“Only God can forgive you. But He would. So yes, I forgive you. Come on. Let’s get you back home. We have to deal with your nose.”
Christopher brought his hands up to wipe his nose, and he saw the blood, wet and red on his fingertips. His face flushed with fever. His joints ached. And the itch split into a blinding headache. He had never felt so sick in his life. Not even when he had the flu.
Christopher thought about the speed he had on the highway. The invisibility. The clarity of thought that came with the itch. If those powers led him to feeling this ill on the real side, he didn’t think he could stand much more.
Before it killed him.
Mary Katherine kindly helped Christopher out of the tree house. His joints creaked with every step. Christopher looked up at the sky. There was no more daylight. He saw a star shooting across the sky. One more sun. One more soul.
When he reached the ground, he looked at the white plastic bag hanging on the branch next to the tree. He instinctively opened it, but there was nothing inside. No Christmas cards. No hidden messages. Just the itch. Christopher thought about the trail of bread crumbs that led him to Shady Pines and the last lines of David’s card.
P.S. Thank you for the baseball glove.
Christopher remembered the times a baseball-glove smell had come to him. Sometimes he was in his room. Sometimes on the bus. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how present the smell had been. Baseball season was long over. He couldn’t remember kids carrying their gloves. Just footballs—Nerf or plastic. But the baseball-glove smell was always around.
I’m sorry if I scare you sometimes.
I never mean to.
Christopher closed his eyes. He let the itch work its way through his mind. He saw the trail of bread crumbs laid out in front of him. He saw the space between the words. The thoughts playing hide-and-seek. Leading him down the trail. The first card telling him to FOLLOW YOUR NOSE to the lady in the attic whose card told him to go see your mother right now. She needs you. And the bicycle that was left in David Olson’s driveway to give Christopher the time to get to his mother at the precise moment when she handed Ambrose David’s Christmas card that ended P.S. Thank you for the baseball glove and the final clue of the puzzle…
But especially the books.
The itch stopped. Christopher opened his eyes. He could feel the blood running from his nose so deeply, he could taste it on his lips. But he didn’t care. Because he finally caught the thought playing hide-and-seek. David was not a demon. He was a little boy passing notes. And there was one place in town where a kid could leave a note for another kid. Even if there were five decades between them. The one place where every kid in Mill Grove got their books.
Mrs. Henderson’s library.
Mary Katherine turned the flashlight back to the trail. She saw a couple of deer frozen in the light.
“Oh, God. Jesus. I hate deer,” Mary Katherine said, crossing herself. “Now, how do we get out of here?”
Christopher led Mary Katherine away from the clearing. Far away in the distance, he could hear bulldozers ripping up the trees. Mr. Collins had won his court battle. Construction had resumed. Just as Christopher thought it would. It wouldn’t be long before Mr. Collins ripped down most of the woods on his march to Christopher’s tree house.
“But what does the tree house do exactly?” he had asked the nice man.
you built a portal to the imaginary world.
Christopher didn’t know if the nice man was captured or being tortured.
He didn’t know if the nice man was dead or alive.
All he knew was that as long as the nice man was missing, there was nobody to protect the world from the hissing lady.
Except him.
Chapter 44
Special Ed woke up. He scratched his arm and stared at the tree outside his bedroom window. The tree was covered in snow. The weight of the snow pulled the branches down, so that they all looked like a sick smile.
Sick smile, Eddie. That’s what a frown is. It’s just a smile that got sick.
His grandmother used to say that to him before she got all skinny and died. He didn’t know why he was thinking of her now. It was like she was there in