In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  Allie thought so as well as she and Zach left sight of the road and stepped into the deep woods.

  Four days would pass until they were seen again.

  7

  Time slips away in the lonely places of the world. For Allie, Zach, and Sam, the next hours passed with barely a notice as the land of man and machine yielded to the hills and hollows of the forest. The quick pace they’d kept from town slowed to an easy stroll. Gone were the brambles and thick trees that had met them just beyond the road. Here in the deeper woods, sunlight reigned. Only the upper branches of the tall oaks and pines lay between them and the sun, making thin spider webs of shadow upon the ground they trod.

  Sam eased out front, guided more by his nose than any sense of direction. His tail whipped from side to side and froze upon the discovery of some unknown and exotic scent. Zach remained close, fully immersed in what he considered his element, and initiated an extended discourse on everything from how to tell direction by where moss grew on a tree to how to survive a cougar attack. Allie found it all sweet in a way, his going on and on to impress her. Truth be told, it was kind of impressive. Not that she’d ever let Zach know.

  “Ain’t no cougars in these woods no more,” she said.

  Zach stopped midsentence—it was something about people forgetting how to get along in the woods and what a shame that was—and asked, “What?”

  “You said it weren’t no use to run or hitch yourself up a tree when a cougar lights on you, but that don’t matter since there ain’t none no more. They might live on in your dinosaur books, but not in the real world.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Allie shrugged, not recalling. “You ever seen one?”

  “No,” he said. “But just because you can’t see a thing don’t mean it ain’t real. Or even that it ain’t watching us even now. And they ain’t dinosaur books, I’ll have you know. Not all of them, anyways.”

  “Only reason you read them things is so you can impress Miss Howard.”

  “That ain’t true,” he said. “I like it. Used to be all sorts of creatures in these woods. Mammoths probably. Sabertooths too. And all manner of Indians. There’s value in knowing what came before, Allie.”

  “Well, I don’t expect we’ll run afoul of a dangerous creature here in the middle of winter,” Allie told him. “If we do, we’ll just feed it Sam.”

  “That’s awful.”

  Ten feet in front, Sam paused in his sniffing and raised his head at the sound of his name. He woofed and wagged his tail, as though the idea of being fed to a hungry predator sounded like a fine way to enjoy a sunny afternoon.

  Allie smiled and said, “Dumb old dog.”

  “You ain’t gotta worry no way,” Zach said. “Something happens, I’ll take care of it. Us Barnetts, it’s like a ree-zort vacation when we venture to the woods. You see that buck I shot last year? Tracked it three miles. Daddy was along, but he let me take the lead. Gutted it myself too.”

  “’Course I saw that deer,” Allie said. “Everybody saw that deer. You brought it to school after your daddy had the head mounted.”

  Zach thumped her in the arm. “Hey, that was an eight-pointer. You tell me that weren’t the awesomest show-and-tell of the whole year. That was like the hall of fame of show-and-tell.”

  Allie dropped her head to hide a smile. She thumped Zach back. “It was okay, I guess,” she said. Which wasn’t the truth. If anything, that buck was the most amazing thing Allie had ever seen. Zach was the talk of the school for days. Even the principal had come by to see it.

  “We ate it too,” Zach said. “Me and Momma and Daddy. Deer meat’s about the best there is. Trick is you gotta scare it good before you kill it. Makes it taste better.”

  Allie thought about that. She said, “That’s about the awfulest thing anybody’s ever told me.”

  “All I’m saying’s that you ain’t gotta worry. You and Sam’s in my world now. Things’ll be right as rain, you’ll see. We’ll find her. Compass still working?”

  Allie lifted her sleeve. “Still straight on.”

  Up ahead, Sam stopped long enough to put his nose to the ground and snort. Zach stooped when they caught up. He traced the faint outline of a track in the melting snow.

  “That’s a deer there,” he said. “Pretty fresh too. Good boy, Sam.”

  Sam lifted his head and licked Zach’s nose.

  “Maybe you can make a spear outta your pocketknife and rustle us up some lunch,” Allie said. “You being the great white hunter and all.”

  “Could if I wanted,” Zach said, and he knew so beyond all doubt. “But you got plenty in your pack. You hungry?”

  She was. Allie had left the house without breakfast and figured it was near supper time, at least according to the dull throbbing from the hollow place in her stomach. But aside from that and the patches of snow that kept getting inside her Chucks, Allie felt fine. She shook her head no. Zach might take a yes as reason enough to turn for home, even with his newfound faith in the compass. She couldn’t risk that, not with them being so close. If the time after The Storm had taught her anything, it was that what the heart believed was often at odds with what the body wanted. Hunger could be just as powerful as faith. A few candy bars and some juice would only get them so far.

  “You hungry?” she asked.

  “Not if you ain’t. Want me to carry your pack for a while?”

  “No,” she said. “It ain’t heavy.”

  They moved on. The woods thinned and spread out. Wide spaces opened up between oaks that stood as tall as buildings. Yet here the sun struggled to reach the ground, trapped as it was in the thick canopy of snarled limbs. What little day filtered through drenched the world into a pale twilight. Zach said that part of the forest was old, maybe even ancient. Allie didn’t know if that was right (it sounded like something from one of his books, and wouldn’t Miss Howard beam at that) but felt it was.

