This was not the worst thing his brother ever did to him. Not even close. But it felt like the beginning of the worst. And that part of his brain felt as busted-up and short-circuited as that homebrewed television.
Josh looked like he came from a similar mold as Lester’s brother—hard eyes, square chin, a body like a weapon—but they couldn’t be more different. Josh didn’t want to hurt anyone but himself. He would rescue Lester from this. He imagines his friend trying to rush out onto the mud and instantly failing as it glops around his ankles and calves. He imagines him looking around stupidly, trying to figure out what to do. He won’t have time to cobble together and tie on a set of makeshift snowshoes, like Lester, so he’ll have to find another way.
A log. That’s what Josh will do. The shore is busy with logs and he’ll heft one up—as wide as his leg, twice as tall as him—and raise it up like a totem, before letting it fall into the mud with a splurt. And it will bridge the way out.
There—the water is pulling back now. The sound of static retreats. Mud slugs his cheek and grit seethes through his hair. And he is spitting and sputtering for breath, blinking away the salt that stings his eyes.
Surely Josh is almost there. He can hear his voice—can’t he? Yelling, I’m coming, buddy! If only his ears weren’t plugged with mud. One log won’t get Josh here. He’ll have to gather and arrange several, along with some chunks of driftwood that might serve as unstable bedding for him to clamber across. It will be inadequate, unsafe, but he’s desperate. He’ll do it, tightroping his way there.
Lester is about to scream for help, when the tide hits him again, a smothering liquid blanket. The static, the static—it’s in his ears and eyes now. It’s all around him, a fizzy nothing. He is a lost signal, a blank screen, a broken television.
He isn’t ready, and this time it will be longer, forty-five seconds, maybe a minute, maybe more. He didn’t gather enough breath to make it that long. All the calculations in the world won’t help him out here. Nature is looser and meaner than math.
Already his lips tremble and his throat spasms as he tries to keep his body shut down, clamped up. He shouldn’t move—that only makes him sink farther—but he can’t help himself. He throws up an arm—his fingers reaching through the water and making one last weak grab for the air, as if he might pull down a breath with him.
That’s when he feels Josh’s hand snatch his. Clamping and shifting his wet grip. Yanking him, struggling him upward, against the foaming surf. A little at a time, until his head surfaces, finally free. He breathes in water and coughs it back out, his lungs hitching. The tide has pulled away now, but Lester is barely aware, with only one salt-burned eye capable of seeing. His body is socked with mud and cold to the core. He knows he shouldn’t reach so desperately for Josh—and risk dragging him down—but he can’t stop himself. All the numbers have scrambled in his head. He is certain of nothing except his need to breathe.
His shoulders come loose—then his belly, his waist, a long, horrible birth. His ears might be plugged, but he can still hear Josh’s muffled voice saying, “I’ve got you, friend.”
Weakly, they crawl across the uncertain bridge Josh built. Lester can’t stop coughing, but he manages to patch together a sentence. “Thought. You. Were. Dead.”
“I’m unkillable, remember? An unkillable bastard. Isn’t that what you called me once?”
Lester barks more than laughs, and then the tide turns again, chasing after them. The water finds them on a log, frothing over it, claiming their wrists and knees, and Josh coaches him forward, saying, “Almost there,” and “You can do this,” and “You’re safe now.”
That’s where he’s wrong. There’s nothing safe about the shore. But Lester can’t respond except to say, “They, they, they, they.” As in, they got Cliff and Todd. And they tried to stone him. And they left him to drown. And they might be watching right now.
“Who?” Josh says, pulling him out of the final stretch of water. “Who’s they, Lester?”
For a second, Lester almost says, My brother.
Todd can’t open his eyes. Dried blood binds his eyelashes. He can’t remember how, but he gashed his head. His brain feels bruised, every thought failing before it can take form. How long he’s been out, he doesn’t know. Where he is, he doesn’t know, but it smells like earthworms and he can hear a muffled dripping, so his first thought is, Basement. He’s in a basement. Underground.
