If You Go Down to the Woods

by Seth C. Adams

  “Be afraid, little boy,” he said, and the knife spun again in his long and dexterous fingers. “But not of death, not this night. Not if I get what I came to collect.”

  I nodded, swallowing a lump in my throat the size of a basketball.

  “There will be a death,” he said. “We all owe one. But show me what I want and yours will be for another day. That I promise.”

  I nodded again. Tears threatened at the corners of my eyes. A knot in my stomach twisted, squirmed. My heart bucked and thumped a primal, tribal beat.

  The Collector motioned with his knife, and I knew the command: Walk.

  I turned, and with Sarah at my side we started back the way we came.

  For awhile, save for the sound of our footfalls, the crunching of leaves and twigs underfoot sounding like the snapping of small and brittle bones, we walked in silence. Silence and darkness don’t go well together, not for me. The darkness, the inability to see things more than a few feet around you, is unsettling by itself. But with silence, and no idea what is out there and no sounds to identify it, the feeling of helplessness and vulnerability is intensified a thousandfold.

  Then the Collector began to speak, and I wished for the silence to return.

  “I once collected from a woman and her family,” he began. “She owed to my employer at the time and refused to pay. She said the contract was null and void. She hadn’t the authority to make that determination. And so I was sent to collect.”

  He paused briefly as if to let it sink in, to make sure we were paying attention.

  “I collected from the woman and from her husband, and from their two daughters,” he said. He said this all as if recounting a particularly fond familial memory. Maybe a barbecue with Uncle Ned, or the graduation of a favorite nephew. “There is collecting, and then there is collecting. Sometimes it’s only business, and sometimes there’s the opportunity for gratification. That night I was intensely gratified.”

  That last hung in the air, undefined, unexplained, and for that I was grateful.

  “That was long ago,” the Collector said. “It was winter, it was cold, not at all like these warm summer months we’re in now. But that night I was warm and the winter didn’t touch me. Do you understand?”

  I understood nothing of what the fucking nutjob was saying. I only knew this whole thing had been a bad idea, the fucking king of all bad ideas, and I wished that I could hop into a time machine, reverse myself a couple of days, and tell my dad about this freak. Dad would take care of it, or he’d call the police and they would. Then I thought of Sheriff Glover, and didn’t know if that last was true or not.

  I understood nothing of what the Collector said, but I nodded.

  Or maybe I understood only too well, and was afraid of that knowledge.

  “Once, in Mexico,” the Collector said as we continued walking, the swell of the mountain seen rising above the tree line ahead of us, “there was this rich hombre who lived in this beautiful private villa. He had something of importance to a man in Brazil. This something of importance wasn’t rightfully the Mexican’s. He had stolen it. I was sent to collect this item and return it to the Brazilian.”

  I wanted nothing of his collection stories. I snuck a glance at my sister from the corner of my eye. Saw her looking back at me with the same look of disgust and fear. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand. Smelling of piss, scared, I wanted to hold my sister’s hand.

  Yet I feared the consequences of the slightest movement. The Collector had told me to walk, nothing else, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to collect from me.

  “The Mexican’s estate was large and had many guards,” the Collector said. “To move with shadows, though, is a talent I learned long ago, out of necessity. I moved through the Mexican’s estate with ease, unseen. I came upon the Mexican in a lush and silken bedroom making use of a little niña. The kind of youth only money can buy. He didn’t notice me until I was at his bedside, and when I asked for the item owed he reached for the nightstand and the gun inside. He was fat and slow. The girl screamed, and I silenced her, and then I made the Mexican tell me where the item was. In time, he told me. I collected the item, and then I collected more, from him, for myself. Do you understand?”

  Standing beneath the rise of Lookout Mountain, its shade over us like a blanket, I nodded. Up there, somewhere, were Tara and Jim, and I wanted to scream for them to run, to forget the whole thing. To run and get the police, to run and get my dad, but I knew I’d die from the teeth of the knife before the first word was even out.

