The Answers Are In The Forest Read online

  “Yeah. That was odd. It was like he was reciting it or something.”

  “Maybe he remembered something.”

  “Could be.” Rusck shrugged. “Need a ride home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me grab my mom’s car keys.”

  We went back downstairs, and his mom met us at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’ll pick up the food after I drop Gabby off,” Rusck said.

  “Good boy. And think about what we talked about yesterday too,” his mom said, messing his hair with her hand.

  “Can we just drop that?” Rusck asked, taking a step away from her.

  “No, you need to think about it,” she said, glaring at him.

  Rusck shook his head and waved over his shoulder for me to follow.

  “Do you need to talk about anything?” I asked as we got into the car.

  Rusck turned the key in the ignition. “No, nothing important.”

  “All right. I’m going to do it tonight.”

  “What?” Rusck asked, looking at me out the corner of his eye while he turned down the street.

  “If that rabbit is in my basement again tonight, I’m not running away. I’m going to listen to that nasty little thing.”

  “It’s just preposterous.”

  “As preposterous as it may be, I’m talking to a rabbit tonight.”

  After a minute of silence and me watching the world go by outside the car window, Rusck asked, “What’s your story? I don’t think you’re an ex-con.”

  “No, I kinda almost went to jail but got community service and probation instead.” My cheeks grew hot. It was kind of embarrassing telling people.

  “Still on probation?”

  “No, that ended right before we moved. Moving here was supposed to be a fresh start or something.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  I laughed. “It’s off to a rough start.”

  “Rabbits,” Rusck said under his breath.

  “So, I know some of Creed’s story, but not much about you.”

  “Earlier, with my mom, she wants me to join a sport or a club at school. Basketball tryouts are coming up.”

  “You play?” I asked.

  “Not at all. It’s too late to try out for football. I’m sure that’s what they really want, someone they can brag about again. I think they’re dying for me to be the son they used to have. They want me to fill in for Creed.”

  “It’s not like Creed’s gone.”

  “They seem to think he is.”

  “Fricking parents.”

  He glanced over at me. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, you don’t play sports. What do you do?”

  Rusck shrugged. “Not much. I used to write for the school paper and for the lit magazine, but I don’t even do that anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Life.”

  “I hear you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Rusck pulled into my driveway, turning off the car.

  “Wanna come in for a bit?” I asked.

  He let out a deep breath, not saying anything.

  “Just for a bit?”

  He cracked half a smile. “Okay.”

  I let us in, and Rusck threw himself on the floor. I didn’t blame him, really; all we had for furniture in the front room were the plastic lawn chairs. I pulled off my jacket, tossing it on one of those chairs, and sat crossed-legged next to him. Rusck put his hands behind his head and studied the ceiling. All the water stains on it almost made it compelling to look at.

  “Want anything to drink or eat?” I asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Okay. You okay?” I said because he lay there frowning.

  “Yeah, no, I don’t know. Just all this stuff today. I always feel so guilty.”

  “Why?” I asked, even though I was one who knew all about guilt. I had the same feeling whenever I got off the phone with my brother.

  “I just feel like maybe I could’ve done something. I should’ve been with him or watching out for him. And now he struggles with so much every day.”

  “You couldn’t predict what would happen. You know that, right?”

  Rusck sat up. “I guess.” He rubbed his hand on the back of his neck. “Even if I couldn’t have done anything, I don’t know…I just feel like I need to do something.”

  “I think you’re doing all you can. You seem like a great brother to have.” I reached out and put my hand on his knee.

  He interlocked my fingers with his, sighed, and looked at me with sad eyes. “Thanks. I’m just a bushel of fun to have around, aren’t I?”

  “Happy people are overrated.”

  He cracked a smile. “What about you and your brother?”

  I sighed. “He’s a great brother. Well, at least in my opinion. According to my mom, he’s the worst, but he just runs a different course than most. Perhaps not the best influence, but he’s the only one who ever really paid attention to me. I kinda got the whole guilt thing going on too.”

  “Yeah?” he asked, squeezing my hand in his.

  “It was my idea, really, and he’s the one in jail.”

  “Ever think that maybe he could’ve just said no?”

  “I guess, maybe. It still sucks.” Neither my brother nor I were ever the best at decision making.

  Rusck nodded with understanding.

  “What in the hell are you doing, Gabby?” my mom shrieked from the kitchen. I didn’t quite know my mom’s work schedule yet. I knew she worked the graveyard shift at one job, and the schedule for her other job varied between day and evening shifts, so needless to say, it took me by surprise when she walked in the back door.

  “Just a friend over,” I said, getting up, seeing her pulling off her coat.

  “No boys, especially when I’m not here. I don’t even know this hooligan.” Since Gerald and I tended to get in trouble, she assumed everyone we hung out with was up to no good also.

  “He’s not a hooligan.”

  “Get him outta here,” she said.

  Rusck quickly scrambled to his feet.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I said so.” My mom trusted me about as far as she could throw me, which wasn’t terribly far because she never exercised and had been smoking since she was, like, four or something.

