"Coop, thank G.o.d."
He sounded glad to talk to me. What was up with that?
"Listen, I have something to tell you." I cupped my hand around the receiver. Even though I was still in my old room, I didn"t want to chance waking up my father. Explaining all this weirdness to him-a man who thought the answer to any problem could be found in a book-would only make things worse. "Don"t let Mom drink that wine-you know, the wine. Sam"s special c.r.a.p. There"s something in there that"s a I don"t know, making her act the way she is." I wanted to tell him about the journal and the grapes, but I figured if he hadn"t believed me before, he really wasn"t going to believe me now, not until I could show him the journal.
"I can"t do that," Faulkner said, and his voice shook on the last two words, shook like San Francisco after an earthquake. "It"s a"
The phone hummed. "What? It"s what?"
He started to breathe heavily, and I wasn"t sure, but I think he might have been crying. "It"s too late, Cooper. Oh, man it"s too late. For all of us."
Then the phone went dead. And Faulkner was gone.
Empty.
The StepScrooge Sam mansion stood empty in a way that went beyond no people being there. The rooms echoed. They smelled musty, as if- As if the well had been here.
Night hung heavy behind me, our street silent as a tomb. I could feel the ticking of a mental clock. I had only until my birthday to get rid of this thing if I wanted to live. And if there was any chance Megan was still alive, I had just that long to find her.
I stepped inside, flicked on the lights, and started to look for my brother. Except even with all the lights on, the house still felt dark. Heavy. Ominous. "Faulkner? Hey, Faulk. Don"t play any games, dude. It"s not funny."
But there was no answer.
"Faulkner!"
I opened every door, dread multiplying with each k.n.o.b I turned. But he wasn"t behind any of the six-panel oak doors. He wasn"t in the kitchen. The bathroom. The laundry room. I stopped at the entrance to the bas.e.m.e.nt and decided to hold that for later. Instead, I turned to make my way upstairs.
And stopped. Swallowed my breath.
One of the well"s evil vine men. Waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
If this thing was now outside the woods and inside the house, it must mean the creature had gotten stronger. Because the day was getting closer for the sacrifice? Because the thing was getting more anxious? Either way, it didn"t look good for me.
My legs nearly went out from under me, but I grabbed the banister and told myself it was just a bunch of sticks. I could take a bunch of sticks. I could beat this thing. I had to.
Because this wasn"t just about me anymore or saving my own skin.
It was about Megan. And Faulkner. And my mother.
"You don"t scare me!" I screamed. I could lie to it and myself.
The vine-and-twig man opened its stick mouth and laughed.
"I"m coming up there!" I swiped one of my mother"s megasize candlesticks from the hall table, then started up the stairs. Still holding on to the banister, because if I didn"t, my legs weren"t going to climb.
The thing waved its arms and clapped its hands, like a baseball catcher waiting for me to send him a fastball.
Were there others in the house?
Oh G.o.d, what if there were a hundred? What if it had gotten the whole d.a.m.ned vineyard to turn into those things and they had taken over the whole house and they were coming to get me and take me back to the well and I was going to die before I could rescue Megan and find Faulkner and- Get a grip, Cooper. Get a grip or you will die.
At the top of the stairs, the vine-and-stick man rocked on its heels and kept swinging its arms, laughing some more. Waiting. Like this was the funniest, most entertaining thing to happen in weeks.
Like it was all a game.
I raised the candlestick higher-that sucker was heavy, made of some kind of metal that needed polishing all the time-and picked up the pace. Five steps away now. Four. I could see its eyes were made of grapes-grapes so shiny, they almost had irises in them. When I was three steps away, it crouched, then pointed to its chin, as if saying, Go ahead, take your best shot.
When I"d been five, my father had signed me up for Little League. I had hated him for doing it. He"d dragged me down to practice, kicking and screaming.
But once I was there, I found out I liked baseball. I made some friends-Joey and Mike, for starters-and stuck with the league until high school. I had a h.e.l.l of a batting average and a pretty decent pitching arm. Coach Harding had already talked to me about trying out this spring for the varsity baseball team at Maple Valley High.
I knew that.
I didn"t think the vine guy did.
And I wasn"t in a sharing kind of mood right now. When I was one step away, I paused, shifted my feet to widen my stance, then let go of the banister. I waited until the stick guy started laughing again. G.o.d, I hated that laugh, and I let that hate boil into a fury that I could control, a rage that I could feel travel down my arm, burn into my fist.
