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Crossing The River

Crossing the River is the best Robert Holland book yet. The book is suspenseful and action-packed with the main character, Deke, having to overcome a bully named Mountain Moran and an older golfer at his club, who will go to any length to win the club championship. Who would have thought that golf could cause life-threatening problems? Well, it does in this book, twice. And there’s horror too. Ghosts. And they provide a scary twist. Lastly, this book is inspiring because of its moral. The title comes from a quote, "An army that has crossed the river cannot turn back." What that means to Deke is that he has to take a chance to reach his goals. What the book shows is that if you cross the river and strive for something better, then anything is possible.

-- Tad Schwartz, age 13

Crossing the River has a different story line than most other books by Robert Holland. This book has many climactic events throughout instead of building for the final main event. That produces a lot of cliffhangers and some dramatic imagery. The novel uses a few rounds of golf, some spooky ghost stories, and the mystery surrounding Abigail Dowd to make a great story. Also, the characters were easy to relate to, like Deacon’s chatty sisters and his good friends Jon and Skipper. This is one of those books you can’t stop reading. Robert Holland scores a hole-in-one for this book!

-- Cory Shapiro, age 13

Chapter One

This Old House

When you live in an old house and read scary novels, sooner or later it occurs to you that your house might be haunted, and years ago, when we moved in, the only place in my house where a ghost was likely to appear was the second floor in the back wing over the kitchen. The walls and floors and ceilings then were dingy and in the places where the plaster had peeled away you could see the laths beneath, looking for all the world like the ribs on a skeleton.

We used the two big rooms then for storage and each room had one dangling overhead light which meant you had to walk to the middle of the room to pull the string and turn it on. The rooms were connected by a hallway also with a single pull string light. From the time we moved in until last winter when we completed redoing the rooms I only went out there once.

That happened on a rainy vacation day in February, the first year we lived there, when I was only ten. I was exceptionally bored, and I remembered an old box of comics I’d had before we moved and I was sure it had to be stored in the back wing. I popped out of my room and opened the door to the hall. In the somber gloom that hall looked especially long. Worse, the only light was halfway down the hall and like the lights in the rooms it worked on a pull chain. Suck it up and deal, right? Well, maybe not so easy as that. More like pull in your head like a turtle and run like a rabbit for the light, which was what I did. And that was okay, not more than a couple of seconds of pure terror, and, hey, anybody can handle that. But then the light didn‘t go on and I was left standing there, holding onto the pull chain as if I’d fallen overboard and that slender string was my lifeline.

Stuck. Absolutely, completely stuck. So I laughed. I have no idea why I laughed, but I did. Probably that’s what kept me from wetting my pants, but it also did something else. Suddenly, I wasn’t nearly so scared and in fact, after I had laughed a couple more times, I’d even stopped shaking. I walked to the end of the hall, opened the door, walked to the center of the room, and pulled the chain on the light, which went on the way lights are supposed to.

But it took several minutes before I remembered the box of Spiderman comics I had gone looking for. Nobody knew I had those comics. And when we had moved I had packed them in a box and taped it shut and labeled it "Deacon’s Stuff". No choice. Mom is convinced that comics rot the mind. In fact, she is pretty much convinced that anything boys do rots the mind. She grew up with three sisters and now she’s got three girls for backup and her mother, Gramma Wini, who looks at me as if I were some kind of ugly slime mold. Grampa Earl, Mom’s father, never seems to say much outside of "yes, dear," and I gotta tell you, I am never, ever gonna be like him.

And I probably won’t be much like my Dad either, mostly because I’m nowhere near that smart. His way of dealing with Mom when she gets on a tear is to look surprised, and then it’s like he turns a switch in his head and you can tell he isn’t hearing anything she says. And sometimes when Mom’s right in the middle of complaining to him about something I’ve done, he just gets up and walks out of the room and goes off to his study where he starts writing out chemical formulas on his big chalkboard.

Mom doesn’t follow him. It’s a rule. His ideas are his work and nobody is allowed to disturb him when he’s working. Sometimes I think he goes there mostly to get away from her torrent of words, but I’ve seen him walk out in the middle of conversations with other people too. Of course, he could be doing that just to keep up appearances so Mom doesn’t get wise to him. One of these days I’ll figure that out. Right now, I’m stuck. I have to listen and my sisters, did I mention my sisters? Three of ’em, Molly, thirteen and the twins, Kate and Kayla,who are ten. They get away with everything, but that’s another story.

I found the box of comics and peeled back the tape and pulled out one of them and sat there, reading it and absorbing the wonderful drawings and wishing I had spidey strength too ... when ... I thought I heard something move, a rustling sound, like dry leaves pushed around by the wind, and I turned toward it, but there was nothing there and the sound didn’t come again.

