“Come see what I found in the woods,” Timmy Baxter said, and like any child of ten years old, I followed him on that last day of summer without a thought.
I had no fear of the forest, then. Its overgrown paths felt like the tracery of my own veins. And as we loped along, as Timmy explained what he’d come across early that misty morning, oh, it got my blood rushing. We darted off the path, into the brush. We hurdled roots, vaulted fallen trunks and jags of mossy rock, heading deeper and deeper until the branches of the trees knit the sky shut.
“Here it is,” Timmy announced, and killed my excitement dead.
I’d been conjuring a massive labyrinthine portal in my head, a crumbling stone spiral, but what I saw was a small, shabby well with the coverboards smashed in.
“Doesn’t look magical,” I said. “Not in the slightest.”
Normally Timmy liked nothing more than an argument, a red-faced ears-popping shouting match that often as not turned to wrestling, but that afternoon Timmy only smiled. He waggled a rock free of the thick dark dirt and held it out to me.
“Toss it in,” he said. “Then stand back.”
I took the rock, which was shaped like a small lopsided pyramid, and juggled it in my hand how I would to test a skipping or train-pelting rock. I didn’t like Timmy’s smile, which seemed to reach back to his earlobes.
But I stepped up to the well and dropped the rock, listening for a splash or clatter. Instead there was an absolute quiet on all sides, like the whole forest was holding its breath. Then rock whistled back out of the well, arced high into the air, and slammed into the dirt between Timmy’s bare feet.
I could not help but holler.
“Pick it up,” Timmy said, cool as anything.
It was nearer him, but I got the idea he was daring me. I stooped very casually and picked it up, and saw Timmy’s bony toes twitching in the soil. The rock was the same shape and heft as before, but the texture had gone strange, all slick and gritty.
“That’s the magic?” I asked, all my excitement returning. “Anything you throw in, it spits back out?”
“Anything at all,” Timmy said.
“What else have you tried?” I demanded, still turning the rock over in my hand. Suddenly the forest floor looked like a science laboratory, every twig and stone ripe for experimentation.
Timmy pointed a pale finger to the splintered lip of the well, where an oily black beetle was crawling along the wood. When I peered more closely, I saw something strange: a second set of mouthparts grafted to its back, snapping at the air.
“Anything you feed it, it spits back out,” Timmy echoed. “But it comes out a little bit different.”
He smiled his wide smile, and I was squeezing the rock more tightly than I realized, so tightly I could feel my pulse thumping against it. I looked at the well’s smashed-in boards, which seemed to have given way all at once.
“What was the first thing you threw down the well, Timmy?” I asked. “To break it open?”
“I don’t recall,” Timmy said, and I realized the rock had a pulse of its own, pumping inside my fist like a living organ. I opened my hand and saw it squirm.
I did not holler, but I dropped it like a hot coal and jumped backward, unwittingly closer to the well’s edge.
“A little bit different,” Timmy repeated. “A little bit twisted.”
He stepped closer, and I finally saw that his feet and hands, usually tanned so dark in the summer, were lily white. The footprints he’d left in the dark soil seemed to glisten, the toe-craters puddled with something wet and shiny. I heard blood rushing in my ears, a furious buzzing from behind me.
When I chanced a look over my shoulder at the well, I saw the mutated beetle wrestling a ladybird, grappling it toward the edge.
I ran from that place as fast as I could. Crashing through the brambles, sticking myself with nettles, gasping for air. For a while I could hear Timmy running after me, calling me names, ordering me back.
Then, after a while, just my own ragged breathing. My own pounding heart.
When school started two days after that, Timmy was not there. My ma said his ma said he’d run away, as he had done before, and would be back before long. I could not tell her about the squirming rock and the patchwork beetle and Timmy’s pale wet feet, but I told her about the well we’d found.
When my pa threatened to belt me, I even led them to it, though every rustling branch made me shiver and leap. It was exactly as small and shabby as before, with no strangeness of any kind other than the small body they dredged up from the bottom of it.
In those days the occasional cougar strayed through, which is the explanation they gave as to how Timmy’s body had been stripped of all its flesh in only three days, leaving nothing but a scoured skeleton.
I have not set foot in those woods since.
