Page 84 of The Reformatory

“I tried to tell you, didn’t I?” Blue said. “Haddock’s the worst of the worst. And now you doin’ just like he said, so that makes you the worst of the worst too.”

“Leave me alone,” Robert whispered.

“That was real dumb, making it look so easy,” Blue said. “All you had to say was ‘Oh, the ghost was here, not there.’ Played him along. But I guess you wanted to look good, huh? Lick Boone’s shoes. Now it’s gonna look way worse when you can’t find no more. He’s prolly gonna send you to the Funhouse pretty quick.”

“I know where there’s plenty more,” Robert said. He didn’t want to say it—he knew Blue was right—but he didn’t want any haint to have power over him.

Blue leaned over then, his neck impossibly long as he forced himself into Robert’s view.

Blue’s face waved in front of him like a snake’s head at an impossible angle, and Robert squeezed his eyes shut to try to keep from fainting.

“Go away.”

Hadn’t Blue told him he only had to tell a haint to leave him be? Had that been a lie? “You scared?” Blue was closer than ever. If Robert had opened his eyes, he might see Blue’s eyes staring right back at him. The sooty smell was stronger now.

“Shut up ’fore I call Boone on you too.” Robert could only manage a whisper.

Robert heard a CLANG so loud that he almost fell out of his bed. Two boys near him stirred in their sleep but they didn’t wake. He wondered why everyone didn’t sit up, but then he realized no one else had heard it. Just him. Blue had made the noise somehow, tweaking Robert’s nerve endings just enough to make his eardrums vibrate inside. What else could he do?

“Okay, stop,” Robert said, his eyes still squeezed shut. “Sorry, sorry. I won’t tell Boone.”

“You sure are dumb,” Blue said, as if Robert’s dumbness were as big and vast as the night sky. Admiring it, almost. “Not the dumbest I’ve ever seen, but pretty damn dumb. And I’ve been here thirty years. Thirty-one, really. You know what we call y’all? ‘Thumpers.’ ’Cause we hear those heartbeats goin’ boom boom, boom boom. Like yours right now.” He laughed.

Robert opened one eye just a little, and he saw Blue’s teeth in the moonlight hardly an inch from his face as he laughed. Those teeth looked too white, and sharp like a wolf’s fangs, but maybe he imagined the pointy tips. Haints weren’t like Count Dracula, were they? He squeezed his eyes shut again. When he opened his eyes, Blue’s teeth didn’t look like fangs anymore. They were only baby teeth. He looked younger all the time.

“You got a problem now, all right,” Blue said. “You gave ’em a taste, but they can’t have no more. Clint’s the only taste they get. You could live the whole rest of your life and never make up for what you did to Clint. Not in a hundred years. You might go to hell already.”

Robert smothered a sob into his pillow. Part of his anguish was feeling sorry about Clint, especially now that the haint had a name, but mostly he was scared of the Funhouse. And, more distantly, he was afraid of the hell he’d heard Pastor Jenkins talk about from the pulpit.

“Have you seen hell?” Robert heard himself ask.

The CLANG assaulted the inside of Robert’s ear again, burning where he couldn’t touch it. “What you think? Dang, you’re dumb. Did he show you his photos of the fire? I bet he did. He’s so proud of it. You think that wasn’t hell? Burning alive?”

“Was Clint… in the fire?”

“Shut up,” Blue said, hissing soot into his face. “You don’t get to ask about Clint. We ain’t none of your business. Don’t you say his name again. Do it. I dare you.”

Tiny drops of pee escaped between Robert’s thighs, but he clamped his bladder tight before he could wet his bed. He held his breath, but he couldn’t quiet the thump-thump in his chest he was sure Blue could hear. Each heartbeat seemed to shake the world.

“Since you’re so dumb, I’ll put it like you can understand,” Blue said. “If you tell Boone where to put down any more of his poison dust—you so much as point in my direction or anyone else—I’ll make sure your mama gets trapped too. I’ll call her right to the spot.”

“No—” Robert said, too loudly, sitting up in bed.

A boy across the room shushed him with an angry Shhhhhhhh, but Robert was the only one in the dorm sitting up in the rows of beds. Blue wasn’t sitting on his bed’s thin brass headboard—of course not; he was floating above it, legs still crossed like he was at a campfire.

“You heard me,” Blue said, bobbing as he floated, “and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. She follows you around—but you know that, don’t you? You can feel her, can’t you?”

Robert felt himself nodding his head.

“She don’t belong here,” Blue said. “She ain’t like us: she didn’t die here. That’s why you can’t see her like you see me. She’s just fighting to be here, trying to look after your dumb ass instead of moving on like she should. She smells sweet as cream—nothing evil ’bout how she went. Bet she went with all of y’all around her saying ‘Oh, Mama, how we love you so much,’ didn’t she? Holding hands and singing songs. It would be a mighty shame, wouldn’t it, if she got caught in a trap that wasn’t meant for her? If your mama was in Haddock’s jar too?”

Robert nodded again. Tears flooded his face. Blue’s mockery of Mama’s dying was unbearable. “Please don’t,” he whispered. “Please.”

Blue grinned, still nothing but baby teeth. How had he ever thought Blue was the same age as Redbone? Blue had been only seven or eight when he died, nowhere near twelve like him.

“ ‘Please, please,’ ” Blue said, mimicking him behind his smile. “You’re no haint catcher now, are you? Now the haint’s caught you.”

Robert breathed faster, trying not to sob too loudly, his throat afire with grief and dread.