He slips in and out of consciousness a few more times before waking fully. Then he takes in a big, panicked breath as a rush of images comes at him. The camera packs. The plane. The island. The trees with faces carved into them.
He tries to reach a hand to his wound, but can’t. He’s tied down. His wrists. Ankles too. His body arranged upright in a chair. It takes many minutes, but he finally blinks his crusted eyes free.
The chair is made of antlers. The walls are cut from dirt and stone. Roots dangle like hair from the ceiling. The space is dim, but oranged by some light. His eyes settle wildly on something. A man wearing a bone mask. Long-snouted, with fangs as big as fingers. A bear. Along his wrist he wears a three-pronged antler braceleted by a leather strap, so that its horns appear like a claw. His clothes are stitched from furs. His hair is long and clumped. Beside him is another wearing a wolf skull, a long beard mossing his chest. A woman in a deer skull, with feathers braiding her hair. And a man wearing a whale skull. A small one, what must be a baby’s, but the mouth is long and strange and reaches to his waist like an awful bill.
Todd doesn’t realize he is screaming until he runs out of breath. When he does, they all lean toward him and begin screaming themselves. Mocking him. Assaulting him with voices that come together into a single rough-throated cry.
He scrunches his eyes shut, trying to hold on to the darkness and wishing everyone away, and just like that, their voices go silent. No, everything goes silent. He has no sense of up or down or left or right. Maybe he passed out again, but he might as well be floating through space. Then—every sense seems to whisper slowly into existence.
First he feels sunlight on his skin and traffic from a nearby highway and the buzz of an electric meter. He smells the cat piss stink of weed and the tang of summer-heated blacktop. When his eyes snap open, he knows instantly where he is. Behind his high school, next to the dumpster. He pinches a joint between his fingers, and a girl stands before him, opening and closing her hand in a gimme motion. Her blond hair is cut short and spiked with gel. She wears purple Doc Martens and acid-washed denim shorts and a Misfits T-shirt two sizes too big. Suzie Neighbors. He hands her the joint and she sucks a lungful off it. “Sorry,” she says and a cloud of smoke hits him and makes his eyes water. “But we’re done.” He asks her why, but he already knows the answer, already knows she’ll say it after she flicks the joint at him and stalks away. “Because you’re a loser, Todd.”
He blinks and the scene shifts. He’s standing on a bartop in Jamaica. A crowd of people has gathered around, laughing and clapping. He wears no pants, but something dangles from his ass. A wad of toilet paper that trails thirty squares or so down the bar. Josh sparks a match and lights the tip and the fire licks its way forward and he bends his knees and kicks his feet, the dance of the flaming asshole, while everyone chants his name.
Todd blinks and now he’s in his parents’ living room. He sits on the couch, while his mother and father stand before him. The sun is at such an angle—coming through the picture window—that he has to squint to see them, their figures dark and casting long-limbed shadows across the floor. They have his report card in hand. They’re telling him he’ll never make it into college, never make anything of himself. He’s a fool. He’s a clown. He’s a follower. Todd tries to tell them about his plans. He and Josh and Lester—they’re planning on launching this channel. This YouTube channel, and—but he never finishes, because his father tears the piece of paper in half, and then in half again, and hurls the confetti of it at him.
Todd blinks—and his fri
ends stand before him. Back in the strange room cut out of the earth with roots stringing the ceiling. Josh and Lester. Cliff and Michelle. They’re all here. They’re all alive. They smile kindly, and he smiles, too, even when he tries to stand and realizes he can’t. Because he remains chaired in place.
Josh steps forward. He has an antler lashed to his wrist. The three horns of it are sharpened and gleam whitely. It jabs forward—and Todd cries out, “No!”—before he realizes that Josh is freeing him, slicing through the bindings that anchor his wrists and ankles.
Todd looks around wonderingly. He rubs the reddened skin. And stands. Part of him wants to run toward his friends and pull them into a hug. But another part of him wants to rush away from here. Their smiles seem too big now, with too many teeth crammed inside them. “Dance for us,” Josh says.
