Suicide Woods

by Benjamin Percy

  They travel down, hunching over so as not to bash their heads. They brace their hands against the walls and follow the curling staircase through thick stripes of earth—a loamy brown, a granular yellow, and then some clay that has the red quality of muscle, all of it veined thickly with roots. And then the floor bottoms out and a tunnel stretches before them.

  The space is wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Tall enough that they shouldn’t have to duck their heads, but the claustrophobia of the place makes them curl and clench their bodies. Into the walls—intermittently, at random heights and distances—there are hollows with animal skulls tucked into them.

  Timber supports buttress the tunnel. From one of these dangles a lit lantern. On the floor beneath it is a rusty tank sloshed full of kerosene.

  “Are they survivalists?”

  “I don’t think that’s the right word for what we’re seeing.”

  “Then what is?”

  Lester says, “There’s something—I don’t know—almost ceremonial about this place. The trees and the cairn. The skulls arranged here. If it’s supposed to be this confluence of ley lines … maybe somebody’s treating it like a church.”

  “Like a cult?”

  When he speaks again, it’s barely perceptible. “Or a coven.”

  Josh looks over Lester’s shoulder—and just past the lantern’s light, where the shadows take over, he sees his parents. His father has sawdust in his beard. His mother is drying her hands on a dish towel. They look at each other and then at him, opening their arms, inviting him into a hug.

  “Josh?” Lester says and snaps his fingers. “Josh!”

  The vision of them swirls away, into the depths of the tunnel, like paint down a drain. Josh starts to chase after them but Lester holds up a hand to stop him. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Thought I saw something.”

  “What?”

  Josh doesn’t tell Lester what he saw or that even now he hears voices whispering just out of earshot.

  “Josh?”

  “Forget it.”

  “You’re not alone, you know,” Lester says.

  “I know.”

  “I mean I’ve seen things too.”

  “For real?” Josh says.

  “I don’t know if anything’s for real … but yes.”

  Neither of them chooses to elaborate, but Josh finally says, “It’s been a long time since I felt scared. But I think I’m there now.”

  “That’s good,” Lester says. “It’s good to be scared.” He pulls the lantern off the hook. “Just remember I can smell the kerosene burning in this lantern. I can wrap my hand around its metal handle. The same person who hung it from that hook dug these tunnels and threw those rocks and built that trap full of geese and chained up those wolves.” Lester puts a hand on his shoulder, and squeezes hard, a demand that Josh stay with him. “We might have fallen off the map, but the laws of gravity still apply.”

  Michelle moles her way blindly through the tunnel as it bends and bends again. She feels her way along the walls and sometimes her hands rough along timbers and sometimes they push into the hollows and find the skulls recessed there.

  She locates a room, foul with sweat, and it takes her many minutes to track its circumference. Her feet shuffle across blankets and furs and she guesses it to be a kind of bedroom.

  From there she follows the tunnel again, counting her steps and maintaining a map in her mind, because her continued concentration is the only thing that keeps her from collapsing and tightening her body into a ball and giving up. She isn’t sure what happened to her earlier, but she blames it on shock and stress and fear. A waking dream brought on by the flood of cortisol and norepinephrine in her system.

  After another 203 steps, she enters a high, wide chamber. From the ceiling dangle long, thick roots. There are so many of them and they reach so low that it’s like swimming through a kelp forest. Hanging from these roots, not all, but many of them, are objects that she fingers curiously. CDs. Tablets. Laptops. Smartphones. What might be the steering wheel of a boat? A silver dollar? With a hole punched through President Eisenhower’s eye to accommodate the root’s knot? The same thing has been done to hundreds of quarters.

  She wends her way through the chamber until she comes across something heavy and solid that creaks the root with its weight. Her hands trace a buckle, a zipper. Her nails scritch the nylon. She knows then what she’s found, but reaches up to ascertain her fear, and yes, there it is, the metal ball stippled with camera lenses. It’s not just any backpack. It’s a Titan pack.

