The shovels sunk in around the stones almost eagerly, and when I lifted the first dirt away, the dark, loamy earth that was revealed reminded me of an open wound. I shuddered slightly at the thought but pushed it aside as I went back to digging. It didn’t take us long to realize that the two stones we were digging at weren’t just two stones, but rather the top layer of what at first looked like a rectangular box made of rock about two feet tall. This wasn’t a natural formation, but rather the sides were all fused together somehow from flat pieces of dark stone that actually reminded me of volcanic rock I had seen at the Smithsonian two years earlier.
At first we focused on just gently digging out the rocks, periodically reassuring Harvey that we were there to help him get out as he rustled close by with what I imagined was some combination of curiosity and impatience. Weeks later I went back and broke open one of the rocks to see what was in there. The inside of the stone rectangles that formed the bars of Harvey’s prison were layered like a cake—dark igneous rock followed by brown crystalline rock followed by more igneous, etc. There were a total of nine layers counting the top and bottom thicker outer layers, and the stony containers had been sealed well enough that the crystal layers—what I figured out was rock salt when I checked Aunt Karen’s old encyclopedia set—had not dissolved away over however many years it had been buried in the ground.
Those details became important later on, but when we were setting Harvey free, we were so high on a mixture of excitement and fear that we could hardly think at all, much less focus on anything not directly related to the task at hand. We hadn’t discussed what came next much, although I think there was an unspoken understanding between myself and Rusty that we wanted to take Harvey with us when we left Aunt Karen’s to live with Dad again. It was as though we imagined ourselves characters in some charmingly dim-witted children’s movie where the kids find a friendly monster, fend off the villain that wants to kill/capture/etc the beast, and ultimately either find a way to keep the monster permanently or say a tearful and heartfelt goodbye after their adventures have run on for ninety minutes or so.
The problem with stories like that is how unrealistic they are. Not because they involve monsters—as should be obvious by now, I can’t dispute that there are strange creatures in the world that I don’t think can be explained, at least not within the framework of what is commonly known and accepted. No, the problem lies with how the monster is treated.
It is viewed, to a large degree, as an object. Something to want, something to keep, something to value because of its uniqueness. At best, it is elevated to the status of a pet—a living creature, but one who’s will and desire are, if not irrelevant, at least considered far less important than our own. At worst, they’re just a face and a name to try and trap our fear of the unknown, containing it with a ring of words that will make the undefinable more defined, and by definition, more easy to control or destroy.
Even now, knowing all of this, I often think of Harvey as “the monster”. Less because of what it did than what it is—something that we didn’t understand and that we should have been terrified of.
It took digging up three stones before Harvey could move through the space, and I remember the thrill of fear when it did so. I felt like we had snuck into a circus and opened up the lion’s cage. Except as it passed the threshold of its prison, it wasn’t a lion, or even a leaf devil any more.
Now it was a large hedgehog.
It was far larger than any regular hedgehog, being roughly the height of a medium-sized beagle, and its appearance was vastly different as well, but that didn’t change the fact that it had gone from being a largely invisible force to a fantastic version of a cute woodland creature. Its face and paws seemed to be hewn from some kind of light, living wood, and its spiny back was a tightly woven thicket of leaves and sticks. When it moved, you could hear a light rustle not that different than the sounds the leaf devil version of Harvey had made.
The fact that it looked like a very cute and non-threatening animal, while a relief, did give me a bit of pause even then. Either that was its natural form or it was an appearance that was deliberately chosen. If Harvey had chosen to look that way, was it because it wanted to be appealing and ease our fears, or because it wanted us to let our guards down?
Whatever the answer or our reservations, we were both delighted by Harvey’s new form as well. We were both greeting and talking to him like an old friend we were picking up at the airport, or possibly like an online friend we were seeing for the first time. Because in some ways that was true. Harvey looked more like something familiar now, and he had a face—a cute face with large amber eyes that sparkled with intelligence and understanding. He wasn’t talking to us, but he did have expressions and body language as we spent the afternoon with him, and in a hundred different small ways I could feel us growing closer to Harvey now that we could interact with him in a way we could more easily wrap our head around.
In some ways, I think that day was the best day of my life. I never wanted to leave, and I could tell that Rusty felt the same. It was well after dark when we finally forced ourselves back to Aunt Karen’s house, and I felt a stab of guilt when I saw her frail form standing on the porch looking at us with worry and relief. She hugged us tearfully as we drew near, kissing our cheeks and making us promise to never do that again, to always be home well before dark. We promised, and it was one promise that we kept during the short time we had left together in her home.
Still, if my regret over worrying Karen had cooled my excitement a little, it had done nothing to stave off my fears. Harvey had seemed very content to hang out with us in the clearing that afternoon—we had played games, petted his strange pelt, and told him more stories of where we were from and what life was like there. But how likely was it that he would still be there the next day? We still didn’t know what he even was, but if he was like most people or animals, he probably would want to be far away from the place he was trapped for so long.
