In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  “Okay, scouts, we’ve got a decision to make here.” She pointed to the right, where the trail escalated into a high, unending stand of bright orange maples that glowed like lit matches.

  “That way is the official Little Jump Off Trail, which goes over Chestnut Knob. It’s high, it’s hard, but seventy years ago it was blazed by the Babcock Lumber Company.”

  Joan was scratching at a mosquito bite. “What do you mean blazed?”

  “They cut a path through the woods and carved marks on the trees along the way.”

  “Okay,” puffed Joan, beads of sweat now dotting her upper lip. “One hard, but marked trail. What’s behind Door Number Two?”

  Mary turned left, toward a much fainter footpath that tunneled between two rows of dark, low-limbed spruce pines. “That will lead us to where we want to camp through more level ground. There’s just one thing you need to know about it.”

  “What?” Alex’s face was flushed with exertion.

  “It goes through the Ghosts.”

  “The Ghosts?” Joan’s voice rose. “That thing Jonathan was talking about?”

  Mary nodded. “I’m not sure how to explain the Ghosts. When we were kids we thought it was where the old dead Cherokees hung out. Now I’m guessing it’s some kind of underground spring that’s eroded the top of a mountain. It’s weird. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else.”

  “So is it, like, haunted?”

  “No, but it’s seriously foggy. The only danger is getting separated from each other.” Mary looked at her friends. “If we take the Babcock trail, we’ll have go slow. If we go through the Ghosts, we’ll have to be careful.”

  Joan looked at Alex. “Isn’t this just sooo Mary? Take this way to get lost, or that way to have a coronary. We should never have let her go into criminal law, Alex.”

  Still winded, Alex just grinned and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Since my lungs are on fire and my legs feel like limp spaghetti, I vote for anything that’s not uphill.”

  “But we don’t want to get lost,” Joan added. “Especially in fog.”

  “Let’s make a caravan,” suggested Mary. “I’ll lead. All you two will have to do is follow me.”

  “Are you sure it’ll be safe?” Joan sounded skeptical.

  Mary nodded. “I’ve crossed that way before.”

  They rested another moment, watching as a flock of lively black chickadees chattered through the trees, then they reshouldered their packs and trudged on. When they entered the tunnel created by the overhanging trees, the cool air turned cold, instantly chilling the sweat on their skin. Though it felt like winter and smelled of Christmas, beyond the first rank of trees the woods seemed strangely aware, as if unseen eyes were watching them.

  “When do these Ghosts start?” Joan asked in a whisper.

  “Just about now,” replied Mary, peering toward the end of the tunnel. Already she could see it—or rather see the lack of anything resembling forest. Thick white mist curled up from the ground, punctured only by the occasional spiky thrust of a tree. Jonathan always hated this place, she remembered. “It’s just like someone pulled a plug, and all the colors drained out of the world.” She’d forgotten how much he’d loved color.

  At the end of the spruce pine tunnel, the trail vanished into a white soup. The three women stopped and stared into a foggy void.

  “This reminds me of last summer, when we went to San Francisco and that fog just rolled in from nowhere.” Joan’s voice took on an edgy cheeriness. “Remember? One minute you guys were looking in that antique shop in Chinatown, and the next minute all I could see was white goop.”

  “Yeah.” Alex snorted. “And then that gorgeous writer from Australia appeared and we didn’t see you for three days!”

  “Peter,” Joan recalled with a coy smile. “What can I say? He was crazy about old Italian chests.”

  Mary laughed. “Here.” She turned to Joan and held out her backpack. “You and your old Italian chest hang on to this strap. That way you’ll stay attached to me. Alex, you grab the strap on Joan’s knapsack, and you’ll be attached to her. We’ll caravan that way. If anybody loses their hold, yell and I’ll stop.”

  “We cowboys call this a pack train in Texas,” Alex grumbled as she grabbed Joan’s knapsack.

  “Well, we Indians call it a caravan in North Carolina.

  Although I guess by now we’ve crossed over into Tennessee.” Mary noticed Joan’s pale face. “Don’t worry. I know this looks spooky, but it’s really not that bad.”

