Horror Stories

by Liz Phair

  I turn back to make sure the kids are all right. They’re clambering over dead wood and streaking down the sandy mountain, arms waving, hair flying, until one of them face-plants. The other two fall backward onto their rumps. Only the adults can make it any distance without careening off-balance. The dads show off in a race to the bottom, their legs scuttling to stay ahead of their accelerating torsos. They’re not so much running as falling with resistance.

  Alberto attacks the slope chest out, like he’s expecting his wings to catch the wind and lift him up into the air. Jim keeps his back perfectly straight, running down an imaginary staircase. When the gradient levels out, they slow, shifting gears into a trot. Mallory and I watch our husbands’ tiny figures come together and start making the arduous climb back up to the top.

  It’s not yet eleven o’clock. We left so early in the morning, to get here while the sand was still cool, that her children are still wearing their pajamas. Olivia is bending down and peering into the maw of an old tree trunk that has fallen on its side. Adam and Nick are throwing twigs and handfuls of sand at each other.

  This hilltop was once home to a stand of black oaks, sixty to eighty feet tall. The dune is moving inland so rapidly that the trees have been buried alive, their topmost branches still sticking up above the ground, a few remaining leaves fluttering in the breeze. Most of them have already died, their limbs twisted and dried out like those bleak trees in old western movies. Mallory and I sit in a patch of shade and enjoy a moment of silence. I run my fingers through the sand, making wavy patterns that I smooth away and redraw. Mallory has that look on her face like she’s contemplating existence. We’ve been friends since fourth grade, and I am fluent in her mannerisms.

  “Do you think,” she begins, and immediately I know she’s about to ask a philosophical question, “that you could live out here? I mean, imagine if you grew up in some small town in Indiana. Like, just a normal, average town. Do you think you’d care about the same things? Would you even want to live in the city?”

  I think I know where she’s going with this. She’s always lobbying me to move back to the suburbs.

  “For instance, if you hadn’t been adopted, do you think you’d still be an artist? Or would you be someone totally different?”

  I’m wrong. She’s talking about her own life and wondering if she’s made the right choices.

  “I don’t know.” I look out at the wide green surface of the lake and see a canvas. “Probably. I think I’d always be creative.”

  “Huh.” Mallory always says “huh” when she disagrees with something you’ve said. She cocks her head to the side and looks at me as if to say, You don’t know yourself as well as you think.

  One of the children starts wailing, a shrill cry of outrage. We jump to our feet to referee. Olivia has a triumphant look in her eyes, and an insouciant saunter. She’s stolen Adam’s branch away. Nick stands by, not sure whose side to take.

  “Come on, you guys!” Mallory rallies the troops with a whoop of delight. “Let’s go see Daddy! Come on, Nickel.” She holds out her hand to my son. “Don’t you want to go see your dad? Then we can get burgers and fries!”

  The men are still only halfway up the hill. They’re not out of shape; they’re talking. When you have children this age, you take any chance you get to grab a little peace and quiet. I watch Mallory and the kids zigzag down the incline, kicking up puffs of sand with every bounding footfall. My heart clenches with joy. It is a perfect day.

  I take off my glasses and clean them with the bottom of my T-shirt. I feel ridiculous wearing these wire-rimmed spectacles, like the spinster schoolteacher in Little House on the Prairie. Normally, I wear contacts, but I’m getting LASIK surgery tomorrow and need to let the natural shape of my eyeball spring back, so the ophthalmologist will have more meat to work with. He’s going to slice off a thin layer of my cornea. He’ll do it while I am still awake and able to see the knife. Then he’ll pick up the partially severed flap and fold it over to one side, leaving it there to hang by a hinge, while he aims a laser directly at my pupil and starts pulverizing tiny bits of my lens until the curvature of my meniscus approximates twenty-twenty vision. He’ll ask me to stare straight into the red laser beam, and I’ll hear the rapid bang, bang, bang of the weapon firing, but I won’t feel the explosions.

