Page 96 of Stay Buried

She turned and was gone, slipping through the crowd and out the door, like the ghost Ash had once believed she was.

THIRTY-EIGHTMINI

October 18, 2016

A squirrel chattered out a warning as Mini neared the top of the hill.

What are you doing here? Go back home, you silly little girl, it seemed to say.

And maybe the squirrel was right.

Mini had been walking for forty minutes now, ever since she’d run away from the motel and Jack St. James. She knew she should go home, should keep her promise to Lorelei, but she couldn’t. There was one more thing she had to do. One more place she had to search for answers.

She’d never been on the old trail up Saw Meadow Hill to the knackerman’s place. She knew every other path in town, every other patch of woods, but this hill had always been off-limits, a haunted place where no one dared to go.

Could she hear him now, the loud chugging of the knackerman’s breath, theclip-clopof hooves?

She swallowed down the hard knot in her throat.

“Be brave,” she told herself aloud, stopping to look behind her. The path was clear. The only things out here were the squirrels and birds. Maybe some deer or moose, even a fox or a bobcat—but nothing that would harm her.

Unless Jack St. James was just out of sight, the gold watch ticking in his pocket?

Keep your mouth shut, little girl.

She had no idea what she might find up there at the top of the hill—if the old house would still even be standing.

Go back, go back, the squirrel chattered, and a raven joined in with a harshcaurr-cauk!, chiding her for not listening.

But she pushed on up the steep, overgrown trail.

At last the path opened up. She’d reached the top of the hill and found herself in a large clearing. She stepped into it, looking around.

The rotting remains of a cabin stood toward the back of the property, the hand-hewn logs notched and linked together like the Lincoln Logs she’d played with when she was little.

The wood-shingled roof had fallen in, the windows shattered long ago. The fieldstone chimney was still mostly intact, as were the stone steps by the front door.

She walked up to the leaning doorway and peered in. The wooden floor was coated with years’ worth of rotted leaves and pine needles. An old cast-iron stove sat rusting in the corner.

“Hello?” she called hesitantly, knowing it was silly. There was no one at home except for the mice and sparrows that made their nests here. No human had lived here for a very, very long time. Almost a hundred years, which seemed like forever.

She knew people in town used to come up and fix the knackerman’s house, keep it repaired. They treated it like a museum, a truly special place. Her papa told stories sometimes, about how when he was a boy, the town would climb the hill twice a year, bring picnics, carry supplies up, and spend all day there, reshingling the roof,washing and mending curtains and bedding, putting new glass in broken windowpanes, sweeping out pine needles, chasing away the mice, polishing the old cast-iron stove.

The people of Boone’s Ferry stopped coming up to the knackerman’s place way back before Mini was born, before her parents were even married—that long ago. And it showed. It seemed like nature was trying to take the house back: there was moss and grass growing on what was left of the roof, a skinny maple had sprouted up to a few feet tall from a pile of leaf litter in the center of the floor. Weeds and trees and vines were growing up over the outside of the cabin, helping to camouflage it, making it look like it was being pulled back down into the earth.

There was a bed in the corner, quilts brown and rotted, the cotton batting pulled out by generations of rodents.

She squinted her eyes and tried to imagine what it had been like back then, when he actually lived there. She could almost see him, the shadowy form of a big man getting up out of bed, making himself a cup of coffee, pulling on his coat before heading outside, walking right past her, leaving a cool breeze in his wake.

Mini shivered and turned, trying to catch sight of him, but he was gone. She made her way to the collapsed barn: a great tumbled heap of faded red boards, hand-hewn timbers. She passed the massive cast-iron cauldron that was big enough for her to crawl inside. It rested on its side, quietly rusting, the mouth gaping, a thick layer of rotting leaves spilling out.

She didn’t want to touch it. She didn’t want to touch anything here.

She felt suffering all around her, even after all this time.

She knew that this was where he cut the animals up and boiled them in the big pot like an ogre in a fairy tale.

She felt it in her body and it made her cold deep down, made her throat feel tight. She could almost smell the blood that must be soakedinto the old floorboards and the ground beneath them.