Imaginary Friends Read online

  Something warm and syrupy drifted through Jack’s body, starting at his eyes and working its way downward to his feet. He felt Pick stir.

  And suddenly Jack was flying, soaring high above the trees and telephone poles across the broad, green expanse of Sinnissippi Park. He sat astride an owl, a great brown-and-white feathered bird with wings that seemed to stretch on forever. Pick sat behind him, and amazingly they were the same size. Jack blinked in disbelief, then yelled in delight. The owl swooped lazily earthward, banking this way and that to catch the wind, but the motion did not disturb Jack. Indeed, he felt as if nothing could dislodge him from his perch.

  “This is how I get from place to place,” he heard Pick say, the tiny voice unruffled by the wind. “Daniel takes me. He’s a barn owl—a good one. We met sometime back. If I had to walk the park, it would take me weeks to get from one end to the other and I’d never get anything done!”

  “I like this!” Jack cried out joyously, laughed, and Pick laughed with him.

  They rode the wind on Daniel’s back for what seemed like hours, passing from Riverside Cemetery along the bluff face east to the houses of Woodlawn and back again. Jack saw everything with eyes that were wide with wonder and delight. There were gray and brown squirrels, birds of all kinds and colors, tiny mice and voles, opossums, and even a badger. There was a pair of deer in a thicket down along the riverbank, a fawn and its mother, slender and delicate, their stirrings barely visible against the trees. There were hoary old pines with their needled boughs interlaced like armor over secretive earthen floors, towering oaks and elms sticking out of the ground like massive spears, deep hollows and ravines that collected dried leaves and shadows, and inlets and streams filled with lily pads, frogs, and darting tiny fish.

  But there was more than that for a boy who could imagine. There were castles and forts behind every old log. There were railroads with steam engines racing over ancient wooden bridges where the streams grew too wide to ford. There were pirate dens and caves of treasures. There were wild ponies that ran faster than the wind and mountain cats as sleek as silk. Everywhere there was a new story, a different tale, a dream of an adventure longing to be embraced.

  And there were things of magic.

  “Down there, Jack Andrew—do you see it?” Pick called as they swung left across the stone bridge that spanned a split in the bluff where it dropped sharply downward to the Rock. “Look closely, Boy!”

  Jack looked, seeing the crablike shadow that clung to the underside of the bridge, flattened almost out of sight against the stone.

  “That’s Wartag the Troll!” Pick announced. “Every bridge seems to have at least one Troll in these parts, but Wartag is more trouble than most. If there’s a way to unbalance the magic, Wartag will find it. Much of my own work is spent in undoing his!”

  Daniel took them down close to the bridgehead, and Jack saw Wartag inch farther back into the shadows in an effort to hide. He was not entirely successful. Jack could still see the crooked body covered with patches of black hair and the mean-looking red eyes that glittered like bicycle reflectors.

  Daniel screamed and Wartag shrank away.

  “Wartag doesn’t care much for owls!” Pick said to Jack, then shouted something spiteful at the Troll before Daniel wheeled them away.

  They flew on to a part of the park they had not visited yet, a deep woods far back in the east central section where the sunlight seemed unable to penetrate and all was cloaked in shadow. Daniel took them down into the darkness, a sort of gray mistiness that was filled with silence and the smell of rotting wood. Pick pointed ahead, and Jack followed the line of his finger warily. There stood the biggest, shaggiest tree that he had ever seen, a monster with crooked limbs, splitting bark, and craggy bolls that seemed waiting to snare whatever came into its path. Nothing grew about it. All the other trees, all the brush and the grasses were cleared away.

  “What is it?” he asked Pick.

  Pick gave him a secretive look. “That, young Jack Andrew, is the prison, now and forever more, of the Dragon Desperado. What do you think of it?”

  Jack stared. “A real Dragon?”

