The Woods Are Always Watching

by Stephanie Perkins

  These liquids reminded her of other necessities. With extreme difficulty, she maneuvered to urinate into the empty mason jar from the previous night’s dinner. Some of it ran over her hands and slopped onto her jeans. I should have just peed myself. The thought wasn’t funny. It was as honest as a deserved punishment.

  A commercial airplane whined across the darkening sky. The sound magnified Josie’s loneliness. She could see civilization, but it couldn’t see her. She had no flares, no SOS spelled out in rocks. The passengers on board would never hear her cries for help. She watched the red blinking lights in silence.

  The wind picked up with brusque and forceful gusts. Dead leaves swept across the ground and showered into the sinkhole. She gripped her hoodie tightly against her chest. This, she thought. This was the most sorry that she had ever felt for herself.

  And then something unexpected blew into the hole.

  It started with one piece of paper, then another. Then several more tumbled in behind. At first, Josie didn’t understand because her mind didn’t want to process what they meant—maps and directions and instructions, each sheet a memory from her mother’s inkjet printer. The man had said he would bring them to help Neena. But he had left them behind.

  Numbing dread sank over Josie. Her ears sharpened to the surrounding forest.

  Night descended.

  NEENA

  THEY DESCENDED ON a narrow side trail off the Wade Harte. The man led the way. Neena didn’t like how he kept glancing over his shoulder as if checking to make sure she was still behind him. As if her wheezing breath and crunching boots weren’t enough reassurance. As if, at any instant, she might bolt.

  The sun sank below the mountains. The final rays of daylight barely illuminated the trail. A nagging haze of gnats followed her. Visually and physically compromised, she swatted and stumbled down the slope with one hand clamped on the headlamp around her neck. It would be there when she needed it.

  The man maintained a steady but incomprehensible monologue about digitally altered videos, trout fishing, his ex-wife, the judges on a network singing competition, pygmy salamanders, and phone addiction. She got lost in the connections and transitions.

  Like the bottle-cap trail, eventually the path opened up, and the foot-worn rut vanished into the forest floor. Unlike the bottle-cap trail, the way to continue was unmarked. Neena’s reliable internal compass—confirmed by the setting sun—was needling her northeasterly, so she was relieved when the man didn’t break stride as he headed in the direction of the parking lot. It wasn’t that she was worried he might get them lost. Clearly, he was familiar with the terrain. It was that she didn’t trust him.

  The man wasn’t just a stranger. He was strange.

  Something ferrety curbed his friendliness. His movements were scattered but quick, with purpose. It felt as if she were being shown one thing only to be distracted from another. Like that old man when she was in elementary school who waved her over to his car to ask if she’d seen his lost dachshund but then wasn’t wearing any pants. She’d run away, hot with shame, feeling like she’d done something wrong. This felt like her fault, too. She never should have left the main trail. She began to pray to bump into another hiker, pray to reach the parking lot before dark.

  They hustled deeper and deeper into the unknown woods. Somewhere nearby, water slipped and rushed over stones. The wind gusted up and shook the trees. And the whole time, the man never stopped talking. He swerved left around an ash with fibrous tumors of moss, and, expecting him to correct right and continue straight, Neena was surprised when he kept left—changing direction completely.

  She hesitated.

  Twenty seconds. That’s how long she’d give him to start heading in the correct direction. Following behind him, she counted in her head. Upon reaching twenty, she decided she’d counted too fast and allotted for twenty more. Then it was only right to add another twenty because that rounded it to a full minute.

  She wanted him to fix this. Now. Her panic spread like a virus. As one minute tipped into two, instinct overrode doubt. To prevent her from traveling a single step farther, her legs stiffened into a stop.

  The man reacted like a trigger. His pale eyes bugged through the sooty black shadows. “What’s the matter?”

  “Why are we turning around?”

  “We ain’t.”

