—I was supposed to meet Alex and the other guys at the gas station down the road at four o'clock. When I finally gained enough courage to tell Great Grandma that, she just huffed and said they'd wait a few extra minutes.

Well, a few extra minutes turned into about forty, and by the time I made it to the gas station (running most of the way), I expected them to be gone. I didn't see anyone at first, except for a few old people getting gas, but then I looked inside and saw someone with some dark hair standing at the counter. It was Alex!

I pushed through the glass door, not realizing how out-of-breath I was until I tried to say hi and not much came out. The noise I made was enough, though. Alex and his short friend turned to look at me. The bigger friend wasn't there, but short Chuck looked angry.

Alex grinned. "Hey," he said. "We thought you weren't coming."

"Yeah, thought you chickened out," snarled Chuck.

I didn't really know what to say. "No . . . I'm here." For half a second, I wished Jay were there with me, but then that stupid feeling went away, and my insides glowed at the thought of an adventure.

Alex turned to the teenager behind the counter. "I'll see you later, Max," he said. Then, he started walking, and Chuck fell in behind. "That's my cousin," he explained to me. He goes to the high school."

As we left the station and headed back sort of toward my Great Grandma's property, I realized I didn't even have an idea of where we were going.

"There're some woods behind the strip mall with the pharmacy in it. They're pretty big. Kids go camping in them all the time. That's where your Grandpa went. Didn't used to be a strip mall there, though, back when he was a kid, so they used to be a lot bigger."

"Is that the same woods where my Great Grandma's is?"

"Sort of," Alex remarked, sloshing through some tall plants while Chuck and I seemed to trip over them. "It stretches all around, up toward town, but I guess it's all one big woods, if you think of it like that."

In some strange way, that made me feel better. I wouldn't be too far from Great Grandma's.

But once we got into the woods, the more we walked, the more wary I became. Everything started to look the same. I was trying to keep mental track of which way we'd come, but I realized there was little chance that I would be able to find my way back to Great Grandma's. The trees didn't seem healthy, to me. They were all scrawny, brambly things, sticking up out of the leaves and dirt around them like a thousand spider legs. I felt more as if we were hiking through a giant tumbleweed than a forest. But I kept on following Alex, listening to him talk about all kinds of stuff, paying more attention to the thoughts in my head than what he was actually saying.

Everything looked the same, so I had no idea how Alex knew where he was going, but all of a sudden, we were at a large boulder. It wasn't so much a boulder as it was a huge slab of stone, sticking out of the ground where it fell away at an easy slope. In fact, we could walk out on the top of it (which we did at first) and go around and crawl under it (which we did second). It was like we were in our own little cave, although it didn't go far back and had no walls.

The three of us sat down; I was cross-legged at the back, Chuck was on his knees to my right, and Alex crouched near the opening.

"This was where it happened," Alex said quietly. His voice took on a different sound than just a few minutes before, when he'd been talking about all sorts of random stuff.

"Right here?"

"Shh," Chuck hissed at me.

I frowned but stopped talking.

"Nobody knows exactly for sure where they were camping," Alex continued. "It was somewhere right around here, though. There aren't a lot of landmarks in these woods, but this is one of them. It's called Shark Fin Rock."

"Cause it sticks up like a shark fin!"

"Duh, Chuck. I think Rob can see that."

It was Chuck's turn to frown.

Alex drew in a breath and slowly let it out, and that was enough to tell us it was his time to talk and ours to listen. "It was one night, a long time ago, when two guys went camping, but only one returned. The story goes that they came here, to these woods, which were a lot bigger back then. They left their houses in the early evening, carrying their camping bags, with no idea of what kind of night was ahead of them. They set up camp somewhere nearby. They pitched their cheap tent and laid out their sleeping bags, and they just did all the normal stuff that guys do when they go camping, I guess. I think they were Boy Scouts, so maybe that helped. I don't know if they lit fires or anything, but they probably ate something for dinner, like some sandwiches or hotdogs—"

"Or maybe they shot a squirrel or a rabbit!"

"Shut up, Chuck. That's stupid. They would have to have skinned it, and that's gross."

I thought about that for a minute and decided that I wouldn't have been able to skin a rabbit, either. I got grossed out by the tick jar . . . who knows how I would've reacted to a bloody rabbit.

"Rob, I forgot to tell you this important part."

I blinked out of my daze and looked at him.

"There was one clue to the kid's disappearance. One clue that made people say it was a monster and not something else."

I sucked in a breath. "What? Tell me."

Alex nodded. "It's awesome. I can actually show it to you."

"Where is it?"

"Chuck and I have to go get it."

That threw me. Where was it? I asked. Could I go too? I asked. But no, they wanted me to stay right there at the campsite and wait while they got it. They wouldn't even give me a hint. I didn't like the idea at first, but Alex convinced me it would take only a minute and that it was definitely worth waiting for. Finally, after a lot of me hectoring and them not answering, I gave in, and the two of them left, promising to be back with the awesome clue in "just a second."