by A. P. Fuchs
Brian set the picture down and opened up the jewelry box next to it. Before taking his shower he would set his gold watch and high school ring in there. Ever since losing a necklace while swimming in Lake Winnipeg as a boy one summer, going near water with any form of jewelry had always been a bad idea.
He put on his watch and ring and smiled.
She's going to like this, he thought.
Beneath Carrie's pillow on her side of the bed, Brian had hidden a love note for her. He took out the tiny envelope from beneath the pillow, opened it, and read the letter to himself.
"Carrie, I guess tonight's going to be it. I'm finally going to be with you forever. I've loved you since always, and tonight I'm going to prove it to you. I can't wait to see the expression on your face. Love, Brian."
He smiled again, the beat of his heart quickening. The clock above the bed said 6:45. He figured he had a few minutes before seeing her.
He went over to his side of the bed and sat on its edge and propped up his pillows. He lied down and set the love note neatly on his chest. The clock read 6:46.
A few more minutes, he thought, needing some more time to get used to the idea that life as he knew it was about to change.
When the clock read exactly 6:50, Brian opened up the night table drawer next to the bed and pulled out a blue, velvet case. Time to get moving. He didn't want to be too late this evening.
The lid creaked when he opened it. Inside was something smooth, silver and shiny. He took the object out and held it in his hands. After feeling it carefully, he set it on the mattress next to him, got up from the bed, picked up Carrie's picture and kissed it. He envisioned her kissing him back.
Bringing the picture with him, he returned to the bed, lay down again and replaced the love note on his chest. He picked up the object and studied it one more time. He had bought it earlier that day. For the one-hundred-and-sixty-dollar price tag, he hoped it worked, hoped it would ensure he and his sweetie would be together forever.
Carrie would agree I got a good deal, he thought. I can't wait to see the look on her face when she sees me.
He closed his eyes then put the object near his mouth, kissing it. His mind wandered to Carrie and he envisioned her the way he always did when he thought of her: running through a playground wearing the white dress she had picked out for their wedding day. A smile on her face and a glimmer of joy in her blue eyes.
It won't be long now, he thought. A tear ran down his cheek.
He pulled the trigger.
* * * *
The Man in the Woods
Bernie Calhoun wasn't too upset the night his wife sentenced him to sleep on the couch in the living room of their small home on Maple Tree Drive. It was quite understandable, actually. Besides, Bernie thought, if I caught her moaning in her sleep night after night, I'd probably do the same to her. Ah well, no matter. Can't take much of her own heavy breathing myself, anyway. And that was true. It was as if his wife, Elizabeth, made a conscious effort to counter each moan he emitted with an equally loud exhale of her own. The funny thing was, though Bernie was sound asleep when she exhaled so audibly, he was still able to hear her.
Bernie set his blanket and pillow down on the first of the three cushions that made up the seat of the couch. There was a hide-a-bed inside, but he was too lazy to pull it out. Besides, if he did, then it would show Elizabeth, when she came down for coffee in the morning, that he was able to make the best out of any situation that confronted him. Tonight, however, he wanted her to feel sorry for him. He would rough-it on the couch, without the bed, and when she came down in the morning, she would feel bad she made him sleep on worn cushions with nothing but a thin, knit blanket and a feather pillow.
Still, her actions were understandable. But the fact of the matter was, Bernie couldn't help his moaning in his sleep. He wanted to help it---but couldn't. Each morning Elizabeth would tell him he was groaning and muttering something as he slept, and each time he would reply by saying, "Yeah, maybe. But there would be no reason for it. I slept fine." Or so he would think because, when he was able to recall them, his dreams the night before had been pleasant ones. He hadn't had any bad dreams for thirty years. But he had plenty before then. And there had been one in particular that had topped them all. Deep down inside, he knew it was that dream that was responsible for all the moaning in his sleep, as if that dream still occurred somewhere underneath the normal dreams he dreamed now.
