Joseph Bruchac Read online

  Joseph Bruchac

  The Dark Pond

  Illustrations by Sally Wern Comport

  TO ALL MY NEPHEWS:

  STAY GENTLE, STAY STRONG

  —J.B.

  Contents

  Prologue It’s Out There

  1 Feeling Things

  2 The Dark Pond

  3 The Fox

  4 The Dream

  5 Creeped Out

  6 Research

  7 Watching

  8 The Scream

  9 Fire

  10 Handouts

  11 Hiding Out

  12 Night Walk

  13 Sabattis

  14 Worms

  15 The Break

  16 The Cliff

  17 The Letter

  About the Author

  Other Books by Joseph Bruchac

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  prologue

  IT’S OUT THERE

  IT’S OUT THERE. I can’t see the dark pond from the window of my dorm room. Its waters are too far back in the woods, four ridges away along the trails that no one else is stupid enough to follow. But all I have to do to see that place in my mind is close my eyes—just as I used to when my mother told me those old Shawnee tales of hidden monsters. I used to think that nothing was as scary as my mother’s stories.

  It’s waiting there. There in the pond. I don’t know what it looks like. I try to see it in my imagination, a huge swirling shadow under the murky surface of the hemlock-brown water. Is it like the two-headed snake in my ancestors’ stories that the foolish little boy rescued and cared for, the snake that grew into a giant serpent and began eating all the people? Or is it like those long-armed things with hair all over their bodies that used to hide in the springs where people got their drinking water? If anyone looked down into the deep, clear water of those springs they would see something white glittering on the bottom. They would lean closer to try to make out what those piles of white things were. And when they realized they were piles of human bones picked clean of flesh it would be too late. The long arms of those underwater monsters would grab them and pull them under.

  Somehow, though—don’t ask me how—I know it’s not one of them, not a two-headed snake or a hairy long-armed aquatic carnivore. But even though I don’t know what it is for sure, even though all I have is a feeling of something big moving under the surface, I know it’s just as dangerous as one of those ancient monsters.

  I also know that even though it seems that most people don’t like me much, even though I don’t have any real friends, it likes me. It likes me so much it wants to eat me. I can feel it.

  1

  FEELING THINGS

  FEELING THINGS. That is one of the gifts I got from my mother, being able to feel things that other people don’t. Spooky, isn’t it? That is how most other kids see it. And me. Spooky Armie. Ever since I was really little (which was a looong while ago) I’ve been teased because I was weird. It wasn’t just because I looked different, with my thick black hair and my brown skin. It was also because I said things that other kids thought were strange.

  In second grade I transferred to a new school. On my first day there I’d made it through the morning by just keeping my head down so I wouldn’t be noticed much, but then came recess. I was out on the playground when I felt that something was wrong. It was like I could hear a bunch of little voices calling for help. A group of kids were gathered in a circle at the edge of the soccer field. When I got closer I saw that they were dropping pebbles onto an anthill. I got in between them and the anthill and held up my hands.

  “You gotta stop,” I said.

  “Why?” the biggest kid asked me. He had red hair that stuck straight up. I think his name was Ray, but I’m not entirely sure. I was in three different schools that year, so all the kids who were bullies or made up clever new names for me kind of blend together in my memory.

  Anyhow, instead of saying nothing, which would have been the smartest move, I gave him an honest answer.

  “You gotta stop ’cause you’re hurting them. The ants are all upset. They’re really scared.”

  “How do you know that?” the red-haired kid said.

  “I can feel it,” I said.

  “Feel this, weirdo.”

  Then he pushed me. It ended up with me on the ground, crouched over the top of the anthill, while the other kids poked me and tried to pull me off. Finally a teacher came and broke it up. For the rest of the two months I was at that school the other kids called me Armie the Anteater.

  Weirdo. Geronimo. Spookie. Tonto. I won’t bore you with all the other nicknames I got over a parade of years and a succession of schools. It sort of changed when, as they say, I got my growth. That happened in sixth grade. Except I didn’t just get my growth, I got a good part of someone else’s, too. I’d always been stronger than I looked, which surprised some of the bullies who tried pushing me around. But now I was also bigger than I felt. Even though I was so much taller than any of the other kids and people stopped trying to push me around, it didn’t mean an end to the names they called me. They just called me names when they thought I couldn’t hear them. But most of the time I could.

  Of course there were times at a new school when some kids would try to buddy up to me—because I was so big. But I’d gotten so used to being the strange little geek the others pushed around that I just stayed inside myself. Like a kid inside a suit of armor built for a giant. Maybe I wanted friends, but I wasn’t going to let them know that. Sooner or later they’d look through the visor of that suit of armor, realize how weird I was, and decide they didn’t want me as a friend after all.

  People didn’t even have to make up names for me. My real name was strange enough. Armin. Armin Katchatorian. I can thank my father for that name, him and all our Armenian ancestors. I can also thank them for being built like a bull and for being endowed with just about as much stubbornness as your average buffalo. When something upsets me, my first impulse is to lower my head and charge. Smart, eh?

