Dearly Departing by Geoff North (book reader for pc txt) 📕

try and keep up with. He rolled beneath the wire and helped her back up along the way.

He rested the palm of his hand gently across her lightly freckled forehead. “Does it sting?”

Her eyes were red and watery but not a single tear had spilled over. “A little.”

Raymond had the urge to turn around and take his sister back to the empty swings. To heck with his older brothers. Let them sit out on the rocks by the stinking water until they drop dead of boredom. Or at least long enough until they got it through their skulls that he and Alicia weren’t playing by their stupid rules anymore.

“They went to hide by the old slough, didn’t they?” Alicia said.

“I figure.”

“We’re not supposed to go there.”

“Nope.”

“Bruce and David will call us chicken-shits if we don’t.”

“Don’t swear.”

Alicia started into the wheat where she’d spotted the narrow, flattened trail her bullying brothers had squashed down a few minutes earlier. She called back over her shoulder. “When the game’s over I’m gonna tell Mom and Dad that Bruce smacked me on the head with a stick. Then I’m gonna tell ‘em David chased us all the way to the slough.”

Raymond grinned at the thought of it. David and Bruce could whine their side of the story until they were blue in the face. It would do them no good. Alicia could cast a spell over her parents as easily as the one she usually had Raymond wrapped within. He chased after her, laughing out loud. Let David and Bruce play by their rules. Alicia would win this game all on her own in the end.

“Be careful,” Raymond warned as they emerged from the tall stalks onto a flat track of worked grey soil at the field’s edge. Twenty feet beyond the dirt was a patch of wild grass encircling a wall of discarded stones. “Don’t climb on the rocks without me.”

The little girl plugged her nostrils between a thumb and forefinger. “Stinks,” she said, taking Raymond’s hand with her free one.

They climbed up onto the rocks and picked a particularly large one to sit on. The water spread out below them dark green, a hundred feet wide, and fifty across. The far side wasn’t littered with field-picked stones. There the surrounding forest grew in with steep banks of brown, mossy grass. It wasn’t much of a wonder why their parents didn’t want them down here on their own. It was a neat place to visit, but the danger of falling into the water without any easy way back out was obvious.

“Stinks,” Alicia repeated. “Real bad.”

Raymond nodded. The smell was exceptionally rank that afternoon. The hot summer sun was cooking the crud clinging closer at the water’s surface. A warm breeze was drifting in from the west, pushing the smell directly into their faces. It reeked like something dead in the air.

“We know you’re out here!” Alicia shouted.

Raymond waited a few seconds before calling out. “Better show us your hiding spot or we’ll tell Mom and Dad where you took us!”

A stinking breeze off the water was their only reply.

“They think they’re being funny,” Alicia whispered. “They think I’m gonna get scared and start crying.”

“You’re not going to?”

“Heck no.” She picked up a smooth white stone at her feet and threw it into the water. It made a satisfying galooping noise and sank out of view. “I can sit here all day if I have to.”

Raymond didn’t feel the same level of determination as his sister. The stench wafting up from the rippling slough had gotten worse. They sat for a few more minutes that way, both holding their noses shut and breathing lightly between their lips.

“Do rocks float?” Alicia finally asked.

“Of course not. Why would you ask something like that?”

She pointed down to a spot near the water where some of the stones were partially submerged. Raymond could see half a dozen more sunk completely underneath, varying in dull shades of grey, brown, and yellowish-green.

“That one’s floating, see?” Alicia climbed down from their rocky perch until she was almost level with the water’s surface. “I been watching it.” She pointed at the top half of a blackish-grey orb approximately six inches wide. “Watch what happens when the wind picks up, it’ll start moving.”

Raymond moved down and grabbed his sister’s shoulder to steady himself. A rock under his left foot shifted. It scraped along the stone in front of it and Raymond started teetering. His arms twirled in the air as he tried to regain his balance. The action created a small cascade of stones rolling into the water.

“There!” Alicia said. “You see that? It’s floating!”

Both of Raymond’s hands were on her shoulders now. The two swayed back and forth a few seconds longer, steadying themselves. Raymond saw what Alicia was talking about when the water began to settle. The blackish-grey stone was floating. It was spinning very slowly in a counter-clockwise motion. The stink in the air had gotten a little worse.

Something was poking out from the side of it. Raymond clung to Alicia’s shoulders harder and craned his head over her for a better look. He thought at first that a twig was stuck to the object. It was coated in rotting grey slime. The thing turned further, revealing more.

Fingers, he thought. No… Claws. Tiny sharp claw fingers.

That wasn’t a branch stuck to the side. It was a tail. Alicia had begun to realize what the floating stone was as well. She took two more tentative steps towards it, until her shoes were on the last slime-covered stones still above water. Raymond tried warning her to move back, but his mouth had gone all dry inside. He didn’t see his brothers sneaking up behind them until it was too late.

The next three seconds of events unravelled before his