Into the Woods (Anomaly Hunters, Book One)

by J. S. Volpe

  She nodded, then turned and slipped back into the crowd.

  Calvin’s heart pounded as he made his way through the press of bodies toward the casket. He didn’t want to do this. He was afraid of what Mr. May would look like. The only funeral he had ever been to was his Grandma Ellie’s, and that had been a closed casket affair thanks to the condition of the body. She had been practically carbonized in a housefire.

  By the time he reached the front of the room, the mourners had dispersed and he was alone with Mr. May. He took a deep breath and looked inside the casket.

  Calvin had heard about how mortuary science had advanced to the point where dead folks looked like they were only sleeping. But seeing Mr. May’s body, Calvin disagreed. Mr. May looked completely unnatural. His cheeks were obviously rouged, the shape of his face wasn’t quite right, and his posture—lying there with his head propped up and his arms bent at an odd angle so that his hands could be folded on his waist—looked stiff and artificial. But the unnaturalness made it easier for Calvin to deal with the experience; it made it clear this wasn’t Mr. May. This was a shell, a thing.

  Calvin stood there a while trying to remember all of the things he wanted to tell Mr. May: that he was grateful for the inheritance even though he didn’t understand the whys and wherefores of it; that he would treat the house and the Collection well; that he would continue investigating anomalies; that he would do his best to solve the mystery of the woods; that despite their brief time together Mr. May had made a profound and lasting impression on him.

  But as he thought these things, Calvin realized they were ultimately for himself, not for Mr. May. Either Mr. May didn’t know anything anymore, in which case there was no point in saying anything, or he already knew what was in Calvin’s mind and heart, and again, their utterance was pointless. Calvin realized there was really only one thing left to say.

  “Goodbye,” he mumbled.

  Blinking away his tears, he turned and headed back the way he had come to look for Cynthia and her family.

  2

  Emily’s funeral was held two days later. It was a small, private affair. No press. No curiosity seekers. No uninvited guests.

  Anna tried hard to maintain a brave face throughout the memorial service at the funeral home, but it was tough. The worst part was the eulogy given by Emily’s dad. It wasn’t the eulogy itself that affected her; it was when Hannibal Crow, whom Anna had always known as a calm, rational man, broke down into helpless, wracking sobs at the end. Anna wept quietly, not even trying to wipe away her tears, just letting them drip like rain into her lap, while Mr. McLaughlin ushered Emily’s dad back to his seat.

  John, who sat a few seats down from Anna, remained silent throughout the memorial service. He stared straight ahead the whole time, his eyes dark, his face stony. He maintained the same grim silence at the graveside service in the cemetery.

  Anna hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since that horrible night in the clearing. Neither of them had been in school since then. There had been too much to do—doctors to see, police to talk to, parents to reassure.

  She finally got a chance to talk to him in the cemetery parking lot after the funeral. While Anna’s parents stopped to chat with John’s aunt and a few other people, Anna stole over to John and said, “How are you?”

  “Okay,” he muttered, not looking at her. He was looking at the grave they had just left: the steep-sided hole in which the casket lay out of sight; the trampled grass around it; the wreaths that marked the spot where the headstone would stand once it was done being carved; the mound of dirt draped with a grass-colored tarp. Some distance away a groundskeeper smoked a cigarette under the eaves of a small wooden shed. A dirt-caked shovel stood propped against the wall beside him.

  “Um, do you want to get together later?” Anna asked. “Or maybe over the weekend?”

  John kept staring at the grave in silence for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed a little, and he turned and looked at her.

  “Do you believe in life after death?” he said.

  “Um, yeah. I mean, not ghosts. But, like, I think Emily’s with God now. And she’s happy.” She tried to smile to show him the happiness she thought Emily must be feeling, but it came out warped and wrong. Though she believed Emily was happy, she didn’t feel such happiness herself. She still had to live here in this world, where Emily was gone, where men like Roger Grey lurked and preyed.