  A part of me knows just how dumb that kind of behavior is. That awareness of my own stupidity is also something I got from my mother.

  “Armin, I just know you’ll outgrow that headstrong nature, when wisdom comes to you.”

  So she says. She even said it when they sent me off to this school, with its “personalized counseling and healthful outdoor environment.” My mother believes that nature is healing. I pretty much agree with her. It is an Indian thing, I guess. Did I mention that my mom is Indian? As if being half Armenian wasn’t bad enough.

  We are Shawnee, the people of the South Wind. Another reason I just loved being sent to a school on the side of the coldest mountain this side of the North Pole. But I suppose it was appropriate. Of all the Indians in North America, it may be that us Shawnees got shoved around from place to place the most, even more than the Cherokees. All the way from the Yucatan peninsula to Florida to the Ohio Valley and then to Oklahoma, and every point in between.

  And if you know anything about Armenian history, you’ll realize that Mom and Dad were sort of meant for each other. Just like the Shawnees, there were lots of people who didn’t want the Armenians to have a country or a history—or a future.

  Like I was saying, the North Mountains School is so far north that the locals think the Fourth of July is a skiing holiday. It gets so cold that if you light a match, the flame freezes and you have to thaw it out to start a fire. In the winter the birds don’t dare sing early in the morning, because if they did their songs would freeze around their little beaks and they would suffocate.

  Funny, eh? But I can’t take credit. Those are all Devo’s remarks. I’m not that good at expressing myself. According to Grayson, self-expressio
n is one of the Top Ten Tasks I need to accomplish. Express yourself. Don’t keep it all bottled up inside you. Grayson’s my counselor here at NMS and is actually a pretty cool guy. Grayson is what we all call him. He says he prefers it.

  But I was talking about Devo, how he is always cracking people up with the clever things he says. He’s as quick with his mouth as I am with my stubbornness. Devo can make a joke out of anything. He suffers from an overabundance of wit, as Scoops, one of our teachers, put it.

  The first time I met Devo was when I bumped into him while we were in the orientation line.

  “Watch it, man,” he said, pulling his slender foot out from under my hoof. “Or I shall hit you so hard, your body will have to take a vacation to visit your head.”

  I looked at this guy. Built like a six-foot-tall pencil with a birdcrest of red hair on top of his dome.

  “You want a piece of me, chief?” he said, poking me in the shoulder with his chest. His breastbone was so sharp that I was lucky it didn’t cut me. By the tone of his voice and the look on his face, you could see he was a joker. Just playing around. Only an idiot would have taken him seriously and pushed him. Like I did.

  Maybe it was because his red hair reminded me of that kid from second grade. Or maybe it was that I was feeling exiled and angry and sorry for myself and pissed at the entire planet. It was only one little shove. I didn’t even draw my arm back to do it, but it flattened him.

  I like to watch boxing on TV, especially ESPN Classic when they show fights from decades ago. Like this one fight when Muhammad Ali took on the British heavyweight champion.

  Ali walks out and just about floors the guy with the first punch. But that doesn’t end it. The guy pops up again. Ali gives him this You still here? look. And pow! he flattens him a second time. Ka-boing. The guy is up almost before he hits the floor. It’s like he’s made of rubber. He is dancing around Ali, waving his fists like he’s the one who just scored a knockdown. Pow! Ka-boing. The guy is up again, Ali is just shaking his head. Pow! Ka-Boing. Pow! Ka-boing.

  Anyhow, that is the way Devo bounced back up to his feet when I first met him and swatted him like a skinny mosquito. Like the British heavyweight champion. But he didn’t raise his fists and dance around me. He just squinted his eyes and wiped a little blood from one nostril. Then he looked at me and said “Whah?” like I had just asked him a question in some strange language. Yeah, the language of stupid violent behavior.

  I felt ashamed. No one else seemed to have noticed it. Me shoving him, him falling down and popping up like a yo-yo. It happened fast and we were at the end of the line. But I knew it had happened.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Oh,” he replied, like I had just introduced myself. “Well, I am David Deveraugh the Third. However, if you ever call me that I shall have to kill you. My friends call me Devo.”

  He held out his long skinny hand and I shook it.

  “Armie,” I said. Then, surprising myself, I added, “Please don’t call me chief.”

  Devo nodded, looking like a crane when he did it. “Of course,” he replied. “Friends for life?”

  “Okay,” I said, surprising myself even more. But I meant it.

  But I have to go back now and explain something, don’t I? I just told you how I met my best friend after having said at the start that I don’t have any friends. Well, right now that is the way it has to be. I can’t have any friends. It’s too dangerous for anyone stupid enough to be my friend.

  Especially someone as brave as Devo. I wish I was as brave as he is. He has the kind of bravery where he would shove a friend out of the way of a car and get hit himself—making some funny remark while he was doing it so that you would be both laughing and crying when he got killed. There’s no way I could let that happen to him. So I haven’t told Devo anything about it.

