“Your deadliest enemy is the one that knows you best.”
- from The Journal of D. D. Windward
Derek spent the morning in his room. He found there, under the sheets of his bed, a kind of quiet security that he knew was not rational. But what was rational now? What use was common sense, anymore? When he approached the Bunyine’s cave, he’d still been grasping at the final, straining tendons of reason. After seeing the creature with his own eyes, though, nothing was immune to suspicion.
He lay in almost absolute quiet. His thoughts were loud enough. Nevertheless, he did not notice, at first, the snapping at his window. When it became more insistent, he turned his head and saw a fuzz of pebbles nipping the glass like a dozen hungry bird beaks. He rose from his bed and had a look. Miranda-Julia was standing out on the lawn. When she saw him, she beckoned him to come down. Her eyes expressed no anger, but something very different, something he’d never seen on her before. Could it be anxiety? Anything that worried Miranda-Julia should worry everyone. A few minutes later, Derek slipped downstairs and opened the front door. Miranda-Julia waited, tapping her foot, under the Pignut Hickory tree. He expected her to scold him for taking so long, but it never came.
“Hey,” she said, not moving any closer.
“Hey,” Derek answered.
She crossed her arms, pretending at being unruffled. Derek could see that something was, indeed, different about her. Something even more conspicuous than the loud colors of her dress. “I, um…just,” Miranda-Julia mumbled. “I was just wondering, you know, what’s up?”
Derek shrugged. “Nothing.” He was convincing.
“Yeah? Cool.” She then took a few experimental steps toward him. Dainty steps that were, also, not like her. “Um…have you heard anything, yet, about what happened at church?”
Derek shook his head. “What? What happened?”
She looked down at her feet. She was nervous. Derek wasn’t certain, but he wondered if he knew what she was feeling. Exactly what she was feeling. “Just, um…just….well, people are talking about, like, some kind of freak out, you know, at the playground at the church.”
“Freak out?”
“Yeah.”
“Who freaked out?”
“Well…everybody. All the other kids are talking about someone who, like, jumped out at everybody and scared them. Freaked everybody out.”
“Were you there?”
She nodded. Slowly. Uncertainly. “Yeah.”
Everything got quiet. Derek knew what she was going through. Her faith had been shaken, too, just the same as his. Reality, for both of them, had become something you couldn’t depend on.
“Everyone got scared? For no reason?” Derek asked.
“Yeah.”
Derek tossed this around in his head while looking at his feet. He was about to do something he never thought he would do, but he desperately needed to let someone in. Why not the strongest person he knew? “I think I saw him,” said Derek.
The girl straightened up. “What? I didn’t even tell you anything about him?”
“I know, but…the freaking out thing. I think that happened to me, too.”
“What?” Miranda-Julia yelped. “Where!”
“Last night.”
“Where, Derek?”
“Um…” the boy stammered. “Inside.”
“Inside your house!”
Derek nodded, timidly. “In the basement.”
“Aaaaaaah!” screamed Miranda-Julia, leaping in anger like Rumpelstiltskin. It made Derek step back. “Tibb! Son-of-a-bitching Tibb!”
“What do you mean?” pleaded Derek.
Miranda’s face was angry. She was herself, again. “That thing calls itself Tibb! And I’m gonna break its goddamn neck! Just you watch me! Just you watch me!”
“Okay, Miranda!” Derek shouted back at her.
Miranda-Julia reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders. Her face was serious. “Show me where. I’m not scared, okay? I’m not scared of it. I’m mad.”
“I know you are.”
“Show me where, Derek.”
So Derek led her to the basement and showed her where he had his encounter. Though he’d had a look at it, he hadn’t touched anything. She examined everything closely. There was nothing on the floor around the water heater, but she noticed the hand swipe etched in dust running down the side. There were faint, wavy, needle-like scratches. Fingernails?
Derek stood behind her with his face sagging, and his hands dangling at his sides. “What do I do?”
Miranda-Julia didn’t turn back. “I’m gonna find this freak. Don’t you worry about that,” she assured him.
“I should tell my mom. She should know.”
Miranda-Julia spun around. “Derek, grownups can’t do anything! They’re too stupid to believe in real things!”
But Derek wasn’t won over by her passion. “He disappeared, Miranda. And he did something to me. It made me feel so scared, I was nearly crazy. He sounded like a kid, kinda. But he’s not really a kid. He isn’t. Not like we are”
Miranda-Julia shook her head. “Listen, it’s as real as us. And that…” Her brow wrinkled up, quizzical. She ran her fingers over the scratch marks, then stepped back.