  “No.” Something powerfully terrified detonated inside Neena. “We’re headed back the way we came.”

  The man pointed behind her. “We came thataway.”

  “You know what I mean. We’re walking back toward Burnt Balsam.”

  His pointing arm shifted. “Burnt Balsam is that way.”

  A blink of doubt. “No.”

  The story changed. “Well, hell. Yeah. But we have to go this way first. The trail’s gonna loop back around.” He took a few steps, attempting to shepherd her forward.

  The problem was that no perceptible geological impediments existed that might require them to walk in this direction. This part of the woods looked exactly like the rest of the woods. Even the tumorous ash appeared to be random, as if he were following a blaze she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see much of anything anymore. Darkness had invaded the forest, and only one thing was clear: This man was not here to help her.

  An unspoken transaction occurred between them.

  The air congested with a toxic pall. In one swift motion, his mask of helpfulness vanished as the rifle slipped down from his shoulder and into his hands.

  Perhaps he hadn’t anticipated it—that she would anticipate him—because she had just enough time to bolt before the first shot exploded out. The boom quaked the earth.

  Frantically, she zigzagged through the dark trees. Josie’s voice screamed inside her skull as she tripped and bumbled: Zigzag! Zigzag! Branches slashed her face and snagged her hoodie. Brambles tore her jeans.

  Another shot ripped through the woods. Bark exploded from the closest tree. The arboreal shrapnel stung her cheeks as the bang echoed against the mountains. Zigzag! Zigzag! Her airways narrowed acutely. The man tore through the bracken behind her.

  She was choking, running, coughing, fleeing. She’d lost all sense of direction. Another shot, and she fell, but she’d only tripped over a root. Her wrists took the brunt of the impact, and as she swiveled to get back onto her feet, a slender gap revealed itself under the massive boulder beside her. A natural hollow. Flattening her body, she wriggled underneath. Too late, she realized that she’d entered the incorrect way, and her head was facing the wrong direction to see out. The squeeze crushed her breasts and lungs. She buried her mouth into her shoulder to muffle her coughs.

  Inhale. She could hear Josie coaching her.

  She used the muscles of her rib cage to breathe in.

  Exhale, Josie said.

  She couldn’t exhale all the way. Every act was purposeful rather than automatic. Huge gulps of air felt like teensy puffs. Her eyes choked with tears as her neck tightened.

  The man careened past the boulder—and then halted. No doubt, he’d realized he couldn’t hear her anymore. How far away was he? A few yards? A few feet? She ceased trying to breathe. Her features twisted into a dimly rasping, openmouthed scream.

  His footsteps trod back slowly through the undergrowth. Sinking into the ground beside her head, they stopped again. One way or another, she was about to die.

  Please don’t hear me.

  Please don’t look down.

  Please don’t hear me.

  Please don’t look down.

  This was her final refrain. His boots shifted in the soft ferns, and she envisioned his stance following his eye line as it scanned the forest. Her abdomen quivered. She couldn’t hold for much longer. The taste of ancient granitic bedrock, damp black loam, and milky green lichen infused her open mouth. Death had arrived at her tomb.

  A bird made a startled caw as it f
lew from bushy cover.

  The man shot again, and her coughing erupted as he thrust mistakenly toward whatever creature had frightened the bird instead of the creature hiding beneath the rock.

  JOSIE

  THE HOLE WAS black and clammy. Josie imagined the plastic bag of inhalers discarded in the fermenting leaves above. The printouts lay beside her in the mud. Night seeped in through the threads of her clothing and her sanity.

  It had been dark for at least an hour, which meant that, any minute now, Neena should be reaching the car. If she’d made good time, perhaps she’d already done it. Help might already be on its way. Though it was unlike Josie to latch onto optimism, she placed a protective cage around these last glowing embers. Her ears strained for the distant notes of a helicopter or a team of emergency responders crashing through the forest. Sometimes she did hear them, only for the sound to persist unchanged and for her to realize that she was hallucinating in her exhausted delirium.

