Watcher in the Woods

by Robert Liparulo

  David stuck out his foot, feeling for something he could not see, hoping to feel it. Nothing, just that same lightness everywhere. He called, “How? Can we do it too?”

  “Sure you can!” Dad said. He zipped higher and came closer to the kids. He hovered over them, smiling down at David.

  David could see the bottoms of his shoes, a spot of gum stuck on one of them. For some reason, this more than anything drove the point home: his dad was flying. And he seemed to be getting more comfortable in the air, less wobbly, more in control.

  Their father shot backwards and stopped. He was still looking down at David, but not between his feet. He said, “It has something to do with attitude, with wanting to do it. It’s like flexing a muscle to find the currents. I’m not saying you’re willing yourself to do it—more like you’re allowing yourself to do it.”

  David lifted his foot again, tapping his toe in the air. He did feel something, a kind of resistance. He moved his whole foot. The air felt spongy, as though he were stepping on a balloon. He heaved himself up onto it and came straight down. He lost his balance and fell back onto the ground.

  Xander and Toria laughed.

  From high above, Dad called, “That’s it, Dae! You can do it. It takes some getting used to.”

  David leaned back on his arms to look up at Dad, and he realized something. “You did this before,” he said to his father. “I mean recently. When you found Xander and me here the other day, you’d been doing this, huh?” He remembered that Dad had been out of breath, his hair all messed up.

  Dad shrugged. He zipped around in a tight circle, rose even higher, close to the level of the treetops now. “I confess,” he said, and laughed. “I wondered if the clearing still allowed it and if I could do it. After you guys found the portals, and Xander went to the Colosseum, I needed a break. This place takes your mind off everything.”

  David lay back, feeling the soft grass under him, tickling the back of his neck. The trees arched over the edges of the clearing, leaving an oval of blue sky directly above. Nothing indicated that the imaginary dome created by mentally extending the treetops to the center of the opening was the highest you could go, but he suspected that was true. His father was just below this upper limit, weaving around. Instead of standing straight, he was starting to lean over. This made what he was doing appear even more like flying.

  “Whoa! David, look!”

  It was Xander. When David looked, his brother was standing four feet above the grass.

  CHAPTER twelve

  SUNDAY, 4 : 12 P . M .

  Xander laughed. His feet, well off the ground, were slipping and sliding around under him, but he somehow stayed up.

  “Check it out!” Xander yelled.

  “Oh, man,” David said, getting to his feet. If Xander could do it, he’d better be able to. He walked to the center of the clearing, thinking that the currents, whatever they were, would be stronger there. Toria was closer to the edge. She was lifting her feet and hopping, but not getting any air.

  She’d better not do it before me, David thought.

  He closed his eyes and patted the air around him. After a moment he felt the resistance he had noticed earlier. Again, he lifted his foot and moved it around, as though feeling for a stair. More resistance, but nothing else.

  Come on, come on! he thought. Fly!

  Sponginess under his feet, under his hands. Squeezing his eyelids tighter, he imagined the air holding him, lifting him.

  “David!” Xander called.

  David looked.

  Xander was way above ground now, grinning like a madman. “Yeah, man!”

  David felt his feet almost slip out from under him, as though he were standing on ice. At the same time, he realized he was not looking up at Xander. He dropped his gaze straight down and saw the grass ten feet below his shoes. His stomach rolled. His muscles tightened. His feet did slip out from under him. He fell back, his arms pinwheeling, his legs shooting up over his head. But he didn’t drop. He saw the ground below him and then Xander again as he came back around. He had done a backward somersault in midair.

  “Way to go, Dae!” Xander said. He threw himself backward. He spun his arms and kicked his feet until he had executed a similar move.

  David watched with amazement. He felt pressure under his feet and arms, as though invisible hands were keeping him afloat.

  He brought his arms down and kicked as he would underwater. And what would happen underwater happened here: he rose higher. As frightening as it was to watch the ground get farther away, David felt a lightness that went deeper than his skin and muscles. It reached his spirit. It was like he was free of more than the laws of gravity; all the garbage that had been dumped on him recently didn’t seem so heavy.

  He was still aware of his mother’s absence and how awful it was. But at this moment, he felt able to deal with it. He was sure it was temporary, as though she had gone to the store and would return soon. He laughed at that, kicked his legs, and shot higher. Bending at the waist, he leaned diagonally over the ground. This—staring directly at a forty-foot plunge—was even more exhilarating. His heart raced faster. His mouth twitched from a joyful smile to a worried frown and back again. His father called to him, and when he turned to look, his body rotated with his head.

  Dad was standing—if that’s what you called it, when there was nothing to stand on—as high as David thought he could go, at the center of the opening to the wide blue sky.

  “What do you think?” Dad said and laughed.

  David meant to answer, but only an excited breath came out. He swallowed and tried again. “Great!”

  Just under the arcing canopy of leaves, Xander hovered. He was reaching up to touch the branches. He was being careful, as though any connection with reality would send him crashing back down.

  “I can’t do it!”

  Toria’s voice reached David, sounding thin and far away. He looked to see her jumping in place on the grass.