  I looked at Rusck with a frown. He forced a crooked smile, waved, and was off. I acted like a normal bratty teenager and stomped to my room, slamming the door behind me.

  Chapter Eight

  I somehow eventually fell asleep that evening until I was woken by the sound of a little girl giggling. This time it wasn’t distant. I fell asleep facing the wall with my back to the room, and the giggling came from there, right behind me, as if a child stood next to my bed. My breath ceased, and I couldn’t move a muscle.

  A chilly breeze blew over me, and I heard the giggling again. Maybe I was still dreaming. That was what I was secretly hoping, but I somehow knew it was not true. With my now customary goosebumps, I swallowed a trapped scream and hesitantly rolled to my other side with my blanket pulled up to my chin. As I completed my roll, the shadow of a little girl skipped out of my room. The same shadow I saw the night before. I knew there was going to be a rabbit in my basement.

  Before I got out of bed to go downstairs, I weighed my options—to go or not to go. If I went down there, perhaps I could somehow help Creed, figure out what he couldn’t remember, but then I’d have to face that zombie rabbit again. I shivered thinking about it and closed my eyes when I heard giggling ride through the floor vent into my room. Perhaps it was all my imagination.

  I threw back my covers and sat up. Hopefully, choosing to go down there was the right decision. I made my way through my room, down the hallway, and to the basement door. I was so tempted to run back to my room, but I turned the doorknob because I had to listen to the rabbits for Creed. With my hand trembling, I pulled open the door that led into the black abyss that was the basement and crouched, grabbing the flashl
ight. With the flashlight in hand, I flipped it on and slowly made my descent, the stairs creaking with each new footstep. Once at the bottom, I looked across the basement where moonlight brightly streamed through the small window, making a spotlight, in which the star of the show already waited for me.

  There sat the same rabbit as the night before, crusty and decrepit as I vividly remembered. I turned to run but stopped myself, blew out a breath, and crept toward the awaiting rabbit. The moonlight displayed the rabbit’s shadow as large as life. This time the shadow didn’t run. It remained standing behind the rabbit with her head tipped to the side. The fact that the rabbit had the shadow of a little girl instead of a rabbit was almost creepier than the way the rabbit looked. I hugged myself, trying to keep the shivers away. The rabbit looked up at me with its little nose twitching. Half its whiskers were missing.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Was I to start talking? Or did I wait for the rabbit to speak first? Maybe Creed was once in the same position as I was. Stepping closer and squatting down, the putrid stench that rolled off the animal infiltrated my nostrils. I coughed and choked on the smell and put my forearm under my nose to try to keep the stench at bay. It didn’t work. My eyes began to water. “Are you aware how gross you smell?” I asked.

  The rabbit straightened its head in the same slow, creepy, robo way as it did before, and its mouth opened with a crunching noise. “Do I?” the rabbit asked in a sweet little girl’s voice.

  I had a sneaking suspicion the rabbit was going to talk, but when it actually did, I wasn’t quite prepared, so I scrambled backward on my butt, backing myself up against a stack of cardboard boxes, gasping for air, frozen. I was pretty certain for a second I was going to pass out.

  The rabbit half walked, half hopped toward me, lifting its legs around in a sort of cycle like it had rusted gears that didn’t quite want to cooperate. In between each step came a sad attempt at a hop. “It’s okay,” the rabbit assured me, its jaw opening and shutting out of sync with the voice that came out of the decomposing corpse.

  My mouth opened, but words wouldn’t come out. The rabbit made its way closer to me, and I pulled up my knees, hugging them as if protecting myself from the creature. I pressed my head back into the boxes.

  “I’m nice, really,” the rabbit said in its out of sync way of speaking.

  “Uh, uh,” I muttered. I couldn’t form a sentence, or a proper thought, for that matter.

  The rabbit scanned me up and down with its stiff neck moves. “Gabby,” sang the rabbit. Its ears twitched. “Gabby Wabby.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  “How…how do you know my name?” I sputtered, finally finding my voice.

  “I’ve been watching you, silly.”

  “This can’t be happening. It’s not possible. I’m dreaming, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We want you to help us.”

  I bit my lip and took in a lungful of putrid air. “You said we.” Oh god, there was more than one zombie rabbit.

  “Me and my friends,” the rabbit said, craning its neck a little too far and unnaturally to the side.

  “But I don’t understand. How could this be? What are you?”

  “I’m just a little girl. Well, that’s what my mommy would say, but I say I’m a big girl.”

  “A big girl?” I asked because most obviously a rabbit sat in front of me.

  “Mmhmm, I’m almost six.”

  “Is that in people years or rabbit years?” I asked, still thinking I was out of my mind.

  “People, silly. I’m not really a rabbit.”

  “You’re not?” I asked, whispering like it was some kind of secret.

  “No, like I said. I’m a girl.”

  “But, but,” I said, still trying to get a grasp on my breathing.

  “I just use the rabbit’s body so I can talk to you,” she said so matter-of-factly.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Otherwise, you couldn’t hear my voice. It’s hard to talk to people when you’re dead. This is the easiest way.”

  “Oh, dear god,” I said out loud, more to myself than the rabbit.

