In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  Allie kept her head down and shrugged—Don’t know, don’t care. More concerning were the invisible nails pushing up through her heels, making her stumble. Allie didn’t know what was going on down there in her shoes, but she didn’t like it. Not at all.

  The tree she chose for her necessary was maybe thirty feet tall, healthy and wide enough for her to sneak behind without any chance of being seen. Allie took a final look and saw Zach’s eyes dart away, then stepped behind the tree. She’d slipped off her pack and unbuttoned her jeans—had even begun the initial downward movement of what she’d come to call the Squat of Shame—when her eyes drifted to the big oak’s trunk. A single cold finger traced a shiver in a line that began at the base of her neck and ended at her tailbone. Allie stood there, half standing and half crouching. Staring.

  “Zach?”

  She bent her head around the tree. Zach had sat on the log in front of the hut, trying but not quite managing to play with Sam. He looked up.

  “C’mere.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to show you something.” Whispering. Not so strange, given how much the world had gone still. And yet Allie knew something else had gone wrong overnight, something beyond all the screaming nothing around her. She tried keeping her insides even so she wouldn’t drift to worry. Or worse, fear.

  “I don’t wanna see what you’re doing back there, Allie,” Zach said, even if that was all he was interested in at the moment. He simply didn’t think he could move from his spot on the log.

  “Come”—whisper—“here.”

  He rose from the log, rolling his eyes like boys who think they’re men do, a look that says, Whassa matter, see a bug? Sam followed, happy to have somewhere to explore with his nose. By the time they reached the tree, Zach was near breathless. He didn’t think he’d ever walked so far in his life.

  “What?” he asked.

  Allie stepped aside. She pointed to the trunk. “What’s that?”

  Zach bent to look and just stood there. He offered no words, no emotion. It was as though he’d been frozen right along with the ground beneath them and the tree in front of them. His mind tried to sort out what his eyes were seeing. Only static came through.

  Scratched into the trunk were five deep gouges that ran in a diagonal from above their heads to just below their knees. Bits of bark hung from the grooves like flaking skin. The insides of the tree were laid bare in the morning light.

  “You hear anything last night?” Allie asked.

  “No.”

  “Nothin’ at all? Did Sam hear anything?”

  Sam’s ears perked at the mention of his name. He wagged his tail and pushed his nose against the leg of Allie’s soiled jeans. She bent and rubbed him without thought.

  “Sam never moved at all,” Zach said. “I kept waking up, coughing and stuff, wanting to see if that light came back. It didn’t. I didn’t hear anything neither. Why?”

  Allie reached up and followed the center groove with one hand. She turned her forefinger sideways, trying to judge how deep the cut went. Her nail disappeared almost to the first knuckle, making her shudder.

  “We gathered wood right around here last night,” she said. “Did you see these marks?”

  “No,” he said. “Did you?”

  She shook her head.

  Zach studied the marks again. “That don’t mean nothing,” he said. “We were tired and you were mad. We had to get something together before it got dark. Sam”—he said only Sam, though in his heart Zach counted Allie and himself as well—“was all shaky because of those animals. How could we have seen this?”

  Allie stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket, feeling the willow bark she’d hidden there. She shuffled her feet on the ground, trying to stop those needles, and kicked at a rock that didn’t budge from the ground.

  “We couldn’t,” Zach said. And so a big chunk of him believed. Because they’d been scared and in a hurry to get under cover, and it was probably near dark when they’d walked over near that tree to gather what they needed, and of course they’d just missed it. Even an experienced woodsman couldn’t see everything.

  Allie watched him fingering the grooves, sinking his own fingernail in. He shrugged a no-big-deal. Sam growled low and moved away, back toward the shelter.

  “You gotta stop being scared of everything, Allie,” he said. “That’s when people screw up is when they’re scared. Those marks probably got made a long time ago by something. A storm maybe, or maybe a hunter.”

  “Storms and hunters can do that to big old trees?”

  “Sure they can. It ain’t like we seen no funny-looking trees in the last two days.”

  “That’s right,” Allie said. Nodding, wanting with all her heart to believe Zach was right and this was nothing at all, even if that primal place deep inside her, first roused way back in the olden woods, now sparked again. “Lotsa funny stuff around here,” she told Zach, just the moment that the voice said, You know what that means, don’t you, Allie?

  “We’d have heard it, something like that. Would’ve made a racket, especially in all this quiet. And there ain’t no tracks nowhere. There’d be tracks for sure.”

  Another nod, this one so vigorous that Allie’s pigtails bobbed in her face. They smelled like wet fur.

  Touch it, the voice said.

  She moved her hand back to the oak and spread her fingers wide. They covered only a small bit of two scratches out of the five total. The remaining three stretched out to either side—two on the left, one on the right.

  “Think it was whatever made that light?” she asked.