  “Are you sure you know the way?”

  For an instant Mary wondered if she was being foolish—overconfidence was what killed most people here. But she’d trekked through the Ghosts a thousand times with Jonathan, and the woods were slowly beginning to seem like home again. She could do this. Anyway, the Ghosts weren’t what frightened her out here. “Just pretend we’re on that subway to Coney Island,” she told Joan, smiling.

  With Alex and Joan tethered behind her, she took a deep breath and stepped into the thick vapor that curled catlike around her shins. The ground was spongy beneath her boots. Moss furred the tree trunks and the only sound that reached her ears was the muted footsteps of her friends. As she watched thin fingers of mist caressing the dark trees, Mary wondered if perhaps she’d been wrong to decide this was an underground spring. Maybe she and Jonathan had been right the first time, when they’d chalked it up to ghosts.

  “This is really creepy,” Alex muttered.

  “I can’t see past my nose. Anything could be watching us from the trees.” Joan’s voice rang high and thin.

  “Don’t think about it,” Mary replied. “Keep your eyes closed if it makes you feel better.”

  “No, I’m okay.” Joan gave a jittery laugh. “This must have been a hell of a place for a Halloween party, though.”

  They walked on, pushing resolutely through the gauzy white silence. Mary realized she hadn’t heard Alex in a while. “Hey, Alexandra, are you okay?”

  “Just enjoying the view.” Alex’s muffled voice came out of nowhere. “Which is either a solid cloud bank or Joan’s butt.”

  “You got a problem with my butt?”

  “No, but if you break wind, I’m a dead woman.” Though they all laughed, Mary could hear the tension in Alex’s joke. For someone who’d grown up under the broad blue skies of Texas, traipsing through this soupy white miasma must be disconcerting.

  “How much longer is this trail?” Alex called.

  “Maybe half a mile.”

  “Well, at least it’s mostly flat.”

  They walked on in silence, as if wishing to pass unnoticed by whatever the mist might conceal. Whispers echoed like thunder here, quiet words resounded as shouts. Alex started to whistle, but her bouncy little tune sounded vaguely desperate in the still air, and she finally gave it up, trudging along accompanied only by the soft squish of her own footsteps on moss and rotting leaves.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the Ghosts ended. The trail emptied into a wide clearing, where two wood-peckers busily drilled for bugs in a copse of sun-speckled pawpaws.

  “Boy,” Joan said as the warm sun began to dry the sweat from the back of her neck. “I’m glad that’s over.”

  They rested, tasting the sharp, piney smell of the breeze, then hiked on, still going up. By the time they crested the one minor Unicoi mountain they’d begun climbing in the early afternoon, the sun was falling westward into the trees. At a tall hickory Mary found the trail that veered up to a place she hoped would be as she remembered—a broad but shallow cave that went about ten feet into the side of Big Fodderstack Mountain. Deep enough to accommodate a tent, the cave would give them shelter on three sides and a terrific view of the mountains below. Unless a bear had beaten them to it, it would be a perfect place to camp for the night.

  She tightened the pack on her shoulders, then led Joan and Alex up the final hundred feet of trail. At its end, she found it just as she had known it years before,
a wide triangular hole gouged in the mountainside.

  “Okay.” She smiled at the others. “Here’s our room for the night.”

  “We’re actually going to camp in there?” Joan peered dubiously into the cave.

  “We are if nothing got here before us.” Mary dug her flashlight out of her pack and beamed it into the semi-darkness. She saw only stones and rubble, but to make sure she found a long pine branch and systematically poked along the back of the small fissure. Nothing pawed at her stick or rushed snarling out to attack.

  “Nobody here but us chicks,” she reported, standing up straight and patting the cool, rough roof of the little cave with the palm of her hand.

  “Won’t it be cold?” Joan eyed the dusty rocks.

  “With all the gear Charlie sent us, we could weather a blizzard on Mount McKinley.”

  Alex sniffed. “You can laugh now, but you’ll thank me in the morning, when you wake up all warm and toasty, with coffee brewing on my special stove.”