Though not one to give into any outlandish ideas or any hoodoo, Bernie did believe that something came through into this world the night he dreamt about the Man in the Woods.
* * * *
Bernie had been ten years old, the oldest of the two sons of Jon and Dhelia Calhoun. His brother, Brent, was three years younger, placing him at seven at the time. They were the "Bee Brothers" to the kids down the street and in the schoolyard. Bernard and Brenton Calhoun to their parents. To each other they were Berno and Brento.
It was often a tradition on weekends for Bernie and Brent to have "sleepovers," not so much in the traditional sense since they lived under the same roof, but on either Friday or Saturday night, Bernie would drag his bedding up to his brother's room and set up camp on the floor. After lights-out the farting contests would begin and, after that, the air smelling of a poignant version of that night's dinner, quiet mutterings of dirty words they weren't allowed to say along with the giggles to compliment them. Words like "poop-butt" and "dinkus" seemed all the more funnier with the lights off. Then, after the profanities were exhausted and the boob-talk done, the Bee Brothers would call it a night, seldom waking, and if one of them did, the other knew about it by a glass of water splashed in their face when the other came back from the bathroom from a middle-of-the-night pee.
But there was that one night that scared Bernie, and it was then he swore never to sleep in his brother's room again.
* * * *
"Catch!" Brent yelled across the field. He let the baseball rip toward Bernie.
"You putz! It's higher than it was the last time!" Bernie yelled back and followed the ball with his eyes as it came down from high in the blue sky like a falling meteorite before landing in his beat-up old baseball mitt. He looked back at Brent. His brother spun in circles in the dirt patch that seemed both out of---and in---place, in the grass before the trees.
They were out camping, playing catch before dinner, with Mom and Dad back at camp about ten minutes away.
Bernie hurled the ball at his brother, throwing a little slower than he would to his friends because Brent was younger and couldn't catch the fast ones. Brent soured his face, like he always did, as the ball came toward him. The ball smacked into his glove with a dull thwack when he caught it.
Brent stood up proudly, and with the ball still hidden in his glove, wriggled his ball hand above his head as if saying, "Hey, I caught it and I'm gonna throw it back at you, but even higher than the last time." He lowered his arm and added, "Hang on a sec." Then bent down to tie his shoe.
Bernie watched him, the sun glaring in his eyes from just above the trees. He turned away when the brightness caused a dull ache behind his eyes. When he looked back, Brent was gone.
* * * *
The forest was uncharacteristically dark for during the day. The green around Bernie was that dark green, so dark it looked almost black. The only thing that told him it was still daytime was the light green highlights on some of the leaves from the sunlight streaking in through the holes in the canopy of treetops high above him.
Bernie looked around. He stood no more than four feet from the forest's edge, and if he took a couple of steps back, he would be able to see into the field where he and Brent had just been playing catch. But he wouldn't be turning around this afternoon. He had to find his brother. And wasn't it just like Brent to go and run off into the middle of a woods he didn't know. He had done the same thing a year ago while at the park near their house. They had been in a field there, too---doing what, Bernie couldn't remember---when, sudde
nly, his brother was gone, swallowed by a cluster of shrubbery and trees.
"Brento?" Bernie called out, quietly at first.
No answer.
"Brento!" he called out again, this time louder.
Still nothing. The leaves rustled in the breeze.
"BRENTO!" His imagination immediately stepped in and he could almost hear Brent call back to him. But Bernie knew the difference between his imagination and real life, and this was real life. Brent hadn't responded.
He stepped further into the dense woods, his footfalls slow at first, but quickly increasing from the panic of knowing his brother could be lost.
"Stupid Brento," Bernie muttered. He thought briefly about running back out of the woods and to tell his parents Brent might have gotten himself lost, but he knew that if he did, his father would no doubt scold him for losing track of his brother and leaving him all alone in the forest. "Dinkus."
The thickness of the brush eased up a little and Bernie soon found himself in a sparsely vegetated clearing inside the woods. He would have thought it would make a cool fort was he not so worried for his brother.