  All five of them, she soon discovers. The packs dangle from the roots like pupae. The death of her team felt like an abstract theory before. Now she feels burdened by the sudden weight of it all. She is the reason they came. She is the reason they’re dead. She deserves to be down here with them, doomed to this place.

  “Here there be dragons,” she says to herself, and just then her hand nudges a switch, and the camera unit whirls to life with a rusty chirp. The darkness retreats as the chamber spins with a kaleidoscopic light. Map every inch of the world. That was their goal. But some places are better left undiscovered.

  In the spinning light, she can see now that four tunnels reach outward from this chamber. The roots sway and the coins clink and the lights flash and she can only turn in circles when wondering which way to go. Until her very heart feels like it’s spinning.

  Then—coming from a low, oval entrance—a voice calls out to her. One she recognizes. A deep-throated rumble she heard often, speaking from the grainy reception of a satellite phone. Paul Meyer. From the earlier team. He had a black beard and thick forearms and previously worked for Outward Bound, leading troubled kids on wilderness adventures. He was from Ohio, she remembers. He liked horror movies. And rock climbing. And deep-dish pizza. His parents were in constant contact after he went missing, and she kept them updated as best she could. She emailed them a few days ago and told them she was assembling a new team. For rescue and recovery. “Don’t give up hope,” she wrote.

  Now Paul is calling her name, over and over, “Michelle?” And he’s not alone. Other voices weave in and out—is that Sammy? and Jane?—a summoning chorus, all crying for her to come. “Michelle?” they say. “This way, Michelle.”

  She goes to them. Following the tunnel into another chamber, this one a natural cave. Its floor is stone and black sand. At its entrance a lantern hangs from a hook and its light barely reaches the domed roof. She pulls the lantern down, surrounding herself with a hazy orange orb. A spring fountains out of the wall and splashes down a rough staircase of fallen rock and channels across the floor. The burble of water replaces the voices and she wonders a moment if that was the source all this time.

  Along the floor and the walls and even the ceiling she notices roots. Some as thin as a finger. Others as broad as a thigh. They work through the dirt and through the stone, hundreds of them, thousands of them, interwoven. All veining outward from the same source. She follows them as they grow ever thicker, and now the lantern reveals their point of convergence.

  It is watching her. A mass of roots that somehow appear knotted and woven and dirt-sculpted and stone-jeweled into the shape of a vast and terrible skull, but the skull of what she does not know. Something old. Something people would fall to their knees to worship. The roots that tumble down the walls and across the floor are its tongues or tentacles or veins. This is the base of the great tree she had encountered aboveground.

  Every pulpit demands an offering, and this one has bodies upon it. Dozens of bodies. Both human and animal. Some are upside down. Some right-side up. Some sideways. With roots up their noses and down their throats and into their ears and eyes. Just as the cemetery outside featured boats new and old, so are the bodies here. She sees among them bones laced together with graying flaps of flesh. But she also smells the sweet stink of rot. Among the corpses she finds the faces of those she recognizes, their flesh preserved by the cold of the cave. Her team.
She has finally found her team.

  She doesn’t realize she is screaming until the hand claps over her mouth.

  Josh keeps calling her name, but Michelle doesn’t seem to hear him. She drops the lantern and its glass shatters on the floor. She bites his hand hard enough to draw blood.

  Even when she spins around and her eyes settle on him, even when he and Lester say, “It’s okay—it’s us,” she keeps her distance. For every step they take toward her, she takes another back. She’s streaked with grime and her eyes appear lidless, and she moves too wildly, swinging her arms and bending her knees too far with every retreating step. She doesn’t breathe so much as gobble air. Words fight from her mouth when she says, “But is it you? Is it really you?”

  They’re going mad. All of them. This place is doing it.

  Lester settles her down by holding his lantern toward a nearby body and saying, “Is it them? Your team?”

