Neverland by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online Page A

together as he
hefted it up out of the crate, its tail whiffling through the air, its tiny claw legs slicing across one another.
    “You feed it blood ? Jesus, you feed it blood ?” I took a step back and practically tripped on a clay pot. “Jesus, it’s alive, you . . . blood . . . feed . . . ”
    “ Yeth ,” he lisped, inhaling deeply, and he did something then that seemed so horrifying to me—more than the blood on the edge of the crab’s shell, more than my growing sense that there was something else, something almost human in the shack with us. He brought the crab up to his face and pressed its underside to his lips. The spiny tail flicked straight up and down, and its legs clung to his cheeks, and a noise came out of my cousin like I’d never heard, a wheezing noise like Grampa Lee made on his deathbed, like Grammy Weenie when she was snoring away, but mostly like Sumter was feeling a kind of pleasure I had never seen another human being feel. Like an expiring sigh.
    “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” I screamed and leapt forward and grabbed the crab off his face; I heard a sound like a sheet ripping in two.
    As I pulled the creature from his face, his skin came with it.
    His face was just a mass of black dripping muscle and lumpy fat and bone, and in my hands—the other side of his skin, a perfect mask of Sumter.
    “ Good , good ,” someone said, and it was Sumter’s skin stuck to the crab, flattened like a pancake, torn lips smacking.
    My hands were shaking so much that the horseshoe crab rattled, but I could feel it trying to pull my hands, and it, toward my own face, and I felt a calm the way they say drowning people feel, and even I wanted to bring that crab with the flapping human skin to my face and feel the pleasure Sumter felt.
    “ Good ,” the faceskin smacked.
    As hard as I could, I smashed the crab down on the edge of the wheelbarrow, and when it hit the ground I stomped my bare foot hard on it, again and again and again.
    When I was sure it had been completely destroyed, and my feet were cut and bleeding from where they’d cracked the shell, I felt his hand on
my shoulder and jumped at his touch as if I’d just been given an electric shock.
    Sumter was whole; his face was intact. I couldn’t believe it; I kept half expecting the skin to be ripped away again, but it remained.
    He was mad as hell.
    “You fool,” he snarled, “it was a trick, it wasn’t real, goddamn you, that wasn’t even god, you moron, I was just testing you, and you failed, Beau, you failed big-time. Get out of my clubhouse and don’t you ever come back here, ever. You just think you’re so smart, but I just showed you, didn’t I? I just showed you! Don’t you ever dare come back here again!”

4
    I wandered the bluffs for hours, confused by what I’d just seen. It hadn’t been like any dream I’d ever had: I really believed that I had seen his face ripped off. I had no desire to ever set foot back in that shack again. I heard the blood pumping through my body, and the sun felt good on my face and neck. I am alive , nothing happened . Just scared . The world seemed like it had been just polished; I noticed the bark on trees and the birds in them, chattering away. The sea air almost took my breath away, it was so strong and thick. Just scared . I decided then and there that I would not play with Sumter at all anymore, that he was too weird, and his Neverland was just an awful bad place. I would never go back inside there as long as I lived, and he could just go and sell his soul to the Devil for all I cared, but I was well out of it.
    But as I passed the shack on the way home in the afternoon, I picked up its scent, like just-turned earth in a garden, and I told myself that it had been my imagination or a trick, like Sumter had said. How had he done that? I don’t care , he’s just perverse , and I’m not gonna be part of it . Maybe he’d used a Halloween mask. It must’ve been a pretty neat one, too. It looked