Off to his right he heard a branch snap and he immediately spun in that direction.
"Brento?" he said, his voice catching in his throat. "Is that you?"
The leaves rustled in the wind again; his only answer.
Bernie trudged toward where he heard the branch snap. He silently swore to himself that when he found his brother, he would noogie the heck out of him.
The twigs and kindling crunched under his sneakers. He came up to some taller shrubbery and trudged through that, too. He parted the branches, some of them slapping back at him. One hit him in the eye.
"Ow," he said, mostly to himself, but secretly hoping Brent was nearby and could hear that he hurt himself trying to find him.
More thin branches, more crunching of shrubbery, more light and dark green. The patch of bushes came to an end and now there was only tree after tree after tree. Bernie looked around, trying to get his bearings. Aside from the bushes behind him, everything else looked the same. This scared him. He had always been good at finding his way around places he was a stranger to, but they had all been malls or neighborhood streets. This was his first forest and he feared he might be lost.
"Great," he said. "I tell ya, Brento, if I get lost because of you, I'm gonna feed you your cojones."
He kept walking, the trees around him seeming to multiply like rabbits. Five minutes later he stopped and looked around again. This time he knew he had done it. Everything looked the same, and what was worse, he couldn't see that patch of bush he cleared a few minutes ago. His path hadn't been straight. He had to avoid trees, roots and other smaller shrubbery.
He was lost.
* * * *
Realizing you're lost comes in stages. At first the "oh-crap-I'm-lost" sensation hits you in the chest with a sharp and thick whumpf. Then that's followed with the rapid beating of your heart, pulsing, "What-am-I-go-ing-to-do-What-am-I-go-ing-to-do." You think of how you got to be lost in a fast replay of everything that transpired up until the present, then you look at your surroundings once more and re-acknowledge that you're clueless as to your location.
Finally, you analyze your options.
And this is what Bernie did. He analyzed his options of where his brother could be. Except he couldn't arrive at any conclusions. His idiot brother had run into the woods, perhaps thinking a game of hide-and-seek would be fun, then not realizing that foreign woods was a bad place to do it in.
"BRENTO!" Bernie called. No one answered.
The air stilled, the rustling of the leaves quieted, the streaks of sun poking through the canopy of the forest ceiling muted.
That's when Bernie saw him. That's when he saw the Man in the Woods.
The Man, standing slightly hunched behind a thin veil of leaves and branches, was of average height and average weight. If Bernie were interested in specifics, he would have guessed around five and a half feet tall, one hundred and sixty-five to one hundred-seventy pounds. The Man's face was round---not fat-round---but round like a baby's. He was bald, too, and there were shallow indents in his skull, making his head look more skeleton-like than normal. He wore a long black coat and his eyes had no pupils or irises, at least none that Bernie could see. Was the Man blind? Maybe. But then why did it seem like he was looking right at him?
Bernie, his knees shaking, wanted to call out to the Man, but he didn't, and Bernie knew something right then. He knew if this wasn't a dream, he wouldn't have known that the Man knew where Brent was.
There was an awkward exchange of glances. The Man knew Bernie knew that he knew where Brent was. Bernie knew the Man knew that he knew that the Man knew where Brent was. And this cycle continued, the cycle of them knowing the other knew, until finally, after much he knew that he knew that he knews, the Man in the woods winked at Bernie then disappeared behind the leaves.
Bernie stepped forward slowly and approached the branches and leaves where the Man had just been. He was sure, just as he stepped up to the branches, the Man was hiding somewhere in the leaves and at any moment he would jump out and strangle him. But the Man didn't and he was safe. Except Bernie knew his brother wasn't. Somewhere, out there ahead of him, lost in the woods, Brent was being held captive by the Man. Bernie could sense it, almost as evidently as if someone had told him so. He didn't call out his brother's name, despite his inclination to do just that. Instead, he walked on, carefully, and with each patch of leaves and branches he passed, grew all the more comfortable the Man wouldn't be jumping out from behind any of them, because, simply, the Man hadn't so far.
