Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: In my living room, dancing badly to Muse
Posts: 253
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A short work in progress
“Come on!” Sarah bounced up and down on the needle-strewn path. “My mom and Linda said they could only distract the boys for a few minutes. They'll realize we're not in the house anymore.”
“I know, I'm hurrying.” Kris pulled her shoelaces tight, then picked up ********, hoisting her to her shoulders. She caught up with Sarah, then slipped on a patch of dry pine needles. Sarah caught ******** at the last minute.
“What are you doing? You shouldn't put her on your shoulders, as clumsy as you are.” She took the toddler's hand. Kris grabbed her other hand and they swung her back and forth as they hurried up the trail.
“I don't think they can see us now,” Kris said, glancing down the path to see the roof of the A-frame cabin disappearing behind a screen of young pines. They both sighed in relief, and slowed to a more leisurely walk.
“Justin has a crush on you,” Sarah said, glancing sidelong to see her friend's reaction.
“He does not. He's just annoying.”
“Yeah, he does. Last night I sneaked up on him, and saw him writing love notes to you.”
“Gross! He's like ten.”
“You're too nice,” Sarah said. “Do what I do, and kick him if he gets close.”
“You're too mean,” Kris retorted. “He's irritating, but I'm not going to make your mom's friend mad at me. I haven't known them for years like you have. But I wish he was more like his brother, and into Transformers, instead of trying to follow us around everywhere.”
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked, eying the uphill slant of the path with trepidation. “I haven't gone hiking in forever, so don't be hard on me.”
“We'll keep at ********'s pace. I just thought it would be fun to go up the trail and see where it leads.” Kris pulled the baby along. “Hey, speaking of last night, did you hear all that noise downstairs?”
Sarah was quiet for a minute, then spoke softly. “I thought it was Justin and Jason messing around, but they were still in their sleeping bags on the floor. Mom, Linda, and the kids slept through it all, and I thought you did too.”
Kris shook her head. “I don't know how anyone could have slept through that. It sounded like someone banging pots and pans together.”
“I asked Mom about it this morning, and she went down to see if maybe an animal got in, or if it looked like someone had tried to break in, but nothing was disturbed. The door and windows were all locked up.”
“I don't like the den,” Kris said. “It's July, but it's cold down there all the time. And it feels creepy. I thought it was that ugly black leather couch and the horrible wallpaper--”
“It's more than the tacky décor,” Sarah said. “Nobody else seems to think there's anything wrong with it, though. Still, nobody ever stays down there either. I think it's subliminal; we all hang out upstairs in the living room even though there's less space up there.”
“Yeah.” Kris laughed off the creeped-out feeling. “Well, I'm having fun anyway. We're going to the lake this afternoon, right?”
Sarah was lagging behind, panting. “If I survive this hike.”
The girls slowly made their way up the trail in silence, enjoying the Sierra Nevada scenery. At least, Kris enjoyed it. Sarah wheezed and grumbled, kicking aside pine cones. ********, the boys' little sister, clung to Kris' hand and obediently followed along. She was not too young to have to be carried everywhere, yet not old enough to be a pain, and the cutest kid they had ever seen. Naturally, both girls had voluntarily taken over ********'s care since the start of their vacation.
The late-morning sun was getting hot by the time they exited the trees into a small clearing. All the sounds of civilization had been left behind a quarter-mile down the trail; they heard only the sighing of the wind in the treetops, with only the occasional call of a blue jay to interrupt the reverence of nature. The summer sun had bleached the knee-high grass to a pale yellow. The light reflected off motes in the air to give the scene a sepia tone, like an old-fashioned watercolor painting. The clearing smelled like pine and dust.
“What's that over there?” Sarah pointed to a series of mounds and small towers, clearly man-made, at the other end of the meadow.
Kris shrugged. “Probably the ruins of an old cabin or something. Let's go see. Maybe we can catch some lizards!”
“Uh-uh!” Sarah said. “You can catch the lizards. ******** and I will just watch.”
They slowed when they got to the other side and realized what it was. Kris picked her footing carefully, sneaking up on the first pillars of rotting wood as if afraid to offend the residents within.
“A cemetery,” Sarah whispered.
Kris squinted at a laminated page stapled to a grave marker, with a yellowed photograph taped inside. “It's a pet cemetery. Creepy. I wonder why it's out here in the middle of nowhere? Who even knows about this place?”
“You can't drive a car up here,” Sarah said, looking around at the forest surrounding the clearing and the narrow path that led there.
“Yeah,” Kris nodded. “You'd have to carry your dead pet in your arms, all the way up the trail--or down it if you came from that way--” she pointed up the hillside at the trail that continued into the woods on the other side of the gravestones.
“Ugh,” Sarah wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you ever see the movie, or read the book?”
“No, but my sister saw it. She said it was really scary.”
“Yeah, it was! They'd bury their pets in an Indian burial ground, and they'd come back like zombies, all evil. And then the little boy--”
“Shut up, shut up!” Kris hissed. “You'll scare ********.”
Sarah laughed. “She doesn't understand a thing we're saying.”
“Still,” Kris said firmly, “not the best place to talk about Stephen King stories, okay?”
“Wimp,” Sarah chuckled.
*To be continued. I'm about halfway done, but need sleep...
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I'm only writing this for fun and not for any desire to get it published. But I probably should have cleaned up the writing and dialogue before posting it anyway. It's a true story that happened to my friend and I in the summer of '87. I love telling it to my kids to freak them out, and thought that it would be cool to write it down in story form. Something truly unexplainable happened in that cemetery, but I'm not there yet. I don't have time to write it right now either, gotta get ready for work. LOL
