Chapter 25 #2
Nora smiled, and they walked on, marveling at the length of the wall. The air seemed to crackle with sudden warning, and Nora halted and pointed into the pines. “What’s that?”
There was a brown shape, twice Marlowe’s height, several yards away, obscured by undergrowth and trees.
The hair on Marlowe’s neck stood up. As they drew closer, they realized the shape was a rusty car; it looked like an automobile from the 1940s.
There was something ominous about this latest discovery.
Marlowe wondered how long the car had been sitting out in these woods unnoticed.
Decades? The car held something bad, she just knew it, felt it somewhere deep in her bones.
“How did it get all the way up here?” Marlowe whispered.
“Maybe there was an old road,” Nora said. “Look at it, it’s been here for ages.”
Marlowe reached out and gripped Nora’s forearm. Her skin was surprisingly cold.
Nora gave Marlowe’s fingers a squeeze. “Let’s get closer, just a little.”
With each step, their sneakers crunched in the leaves, a sound that seemed to echo through the woods. It was impossible to tell what color the car had been, it was so rusted over. The wheels were gone, and there seemed to be a bunch of debris and sticks inside.
Nora let out a little groan, a sound caught halfway between excitement and fear. “Oh, it’s creepy.”
Marlowe tore her eyes away from the car and to the surrounding area.
She frowned as she saw the rim of an old tractor tire, the inside darkened with ashes.
As Tom Gallagher had once told them, nothing made a better firepit than a metal tire rim.
Marlowe reached down and touched the remnants of a charred log with a finger.
It was not warm, but that was hardly a relief.
The car might have been old, but the fire wasn’t.
The half-burnt log and ashes were recent.
“We should go.” Marlowe’s voice came out loud, piercing the quiet of the trees. “Something is wrong with this place.”
A clattering caused Marlowe to jump out of her skin. She whirled to see Nora banging a stick against the door of the car. In two steps, Marlowe was at her friend’s side. She yanked the stick out of Nora’s grip.
“Stop,” Marlowe hissed. “We need to go.”
Nora’s eyes widened at Marlowe’s reaction. “What is it?”
“I can’t explain, I just don’t like this.” Marlowe lifted her hand to her chest, where her heart had worked itself up to the pace of a hummingbird’s wings.
Nora didn’t laugh. She didn’t question Marlowe’s gut reaction. She simply let Marlowe take her hand, and together they ran all the way back to the edge of the woods, where Nate and Henry had been collecting near the top of the North Field. Marlowe knew then that she could trust Nora with anything.
By the time they reached Nate and Henry, they were panting.
“We found something,” Marlowe said, her chest rising and falling sharply as she tried to catch her breath. “I think someone’s living out there.”
“What are you talking about? We know every inch of this place. No one is out there,” Nate said.
Nate liked to swagger about as if he was the resident cartographer. He claimed to have explored every acre of the countryside. But he’d never come across that car before; none of them had.
“No, it’s true. We found a car. It’s old and abandoned and creepy,” Nora added.
Marlowe raised her hands up to deliver the spooky part. “And there’s a tire rim where someone made a fire.”
Nate and Henry abandoned the wheelbarrow and the stones to follow the girls farther into the woods.
Nate moved at a rapid pace, and Henry’s face turned red with exertion.
“You scared?” Nora asked Henry.
“No.” He shot her a pointed glance.
“You’ll be fine,” Nora said. “Marlowe nearly fainted, but nothing bad actually happened.”
“Yet!” Marlowe cried, suddenly annoyed at Nora’s lightness. But she, too, was less scared now that all four of them were marching toward the rusty car together. There was power in numbers.
Henry was fascinated by the car. He loved any sort of machinery, and he instantly climbed through the window to investigate what remained of the steering wheel, as Nora stood by. She probably would have done that herself earlier, if Marlowe hadn’t stopped her.
Nate and Marlowe stood above the tire rim.
“Could be a hunter.” Nate poked at the charred log with a stick.
“I don’t think hunters usually light fires. It would scare away the prey. Anyway, Dad doesn’t give out permits for overnight use.”
“So maybe someone’s just camping out.” Nate squinted through the trees. “This might not even be our property.”
This suggestion surprised Marlowe. She had assumed that anywhere they could walk within a reasonable amount of time was on the Fisher property.
But of course, that wasn’t how it worked.
So maybe this stretch of land belonged to a neighbor, one who liked to camp out by an old car that belonged to his or her grandparents. The thought settled her mind.
From a few yards away, Nora kicked at a glass bottle. Her bare suntanned leg was a blur in the air. “Or maybe it’s a creepy old man. Who wears animal furs and hunts with a bow and arrow!”
Marlowe cracked a smile as Henry’s ears perked up. He loved when Nora came up with stories.
“What’s his name?” Henry asked.
It took barely a millisecond for Nora to respond. “Mr. Babel.”
They all shivered at the delicious streak of fear the name induced, even Nate.
“Mr. Babel fled into the woods years ago, after his wife and children died,” Nora declared.
“They perished in a fire!” Marlowe added, finally able to partake in the levity.
Nate rolled his eyes, but then he added, “I bet he’s got an old shotgun, not some measly bow and arrow.
” He turned then, leading them all back toward the fresh pile of stones and the wheelbarrow they’d abandoned.
He declared that they’d had enough rocks for the day—it was time to head across the street to the Flats.
They talked of Mr. Babel the whole way back to the building site.
Then they unloaded the rocks, and Marlowe beamed at the first few feet of the wall they’d built.
It was so neat and tall and solid, nothing like the crumbling walls up in the woods.
They would build this one to last forever.