  Sensing my hesitancy, the Collector felt compelled to extol upon us one last treatise on collecting.

  “I have collected for many individuals, for many years. My employers are numerous, but the outcome is always the same. They get what they want, as do I. I have never failed, and I never will. My present employer will get what is his, as well. That is my reputation, as collector, and reputation is everything. Do you understand?”

  I did indeed understand more of the Collector now. He had been doing this for a long time, probably longer than I’d been alive. He was a man, but during the course of his life, the pursuits of his profession, he had become something more. Something of this world, and beyond it. Something malignant; something poisonous. I felt sullied and tainted just by his presence.

  I nodded my understanding.

  “It’s … up there,” I said, somehow finding my voice. “All of it.”

  “Let’s go,” he said, and my sister and I started up the rocky incline.

  I had to fight the urge to race up the hill. Each foothold and handhold I placed with a determined and consciously feigned care, as if I were unfamiliar with the climb. Eagerness to get to the top might betray mere fear and alert the Collector to something else.

  I took an opportunity with one difficult foothold to look down, and I saw the Collector still there, yards away, at the bottom. The bowie knife flashed in his hands like lightning, and yet it was an idle motion almost without thought. He was standing there, looking up, but not looking at me or even at the top of the mountain. Maybe he was looking at the sky and the moon, and maybe the strange gears of his mind were in the middle of some dark and alien purpose I’d never comprehend. That I’d never want to comprehend.

  This is the night. These are the times.

  I realized he was made for the night, and the night for him.

  Then he looked at me looking at him. The pale blur of his face in the dimness. A smear of off-white and the faintest hint of eyes and mouth.

  He started up after us, and I turned and continued climbing.

  We made it to the top before him, and Sarah and I stood at the peak and looked about. At first I didn’t see my friends, and then my eyes roamed up the wall of stone and there they were lying flat atop it, staring down at us, vague in the moonlight like wispy spirits.

  Except for the gun in Jim’s hands, the metal gleaming in the night. On his belly atop the upright stone, he held the pistol in both hands, aimed in our general direction.

  I heard the approach of the Collector from behind us. The tumble of dislodged stones and pebbles, tiny avalanches, as he scaled Lookout Mountain. Turning, I thought of kicking him as he rose to join us, sending him sprawling back down the rocky hill. But he was right there, hands clasping the edge and pulling himself up, and the knife, the knife in the moonlight, silver streaks across the blade like wicked smiles.

  I turned back towards the peak of the small mountain, and the upright stone like a large tombstone. Jim, atop it, motioned us with a nod to move aside. Sarah did, but I was too slow, and then the Collector was standing behind me, one arm wrapping around me like the first time, the knife at my throat.

  The Collector saw them immediately.

  The blade pressed dangerously against my flesh.

  “No tricks,” he said, his voice still calm and stoic even with a gun pointed at him. “That was the deal.”

  “You’re a liar,” I said, my voice little more than a wh
eeze with a knife at my throat, and the smell of piss permeating the air like a strong and stringent perfume. “You … would have killed us … anyway.”

  “Perhaps,” he said in his silken poet’s tone. “Perhaps not. Now you’ll never know.”

  “We … we don’t want to hurt you!” Jim said from his perch, his voice tremulous and high. Not at all like the confident kid I’d met not so long ago. “Just leave my friend alone! Go away and leave us alone!”

  “I’m afraid that, my dear boy,” the Collector replied, his minty breath puffing against my cheek, “is not an option.”

  I knew it was coming then, the end, the end of me, the end of it all. There was going to be a lot of collecting, a harvest of collecting. I doubted Jim could shoot a man, even in self-defense. Shooting cans off a stump in your backyard, and shooting a human being, were worlds apart. Even if Jim did take a shot, I doubted he could kill this man, this thing, the Collector, in one shot once he slit my throat and went for the others. I doubted if bullets, if anything, could kill this creature that held me. It was over, all of it, and I’d only just met these friends, who in such a few short weeks were the best friends I’d ever had. Worst of all, one kiss, and one kiss only, from the most beautiful girl I’d ever known.

