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  "What the hell?" Timmy pounded his fist against the new boards that had been nailed up overnight. "Barry' s old man must have found out. No wonder Mrs. Smeltzer said he was pissed off."

  Doug slapped at a mosquito. The squished insect left a red smear on his palm. "Oh, man. Wonder how much trouble Barry got into?"

  "God," Timmy said. "I don't even want to think about it. Depends on whether or not his dad figured out we were the ones climbing through there when he wasn't around." Timmy paused to lace up his Converse AllStars, which had come undone, while Doug inspected the window. "I don't see what the big deal is. Barry's allowed in there when he has his old man' s keys." "Yeah, but nobody 's supposed to be in there when he isn't Page 75

  aroundespecially us. And besides, when have any of Mr. Smeltzer' s rules made sense?

  He makes a big deal out of everything." "If he does know, you think he 'll tell our parents?"

  "I don't know," Timmy said. "I doubt it. He knows that my dad doesn' t think much of him." Doug poked the dirt with a stick. "You don 't think… you don't suppose he'd hit us? The way he does Barry?" "I'd like to see him try," Timmy said. "I' d kick his drunken ass." From behind them, Clark Smeltzer said, "Is that so?" Timmy and Doug both jumped, and Doug let out a frightened squawk and dropped his stick. Mr. Smeltzer seized them by the ears, pinching and twisting the cartilage. The boys shouted for help as he yanked them to their feet and spun them around. He grinned. "Kick my ass, will you?"

  "Let go," Timmy demanded. "You 're hurting us." Doug started to whimper. Timmy silently willed him not to cry, not to give Barry' s father the satisfaction. "You 're hurting us," Timmy repeated. "You' re goddamn right I am, you little brat." He released them both and took a menacing step forward. Crying out, Doug scrambled backward, tripped, and tumbled over onto the dirt pile, landing flat on his back. Timmy shrank against the wall of the shed.

  Clark Smeltzer glared at them both. His eyes were red and rheumy, and an unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. He chomped the filter furiously. Barry stood behind him, lingering in the background, looking at his friends in dismay. His eyes were wide. He said nothing.

  Timmy glanced around in fright, hoping that Mrs. Nelson would jog by again, see what was happening, and rescue them. But Mrs. Nelson was nowhere in sight, apparently done exercising for the day. The cemetery was deserted. Somewhere in the distance, one of the neighbors started a lawnmower, and he heard the faint drone of it, but as far as Timmy was concerned, the lawnmower and its owner might as well have been on the moon. Clark spat out the cigarette. "I figured it was you two that was sneaking in here, as well.

  'Couldn't just be them other boys,'

  I thought. Looks like I was right. Thought I told you two that I didn 't want you playing in this graveyard no more."

  The boys said nothing. Doug was too busy fighting back tears and Timmy was afraid his voice would betray him. His legs trembled and his face was flushed. His lips felt heavy. Swollen. His heartbeat throbbed inside his head.

  Barry took a timid step forward. "Dad…"

  Clark whirled on him. "You shut your goddamned mouth, boy. I don't want to hear a thing from you. You were probably breaking in here with them, weren' t you? What 'd I tell you about being out here without me? Huh?"

  He raised his hand and Barry cringed. Timmy stepped forward.

  "Why don't you just leave him alone, you son of a bitch?" Clark turned, slowly, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.

  "What'd you just say?"

  Timmy swallowed. "You heard me, asshole. You're good at hitting women and little kids. Why can't you beat on somebody your own size?"

  The color drained from Mr. Smeltzer's face. His open hand curled into a fist.

  "I've warned you before, Graco. Somebody needs to do something about that mouth of yours."

  "Go ahead," Timmy challenged. "Hit me."

  "Timmy," Barry said, "Shut up. Don't"

  Clark lunged. Timmy tried to dodge him, but the angered man was quicker. He seized Timmy' s Tshirt with both fists and lifted him off the ground, slamming him into the wall of the shed. Timmy 's feet dangled off the ground. The boy was too terrified to speak. Timmy's anger vanished, replaced with fear.

  "Dad," Barry pleaded, "put him down."