“What is it?” asked Derek.
She crossed her arms. It meant she was angry, or she was getting angry. Which was more dangerous, Derek wasn’t sure. She did it a lot, though. “That tree in your yard. I didn’t think to ask about the tree.”
“What about it?”
Miranda-Julia pushed past him and clomped up the steps. Derek didn’t bother asking her why, it wouldn’t change anything. When he found her, she was standing by the hickory, picking at the scratch marks. She was leaning in close, eyes squinting. Derek approached her.
“What are these, Derek?”
Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom thinks it was a bear.”
“It’s not bears! There’s no bears!” she yelled. “It’s more scratches, is what it is. From what?” Miranda-Julia asked.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She turned around. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Weird stuff is going on, Derek. You gotta tell me, everything. It’s easier than making you tell me.”
“I don’t know anything. Really, I don’t.”
“Okay,” she replied, slapping bits of wood from her hand. “So, it’s the hard way.”
Derek backed away, hands raised defensively. “Look, I can’t tell you. Scare me all you want, it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, it’ll matter. Real soon.”
Then something unexpected happened. Derek got angry. “Miranda! You don’t need to know everything! If I say I can’t tell you, then I can’t tell you!”
She pointed back at the tree. “What did that, Derek! You might, as well, tell me, because you know where I’m going next. I’m going right up there to those stupid woods, and I don’t care what happens. I’m gonna find out what you did that day when you got all crunched up. And if you won’t tell me what I’m headed into, what happens is on you.”
Derek looked hurt. He looked scared. “Why would you go up there? There’s nothing there, Miranda!”
“Is this another thing I’m supposed to not know about?”
A pause. “No. There’s nothing to tell about up there.”
“Then there’s no problem. I’m going to walk up there, right now.”
Derek slumped. “Don’t do this, Miranda.”
“Don’t do what? Walk in the woods? Why wouldn’t I? Nothing to worry about in the woods. This is just dumb Pennsylvania, there aren’t Gila Monsters or anything.”
“I mean, don’t do anything. This isn’t like that thing Tibb. This is worse. A lot worse. You gotta believe me. You don’t want to know more. Just leave it all alone. Please.”
“You know I won’t.”
Derek turned away. He hugged himself. Emotional. “Why do you…why can’t…why can’t you mind your own business! I mean, it’s my life! Why won’t you just go away!”
Miranda-Julia just stared at him for a moment. A withheld reaction. She wanted to tell him how much he’d just hurt her. Then clock him. “Because you’re not strong, Derek. Not in the right way. You can take a hit, but you can’t make it stop. You won’t. So it just keeps going on.”
Derek’s eyes were desperate, pleading. “Please. I’m not talking about some bully this time, Miranda. You can’t do anything about this. You can’t help me.”
Miranda-Julia grunted. The look she served Derek was the same one that many a loud-mouthed schoolboy had briefly glimpsed just before his opinion of girls was forever changed. “Kid,” said Miranda-Julia. “Even my patience is losing patience.”
The Huffys continued peeling down wallpaper. After finishing the parlor, they did part of the dining room before moving on to the upstairs hallway. In every new spot, before they could begin, they had to wait for Peter to give the order to his invisible friend. Each time he did it, the area sweltered and the phenomenon repeated. Alyssa was gravely quiet for most of it, not contributing enough to qualify anything they said as real conversation.
They discovered that the mural became more complex as they went, consisting of more than just quaint portrayals of trees, bushes, grassy fields, and forest paths. Crowding the landscapes, more and more, were dozens of eccentric, colorful figures. Scores of strange creatures dashing and dancing about. There were fairies and sprites, pixies and elves, kobolds and gnomes – all the stars of merry, woodland yore. Some were hidden within the plant life, peering out from behind leaf and bush, bearing impish grins and lying in wait to imperil travelers with their mischief. Some were brazenly at prance at your feet, daring you to challenge them or to follow them into places people were not welcome. Nothing was more than waist-high, so, if the intended effect was to make the inside of the house into a forest of whimsical beings and delights, it failed to some extent. None of the paint reached up past three feet. An hour or so in, Alyssa was trying her best to deal with all they'd seen. She was distant, but not avoiding conversation.
“I think this stuff is all really old,” said Alyssa.
“Well, this is oil paint. And it’s old. This primer is all flaky, it could be from the fifties. Who knows?”