  A slight sense of motion as the Collector’s fingers tightened their grip on the knife. The tensing of movement to come. The cutting.

  A sound below us.

  The stomping of feet. Heavy, thunderous as they grew closer. Shouts. Panting. The crackle and snap of branches.

  The Collector relaxed his hold on me so that he could turn and look down. Acting before thinking, I slipped down against him, under his loose arms and the guillotine blade, fell to the ground and rolled away, towards my sister and the upright stone and my friends with the gun above me. The Collector looked at us, then looked back down the slope of the mountain to whatever was coming.

  Something heavy hit the incline and scrabbled up, kicking loose cascades of pebbles and dirt. Heavy breathing could be heard even from this distance. Shouts pursued the climber, the voice violent and familiar, and more footfalls close behind.

  The Collector turned again towards us and then looked down once more, uncertain.

  “Don’t move,” Jim said to him in little more than a whisper, and the Collector faced us and the gun pointed at him. His motions were lithe and casual and unbothered. He seemed a lazy and complacent audience member watching a boring play on a lackluster stage.

  The second set of footfalls below and out of sight at the bottom of the mountain slowed, then started up the incline also, kicking and stomping footholds into the face of it. Shouting still, wordless grunts and noises of intended violence carried up to us. Almost at the top now and I knew who was coming, both of them, pursued and pursuer, by the shouts of the second and the promise of pain he brought with him.

  “Bobby!” I yelled. “Don’t come up!”

  But there he was, clawing up over the edge now, meaty hands grasping and pulling and him rolling over the top. He didn’t see the Collector until the man was grabbing at him and pulling him up and wrapping an arm around his throat and bringing the knife up, sliding it between two rolls of chin.

  Bobby’s face was frantic and confused. He looked at us across the peak of the mountain, saw Sarah and I standing and Tara and Jim on top of the rock with the gun. His eyes tried to roll down and to the side at the sound of his dad’s ascent, kicking and slapping stone and dirt for purchase. The size of the man, the mountain of him, came over the edge and arose, like a leviathan from the ocean of night and shadow.

  The Collector stepped aside as Mr. Templeton rose to full height.

  Bobby’s father, streaked with sweat and glimmering in the night, looked about. He saw the Collector holding his son, and the knife in the shadowy man’s hands. He saw us and the gun, and his gaze narrowed on me and Sarah, and he smiled. His face was bandaged and purple with bruises, and his smile was gapped in places by missing teeth.

  In the arms of the Collector, Fat Bobby was likewise streaked with sweat and reminded me of a large and wet Thanksgiving turkey. His face was bruised as well, his mouth bloody, and a knot the size of a golf ball perched atop his forehead. I wondered how many other bruises, or worse, were hidden underneath Bobby’s clothing.

  Images of him huddled in his bedroom, or what served as a room in their trailer, the belt and fists and kicks raining down, came to me. The pain, the resigned horror at what had always been endured, the hopelessness. The blows still coming and nothing you could do about it.

  Such an existence made no sense to me.

  I hated the bull man before me all the more.

  “That’s my son,” Mr. Templeton said, facing the Collector now and pointing as if for emphasis in case the other man didn’t know what he was talking about. “Give me my son.”

  “I’m afraid that can’t be done,” the Collector said, his voice like soft music from the darkness about his face. “These children have something of mine.”

  “Let Bobby go or I’ll fucking blow your head off!”

  Jim’s voice from above was sudden and loud and made me jump.

  The Collector ignored him and focused on Bobby’s father.

  “There is money here,” he said in his lilting tone. “Lots of it. Help me collect it from these children, and perhaps you can walk away with a bit of it.”

  “Money, huh?” Mr. Templeton said and his ruined face showed interest. Fat Bobby jiggled and quivered in stark terror in the iron grasp of the Collector. He watched his dad as if seeing an alien creature. “And where is this money?”