  “As real as you and I. And very dangerous, I might add. Too dangerous to be let loose, but at the same time too powerful to destroy. Can’t be rid of everything that frightens or troubles us in this world. Some things we simply have to put up with—Dragons and Trolls among them. Trolls aren’t half as bad as Dragons, of course. Trolls cause mischief when they’re on the loose, but Dragons really upset the apple cart. They are a powerful force, Jack Andrew. Why just their breath alone can foul the air for miles! And the imprint of a Dragon’s paw will poison whole fields! Some Dragons are worse than others, of course. Desperado is one of them.”

  He paused and his eyes twinkled as they found Jack’s. “All Dragons are bothersome, but Desperado is the worst. Now and again he breaks free, and then there’s the very Devil to pay. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often. When it does, someone simply has to lock Desperado away again.” He winked enigmatically. “And that takes a very special kind of magic.”

  Daniel lifted suddenly and bore them away, skying out of the shadows and the gray mistiness, breaking free of the gloom. The sun caught Jack in the eyes with a burst of light that momentarily blinded him.

  “Jackie!”

  He thought he heard his mother calling. He blinked.

  “Jackie, where are you?”

  It was his mother. He blinked again and found himself sitting alone beneath the pine, one hand held out before him, palm up. The hand was empty. Pick had disappeared.

  He hesitated, heard his mother call again, then climbed hurriedly to his feet and scurried for the bushes at the end of his yard. He was too late getting there to avoid being caught. His mother was alarmed at first when she saw the knot on his forehead, then angry when she realized how it had happened. She bandaged him up, then sent him to his room.

  He told his parents about Pick during dinner. They listened politely, glancing at each other from time to time, then told him everything was fine, it was a wonderful story, but that sometimes bumps on the head made us think things had happened that really hadn’t. When he insisted that he had not made the story up, that it had really happened, they smiled some more and told him that they thought it was nice he had such a good imagination. Try as he might, he couldn’t convince them that he was serious and finally, after a week of listening patiently to him, his mother sat down in the kitchen with cookies and milk one morning and told him she had heard enough.

  “All little boys have imaginary friends, Jackie,” his mother told him. “That’s part of growing up. An imaginary friend is someone whom little boys can talk about their troubles when no one else will listen, someone they can tell their secrets to when they don’t want to tell anyone else. Sometimes they can help a little boy get through some difficult times. Pick is your imaginary friend, Jackie. But you have to understand something. A friend like Pick belongs just to you, not to anyone else, and that is the way you should keep it.”

  He looked for Pick all that summer and into the fall, but he never found him. When his father took him into the park, he looked for Wartag under the old stone bridge. He never found him either. He checked the skies for Daniel, but never saw anything bigger than a robin. When he finally persuaded his father to walk all the way back into the darkest part of the woods—an effort that had his father using words Jack had not often heard him use before—there was no sign of the tree that imprisoned Desperado.

  Eventually, Jack gave up looking. School and his friends claimed his immediate attention, Thanksgiving rolled around, and then it was Christmas. He got a new bike that year, a two-wheeler without training wheels, and an electric train. He thought about Pick, Daniel, Wartag, and Desperado from time to time, but the memory of what they looked like began to grow hazy. He forgot many of the particulars of his adventure that summer afternoon in the park, and the adventure itself took on the trappings
of one of those fairy tales Pick detested so.

  Soon, Jack pretty much quit thinking about the matter altogether.

  He had not thought about it for months until today.

  He wheeled his bike up the driveway of his house, surprised that he could suddenly remember all the details he had forgotten. They were sharp in his mind again, as sharp as they had been on the afternoon they had happened. If they had happened. If they had really happened. He hadn’t been sure for a long time now. After all, he was only a little kid then. His parents might have been right; he might have imagined it all.

  But then why was he remembering it so clearly now?

  He went up to his room to think, came down long enough to have dinner, and quickly went back up again. His parents had looked at him strangely all during the meal—checking, he felt, to see if he was showing any early signs of expiring. It made him feel weird.