  “I’m not scary, just dead.”

  “Okay,” I said, the flashlight bobbing about in my shaking hands. “You’re a dead little girl communicating with me through the corpse of a rabbit?”

  “Does communicating mean talking?”

  I nodded.

  “Yep, that’s it, then.”

  “But how? Are you a ghost?”

  “Yep, pretty much.”

  “But why aren’t you all ghost-like?” I asked, glancing over at her shadow on the wall.

  “Like I said, otherwise, I couldn’t talk to you, something about being dead and all.”

  “But why?” Nothing made sense.

  “I don’t really know. You’ll have to ask Kevin. He keeps telling me why, and I keep forgetting.”

  “Is Kevin dead too?”

  “He sure is.”

  “Oh, shit. How many of you are there?”

  “Um, let’s see. There is me, Kevin, so that’s two. And then there’s Liesel and Jacob and how many is that?”

  “Four.”

  “Okay, then there’s also…” The rabbit paused and thumped her foot. It made the same crunching noise as when it opened its mouth to speak. Rigor mortis must’ve already set in. “I got it,” she said. “Sophie.”

  “Five dead children?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why here? Why this house?” I swept my gaze around, taking in the basement, glancing up at the ceiling, sitting there in the house that was somehow connected to dead children and possibly also to Creed Almeida.

  “This is where we all met. Well, back in the woods, really.”

  “But why are you all around? Shouldn’t you be in a better place or wherever you’re supposed to go?”

  “We can’t leave until somebody helps us.”

  “And that somebody is me?” I put my hand on my chest, my heart pounding hard inside.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, what do you want me to help you with?”

  “Find out who killed us.”

  I swallowed the urge to vomit. “Killed you?”

  “Sure enough. Each and every one of us.”

  “Wha…what?” I tried to spit out my words, but when you were talking to a rabbit corpse possessed by a murdered little girl, it was kind of hard.

  The rabbit’s mouth slowly opened, and she yawned. “I’m going to go now. I’m sleepy.”

  “But, wait. Whoa, you can’t just drop that on me and leave.”

  “Drop what? I wasn’t holding anything.”

  I realized I truly was talking to a five-year-old. “Tell me your name, at least, before you go.”

  “Donna,” the rabbit said, yawning. “Bye.”

  “Uh, bye,” I said, giving an unsure wave.

  Donna crept away in the creepy rabbit corpse walk. She slipped between a couple of boxes, and then I heard some scratching noises. The chill and putrid scent departed with her, and I was left alone in the basement wondering if what happened was actually real. I steadied myself to stand. I hadn’t realized I was shaking so badly. I walked over to the stairs, looking over my shoulder, double checking that Donna, the dead, almost six years old child in a rabbit’s corpse, was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  I pondered if I should go to school that morning. I was way past tired, spending the rest of the evening going over what happened. Maybe I imagined it all, but really, I knew I didn’t because even though he didn’t remember, Creed probably met those rabbits. But something went wrong. We had to figure out what and who took him, so maybe by helping Donna, we could help Creed too. I decided to go because I really needed to talk to Rusck. I knew doing what I had to do required help. Mainly because I didn’t know what in the hell to do.

  Climbing in the shower, I made the water good and cold, hoping to revive myself somehow. It didn’t hel
p much, just made for a quick shower. Breakfast didn’t go too great either. My bowl of cereal stared up at me as my stomach told me eating wasn’t on the agenda for that morning. I got dressed in a thermal and some jeans, throwing a beanie over my hair because I wasn’t in much of a mood to even attempt to do something with it. My sandy colored hair generally needed much taming. It was thick and wavy and tended to look like I just got electrocuted. I grabbed my jacket, keys, and backpack and headed out the front door.

  I was quite happy to see my bike waiting for me when I walked outside. Rushing through the crisp fall air was always a good way to clear your mind. Once at school, I did a mad dash through the hall to find Rusck. I spotted him walking away from his locker with his hands in his back pockets.

  “Rusck,” I called. A few people looked at me and snickered, and I pushed a freshman or two aside and made my way toward him. “Hey.”

  He stopped, turned, and waited for me.

  “I got things to tell you,” I said among the slamming lockers and bustle of the beginning of the school day.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah?”

  I glanced around the hallway. There were too many people meandering about to overhear me talking about impossible things. “Is there anywhere we can go, without so many people?” I asked, leaning in close. Mistakenly, I leaned in too close and picked up a refreshing smell of peppermint. I wondered if he just ate some candy or maybe had on some lip balm. And if I licked his lips, would they taste like said peppermint?

  He bent down a little, meeting my face with his. “C’mon, I know someplace.”

  “Good,” I said, pushing away thoughts about him that were not focused on the subject at hand.

  He waved over his shoulder, and I followed. We walked down the hall, past open classroom doors, and past everybody who actually headed to class. We turned right down another hall where the students started to dissipate a little and then left down a short hallway into an empty classroom with a handful of scattered desks and crooked blinds on the windows.

  “This room is usually just used for detention,” Rusck said, scratching the back of his head.

  “Been here a lot?”