Dan Poblocki - The Stone Child

Eddie chuckled too. “I guess not.”

“I mean, yeah, I heard some noises I couldn’t explain,” said Harris. “And once or twice I thought I saw a shadow move, but when I turned to look, nothing was there. Then again, I’m pretty skeptical when it comes to stuff like this. Sure, I like Olmstead’s books, but I know the difference between what’s real and what’s made up.” Eddie didn’t quite believe him. Harris continued, “People in town are pretty serious about the legend of the statue, though. They talk. Some people think that if you stay up here too long, the ghost of the woman will follow you home. She’ll haunt you until you go crazy. That’s probably why the librarian freaked out when you showed her your book. Mrs. Singh’s definitely heard about the statue’s symbol. When she saw it on the first page of your book, she must have thought you’d already been up here. She didn’t want the ghost to follow her too.”

“That’s dumb,” said Eddie, forcing a laugh. “People in Gatesweed really believe that?”

Harris scoffed. “Yeah, actually. Some of them really do. But then again, a few of them are crazy, if you ask me.”

“Seems like someone’s crazy enough to graffiti that statue in town.” When Harris gave him a knowing look, Eddie continued, “So weird. Someone had painted this awful face onto the pedestal, with swirling black squiggles for eyes.”

Harris smiled reluctantly and crossed his arms. “Once, someone spray-painted it on the side of my mother’s store,” he said. “The Woman Is Watching . In big black letters. It took forever to clean it off.”

“Someone graffitied your store because of the Olmstead Curse?” Eddie asked. “They don’t want her selling his books?”

“Exactly.” Harris nodded. “They think the less people who come through town, the less… trouble there will be here. To them, Gatesweed is filled with dirty little secrets, Nathaniel Olmstead’s disappearance being number one. But my mother was friends with him. And she’ll never stop selling his books in her store-no matter how many times people paint nasty things on her front porch… or how many people believe his monsters are real.”

The pair of red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked in Eddie’s memory. He remembered the articles he’d read on the Internet about the curse. “People really think his monsters are real?” he said, clutching his book bag even tighter.

“Yeah,” said Harris. “Some people do. Like the animals people say they’ve seen in these woods. I’ve never seem them, but I’ve heard people say they look like the ones Nathaniel writes about. Everything that happens in this town gets blamed on him-and he’s not even here anymore. People stopped going to the movie theater on Main Street because of the things they said lived behind the screen. And the mills closed down after the owners kept finding huge gouges in their machinery. People said they looked like bite marks. And, of course, a small group of people blamed the New Mill Bridge collapse on Nathaniel’s trolls. After everything else, that one was pretty much inevitable. Lots of people left town when the mills closed. That sort of destroyed Gatesweed, so it makes sense that people need someone to blame, but still…”

“What about the symbol on the statue?” said Eddie. “Do you know what that means? I read something about the Greek letter pi, which looks almost exactly like the symbol carved here.” He pointed at the girl.

“Right… from math class,” said Harris. “Maybe. We could look into it, but I’m not very good at that subject. And I don’t know a thing about Greek. What I do know is that the book you found is important. I was so happy when I saw you in school today… that you weren’t just an Olmstead hunter, chased away by old Wally the Weasel. That’s what my mom calls him,” said Harris, with a smirk. “I was thinking about your book all night. The code has to mean something. The symbol on the statue is the connection. I brought you here so that you’d understand… The secret of the book in your bag isn’t just about a code. It’s about this place, this statue. It might be about Nathaniel Olmstead himself. Who knows… maybe if we solve it, we’ll find out what really happened to him. Maybe we can clear his name. Then people will leave my mom alone.”

“Yeah, totally!” said Eddie. “Nathaniel Olmstead would also probably give us his autograph or something… if he’s, you know… still alive.” As he said the words, he felt foolish, disrespectful-especially in this place, so close to where the man had lived. He wandered to the opposite side of the circle. “So you do think the book might have belonged to Nathaniel Olmstead?”

The land sloped down quickly. At the bottom where it leveled out, the hill was met by a lake, about thirty feet across. The trees on the other shore concealed a steep, rocky hillside that jutted high above the water. Through the thick foliage, the tree roots were visible clinging, almost clutching, at the cliffside. Near the water’s edge, several long, leafy branches hung down from the trees and dangled just above the calm surface, tickling their own reflections with stringy shadows.

“If not, at least it belonged to someone who knows about the Nameless Woods, the Nameless Lake,” said Harris, following Eddie across the clearing to the top of the slope, “and the symbol on the statue.”

“Which could be anyone in town,” said Eddie. “Right?” He picked up a pebble from the edge of the clearing before heading down the hill.

“Yeah,” said Harris, “but no matter who it belonged to in the past, now it’s up to us to figure it out.”

Eddie nodded, excited. Was Harris suggesting they work together? That they become friends? “Yeah,” he said as they neared the edge of the lake. “It’s up to us.”

“So how should we start?” said Harris.

At the shore, Eddie tossed the pebble. It bounced across the sky’s reflection, splashing several times before disappearing underneath the surface. “I’ve already taken the one code book out of the library,” said Eddie. “But it’s really confusing and not much help.” The raven called to them from the top of the hill near the statue, louder this time.

“Forget about it then,” said Harris. “I’m sure we can find some sort of pattern on our own.”

Eddie was about to take The Enigmatic Manuscript out of his bag so they could get started, when near the far shore, the calm surface of the water suddenly rippled, as if something large had risen from below. The raven at the top of the hill took off for the sky. Wide-eyed, the boys looked at each other.

“I think the sun’s starting to go down,” said Harris, stepping away from the shore.

“Did you see that?” said Eddie. Small waves disturbed the water at the center of the lake. Eddie stepped forward, trying to peer through the blue sky’s opaque reflection. He could see a dark shape shifting and squirming in the hazy depths fifteen feet from the shore. The shape reminded Eddie of a fast-moving storm cloud, swirling and rolling in upon itself as it grew stronger. The forest behind him was suddenly quiet, as if all its inhabitants did not want to be heard. From where he stood, Eddie could see the dark cloudy shape rise to the surface of the water from below, creating a black spot nearly five feet in diameter. The edges of the black spot seemed to pulsate and roil, spreading its wide fingers out across the top of the lake like a fist slowly opening. “Is it an oil slick?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Harris, staring at the spot intently as it continued to grow. Now it had doubled in size. It floated in stark contrast to the sky’s blue reflection, turning the water black as it spread outward.