  He found he couldn’t concentrate on his homework, and anyway it was Friday night. He turned off the music on his tape player, closed his books, and sat there. The clock on his nightstand ticked softly as he thought some more about what had happened almost seven years ago. What might have happened, he corrected—although the more he thought about it, the more he was beginning to believe it really had. His common sense told him that he was crazy, but when you’re dying you don’t have much time for common sense.

  Finally he got up, went downstairs to the basement rec room, picked up the phone, and called Waddy. His friend answered on the second ring, they talked about this and that for five minutes or so, and then Jack said, “Waddy, do you believe in magic?”

  Waddy laughed. “Like in the song?”

  “No, like in conjuring. You know, spells and such.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “What kind?”

  “Yeah, what kind? There’s different kinds, right? Black magic and white magic. Wizard magic. Witches brew. Horrible old New England curses. Fairies and Elves…”

  “That kind. Fairies and Elves. Do you think there might be magic like that somewhere?”

  “Are you asking me if I believe in Fairies and Elves?”

  Jack hesitated. “Well, yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Not at all, huh?”

  “Look, Jack, what’s going on with you? You’re not getting strange because of this dying business, are you? I told you not to worry about it.”

  “I’m not. I was just thinking…” He stopped, unable to tell Waddy exactly what he was thinking because it sounded so bizarre. After all, he’d never told anyone other than his parents about Pick.

  There was a thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. “If you’re asking me whether I think there’s some kind of magic out there that saves people from dying, then I say yes. There is.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Jack was asking, but the answer made him feel good anyway. “Thanks, Waddy. Talk to you later.”

  He hung up and went back upstairs. His father intercepted him on the landing and called him down again. He told Jack he had been talking with Dr. Muller. The doctor wanted him to come into the hospital on Monday for additional tests. He might have to stay for a few days. Jack knew what that meant. He would end up like Uncle Frank. His hair would fall out. He would be sick all the time. He would waste away to nothing. He didn’t want any part of it. He told his father so and without waiting for his response ran back up to his room, shut the door, undressed, turned off the lights, and lay shivering in his bed in the darkness.

  He fell asleep for a time, and it was after midnight when he came awake again. He had been dreaming, but he couldn’t remember what the dreams were about. As he lay there, he thought he heard someone calling for him. He propped himself up on one arm and listened to the silence. He stayed that way for a long time, thinking.

  Then he rose; dressed in jeans, pullover, and sneakers; and crept downstairs, trying hard not to make any noise. He got as far as the back porch. Sam was asleep on the threshold, and Jack didn’t see him. He tripped over the dog and went down hard, striking his head on the edge of a table. He blacked out momentarily, then his eyes blinked open. Sam was cowering in one corner, frightened half to death. Jack was surprised and grateful that the old dog wasn’t barking like crazy. That would have brought his parents awake in a minute. He patted Sam’s head reassuringly, pulled on his windbreaker, and slipped out through the screen door.

  Silence enveloped him. Jack crossed the damp green carpet of the backyard on cat’s feet, pushed through the bushes at its end, and went into the park. It was a warm, windless night, and the moon shone full and white out of a cloudless sky, its silver light streaming down through breaks in the leafy trees to chase the shadows. Jack breathed the air and smelled pine needles and lilacs. He didn’t know what he would tell his parents if they found him out there. He just knew he had to find Pick. Something inside whispered that he must.

  He reached the old pine and peered beneath its spiky boughs. There was no sign of Pick. He backed out and looked about the park. Crickets chirped in the distance. The baseball diamonds stretched away before him east to the wall of the trees where the deep woods began. He could see the edge of the river bluff south, a ragged tear across the night sky. The cemetery was invisible beyond the rise of the park west. Nothing moved anywhere.

  Jack came forward to the edge of the nearest ball diamond, anxious now, vaguely uneasy. Maybe this was a mistake.

  Then a screech shattered the silence, and Jack caught sight of a shadow wheeling across the moonlight overhead.

  “Daniel!” he shouted.