“I don’t know why anyone would cover all this up,” she said. "They could have left something. "She sounded bored, but Peter could tell she was feeling kind of spooked. There was fear growing inside of her. He wasn't certain how he knew, but he knew.
Peter shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s nice, but there’s all this empty space.”
A little later, they were clearing the upstairs hall when a little hint of black paint started to show entwined within the green and brown hues. The paint looked dabbed on, at first - faint, curvy, and moving like wispy shadows. They pulled down the last sheet of paper in the hallway and found two giant, poisonous, yellow eyes staring out at them. The shadow had culminated into a monstrous form with a head far too large for its body. Peter was a little off-put by it. It made him feel a little vulnerable to find that this creature had been lurking behind the wallpaper. Alyssa was more pensive, looking it over with an appraising eye. Suddenly, she sprang.
“I know this!” she shouted.
“Whoa! What? What?” Peter stammered.
“I’ve…this...” she stammered, her index finger bobbing up and down.
“Is the next word a verb or a noun?” asked Peter.
“Wait, I’ve gotta check something.” She turned and darted down the hall to their bedroom. Peter had always been a guy who loved surprises, even guessing games, but he’d been changing his mind about a lot of things, lately. When he got in the bedroom, she was sitting on their bed, swiping at her phone.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“That kid with the flute and that monster thing, there’s something familiar about it all.”
“What’s familiar about it?”
“It’s just…just…give me a minute.”
She jumped to her feet and stuck the phone in his face. “Look at this. Here. See?”
“What?”
Peter looked. She was on Amazon.com, her finger tapping on what looked like the inside of a book. Alyssa enlarged the picture with two fingers. “See!” Peter looked. It took a few seconds before he realized what he was looking at. When it hit him, his mouth dropped open. It was a colored pencil drawing, alarmingly similar in likeness to the paintings adorning their walls.
“Look at that!” said Alyssa. “This is where it’s from. You see?”
“Jeez. Wow.”
“That’s where these paintings come from. The Piper and the Watching Woods. I knew I’d seen these images before.”
“Hmm,” Peter hummed. “I’ve never heard of this book.”
“Of course you have. It’s famous.”
“I swear to god! I don’t know it.”
“Okay, Peter, but whoever painted the walls was just copying from this book.”
“Wait a minute, honey, that’s not possible. Dickon…”
“Forget Dickon! There is no Dickon! Don’t you get it? This whole thing is just a mental screw up. Some kind of shared paranoia.”
“Lyssie, have you forgotten the stuff that’s happened? The weird stuff? The magic stuff?”
Alyssa tossed the phone on the bed. Peter watched it bounce. It felt meaningful. “Peter, what makes more sense: that there is a magical English kid, or that we just fell into some psychological trap?”
Peter was desperate, seeing all the progress they’d made this morning slipping away. “Are you kidding? You have got to be kidding.”
Alyssa was exuberant. “I’m not kidding! We’ve been so dumb about this whole thing! Think about it! Entire groups of people see UFOs all the time. There aren’t any UFOs, Peter.”
Peter was taken aback. She was talking crazy. “You seem to be forgetting, well, everything that’s happened very, very recently. Just now! That recent!”
Alyssa stood up. “Look, I became just as convinced as you are, Peter. But this whole thing was just us deluding ourselves.”
All of a sudden, Peter saw himself losing his only living compatriot in this new, strange world his life had become. It felt like he was watching her leave him. Like she was walking out the front door with a suitcase in each hand. “Honey, I don’t know what’s happening in your brain, but you are now making no sense, whatsoever.”
Alyssa just shook her head. “I’m done with this.” And she walked out of the room, leaving Peter to face whatever this was they’d uncovered by himself. He’d seen her stubborn before, that was nothing new, but the way she had convinced herself, beyond reason, was something unfamiliar. My god, I’ve never seen real, clinical Cognitive Dissonance in action. He let out a long, long sigh.
“Dickon,” Peter spoke, knowing the boy had to be somewhere within earshot. “I need a song that either makes women believe me or makes me not care if they do.”
Derek led Miranda-Julia up to his bedroom and pulled out his overloaded backpack from beneath his bed. He laid it on the mattress, undid the knotted ties, and then pulled out the collection of pages that made up D. D. Windward’s life story. He treated it like the Declaration of Independence. Before he opened it, he paused and met Miranda’s eyes.
“This isn’t the right thing to do,” he spoke, softly.