  “It’s them,” she says, nodding sharply. “It’s going to be us if we don’t get the hell out of here.”

  “It already is us,” Lester says, and they follow his gaze to Todd. He is naked. A fat root has wormed into his open mouth and down his throat. Another curls through his eye. Another goes into his ear. Others have entangled him elsewhere. Blood oozes off his body—and all the other bodies—and into the springwater that flushes its way downstream.

  Her voice jitters when she says, “It’s like a temple. It’s like—” But she isn’t sure what to say, because this isn’t like anything. She wants to give it a name, but the only name it deserves is a scream.

  Josh touches Todd—hesitantly at first. “No.” His skin is cold. His body limp. “No.” He searches for a pulse and can find none. “No.” He pulls at the roots and they make a suckling sound when displaced. But he can’t free his friend. “No, Todd. No, no.” He hasn’t opened himself up to sadness yet. There’s only denial. And anger flaring on the other side of it.

  “Let’s go,” Michelle says. “Let’s just please go. We’ll swim for it. It’s a long way, but we can rest on the logs when we’re tired and—”

  She goes quiet as Lester lowers his lantern. His grip uncurls and it strikes the floor and tips over and the flame nearly dies.

  “Lester?” Josh says, his hands still on Todd. “You okay?”

  In response Lester lets out a wheezing sigh. Blood dribbles from his mouth, and he looks down at the prong that has suddenly appeared in his chest, the tip of an antler, shoved all the way through his back and out his breastbone, as though he were a sheath. When his body collapses, a man steps forward to take his place.

  It’s Josh. Or some version of him. The Josh who made it over the mountains. The Josh without scars hatching his skin. The Josh with a genuine smile brightening his face. Some figures approach, melting out of the darkness. His mother and father appear on either side of this happier, healthier version of himself and take his hands in theirs. Someone nudges between them, and they look down to chuckle at his sister, May. They all lean together affectionately. And then settle their eyes on him and wave him forward.

  Maybe he would have gone. Maybe he would have joined them. If not for Michelle.

  She scoops up the dropped lantern and leaps forward and swings it hard. Directly into the face of the other Josh. His face goes from a smile to a snarl and then transforms into a bear skull. A mask.

  She swings the lantern again and the skull cracks and this time the lit kerosene splashes onto the man. For that is what he is. A man, not a phantom. A man who is screaming because his face is on fire. And when he swats at it, his hands catch on fire as well, and then his chest when he tries to extinguish them there.

  Flames trail from the lantern like bright ribbons. She spins in a fast circle—and releases it. The lantern comets through the air with a sizzle. Then strikes the roots of the great tree. Maybe they twist and retract, but who can be sure in this indefinite light. Fire catches and a high-pitched keening follows. The sound comes from the witches.

  Michelle grabs Josh’s arm and drags him away and says, “Come on!” They kick their way into the stream, and the cave ceiling angles down sharply and they duck their heads and then drop to their knees to continue forward. “Where are we going?” he says and then understands as she forces her body flat and slides downstream and worms through a low hole in the cave wall. A band of moonlight is visible there, and he realizes it must be the same place they paused to drink earlier that day.

  He drops down to follow her, but just then someone dives onto his leg and takes hold of it. A man with a long-jawed whale skull fitted over his own. Josh kicks at him until he is free. And then splashes and wriggles forward, into the short tunnel, the water surging all around him, a familiar feeling. His belt catches at one point, but he claws and scrambles his way out.

  Michelle is on the other side, holding out her hand to him. But just as he grabs it, another snatches hold of his ankle. For a straining moment he is caught in the stream, still anchored to the underworld. He gives one last kick and slides free and pinwheels for a moment in the stream.

  By the time he recovers and crawls onto the bank, he sees that Michelle has climbed onto the hillside over the tunnel. She kicks at a boulder, trying to dislodge it, straining down with her weight.

