Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read Online Free

Rock was an impressive, glacial boulder; twenty feet tall, sixty feet at its widest. Calved neatly in half on its north side, there was a three-foot-wide crevasse through to the boulder’s center. The boulder was a giant cake that had a thin piece cut out of it. The boys rushed inside the split and took turns taking pictures and videos of each other shouting, “Hardcore parkour!” and “American Ninja Warrior” while trying to spider-climb up to the top. Josh and Luis weren’t strong enough, and they couldn’t get leverage with one foot pressed flat against each wall, and they barely got a few feet off the ground before sliding back down. Tommy must’ve still been sore from his bike crash, because his legs started to shake, and he gave up climbing after getting maybe six feet up.
    They walked around to the south side of Split Rock, where some of the boulder had collapsed and crumbled away. They quickly found a path over those broken and moss-covered rocks and scrambled to the top of the boulder, which was flat enough to walk around on without any worries of sliding or falling off. They were high above the forest floor, no doubt, but not up enough to see over the trees of the thick, surrounding woods.
    Josh said, “Think anyone can hear us up here?” They hadn’t passed any other bikers or hikers along the way.
    â€œDon’t know.” Then Luis yelled, “Seven!”
    Tommy said, “Catchphrase.”
    Luis: “All set. No one can hear us.”
    A thin crack in the rock lead away from the big split to an eight-foot-tall tree that had somehow sprouted up through the middle of the boulder. It was dead now; sun-bleached gray, petrified, its surfacestone-like in appearance. The trunk was sinewy, twisted, and pocked with knots and the stubby, sharpened bases of long-ago broken branches. The tree tapered and thinned to a spear-like point.
    Tommy: “Whoa. Sick tree.”
    Josh: “Looks like a weird statue.”
    Tommy: “Like something out of the Nether.” The Nether was the underworld or Hell of Minecraft, a shared-world video game the boys had been playing together, off and on, since fifth grade. Tommy wasn’t the best player of the three but he watched the most YouTube Minecraft tutorials and Let’s Play videos. Tommy had even set up and run his own white-listed (which meant private) server for the three of them to use.
    They walked the perimeter edge of Split Rock, faked pushing each other off the impressive sheer drops to the jagged rocks below, reached out to the still-living trees that had grown around the contours of the boulder, and leaped back and forth over the split. Josh’s stomach tightened every time he jumped over the crevasse and he felt that empty space opening up below him.
    Josh hung his backpack on one of the weird tree’s jagged branch stubs. He passed out the drinks and granola bars. His first sip was too greedy, and he spilled the red drink all over his white Ames Basketball shirt from two winters ago. When Josh had first played town ball as a fourth grader, he had been the quickest kid out there and easily made the town’s travel team. Three years later he was cut. He was by no means fat, but he had gained weight in his middle and hadn’t gotten much taller, not like Tommy had, and he certainly had not gotten any faster or any better at basketball. Too many other kids had passed him by athletically and skill-wise. Josh couldn’t keep his dribble anymore and couldn’t stop anyone else from scoring. Although he’d experienced plenty of other indignities as part of the daily horror of middle school, getting cut from the travel team was the most devastating.
    Josh said, “Shit, shit, shit,” and stood up, trying to keep the spilled red drink from dripping down onto his shorts and legs.
    Luis: “You need a straw or a sippy cup?”
    Tommy: “Chirps!”
    Josh: “I’m gonna