Miranda-Julia scowled, crossed her arms. “What makes you think you’re always right?”
“No, it’s just…” But he didn’t say anything else. He carefully opened the portfolio. There were stacks of yellow, crinkled pages. Miranda’s face lit up.
“Holy crap!” she spat. “What is this? It’s old!” Derek, however, was softly reverent.
“These pages are the life story of Douglas D. Windward. Written in his own hand.”
“Really? Wow!”
“He left them behind for me.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “He couldn’t have known about you. He died a million years ago.”
“He doesn’t say my name.”
“Where did you find it?”
Derek became pensive. “I kind of…figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“Okay, um. Do you know all that stuff about Douglas and the story of the Minotaur?”
“A little. Not, really.”
“Well, he liked to tell it to people. Entertain all the kids in the town with it. So I started reading it. I just had this idea in my head that it was some kind of clue to everything, because he liked it so much.”
“Hmm. But how did he know that you would find it, not somebody else?”
Derek was about to respond, but the words failed him. He then turned to the portfolio and began leafing through the pages. When he found what he was looking for, he took out the page and cleared his throat. “’I have complete confidence that you, the reader, are precisely who I intended to reach. There are celestial instruments at play here that are about to go quiet, and the melody shall resume when your eyes meet these pages.’”
Miranda-Julia snorted. “Yeah, he’s definitely related to you. That could be your diary.”
Derek became defensive. “Do you want to know things, or not?”
Miranda-Julia shrugged. “I just mean, like…how did he know that you would find it, and not some guy digging up the side of the road?”
“I don’t think he thought it would be a relative. I think he thought that somebody would figure it out, someone who thought the way he did. Had the same kind of brain he did.”
Miranda-Julia looked insulted. “What do you mean? You have some kind of special brain? Get over yourself.”
“He was just taking a chance. It was a longshot. A super longshot.”
How did you figure it out?” Miranda-Julia, though skeptical, was excited, nonetheless. “So what’s the big deal about this? What does this have to do with anything? What’s it got to do with Tibb?”
“I don’t know about that. He writes about a lot of things, but not about Tibb. There’s too much in here to tell you everything, and most of it isn’t useful, right now. The thing in the woods, that thing, he tells all about that. It’s called the Bunyine.” Derek shivered, chilled to the bone. He was not going to tell her about his upcoming rendezvous. “I don’t know where the name comes from, exactly. He doesn’t give a complete account of anything. He went all over the world looking for it, and he left a lot out about that. But all he found was stories. He tracked stories from Turkey, and around that part of the world, back to the United Kingdom for several years. Then he came here.”
“What is it?”
Derek paused a moment, a bit unsettled. “It’s something really terrible. I’ve seen it.”
“Okay, but what is it?”
“It’s, like, a monster. A cat that’s as big as a bus.”
Miranda-Julia nodded, but Derek could see disbelief forming in her eyes.
“It’s the truth,” Derek insisted.
“Okay. It’s the truth. Up there in the woods, there’s a giant kitty-bus. Anything else?”
“It speaks.”
Her mouth crinkled up, even more doubtful. “A giant, talking cat? And that’s okay with you?”
Derek was frustrated. “You wanted to know, so I’m telling you.”
“Okay, so you went up there, you saw it.”
“I talked to it.”
“You talked to it? Okay. Then what happened? It chewed you up like a Charleston Chew and spit you out, right?”
The boy seemed to shrink a little bit. “I just got scared. Real scared. It came at me, and I just couldn’t stop my feet from running. I’d never felt anything like that before. Fear like that. Not until last night. It was similar. They do something to you, these things. Tibb and the Bunyine. They do something that makes you crazy, but they can take it back. I think they can do other things, too. They could do good things, I bet, if they were good, but they’re not. I think that’s why nobody ever goes up there. It’s how it keeps people away. It just takes a little bit of it, and people change their minds about going. People turn right around and leave.”
Miranda-Julia thought about this for a few seconds. “Yeah. People have been scared a lot, lately. It’s become a whole, big thing.”
“You didn’t feel scared?”
The girl crossed her arms, then she took a long, deep breath. “When all those kids were losing it…hmm.” The girl became pensive. She scratched her earlobe. “I think I did feel something, but I just…kind of…ignored it.”
“How did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Who knows? I don’t get it, though. I don’t get it, at all. What’s the point?”
Derek’s brow furled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Miranda-Julia scratched her head now. “Why is all this stuff going on? If there is a big cat, and a kid with alligator teeth, what the heck are they up to? What are they doing here, Derek? What’s the point?”
