Mike’s story was really good, too. He started with the flashlight under his chin.
“Do you know why they bury bodies six feet deep?” he asked like those spooky guys who host the horror nights on TV.
“Because they start to smell,” Special Ed said. “I saw it on TV.”
“No,” Mike said. “They bury them six feet deep so they can’t get out. They’re all awake under there. And they are crawling like worms to get out. And eat your brains!”
Mike proceeded to tell the story of how one zombie woke up underground and crawled out to get back at the guy who shot him and his girlfriend. It ended with the zombie eating the guy’s brains with a knife and fork. All the guys loved it!
Except one.
“I have a better story,” Special Ed said with confidence.
“The hell you do,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Matt added, trying to sound tough.
“I do. I heard it from my dad,” Special Ed assured him.
Mike nodded, prodding Special Ed to “Do your worst.” Special Ed took the flashlight and put it under his chin.
“A long time ago. In this town. There was a house. The Olson house,” Special Ed said.
Mike and Matt got instantly quiet. They had heard this one.
“Mr. and Mrs. Olson were away at dinner. And they left their oldest son in charge of his crazy younger brother, David. All night, he kept coming down the stairs while the older brother was trying to make out with his girlfriend, and David would say these crazy things.
“‘There is a witch outside my window.’
“‘She has a cat who sounds like a baby.’
“‘There is someone in my closet.’
“Every time he came down, his big brother would make him go back upstairs, so he could keep making out with his girlfriend. Even when David came down with pee stains in his pajamas from being so scared, the older brother thought he was just faking it for attention because David had been so crazy lately. So, he took him upstairs and changed his pajamas. Then, he walked him all over the upstairs and showed David that there was nothing scary up there. But David wouldn’t listen. He kept screaming. It finally got so bad that the older brother locked David in his bedroom. It didn’t matter how much David screamed or kicked at the door, the older brother would not let him out. Eventually, the kicking and screaming stopped. And the older brother went downstairs to be with his girlfriend again.
“That’s when they heard the baby crying.
“It sounded like it was on the porch. But they didn’t know who would bring a baby here this late at night. Or why. So, they walked to the front door.
“‘Hello?’ asked the older brother.
“The older brother looked through the peephole in the door. But he could see nothing. All he could hear was the sound of that baby crying. He was just about to open the door when his girlfriend grabbed his arm.
“‘Stop!’ she said.
“‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘There’s a baby out there.’
“‘Don’t open the door,’ she said.
“‘What are you talking about? What if it’s alone? It could wander out into the street,’ he said.
“‘It’s not a baby,’ she said. Her face was pale. She was terrified.
“‘You’re crazy,’ the older brother said.
“She started walking up the stairs toward David’s room.
“‘Where are you going?!’ he screamed.
“‘Your brother is telling the truth!’ she said.
“The older brother opened the front door. There was a little baby basket on the porch. The older brother crept up to it and took off the little blanket. And saw it…
“…A little tape recorder playing a baby’s crying. The older brother ran upstairs and found his girlfriend in David’s room, screaming. The window was shattered. There were muddy handprints all over the glass and walls. His little brother was gone. They never found him.”
The boys were silent. Christopher took a deep swallow.
“Did that really happen?” he asked.
The three boys nodded.
“It’s a local legend,” Special Ed said. “The parents all tell us that story to make us go to bed at night.”
“Yeah, but in our uncle’s version of it, there was a killer on the porch with the baby recording,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “And there was no girlfriend.”
Either way, it didn’t matter. Special Ed was crowned the king of the ghost story. By that point, it was well past midnight. The day’s labor and their full bellies made everyone sleepy. Since they were all spooked by the stories, they decided that one of them should stand guard while the others slept. Like a good leader, Christopher took the first shift to let his crew get a good night’s rest.
And give him a chance to be alone with the nice man.
Christopher watched his three friends unroll their sleeping bags on the cold ground. They climbed in and huddled together for warmth. Within minutes, the chatter died down. The flashlights clicked off. And there was darkness. And there was silence.
Christopher sat in the tree house. He looked around the clearing for any signs of babies or cats or witches. But all he saw was that deer. It stared at him for a moment, then went right back to sniffing the ground for things to eat.
Christopher wrapped the sleeping bag around him a little tighter and crunched a cold Oreo, his tongue finding the gooey white middle. He looked at the woods in the moonlight. The changing leaves red and orange like a campfire. And the minute he saw them, he could smell the leather baseball-glove smell and his father’s tobacco shirt and mown grass and damp leaves and chocolate chip pancakes and everything else that ever smelled great to him. He looked up and saw that the clouds had parted, letting in the moonlight. Behind the moon were thousands of stars.
He had never seen so many. So bright and beautiful. He saw a shooting star. Then another. And another. One time in CCD, Mrs. Radcliffe said that a shooting star was someone’s soul going up to Heaven. He also saw a science show on TV that said a shooting star was a meteor burning in the Earth’s atmosphere. But his favorite theory came from the playground back in Michigan. Christopher had heard once that a shooting star was nothing but a dying star’s last breath and how it takes six million years for the light to travel to Earth so that we know the star is dead. So, he wondered, which was which. A soul or a star? And what if all of the stars had burned out already and it was just taking Earth six million years to know it? What if that six million years happened tomorrow? What if they were all alone? And there were no stars except the sun? And what would happen if the sun burned out? And our shooting star could be seen millions of years from now? By a little boy with his friends building a tree house. And eating cold Oreo cookies or whatever it was that people out in the universe ate. Do all stars and all souls go to the same place in the end?
Is that what the end of the world would look like?
That thought made his head hurt a little, which was strange because he never got headaches when he was at the tree. But this thought was different. And it led to nicer ones. Like toasty fires. And his warm bed at home. And how nice his mother’s hand felt when she stroked his hair while he fell asleep. He had barely slept for over twenty days now, as he stayed up late every night bringing wood out to the tree to prepare for the build. But now he couldn’t remember ever feeling sleepier.