Spire in the Woods/5

“What’s with the bag?” Fletch asked as I tossed my duffel bag onto the back seat and got inside his car. If memory serves, it’d been 25 or so that day, and felt even colder in the little Civic.

“Supplies. Incense. My mom’s Bible. Couple flashlights. Some miscellaneous crap I borrowed from Kerry.”

Fletch acknowledged he’d heard me with a soft grunt and we were on our way to pick up Scary Kerry.

Truth be told, while the bag did have my mother’s Bible and the flashlights, the ‘miscellaneous crap I borrowed from Kerry’ was actually a bicycle pump and a pool raft shaped like a small boat that I’d borrowed from Kristy McDowell earlier that day. I didn’t see the sense in telling Fletch yet that I wanted to do more than just hear the bells. At least not while we were still in my driveway and he could back out. Better to wait until we were down there and the worst he could do was leave us without a ride home.

We grabbed Kerry and were properly on our way shortly after eight o’clock. For the first hour or so, the drive was surprisingly pleasant. Kerry asked Fletch questions about where he was hoping to go to college, which schools were his safeties, and how he was going to pay for it.

Fletch answered all of her questions and was even joking around a bit, but as we got deeper into Massachusetts his nerves started to creep in. He fell silent around the time we cleared Worcester. It didn’t take a mind reader to know he was thinking about Rob. It was impossible not to.

We were retracing the steps of a boy who had killed himself. Whatever he’d found down there, whether it was supernatural or not, whether it was something or nothing, Rob had blamed it for driving him to madness and death.

I had never been scared on any of my other ghost-hunting trips. Not really. Usually I was filled with a sense of anticipation. A giddy feeling that I could soon make a discovery that would forever change the way I saw the whole world, accompanied by a touch of anxiety that I might get caught trespassing somewhere I didn’t belong.

But as we pulled into the trailer park, my heart was pounding in my chest and my palms were covered in a cold sweat.

“Ten thirteen,” Fletch said, cutting the engine. “If we hustle we might be able to hear the bells toll eleven.”

Kerry and I nodded dumbly. I could tell she was feeling it too. This was different than the Blood Cemetery or the Eunice Williams Covered Bridge. We were walking into the ghost story of Robert Edward Kennan. And the only thing we knew for certain was that he was dead.

“Pass me my bag,” I said to Kerry as we stepped out of the car.

Fletch wordlessly led the way. The crunch of the dead leaves beneath our feet echoed out into the forest. Even though the moon cast more than enough light for us to see, I fished the flashlights out of my bag just to have something to do.

It hadn’t snowed yet that year, at least not at the Quabbin, but it was cold. The temperature had dropped into the high teens and the wind ripping through the bare trees wasn’t helping matters any.

It was no surprise we didn’t see anyone as we crossed into the park. We were in the middle of nowhere. Hell, if it weren’t for the metal pole that served as a gate stretched across Old Ware-Enfield road, we probably could have driven in without anyone noticing.

The smell of woodsmoke hung faintly on the wind. Somewhere, miles away, people were sitting around their fireplace, probably commenting on what a good night it was for a fire. I bet they felt cozy.

Fletch rubbed his nose and sniffled. It could have just been the cold making his nose run a little, or maybe he smelled the smoke too. Either way, it reminded me of something I’d read once. Firemen say that when a person burns to death, their flesh smells like pork.

I pitied Fletch. Thank God I hadn’t been there to smell Rob burn.

By the time we reached the fork where the access road splits off from Old Ware-Enfield, my legs felt like blocks of ice. We hadn’t been stupid. We had warm hats and jackets, but a two, two and a half mile walk at night in late December is too much for just a pair of jeans.

I stomped my feet to warm up. “What I wouldn’t give for some ski pants.”

“At least you brought gloves.” Kerry said. She had one hand buried deep in her coat pocket, the other holding the flashlight I’d given her with her sleeve pulled down over her fingers.

Fletch cast a baleful eye in our direction. Even though we hadn’t been particularly loud or said anything disrespectful, he looked at us as if he’d caught us dancing on Rob’s grave. As far as Fletch was concerned, we were on hallowed ground.

We pressed on in silence until, from just ahead of us, we heard “cuh...cuh...cuh...” whispering gently through the trees. It sounded vaguely like the Friday the 13th soundtrack was being carried on the wind across a great distance.

“What the hell’s that?” Kerry hissed.

“Ice.” I said.

“Ice makes noise?”

“Yup.”