“The Bunyine’s been here for a long time, Miranda. I think it might have left and come back.”
“But why?”
Derek stood up, thinking. He was quiet for a minute, then sat back down. “Douglas wrote a little about why he came to Pennsylvania, and how he figured it out, but the journal starts getting a lot spottier, right around then. I think it had to do with other stuff. People who worshiped the Bunyine. Well, most of it is spotty, but towards the end it gets worse. He had what’s called Korsakoff’s Syndrome, and his memory was full of holes. It’s really strange. People with it can sometimes remember their childhood, but not the color their house is painted, or their grandchildren’s names.”
Miranda-Julia nodded. “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”
“I think he left out a lot of things that he would have told me. At the very beginning, he states his regret that he didn’t start the journal earlier, before his health troubles.”
“Okay.”
“He said something about a treasure of some kind that he found, but then he didn’t go into details. I think he didn’t know that much about it.”
“Treasure? Like with a treasure map?”
“I don’t think it was that kind of treasure.”
“But he called it a treasure?”
Derek shrugged. “He uses very pretty language, sometimes. Treasure could be anything.”
“Did he just forget everything important?”
“I don’t know what’s important, and what isn’t.”
“It’s all important! Isn’t it? There’s all this weird stuff going on.”
“Okay.”
“Wait. Where did you find that thing?”
Derek sat down again. “I was coming to that.”
“Well, we’re here now. Spit it out.”
“Okay. You see, Douglas loved, well, he had a fascination, I guess, with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.”
“The Minotaur. That’s that thing with the big head with horns. I saw it on Xena. Or maybe it was a different show. I forget. It was on Netflix. Maybe.”
Derek nodded. “Yeah. The Minotaur was half-man, half-bull. It lived in a maze, but that’s not really the part of the story that’s important. The important part is Theseus. I remember hearing stories about how Douglas used to tell of the life of Theseus. The Minotaur was just one part of it. The important part was when Theseus passed his father’s test.”
“Oh, I get it. Tests and stuff like that. Douglas loved testing people, I guess? Seeing if you’re good enough?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like him, though. Not the ‘good enough’ part, at least. He wouldn’t think like that. Anyway, Theseus inherited two prizes from his father, and they were buried under a big rock. When Theseus was big enough, he lifted the rock and took the prizes.”
“Wait…” said Miranda, making an immediate association. The gears of her mind were clicking and spinning. “A big rock. There’s that big rock up near the bridge, by the woods. You go up there! Does that have something to do with this? Your bag was there!”
“Yeah.”
“Derek! Did you lift that rock? What did you use? A crane or something?”
Derek shrugged. “I didn’t lift it, I just dug underneath it. I went up there with a shovel and I dug a channel. And there it was - Douglas’ journal, wrapped up in hundred-year-old linens and oil cloth. I sat there for nearly seven hours reading it. It’s wonderful. It really is. Sometimes, though, he rambles a bit. A lot…a bit. He couldn’t help it, though.”
Miranda-Julia was frowning. Something wasn’t sitting right. She wasn’t getting upset, though, it was just the opposite. She felt an energy building in her. It was exciting. “What about the sign? Why’d he do the sign? If there’s a big beastie up there, then why’d he build that bridge and put up that sign? That was just inviting people to go up there.”
Derek shook his head. “No, he was penning it in. Well, scaring it away. Something bad happened, the sign and the bridge scared it away. It doesn’t like attention. People knowing about it.”
“Something bad happened?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what, though.”
“Why would it be scared if it’s so big?”
“It’s scared of people. I don’t know why. He doesn’t know why, either. But he knew it would leave, and it did, but it’s back now.”
“But you said it’s as big as a house. It wouldn’t be scared of people. That doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s a coward, or something. A big, old scaredy cat.”
“I don’t know.”
Miranda-Julia’s anticipation was growing and she couldn’t stick to one topic. A few seconds later, she hopped to her feet, swinging her fists with enthusiasm, as if practicing for an upcoming bout. The boy’s room resounded with the clamoring, so much, it began to alarm him. Miranda-Julia then leaped up onto the bed and started to jump up and down on the mattress. Derek lifted and sank, diametrically, with her bouncing. He gathered up his papers, shielding them with his life.
“This stuff is amazing!” Miranda-Julia hollered. “We’ve got monsters, and old books, and vampire kids! I can’t believe how awesome our town is!”