The Gully Boys

When I was four, I had two invisible playmates. I called them Pip and Squeak, though Squeak was never a fitting name for something so menacing. They only appeared at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hollows of Vermont, a place that smelled of damp earth and rotting timber. I remember the game: Pip was the good one, always helping me build forts from fallen branches, while Squeak was the troublemaker, the one who knocked over my blocks and whispered things that made me cry. My grandmother, a woman with eyes like winter ponds, would find me arguing with empty air, and I’d blame Squeak for every broken dish, every overturned chair. She never scolded me, just looked at me with a knowing sadness.

Years later, when I was old enough to ask questions, she sat me down by the wood stove and told me that my father and his brothers had also played with two invisible friends. They too had called them Pip and Squeak, and they too had blamed the ‘bad’ one for their mischief. I was intrigued, so I dug into the history of the land. The farmhouse sat on what was once a peat bog, and beside it ran a deep, narrow gully, choked with brambles and fog. In the 1920s, a Model T had careened off the icy road and plunged into that gully, killing two young brothers, Amos and Eli, whose names had been lost to time. My blood ran cold. I had never known their names, but I knew I’d met them.

The house itself was a colonial relic, with low ceilings and doors that stuck in the humidity. Strange things had always happened there: footsteps on the attic stairs when no one was up there, the smell of pipe smoke in the parlor where no one smoked, and the constant sense of being watched. My aunt once swore she saw a boy’s face in the window of the root cellar, a face that vanished when she blinked. My uncle, a skeptic, had a nightmare where he was drowning in mud, and woke to find his bedclothes soaked and a clump of dark soil on his pillow.

But the worst was the gully. Whenever I visited as a child, I felt an overwhelming urge to go down to the edge and look into the black water that pooled at the bottom. Once, I slipped and nearly tumbled in, and I swear I saw two pale hands reach up to grab me. My grandmother pulled me back, her face ashen, and she muttered something about ‘the boys’ that I didn’t understand then. I understand now.

I’m 27, and I haven’t been back to that farmhouse in a decade. But last night, I dreamt of the gully. The water was still, reflecting the moon, and two figures stood at the edge, beckoning to me. They wore old-fashioned clothes, their faces blank and wet. When I woke, I found a clump of peat moss on my bedside table, and my phone had a voicemail from my grandmother, telling me she had passed. The funeral is next week. I have to go back. I have to face the boys I once called friends, and I have to learn why they’ve waited so long to call me home.