  They quickly set up their camp. Every piece of Alex’s equipment proved to be a marvel of space-age engineering. In twenty minutes the blue and white tent was up and functional, with three sleeping bags lying side by side on an insulated tarp. Just outside the cave Alex assembled the stove on which she swore she could both boil freeze-dried lasagna and bake brownies. While she cursed one reluctant leg of the stove, Mary went back down the trail to gather twigs for a traditional fire.

  “Are you going to start it with flint like they do in the movies?” Joan followed like a puppy as Mary carried an armful of small dead limbs to the far edge of the cave.

  “Not hardly.” Mary dusted off a circle on the ground and piled tiny pieces of dried leaves and twigs in the middle of it. She took a piece of chemical fire starter from her backpack, lit it, then shoved it beneath the tinder. Instantly, a small hot blaze swelled up. She added pine kindling, then the twigs she’d found—and the campfire began to crackle. “See? Cherokee woman’s fire burn all night. Alex’s stove’s just good for dessert.”

  Joan looked at her with awe. “I’ve always known you were cool, Mary Crow. But I had no idea you were this cool.”

  Her fire built, Mary moved to the edge of the cliff and dangled her legs over the vastness below. It felt good to be still. Already her thighs ached and her shoulders were sore. Tomorrow, she knew, they would each wake up with leaden feet and cracking knees, but they could spend the day soaking their aches away in the steamy waters of Atagahi. For a moment she watched as Joan filled a pan with bottled water and Alex stirred her brownie mix, then she turned back to the mountains.

  The Old Men have been kind today, she decided, remembering their names as her mother had taught her— Dakwai, Ahaluna, Disgagistiyi . They’d allowed her to guide her two best friends through the forest without harm. Thank you, she said silently, as a sudden gust of wind stroked her cheek. For once, you have made me feel welcome.

  NINE

  Okay, Buster, just one more mile to go.” Brank shifted the sack on his shoulder. For the last hour he’d toiled up through an unending growth of slippery green thorn bushes, and even the almost empty canvas bag he carried lay heavy across the top of his left shoulder.

  “Maybe we’ll have us a party when we get to Simpson’s Bald,” he wheezed like a splayed-out accordion. “Or maybe we’ll just sit down and try to recover from the getting there.”

  He pushed his way through a stand of goldenseal that cluttered the trail. It was odd to see a flatland weed growing up so high, but these mountains always did do strange things. Birds that belonged in Maine roosted in Tennessee; trees that covered the cliffs of Nova Scotia sprouted up in Georgia. His immediate destination, Simpson’s Bald, was strangest of all—the bare top of a mountain that reputedly got its name from a Union spy who’d been hanged from the lone oak tree that grew there. The soil was a sick shade of gray beneath the limb-span of that old tree, and the mountain people teased their children with tales of witches and boogeymen who held horrific ceremonies in the wide circle of blighted earth.

  Brank, however, found Simpson’s Bald restful. He was accustomed to the single, ineffectual ghost that haunted the place, and no one else ever bothered him there. The mountaintop afforded a 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain, and the huge roots of the old hanging tree coiled so thick and deep that a man could lie down between them and wait out a blizzard without getting wet. It was solitary, it was safe, and it was also the one place he knew he could get a clear shot at his sister.

  “Scheisse!” he cursed as he stubbed his toe on a rock hidden in the goldenseal. Lately he’d found himself cursing in German, the language of his childhood. Though he had not heard a word of it in thirty years, for the past several weeks it had floated on the top of his consciousness like a bobber on a fishing line.

  “Scheisse meant shit,” he explained to Buster as he recovered his footing. “Esel meant stupid. Wiesel meant me.”

  He trudged higher. The goldenseal gave way to a scraggly stand of white pines, which shrank into an even thinner scrub of rhododendrons. He decided that green things must run out of juice this high: all the effort devoted to growth at lower elevations up here went to pure survival. He scrambled over a final patch of lichen-covered rock, then he was there.

  In the dying daylight the mountaintop glowed a pale green. The single oak tree thrust up from the earth like a bone-yellow hand begging something from heaven. Brank guessed most people would find this tree unsettling, but he admired its stubborn defiance, and the odd, hardscrabble shelter it offered.