  Excitement coursed through him. He began to run. Daniel was circling ahead, somewhere over the edge of the bluff. Jack watched him dive and soar skyward again. Daniel was directly over the old stone bridge where Wartag lived.

  As he came up to the bridge he slowed warily, remembering anew the Troll’s mean-looking eyes. Then he heard his name called, and he charged recklessly ahead. He skidded down the dampened slope by the bridge’s west support and peered into the shadows.

  “Jack Andrew McCall, where have you been, Boy?” he heard Pick demand without so much as a perfunctory hello. “I have been waiting for you for hours!”

  Jack couldn’t see him at first and groped his way through the blackness.

  “Over here, Boy!”

  His eyes began to adjust, and he caught sight of something hanging from the underside of the bridge on a hook, close against the support. It was a cage made out of stone. He reached for it and tilted it slightly so he could look inside.

  There was Pick. He looked exactly the same as he had those seven years past—a tiny man with a reddish beard, green trousers and shirt, black belt and boots, and the peculiar hat of woven pine needles. It was too dark to be certain whether or not his face was flushed, but he was so excited that Jack was certain that it must be. He was dancing about on first one foot and then the other, hopping up and down as if his boots were on fire.

  “What are you doing in there?” Jack asked him.

  “What does it look like I’m doing in here—taking a bath?” Pick’s temper hadn’t improved any. “Now listen to me, Jack Andrew, and listen carefully because I haven’t the time to say this more than once!” Pick was animated, his tiny voice shrill. “Wartag set a snare for me and I blundered into it. He sets such snares constantly, but I am usually too clever to get trapped in them. This time he caught me napping. He locked me in this cage earlier tonight and abandoned me to my fate. He has gone into the deep woods to unbalance the magic. He intends to set Desperado free!”

  He jabbed at Jack with his finger. “You have to stop him!”

  Jack started. “Me?”

  “Yes, you! I don’t have the means, locked away in here!”

  “Well, I’ll set you free then!”

  Pick shook his head. “I’m afraid not. There’s no locks or keys to a Troll cage. You just have to wait until it falls apart. Doesn’t take long. Day or two at most. Wouldn�
��t matter if you did free me, anyway. An Elf locked in a stone cage loses his magic for a moonrise. Everyone knows that!”

  Jack gulped. “But, Pick, I can’t…”

  “Quit arguing with me!” the Elf stormed. “Take this!” He thrust something through the bars of the cage. It was a tiny silver pin. “Fasten it to your jacket. As long as you wear it, I can see what you see and tell you what to do. It will be the same as if I were with you. Now, hurry! Get after that confounded Troll!”

  “But what about you?” Jack asked anxiously.

  “Don’t bother yourself about me! I’ll be fine!”

  “But…”

  “Confound it, Jack! Get going!”

  Jack did as he was told, spurred on by the urgency he heard in the other’s voice. He forgot momentarily what had brought him to the park in the first place. Hurriedly, he stuck the silver pin through the collar of his jacket and wheeled away. He scrambled out of the ravine beneath the bridge, darted through the fringe of trees screening the ball diamonds, and sprinted across the outfields toward the dark wall of the woods east. He looked skyward once or twice for Daniel, but the owl had disappeared. Jack could feel his heart pounding in his chest and hear the rasp of his breathing. Pick was chattering from somewhere inside his left ear, urging him on, warning that he must hurry. When he tried to ask something of the Elf, Pick cut him off with an admonition to concentrate on the task at hand.

  He reached the woods at the east end of the park and disappeared into the trees. Moonlight fragmented into shards of light that scattered through the heavy canopy of limbs. Jack charged up and down hills, skittered through leaf-strewn gullies, and watched the timber begin to thicken steadily about him.

  Finally, he tripped over a tree root and dropped wearily to his knees, gasping for breath. When he lifted his head again, he was aware of two things. First, the woods about him had gone completely silent. Second, there was a strange greenish light that swirled like mist in the darkness ahead.