Todd mouths the word What? but can’t quite say it.
This time they all say it together: “Dance for us, fool.”
Todd shakes his head no. When he backs away, the smiles grow wider still, reaching all the way to their ears. Many hands reach for him and push and pull him. “Dance for us,” they say. “Fool, fool, fool.”
The walls are yellow where they’re not papered with maps. The curtains are pulled aside to reveal a brilliant summer day, and Michelle kneels in a square of sunlight now, playing with her bears. She’s gathered a collection of them over the past two years, and they’re her favorite toys. Plastic figurines that come with costumes and props. The sister bear has long red fur that can be combed and styled. The papa bear comes with a hat collection. The bears drive cars and the bears cook meals and the bears celebrate Christmas.
Right now the bears are on an adventure, ranging around the woods, searching for the best place to have a picnic. She has laid down a National Forests map for imaginative effect, and nudges the bears across the topographic features as they discuss the benefits of a coulee over a mountaintop for their meal.
In her excitement, her hand moves too swiftly and knocks one of the bears to the side. The brother bear. He tumbles across the floor and comes to a rest near the heat register and her narration of the picnic adventure ends. She’s trying to remember something, but it escapes her. Like a dream that still flickers around the edges of your mind as you’re brushing your teeth, changing out of your pajamas.
She leans toward the register and feels a warm wind breathing out of it. The metal venting drops down six inches and then elbows off into darkness. Down there she can see a thick layering of dust and a dead moth.
She is about to return to her map when she remembers. She was playing just like this—in her room, with her bears—when a voice came trembling through the grate. It was her older brother, Zack, whose room was below hers. He said he could hear her and she said, “So?” and he said, “It’s annoying.”
“Then stop listening.”
She resumed playing for another minute, and then he called up, “Hey, I’ve got a fun idea.”
“What?”
He told her to drop something down the register. A pencil or a ball or something.
“Why?”
“Because I think it will drop into my room. I think I can catch it.”
“Okay,” she said and found a cupcake-shaped eraser and pulled off the grate and said, “Here it comes,” and dropped it and it slid and bumped down the vent pipe. “Did you get it?”
“Got it!” he said. “Now do one of your bears.”
“No way.”
“Do it. Then we can play with them down here together.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
So she dropped them. One after the other. Sister, papa, and all the rest. Her favorite toys. They vanished, sliding off into the dusty, dark guts of the house. When she ran downstairs, she found her brother lying on his bed, his hands tucked behind his head, a small smile on his face. “What?” he said.
“Where are the bears?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the one who dropped them down the vent.”
She had never cried harder or longer in her life. Not even when her grandmother or dog died. And she had never felt so much anger at someone, but also a sense of self-condemnation. It was her fault because she had trusted him. She made a promise—an eight-year-old’s promise, but still, the mark of it lasted all these years—that she would never trust anyone.
Never trust anyone. It would be easier, so much easier, if she could, but she can’t. She can’t trust her toys, so she can’t trust the room, so she can’t trust the dreamscape she’s lost in. She brings her hands to the side of her head as if to contain her thoughts. She stands and reels before the wall. The wall of maps. Here is the collage of the globe, the country, the state, the city—each with an X on it. An X that implies You are here. She is there.
No—she is not. And it’s then that the illusion begins to crack through and she can feel her mind beating at it until it nearly shatters. “It’s not real,” she says and lashes out, punches a hand into a map and through the wall itself. She swipes again and tears down a map of the country and kicks the baseboard and slams her shoulder against the drywall. There is a puff of dust, the splintery crunch of the rotten studs beneath, and then it all comes crumbling down around her.
And she finds herself instead in an earthen tunnel.
“I should have waited for her,” Josh says.
