My take on how the night in Hollander's Woods turned Li'l Castle into a writer.
Later, he could never quite recall how he'd made it back to the house. He ran blindly through the woods, not caring which way he was going, wanting only to get away.
When the need to rest and breathe brought him to a halt he stood, leaning against a tree, one hand pressed against the stitch in his side. His legs trembled and he knew the muscles would be in agony the next morning (and he'd be happy about it, because that meant he'd made it to the next morning). His throat and lungs felt seared with cold and exertion, and somehow, even in the midst of all this, he was aware of the scents of the nighttime forest. I know what terror smells like, he'd write, years later. It's the copper scent of blood and the green scent of the trees as they look on indifferently.
He'd stop to catch his breath, and then he'd hear something. A rustling in the undergrowth. It might have been the wind or a nocturnal animal or the masked killer, and he was taking no chances. He ran. Whether he had his wind back or not, he ran.
It took him completely by surprise when he got back to the house. One moment he was blundering through the trees, and the next he was in the backyard. Everything was as he'd left it. The same trellis leading to the same open window in the same bedroom where Evan was, having fallen asleep before midnight, when they'd vowed to sneak out. Rick climbed the trellis and crept in through the window and crawled into his sleeping bag as Evan snored on. Rick lay there, trembling with cold though the heavy flannel bag was soon warm enough. All the rest of the night he stared at the window, expecting any moment to see that black-and-white mask appear in the window because the killer had decided he'd rather not leave witnesses. He didn't look away until seven in the morning, when Evan woke, glanced curiously over at Rick. "Oh, man, I fell asleep. What a dumb-ass." Evan paused to whack himself on the forehead with a rolled-up Spider-Man comic as his punishment for falling asleep. "Did you sneak out?"
Rick had no idea what he was going to say until the word fell out of his mouth. "Yeah." Was he planning on a confession, or was this some sort of bravado?
"Cool! You see anything?"
He wanted to tell Evan what he'd seen. Evan was a good guy, smart, and his folks were nice. But that was just it. What if the killer had followed Rick? What if he'd lurked just out of sight and seen where Rick had fled to? If he told, he might put Evan and his family in danger, too.
Rick shrugged, hoping it looked natural. "Nothing much. Trees. Couple of bats."
"That's it?"
"That's it." He felt sure his lie was plain as day, but perhaps he was a better liar than he'd thought, because Evan bought it.
X
It got a little better after he got back to the city.
He was able to sleep again; somehow it was hard to imagine the man in the mask climbing the fire escape to their apartment. But sleep brought dreams, and in those dreams he relived that night. It was when his dreams started not just replaying events but twisting them in new and terrifying ways—when the dead woman's eyes opened wide and she asked in a voice half-choked with blood for him to help her, or when he swatted at the mask to see what was beneath it and found no face at all but cold, black emptiness—that he started to wonder if he might be going crazy. The imagination that had been his one true companion and had kept him entertained through boring classes and waiting while his mother went to auditions seemed to be his worst enemy now.
He didn't often wish he had a father (from his classmates he knew that more often than not fathers could be distant or clueless or just plain mean), but now he did. A father might have some idea about what to do and how to keep the family safe. He dared not confide in his mother because once or twice in his dreams she had been the dead woman in the woods, and much as she annoyed him sometimes, she was all he had. He could not risk any danger to her.
He was sitting at his desk one night, a stack of books beside him. In the hopes that reading might take his mind off things, he picked up books at random, skimmed through the first few pages. Some were old friends, some were new, and none of them kept his mind away from the night in the woods.
His old friend imagination came to the rescue. Maybe nothing you can read will help, it said. Maybe that book isn't written yet. Maybe you should write it.
Well, that was an idea. He'd never written for his own pleasure before. Up until now, he'd been content to be the reader, not the writer. Rick felt an excitement that was both familiar and not. A sense of possibility. A door was opened, and there was no knowing where it would lead. He'd have to figure that out.
Over the next week he filled a legal pad with words. Describing the woods, and how lonely they were. His first sight of the masked figure. The dead woman, and how cold she was. How her blood looked almost black in the moonlight, and how the mask appeared to be weeping blood.
He wrote and wrote. And when he felt he'd reached the end of it, he looked back at what he'd written.
It was awful.
Oh, parts of it were good. There were some good sentences here and there. But the whole thing just sat there. It didn't grab Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde him the way Lord of the Flies and The Hobbit and Casino Royale and did.
