Mason Read online

  Unsure of what to do, Mason took another tentative step inside, looked around at the sofas and the plants and the hallways and a long desk with an old man sitting behind it. He walked to the desk, and the old man looked up from a book he was reading and peered over the top of his glasses.

  “I’m looking for Rene,” Mason said, uncomfortable under the old man’s gaze.

  “Rene?” the man asked.

  “Yes, please. Rene. She’s my friend.”

  The old man put down his book and took off his glasses. He smiled a little and leaned closer to Mason.

  “Is your friend an employee or a patient?”

  “She got hurt.”

  “Well then,” the man said. “That would make her a patient. And what was your friend’s name again?”

  “Rene,” Mason told him. “She’s my friend since we were babies.”

  “Those are the best friends to have. Now tell me, what is Rene’s last name?”

  “Denton.”

  The old man nodded. “Let me see what I can find out for you.” He lifted a telephone and punched at the buttons.

  Nervous, Mason looked at the cover of the man’s book. On it, a strange man with a dog’s head emerged from a black background, snarling and looking angry. He’d seen this kind of beast before, in movies on the television, but he couldn’t remember what it was called. It didn’t matter. The picture interested him. Mason’s gaze followed the arc of the creature’s brow over the points of its ears and down the long, powerful jaws. He noted each tooth, its shape and its sharpness. He observed the color of the eyes—yellow like gold coins—and the tongue—pink and black.

  “Son?”

  He studied the rounded, muscular chest and the big arms ending in pointy claws. It wasn’t a very good picture, not like some he had seen, because the shape didn’t look real, and it was supposed to be covered in fur but the hair was drawn badly.

  “Son?” the old man said again.

  Mason snapped out of his reverie. “Yes, sir?” he asked, having forgotten why he was standing at the counter in the first place.

  “Your friend is upstairs. She’s in intensive care. You can go up if you like, but you may not be able to see her.”

  “She’s in a tent upstairs?” Mason asked.

  The man smiled. “Intensive care,” he said. “Maybe I’d better show you.”

  “Thank you,” Mason said. You always had to say thank you.

  The old man stood. He was taller than Mason and really thin. He walked away and Mason followed, noticing how the man’s arms swung when he walked. They turned a corner, and Mason found himself looking at a wall with three elevator doors in it. The old man pushed a button and stepped back.

  “Now, when you get inside, press the button with the five on it,” he said. “When you get out of the elevator, just walk down the hall to a big counter and tell one of the people there your friend’s name. They’ll get you set up right as rain.”

  Right as rain—his aunt Molly said that sometimes, and its familiarity was reassuring. Mason smiled and thanked the man again.

  Upstairs, he did what he was told. He stepped off the elevator into a hallway that smelled like the clean bathroom at home, only without the bubble-gum scent over the top of it. And this place did look like the hospitals he’d seen on television.

  Men and women, old and young, all in white coats, walked the hall. They didn’t even look up at him, but that was fine. He went to the counter like the man told him, and a pretty woman with black hair and green eyes said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Rene, please. She’s my friend, my best friend since we were babies.” Mason wanted to say more but stopped himself. He was scared of this place and was worried that he might get in trouble for being here, and the woman with the black hair was looking at him like he’d done something wrong.

  “Rene Denton?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Are you a family member?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “I’m sorry, young man,” the woman said, though she didn’t look sorry to Mason. “But Ms. Denton can’t have visitors just now.”

  “Oh,” Mason said, looking down at the floor. He shoved his hands in his pockets, felt the folded piece of paper with the picture he’d drawn for Rene. Maybe the woman would take Rene the picture. He didn’t have to give it to her himself, just so long as she got it. It might make her feel better.

  Before he could pull the picture out, a hand fell on his shoulder. Startled, Mason jumped. He turned around and saw Rene’s mama and his heart slowed a bit.