Night has fallen. The stars that speckle the darkness seem outnumbered only by the trees in the forest. A campfire crackles on the beach, far from Cliff’s body, and by the orange glow of it Josh helps Lester clean away the mud and examine his wounds. “She called after me. She told me to stop. But I wasn’t thinking. I was chasing—”
What exactly? The ghost of his sister? Or some child who—impossibly—lived here? The daughter of whomever Lester thought he saw on the shore? It’s easier not to ask questions. It’s better not to think at all. That’s always been true for him. He’s always better off when he has a mission, some pressing task to fulfill. Whether it’s wing-suiting off a skyscraper or escaping the plane or saving Lester, when his mind is singularly focused, it doesn’t wander in dizzying circles as it does now.
“Maybe she’s fine,” Lester says. “Maybe Todd’s fine too.” But there’s nothing in his voice worth believing.
Lester was talking earlier about ley lines and energy vortexes. Compass points spinning and radio signals scrambling. But really, it’s Josh’s mind that feels like it’s short-circuited. If he listens to the slop of the tide, to the wheeze of the wind, he hears something. Something beckoning. Something that’s been waiting for him. It has a terrible secret that will make moss fur his tongue and flowers spring from his eyes and roots reach out from beneath his toenails.
“Josh!” Lester says and the world snaps back into focus.
“What?”
“You went someplace else.”
“Sorry.”
“I was trying to tell you about the phone.” He studies Josh with his one good eye, while touching the other one tenderly, the pouched-over bruise sealing his vision. “I gave it to Todd before I tried for the plane.”
Josh rubs both hands across his face and blows a sigh through the fingers. “Where we are isn’t a secret, right? Someone will come for us.” His breath is soured with spent adrenaline.
“But when?”
“When they realize Michelle’s missing. Or Cliff’s missing.”
“She never told anyone she was coming—remember? Atlas doesn’t know she’s here. And that plane will be lost to the mud sooner than later.”
Josh closes his eyes for a long time and readjusts his expectations. “You said you thought they took Todd. Where?”
Lester sweeps his arm, as if to say: The island, the night, who the hell knows.
Then comes a sound. From behind them. Among the trees. A skitter of rocks.
They go silent and stare into the impenetrable black for a minute. Then Josh picks up a stick wigged with lichen. He jabs it into the fire unt
il the flame catches and uses it as a torch when approaching the scar-faced trees.
The inexact light makes their carved mouths appear to move, as if they are cackling silently. He limps up and down the line of them—the bite in his calf aching—and then pauses before the hollow tree. Something glints at its base. He kneels, reaching out a hand to pluck a red M&M from the ground. He clenches it in his palm a moment, so that when he opens it again, the candy has melted and smeared.
The stick has burned down enough that he hurls it back to the beach. Lester digs into his pocket and clicks on a penlight that projects a thin yellow funnel. “This will work better.”
“He’s in there,” Josh says.
“In there?”
“Down there. Below.”
“How do you know?”
He pops the M&M in his mouth and crunches down. “I know.”
Lester trains the penlight on the tree, illuminating the ground before the hollow. The dirt here is as glossy as a frequently used trailhead. The hollow appears to be a rough doorway that drops into a stone staircase.
A few peanuts and crumbles of Chex mix dot the steps and Lester says, “You’re suggesting we follow the breadcrumbs into the enchanted forest?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Those stories usually have a witch in them, Josh.”
“Do you have another suggestion?”
Lester takes a long time to answer. “Part of me is like, what if it’s a trap?” he says with a sigh. “But then I guess nothing’s changed, since we’ve been in the trap ever since the plane crashed.”
“I’m going,” Josh says.
“Then I’m coming. Nobody’s leaving anyone behind in the dark.”
Josh doesn’t tell Lester about the need that animates him. Need beyond any thought. Need as a feeling. A brain stem firing to nerve endings, the raw ingredients of himself. The need compels him to go down. He has his mission. He knows what he needs to do. To join the girl below. May. He knows that’s where she’s hiding. And if she’s there, maybe all the rest of them are too. His mother and father. As if the island were an open grave, and he’s discovered the entrance.
Suicide Woods Page 18