  She heard four gunshots. They sounded like thunder. Perhaps they were thunder. But surely these were all delusions, too. The best-case scenario was that the man was only concerned with himself—and whatever animal he was hunting—and that he’d flat-out left the woods. Because if he was looking for Neena, what would he do to her? And if Neena couldn’t get help, what would become of Josie? Would the man return for her, or would he leave her here to starve and rot? Which was worse?

  Josie shivered. Her ears were cold shells, and her nostrils had hardened with the rusty scent of her own blood. The pain was so livid and fluctuating that it was almost redundant. Her only comfort was her backpack, the bulky presence hugging her from behind, the sole barrier between her and the surrounding dirt.

  Night spiraled around her in lonely loops.

  Two girls walk into the woods, she thought. But the story wasn’t a fairy tale. They hadn’t dropped a trail of bread crumbs, discovered a gingerbread cottage with sugar-paned windows, or shoved an old witch into a flaming stove. Nor was it a ghost story, traded in whispers around smoky campfires. It wasn’t even an urban legend. Their story was flesh and bone. Urgent and real.

  A firm crunch fractured the cloistered silence. The sound of an approaching human was definitive in its reality. “Neena?” Josie’s voice surfaced as a croak. “Neena. Neena!” Each call grew louder and more unhinged. “Can you hear me?”

  Neena would have called back. A medic would have responded, too.

  “Help! Please help me!”

  Heavily, steadily, the footsteps advanced.

  “Oh God.” Josie whimpered. “Please, no.”

  The steps were deliberate and unhurried. The man had returned, and intuition told her that he hadn’t brought help. He stopped beside the sinkhole. Squinting upward through the inky nothingness, she tried to make out his figure, but he held himself just far enough back that she couldn’t see him. Could he see her?

  “Is that you?” she asked. “Are you the man who helped me earlier? I didn’t catch your name. I’m Josie.”

  The man exhaled in the darkness. The sound was hushed, channeled through a robust and sturdy chest.

  “Did you find my friend? Did you call for help?”

  Each question swung ominously unanswered. Her denial took its final push in the form of honesty. “I wish you’d say something. You’re scaring me.” She managed a rough laugh to keep it conversational. “Is my friend okay?”

  The man walked away.

  But then he turned again, walked toward her—and kept going. As he passed the sinkhole, his large, shadowy frame materialized briefly before slipping back into black.

  Fear stunned Josie like a captive animal.

  The man retreated. Turned. Advanced. He was pacing, prowling, threatening her with glimpses of his presence. The hole grew deeper and darker. Hostility strangled the oxygen from the air. Intense anger radiated out from him, as well as something even more dangerous but stifled. A tangible manifestation of evil.

  “Please,” she begged. “Please stop. Say something.”

  He lapped back and forth.

  With each predatory pass, her terror amplified. The man was enjoying himself. He was reveling in her fear. As his pacing drew closer, the outline of his shotgun became as clear as moonlight. Wishing for a weapon, she gripped the mason jar instead. Fright ignited into fury. “What do you want from me? Go away! Get the fuck away from me!”

  In a flash, he was crouched beside the rim. She shrank back. The man stared, dark eyes unblinking, across the vulnerable length of her body.

  She strained to see him better, to see him at all. “Wh-where’s my friend?”

  His shadow hardened. “No need to concern yourself about her.”

  A leaden weight dropped through her gut. “What did you do? Where is she?”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  Josie cried in soundless anguish. “Where is she?”

  “I have plans for you.”

  “No. Please.”

  “I bet you love to party with the boys at school.” His words vibrated with tightly bridled rage.

  She cringed and recoiled. “Please,” she said again. “Please leave. I won’t tell anybody I saw you hunting. I won’t say anything, I promise.”