  “Mason?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Mrs. Denton looked really tired and sad. Her eyes were pink, and her hair didn’t look as pretty as it usually did. It was kind of smushed down on one side and really tangly on the other.

  “Did Molly bring you out?” she asked, looking around the room.

  “No, ma’am,” Mason said. “She said I shouldn’t come, but I brought Rene a picture to make her feel better.”

  “That’s very sweet,” Mrs. Denton said, but she started crying.

  “I’ve already informed the young man that your daughter isn’t seeing visitors right now.”

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Denton said, sniffling. “Rene would want to see him.”

  Mrs. Denton wrapped her arm around Mason’s, and the fear he’d felt since walking into the hospital grew worse. It was like Mrs. Denton was really afraid too, and when she touched him, a lot of that fear ran into his body.

  “Is Rene okay?” Mason asked.

  “We hope so,” Mrs. Denton said, squeezing his arm a little tighter. “We’re praying.”

  They walked around the desk, past two men in white coats who were looking at a clipboard and whispering. Ahead of them stood walls of glass with white curtains behind them. The rooms inside were dark except for glowing machines and small lamps. Mason hesitated, feeling as though Mrs. Denton was leading him into the mouth of a monster.

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Denton said. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”

  But he did want to. That’s why he came. He was just being a baby and he knew it. He said, “She’s my friend,” and they continued to the room.

  Inside, Mason saw someone on the bed. It didn’t look like Rene, though. A big white cap covered her head, and a square bandage covered her cheek. The other cheek was purple and yellow, the way Mason’s arms looked after Gene hit him with the sock. A tube ran over the girl’s face, and machines hissed and clicked and beeped around her. But it wasn’t Rene. Was it?

  “Is that her?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mason,” Mrs. Denton said, sniffling loudly. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped at her eyes and nose. “She was hurt very badly.”

  “Is she asleep?” he asked. “I don’t want to wake her up.”

  “You can’t wake her up,” Mrs. Denton said. She started to cry really hard then.

  Mason felt responsible. He knew he’d done something wrong, said something wrong, like always. Why was he such a doorknob? Why couldn’t he ever say the right thing?

  He felt like he might cry too. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Mason,” Mrs. Denton said through her crying.

  But it wasn’t and he knew it. He should just leave. Rene wouldn’t be able to see his picture anyway, not if she was asleep. He should just give it to Mrs. Denton or tear it up and throw it away.

  “Your pictures piss people off,” Gene had said.

  Looking at Rene, anger joined the fear in Mason’s body. Gene lied. People liked Mason’s pictures. They told him so. Maybe Rene was asleep and couldn’t see the nice picture he’d drawn for her, but he could put that same picture in her mind if he wanted to. If he wished hard enough, he could let her see the park and the river and all of her friends and the sunshine and a nice fried-chicken lunch and big cups filled with lemonade.

  Mason gently removed Mrs. Denton’
s arm from his, and he walked across the room. Closer now, he recognized Rene beneath the bandages and the terrible bruises. He reached out to hold her hand, imagining the perfect Sunday afternoon at their favorite place, wishing she would dream of it until it was time to wake up. He wanted to put his palm on her forehead like his mama had when he felt bad as a boy, but the bandages there scared him. So he slid his hand under hers, really carefully, instead.

  Her skin felt warm on his. It was nice, even though he was still frightened. He concentrated as hard as he could on the nice picnic picture; it had to be perfect to make her feel better. But something terrible happened.

  The dream of the park and the smiling people and the chicken lunch turned dark as if a sudden thunderstorm rolled in from above. The trees at the edge of the park raced toward him, closing in like an angry mob, and the river slid closer. The grass he’d imagined turned brown and black, melted into leaf-shaped globs. Familiar faces appeared. They were mean and frightening. When the picture finished changing, Mason saw that instead of the park, he was in the Hollow. The faces came closer. And he was scared. So terribly scared.

  “Mason?” Mrs. Denton said from the doorway.