  Few words passed between them as they crossed through that place. There seemed no end to it. The only sounds were their shoes crunching against the snow. Even Sam fell silent, choosing to walk beside Allie rather than up front. No wind blew there. Allie thought maybe no wind ever had, not even the one that had taken her momma. She kept her feet moving where the needle pointed, but her head moved everywhere. There was a strange peace to that part of the woods, almost a gentle pulsing, and Allie let the stillness fill the cracks inside her.

  And yet there was something else to those woods as well, a shadow only Zach could feel. Lurking somewhere close, flittering among the trees, just out of sight.

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  But when Allie looked at Zach’s face, she saw his eyes darting and his shoulders gone hunched. It was just the way Sam looked right before wailing at one of those summer thunderstorms.

  There was no telling how long it took for them to find the borderland where the old forest yielded to the new. It felt much shorter to Allie than to Zach, who nearly sighed with relief when he spotted the jagged line of fallen trees and thornbushes ahead. Just in front of the scrub rested a boulder the size of a small car, and there they rested. Sam made no lap around the rock to sniff and snort, nor did he sit when Allie called him to her side. He only stared back through those ancient trees with his tail sharp and his head twitching, as though his eyes were chasing a fly. Allie ignored this, of course, just as anyone who’d never spent time in the wilderness would, and Zach shook his head as that thought crossed his mind. He himself had taken a keen interest in what Sam was doing. Whatever it was Zach had felt as they’d come through, Allie’s dog had felt it too.

  “I didn’t like that,” Zach said.

  “Didn’t like what?”

  “Going through there. It felt funny.”

  Allie said, “It was just some old woods,” though not because it felt exactly true. It did, however, feel simpler.

  “Know what going through there reminded me of?”
r />   “What?”

  “Going through the Holler.”

  “Happy Holler?”

  He nodded, not wanting to repeat the words. “Ain’t too far from where we set out, you know. Maybe like five miles is all.”

  Allie snorted. “You don’t know what the Holler looks like. You ain’t never been there.”

  “But I heard. And what I heard’s what that looks like.” He pointed back through the trees. “All old and spooky. They say the Holler’s all trees and tangles, the worst tangles you ever seen. And spirits.”

  Allie moved her eyes back to where they’d come. Their footprints had made an S in the broken snow beyond, past where she could see. How far they’d come couldn’t be told, nor how long it had taken them to get there. There was nothing other than the ache in Allie’s legs, the hunger in her belly, and the thirst in her mouth to gauge their range. Time slips away in the lonely places. Distance as well. Allie and Zach would have been shocked to know that in the hours since they’d left the road, they and Sam had traveled nearly six miles.

  Zach climbed the rock and sat. He said, “I’m going there one day when I come of age. To the Holler, I mean. Probably soon.”

  Allie said, “Daddy took me near there once. He said his name’s on the gate. Never understood why anyone’d want to go down there just to do that.”

  “Carving your name on the rusty gate shows you got spine. Havin’ a spine’s the most important thing to a man.” He rubbed his eyes and coughed again, loud and deep, then cringed when he felt a stinging something in his chest. “You don’t understand. Girls ain’t brave like boys are. It’s science.”

  “That ain’t science,” Allie said. “That’s just boy talk.”

  “How far we going?” Zach asked. “Looks like it’s getting late. Your daddy’ll be home soon, and Momma’s expecting me for supper.”

  Allie studied the compass. “Just a ways more,” she said. “It won’t be long. Can’t be. We’ll look a little more and then eat. Guess we gotta go through this scrub.”

  Zach studied their footprints. Some of them in the distance had disappeared in the last minutes. They’d been there when he’d looked the first time, right after he and Allie found the rock. Barely there, but still visible in the patches of snow. Yet now there were not only no prints, but the snow was gone as well.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “How’d your daddy come all the way out here to drop off that Mary before he went to work? It don’t make no sense.”

  Allie shrugged because nothing came to mind. Zach had a spine, yes, and he was also kind, but he was smart most of all. She’d guessed back at the road it wouldn’t be long before he popped that question, and she knew she’d have to be careful how she answered.

  “Maybe he didn’t go to work at all. He’s done that before. Says, ‘I’m leaving for work, Allie, and I’ll see you this evenin’.’ But when his truck pulls back up in the driveway again, it’s my other daddy that gets out. I think sometimes he goes down to Bobby Barnes’s shop instead and sits there all day, getting liquored up. That’s probably what he did.”

  Of course maybe that’s what really had happened that day—it had plenty of times before—and how was Allie supposed to know either way? And if it could have happened, then was what she just told Zach a lie? She didn’t think so. But even if Allie had known that Marshall Granderson had just left work and was driving to the Walmart for a new Mary with a beer in one hand and his cell phone in the other, trying to call her yet again, trying to tell himself everything was still fine even if something told him it wasn’t, trying to comfort himself by saying even if the Mary was gone, he and Allie still had each other, they had each other, and that was all that mattered—even if Allie had known all of that, she would have told Zach the same thing.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go before this needle decides to peter out again.”