There was another clearing ahead of him, this one not nearly as big as the one he had first encountered when coming into the woods. But it was big enough to hold a small house with a round roof.
The Man lives here, Bernie knew. And Brento's here, too.
The house was something out of a storybook. Its walls were white, its roof a light brown with smooth shingles that looked to be more impressed on the structure rather than laid on it. There was a door, its edges round, with a window on each side, about head height, their edges round as well. What was off about the house were two things. No smoke came from the chimney. Bernie thought this strange simply because if someone lived in a house, like in all storybooks, smoke came from the chimney. That's just how it was. And no path led to the two steps that went up to the front door. All storybook houses had a path leading up to them. That's just the way things were.
Bernie approached the house, images of Brent filling his mind. He could almost see his brother inside the house, standing there in the center of the room, watching the Man wait for their visitor to arrive. The Man would pace back and forth, occasionally grumbling something about how Bernie was taking so long in getting here, and Brent, too scared to move, could only nod at the Man, his bizarre obligation to agree with the Man taking him over completely.
A shudder raced up and down Bernie's spine. A knot formed in his stomach. He started toward the house, his steps shaky. With each footfall---though he consciously knew he should be getting closer---the house seemed to be distancing itself from him, apprehension of what might come making his trek up to the house longer and longer.
The two windows at the front of the house were like eyes staring at him; the door a long, drooping nose, the two rows of steps the teeth in a haunting smile.
Step. Step. Step.
The house was three footfalls closer, but seeming to move two footfalls back.
Step. Step. Step.
Three footfalls nearer. Two footfalls further.
Step. Step.
Two paces. Then one away.
Step. SNAP! The sound echoed in his legs. Bernie yelped in surprise. A branch had broken in half beneath his right foot. He looked down, shook his head. His wobbling legs continued forward again.
Closer came the house. Further away the house moved.
After what felt like forever, Bernie was only two
paces away from the steps to the door.
The house was menacing this close, its size seeming to have doubled in just a few short paces. There was dead silence from behind the door, no sign of anything living inside.
Bernie tried to call out Brento's name, but only a dry, pinching rasp rose from his throat.
He moved closer to the house. He raised his foot above the first step. It landed on the concrete foothold with a thwack, as if his shoe had slapped the stone instead of merely stepped on it. Bernie stepped onto the stair, paused, and found balance on his rubbery legs before stepping up to the next. He was face to face with the door. The sharp smell of pine filled his nostrils. There was that blasted silence within the home.
Bernie knocked, the sound hollow, the door that had just seemed so large and thick suddenly seeming so thin and weak. There was no answer, as expected. Why would there be? Bernie knew who lived behind the door. The Man wouldn't be inviting him in. The Man would want Bernie to walk in. He knocked again, just to be sure. Same hollow sound. Same silence responding. The door handle was a shiny, golden knob that Bernie could see his reflection in. He reached for it, grabbed it, its cool surface sending a shrill up his arm. He ignored it and turned the knob, the door unlatching itself effortlessly. He pushed and the door swung open.
What he saw took his breath away.
But not in that good way, like how Mary had taken his breath away when she entered his fourth grade classroom after she moved here from Ontario at the beginning of the school year.
What Bernie saw held his chest in an iron grip, his lungs refusing to inhale the thick, foul air of the house.
The interior was a simple room, rounded at the corners, with a straw bed over to one side. The walls, lower down, were covered with animal heads---deer, mostly, with a couple of dog and fox heads, rabbits, even a squirrel's. Higher up on the wall, however, human heads were mounted on dark, oak plaques, like prize trophies, which, Bernie supposed, was what these heads were to the Man. The heads were of all kinds: white people, black people, Native people. Males, females, both young and old. Even a baby's head, as if a match to the odd-ball squirrel head lower down.
