I try to tell him that this is exactly what I am afraid of, but I can’t. I have no strength. I open my mouth, then clamp it shut again, afraid of making another one of those horrible sounds. Danny steps aside, and shoots me a look that says only— Quiet, please, rest now —before fading back with the other children.

              And then, finally, he is there by my side, seeming to tower over us all, checking my wounds and carefully moving me away from the water, cursing it as though angry at it for being there, as if the dirt and the water have injured me and made me bleed. His voice echoes in my head as he demands answers from the silent staring children, but he doesn’t wait for a reply before telling me not to worry, help is coming and everything will be okay. His eyes shift to the small shack. I shake my head—there is no more danger. Though he can’t know what has happened here yet, he nods. He rubs my hand and for a second I try to believe that, in fact, everything will be okay. But as the world goes black, all I can think of is how I have failed, how I have miscalculated, how I have stupidly mistrusted my own instincts, and all I see before me are the damaged faces of those I have left behind to save me.

Before the Beginning

              There is blood, and there is sweat, and there is soil, and there are the leaves that wither and fall from the trees in the orchard each fall, drying up and crunching underfoot while raked into orderly piles and burned. People think they make a difference to the earth, but really they’re just there to help the land along. There will always be blood, always be sweat, and always be soil. They can’t survive apart. They seek each other out. They find each other.

              No one, not any of them, knew what lay in wait for them, crouched at the end of that darkened hallway of a year, 2001. The beast hiding beneath their beds came alive soon after those Twin Towers fell, and did not let up. Two days later, that was when it all started, with first one missing girl, and then a second. They hoped it would end there. Things were quiet for a while, the cold snap of winter wrapping the town of Carver Isle, Washington in a frozen stillness that everyone, with a gullible hope, mistook for the end.

              But then December hit, an angry Christmas storm. No one could have predicted it would have been so bad. It became one of those stories where folks could never find the beginning; they’d just keep backing up in time until they were practically giving a town history lesson. After all, trying to pinpoint exactly when an apple first begins to rot is a difficult business. But the Kelly Orchard is as good a place to start as any, since it’s really at the heart of it all.

The apple orchard itself stretches out for several acres between Orchard Valley Boulevard and Mica Way, its leaves full of history. Jimmy Kelly—Red, folks used to call him—and his wife Maura built it up back in the early twenties, before the crash. They bought and worked the whole place when it was nothing but dirt, breathing life into the muddy mess. Old Red was a cheap bastard, even by Depression standards, but that was probably what made him a success. He’d won the plans for the main house in a poker game, and helped build it with his crew; he’d been a carpenter by trade back in Ireland. The cabins housing the pickers were built by the very first team of orchard hands he hired, based on the theory that they’d build better houses if they knew they were going to be sleeping in them. He was correct—those same cabins are still standing on the property today.

Maura eventually had children of her own, but before then, there were the pickers’ kids. She always kept an eye out for them when their parents were busy working the orchard. They both exasperated her and endeared themselves to her. Anytime she hung her laundry out back, it was guaranteed she’d have to scold the little ones for kicking up dust too close to the drying line. Still, not ten minutes later, they’d scramble for a spot near her on the porch, where she’d tell them Irish fairy stories, or teach them, in her sly way, how to read and write.

And that was how the constant presence of children at the Kelly Apple Orchard began. Since the very beginning, they were there. They played games in the dirt drive of the two-story Craftsman during its construction. They made faces at the fumes from the floor finish and the paint. They stood aside somberly as Maura shooed them away to make room for the kitchen stove, one hand clutching her skirt while the other went to her cheek in a gesture of worry. They ooh-ed and ahh-ed at the first treehouse Jimmy built; they got splinters from its wooden trunk-ladder, and rope burns from its tire swing. In the summer, they stayed up late playing Ghosts in the Graveyard among the squat new apple trees. They said their prayers as their parents instructed them, often accompanied by a grimace. They experienced their share of lost pets, influenza and death. But this was a part of growing up, of ceasing to be children, and though it tore at Maura’s heart each time she noticed one of the children growing older, she was proud to have been a part of it. She knew the truth: that the orchard would have been a sad, sallow place without children, for they were what made it sing. These days, the orchard still has its children, and though different from their predecessors, they thrive there, as they always have.

