Neverland by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online

its disguises, again the image changed, its skin dripping down around its eyes as if it were weeping,
and what I saw beneath the liquid flesh was just the turning earth, ripe with nightcrawlers, thick with roly-poly bugs and albino grubs, feeding, feeding, feeding on the pungent and rotting vegetation—and even this was a face.
    Every cell in my body seemed to rebel against this image, and it was like hitting a sudden high fever or like a dream where I would fall from a great height down into the sea. I had no breath, I had no muscle, I had no life . All around me I smelled—not the sea, not the clean air—but the mustiness of rotting, damp leaves, of just-turned earth, of places beneath stones where creatures moved slowly on their dark paths.
    As if in a distant world, I heard Sumter’s voice, “The face of god. You saw it, didn’t you? I know you saw, I know you did.”
    I blinked and it was gone. That vision, that face from a nightmare no longer existed—only a lingering sense of dampness and rot, which even then faded like a half-remembered dream. As I turned to the sound of his voice, Sumter’s face was red and shiny, as if he’d undergone some great exertion, like rolling an enormous boulder up a hill.
    I had goose bumps all up and down my arms—Mama always said that it meant someone was walking over my grave. I had had my waking dreams before, but I was sure this was no dream. I could’ve sworn that I saw what I saw . I gasped, “How’d you do that?”
    He looked all innocent. I could never tell if he was lying or not, although I always strongly suspected he was. “Huh?”
    “What I just saw. Jesus, Jesus.”
    Like I said, Sumter always scared me the most when he was quiet, mainly on account of he wasn’t quiet a whole lot, and when he was , he looked like a different kid. He looked like he wasn’t my cousin at all, but somebody I never met and would never want to meet. Sometimes I couldn’t believe we’d come from the same blood. Here he was being the most quiet I’d ever known him to be, and I got the shivers. I could just about feel my face turning from deep red to white and back again.

    “You saw the face of god,” he said in the tiniest voice, so I had to strain to hear him. “It’s a god that eats, and you got to feed god so’s it won’t eat you first.”
    I could smell his bad breath, just like he’d been vomiting candy all morning: sweet and sticky and warm. I just couldn’t bring myself to look back at the dark opening of the crate. Sumter’s eyes rolled up a little, so I could only see their whites, and he gave out with a little gasp like someone had surprised him—he was making some motion with one hand over the other. He had used the metal edge of the soda-pop tab and sliced down on the flesh that ran between thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He used his other hand to milk the blood out of it—a few droplets of red hit the edge of the crate. Something smelled funny, and I noticed he had a growing wet stain down around his zipper.
    More drippy blood spat from his hand to the opening in the crate.
    He let out a long sigh just the way Grammy Weenie did in her sleep when I thought she was giving up the ghost, and then his eyes rolled down into their normal places.
    I had goose bumps just about everywhere on my body I could admit to, and I heard the thing move in the crate as it came toward the few drops of blood he’d squeezed out.
    Someone said, “ Good , good .”
    I looked at Sumter again. Had he just said that?
    I didn’t want to look back in the crate and take the chance of seeing that gross face, but I did, and there was nothing like it within a mile: In the crate was what I thought I had seen at first.
    A horseshoe crab.
    Only now it was different.
    Now, it was alive .
    Its helmet-back dull and dusty, its dozen legs scraping and clacking against the splintery wood, its spiny tail rising and falling. The thing seemed bigger than life, larger than Sumter’s hands put