I curled my grip tightly around the makeshift bat, raised it onto my shoulder, then swung, hard and even. "Shut up!"
The candlestick bat connected with the side of its head, smacking into the twig figure, solid enough to kill a guy. Its nature head exploded into pieces, bursting like a cartoon sun, and it stumbled back. I started to move forward, to finish the job, when the pieces of its head began to lift up from the floor and started to swirl in a circle, then-to my horror-knit themselves back together.
It laughed again and said something I couldn"t understand. Even though the words had made no sense to me, I knew what they had meant. It could have been speaking Mandarin and it wouldn"t have mattered, because its words were spoken in the language of the playground.
The roar of a bully. The taunting you-think-that-hurt dare.
It started toward me again and I raised the candlestick and swung harder this time.
"Get back!"
Again, its head erupted in a starburst, then zipped back together, as if it was the Road Runner, down for only a second.
"Get away, you freak!" I took another swing and another, this time hitting it in the legs and the arms, but then at one point the candlestick just went through its legs. I took a step back, stunned. "What the h.e.l.l?"
It laughed again, then reached forward and swung at my head with the branches of its arms. I ducked. It swung again, this time lower, faster. Faster than me.
The blow hit me squarely in the gut, blasting my breath out of my lungs and sending me flying down the stairs, somersaulting like an Olympic gymnast, except with a dismount that sent me landing on my wrist.
I screamed. The twig thing yowled and danced at the top of the stairs.
I cradled my wrist against my chest and tested it, gingerly moving it back and forth. It hurt like h.e.l.l, but it moved, so it wasn"t broken. A sprain. A bad one. Either way, I didn"t have time for the pain.
I needed a way past that thing to make sure my brother wasn"t upstairs somewhere, trapped. I picked up the candlestick again, in my other hand, and realized there was no way I could hit it using my left arm. For one, my lefty batting average was zero. For another, hitting the thing hadn"t gotten me anywhere. This one didn"t have the green webbing that had coated my school desk and my computer, but it had the regeneration abilities of a starfish on steroids.
Then I saw what had been sitting next to the candlestick on the hall table and knew another way to take out a vine man. I ran back upstairs again.
It was still laughing when I reached the top of the steps. I stood in front of it, raised the candlestick again.
"Yeah, real funny, isn"t it? Everyone wants to be Jon Stewart. Why not try torch singer for a career!" Then with my right hand, I flicked my mother"s Bic lighter. I brought the candlestick together with the lighter, then thrust both at the vine-and-twig guy. My wrist screamed in agony, but not as loudly as the stick man did.
Because I knew one other thing this vine guy didn"t know.
Dry grapevines go up like kindling when you light them on fire. Without the web coating, he was as dry as paper. In seconds, he was toast.
So were the hall drapes, but I figured I"d deal with those later.
I headed down the hall, lit candle in one hand, lighter in the other, opening the rest of the doors and calling for Faulkner. No more vine guys up there.
But no Faulkner, either. Or Mom. Or Sam.
Night carpeted the yard. A few lights ringed the back, accenting Sam"s ridiculous plants, painting his pretty land scaping picture, and giving me just enough light to see there weren"t any vine guys on the lawn, either, thank G.o.d.
But what if they were in the woods? Just waiting for me to leave the house?
I stopped at the last door in the hall, the one that led to the attic. I turned, ran for my room, opened my closet, and tore it apart until I found the binoculars in the small storage bin in the back, left over from a camping trip with my dad last summer. He"d bought them for me in case I had wanted to look for birds.
I"d used them to scan for girls on the beach at the lake down the road.
But now I took them up the stairs to the attic and used them to look out the tiny window facing the woods.
At first all I saw were trees and more trees. Then the trees parted, like curtains. They wanted to show me something?
The well.
No. Someone at the well. A tall, lean figure. From here, I couldn"t tell if it was a man or a woman. The night sky kept me from discerning much. Too tall to be Megan or Faulkner. Too skinny to be Sergeant Ring.
One of the vineyard workers, maybe? Or Sam? My mother?
The person was holding something close to his or her chest. I leaned forward in the window but couldn"t make out what it was. Then the person raised up the bundle, held it for a long second, and let go.
The blanket unfurled-small, white, square, the kind they used in hospitals. Whatever had been wrapped in it dropped into the well.
So hungry. So hungry. Give me more.
