The pair of red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked in Eddie’s memory. He remembered the articles he’d read on the Internet about the curse. “People really think his monsters are real?” he said, clutching his book bag even tighter.
“Yeah,” said Harris. “Some people do. Like the animals people say they’ve seen in these woods. I’ve never seem them, but I’ve heard people say they look like the ones Nathaniel writes about. Everything that happens in this town gets blamed on him-and he’s not even here anymore. People stopped going to the movie theater on Main Street because of the things they said lived behind the screen. And the mills closed down after the owners kept finding huge gouges in their machinery. People said they looked like bite marks. And, of course, a small group of people blamed the New Mill Bridge collapse on Nathaniel’s trolls. After everything else, that one was pretty much inevitable. Lots of people left town when the mills closed. That sort of destroyed Gatesweed, so it makes sense that people need someone to blame, but still…”
“What about the symbol on the statue?” said Eddie. “Do you know what that means? I read something about the Greek letter pi, which looks almost exactly like the symbol carved here.” He pointed at the girl.
“Right… from math class,” said Harris. “Maybe. We could look into it, but I’m not very good at that subject. And I don’t know a thing about Greek. What I do know is that the book you found is important. I was so happy when I saw you in school today… that you weren’t just an Olmstead hunter, chased away by old Wally the Weasel. That’s what my mom calls him,” said Harris, with a smirk. “I was thinking about your book all night. The code has to mean something. The symbol on the statue is the connection. I brought you here so that you’d understand… The secret of the book in your bag isn’t just about a code. It’s about this place, this statue. It might be about Nathaniel Olmstead himself. Who knows… maybe if we solve it, we’ll find out what really happened to him. Maybe we can clear his name. Then people will leave my mom alone.”
“Yeah, totally!” said Eddie. “Nathaniel Olmstead would also probably give us his autograph or something… if he’s, you know… still alive.” As he said the words, he felt foolish, disrespectful-especially in this place, so close to where the man had lived. He wandered to the opposite side of the circle. “So you do think the book might have belonged to Nathaniel Olmstead?”
The land sloped down quickly. At the bottom where it leveled out, the hill was met by a lake, about thirty feet across. The trees on the other shore concealed a steep, rocky hillside that jutted high above the water. Through the thick foliage, the tree roots were visible clinging, almost clutching, at the cliffside. Near the water’s edge, several long, leafy branches hung down from the trees and dangled just above the calm surface, tickling their own reflections with stringy shadows.
“If not, at least it belonged to someone who knows about the Nameless Woods, the Nameless Lake,” said Harris, following Eddie across the clearing to the top of the slope, “and the symbol on the statue.”
“Which could be anyone in town,” said Eddie. “Right?” He picked up a pebble from the edge of the clearing before heading down the hill.
“Yeah,” said Harris, “but no matter who it belonged to in the past, now it’s up to us to figure it out.”
Eddie nodded, excited. Was Harris suggesting they work together? That they become friends? “Yeah,” he said as they neared the edge of the lake. “It’s up to us.”
“So how should we start?” said Harris.
At the shore, Eddie tossed the pebble. It bounced across the sky’s reflection, splashing several times before disappearing underneath the surface. “I’ve already taken the one code book out of the library,” said Eddie. “But it’s really confusing and not much help.” The raven called to them from the top of the hill near the statue, louder this time.
“Forget about it then,” said Harris. “I’m sure we can find some sort of pattern on our own.”
Eddie was about to take The Enigmatic Manuscript out of his bag so they could get started, when near the far shore, the calm surface of the water suddenly rippled, as if something large had risen from below. The raven at the top of the hill took off for the sky. Wide-eyed, the boys looked at each other.
“I think the sun’s starting to go down,” said Harris, stepping away from the shore.
“Did you see that?” said Eddie. Small waves disturbed the water at the center of the lake. Eddie stepped forward, trying to peer through the blue sky’s opaque reflection. He could see a dark shape shifting and squirming in the hazy depths fifteen feet from the shore. The shape reminded Eddie of a fast-moving storm cloud, swirling and rolling in upon itself as it grew stronger. The forest behind him was suddenly quiet, as if all its inhabitants did not want to be heard. From where he stood, Eddie could see the dark cloudy shape rise to the surface of the water from below, creating a black spot nearly five feet in diameter. The edges of the black spot seemed to pulsate and roil, spreading its wide fingers out across the top of the lake like a fist slowly opening. “Is it an oil slick?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Harris, staring at the spot intently as it continued to grow. Now it had doubled in size. It floated in stark contrast to the sky’s blue reflection, turning the water black as it spread outward.
“It’s coming up from the bottom of the lake.” Eddie leaned forward. “Like a geyser.” He was frightened, yet at the same time, he was curious. “Or maybe not. I can’t really tell.” He’d never seen anything like this before. After Harris’s spooky stories about the woods and the town, he felt compelled to run away, but he also wanted to stay to see what would happen as the black shape grew and grew. This almost seemed like something that would happen in a Nathaniel Olmstead book, but, of course, Eddie told himself, those stories were not real, in spite of what people believed.
Now the dark shape in the middle of the lake was as large as a small island, taking up almost all of the water’s surface. The blue reflection from above had been replaced by darkness from below, as if someone had covered the sky with a blanket; yet, when Eddie looked up, he could see the sun still shining somewhere beyond the canopy of trees near the horizon. Even so, the afternoon light barely broke through the tree-tops. Then Eddie noticed something even weirder. In the water, there began to appear little white specks of light, which wavered as the surface rippled slightly. Eddie was reminded of a book he’d read about phosphorescent algae. He also remembered reading about a type of shrimp capable of producing a small amount of light, like a firefly. But these specks of light didn’t look like algae or shrimp or fireflies. They appeared to be something else-something familiar that Eddie couldn’t quite name.
“Are those… stars?” whispered Harris.
The darkness reached the shore, so that now, except for the specks of light, the entire lake had turned black. The water did not merely look dirty-but impenetrable and infinite. Eddie cautiously leaned forward even farther. “You’re right,” he said. “It almost looks like… a reflection of the night sky.” He glanced up at the cirrus clouds wisping in the afternoon light, then shook his head, baffled. He bent down and picked up another pebble from the edge of the water. He was about to toss it in to see what would happen, when Harris grabbed his arm.
“Don’t,” said Harris. “Look.”
The specks of white had turned red. Eddie realized they no longer looked like the reflection of stars from above. Now the lights were clearly floating just below the water, close enough for Eddie to reach out and touch. The sight was almost hypnotic. Eddie began to feel dizzy. Suddenly, he knew what would happen next. He’d read about it in one of Nathaniel Olmstead’s books on Saturday night.