  Zach hopped off the boulder first, happy to be going somewhere away from those old woods, even if it was the wrong way from town. Allie took off her jean jacket and tied it around her waist, just below the scarf Sam had found. The pack was next. She readjusted it over her shoulders and decided if they were out there much longer, she was going to have to find some private time behind a bush.

  “To me, Sam,” she said.

  The dog turned and looked at her, huffed, and looked back through the trees. His tail never moved.

  “Sam, let’s go.”

  Still he wouldn’t. Allie grabbed his collar and turned him, ushering him off into the brush. The three of them picked their way through a maze of struggling oaks and thistly undergrowth that slowed their pace to a near crawl. Time slipped more. The sun faded as pockets of thick clouds dotted the sky over the distant mountaintops. Here and there, blackbirds called out. A breeze rustled the trees.

  “You laughed back there,” Zach said. “When I told you about the Holler.”

  “Just ’cause it was so dumb.”

  “It was good to hear, though. You don’t laugh much anymore.”

  She kept her pace, picking her way through the tangle, wincing as limbs smacked her in the face. Her feet, which had all that day sent only sporadic messages that they were cold, now reminded Allie of that fact with each step.

  “Most times I don’t let myself feel nothing to laugh at,” she said.

  “How do you do that?” he asked. “Decide not to feel?”

  “It ain’t something I do as much as it was just something that got done to me. Momma left, and a stone got rolled over my heart.”

  “I know. But sometimes you just gotta roll that stone back away.”

  “Ain’t that easy,” Allie told him. “You ain’t never lost anybody, Zach. Maybe if you did, you’d understand better. Feeling too much only makes you hurt. There’s rare cause to laugh.”

  “I lost my granddaddy,” Zach said.

  “Your granddaddy’s in the Greenville jail. You can’t lose somebody if you know where they are.”

  “But I still miss him. Not like you miss your momma, but maybe it don’t count that he’s close and she’s far. Neither of them’s here, and that’s what—”

  Zach didn’t finish his thought. He pushed through the last of the underbrush they’d spent the last twenty minutes climbing over and through. What lay on the other side was an open space that could have nearly been a meadow in springtime. Now it was only a dead place of gray grass and scattered rocks that not even the last rays of the sun could lighten. In the distance—two miles, maybe five—rose the tip of a distant hill.

  A lone oak stood so tall and wide in the middle of the field that no other trees could grow there. The trunk was wide enough that Allie and Zach could stretch their arms around it and still not touch one another’s fingers. Not that they would try. Allie had made up her mind already she was going nowhere near that tree. Its bark lay gray and lumpy in the fading sun, like the skin on a man whose long life was near ending. The top was bare but for three giant limbs that grew out and up like tentacles. Two more branches, long and near the middle, stretched out like arms. It was the most frightening thing Zach had ever seen, but that was not what had stolen his voice. It was what lay at the tree’s center. Two knots bulged from there like giant, empty eyes. Below those, the wood had been hollowed out by age and disease, leaving behind a long, jagged maw that looked frozen in a scream.

  Allie felt Zach searching for her fingers. He did not take her hand but let their skin touch. Sam’s ears pointed in the same direction as his tail—back. That didn’t seem a bad idea to Allie. In fact, going back seemed the very best thing in the world right then.

  “I think we should go,” Zach said. It was his whisper voice, the tone he’d used in the olden woods. He hadn’t meant to talk that way, but he couldn’t help it. “I don’t think we should be here no more, Allie.”

  Allie looked at the compass. The needle pointed on, through the tree’s center.

  “We can’t go back,” she sa
id. “We’re close, Zach. I think she’s just ahead.”

  Sam took one step forward but went no farther. Allie didn’t like that. Samwise had sniffed nearly every tree in the whole woods that day, but he didn’t want to go near that one.

  “We can come back tomorrow,” Zach said. “We know where to come now. Won’t take us long at all. Your daddy’ll be home soon. I gotta get home for supper.” He clamped the hand that wasn’t touching Allie’s over his mouth, stifling a cough. “I can’t get in trouble right at Christmas.”

  The needle floated, trying to get Allie’s attention.

  But the tree. That tree.

  It scared her, though she gave that feeling little weight. Allie put much more weight to the notion that Zach was afraid as well. He wouldn’t admit that—not ever—but she could tell. Worst of all was Sam. He was scared too. Dogs weren’t scared of trees. Not regular trees, anyway.

  “Okay,” Allie said, and she realized that had been a whisper too. “We’ll come back tomorrow, though, right?”

  “Sure we will.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Zach turned to leave. Allie lingered, unable to look away from that gnarled oak. How it looked as if it were warning them, screaming to stay right there, to go no farther. Sam left for Zach’s side. When Allie finally turned as well, she ran straight into the back of Zach’s hat.

  “Hey! What’s your problem?”

  Zach didn’t turn, didn’t even move against the weight Allie had thrown at him. He only said, “Something’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  The back of his head shook. “I don’t know. Everything looks . . . different.”