  He let go of Rene’s hand. Sweat poured off his brow and into his eyes. He stepped away, mouth open, trembling.

  “They shouldn’t have done it,” Mason said, still terrified by the faces in his mind. “They shouldn’t have.”

  “Mason, are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he ran out of the room, knocking into Mrs. Denton and not even saying he was sorry. And he kept running. He raced down the hall, voices raised at his back. He turned a corner and kept running as if the terrible people in his head were chasing him.

  Mason found a stairwell and stomped down it as fast as he could. At the bottom, he threw open the door and sprinted along the hall and into the lobby. The nice old man who had helped him find Rene called out to him, but Mason didn’t stop running, not until he was all the way home.

  Mason sat on the floor of his room, eyes squeezed tightly against the pain in his chest and his head. He’d never felt so frightened and lost before. Sadness, anger, and fear coiled in his skull and behind his ribs. Usually, when he felt bad, he thought about a nice spring day or playing with his old friend Lightning, or some of his mama’s nice chocolate-chip cookies, but none of these familiar comforts helped. Nothing helped.

  Mason yanked the paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He stared at the picture he’d drawn for Rene. The park. The picnic. He hated what he saw there. The nice picture was a lie. Rene’s picture, the one he’d seen when he touched her hand, was more real.

  He stood and carried the sheet to his desk. He slapped the page on the table with the pretty picnic scene facing down. He snatched a black colored pencil from the edge of his desk. Then he started sketching, his hand moving so fast and his fingers squeezing the pencil so tightly that his muscles ached after only a minute. He kept drawing and drawing, though, hoping to get the terrors out of his mind. But even when the picture was complete, and he gazed at the four faces captured on the page, more terrible pictures remained in his head.

  The dark and oily thoughts were just too strong to be banished. He pictured the trees of the Hollow, wrapped in the bodies of a thousand black snakes. Not a single leaf or branch or bit of bark was visible beneath the serpents. The ground oozed and pulsed under a blanket of wet, rot-black leaves. Faces floated above the ground. They were terrible faces, twisted up with ugly smiles and hateful frowns. Their mouths moved. They yelled. They laughed. Each movement of their lips brought another flash of pain, another layer of fear.

  “Stop it,” Mason whimpered into the room.

  More creatures appeared in his vision. A great flock of crows with ember-orange eyes and shredded feathers flew through the black woods to perch on the moving branches. Their bellies were opened; bits of their insides poked out and dangled above the dark forest floor. Dogs, similarly abused and long rotted, emerged from among the tree trunks, forming a grotesque pack behind the hovering faces. Black shapes, creatures Mason was unable to fully imagine, slunk in the shadows and clutched at the serpent-ringed trees.

  It was all so awful. Mason couldn’t take any more of it, so he opened his eyes.

  But the haunted forest did not vanish when his eyelids parted. It remained all around him. The walls and floor and ceiling of his room were gone. The woods rolled out ahead of him, seemingly endless, and Mason was trapped with the beasts it harbored.

  His fear ticked up a notch. The trembling in Mason’s body turned into an audible hum that settled in his head. And beneath this droning, his anger and dread subsided as the thrumming buzz grew louder. A crow flapped its wings, rose from a branch, and then settled back to its perch. The terrible pack of dogs watched him with cold, black eyes. The hum followed his veins from his head to his feet, wiping out all sensation as it went, leaving Mason numb.

  A figure in white appeared behind the pack of dogs. It was Rene, and she looked pretty in a white dress, but Mason felt nothing about it. He simply watched her.

  Rene held out a hand to him. Her body trembled and jerked to the side and a spray of blood flew from her mouth. Another twitch of her form and a wound blossomed on her shoulder. A scarlet blotch stained her white hospital dress.

  This terrible dance went on for over a minute, but Mason felt nothing. It was like hearing so many noises all at once you couldn’t really hear anything at all. His emotions had grown too strong, too loud. As a result, they canceled each other out.