  John looked up at the sky. A few dull gray clouds were scudding overhead on the chilly autumn wind. His eyes dropped back to the grave.

  “Don’t you?” Anna asked, troubled by his silence.

  Before he could answer—if he was going to answer at all—Anna’s parents disengaged from their chat with the other adults. Anna’s mom took her hand and began to guide her toward the car.

  Anna looked back over her shoulder at John. “I’ll call you, okay?”

  John said nothing. She wasn’t sure he had even heard her. His eyes never wavered from the open grave.

  3

  That night John dreamed he stood atop a tall, round, crenellated tower built of snow-white stones. The cloudless blue sky stretched overhead, as vast and deep as the sea, and the sun burned directly above him, reducing his shadow to a black oval beneath his feet. In the sunlight the tower’s white stones seemed to glow with milky luminescence.

  John peered over the battlements and gasped. The tower stood in the center of a lush, green forest that extended on and on in every direction, nearly mirroring the vastness of the sky. And though the tower itself was not as tall as the tallest trees in the forest, it rose far above their crowns for it had been built upon a high, grassy hill.

  The view was incredible. He could see the curve of the earth in some places. (And yet he also realized that this was impossible: To see as far as he did would require his being many thousands of feet above the world. The fact that he saw what he saw from a tower that, even with the height of the hill taken into account, could not be more than a couple hundred feet tall, made him realize this had to be a dream.)

  A tan stripe ran along the horizon in the direction John was facing. The edge of a desert, probably. To his right, a line of hulking gray mountains extended along the horizon, their snowy peaks bright in the sunshine. To his left, the forest ended countless leagues away in a green plain threaded with blue rivers. At a spot where several blue threads met was an irregular shape colored gray and black and brown and white. It was, he realized, a huge city, the towers and pinnacles of which, though surely enormous, were at this distance as thin and faint as the hairs on a spider’s leg. And in the final direction, opposite the desert, a silver-blue glimmer along the horizon betokened the presence of an ocean.

  “Do you like it?” said a voice behind him. A girl’s voice. Emily’s voice.

  John whirled. Emily stood in the center of the roof, smiling at him.

  John’s eyes filled with tears, and a big, joyful grin split his face. He took an eager step toward her, then froze, his emotions suddenly plummeting.

  “This is just a dream, isn’t it?” he said.

  She started to shake her head, but then stopped and shrugged.

  “Well, yeah, kind of. But it’s not a normal dream. It’s a special dream.”

  “Oh.” He pondered this, then gestured at the fantastic landscape around them. “Where are we exactly?”

  She looked out at the scenery with a small, pleased smile. “Somewhere later. It’s not a real place yet.” She fixed her dark eyes on John again. “But you can help me make it real. We can replace the evil, broken world with one that’s better.”

  John regarded her in silence a moment, then turned to look out at the breathtaking dreamscape again. A smile slowly spread across his face.

  “Tell me how.”

  4

  “God, my life has been nothing but funerals lately,” Cynthia said. She and Calvin were strolling through one of the Collection rooms on the third floor of Calvin’s house. It was the first time they had had a
chance to meet up since Emily was buried four days ago. “My parents even took us to Officer Thompson and Carter’s funerals. Which was only proper. They died trying to find her. I think we even would have gone to that FBI agent’s funeral. Agent Schmidt. But he was buried where he grew up. Somewhere in Utah.”

  “Did they ever determine what your aunt died of?” Calvin said.

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, actually no. Not really. They officially chalked it up to something called SUDEP, which stands for ‘sudden unexplained death in epilepsy.’ It’s basically just a clinical way of saying they have no idea what happened.”

  “Sort of like how they had no idea what caused her seizures in the first place.”

  “Exactly. Except we know that whatever happened to her probably had something to do with whatever is going on here in the woods. But that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? What exactly is going on in the woods?”