  “Fate Lyons would have hooted at all these silly hillbillies, Buster,” he chuckled to the snake. “This old bald’s just a place where witches land their brooms.”

  He walked across the mountaintop and threw his sack down beneath the gnarled tree. His shoulders and legs burned from the final mile of the trail, and the cold wind that whipped around the mountain made his eyelids feel like sandpaper. With spare, practiced motions he quickly unfolded his blanket and laid it in a deep trench between two of the thickest roots. Punching his near-empty sack up like a pillow, he nestled down inside the trench. The hard earth felt good against his back, and for a while he just lay there, relishing the sensation of not moving. He would build a fire, but later. Right now he just wanted to be still.

  When the almost-full moon rose he got to his feet and snapped off some of the lower limbs of the tree. Dead to the point of being powder, they broke off with a groan rather than a crack, and a few minutes later they lay in a pile, orange flames licking their undersides. Brank huddled close to the small aura of light and warmth the old branches produced and stared into the fire. Though he’d missed his best shot at Trudy, the day hadn’t been a total loss. He’d mailed his pelts off and had some fun stealing that Cherokee’s photograph. He patted the pocket of his shirt and smiled. Tonight he had his own personal little movie star, right in there, waiting just for him.

  When the fire had burned down to a ruddy glow, he dug into his sack again, pulling out his Moon Pies, his whiskey, and his vitamins. “Ten thousand units of vitamin A,” he read aloud, squinting at the label in the firelight. “Two thousand units of Vitamin C. Every antioxidant known to man.” Chuckling, he opened the bottle, tossed three tablets in his mouth and washed them down with a swig of whiskey. “Whoa!” He shook his head at the potent combination. “Guess I’m antioxidized now.”

  He leaned back against the tree and ate two Moon Pies, looking at the brightly colored advertisements in his Esquire magazine. Fate would be proud of the way he was taking care of himself, and keeping his mind up-to-date. By the time he finished eating and reading, the fire seemed to be the sole orange spot in the middle of a steely-blue universe. He put the magazine away and drank several more swallows of whiskey, eager for its warmth to reach the stiff muscles of his buttocks and thighs. Good whiskey’s like a slow fuck, he thought, then he remembered his photo. He unbuttoned his pocket and looked at Jodie Foster’s silvery face.

  “Schön,”
he murmured, tracing the outline of her neck with his finger. “And tonight you’re all mine.”

  He turned and balanced the photograph against the knuckle of a tree root. He’d just begun to unzip his pants when he heard a creaking, high above his head. He thought he knew what it was, but it never paid to be too cocky on Simpson’s Bald. Grabbing his gun, he slipped the picture back in his pocket, then sat by the fire and waited.

  It didn’t take long. In a moment it came to him as always, floating down from the tree, its blue uniform in tatters. A noose dangled from its neck, and it rolled its green head from side to side, blinking bottomless scarlet eye sockets directly at him.

  “Hello, bro.” Brank nodded. “Still haven’t gotten rid of that necktie, have you?”

  The apparition gazed at him pitifully, then clawed at his neck, as if he might tug his head off in his efforts to remove the noose.

  Brank scowled, suddenly irritated at the spectral interruption. That stupid ghost pulled the same dumb trick every time he came up here. It had grown as predictable as a train.

  “Don’t you know the war’s over? You won. The Union is saved. Go back to hell and celebrate.”

  The ghost looked surprised for a moment, as if it wanted to speak, then suddenly the red eye sockets opened wide and the specter grew, stretching to the top of the tree, then swelling high above it. Brank watched, gooseflesh rising on his arms. The crazy thing had never done anything like this before. It had always been nosy, but manageable. When it began to tower fifty feet above him, Brank pulled back the hammer of one barrel and fired.

  The shotgun’s deep boom split the night. The ghost screamed—an agonized wail that turned Brank cold inside, then, in an instant, it shrank into a shiny red ball of vapor a foot away from Brank’s head. It glittered there for a moment, pulsing with crimson light like a mad heartbeat, then imploded into a pin-spot of icy blue, and vanished.