People think of ice as an object— solid and inert— but ice expands and contracts a great deal. Slight variations in temperature, small eddies and imperceptible currents prevent the water from freezing uniformly. Little fissures turn into big cracks as the ice strains against itself until it buckles and splinters into plates. What we were hearing was like Continental drift in miniature, big ice plates pressing against each other until something snapped with the resulting sound echoing over the reservoir's frozen surface.

We cleared the treeline and, sure enough, the Quabbin was frozen. I was surprised. bodies of water as big as the Quabbin don’t usually freeze until mid-January or so.

“Guess we won’t be needing the raft,” I thought.

That’s when the bells chimed eleven.

Bliss. My body shuddered. I felt like I was beneath Alina, her weight pressing down on the parts of me that strained to meet her. My flesh tingled. It was as if the smooth skin of her back that my fingertips had danced lightly across now surrounded every inch of me.

In that lingering moment, I was sated. The bells had nourished me like a feast nourishes the starving. I wanted nothing but to be exactly where I was, hearing exactly what I was hearing, feeling exactly what I was feeling.

Then all was silence. I was, once more, out in the cold.

“I heard them,” Kerry breathed. I turned to her and saw that she had a wistful gleam in her. It was the first and last time I ever saw her truly happy.

Fletch fell to his knees, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God.” He was laboring to breathe. “That was... that was beautiful.”

I sat down beside him. The dirt beneath us was hard as rock. The echo coming off the ice sounded like a gentle tide lapping on the shore. I looked up at the sky. So far away from the light pollution of Nashua or Boston or Lowell, I could see a myriad of stars I’d never noticed before. It’s the sort of thing that makes some feel small, but not me. I’d just peeked behind reality’s veil and discovered...

Well, I didn’t know exactly what, just that there was more! Not up there around distant stars, suspended on the far side of an unfathomably great abyss, but right here, with nothing between us and this undiscovered country but a few hundred yards of ice and an hour’s time, when the bells would toll twelve.

We should have left. We said we only wanted to hear the bells. The only reason Fletch was even there was to make sure we’d turn back. I had witnessed what I’d been searching for throughout all of my ghost hunts: I had evidence of the supernatural.Wasn’t that all I’d ever wanted? One experience to bolster my faith? Just one that I could point to, cling to, whenever I found myself besieged by doubts?

I had certainly thought so, until I heard those goddamn bells.

I’m not sure which one of us was the first to tentatively step onto the ice, but I recall clearly none of us voiced an objection. Not even Fletch.

The ice was slick, and we fell hard more than once, but we were all of us New Englanders and no strangers to shuffling across an expanse of ice. The trick was to keep your weight centered above your feet.

We talked in clipped bursts about what the bells had felt like to us, speaking in broken analogies, unable to fully share what the bells had awoken inside of us, but straining to convey it as best we could.

“I only ever flew in a plane once. My parents, even though they couldn’t really afford it, took me to Disney. They were already fighting then. It was bad. But on the plane, going to Disney, when it started to take off...” Kerry trialed off.

“Cuh...cuh...cuh...” The echo was louder than we’d heard it from the shore.

“In my head, when I was seven, only rich people flew anywhere. And my parents weren’t fighting. I felt lucky, you know?”

Fletch grunted his acknowledgement. “What time is it?”

I checked me watch. “About a quarter past.”

“CUH.” We must have been right on top of where the ice was grinding against itself.

We froze. Each of us strained our eyes and ears, trying to determine if the ice was safe. We knew if the ice wasn’t safe it’d be dangerous to press on. We knew it, but we didn’t care.

“Maybe you should go first,” Fletch said to me. “You’re the lightest.”

“Yeah,” I said and shuffled ahead. Being closer to the bells felt worth the risk. Any risk.

Kerry and Fletch followed in my wake, neither following directly behind me so as to spread our weight across a broader area.

We pressed on. The conversation died. The wind blew hard across the reservoir and tore through our clothes like a knife.

We didn’t care.

“Cuh...cuh...cuh...” The sound was growing fainter. We had crossed nearly three quarters of the distance to the island that housed the Spire.

I never heard the ice crack, just the sharp inhalation of breath for a scream that never escaped her lips. Kerry plunged through the ice. I turned just in time to see her head go under.

Kerry came up thrashing, but as she hit the sides of the hole she’d made more and more of the ice broke away, expanding the hole to the size of a kiddie pool.

I shuffled my feet as fast as I could towards the edge.

Fletch screamed for me to stop. “No, no! It’s not stable!”