  It’s out there. I can feel it. And I am not going to wait for it to come for me.

  2

  THE DARK POND

  THE FIRST TIME I saw the dark pond was on one of my walks. It being a woodsy school, the teachers encourage you to take walks on your own. You are supposed to stay on the trails, of course, not get too far away from the campus. But they tell everyone that it is part of the curriculum for students to just take off. Go out and commune with nature. Get in touch with the wild part of yourself, so to speak. As if I was ever out of touch with it.

  I guess that Grayson understands a little bit about how it is with me and nature, though. I have to give him credit for that. Part of the deal with this school is that every student gets a counselor, so I didn’t expect much. But Grayson surprised me. The first time I walked into his office he hit the nail on the head. He didn’t introduce himself, didn’t say hello or ask me to sit down. He didn’t look up at me wisely over some open folder full of information, compiled from all my former schools, about my antisocial behavior. He just nodded at me and said in this voice that sounded like a truck going over a gravel road, “So, it’s easier for you to make friends with animals than with people?”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  I kept my face expressionless, but I was impressed he had picked that up about me. I could feel myself letting down my guard with him. It was only later that I realized he had sort of cheated. That window he was standing next to when I came in looked out over the little stand of birch trees where I’d been sitting to wait for my appointment. He had probably seen me with those three pesky blue jays that had insisted on sitting on my shoulder and eating half of my darn granola bar.

  It was right after the anthill incident in second grade when the birds started to come to me. One day I was sitting at the round table behind our house. Dad had made that table from a wooden telephone-cable spool, painting it with polyurethane until the top was smooth as glass. I was trying to make a list of things that were good about myself. I was feeling so down after the way the other kids made fun of me that I needed to do something to make myself feel better. But it was hard to put even one thing on that list. Then I heard the flutter of wings. A robin landed right on the hand that was holding the pencil. It cocked its head and then I swear it nodded at me. It pecked at the sleeve of my favorite shirt. That shirt had been my favorite for so long that it had loose threads, and the robin pulled one loose. With that thread in its beak, it flew up to a cedar by the house.

  I put down my pencil and went to sit by the cedar tree. I sat there for a long time, watching the robin as it flew back and forth, bringing twigs and grass and pieces of string as it built a nest. My list was forgotten. I slept that night without even one bad dream.

  The next day, when I tried to pick up my list, it happened again. This time it was chickadees. Not one but three of them. They landed on my shoulders and my head. When I stood up they flew in a circle around me. I couldn’t stop smiling. I looked down at that piece of paper and wrote three words: “Birds like me.”

  Having told you that story, you might have the wrong idea about me. I am not an eco-freak. I am not a tree hugger. They make me sick. Tree huggers, I mean. Not trees. Trees are okay. But people who go out to worship nature, wilderness with no people in it, they just bug me. For one thing, nature isn’t some cute sweet little bunny. It’ll swallow you up if you don’t watch yourself. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful or sacred. It is. More than you know. And it’s not that I don’t get a thrill when a crow flaps down onto my arm or a chickadee lands on my head—though I have to admit it doesn’t thrill me when they start pulling out a hair or two for their nests. Orioles are the worst. They weave those hanging nests you see high up at the end of branches. So they like really long hair—like mine. They’ll just keep coming back for more unless you get firm with them. You have got to set some limits when birds take you for granted as a safe landing place. I don’t mean you shoo them away or anything. You just have to politely say, “Hey, stop that, you got enough.” You know what I mean?

  Anyhow, you just have to respect the natural world and remember that you’re p
art of it. We’re supposed to appreciate the forest, and a lot of times we’re supposed to be using the trees for food and shelter and firewood. Of course you thank them for all that. Thanking the trees, that just makes sense. Hugging them is what is sort of dumb. And there’s no such thing as wilderness, my mom always says. There’s just home. Although you got to remember, like I said before, that just because it’s home doesn’t mean the natural world is like totally safe. After all, as they say, most accidents happen in the home. Especially when you aren’t careful. And that’s how I was the first time I saw the pond. I was not careful.

  The ice hadn’t thawed yet, and so I thought it would be safe to walk across it. That was before I knew about the springs under the surface that made the ice thin in places you wouldn’t expect. Before I knew other things about the pond. It was drawing me in, you see. It was calling me. It knew I was there. It was waiting under the ice.

  That day, I was so glad to be outside and not hearing Grayson’s gravelly voice drone on about improving my social skills that I didn’t catch on to the fact that something was reeling me in.

  Armin, you just have to open up more to people. Just take it one little step at a time.

  Yeah. Unh-hunh.

  Now, though, in the woods, one step after another meant I was that much farther away from anyone who could give me useful life-skill advice and help me add another positive to my balance list.

  I was, of course, not anywhere near the marked trails or the school campus. I was maybe two miles into the woods and another mile over on the other side of the cedar swamp on state land. They were always warning the students not to go too far off the marked trails. Every year at least one or two people get lost up here. They eventually find some of them.