Mandy Barely's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Mandy Barely had three nights left to save the boy in the cabin, and she had not slept in two. She sat in the woven chair on the porch with her flashlight in her lap and the stuffed rat her grandmother knitted tucked under her thigh. The rat's stitched runes glowed faint against her jeans whenever the wind shifted. Inside the cabin, the boy lay quiet the way he had been quiet since the first night of camp, when he wandered off the trail alone and came back with a spiral burned into the back of his neck. Three clean rings, and a fourth so faint she had to tilt his head to the firelight to see it. Nothing in any book she had found mentioned a fourth ring. The cabin stood alone in the clearing now. The other counselors had moved the rest of her group two nights ago, after the scratching started. She hadn't told them about the drawing folded in her back pocket, or about the boy's face, which looked dimmer every morning, like a lamp someone kept turning down. The door behind her was the problem. Each night something climbed the porch and gouged spirals into the planks. The first night, one spiral, low near the handle. The second night, three more, deeper. Tonight the door was a field of them, overlapping, the wood split white along the cuts. She had counted the rings on the largest spiral that morning. Four. She had sat on the steps and put her head between her knees. She could not stay awake another night alone. Her uncle had taught her that a tired tracker misses the print right under her boot. So at sundown she walked to the memorial post at the edge of the clearing, where campers and counselors had hung trinkets for thirty summers, and she lifted down a small tin medal a girl had left the year Mandy started. She brought it back and nailed it to the center of the door, between two spirals. Then she sat in the chair with the charm rat in her lap and waited. The scratching came near two in the morning. She heard claws test the bottom plank. The rat in her lap grew warm. The medal on the door began to hum, low, like a wire under tension. Whatever stood on the other side of the wood drew one slow line, stopped, and tried again. The medal hummed louder. The claws scraped sideways and then stopped. She heard something step back off the porch and walk away through the leaves. She did not move until the birds started. At dawn she opened the cabin. The boy was sitting up. He looked at her, and the fourth ring on his neck was darker than it had been the night before. He said her name. It was the first word he had spoken in six days, and it was not a relief. It meant whatever had been kept outside the door was now finishing its work from inside.