The next morning we were out of the house at sunrise, and as soon as we were out of sight we broke into a desperate run back toward the clearing. I felt my stomach drop when we arrived and saw no sign of Harvey. We started walking the area, calling out to him, but there was nothing. If the day before was one of my best days, that one was one of my worst. We spent hours combing the woods, but there was no sign of Harvey anywhere. By late afternoon we were bone-tired and heading back to the house when Harvey found us.
He waddled up to us like…well, like a giant magic hedgehog I guess, and it was clear that he was happy to see us. We knelt down and hugged him gently, after which Rusty started explaining to Harvey how he shouldn’t worry us like that. How we had been looking for him all day and we ought to be mad at him, but he forgave him.
Something stirred in the back of my head at that, though at the time I didn’t recognize it for what it was. It was growing dark again, so we reluctantly said good-bye, though this time Rusty told Harvey to follow us close to the house so he would know where we lived and could meet up with us more easily next time. That we would be back at the edge of the trees near the house the next morning. Again, a slight tickle in the back of my head that made my stomach uneasy, but I tried to ignore it as I waved bye to Harvey and followed Rusty back to the house.
The next few days were fun and exciting, and in many ways it was like we were living in some kind of fairy tale. We would get up early, spend the day with Harvey, and then come back home in the evening tired and full of anticipation for when we got to see him again. But as happy as I was, I had come to recognize the little twinge I would get in the back of my head from time to time.
It was worry. Not worry that Harvey was going to hurt us—that was always a possibility, but he’d had plenty of chances if he wanted to do so—but worry that Rusty was…well, he just seemed different somehow.
We had never had pets growing up because my mother was so allergic, and while I loved cats and dogs, my only real exposure to them had been in public or when I was over at a friend’s house. I had even less exposure to how Rusty was around them, but the few times I had been with him when we met a dog or cat, he had been the way he always was—gentle and kind.
But some people are different with their own animals, and some people view pets less as a friend or companion and more as an object to be used or…well, even abused. I never saw him actually be mean to Harvey—he never hit him or anything like that—but I found myself growing more concerned with how he was treating him just the same.
He would tell Harvey what to do. Try to make him do stupid tricks. Yell at him if he did something different than what Rusty wanted. A couple of times I told him to chill out and it seemed to help for a time, but before the end of the day he would be back to treating Harvey like he was a misbehaving dog that he planned on bringing to heel.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much. He’s a teenage boy treating a magic animal like a non-magic animal. Except it was more than that. First, Rusty would get this odd look on his face at times. The best way I can describe it is that it reminded me of how our mother could look sometimes when she was still around. Like she was just waiting for you to step wrong so she could jump you. Not because she wanted to correct you, but because she wanted an excuse to talk bad to you, maybe slap you a little. It was a terrible kind of happy anger that was brimming and ready to be poured out on you at the first sign of provocation.
This memory was part of how I knew that, despite the odd way that Rusty was treating Harvey at times, it still was Rusty. It wasn’t like he was being possessed or controlled by Harvey or something. He always seemed like Rusty while he was doing it—just a version of Rusty I wasn’t as familiar with.
The second reason it worried me so much was because of what it said about how Rusty viewed Harvey. Every day he was treating him more and more like a pet. A wild animal maybe, but one that Rusty was working hard to tame.
Except we knew literally nothing about Harvey except for how we had found him and how he had acted so far. He could be totally sweet and harmless, or he could be able to kill us without a second thought. He could have the understanding of…well, a hedgehog…or he could be far smarter than we were. After two weeks had passed since freeing Harvey, I was getting ready to talk to Rusty about it all. About how he needed to respect Harvey more and quit treating him like he was a stupid toy.
Then I got sick. I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, and when Rusty got the thermometer, I had a fever of over 104. I had come down with the flu, and with Karen’s compromised immune system, Rusty was the main one that took care of me for the next several days as I got over the worst of it.
He did a good job, but he would still disappear for a couple of hours every morning and afternoon to go visit Harvey. I was miserable from being sick, but moreso because I hated feeling left out. I missed seeing Harvey, and Rusty said he could tell that Harvey missed me too. I also still worried a little bit about how Rusty and Harvey would get along without me being there.
On the third day of me being sick I found out. I heard a commotion as Rusty came running up on the front porch and flying through the door before locking it behind him. Karen was up in her room, so he managed to avoid any questions as he made his way to our bedroom downstairs. Despite that, I almost yelled when I saw him come in.
He was sweaty and dirty, but I barely noticed for looking at his right leg. It was bleeding badly from two lines of cuts that looked like large claw marks. His eyes were wide with fear as he looked at me.
“What happened?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Harvey got mad or went crazy or something. He changed shape again. Got bigger and…he fucking tried to kill me.” His face began to crumple in on the last as tears began springing up and running down his dusty cheeks. He hobbled over to the window. “He followed me, but I think he stopped at the edge of the trees.” It had been gray outside all day, and as twilight was coming on, it was hard to make out much in the growing murk of the woods. But then I saw him. A massive shadow deeper than the rest, defined only by his own darkness and the flickering glow of large, amber eyes. He was in the woods looking at us. Not just the house, but I felt sure Harvey was staring right at us.
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Credits
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