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  "Pplease," Doug said, "please Mr. Smeltzer, don't"

  "Barry, I told you to shut your fucking mouth. You too, fat boy." He turned back to Timmy, his leering face only inches away. Despite his terror, Timmy winced at the man's foul breatha miasma of cigarette smoke, coffee, booze, rotting teeth, and bleeding gums.

  I won't cry, Timmy thought. I won't cry, I won't cry, I won't. And then he did.

  "Now, Graco," Clark snarled, "you listen up and you listen good. If I see you or your tubby friend in this cemetery again, I will tan both your goddamned hides so bloody that your mommas won 't recognize either one of you. And you know what? I'll get away with it, too. You're trespassing, and that's against the law. It ain't like I didn't warn you before." As if to emphasize, he slammed Timmy against the wall, hard enough that his teeth clacked together. Then he let him drop.

  "There's a new lock on this shed, and I'm the only one that can open it. It's all boarded up nice and tight. Anybody else gets in, I'll know about it. Don' t let me catch you here again. And as for you," he turned to Barry, "you ain 't to hang out with these two no more. They're trouble. Up to no good. You think they' re your friends now? Just you wait. Get a few years older, they 'll want nothing to do with you anymore. They'll think they're better than you. Their kind always does. Just like Graco's daddy. Ol' Randy thinks he' s better than me cuz '

  he's got that highpaying union job down at the mill and all I do is dig graves and mow grass." Timmy stirred. "That's not true."

  "Shut your face. Now you mind me, Barry. You see these two riding down the street, you go the other way. They come to the house, you don' t answer the door. I catch you playing with them again, you know what will happen."

  "Yes, sir…"

  While Mr. Smeltzer was distracted, Timmy crawled over to Doug's side. The two boys squeezed each other's hands. Timmy thought he might throw up.

  "No more," Clark said. "Am I understood?" Tears filled Barry's blue eyes. "But Dad"

  "No 'buts' about it."

  "But they're my best friends. I don't have anybody else." Clark lashed out, slapping him across the face with the back of his hand. Timmy and Doug gasped. Barry's cheek turned red.

  "Go ahead," Clark said, his hand still raised. "You go ahead and back talk me again, you little punk. I dare you."

  Weeping, Barry stared at the ground. Clark turned back to the others.

  "Wipe your noses and run home to your mothers. I don't want to see you here again."

  "Barry?" Timmy reached for their friend.

  "I said go!" Clark kicked out. His heavy, steeltoed work boot slammed into Timmy's tailbone. "Get the fuck out of here."

  The boys' last bit of resolve shattered. Both Timmy and Doug fled. They couldn't go in the direction of Timmy' s house, because the utility shed and Mr. Smeltzer both blocked their way. He stood there, hands on his hips, the look on his face just daring them to pass. So instead, they ran in the other direction, toward the cornfield at the far end of the graveyard.

  A rock bounced off Doug's shoulder blade. He cried out, but didn't look back.

  "That's right," Clark Smeltzer shouted, "Just keep on running. If I see you here again, it'll be both your asses!"

  His laughter hounded them as they reached the edge of the cemetery and stumbled into the cornfield, heedless of the damage their pounding feet were doing to Luke Jones 's crop. Halfway through the field, Doug paused, gasping for breath. Page 77

  "Let's stop a minute," Timmy suggested, wiping the remaining tears from his eyes. Sweat poured down his forehead.

  Doug nodded, unable to speak. He sank to his knees and closed his eyes.

  "That… jerk…" He gulped air. He can't… do that. Barry's our friend. He can't �
�" Timmy stripped off his Tshirt and mopped his brow. "Save your breath. He just did. And we let him."

  "We could have stopped him. We could have fought back."

  "No we couldn't have. Come on, Doug, who are we kidding? We' re two kids, man. When it came down to it, and he literally had us backed up against the wall, we did everything but piss our pants, we were so scared."

  Doug's face, already purple from a combination of crying and running, now turned violet. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "Too late."

  "Oh no. Please tell me you didn't."

  "I did. Just a little bit. When I fell. Some squirted out." Timmy snickered, then chuckled, then turned his face to the sky and howled. He pointed at his friend, tried to speak, and only laughed harder. He stretched out on his back and giggled.