  “I was just about to acquire that information,” the Collector said. “But there was the little problem of a gun …” he said and then his arm shot out like he was casting dice. The arc of the blade flashed through the space between us.

  I thought it was coming for me. Rooted as I was by fear, I waited for the blade to find me, pierce my heart and bleed my life away.

  But the air parted above me as it passed, and a yelp of pain from Jim followed its passing. The pistol discharged and a thunder close to my ear drowned out the rest of the world.

  I slumped back against the stone in pain, cupping the side of my head. The world around me spun in kaleidoscopic swirls and rollercoaster tilts and loops.

  Bobby was cast aside like a fat and doughy rag doll by the Collector. His face collided with rock and he remained on the ground, unmoving.

  Mr. Templeton charged across the small space and met the Collector with a thud. The momentum carried them both down and over the side of the mountain. The tumbling and smacks and thumps of their descent were like drumbeats.

  A brief rustle of motion as I felt more than saw Jim’s form roll off the stone above and thump down beside me. He moved and groaned in pain, and though I was glad to see him alive my eyes fixed on what dropped along with him.

  The gun clattered against the stone floor beneath me with a metallic clacking. I saw in blurs and whorls and tried to grab it. The world tilted again as I moved and I vomited hot and steaming chunks that splattered the ground like a gruesome rain.

  Tara jumped down from above, knelt before me, found the gun, snatched it up. She strode the few yards to the edge and peered over. Sarah crab-walk shuffled on her knees between me, Jim, and Fat Bobby, her hands coming away from each of us bloody. The scarlet wetness alight by the moon was very red.

  I’d never seen so much blood before. I wondered how much of it was mine, how much that of my friends.

  The thunder of gunshots clapped atop our little mountain, startlingly loud even through the ringing in my head. I jumped with each explosion, my hands to my ears, and looked to their source.

  Tara stood at the precipice of the hill, her arm outstretched over the brink and pointing down. The pistol in her grip issued a curl of smoke from the muzzle, like a ghost snake rising.

  The drumming in my ears faded and I brought my hands away and there was blood there, but I could hear, and I heard rocks
and dirt sliding down the hillside. Thumps and grunts. I crawled over to Tara with the smoking gun, and at the edge I looked down and there was Mr. Templeton looking back up at us far below.

  But his head was backwards, the rest of his body belly down against the forest floor. His arms and legs were bent at weird and impossible angles, like an action figure in broken poses.

  A few feet from Mr. Templeton, the Collector lay sprawled in the bushes, his fedora still on his head even after falling so far so that I thought maybe it was part of him, attached to him like a strange organ. His coat spread out from beneath him, wide and open like the wings of an insect.

  Near his right shoulder two holes like eyes stared back at me, though these eyes bled. The cloth of his black shirt was torn about the holes.

  Holes in cloth, holes in flesh.

  Seeing these, I wished for a hole of another sort, to bury myself in and hide from all that had transpired.

  The Collector, motionless, collecting nothing, yet still I feared him and looked away. Only to see the other bodies strewn about, those of my friends, and I buried my face in my hands so I saw nothing.

  4.

  Barry, having heard the gunshots, came minutes later, rushing through the trees like a would-be hero, too late in the last reel of a movie. Meeting him at the bottom of the hill, we looked at him, saw him take in the bodies of Mr. Templeton and the Collector, and the horror on his face was what we all felt inside.

  Jim, a hand pressed tightly to the nasty gash on his shoulder, wanted to check on the Collector. He took a step in that direction before Barry stopped him. Told him that we shouldn’t disturb anything. This was a crime scene and the police would take care of everything. None of us put up much of a fight against this proclamation.

  I least of all. I just wanted out of there.

  Barry told us to follow him back to the car and he’d take us all over to the hospital and call the police. Once, as we started away, I looked over my shoulder back at where Mr. Templeton and the Collector lay sprawled. Whether it was a trick of the moonlight, shadow, or wind I thought I saw the merest twitch from beneath that fedora and high collar.