  Below her—out of the darkness—the sharp white skull of the whale appears. Water froths around it. Then two arms appear and a torso, and just when the man is about to pull himself free, a few pebbles and a curtain of dirt come tumbling down onto him, followed by the boulder. It splinters the skull with a damp crunch and the shards of it are carried downstream, lost to the fragments of moonlight reflecting off the water’s surface.

  A fat moon hangs in the sky. Michelle has never liked the night, but she’s always loved the moon. Because moonlight is different and special, almost always a surprise, silvering the world with a magical glow. It’s something to pause and marvel at. “Look at the moon,” people say, turning their faces upward. No one ever says that about the sun. Because it’s our standard, our normal, our boring. Life is like sunlight. But dying is like moonlight. Maybe that explains her attraction to Josh. He is always on the brink of death, and that makes him unexpected and scarily beautiful. He is a kind of moon giving off his own special light.

  Now she’s joined him. She’s never felt more vital, flooded with energy that brightens hidden pockets of herself she never knew existed. She is the one who saved them. She is the one guiding them through the woods now. She might have commissioned this expedition, but for the first time she truly feels in charge of it.

  Josh’s voice is high and pleading when he says, “Lester was the first friend to come see me in the hospital. After the crash. I remember waking up and seeing his face first. He was always there for me.”

  He seems to be talking more to himself than to her, but she still says, “I’m here for you now.”

  He can’t seem to keep his balance as he blunders his hip into a stump and scrapes his forehead against a low-hanging branch. “My calf hurts,” he says and she wants to say, Stop whining. He doesn’t ask where they’re going. And he doesn’t thank Michelle or remark that she just killed a man or maybe more than one. They are beyond the reach of any map here, and also of rules.

  “What did you see?” he says. “When you swung that lantern—what did you see?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I mean—I don’t trust the answer.”

  She smells smoke. Maybe it’s roiling blackly through the tunnels now and leaking from hollowed trees as if through secret chimneys. Maybe the island was right to defend itself. Because mapping the world meant conquering it.

  A flash of silver catches her eye and she pushes through a thorned and berried cluster of devil’s club. “Found it,” she says, uncovering a crab boat with its hull half-buried. Here begins the junkyard. Crashed planes and sunken ships dragged here to be claimed slowly by the elements.

  “What did
you see—in there?” he says again, and she says, “My team. I saw my team.”

  “The lost team?”

  “Yes. I saw dead people. Okay?”

  “That’s not what I saw.”

  “Then I guess you haven’t gone crazy like me.” She doesn’t want to think about it. She wants to focus on surviving. And the only way to do that is to find the aluminum canoe she spotted earlier. The velvety black air is broken up by silver shafts of moonlight that illuminate the wreckage.

  “No,” he says. “That’s not what I mean. I saw my family.”

  She looks him hard in the eye. “What are you talking about?”

  “And I saw myself.”

  She locates the canoe and asks for help as she sweeps the leaves and tears the vines off it and tips it over and dumps out the mildewed water and the two lacquer-peeled oars gathered at its bottom. “This way,” she says and they hoist the canoe by the gunwales and portage toward the shore.

  “What I saw kept changing. Like, the longer we were here, the worse it got. As if the island was figuring us out,” he says. “Are they ghosts?”

  She readjusts her grip. “Ghosts don’t burn.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He can’t stop talking, his words a babbling rush. “Whatever they are, it’s like they’re here in service of the place itself. Like that tree is one big witch. The island. The inlet. The surrounding forest. This entire fucking state.” They push out of the trees and teeter down the shore.

  “Does it matter what you call them?” she says, even as she recognizes his desire. He’s acting like her. Wanting to put a pin in something. Label it. Stick it neatly in a drawer. But she’s given herself over to the unknown.

  They heave the canoe forward and it grumbles and scrapes across the rocks and then glides halfway onto the water. Michelle already has one leg inside it, and Josh is about to follow her when he hears a voice—a girl’s voice—call out, “Wait.”