Cold water sucks the heat from your body thirty-two times faster than air. Every second Kerry stayed in that water increased the likelihood her arms and legs would go numb and she wouldn’t be able to pull herself out of the water even if the ice stopped breaking.

Laying on my stomach to spread as much of my weight across the surface as I could, I dragged myself out to the water’s edge.

“Grab on!” I held onto the shoulder strap and tossed my duffel bag into the water as close to Kerry as I could.

Her hands fumbled, already rendered useless from the heat loss, but she managed to wrap her arms tight around the bulk of the bag.

I pulled her up to the edge. She got most of her body out of the water before the ice cracked, and she fell back in, almost taking me with her.

Strong hands grabbed my ankles and pulled me away from the hole.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Fletch grunted as he struggled for traction on the ice.

I don’t know how he did it, but Fletch managed to get enough of a purchase that we were able to drag Kerry out of the water.

Scary Kerry was white as a bone and panting for breath through chattering teeth. She struggled to get to her hands and knees.

“We’ve got to get her out of here,” Fletch said.

The pull of the bells had been broken. What the fuck had we been thinking?

“Bring the car around. We’ll meet you.” The car was easily two miles away.

Fletch nodded and was off, shuffling his feet across the ice as quickly as he could.

I was afraid to stand too close to Kerry out on the ice, but what choice did I have? She was still struggling just to crawl.

I grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her across until we were far enough away from the hole that I felt comfortable enough to pull her to her feet.

And still the ice went “cuh...cuh...cuh...” as I watched Fletch slip out of sight behind the trees. It didn’t sound gentle anymore.

I put her arm over my shoulder. We shuffled along best we could. Each time one of us slipped, I thought the ice had given out again. My heart would race and I’d think, “This is it. This is how I’m gonna die,” but instead we would just be slammed down against the rock-hard surface.

Kerry followed my instructions. She didn’t seem confused, but she wasn’t talking either. By the time we’d reached the access road, her lips had turned pale blue and the water in her hair had frozen.

At the fork on Old Ware-Enfield road, I insisted that we trade jackets and I gave her my hat and gloves, one of which was wet from pulling her out of the water, but I figured it was better than nothing.

Kerry fumbled and struggled to get out of her jacket. We had to stop walking so I could help her with the zipper. She fought me as I tried to get my hat over her enormous head and with slurred speech complained that she was hot.

I knew what that meant. Kerry was in trouble. If I had had a cell phone back then I’d have bitten the bullet and called her an ambulance, but I didn’t get my first cell phone until 2001.

I made Kerry run the rest of the way, even though she moved like a drunk in an old cartoon.

Fletch saw us approaching the gate and, leaving the engine running, ran out to meet us.

“How is she?” he asked, putting her arm over his shoulder.

“We need to get her to a hospital.” Fletch and I were moving as quick as we could while dragging Kerry along between us.

“Do you know any around here?”

“You don’t know where the hospital is?” I screamed as we got into the car.

“Why the fuck would I know where the nearest hospital in Western Massachusetts is?”

Fletch put the car in drive and started heading towards Amherst, figuring they’d have a hospital there and we’d see signs for it on Route 9. Had we gone the other way, back towards Nashua, we’d have been at a hospital in eleven minutes. Unfortunately, the way we chose, the nearest hospital was in North Hampton, over an hour away.

Even with the heat on full blast the car was freezing, and practically as soon as the doors closed Kerry started stripping out of her clothes.

“You gotta get back there with her,” Fletch said.

He was right. Before our week-long winter hike, our instructor-chaperones taught us what to do in the event that someone displayed any signs of hypothermia. You get them out of their wet clothes, you strip down and you get into a sleeping bag with them. It’s called passive rewarming, and Kerry clearly needed it.

I crawled over the emergency brake into the back seat with the half-naked Scary Kerry. She didn’t fight me or complain about being warm, but it was difficult to get close to her. She had wedged herself down on the floor, mostly behind the passenger’s seat, a space I would have never imagined could accommodate me, let alone both of us.

“You got a blanket back here or anything?” I said, looking around in the mess and clutter that Kerry sat on top of.

“No, but hang on.” Fletch wrestled himself out of his jacket while he drove. It occurred to me that I could use the uninflated raft as a blanket, but when I looked for my duffel bag I realized I must have dropped it somewhere between the reservoir and the car. Fletch threw his jacket back to me. It’d have to do.