  I dig my toes down into the sand, picturing the trees buried beneath me. What must it be like to have grown up in the sunlight and the rain, to have groaned and swayed under the storms bearing down on this coastline, only to be entombed and immobilized, cut off from all sensation, suffocated? In tree time it must have happened very fast. They live so slowly that the roving dune must have seemed like an alarming advance. There are a lot of ways oak trees are prepared to die: infestation, disease, fire, saw blades; but I’ll bet drowning in silicon dioxide isn’t something they anticipated.

  It reminds me of a terrifying scene I saw in a film once, when I was a child. A dead pharaoh was being laid to rest in his underground burial chamber. One of the priests who’d helped prepare his body for the afterlife turned traitor and betrayed the rest of the royal family, trapping the pharaoh’s heir and his relatives inside the tomb. Huge limestone blocks came down outside the chamber, blocking off all the exits. A dreadful confusion ensued as small channels opened up in the ceiling and released torrents of sand, which began filling up the vault. The young heir, distraught, looked to his mother for help, but she knew there was nothing they could do. They would all die together in a matter of minutes, when there was no more air to breathe and grit choked their lungs. I can’t bear to think about those trees anymore.

  Mallory and the kids have met up with Alberto and Jim. Adam, Nick, and Olivia are scampering up the side of the sand dune on all fours, their energy undiminished. I try to remember whether or not I reapplied Nick’s sunscreen. His little blond head bobs along as he powers up the hillside, sticking close by his dad. He looks like me around the face, but his coloring is his father’s. The group stops. They are almost to the top, but the exhausted adults need a rest and stand with their hands on their hips to take in the spectacular view.

  I notice more people arriving on the beach, far below us. It looks like a father and three children. It’s nice to see another family out enjoying the day. Judging from the father’s mullet and mustache, they probably live in one of those small Indiana towns Mallory was just waxing nostalgic about. The older girl and boy stand back from the water’s edge while the father and the youngest son wade out up to their ankles. The little boy is no more than five years old, slight of build and excitable. The dad lights a cigarette.

  All of a sudden, the playful boy loses his balance and falls face-first into the water. He jumps right back up again, but the front of his clothes are soaking wet. Enraged, the father backhands his son off his feet. His tiny body arcs backward through the air, landing five feet away from where he started. I gasp, going completely rigid. My heart starts thumping in my chest. The father walks over and picks the little boy up by the arm and kicks him in the ribs. This man is beating his child like a dog. I make a guttural sound that starts deep in my throat. My hands fly up to my chest, one on top of the other. Mallory, Alberto, and Jim have all frozen, watching. And then it stops. Like a sudden squall, it is over.

  Nobody moves. We don’t call out. They wouldn’t hear us; they’re too far down the slope. So far below, in fact, that they look like miniature dollhouse figures, almost unreal. I am shaking. The man’s other children don’t react at all. It’s clear from their body language that this is an everyday occurrence. I want to run down there and smash this asshole’s face in with a rock, watch the lake water turn red around our desperately grappling bodies. I can see his mouth spluttering, his eyes wide with surprise, as I drown him in the shallow water.

  I have another split-second vision in which I take this boy home with us and care for him and raise him as part of our family. I see mys
elf tucking him into bed after he is combed and clean, smoothing out his anxious brow with a tender touch, explaining to him that his daddy loved him, but some people are just angry and sad. They hit the closest thing to them.

  I take this scenario forward in time to his college graduation, when he is a fine, strapping young man with competitive athletic ability and no abusive tendencies. I do all this recalibration of his destiny in a matter of seconds. I’ve raised an entire human being in my mind. He’s fine. He’s safe. Do my thoughts make any difference? Does prayer make a difference? Can powerful intentions start a separate timeline of events in another dimension of reality? Are we linked now because of our emotional intersection? Have we ricocheted off each other in a way that means anything?