  Calvin shook his head. “I don’t know. I just keep thinking about that pentagram on the map. If your aunt was right about how emotional energy can be imprinted on a place, then I wonder what happens when it gets imprinted in a specific way, when a few centuries’-worth of intense emotions gets concentrated in certain key spots.”

  “It might even be more than a couple of centuries if those skeletons Turner May wrote about are any indication.”

  “Yeah, and that’s another thing: In Turner’s account we had two skeletons in a dome-shaped room somewhere under the woods. Then in the present day we had Roger Grey, who couldn’t have known anything about any of that, getting ready to kill two kids in a round clearing, where a dome of light appears every time someone gets killed there.”

  “And then there’s the stuff we saw inside the light. I don’t know about you, but I saw…” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “Well, I saw a lot of things, but one of them sure as hell looked like a walking tree with a face on it, like one of those Ents from The Lord of the Rings.”

  “I didn’t see that. I did, however, see what appeared to be a Viking ship. And a flying Asian guy. And some giant penguins.”

  “Giant penguins?”

  “What, is that weirder than an Ent?”

  She opened her mouth to respond, then shut it again and shrugged. “No, I guess not.”

  “The question is, what were we seeing? Alternate realities? Hallucinations? Dreams? Disembodied ideas?”

  Cynthia suddenly stopped walking and frowned. “A hole…”

  Calvin stopped beside her. “What?”

  “Aunt Wendy. That was one of the ways she described what she was seeing. Which was probably the same thing we were seeing. She said it was a hole.”

  “A hole in what?”

  She shrugged. “Reality? I don’t know.”

  Calvin pondered this, then sighed. “There are too many questions and not enough answers. I guess this is just gonna have to be one of the things I look into as an anomaly investigator.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Alone?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “Um, I don’t know. I mean, I wasn’t sure if you were still interested now that Emily’s, you know, not missing anymore.”

  “She might not be missing anymore, and Roger Grey might be dead, and all the micro-level stuff might be sorted out, but we still don’t understand the macro-level. The big picture. If there’s a consciousness or some kind of purpose behind all this, then I damn well want to know what it is. But even if there isn’t, even if it turns out that all of it—the tragedies, the patterns—if it was all just a bunch of random accidents—even then, I still want to investigate anomalies. I mean, all the stuff I saw I can’t unsee. My world is different now. I’m different now. I can’t go back to the way things were. So, yeah, I’m definitely on board with this. I’m ready to investigate all the damn anomalies the world has to offer.”

  “Awesome.”

  He grinned. She grinned.

  Then they looked around at the rows of crowded shelves stretching away in every direction. Their grins faded.

  “So…” Cynthia said. “Where do we start?”

  5

  From the Kingwood Morning Star, Sunday, November 10, page B3:

  PIGEON SIGHTING SPARKS EXCITEMENT, CONTROVERSY

  PHOENIX TOWNSHIP—The bird-watching community is all atwitter after a birder observed a small flock of what appeared to be passenger pigeons, a species long believed extinct.

  Fred Birney, 60, a resident of Deermont, was bird-watching Friday in a heavily wooded area in southern Phoenix Township, one mile west of Route 7 and two miles north of the township line, when he spotted a flock of about a dozen birds perched in the upper branches of an oak tree.

  “At first I thought they were mourning doves,” Birney said. “But when I checked my field guide I realized they couldn’t be. They were too big and a little too colorful, and they didn’t have the black mark on the throat that mourning doves have.”

  He got out his camera to photograph the birds, but before he could do so, they flew away southward.

  Since his field guide provided no clues to the birds’ identity, he hurried home to consult his other bird books. In an antique bird guide published in the 1920s, he finally found what appeared to be a perfect match: the passenger pigeon.

  “I was amazed,” Birney said. “That was the last thing I was expecting.”