              The leaves had already started to change color, to curl up and die and fall from their branches when eleven-year-old Jamie Cole was abducted on her way home from school, thus setting in motion a series of events that would alter the town and people of Carver Isle, Washington, forever…particularly the children. It’s impossible to say, looking back now, whether anything could have been done to stop or change it. Sometimes, you have to just start telling a story for the truth to feel comfortable about revealing itself.

PART ONE:

THE TAKEN

“Come now,

my child,

if we were planning

to harm you, do you think

we’d be lurking here

beside the path

in the very dark-

est part of

the forest?”

     —Kenneth Patchen , But Even So

—ONE—

Thursday, September 13, 2001, Carver Isle, WA, 3:10 p.m.:

              If only Jamie had ridden past the truck parked by the side of the road that day, everything might have been different.

             If she’d been watching the road and not the trees, the child might not have seen the truck at all. She was riding her pink Schwinn towards the Gas ’N Sip after school that day, where Danny and Jenn and the others had agreed to meet up for a slushie. It was already becoming too cold for things like slushies, now that fall was upon them, but she wanted to pretend it was still summer, and that she hadn’t recently been sentenced to a dreary nine months in Mrs. Hiller’s sixth grade class. If she breathed in deep enough and closed her eyes, she could smell the pine and try to ignore the decaying maple leaves signifying fall and the new school year.

             At least there was Mrs. Kelly’s orchard; they still played there after school, even though Mrs. Kelly was real sick. Danny was worried that she might not come back from the hospital this time. But wouldn’t the grown-ups say so if that was true? Jamie was glad, anyway, that the orchard managers still let them play there after school. She hadn’t gone there for the past couple of days because of what happened in New York two days ago with the airplanes; everyone had been glued to their televisions. But slowly, people were venturing outdoors again. Be on alert , she thought to herself. Terrorists could be anywhere. That was what Marcus and Danny said. The terrorists could even be—

              Waving at her. Someone was waving at her from inside the big truck parked on the side of the road.

              Jamie slowed her bicycle, but did not entirely stop. While she was a friendly child, she was not a stupid one, and knew about the dangers of speaking to strange men in cars. And trucks . Still, she was curious. What if someone needed help? Then again, what if this was a terrorist? She weighed her options; if anything bad happened, she was close enough to pedal to the Gas ’N Sip with very little effort—Jamie could see the sign from here. She backed her bike up a bit and came closer to the truck, her reddish blond hair falling in loose strings down her striped turtleneck sweater as she squinted up at the driver.  

             There was an amiable man with blond hair and blue eyes in the driver’s seat who appeared relieved to see her. He had on a plaid shirt and baseball cap, like the kind her stepdad wore on hauls. She wondered briefly if they were pals. He cranked down the window of his truck and peeked out. “Oh, hey there, sweet pea! Sure am glad to see you.” He waved a map through the window, an exasperated look on his face. “Look, I’m lost here. Think you can help me out?”

             “S-sure,” Jamie replied, with a moment’s hesitation in her voice. After all, hadn’t they been taught to obey adults, but also be wary of strangers? She wondered what her mother would do, and had no idea. The woman was an ongoing reconstruction project, so this was a difficult question to answer offhand. Jamie decided to keep the bike beneath her, just in case, like a trusty steed. She half-walked it over towards the driver’s side on her tip-toes, the truck’s tall cab towering over her.

             The driver’s blue eyes twinkled down at her, and he pointed at the map. “Shoot, pumpkin, can ya see where I’m pointing? I need to get there. Do you know the best route?”

             The child, closer now, looked first at the man’s eyes, and then followed his finger to the point on the map. She could see that it was not a regular map, but a computerized map, with a familiar address on it and a star marking the location he was looking for. That’s my address, my house , she thought to herself, and blinked up at him again, uncomprehending. Then she saw his eyes, and thought with a shiver, They’re like teeny pieces of ice .

             That was when the door came crashing open, knocking her to the ground. Her heart raced and she scrambled to get up, but then somebody else was there, clamping something over her mouth and making the world swim before her eyes. As she squinted up towards the hands that came down at her, her own arms flopping sluggishly and with little meaning, she saw two faces merging together with a monstrous force to become something else altogether.

             She saw The Creature That Lurks Under The Bed.