The girl stands on the shore. The eyes of the deer skull are socketed black but he can feel her eyes watching him. “Don’t leave.” In her hand something glows. The satellite phone. “You forgot this.”
Josh tries to concentrate on getting his legs to move. First one, then the other. He simply needs to climb in the canoe and shove off. But he can’t. His mind feels as though it has shattered and out of the cracks have sprung roots that tunnel deep and hold him in place. He will never leave this place. It’s where he belongs. And the girl is walking toward him now, reaching out her hand, offering the phone, and he can do nothing but say, “May? Is that you?”
Her voice deepens and her body fleshes out. “You’re joking, right?” Todd says. “It’s me, bro.” He wears a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts and flip-flops.
“Where were you? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“Sorry, man. There’s this great bar around the corner. Getting my happy hour on. First round’s on me. Let’s go?”
Josh ignores Michelle tugging at and pleading with him. The part of his brain that hasn’t shut down remembers reading an article once about persistence hunting. Early humans would chase animals to death. Antelopes, gazelles, boars. Because we are uniquely suited for long-distance running, we can successfully chase down death or race away from it. That’s what he’s been doing all this time. Ever since the crash, he’s never stopped running. But now he’s ready to stop. He said as much back in Minnesota, right before he dove down that channel of water, the Devil’s Kettle. “Remember?” Todd says. “You’re the one who said it, bro. You’re done.”
“I’m done,” Josh says.
“No more daring the nightmare. Time to kick back.”
“I’m ready to rest.”
“This is a good place for that. I know a good tree you can settle into the shade of for a nice long nap.”
“As good a place as any.”
“You said it, man.”
The faces keep changing as the figure comes closer, and closer still, first Todd, now Lester, now his mother, now his father, finally his sister, and she grabs her ear and tugs hard and peels off her face and reveals the skull of a deer beneath it. Because Josh is screaming, he doesn’t hear Michelle when she says, “Look at me! I’m right here, and right now I need you.”
In the end, Michelle has to knock him out, curling her hands around the paddle and cracking its blade across the back of his head. She drags his body and flops it into the canoe and shoves off from shore. They’re out on the water now, and she leans hard into every stroke, switching sides to fight the current that wants to push her back to the island.
She concentrates on her paddle. On the muscles burning in her shoulder. On finding her way through the many logs clogging the inlet. On the stars that will tell her where to go. She is concentrating so hard, she fails to see the girl tucked into the bow of the canoe. The girl wearing the deer mask. The girl with the sharpened antler clenched in her tiny hand.
Michelle is not sure how far away she is from the island—thirty yards, fifty, one hundred—when she hears a familiar two-toned whistle. She won’t look back. Who knows what she’ll find there. She imagines fires rising from below and embers fleeing the forest like bright autumn leaves. She imagines the witch tree uprooting itself and clambering after them with its long, dirt-clotted tentacles. She imagines hundreds of figures standing on the shore, watching her go, the island itself appearing like a humped black cairn.
Some things can’t be captured by a photo. Some places don’t align with maps. Some myths have yet to be discovered.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the journals and magazines in which these stories originally appeared:
“The Cold Boy” (Gulf Coast), “Suspect Zero” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), “The Dummy” (first published in Cemetery Dance; later collected in XO Morpheus, published by Penguin and edited by Kate Bernheimer), “Heart of a Bear” (Orion), “Dial Tone” (first published in the Missouri Review; later collected in American Fantastic Tales, published by the American Library Association and edited by Peter Straub), “The Mud Man” (the Southern Review), “Writs of Possession” (the Virginia Quarterly Review), “The Balloon” (first published in Ploughshares; later expanded and warped into a postapocalyptic novel, The Dead Lands), “Suicide Woods” (McSweeney’s), and “The Uncharted” (Full Bleed).
Thanks to Larissa MacFarquhar for her reporting on the suicide culture of Japan—in “Last Call,” published in the New Yorker—which inspired me to write the title story of this collection. And a special nod to Mary Shelley—the queen of darkness—for Frankenstein (especially chapters 11–16), without which I never would have written “Heart of a Bear.”
Katherine Fausset. Steve Woodward, Jeff Shotts, Fiona McCrae, Marisa Atkinson, and the rest of the Graywolf crew. Holly Frederick and Noah Rosen and Britton Rizzio. Thanks to you all for the coaching and support.
And thanks, as always, to Lisa, for the love and friendship. Couldn’t do it without you, Chief.
Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—most recently, The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—as well as three books of short stories. His book of craft essays, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, is widely taught in creative writing classes.
His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review. His honors include an NEA Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
He broke into comics in 2014 with a Batman story in Detective Comics, and has gone on to write celebrated runs on Wolverine, Nightwing, Green Arrow, Teen Titans, and James Bond for Marvel, DC, and Dynamite.
The text of Suicide Woods is set in Utopia Std. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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