  Once the most common bird in North America, passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction during the nineteenth century. The last known wild passenger pigeon was killed in Pike County, Ohio, in 1900. The last captive specimen died in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens in 1914. Birders, however, remained on the lookout for the birds for years, hoping against hope that a colony still remained somewhere and that the birds would one day make a comeback.

  Sure that these hopes had finally become reality, Birney reported his sighting to fellow members of the Kingwood Audubon Club. From there, word quickly spread to birding groups across the country. Plans are already underway for a series of outings in Phoenix Township to search for the birds.

  Despite the fanfare, many bird experts, such as Scott Brandenberg, an ornithologist affiliated with the Kingwood Zoo, believe that the whole business is much ado about nothing.

  “They were almost certainly mourning doves,” Brandenberg said. “There have been countless sightings of supposed passenger pigeons over the years, and they’ve always turned out to be mourning doves. The mistake a lot of amateurs make is forgetting that what you see in a bird book is not always what you see in the field. Minor variations in size or color sometimes occur, and minor variations are all that’s needed for mourning doves to look like passenger pigeons.

  “Of course I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of me hopes he’s right,” he added, a little wistfully. “It would be like a dream come true.”

  Other works by J. S. Volpe, available from fine e-book retailers everywhere

  ANOMALY HUNTERS

  Book 2: From Finland with Love

  Two years have passed since the fateful events of Book One. Now sophomores in college, Calvin and Cynthia investigate a campus murder linked to the legendary Ur-Tarot, the original Tarot cards created by a psychic monk a millennium ago. Along the way, the duo befriends Kaarina Nurmi, a beautiful bisexual Finnish girl who helps out with the investigation. Unfortunately Kaarina’s involvement might prove to be more trouble than it’s worth, given that Calvin is straight, Cynthia is gay, and both of them are frustrated virgins who see their sensual new friend as the answer to their lonely prayers. Will the duo’s ensuing rivalry for the delectable Finn derail both the investigation and their friendship? Then again, considering the way the dead bodies are piling up, they might not be alive long enough for it to matter…

  Join the Anomaly Hunters in a tale of sex, death, Tarot cards, and some really bad poetry. Oh, and did we mention the sex?

  77,200 words

  Book 3: The Thing in the Alley

  This is it—the whole team working together for the very first time!

>   When horribly mutilated bodies start turning up in Kingwood, the Anomaly Hunters determine that the culprit can only be a leucrota, a supposedly mythical monster that can mimic people’s voices. With Violet’s history-geek sister Lauren helping out, the team combs the city in search of the man-eating beast. Will they stop the leucrota before it kills again, or will they only become its latest victims?

  Plus, an unexpected discovery in Mr. May’s office leads Calvin to a young woman named Tiffany Fish who has strange links to both the Anomaly Hunters and their current investigation. It’s a meeting that will change Calvin’s life forever. How? Well, if you thought his near-fatal involvement with a cute blonde in the last volume might have put him off cute blondes for good, you were very, very wrong.

  Love and echoes are in the air, and the writing is most definitely on the wall in the third remarkable volume of the Anomaly Hunters saga.

  94,000 words

  THE CHRONICLES OF ERIDIA

  The Singular Six

  An action-packed novel set in the world of Eridia.

  Frankenstein’s Monster…Dr. Frankenstein’s courageous niece…a superhero with the power to turn to stone…a robot who performs psychoanalysis…a tweenage queen…a snarky Incan jaguar god…

  These disparate individuals must team together to hunt down and vanquish the Marauders, a horde of evil bandits who aim to conquer the land of Erizan. Each of the six has their own reasons for undertaking this dangerous mission. Only together do they have any hope of succeeding.

  Their journey takes them across a bizarre patchwork landscape and pits them against strange and terrible foes—from an abandoned research lab overrun by a peculiar variety of zombie to an idyllic woodland populated by carnivorous stuffed animals, from the mazy lair of a huge, hateful serpentine beast to the Marauders’ blood-soaked battle arena where the sextet must fight for their lives.