I stripped down to my underwear. Scary Kerry was completely unresponsive. I did my best to move her into a position where could I lay next to her and draped Fletch’s jacket over my shoulders and mine over our legs before spreading myself across her corpulent belly.

I’d like to say I spent the next hour concerned only for the well-being of my friend, but that’s not true. A million thoughts ran through my head.

Yes, I did think about Kerry. I thought she already looked dead and hoped that at least some of her pale complexion was just the moonlight. I noticed how slow her breathing was. I could barely feel her cold gut moving at all.

But I also thought about Rob and the rumor I’d repeated when I was in the sixth grade. The one about how he’d been found naked in the woods with a mentally handicapped girl. I thought about how everyone said he’d tricked her into sleeping with him. And even as my friend lay beneath me, for all I knew dying, there was a small part of me that was thankful we were so far away from home and nobody would hear about this.

Shortly before one-thirty in the morning we pulled up in front of the emergency room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. Fletch got out of the car and ran for help.

Kerry was unconscious when a pair of nurses or orderlies or whatever they were pulled her out of the car and put her on a stretcher. When they asked me, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d checked to see if she was still breathing. It had been a few minutes. At least.

They couldn’t find a pulse.

Fletch and I were forced to stay in the waiting room. We couldn’t do anything else for her. Kerry was in their hands now. In a way that was worse. At least for us. When we were in the car we had a goal, something to focus on. We had to get Kerry to a hospital. Once we’d arrived, the adrenaline that had been coursing through our veins returned to whence it came and left us with nothing but doubts.

Could we have done more? Had we been fast enough?

“She’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.” Fletch rocked back and forth in his chair, repeating his little mantra as if he could will it to be so. “She’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.”

It was over an hour before we were able to get an update. Kerry had survived, but only just. When they initially checked her vitals, Kerry’s core temperature had fallen to 64 degrees Fahrenheit and her heart rate had slowed to 29 beats per minute. For a girl Kerry’s age and size, you’d expect her resting heart rate to be in the neighborhood of 74 beats per minute.

The emergency room doctor felt Kerry’s hypothermia was too severe for external warming techniques and elected to irrigate Kerry’s stomach and colon with warm saline solution. Every fifteen minutes, the saline, by then cold, had to be pumped out and replaced with more warm saline.

We had hoped we’d be able to see her, but at that point, they’d only managed to raise her body temperature about 4 degrees and Kerry was still unconscious. She also had third- or fourth-degree frostbite on several of her fingers and toes and one of her ankles, but they wouldn’t have to worry about that tonight. There’s a saying about frostbite: Frozen in January, amputated in July.

The nurse, a young, homely woman, looked at us like we were criminals. I guess she blamed us for the state Kerry was in. Even now, I’m not sure she was wrong. “Is there someone your friend would want us to contact?”

Her mom.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do it. Payphone?”

“Follow me.”

The nurse turned and led me back to the admittance desk. It’s funny, as scared as I was that my friend’s life was still in serious jeopardy, somehow I was also scared to be in trouble with her mom, and by extension mine. What can I say? I lacked perspective and the enormity of the situation hadn’t fully sunk in. The nurse let me use one of the hospital’s phones.

“What! What do you want? Why are you calling my house at three fucking o’clock in the morning?” Mrs. Peterson screamed into the phone.

“Kerry’s been in an accident.”

“What are you talking about? Kerry’s asleep. She’s…hold on, Kerry! Kerry!”

I could hear Mrs. Peterson lumbering through her house and bellowing for her daughter. She certainly had her faults, but lacking affection for daughter wasn’t one of them. I’d often suspected that Mrs. Peterson had been one of those sad sacks who had known their marriage wasn’t going to last and insisted on having a kid anyway, not to save the marriage but just to have one person in the world that loved them unconditionally.

“What happened? Where is she?”

All I told her was that her daughter had fallen through some ice. Nothing else. And emphasized at every turn that she was alive and being cared for, which was true. But I also promised that she’d be fine. It was a promise I had no business making. I just couldn’t stomach hearing the hurt in her voice. I would have said anything to make Mrs. Peterson feel better.

I handed the phone back to the homely nurse so that she could give Mrs. Peterson directions to the hospital.

Two and a half hours later, Ecto-1’s tires screeched to stop in the parking lot.

“My daughter! Where is she?” I could hear her even before she was through the doors.

