Trevor stopped buzzing long enough for me to make out what the thing was saying. I leaned back in my chair, tilting my head toward the open window.

Cooper, it rasped. Then it gained in volume, clarity. It had my attention now and wasn't letting go. Come back. We have unfinished business, you and I.

It had found me again.

Not so impossible, considering it had found me in my bedroom.

Found me in school.

But this, this was different. This was Megan's house. This was taking it beyond personal and bringing the battle to someone I cared about. I didn't know what to do. Should I run? Should I warn her?

I looked down at the table, sure I'd see some of that green web crawling over the linens, taking the twins' heads and melding them together, smushing them into one green ma.s.s, but no, it wasn't there.

I swallowed hard. Mrs. Garrett laid a slice of pie before me, but my appet.i.te had run off to China. In its place was the smell of the well, the claustrophobic feeling of being there again. I could taste it in my mouth, feel the rocks against my back, the slime on my hands. I jerked away from the table, releasing Megan's hand.

It wasn't here now. But that didn't mean it wouldn't be. Soon.

"I a I have to go."

"But you haven't had dessert," Mrs. Garrett said.

"Thanks, but, ah, I'm full. Way full." I backed up until I hit the sideboard so hard that the dishes rattled. The corner of the furniture piece rammed into my back, a sharp poke that felt real and solid. I slid along the edge, needing that sense of reality to help me get out of the room. My heart hammered in my chest loud enough that I was sure everyone heard it. Sure the thing could hear it, track every beat like sonar.

"Buzz, buzz, buzz," Trevor called, laughing. "He's scared of my b.u.mblebee!"

The Garretts stared at me as though I were an escaped lunatic. Elise gave me the evil eye. Mr. Garrett frowned. He'd always thought Megan could do better, like find a b.u.m on the street corner better. He shook his head, as if he wished he'd never wasted two bucks' worth of roast beef on my stomach, and watched me leave.

Megan rose, too, and followed me out of the dining room and down the hall toward the entryway. "What the h.e.l.l was that about?"

"Megan, I have to leave." I reached for the door. The growling scream increased in volume in my head, pounding out my name like a drum, over and over again, increasing waves of taunting.

Cooper, Cooper, Cooper.

Then it began to laugh. As though it could see everything I was doing. Could feel how scared I was and thought it was funny as h.e.l.l.

What was I going to do? Where was I going to go?

Nowhere was safe.

My chest tightened. My legs threatened to go out from beneath me.

The truth hit me in the solar plexus like a UFC fighter. If I didn't kill it, this would never stop, not until I was dead.

"Cooper." Megan grabbed my arm. "You're white as a sheet and you're acting totally psychotic. You're freaking me out."

Cooper, you're freaking her out, the thing echoed, higher pitched, mocking Megan. If you come back here, I'll show you something really freaky.

"You're freaked out?" I leaned closer to her and lowered my voice, watching the hallway to be sure none of the Garretts stumbled upon us. "I'm the one whose mother is a raving psycho every other hour. I'm the one who has this thing that's trying to find me. It's friggin' screaming in my ear right now, Megan. I know that sounds crazy, because I'm, what, three miles away from my house? But I can hear it. I don't know how, but I can. And somehow, it has my mother wrapped around its claws or whatever the h.e.l.l it has, and she wants to throw me down the well so this thing can have me for dinner. So don't talk to me about freaking out because I am as freaked out as it gets."

She blinked. "You're serious, aren't you?"

I threw up my hands. "What did I just tell you out on the stoop? Do you think I'd make up something like this for chuckles?"

"Well a yeah. You've pulled some pretty big pranks before."

"This is not like gluing Mr. Spinale's a.s.s to his seat in science cla.s.s! This is bigtime scary c.r.a.p." I ran a hand through my hair and drew in a breath that shook. I needed to get a grip. "Listen. I need help. And you are the smartest person I know besides Faulkner. But I can't ask him to get involved because a"

Megan's gaze met mine, and in that knowledge of someone who has known me since kindergarten, she finished the sentence. "Because he doesn't believe you and trying to convince him would take more time than you have."

"Yeah." In that moment, I think I loved Megan. For understanding me. For knowing me. But I couldn't think about that, because I knew if I lost my focus for one second, like I had over the past week, I'd end up in the woods again. And next time, I'd end up in the well instead of beside it.

"Well, I believe you." Megan leaned forward and wrapped me in a hug that smelled like cocoa b.u.t.ter and felt like Christmas. She held tightly for a long time, then let me go. "Give me ten minutes, and then meet me at the playground."

Our old place. My Megan.

Suddenly I could breathe again.

I nodded. Then I left, hoping I hadn't just made the biggest mistake of my life by tangling her in this mess, too.

"Do you have a plan?" Megan asked.

