“Where’s Gage?” Fox demanded.
“Jesus, what’s up with you?”
“Where’s Gage?” Fox repeated, and Cal’s amused gray eyes sobered. “Working the arcade. He’s… he’s coming out now.”
At Cal’s quick signal, Gage sauntered over. “Hello, ladies. What…” The smirk died after one look at Fox’s face. “What happened?”
“It’s back,” Fox said. “It’s come back.”
One
Hawkins Hollow
March 2008
FOX REMEMBERED MANY DETAILS OF THAT LONG-AGO day in June. The tear in the left knee in his father’s Levi’s, the smell of coffee and onions in Ma’s Pantry, the crackle of the wrappers as he and his father opened Slim Jims in Mrs. Larson’s kitchen.
But what he remembered most, even beyond the shock and the fear of what he’d seen in the yard, was that his father had trusted him.
He’d trusted him on the morning of Fox’s tenth birthday, too, when Fox had come home, bringing Gage with him, both of them filthy, exhausted, and terrified, with a story no adult would believe.
There’d been worry, Fox reflected. He could still see the way his parents had looked at each other as he told them the story of something black and powerful and wrong erupting out of the clearing where the Pagan Stone stood.
They hadn’t brushed it off as overactive imagination, hadn’t even come down on him for lying about spending the night at Cal’s and instead trooping off with his friends to spend the night of their tenth birthday in the woods west of town.
Instead they’d listened. And when Cal’s parents had come over, they’d listened, too.
Fox glanced down at the thin scar across his wrist. That mark, one made when Cal had used his Boy Scout knife nearly twenty-one years before to make him, Cal, and Gage blood brothers, was the only scar on his body. He’d had others before that night, before that ritual-what active boy of ten didn’t? Yet all of them but this one had healed smooth- as he’d healed from any injury since. Without a trace.