  “Now, what makes you think I’m hunting, all the way out here?” The man paused to lift the gun. “This?” He laughed, but the utterance was low and malicious. “Yeah. I reckon you could say I’m hunting.”

  “Neena’s getting help.”

  “Neena.” His crude tongue tasted the name. “No. She can’t help you.”

  An image appeared of her best friend crumpled on the forest floor, a vicious shot to the head, her gaze vacant. “Our parents know where we are. They’re expecting us tonight. When we don’t show up, they’ll send help.”

  “They won’t know you girls is gone for a while.”

  “They will. They’re really strict. If we’re late—even five minutes—they’ll call the cops. My dad called them last year when—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” he snapped, dropping low to the ground. “I can smell a liar.”

  His halitosis stench blasted her olfactory organs, so abhorrent and animalistic that she believed him. Abruptly, he stood back up and stormed into the woods.

  The crashing in the underbrush stopped with similar curtness.

  Her heartbeat drummed. Seconds drained into minutes. She concentrated for any noise that might betray his location, but the void had consumed him.

  Her bones chattered and shook, and the jar of urine slipped from her grasp. She reached for it blindly before remembering the headlamp. Her pulse leapt. As she shifted to reach into her pack, the fragile skin around her ankle—barely holding on to her foot—jounced with shockwaves of pain. One hand clenched into her jeans for strength, while the other patted through the pack’s top pouch. Her fingers snatched up the headlamp.

  She listened, vigilant, holding the headlamp dark against her chest, not wanting to waste the battery until the light was needed. The elastic strap snugged around her fingers. The plastic indented her palms. The woods retained their secrets.

  If the man was gone, did that mean Neena was alive? Did he leave to check on her? Torture her? Was he playing sick games with her, too?

  I’m sorry I told him you were out there. Josie clutched the headlamp even tighter, hoping that Neena could read her mind, hoping the connection between them was real. I didn’t mean to give him your name. It just slipped out. I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you, that I yelled and called you selfish. You’ve never been selfish. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Time crawled until she was positive the man was gone.

  He wasn’t gone. At first, it was a sensation. A prickle, a tingle, a feeling that something had changed. Her heart rate, having finally slowed, began to accelerate. Her ears perked but did not detect. But then . . . an inhalation.

  Ice crysta
llized down her spine.

  Exhale.

  He was close. It didn’t make sense that she hadn’t heard his approach, unless he’d never walked away at all. Unless he’d been standing right above her the entire time.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Inhale. Exhale.

  Each breath grew incrementally faster.

  Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

  Josie struggled to operate her shaking fingers. They felt separate from the rest of her, a tool she’d never mastered. She pressed the headlamp’s button, and the monster grunted away from the bleaching spotlight. It took a moment to process what was in his hand, pink and fat and wormlike. Repulsion quickly replaced confusion.

  She seized the mason jar and hurled it. Glass shattered against the side of his head. His dripping face glinted, slick with blood and urine. He was stunned. And then he unraveled with fury. In swift retaliation, he picked up his shotgun and aimed. Her hand raised in defense as he fired into the hole. The explosion was the loudest sound she had ever heard. Debris and fluids blasted into a mass around her.

  The man stormed into the trees. “Now try and get out,” he called back.

  She sputtered and choked in the aftermath. Her body was in shock. Warm liquid gushed down her arm. Her left hand fumbled for the headlamp and held it up. Floating specks of dirt glistered in the beam as she squinted through the settling cloud. She saw her right arm, which was still lifted in defense. But she did not see her right hand.

  NEENA

  AS HER HAND grazed the rock above, her ring scraped but did not crack. It wasn’t the original. Neena had purchased it for a second time last spring, after the first had shattered when she’d banged it against her bathroom countertop at the wrong angle. She had replaced it straightaway with money from her savings, previously reserved for college textbooks, but she had never told Josie. Neena didn’t want her to worry that the broken lapis lazuli was an omen—that it represented anything other than Neena’s own carelessness.