  Dad said, “I think you’re trying too hard, honey.” He moved his arms and legs and began descending toward her.

  David swiveled away and “swam” toward the canopy at the edge of the clearing. How cool would it be to get a leaf from up here and save it as a memento of his first time flying? He still had trouble thinking of it as flying. It wasn’t like Peter Pan: hadn’t Wendy, John, and Michael Darling needed fairy dust? And they had flown away to Neverland.

  David, Xander, and Dad weren’t flying, and they would never go anywhere this way. But that was all right. This was enough.

  He was near the edge of the clearing and reaching up to a leaf bigger than his hand, when something outside the clearing caught his eye. His eyes widened, and his heart felt squeezed into a tight knot. Through the trees, on the ground, a man stood looking at him. He was in shadows, but David could tell the man’s expression was grim. He had long hair that was blowing around his head. He wore a dark overcoat, and his hands were stuffed into his pockets. The whites of his eyes seemed to glow in the darkness of the woods.

  David hitched in a breath and tried to yell for Dad, but his mind would not form the words he wanted to use. He moved his mouth without saying a thing.

  He suddenly realized he was still moving, fast and out of control. He saw a heavy tree branch seconds before he crashed into it. His face hit first, then his chest. The pressure or currents that had been holding him up suddenly evaporated, and he fell.

  His hands clawed for the trees and grabbed a branch. His descent jerked to a stop, then the branch snapped and he kept falling. His fingers tore at leaves and twigs. Like a freight train, the ground rushed at him.

  David screamed.

  CHAPTER thirteen

  The assassin tumbled over the body of the prince. He realized instantly that the man was intact; it must have been a trick of the light, the shimmering, that had made him think the prince had been torn apart.

  The assassin crashed down against a wood-planked floor. His ankle twisted; the puncture in his
side flared with fresh pain. He ignored it. Instead, he rolled away from his adversary, away from any slicing blades the injured man might swing at him. A wall stopped him short. So he twisted and spun and plunged his knife into the prince’s back, cracking through the left shoulder blade to reach the heart. The prince did not utter a gasp of death. He did not spasm in a final effort to retain life. The man had been dead before the assassin’s knife–from the arrows, surely. But the assassin was trained to consider all possibilities before a normal person would think of even one. Could someone else have killed him, someone now hiding?

  He looked around. He was in a small room with doors on opposite walls. A wooden bench, some items hanging on the wall above the bench—a helmet, tunic, an archer’s bow. One door was open, revealing the walls of the crevasse into which he had jumped in search of the prince. Beyond the crevasse, black smoke streaked through a blue sky.

  The door slammed shut. The assassin leaped for it. He tugged and pushed at a circular metal protrusion, but the door did not budge. Light glowed from a torch mounted on the ceiling, but it did not flicker with flames, and when he held his palm up to it, the light did not warm it. He squinted suspiciously.

  A banging noise came from the other door. Quickly, he pressed his foot against the back of the prince and extracted his knife. He swung it toward the door, crouching, ready to spring. With no place to hide, he would simply have to fight whatever confronted him.

  The banging continued, and he realized it was not coming from the door itself, but somewhere beyond. He stepped silently to the door and listened.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  It was not at this door that someone pounded. Perhaps, he thought, the people here knew an intruder had entered their midst. Maybe this banging was an alarm.

  He must have stumbled into secret caves the Sidonians used to escape from their enemies. But why would they have put so much effort into the construction of a subterranean hideaway? The room was a perfect box, its walls smoother than he had ever seen outside of a king’s palace. That’s it, he thought, this place must be a sanctuary for Sidon’s nobility. That’s why the prince, and not commoners, had fled to it. Only a select few knew of it.

  Bang, bang.

  And one of them was beyond the door, obviously deeper into the cave. He put his fingers on the metal knob and pulled. The door remained shut, as he had expected it would. Like the other door, its latch was hidden. Then his hand moved, and the knob turned with it. He heard a click, and the slab of door came loose from the wall. He inched it open and peered through the crack. He saw a corridor stretching out of sight. It was narrow, as a tunnel should be. Like the room, however, the walls had been carved smooth and shaped into a rectangle. Fifteen feet away, a man studied the frame of another door on the other side of the corridor. While the assassin watched, the man slammed a tool into it: bang, bang.

  What would he be doing at a time like this? Certainly, he knows about the city’s besiegement.

  But the man’s relaxed posture and casual movements indicated no knowledge of the war outside or of the assassin’s intrusion.

  Good, the assassin thought, the man will be dead before he realizes his ignorance.

  At that moment the first door blew open. Blinding light flooded in, along with a wind that carried stinging grains of sand and swirling smoke. The wind whipped through the small room and back out the door from which it came, like a genie’s invisible hand reaching for the assassin. He squinted against the light and the blowing sand, and his hair flapped like a flag pointing at the wide-open door.

  When he looked, the man in the corridor was staring back at him. The wind pulled the door out of his hand, opening it all the way. The wind was pulling everything. The hem of his chiton, which hung from belt to mid-thigh, snapped up and down and then pulled tight toward the open door. He thought again of a hand tugging at him.