I'd paced for the ten minutes it had taken Megan to reach the playground across the street from my old house, the small white Cape my family had lived in for years, while my parents' marriage had seemed perfect. The two of them reading novels by a crackling fire every night, one of those scenes you'd seen in a freakin' Rockwell painting. Then on D-Day, my mother walked in, dropped the divorce bomb, and moved out.

A week later, she had moved in with Sam. Faulkner and I had never understood it. My father had never seen it coming. Sometimes I walked by this house and wondered what had gone wrong. What detour all of us had missed. I guess I was directionally challenged, because I never found it.

I turned away from the house. "Not really," I told Megan. "It's kinda hard to make a plan, considering I haven't actually seen the thing that's after me. Only a felt it."

"Okay. " The disbelief was back in her voice. The kind that said I belonged on the closest crazy couch. "So you want me to help you wipe out some unseen creature in a well that you think is trying to murder you? A creature that is working with your mother. A woman I have met, by the way, and who made me cookies when I won the sixth grade spelling bee."

"She's not who, or what, you think." But even as I said the words, they sounded insane. It was broad daylight on a Sunday. All around us, parents were hanging with their kids. Tossing Frisbees, walking dogs, throwing b.a.l.l.s. Normal to the nth degree.

Megan paced a few steps away, then back to me. "Why would she do that? She's your mother, Coop."

"I don't know." I sat down in the center of the seesaw. "I don't know."

Megan slid down beside me, her arm draped across my back. She put her head on my shoulder and sat there a long time, quiet. This was what I liked most about her. How she could just be there, be with me. "What happened?"

I didn't say anything for a second. Just breathed in the scent of her shampoo. Clean. Innocent. A world away from my world.

I told her about how things had started to go wrong almost two years ago. About the pool and how my mother had held my head under too long during a game of Marco Polo. About the time she'd backed the car up when I was on my bike, hitting the gas hard and slamming into the front tire of my ten-speed, knocking me to the concrete. And then about my mother telling me that Whipple had gotten lost and how she had convinced me to go into the woods with her to "look for the dog."

Really only taking me back there so she could upend me like a c.o.ke can she was going to recycle and throw me into the well. And then about the other night and her dragging me through the woods for a return visit to the bottom of the well, except I had gotten away.

When I had finished my confession Megan stared at me, her chin on her chest. "Oh my G.o.d, Cooper." She shook her head. "Oh my G.o.d."

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been thinking."

"Did you tell Joey? Mike?"

"Come on, Megan. Do you really see Joey or Mike taking me seriously? Doing anything that would help? If anything, they'd get drunk, pop some popcorn, and sell front-row seats to the execution. And they'd play bookie on who would win." I walked away, heading through the park. I gave one of the swings a push as I went, and it arced upward with a creak of protest.

I heard Megan curse behind me. She had to be royally p.i.s.sed at me to swear. It wasn't that Megan was perfect, just that she had this thing against swearing. She'd given it up for Lent one year and never picked up the habit again. It was one of the things I liked about her. She stuck to stuff. Unlike me, who had all the lasting power of a Paris Hilton relationship.

"Wait, Cooper." She did a light jog and caught up to me, grabbing my hand. "Why me? Tell me that and I'll help you."

I toed at the ground, disrupting a few stones and kicking them to the side. A few feet away from us, a family of four was heading home, the kids walking between the mom and dad. My stomach clenched, and I stared at the ground again instead of at Perfecto Family. "Because you're the only one I trust. Name another high school freshman who is going to believe there's some freakin' creature in a well telling my mother to throw me down there for its midnight snack?"

"You have a point. It is pretty unbelievable."

"Exactly. If I hadn't been down there myself, I wouldn't believe it." I looked away. Swallowed hard. "I think whatever this is that takes her over is getting stronger." Friday night reared its ugly head in my mind. "I can see it in her eyes. I can feel it in the way she looks at me, hear it in the way she talks. And in the way the thing talks to me."

"It talks to you? Like, with real words?" Megan stared at me incredulously, as if this was all still too much. "What's happening, Cooper?"

The air between us stilled. The breeze froze. Leaves stopped rustling. Birds held their chatter.

And then laughter started, but it wasn't coming from anyone in the park, but from far away, far across town.

The whisper of my name carried on a slight breeze. I felt the creature reaching for me, like fingers dancing up my spine. It was coming for me. Again.

"We have to move." I yanked Megan away from the swing set and started to run.

"What is it? Tell me, Cooper. This is weird, really, really weird."

"It's looking for me again." I ran out of the park, Megan keeping up easily because she did spring track. We circled past the elementary school, down Larch Street and over to Hill. I charged down that street, down another, a third, a fourth, running until my lungs hurt and my stomach ached and I was bent over, gasping for air, looking at Megan's face beaded with sweat. And still I could hear it in the back of my head. "I can't get away from it. I have to get in a car or on a plane or on the freakin' s.p.a.ce shuttle."

"Or a" Megan paused. "Kill it."

