The Secret of Loblolly Creek

Chapter Eight

It was Saturday again:  mid-morning, with another week of school safely out of the way.  Dylan and Scott shared only a couple of classes at Summerville Middle School, and both had other friends.  Yet they were best buddies, with a strong, if unacknowledged, bond between them.  It was probably inevitable that the pair would end up at Scott’s place again this weekend. 

Until today Scott had spoken little about the events of the previous Saturday.  But as soon as they arrived at the trailer, he ushered Dylan back into his bedroom.  There, atop his desk, he unfurled a grand, detailed, full-color map of Lang County, of which Summerville was the seat.

“Okay, Dylan,” he said.  “Show me where you saw that glowing ball.”

“Not this again.”

“Just show me, okay?”

Dylan scanned the map, and then traced his finger down the slender, mostly straight line that was Highway 17.  He stopped at what he thought was the spot.

“Good.”  Scott took an orange pin from a clear plastic box and stuck it on the map, nearly stabbing Dylan’s finger in the process.

“Hey!  Watch it!”

But Scott wasn’t listening.  “Just before the bridge over Loblolly Creek, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Hang on a second.  Look at this.  Here’s where I live.”  He put a pin in the general vicinity of the trailer park in which he and his mother resided.  “And this is where they think that Thorpe kid was before he got snatched.  What do all these places have in common?”

“Nothing that I can see.”

“Are you sure?  Take a minute; look at the map.  There’s one thing that my trailer park, the bridge, and the woods where that kid disappeared have in common.  I’ll give you a hint.  It’s a geographical feature.”

“That doesn’t help me.”

“Okay, dumb-ass.  The bridge goes over it.”

“Loblolly Creek?”

“We have a winner.  Every single one of these sites is beside Loblolly Creek.”

 “What does that prove?”

“What do you mean?  Isn’t it obvious?  All of this weirdness is taking place around Loblolly Creek.”

“It’s probably just coincidence.  What makes you think that the Thorpe kid and this ball lightning stuff are even related?”

“It’s just something I noticed.  You saw that weird light at the bridge first; then we saw it again here.  When I stuck the pins on it I realized that the Thorpe kid disappeared somewhere between those two points.”

Dylan shook his head.  “You’ve gone crazy, man.”

“I’m going to Loblolly Creek,” Scott announced.

“Why?”

“Because I think something weird is going on around there.  And I want to know what it is.”

“The only place where anything weird is going on is inside your own head,” Dylan replied, pleased at what he thought was a clever comeback and nearly as glad that Scott had given him the opening to make it.  “Listen, the police searched the whole place, remember?  They searched all up and down it after that boy disappeared.  Nobody found anything.  He had just vanished off the face of the earth.  And these lights—look, it’s like I told you.  Ball lightning is—”

“I’m sick of hearing you talk about ball lightning,” Scott snapped.  “That’s all you ever say:  ball lightning.  A UFO could land in your front yard and you’d say it was ball lightning, because you don’t want to think it might be something you can’t explain.  I’m telling you, Dylan, something’s going on here.  I don’t know what it is, but something’s definitely going on.”

With these words he left Dylan at the desk, went to his bed, and fell back on the mattress.  There was a long silence.

Then Scott said, “You don’t have to come with me if you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Okay, you’re not scared.  You just don’t want to go.  That’s fine.”

“It’s a waste of time, Scott.”

“What else do we do on the weekends but waste time?”

“I guess you’re right about that.”

“Sure, I’m right.  So come on.  Let’s just go down there and look around.  It’s something to do.  I’m sure we won’t find anything and then you can make fun of me for wanting to go there in the first place.”

“Okay, fine,” Dylan agreed, figuring it couldn’t hurt anything.  “Let’s do it.  But I’m not going to wait until we’re done to make fun of you.”

***

The boys set out that afternoon.  Loblolly Creek was only a few hundred yards from the trailer park, but getting there required a rather tortuous trek through woods much thicker than either boy would have liked.  Thorny vines, sprawling bunches of palmettos, and low-hanging branches all conspired to make their odyssey difficult.  There were a few paths around here—indeed, the boys had followed those paths from time to time—but they seemed to grow over quickly, and even when they thought they had found one, it often faded into the brush before they followed it very far.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we exposed an alien base or something?” Scott said as they fought their way through the tangled coastal wilderness.

“Oh, sure,” said Dylan.  “And how do you know the aliens won’t take us back to Mars for dissection or something when we find them?”

“We just won’t get caught.”

“Of course not.”

Relief came when they reached Loblolly Creek.  The foliage was as thick as ever, but the water level of the Creek had fallen back to normal since the heavy rains of the prior weekend.  That meant they were able to walk along the water’s edge, where the mud was firmly packed and not many brambles intruded.

“You know,” Scott said, “there was something else about Loblolly Creek that I noticed when I was looking at the map.”

“What was that, Detective?”

“It doesn’t have any origin point.  It just starts somewhere up in the county.  There’s no swamp, no other little creeks, no nothing, that show up on the map.  It’s just there, all of a sudden.”

“Maybe it’s fed by a freshwater spring.”

“Could be.”

They made their way south.  Dylan felt ridiculous.  Since the disappearance of Jacob Thorpe, this land had probably been some of the most well covered terrain in southeast Georgia.  Even now men were still searching here, though fewer as time went on.  He felt sure they would find nothing.

And he was right.