  Mason stood and the vision of the forest flickered, faded, and then vanished. He reached down to the desk and lifted the sheet of paper, looked at the faces there—the faces of Lara Pearce, Lump Hawthorne, Ricky Langham, and Hunter Wallace. He followed the contours of their brows and cheeks and mouths.

  He examined every line in the drawing.

  And he felt nothing.

  17

  Negative Space

  Lara hadn’t felt warm in days. At home, she wrapped herself in a blanket and shivered beneath it, though the furnace pumped more than enough warm air. When outside, as she was now, walking to school, she wore a parka that her dad, Larry, had bought her for a ski trip. The family was supposed to go to Aspen, but the trip had been canceled, like all the family trips had. She shook with cold, barely able to keep her teeth from chattering.

  “Why, Lara?” Rene had asked.

  The question came back to her like a cold stream, running down the back of her head to trickle along her spine. Lara stopped in the street, only half a block from school. She thought she might cry again. She bit her upper lip and breathed deeply through her nose, trying to remove Rene and her question from her thoughts.

  It wasn’t that easy. She hadn’t stopped thinking about Rene and what had happened to her since that night at the Hollow. If she’d known what Hunter was planning, she never would have made that call. God. She never would.

  But she did make the call. And worse. She stood there and watched them hurt Rene and did nothing to stop it. She didn’t even protest, and she didn’t know why. At the time she had felt Rene deserved her punishment—felt Hunter and his friends had every right to beat her up. But why?

  “Why, Lara?”

  Lara bit down a little harder on her lip to make sure she didn’t start crying. She hadn’t talked to Hunter since that night and wouldn’t if she could help it. Once she’d thought his bad-boy rep was hot. After what he’d done, she just found him terrifying. She took a step forward, knowing she was already late for her first class. Then she stopped.

  A white figure stood behind the Marchand High sign. It was Rene, wearing a hospital gown. Even from such a great distance, Lara could see the red and purple wounds staining her face. Recognizing her friend, Lara gasped and stepped back.

  This couldn’t be real. She’d called the hospital before leaving for school. Rene was still in a coma. But there she was on the front lawn of the school less than fifty yards away, clear an
d solid and pointing at Lara.

  “Oh,” Lara said, the sound catching in her throat.

  She considered the possibility that she was seeing a ghost. Maybe Rene had died.

  It was too much for her. She couldn’t go into that school, not where she and Rene had shared so many memories. She just couldn’t.

  Heart racing, Lara turned away from the apparition. A car skidded on the road only a few feet in front of her. She was so startled, she thought her heart might stop right then.

  When she recognized the driver—Hunter Wallace—she almost wished it had.

  “Get in the car,” Hunter told her.

  “I…I’m late for class,” Lara said with a trembling voice.

  “Screw class. We gotta talk.”

  “I’m really late,” Lara tried.

  “Get in.”

  Lara did as she was told, but she moved slowly. Clutching her books to her chest like a shield, she shuffled her feet through the dirt. She reached out for the door handle and leaped back when the door swung open.

  Lara climbed in. She felt like she was lowering herself into a black pit.

  “Close the door,” Hunter said, revving the engine.

  She did as she was told again, and Hunter sped away. Lara looked out the passenger window, saw her school pass on the right. She clutched her books tighter and waited.

  “You didn’t return my calls, baby,” Hunter said. “That ain’t cool.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Lara replied. “A lot of homework.”

  “Homework,” Hunter repeated. He snorted out a low chuckle. “Seems more like you’re avoiding me.”

  “Just busy.”

  “Yeah, well, I been busy too. Me and the boys been working real hard to make sure our alibis are good and tight. Seems they think someone might start talking.”

  “Really?” It suddenly went from cold to freezing in Hunter’s car.

  “I don’t s’pose I need to remind you that you set this up.”