The Pricker Boy by Reade Scott Whinnem Page A

years or so.”
    “Maybe the pit was here, and Hora dug his foundation around the pit.”
    “Or maybe Ronnie can create magical places with hismind! This is crazy. You hear a little of this and that and Ronnie writes his story around it, and then we find this place and you both try to make it all fit together. Just to scare us.” He stares at Ronnie and me. Emily passes by on her third trip around the foundation and smiles at Vivek.
    “Okay, maybe Emily isn’t scared, but she’s as bonkers as a drunken bedbug. Look at me—I’m scared enough to puke. Look at Robin, bud. She’s your blood. Doesn’t that mean something to you? You just found a piece of your father’s and her father’s history, a second-generation discovery, and you’re using it to scare her silly. This could be really cool … but it isn’t.”
    Robin folds her arms in front of her chest, gripping her elbows tightly. Despite the heat, she appears terribly cold. I’ll admit it, I’m enjoying her fright until, out of the corner of my eye, I see Emily leap down inside the foundation.
    And immediately, without reason, I am as terrified as both Ronnie and Robin.
    Her feet hit the half-rotted leaves in the basement of the Hora House, and things that have been sleeping down there for years and years now wake up and begin to spin around her ankles. Emily can’t see them, but I can.
    She starts poking around the walls of the foundation. She trips over an old bottle and picks it up, holding it up to the sunlight. One of the things comes up with her wrist and wraps around her forearm before dripping back toward the ground. She pokes at a few old bedsprings. All the while, those things are waking up and swirling, rising around her,flapping like mad birds. They are angry things, tiny things, young things that have been asleep for so very long and don’t like being woken from their nap.
    “Get out,” I say.
    Emily looks up at me. “Excuse me?”
    “Get out. Now.”
    “But this is interesting,” Emily says, completely unaware of what is twirling around her torso.
    “You have to … you have to get out. Climb, now! It isn’t safe!”
    “We should go,” Robin says. “Please! This doesn’t feel right!” I’m amazed that we’re actually agreeing about something, and I wonder for an instant if she can see what I see.
    “But how often do you get the chance to—” Emily protests.
    “Get out now!” I scream, and Emily climbs out of the cellar.
    She looks me up and down as if I’m some kind of specimen wiggling in a dish. “Are you okay?” she asks.
    I look down into the cellar. Whatever lives down there begins to settle in again.
    “We should get on with this,” I tell them, and I begin to head back. I don’t look over my shoulder. As soon as I feel the Hora House disappearing into the trees behind me, as soon as that nest of boulders is no longer visible, I feel better, like I’ve once again woken up from a terrible night vision.
    My heart calms down. My head is clear. I’ve learned enough for today. I’m ready to go home.

A s soon as the weather was warm enough for us to sit in a boat without freezing our asses off, Pete and I would get up early and gather our gear and sneak through the woods to Ed Giles’s cottage. Ed Giles is a loudmouthed retiree who winters down in the Florida Keys. He spends the whole summer asking us year-rounders how the winter was, just so he can tell us how warm the water is in the Keys at Christmastime. Overall, he isn’t a bad guy, though.
    We’d grab the hull of Ed’s Sunfish and take it down to the pond. Ed wouldn’t be up to his place for a few months yet, and we figured that he wouldn’t mind if we borrowed his sailboat for a few hours. Actually, we didn’t care whether he minded or not. What was important was that he wouldn’t know.
    We couldn’t get at the sail or the rudder, so we alwaysnabbed two canoe paddles from under his cottage. We’d slip into the water and paddle quietly down past our