  “Light don’t make marks.”

  “You sure?”

  “’Course I am.”

  Allie looked at Zach, trying to figure if he was telling the truth. Sam barked. It was low and soft, barely more than a whimper, but in the silence it came like a roar. Only the white tip of his tail was visible behind another tree, this one on the opposite side of their hut. Allie picked up her pack and followed Zach. There were more scratches behind that tree—five of them, deep and wide.

  They walked a wide circle around camp, moving from tree to tree. Seven others bore the same scores. One, a tall maple with limbs that stretched over the back of the very place where they’d bedded down, bore only four.

  “That one’s different,” Zach said. “See that? Only four scratches. Don’t mean nothing, Allie. Probably just some disease is all. This whole place looks like it’s dyin’. ’Sides, ain’t no tracks here, neither.” And there weren’t, Zach had made sure, and that was the only thing that stayed the full-blown panic building inside him. “Don’t be scared, Allie. You get like that, the mind starts saying stuff’s there that ain’t.”

  Allie nodded one last time, slow and soft. She whispered, “Okay, Zach,” even as that small and terrible voice inside her said, You know why there’s only four scratches on that maple, don’t you, Allie?

  She shook her head no as Zach left her to call Sam. Shook it no again.

  Because that maple’s smaller, Voice said. Why, this here maple probably looked like a pencil to Who made that. This tree’s too small to hold all five

  —“Stop it,” Allie whispered, not wanting to hear—

  CLAWS. Bet he stood right here watching you sleep too. Zach says that’s not what happened, but you know, don’t you? And you know what? Zach knows too. He’s just too scared to say.

  Allie stared at the ground, trying to find the path she and Zach had taken around the perimeter of their camp. None of their footprints showed. The earth was too hard. Anything could’ve come by in the darkness and not left a trace.

  Sam sniffed the bottom of the maple and growled. He lifted his head and cocked a hind leg, spraying the tree. Allie rubbed his head once he’d finished. He may have been a dumb old beast, but Allie’s dog was no coward.

  “Allie.” She felt Zach’s hand at her back. It was equal parts shaky and calming. “It’s like when you said something was back in the meadow. T
hen you talked to me, and you decided it was nothing. Right?”

  “Right,” she whispered.

  “This here’s the same thing is all.”

  No, it’s not, Allie. You thought you could hide out here in the big woods? You can’t. Look around you.

  She did. From the maple, on around behind her, to the big oak where she’d first gone. The shelter occupied the center like a bull’s-eye. All the blood left Allie’s face with a speed that made her feel faint.

  “It’s like we were marked.”

  “What?” Zach asked.

  “Why’d all those birds and critters come running past us, Zach? What was back there?”

  He looked at the maple again. This time Zach touched the grooves. One after the other, tracing them from above his head down to his waist. “I was gonna say we could stay a little while,” he said. “Got water close, and a good shelter. We could use the rest. But maybe we should move on.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Allie said, “but we don’t know where we are, so we can’t know where to go. In case you forgot, my compass is gone.”

  Zach ignored that. Allie let him. She figured Zach was the only other person in the world who missed that compass as much as she did right then. But Zach was thinking no such thing. He shuddered from the chill in him and coughed into a hand that looked more brown than white. When he wiped his nose, snot streaked his sleeve. He knew exactly where to head to find home, thanks to the clear morning. The trick would be telling it right to Allie.

  “Can’t go through all that water, not with your tennis shoes. That means north’s out. Can’t go south, because that’s behind us and that’s where all them animals came from. I don’t know why they were running, Allie, but I figure it’s best if we stay away from there. West is out, because we’d have to cross the stream and run into the same problem as north. Guess that leaves east.”

  “What about my momma?”

  “Easy. If that’s the only way we can go, then I guess that’s where the compass’d be pointing.”

  Allie nodded. It made sense, but “I don’t think I can walk, Zach. My feet ain’t so good.”

  “Let me look at them.”

  He guided Allie back to the log and removed her shoes and socks. She nearly screamed at what was underneath, quiet woods or not. The skin over her feet looked pasty, almost ashen. Like Salisbury steak minus the gravy.

  Zach pressed on her big toe. “You feel that?”

  Allie nodded. “They hurt bad when I first woke up. Now I don’t feel much. What is it? Do I got the plague?”

  “Frostnip,” Zach said. He rubbed his chest. “You need a fire soon. We won’t go far, only a ways. I’ll try a fire again. Think you can walk just a while?”

  Allie looked at that perfect circle of scored trunks, imagining the marks behind them. Facing out to the woods rather than in toward them

  And why would that be?

  “I can walk.”

  “Let’s get on, then. It’s gonna be cold today.”