Still, I looked and waited, listening to the wind moaning against the house. Then I saw where one of the windows had not been locked and I walked over and pushed the upper half of the window up against the frame and slipped the catch in place. The moaning, at least the loudest of it, stopped and I went back to my comic book.

The rain beat against the side of the house as if it were coming out of a fire hose and the wind howled outside in the trees. We were in the middle of a genuine nor’easter. I like storms, even when they keep me off the golf course. Especially I like them when I’m curled up inside. But I don’t like it when we lose the power because Mom runs amok, dashing about, making phone calls, groaning and complaining and wishing we had a generator and then the sisters get all worked up and you’d think everybody had gone insane.

And just then the power went out. You could have heard them all shrieking a hundred miles away. I decided to stay where I was, out of sight--out of mind, and though the room was dark, there was still light enough to read my comic. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I was determined to hang on as long as I could because the second I showed up, she’d somehow blame me for the power going out.

What I hadn’t figured on was just what sort of interruption would arrive. But a few minutes later when a warm breeze washed over the back of my neck I gotta tell you, it got my attention. And then the pull chain on the light began to sway back and forth.

In a flash I was on my feet, and making hard for the door as I legged it out of the room and down the hall to my room. I closed the door, and sat on my bed, with my back to the wall, watching -- waiting. Everybody else was downstairs and even in a house as big as this, I could hear all the moaning and wailing about the power having gone out. For a while I listened and finally I began to make out that they were looking for me ... or at least Mom was looking for me. But I wasn’t moving from my bed. No sir. The one thing you never do is give a ghost a shot at you. Had I really said that? What an idiot. There aren’t any ghosts. It was just the wind. Probably it had changed direction and found another slightly open window, which explained why the light cord had started swaying, but did not explain why it had felt warm. For the moment, I was willing to overlook that because if I didn’t, I’d have scared myself so badly I’d puke.

I looked down at the comic still clutched in my hand and then I remembered that I hadn’t shut the door or turned off the light and when the power came back on everyone would know I had been out there. Worse, I had not closed up the box of comics.

"Deacon! Deacon Hunter, where are you?"

I slid the comic under my mattress, walked to the door and opened it. "Yeah?"

"Did you do that? Did you leave the door open to the back wing?" She pointed to the hall from which I had just escaped with my life.

"Who, me?"

"Who else?"

I shrugged and walked toward the hall. No escape. "I was looking through my old stuff," I said.

"Well, go down there and close the doors."

If that hallway had looked scary before, now it looked a certain road to the underworld. The walls looked wet and slimy. "It’s too dark," I said.

"Deacon, there’s plenty of light. Now you just march down there and close the doors properly and I’m going to stand right here and watch." That helped. No ghost would turn up while Mom was there. She‘d talk it right back into its grave.

"The light is burned out," I said. "Never mind about that. There’s no power anyway, and there’s plenty of light. I’ll have your father change the bulb when he comes home. Now go!"

So -- I went. I don’t remember breathing the whole way down and back, but I do remember, when I was in the room and out of sight of Mom for just an instant, hearing a sound like someone laughing very far away. It was not a nice laugh. In fact it sounded evil and angry. I closed up the comics box, pulled the chain on the light so it wouldn’t go on when the power came back, and dashed out into the hall.

And while I may not have breathed, and while a cold sweat was running down my sides, I didn’t run. I wanted to, oh, man, how I wanted to run, but I clamped my jaw shut and made myself walk. The air felt thick and heavy almost like soup, and I could smell something foul like a rotted animal, but I walked all the way to the end and shut the door.

"Now," Mom said, "let’s go downstairs. Before the stupid power went out, Molly and I baked some of those wonderful oatmeal cookies we all like so much."

Mom’s cookies are awful. She’s taken a stand against sugar so she puts honey in ‘em and they taste like old socks. Dad won’t touch ‘em, and he says it’s to keep from putting weight on, but I know why. They’re awful. I, on the other hand, have no excuse so I have to eat them. One. I never eat more than one. But even that is way too much. Give me real chocolate chip cookies anytime.

I never went into that back wing again until last summer after it had been completely redone. The hall was well lit now and all the windows were new windows and the rooms were bright and cheerful. But hey, I didn’t exactly hang around. The way I figure it, there probably is no such a thing as a ghost, but why take the risk?

Recently I’ve been rethinking my position on this. Maybe the ghost is only in the room at the end. What I have in mind is getting my best friends, Jon and Skipper, over to spend the night in the end room. A spook party could be really cool.

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