Neverland by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online Page B

real, but maybe if I hadn’t been so scared ( you’re a fool ), I would’ve seen the seams or the wires or where it didn’t fit over his face right. They
always advertised masks like that in the back of comic books; maybe he’d sent away for it. I don’t care . He’s just perverse, and I’m never gonna go in there ever again as long as I live . Never . Cross my heart and hope to die .
    When I got home, Daddy was snoozing on the grass while Mama and Uncle Ralph were setting up Aunt Cricket’s croquet set on the side lawn, trying to be careful to avoid stepping on the flower beds that Aunt Cricket guarded over while she stayed at the Retreat. They were being mindful of stepping over the wickets, too, and not tripping on the balls and mallets, because Uncle Ralph and Aunt Cricket and my parents had been having early cocktails—it wasn’t yet four—and they all smelled like gin-and-tonics.
    “I got to talk to you,” I told my mother.
    She was smiling, but a kind of tense smile the way she sometimes did around my aunt and uncle. “Honey?”
    “It’s about Sumter,” I tried whispering, but Aunt Cricket heard me and clomped over to get in on it.
    “What do you have to say for yourself?” Aunt Cricket asked suspiciously.
    “Oh, Cricket, let him say what he wants,” Mama said. She swung her croquet mallet back and forth idly.
    “He’s doing strange things,” I said, ashamed that I was so close to squealing. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I tried, but it came out all wrong. “I saw like this monster and it ripped his face off and it had shark’s teeth. He has this skull, and he feeds it blood. But it may be a mask or something. Like those things on Creature Feature with the skull sticking out, sorta.”
    Mama sighed, and ignored me then, the way she did whenever I told her a particularly strange dream. I knew she must wonder if I was a little crazy. “No more horror movies late at night,” she said. “I don’t care if it is summer, no more horror movies. Beau, you’re too impressionable. You’ll be wetting the bed all over again.”
    I felt my face go red with embarrassment.

    Aunt Cricket sipped her drink. “Seems to me you’re the one doing the strange things,” she said. “He told us all about it. Frankly, I don’t care about one of them ugly old crabs, but it wasn’t too nice of you to smash up his pet, now, was it? He caught it and he was taking care of it, and what kind of little boy goes around stomping on horseshoe crabs, I wonder.”

5
    Lying is a trait common to children, but we are never good at it. Sumter had gotten home first and had lied to save his skin.
    I wiped my feet on the bristly welcome mat on the porch when Grammy Weenie’s harsh voice called out, “You been up to no good, Beau? You been with that cousin of yours?” She punctuated each word with a phlegm-laden cough. The wheels of her chair scratched noisily against the warped floor of the front hall as she slid to the open doorway. Aunt Cricket’s black-and-yellow crocheted throw lay across her lap, and Grammy picked at the flower pattern with her bony fingers. There, amidst the flowers, rising between her knees, was the dreaded silver-backed, all-natural bristle brush.
    The brush put the fear of God in me, but I didn’t want to go through the humiliation I’d just endured at the hands of the other grown-ups. Grown-ups never wanted the truth, anyway; they only wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. I lied, “Ain’t seen Sumter since this morning.”
    “‘I haven’t seen Sumter since this morning,’ you mean.”
    “I haven’t seen Sumter since this morning. Yes’m.”
    “You got to practice, Beau, you’re not very good.”
    “Ma’am?”
    “Prevaricating.”
    “Ma’am?”
    She squinted her eyes and leaned forward, clutching the brush by its handle, lifting it up and slapping it down lightly on the top of her leg. “ Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me , young man .”

    I never knew how to respond to