I remember it was late Summer. The grass had started to yellow, already, and the birds were twittering with the sad, going-South, sense of vacationers packing up in a hotel room. Bill and Mike suggested skipping the first day of school, and I went along because I never learned anything anyway.

It was when we got to the cave put in the mountain that we first felt a bit nervous. We’d walked up through the forest, dodging the cat-sized horseflies and horse-sized pumas. Later, when I grown a bit and moved, I realized my hometown was kind of different, but when you’re a kid you take things as they are.

Anyway, that cave was forbidden. Everybody in town had stories of some dumb kid or brave young fool who’d gone up there and never’d been heard from again. So of course that was where we headed.

It was dark, and dank, and damp and a whole bunch of other things. The bones piled neatly just inside the entrance was our first clue that maybe things weren’t just stories and moonshine after all. We looked at the bones and Mike kept saying the skull looked just like that of Mr. Thompson, the History teach back at school, but Bill and I said he must’ve been drinking his daddy’s liquor that morning, because we’d both seen Mr. Thompson in town just yesterday, heading down Main Road with a spring in his step and heading suspiciously down the road to where Miss Bonnette lived. Which was no-one’s business really, but it was a small town.

Anyhow, the skull’d been a skull for much more than a day, because it had that bleached-out kind of look like the cattle skulls the Mr. Higgard used to line his driveway. Which, come to think of it, was kind of a weird way to decorate your property, yeah, now I think about it. But for some reason Bill was not to be dissuaded from his conviction. He grabbed the skull and raised it up and held it with one hand while he swung the jawbone with the other hand and did a passable imitation of Mr. Thompson talking about the impoooortins o’ th’ seevil wahr. Me and Mike started doubling over laughing, but stopped right quick when we both felt, like, this real cold wind coming from inside the cave and blowing over us.

So of course we turned on our flashlamps and then spent a good five minutes or so arguing about which of us oughta go first, because Bill lost the first time but said everyone knows rock, paper, scissors is a best of three game. So then Mike lost, but he said well if it’s best of three why not best of five? And so anyway, it took five minutes, and ended up me going first.

Which actually, I didn’t mind, because I was thinking about Suzy Bentson and how I was going to tell her later that week about how I’d bravely led our little troop into the belly of the beast, the very den of the monster, and…

Well, that was where my imagination kind of failed me. I didn’t know what’d put them bones there, and without some sort of image, like, I was having a hard time imagining what the horrible beast that lived there looked like. Did it have long arms with hooks on ‘em, sort of like Mr. Billing the Butcher looked when he was swinging around those big slabs in the cold freeze back of his shop? Or did it have just this huge mouth with razor sharp teeth like the big saber-tooth that’d been the only thing worth seeing that trip to Capital when we done that field trip that time? Or maybe it was some sort of vampire-looking man-thing. In which case I didn’t really know what to do, because if there’s one thing everybody knew in our town thanks to the gypsy come up from New Orleans told us, it’s that vampires don’t like garlic, and we didn’t have any of it with us. But I was young and strong and figured no matter what the beast monster looked like I’d just swing as hard at it as I swung at Jimmy Kinner that time he talked about my Momma and down the thing’d go.

The further down the cave we went, the danker and damper it got, until we were wading through water up to our ankles.

The first ice leech was a small ‘un. Maybe just a foot or so. It got Bill, and Mike and me laughed when he started thrashing around and trying to jump up out of the water, running with this limp because, man I tell you, them leeches are heavy, and they just don’t let go. Then both Mike and me got hit, and we started scrambling back the way we came, Mike with two leeches on one ankle, me with just one.

Anyway, we got back up the way to where the cave sloped away from the water, and we all started swinging down with our flashlamps just about hard as we could. Then we sat there panting for a bit, looking at the smashed up leeches and giving them a good hard swing if they twitched. Or even if they didn’t. None of us had a wristwatch, but we all felt like the day was getting on. Mike started whining about how he needed to get back to supper because he wanted to take Bettie to the pictures and his Momma’d find all kinds of chores for him to do if he was late. Me and Bill were kind of tired and wanted to go home too by now, so we were real grateful to Mike for giving us an excuse to talk about what a sissy momma’s boy he was for a good ten minutes before we reluctantly, and with a whole lot of sighing, agreed to call it a day.

It was only later in the week that we found out the beast’d been caught. Turns out Mr. Thompson was a for real shape-shifter type thing, and he’d killed his secret twin brother, which was the skull we’d found, and that he’d eaten poor Miz Bonnette instead of taking her out to the point like everybody’d thought. But I didn’t really care about none of that, and got bored quick when people wanted to talk about it over recess, because Suzy Bentson’d just agreed to go out that Friday. With me.