I scrambled back from the window, the binoculars crashing to the floor. One of the lenses cracked. My breath panted in and out and I ducked down, even though it was impossible for whoever was at the well to see me back here.
What the h.e.l.l had I just seen? And heard?
Someone feeding that creature?
Oh my G.o.d. Oh my G.o.d.
Oh. My. G.o.d.
I crawled back, poked my head over the window ledge, then dragged the binoculars up and took another look. The figure had turned and paused in the woods, as if the person was listening, the blanket tucked under one arm.
I focused the binoculars again just as the clouds shifted past the moon, and a shaft of light fell onto the woods and revealed the person.
Sam.
In his doctor scrubs.
With dark crimson stains down the front.
I fought the urge to hurl. I knew now for sure what that bundle had been. Sergeant Ring"s words came back to me.
The hospital is looking into your stepfather"s track record with deliveries a Infant mortality a Was that because he"d been feeding that thing a Babies? The ones that died when he was delivering them?
Like my twin brother?
My stomach rolled and pitched, and I had to look away again for a second. When I turned back to the window, Sam was gone.
Instead, I saw Faulkner, sitting at the base of the well, slumped over. Someone had tied him in place, leaving him there, waiting to be sacrificed, like that kid Isaac in the Bible.
The creature dragged his body across the well"s bottom and screamed his fury. Again, the one who fed him had come, and again, he"d done almost nothing to repay Auguste for all he had given him. No grat.i.tude. Nothing but disdain, hatred.
All these generations of wealth he had lain at the feet of Jumels- And for what?
For these measly meals. Dead little nothings of humans. He kicked at the latest offering and roared another outrage.
Yes, the one who fed him, whose "generosity" the creature depended upon, had let him eat another meal tonight, as a way to build his strength for the battle yet to come, but he was tired of these ridiculous trifles to eat.
He needed older twins. That was the meat that gave him power. Those on the edge of p.u.b.erty, their lifeblood peaking at its highest- Those were the ones that fed him best.
And yet, this Jumel fed the creature smaller bites, to keep him subdued. Under his thumb.
The generations who had come before had understood the creature. They had fed Auguste well, had tended to his needs. They"d sent down whole cows, pairs of pigs, and plenty of the right-aged humans, never making him hunt on his own.
They had tended to his home, knowing the arrangement, knowing one day Auguste would rise up from the depths of h.e.l.l and be restored to life, would want to see the place he had missed for so long. See the little cottage on the edge of the vineyard, the one that had once held his heart.
So Auguste had given back. He had made the grapes grow. Had made Gerard, then Gerard"s son, and then grandson, and now great-great-great-grandson, wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
But this one had been cruel. Withholding food for days at a time. Taunting Auguste with names and words. But worst of all, he had ripped down the house. Used machines to tear it apart, limb by limb. He had shredded Amelia"s cottage, had called it an eyesore. And in its place, he"d built a gaudy testament to hubris. Auguste had roared his outrage, but it hadn"t mattered.
So Auguste had wreaked his vengeance on the land, drying the grapes on the vine. Reminding him whose blood this vineyard really lived on. By whose sacrifice the grapes continued to grow. Without Auguste, all this would die.
And so, too, would the Jumels.
Two hundred years ago, Gerard had pushed him down here and Auguste had stayed. So Amelia could live. And as his skin and body gave way from human to creature, he had stayed, waiting for the day when the chosen one would come and take his place.
An heir created from Auguste"s own seed, sacrificed on the two-hundredth anniversary.
Auguste had only one regret, something he hadn"t known until after he"d been down here and learned the rest of the story from the land, which spoke to him. Their mother had been called to bring the sacrifice, and then, when she"d refused to give up her son- She"d been taken, as an incentive for Gerard. Their mother, the unwitting accomplice to the horrific bargain their father had received on the vineyard. Too late, Gerard had realized why his father had gotten such a good price on the land. Make the sacrifice, he"d been told, and continue the legacy, or every grape would die on the vine. And every per son living there would die. If only she could have been saved, too. But that- That was in the past. It was time for living now. Auguste"s time.
Now Auguste would give Cooper the same choice. Either go down into the well to fulfill the land"s destiny or those he loved would pay, and pay dearly.
Setting Auguste free, finally, from this cursed existence to walk the earth.
Cooper"s transformation wouldn"t take long. And if he struggled, well, that would only add to the excitement. He had to understand he was part of a bigger plan. A lifetime of plans.