I looked at her and decided I did love Megan. I leaned over, and without hesitating-h.e.l.l, why bother hesitating with anything anymore, especially after all this?-I kissed her, not caring that both of us were sweaty and still catching our breath, that we were supposed to be over, that she had made it pretty clear that she hated me, that I had broken up with her because I thought it would be better for her. Safer.

I just grabbed her and kissed her. She tasted of chocolate and goodness and made my heart sing, my head swim. I pulled back after a moment, feeling right then as if I could float all the way to the moon. "Thank you."

"For what?" A blush filled her cheeks, that smile I loved square on her lips.

"For believing me." I put an arm around her, then turned back in the direction where my old house lay, where everything used to be normal. Megan and I stood there watching the sun set, not saying anything for a long time.

But I couldn't avoid the real world forever, and the truth knocked at my brain, moving the rest aside. "And for being here," I added, giving her shoulder a squeeze, thinking it might be the last chance I got for a long time. "I need all the help I can get right now."

I had no real weapons. It wasn't as if I could walk into a store or go to a street corner and buy a gun. I came from white-bread America, a small town in the middle of Maine, not war-zone Detroit. Guns weren't exactly lying around and gun dealers didn't hang out on the corner of Larkspur and Bayberry.

Not to mention I had exactly twenty-seven dollars in my pocket. Enough to buy a really cool water pistol. Whoo. That'd really scare the monster.

"Okay, so you don't have a gun. You do have a knife," Megan said, pulling out the long, skinny knife I'd managed to swipe from my mother's kitchen before I met up with Megan. Three nights ago, she'd used it to make lemon chicken for dinner. Now it had turned into a weapon. One I might have to use against her. But I couldn't think about that.

No matter how bad things got, she was still my mother.

But what if things did get that bad? What if I was in the woods with her again and this time couldn't get away? Could I use the knife? Could I stab her?

I didn't know. And honest to G.o.d, I didn't want to know.

Instead, I focused on the task at hand. "I also brought along some rope. And pepper spray. StepScrooge Sam gave it to my mother for when she goes into the city to go to the mall. On the, like, once-a-year occasion she goes by herself." I rolled my eyes. "Whatever. Like Maine is riding the crime wave."

Megan paced the living room in the abandoned house we'd holed up in, the same one I'd stayed at that first night. It had been quiet that night-a seriously freaked-out quiet, but quiet all the same in my head-so I figured this place was safe.

"Is it talking to you now?" Megan asked.

"Nah. For some reason, there's nothing from the monster when I'm here."

"Did you know the old lady that lived here?"

I shook my head.

"Her family used to live on your property, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"At the vineyard. My mom told me about it. The old lady that lived here used to do tailoring and stuff for my mom. And she said her family used to live at the vineyard. Like, her great-great-great-aunt or something grew up there."

"Huh. Small world."

"Yeah." Megan crossed to the piano that sat against the wall, so old that it looked about ready to cave in. She ran a finger over the keys, and they let out a screech of notes. She thumbed through the music on the stand. "There are names here. One of them is the old lady's. Beatrice."

"Nice name. If we have kids, we'll name our kid that."

She shot me a glare. About the kids thing or the name, I wasn't sure. I gave her a grin, to show her I was kidding.

"Here's a Victoria and a"-she moved closer to read the faded writing on the last one-"Amelia."

"Can we get back to the plan?" I said, my nerves pinging like a pinball machine.

"Sorry. What is the plan?" Megan tied her hair back in a red bandanna, looking sort of like a samurai getting ready for a battle.

"You lower me into the well. I stab it. Happy ending." I doubted it would go that smoothly. But I couldn't keep running.

This thing-whatever the h.e.l.l it was-was going to follow me and find me. If it didn't climb out of the well itself and I had a feeling it was going to at some point-it would send its skinny green soldiers to drag me back down, and one of these days, there wouldn't be a Faulkner waiting at the top to pull me out. Or a Megan.

I'd die in the well. And that wasn't the way my future was supposed to go. Not if I had anything to do about it.

"I don't know, Cooper." Megan chewed on her fingernail. "What if I'm not strong enough to pull you back out?"

"You wrap the rope around a tree and use that for leverage. You can do it, Megan." My voice sounded a lot braver than I felt, though.

For a second, I hated myself for dragging her into this. I should have gotten someone else, like Joey or Mike, even if they were idiots. I cared too much about Megan to have her get hurt. But there was no going back now.

What choice did I have? If I called Joey, he'd just laugh his head off. Knowing him, he'd let go of the rope and leave me down there for an hour just to have something to jabber about in gym the next day.

Megan and I might be over, but she was the only one I trusted to hold on and hold tight. She looked at me, her face a strong but determined shade of pale. "You ready?"

"Yeah." I managed not to sound like a weenie when I said it, but as we walked the couple of miles back to my house and into the woods, my legs turned to jelly and I wanted to p.i.s.s my pants and run like h.e.l.l.