  "It's not funny," Doug said, but he was smiling, and a second later, he started laughing as well. "Look at us," he said. "We almost get beat up by our best friend' s dad, and then, just a little while later, we 're sitting in a cornfield laughing because I peed myself." Timmy sat up. "It's a defense mechanism. Like SpiderMan. Ever notice when he's fighting Doc Ock or Hobgoblin, how he cracks jokes all the time? That' s because he 's scared. It's how he deals with being afraid. It helps him face the monsters."

  "Too bad we couldn't do the same back at the shed."

  "Yeah." Timmy took off his Converses and shook dirt and pebbles from them.

  "I mean, why did we have to be so chicken?" Doug shook his head in shame. "We weren't afraid of Catcher. Well, maybe a little. But that didn' t stop us from standing up to him."

  Timmy slid his shoes back on. "And look at what happened when we did."

  "That wasn't really our fault, though. Barry was the one who snapped."

  "I read this issue of The Defenders once. Nighthawk, Gargoyle, Dr. Strange, and Son of Satan had to travel to this other dimension to rescue Valkyrie and Hellcat. There was a line in it that said, 'When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.' I didn' t understand what it meant, so I asked my grandpa. He told me it was from some philosopher.

  I can 't remember the guy's name. Nacho or something. He was German, I think."

  "Nacho doesn't sound very German."

  "It doesn' t matter. Anyway, Grandpa explained it to me and then told me a few other things this guy had said. I always remembered the one, because I thought it sounded cool."

  "What was it?"

  "When you battle monsters, you have to be careful or else you'll turn into a monster yourself."

  Doug mouthed the words, silently repeating them to himself. Then he frowned. "I don't get it. What's it mean?"

  "Think about it. We fought Catcher and what happened? For a few seconds, Barry acted just like his father. And me, earlier. What I said about Ronny and those guys. You 're rightit was a stupid thing to say. The kind of thing you'd expect them to say, rather than one of us. Maybe it's better that we don' t fight our own monsters. Maybe we 're better than them."

  "Maybe," Doug agreed. "I don't know. I still wish we'd have done something. Poor Page 78

  Barry. I'm worried about what's gonna happen to him now."

  "We'll still see him. Dude, he's our friend. I don't care what his old man says. He can't stop the three of us from hanging out together. We'll sneak out tonight and then all three of us can hang out in the Dugoutor look for another way into the cave, since we can't get into the shed."

  Doug looked frightened again. "No way. After what just happened? I'm not setting foot in that cemetery anymore. And besides, that's not what I mean."

  "Well, what do you mean, then?"

  "I'm worried about what his dad is going to do to him after all that."

  "Yeah." Timmy sighed. "Me too, man. Me too."

  "Mr. Smeltzer was always kind of weird, but he' s really starting to lose it. Who knows what he could do? And did you notice something else? When we were at the shed, he said,

  'I figured it was you two that was sneaking in here, as well. Couldn't just be them other boys.' Who do you think he was talking about?"

  "I don't know," Timmy said. "I can't even think about that right now. I still feel like I'm going to throw up."

  "What if it was Ronny, Jason, and Steve? What if Mr. Smeltzer knows what happened to them?"

  "Barry's dad is a serial killer?"

  "Well, noprobably not. But you saw what he did to us today. How he acted. Sure, he' s hollered before, but he never laid a finger on us. Not like this. Today was different, and the way Barry 's mother talked, he was like this last night, too. Maybe he caught them trying to sneak in the shed and… lost control?"

  "You think he killed them?"

  Doug didn't reply.

  "He wouldn't have done that," Timmy said. "He's crazy, but killing them? That seems a little farfetched. He' s just an abusive jerk, not some psycho. Much as I hate the guy, and as much as I think my dad 's wrong, and that there really is a serial killer running around, I don't think it's Barry's old man."

  "Yeah," Doug said, nodding. "I guess you're right. I hope you are, anyway. So what do you want to do now? We can't go back to the cemetery and we can' t go anywhere else, either. We can 't even get our stuff out of the Dugout."

  "Let's finish catching our breath first. My stomach and my head still hurt."