No one would read this. No one would want to.
Blinking hard and biting his lip to keep the tears away, he tore each page off the legal pad, one by one, crumpled each up into a ball and tossed it into his wastebasket. Then he sneaked out to the kitchen, swiped the ice cream out of the freezer, and ate it straight out of the carton until he nearly got sick.
He spent much of the next day at school in a black mood and dealing with the stomach-rumbling aftershocks of an ice cream hangover. After school he was reluctant to go back home and see his wastebasket full of crumpled pages, so he made his way to the New York Public Library.
As always, the place felt like home. The quiet echoes, the murmuring voices, the golden afternoon sunlight slanting in through the windows, the smell of paper, the thud of the due date stamp that meant someone had found the book they wanted and would be taking it home. He'd always liked that last sound, but now it just made him feel like crying again. He still remembered, after reading Casino Royale that first time, his fervent wish to some day write a story even half that good. To have a librarian here stamp the due date on a book he'd written. To have one of his stories capture someone's imagination the way all so many books had captured his. To entertain them or scare them or cheer them up. To have someone say, as he had so many times: That was one hell of a story.
Of course. A story.
That's what was missing. All that writing he'd done was just description. And some of it was good, but it was like a car with no engine in it. It didn't go anywhere. There was no story. It was so obvious. After all, what would Lord of the Flies be if it was just descriptions of the island and the boys, with no story?
Could he figure out what the story was? Put an engine in that car and make it go? Hell yes he could.
Rick ignored the stares of the patrons and the librarian as he turned and ran out of the library as fast as he could.
X
Empty. The wastebasket was empty.
He sat down on the floor, too numb to even bother taking off his backpack. He should have known. His mother had an audition in a couple days, and sometimes when she got anxious, she did frantic bouts of housecleaning. All the apartment's wastebaskets were emptied, their contents long incinerated and polluting the skies of New York.
Gone, all of it. Oh, he might be able to re-create some of it, but he knew that some of it could never be captured again. The good and the bad, all ashes now.
Rick slung his backpack onto the floor and himself onto his bed. He wanted to sleep to forget what he'd lost, but the dreams, which had faded back this last week, might come back. He opted instead for staring at the ceiling, watching the afternoon light slowly wane.
"Hey kiddo. You awake?" His mother stood in the doorway of his bedroom, one hand resting on the door frame, the other holding a grocery bag.
"Hey Mom. Yeah, I'm up."
"Good. I have something for you." She held out the bag.
He took it, surprised at how light it was, and when he looked inside he saw the crumpled papers from his wastebasket. "How did…"
She smiled, looking quite pleased with herself. "There I was, getting ready to tip it in, when I saw all those balls of paper. I figured that either you were making origami boulders for school…"
He laughed, not only from relief but because origami boulders was pretty funny. He'd have to remember that for a story some day.
"…or you'd been up to something all those nights you've been cooped up in here." She cocked her head to one side and looked at him searchingly. "Why'd you throw them out?"
"I thought they weren't any good," he said.
She sat down beside him. "Maybe they weren't. Maybe some were. Maybe some can be made good with a little more time and practice. You've seen what I go through."
He had. The endless practicing, the auditions, the waiting for calls that sometimes brought good news, sometimes brought bad news, and sometimes never came at all.
"The thing is, no one gets it right the first time. Oh, maybe once in a while you get lucky right at the start, but that's lightning in a bottle. When you begin, a lot of it's going to be crap."
"Such language," he said in mock dismay.
She playfully thumped him on the head. "I've heard you say much worse when you're with your friends. But it's true, when you begin, most of it will be garbage. The important thing is to keep at it, find out what you do that's good, and keep doing it until you get to be great."
"You think I can?"
"You're my boy, how could you not?" she said.
"Did you read any of it?" he asked. He hoped she hadn't. Not because he feared what she'd say about his writing, but in case she asked about the murder and the mask and the woods. Maybe he could convince her it was just imagination…maybe. Rick suspected he hadn't been able to fool her nearly as often as he'd wished.
His mother shook her head. "When you're ready, you'll ask me to." She stood up. "I expect you want to be alone with your origami boulders. Can I bring you a sandwich in a little bit?"
He nodded happily. "Thanks, Mom."
She left, and he began uncrumpling the papers one by one, smoothing them out, reading over what he'd written. By the time she came back with the food, he was buried deep in words and images, asking himself, Where's the story?
And finding it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.