  Nothing’s changed, I realize. Nothing’s different. This brave little child picks himself up and walks back to the shore to join his siblings while the dad continues to stare out at the lake, smoking. The whole revolting cycle of love and violence starts to play out in my mind. The same guy who just hit his kid will be the one tucking him into bed—if not tonight, then tomorrow. Sometime. What kind of horror is that, to be five years old and to know that the person you have to accept love from could at any moment be the person who ends your life?

  The single mercy is that none of our children witnessed it.

  * * *

  —

  Mount Baldy is closed to the public now. You can’t go there anymore. A freak accident exposed a hidden danger lurking beneath the soft quartz sand. In 2013, six-year-old Nathan Woessner and his family were visiting the dunes on a summer holiday camping trip. Nathan and his friend Colin decided to race up the face of the dune, starting from the bottom. With the emerald water of Lake Michigan sparkling at their backs, the two young boys dug their feet in and scaled the mammoth sandpile.

  Nathan was climbing right by Colin’s side, until he wasn’t. Colin said Nathan went to investigate an open hole, and when he lowered himself in, the dune swallowed him up. By the time his parents reached the spot of his disappearance, all that remained was a shallow depression. They started digging frantically with their hands, but whatever sand they managed to displace quickly filled back in again. A local geographer who happened to be there studying dune movement assured them that it wasn’t possible for any subsurface cavities to exist. The pressure of the surrounding sand was just too great. But Nathan’s parents were adamant. He was there. They wouldn’t abandon him.

  Emergency services came with a backhoe and dug down eight feet. The rescue was described in the December 2014 issue of Smithsonian magazine. “They began noticing odd features in the sand: pipe-like cylinders, eight inches in diameter and a foot or two long, of what looked like old bark. Brad Kreighbaum, 36, a third-generation firefighter, soon came across a six-inch diameter hole that shot deep into the sand: ‘You could shine a flashlight and see 20 feet down.’

  “When he scooped Nathan’s body out of the sand at 8:05 P.M., Kreighbaum noticed other patterns in the cavity cocooning the boy. Its inside wall was sandy and soft, but bore the imprint of bark, almost like a fossil. It was as if the boy had wound up at the bottom of a hollowed-out tree trunk, except not a bit of tree was there.”

  The ancient stand of oaks had rotted away so slowly that their sturdy bark kept the weight of the sand at bay. Nathan Woessner was revived, and he walked out of the hospital two weeks later, perfectly fine. I hope that while he was underneath the dune, Nathan could hear the muffled cries of his family promising to save him. I like to think that the old trees made a collective decision that no child would ever again be hurt on their watch, and that our earlier prayers for that poor beaten boy reached them, the silent sentinels of eastern Lake Michigan.

  My brother, Phillip, wants me to climb the tallest pine tree on our grandparents’ property. It’s the big one he points out from our bedroom window, the broad, stately conifer poking its head up above the canopy. Granddad says it’s nearly two hundred years old, almost as old as the Declaration of Independence. When we run down the hill to the barn and look back up toward the house, its spire reaches higher than the roof. Phillip considers it his personal Everest, a challenge to be met and conquered before the end of the summer. He’s afraid to climb it alone, so he’s trying to persuade me that there’s something magical hidden up there, like butterflies or fairies.

  I’ve been reading a lot of illustrated books about elves and folklore lately. There’s so much flora and fauna in the woods around Red Bird Hollow that I’m convinced the forest is enchanted. Winnie and Granddad’s renovated farmhouse sits on fifteen acres of woodland in Indian Hill, a small municipality outside Cincinnati. It’s horse country, with lots of winding trails and long driveways. When Granddad bought the place in 1952, my mother called the move “social suicide.” She was in college at the time and refused to join the family this far away from the cultural attractions of downtown.