If the kids at school thought Kerry was frightening to behold, it was only because they’d never seen her mother upset. Mrs. Peterson ran up to the admittance desk wearing her jacket over her bathrobe, the sweatpants she slept in peeking out over her snow boots. Her face was red and puffy from crying and her hair looked not just uncombed but as if someone had tied it in knots and then dipped it in grease. By comparison, the homely nurse looked like Helen of Troy.

“She’s my daughter! You have to let me see her!” Mrs. Peterson said, pounding the desk in front of her. Being a mother was the reason Mrs. Peterson got out of bed in the morning. It was the reason she worked a thankless, poorly paying job. And it was the reason she wasn’t about to let anyone keep her from being there for her daughter.

Fletch and I jogged the short distance down the hall from the waiting room. The hospital staff was looking nervously at Mrs. Peterson’s red face and bulging veins. A pair of nurses moved in close behind the homely nurse to support her.

“You can’t see her until she’s been stabilized,” the nurse said, her voice quivering.

Mrs. Peterson let out an inarticulate scream that shook her whole body. It was a desperate noise that sounded like a wounded animal.

The homely nurse flinched, Fletch took an involuntary step back, and one of the other nurses peeled off from the pack and ran down the hall, probably to get security. She needn’t have bothered. After her scream, Mrs. Peterson collapsed to the floor in tears.

I laid my hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. Mrs. Peterson looked up and saw that it was me. I thought for a moment I’d receive the same treatment as the nurses. Instead, she pulled me down on top of her and hugged me, clinging to me like I was life itself.

Mrs. Peterson buried her face in my shoulder and cried. I wished she had yelled at me, and not just because my face was pressed into her hair, which smelled of sweat, deli meats, and feta cheese. I’d nearly gotten her daughter killed. I didn’t deserve to be embraced like a member of the family. And something about the way Mrs. Peterson so desperately held me reminded me of the trip her daughter and I had taken to Greenfield.

I had been reckless with Kerry in so many ways.

Fletch helped the two of us to our feet and we led Mrs. Peterson back to the waiting room.

We stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home, but neither of us could bring ourselves to eat anything. Fletch and I had stayed at the hospital until nearly 10am; by that time Kerry’s temperature had returned to normal but at no point had she regained consciousness.

We would have stayed longer, but we’d been awake for nearly 24 hours at that point and our bodies were beginning to shut down. I left Mrs. Peterson my parents’ number and told her to call me if she needed anything. She took it and thanked me for “watching over” her little girl.

Sitting beneath the fluorescent lights, waiting for Fletch to finish his coffee, I felt like Judas minus the silver. I should have stayed at the hospital. But I copped out. I couldn’t stand Mrs. Peterson being nice to me.

“I never should have brought you.” It was the first thing Fletch had said in hours.

“We’d have gone anyway,” I said, smearing ketchup around my tray with my hashbrown so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eyes. “We’d have gone, she’d have fallen, and you wouldn’t have been there to pull her out. I could have driven or I could have tried to warm her, but I couldn’t have done both.”

Fletch didn’t respond. I guess he still felt like it was his fault.

“She’d be dead right now, Fletch. Me too, probably.”

I hazarded a glance up and wished I hadn’t. He was giving me the same look I had given Mrs. Peterson an hour earlier when she thanked me for watching over Kerry. Neither of us were ready to be forgiven yet.

“Well,” he said, “we should have left after we heard those fucking bells.”

I couldn’t argue with him there.

Fletch finished his coffee in silence. After he was done, neither of us moved to get up. It was probably around 10:30 or so at that point, and neither of us had called our parents. We knew we should have found the nearest payphone. We knew we couldn’t hide what had happened. We couldn’t lie. At least not about Kerry. But even if it was only for a couple of hours, we wanted to push that eventuality off for as long as possible. Our parents would know soon enough.

We got back in the car and rolled down the windows, hoping the cold air would help keep Fletch awake long enough for the coffee to kick in. Fletch stopped for the light at the intersection of Amherst Road and the Daniel Shays Highway. We needed to go left which would take us North towards New Hampshire, but Fletch hadn’t hit his blinker yet.

“Can I tell you something?” Fletch had struggled to get out each word.

“Yeah.”

“A part of me wants to go back. I want to hear them again.”

So did I. All we’d have to do is go right.

“Do you...if we did, do you think we could get there by eleven?” I asked.

The light changed. We didn’t move until the car behind us started honking. Fletch hit the blinker. We went left. My cheeks burned with shame.

“We probably wouldn’t have made it in time,” I said.

“We can’t. We can’t. We can’t go back there. Not ever.”

“No. Never.” But even as I said it, I knew I would. The bells felt like home.