  "Did he hurt you when he slammed you against the shed?" Timmy shook his head. "No. Not really. I think it's more nerves than anything else." Timmy lay back on the ground, careful not to squash the budding corn stalks. Clouds drifted slowly by above them, and he wished that he could hop on one and ride away. He 'd always been mystified by clouds. They looked like solid thingsislands floating above the earth. Meanwhile, Doug reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic egg of Silly Putty. He began playing with it, rolling it in his hands and then flattening it out, while Timmy watched the sky and tried to figure out what they could do. The sun felt good on his face. He wished they could just stay there in the field for the rest of the day. He turned to his friend.

  Doug found an anthill and began picking up the scurrying insects with his wad of Silly Putty, pretending it was the Blob and that the ants were frightened townspeople. He'd always been able to entertain himself like that. One summer, he'd enlisted Timmy and Barry' s help in collecting empty locust shells from the trees and shrubs. They ' d spent an entire day gathering the bugeyed, creepy looking husks. Then, overnight, Doug had set them all up on top of a train table in his basement. He 'd placed his green plastic army men in the diorama as well. The next day, the boys had reenacted a fantastic battle between the U.S. Army and some alien bugs from outer space. Watching him now, as Page 79

  Doug transformed his Silly Putty into yet another alien menace, Timmy grinned. Then the memory of Clark Smeltzer's voiceand the look on Barry's facemade his grin vanish as quickly as it had appeared.

  Timmy stood up and brushed the dirt off his pants. "Let's walk over to the woods. Maybe we can find a hornet's nest or something cool."

  "But we're not supposed to. Your parents said."

  "Yeah, but they didn't know that Mr. Smeltzer was going to chase us out of the boundaries anyway. I mean, we' re already beyond where my mom and dad said we could be. Might as well make the best of it. It 's not like we'll get caught or anything." Doug put his ball of Silly Putty, now embedded with ants, back in the plastic egg and slipped it into his pocket. Timmy gave him a hand and helped him to his feet. Then the two of them set off for the tree line. As they neared the edge of the forest, they noticed four turkey buzzards circling in the sky. The carrion birds were hovering over a specific spot in the woods.

  "Something must have died in there," Timmy said, nodding toward the birds. "Maybe a deer or a pheasant. We should check it out."

  "What do you want to see an old dead deer for? That's gross."

  "I don't think so," Timmy said. "Sometimes, it's kind of cool." They pushed through the thick tangle of thorns and branches growing around the edges of the forest, and stepped beneath the leafy cano
py.

  The temperature was cooler in the woods, and rainwater from the previous night's storm still dripped off the limbs overhead. It was darker under the trees. The woods were alive with sound, birds and insects, squirrels barking at one another, dead leaves and pinecones crunching under their feet. Flowers burst from the dark soil, lining the trail with different colors and fragrances. A chipmunk sat on a mossy stump and watched them go by. A plane passed overhead, invisible beyond the treetops. Timmy glanced upward, but he could no longer see the circling buzzards.

  They didn't often come to this section of forest and hadn't fully explored it, and despite that morning' s terror, their spirits lifted slightly at the opportunity to do so now. They ' d only gone a few yards in, and were still standing in an area where the undergrowth was sparse and the trees were spaced far apart, when Doug spied the raspberry bushes.

  "Awesome!"

  He ran over to the thick stand of bushes and began picking raspberries, greedily popping them into his mouth and relishing the taste. Juice dripped from his lips. Timmy heard the unmistakable squawk of a turkey buzzard overhead, but the leaves still hid them from sight. He sniffed the air, but didn't smell anything dead. Doug groaned with delight. "My mom never buys these at the grocery store. Says they're too expensive."

  "My mom says the same thing. I was surprised she actually had blueberries on hand this morning for the pancakes."

  "Try some." Doug held out a handful of berries. Timmy strolled over, but before he could join in, something behind the bushes caught his eye. The sun shined down through a break in the trees, and the sunlight glinted off of something bright and metallic.

  He tapped Doug's shoulder. "What's that?"

  Doug looked up. His face and fingers were stained red from berry juice. "What?"

  "There," Timmy said, pointing. "On the other side of the bushes. The sun is reflecting off something. See it?"

  "Metal…"

  "Sure looks like it."

  "What do you think it is?"

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  "Could be anything," Timmy said. "A tree stand left behind by a hunter, or someone else's fort, or an old junked refrigerator or something." Or a crashed UFO, he thought, or maybe the hatch to a secret underground government base. Or what those birds are looking for…