  To Phillip and me, it’s a wonderland that we explore every weekend while my parents have some time to themselves. We spend all day outdoors, roaming the woods, wading through the creek, or venturing across the road to the spring-fed pond. Winnie rings the big bronze bell when it’s time for us to come home and get cleaned up. There’s always somebody coming over for dinner. Red Bird Hollow is a gathering place for the extended family, the type of household that encourages neighbors to drop by unannounced. Each day is an adventure, yet the landscape exudes an atmosphere of peace and tranquility.

  Granddad enjoys his country living. He’s acquired the habits of a gentleman farmer. He drives a small tractor, shoots clay pigeons, and has his cocktails on the patio every evening at dusk. His booming laughter fills the air whenever we’re all together, scaring the sparrows from the eaves. He stables some of the neighbors’ horses in the barn, and I like to visit them and feed them oats. They lip the grain from my open palm while I stroke their noses, fascinated by the way their velvety skin lays over their sturdy skulls.

  Phillip isn’t too interested in the animals. Normally he plays war with our cousins, but today he only has his little sister—and I’m not tempted to take up BB guns and bows and arrows. He thinks it’s the perfect opportunity to tackle the massive pine tree without the Voss boys around to make fun of him if he fails. If he succeeds, he’ll be able to claim the distinction for all time, and they’ll be sorry that they didn’t think of it first. He climbs up the ladder into the rafters of the barn and sits on the edge of a hay bale, shaking handfuls of straw down onto my head. He can be a real pest when he doesn’t get his way.

  We hear the screen door slam up at the house, and the dogs come streaking down the hill toward the barn, the tags on their collars jingling. The horses stamp impatiently in their stalls, ears twitching, tails swishing the flies away. The brown mare extrudes a steaming volley of manure, and the smell propels us back out into the yard. Phillip follows me around, harrying me, suggesting that at the very least there’ll be colorful eggs in all the birds’ nests scattered among the branches.

  I collect the robin’s-egg shells that fall down onto the thick carpet of pine needles on the forest floor. I use them in my spells. Their wondrous blue-green color has nothing to do with the parent birds’ plumage. Still, Phillip sells me on the logic that cardinals lay red eggs, goldfinches lay golden ones, and blue jays’ eggs are azure. Phillip could sell snow to an Eskimo. He beguiles me with his argument that this tree is the largest for a reason, that it’s the gateway to a mythical realm—and, just like Jack with the beanstalk, we’ll find treasure at its pinnacle.

  I trudge up the driveway in my Keds and bell-bottoms, listening to Phillip chatter excitedly about how far we’ll be able to see once we reach the top. He says I’ll be able to look into my friend Tiffany’s house next door and wave to her. I don’t want to play with Tiffany right now. She has more Breyer model horses than me. What I want are some live pixies or some iridescent-black ravens’ eggs. I really need magic to be real, and I live i
n a state of quasi denial where flowers have faces and inanimate objects can communicate. Everything I know I glean through signs and symbols. I think thunderstorms can see me.

  On the material level, though, I’m very practical. I have survival skills, or at least a survival instinct. Phillip’s tried his best at times to kill me, but he hasn’t yet succeeded. For my part, I have pondered the odds of his survival if, say, our station wagon came to an abrupt stop and he flew through the front windshield. These kinds of accidents can and do happen to kids our age. Our friend Scott Carroll ran right through a plate glass door during a game of tag at his birthday party, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the long, jagged shard sticking out of his arm. Childhood is a time of curiosity and peril, and nobody comes out of it unscarred.

  Phillip takes us on a detour to the toolshed. I assume it’s his way of hazing me, since he knows I’m afraid to go in there. Granddad keeps his rakes, hoes, and hedge shears hanging on the walls. They look like implements of torture, and I feel much safer in Winnie’s kitchen with her mixers, frying pans, and chopping knives. Phillip pockets a strip of firecrackers from our father’s Fourth of July stash and looks through the drawers of Granddad’s worktable for a box of matches. Luckily, he doesn’t find any. As we’re leaving, I notice that the weather vane on the roof has spun around and is pointing southwest.