  The body of the prince began sliding along the floor. The shafts of the arrows extending from his back bowed in the fierce wind. A gust howled in and, as it departed, took the prince’s body with it. The assassin watched the prince fly through the door and vanish in the light. The wind pulled at the assassin’s feet, and he fell. His knife was ripped from his hand. It disappeared into the bright void beyond the threshold. The assassin would have gone through next, had he not gripped the frame of the other doorway.

  The man in the corridor rushed toward him, his expression changing from bafflement to alarm.

  The assassin was powerless to defend himself. It was all he could do to hold on to the frame and resist the force that pulled at him. Everything in him screamed out against being taken through that other door. Before the wind had come, he had seen the crevasse and smoke-filled sky on the other side. Now there was nothing but light and wind. Perhaps his nation had angered the gods by attacking this land. Or maybe he had stumbled into the lair of some beast unknown to his people. At that moment all he knew was that he must not go back through that door.

  He pulled with all his might toward the hall, but the wind’s grip on him was too strong. The other man reached him, grabbing for his arms. He seemed suddenly to become aware of the storm. He lurched forward, and the assassin thought this man, too, was going to fly right past him and out the door. But the man jammed his feet into the corridor wall on either side of the door’s frame. Over the howl of the wind the assassin could hear the man yelling in a strange tongue. The man held firmly to the assassin’s arms.

  The assassin noticed the man’s clothes and hair were flapping only slightly and realized the pull of the wind was not as fierce outside the small room. He had to get out. Seeking to gain more leverage, he released one hand from the door frame and gripped the man’s clothes under his neck. The man canted his body backward, pulling the assassin with him.

  The wind grew even stronger. The assassin’s sandals came apart and flew away—first one, then the other. Near panic now, he tugged hard on the man in the corridor, putting him off balance. The man flipped forward, over the assassin and into the blinding light beyond the other door. The assassin squinted back, watching the man disappear. As soon as he vanished, the door slammed shut, and the wind died.

  The assassin gripped the door frame and kept his eyes on the closed door for a long time. When it didn’t burst open again, he pulled himself into the corridor, rolled away from the room, and stared up at the ceiling until his breathing and his heartbeat slowed to normal. Finally he sat up. The corridor was dimly lit from vessels of light attached to the walls. Like the light in the ceiling of the small room, they did not flicker with flame. Everything about this place was strange.

  He nodded to himself. He had thought a beast resided here. The strangeness seemed to confirm that suspicion.

  Grunting, feeling his wounds and aching muscles, the assassin stood. With the caution and stealth that was as natural to him as breathing, he approached the open doorway to the little room. It was cleared of everything he and the prince had brought into it: no sand, no weapons, no clothes. Even the blood they had shed was gone. Strangely—but no stranger than the rest of this place—the items still hung from hooks over the bench. He remembered them rattling against the wall as the wind tugged at them, and he wondered how they survived its devastating pull.

  He stepped into the room, just far enough to reach his fingers around the edge of the door. He pulled it shut as he backed into the corridor and stood quietly.He kept his eye on the door, expecting something to lurch out at him. His ears, accustomed to hearing the slightest scrape or breath, sensed nothing. He scanned the corridor one way and then the other, and the skin on the back of his neck tightened as he realized that the door he had just shut was only one of many.Who knew what monsters lurked behind the others? If they were anything like the wind-beast he had survived, he was in no hurry to meet them. A wall blocked one end of the corridor. Set into the other end was an opening. Shadows lay beyond. He was used to darkness. He thrived in it. He walked toward it.Leaning against the walls for support, he stumbled past
the doors, determined to find a way out of this labyrinth of ghosts and monsters.

  CHAPTER fourteen

  SUNDAY, 5 : 55 P . M .

  David sat on a treatment table in the Pinedale Community Health Clinic. Every time he shifted his weight, paper crinkled under him. He frowned at the newly plastered cast encasing his left arm. A nurse had given him pills for the pain, but it still felt like someone was twisting the point of a knife into his forearm. Dad ran his fingers over David’s head, sweeping the hair off his face.

  David wrinkled his nose at him. “It still hurts,” he said.

  Dad brushed his fingers over David’s cheek. “I’m sorry. Nothing like that ever happened to me, just falling like that.”

  “I lost my concentration. That man . . .”

  David had already told his father about the man he had seen in the woods. While Dad was checking him for more injuries and scooping him up to carry him to the car, Xander had run into the woods for a look. By the time Dad pushed through the dense vegetation surrounding the clearing, David in his arms, Toria holding on to his pants pocket, Xander had returned. He had not spotted anyone or seen any signs that someone had been there.

  “But he was there! I saw him!” David had insisted. He had not wanted his father to think that the excitement of flying had caused him to be reckless. Plus, Dad should know that somebody had been there. Somebody had seen them.

  Dad had given him a squeeze and said, “Let’s not worry about him right now, Dae.”

  That had made him feel better, but now that he knew he was going to be all right, the man’s presence concerned him again.

  “You’re sure he saw you?” Dad whispered.

  David nodded. “He was looking right at me. Just standing there.”