  They stuffed her Chucks and socks with the pine needles and leaves from inside the shelter. Zach offered to carry the backpack with the promise that he wouldn’t look inside. Allie kept it anyway. Not because she didn’t trust him, but because she didn’t want to have to ask for it when she went to do her business later. She reminded herself she’d have to do that soon.

  Sam didn’t lead this time. He kept close to Allie instead, looking around and behind but mostly at her, as if making sure she didn’t wander off. It was Zach who walked out front. He held his pocketknife in one hand and a straight branch of fallen oak in his other.

  She turned to take one last look at the place that had been their temporary home. It had been only one night, and they had both been hungry and tired and sick, but Allie was still struck with a sense of sadness at having to leave. Even with the compass gone, she had felt safe there. Happy, almost. But that was gone now. She’d been found. And because Zach and Sam were with her, they’d been found too. Marked. Zach had not bothered to fasten the door back. Allie almost said something to him about that, then didn’t. It felt better, knowing that door was still open. Maybe they could come back someday, show her momma what they did while they were looking for her.

  Her eyes went to a place farther back from the hut, where the trees bunched together. Something moved there. Only for a moment, then gone. The breeze shuffling a limb, maybe

  (No)

  or a trick of light.

  (Don’t you think like that, Allie. Thinking like that will get you all killed, and it’ll be your fault. Just yours.)

  She turned, making sure Sam and Zach were still close. From there on, Allie kept her eyes ahead.

  2

  And so it was east toward the sun where Zach led them, just as a combination of forestry servicemen and state police began mapping the day’s search in the cold shade of the Christmas tree in the town square. The crowd that greeted Marshall and Grace that morning was twice the size they’d found the day before. Word of Allie’s and Zach’s disappearances had spread to the tiny communities of the hill country. Jake in particular welcomed this development. Staties and forestry folks did their jobs well, but no one knew the mountains and hollow surrounding Mattingly better than the hill folk. The cold was near unbearable, and the search thus far had turned up not even a semblance of evidence. Jake allowed himself to believe nonetheless, even as the memory of Zach calling out through the nightmare the night before was still fresh in his mind—a son begging his father to keep the monsters away. The children would be found.

  Jake only wished Kate could believe the same. The past days had been harder on her than anyone, even Marshall. She could not sleep, would not eat. Would barely talk. The Barnetts had endured much as a family, had stretched to near breaking the bonds that held them together, but Jake knew Kate’s faith was failing. In many ways, she had gone lost right along with Zach.

  Strange as it may seem, the one person who truly understood what Kate Barnett felt was the man who had so often cursed the fact that she had survived The Storm while his own wife had not. Marshall would understand Kate’s gnawing doubts. He too felt no such compunction for faith. Heartache was the norm now, and Marshall could sense its approach the way birds sensed a coming storm. He and Grace had spoken little that morning. It had taken Marshall a full thirty minutes of stutters and awkward pauses to apologize for all he’d said the night before. Not because he couldn’t decide what to say, but because he wanted—needed—Grace to understand.

  Grace had accepted that sorry well enough, though the truth was that all she wanted was for Marshall to understand as well. He didn’t, of course. Likely couldn’t, even if he and everyone else in Mattingly still remembered the sad tale of Henry Louis Howard, the man who had once been “Looey” to his friends, Hank to the many who weren’t, and Daddy to his little Gracie before the misery took him.

  What hurt feelings existed between Marshall and Grace were put away once they reached town. Now it was more squeezes of Marshall’s shoulder and grave tones of faith and hope and Christmas miracles by the throng, all of which Marshall took well. He found those sentiments necessary on a morning when the thermometer in front of the hardware store barely registered seventeen. He thought everyone needed such good words. The town had pulled together again, had bound its fate to Allie and Zach, but Marshall saw that many of the faces greeting him were without the determined looks of the previous day. Dwindling weather didn’t have much to do with it. Dwindling hope did.

  Zach may have shared that same sense of doom the night before, but he had greeted the new day with a sense of guarded hope that kept his feet moving through the forest. He did not need to see the muted expressions on the townspeople’s faces as they dispersed to beat bushes and comb fields, nor did he have to hear the soft pleadings of his mother’s voice spoken to a bright, sun-filled sky. He knew their time was low. The deep woods was no place to tarry even in summer, when food was aplenty and the days were drawn in long, warm strokes. Being s
tranded there in the wintertime was worse and different. Let Allie believe in ghosts and boogeymen. Zach knew what truly stalked them was something that had no need to lurk behind trees or in the cover of night because it hid inside them—deep down in Zach’s thickening lungs and in Allie’s hard, graying feet. They had more to overcome than the forest now. They had to beat death.

  That notion made it easier for Zach to lay aside his guilt over telling Allie east was their only way. The truth was that west had also been an option (the brook had frozen along with everything else overnight, and even if it hadn’t, the banks were still narrow enough in some places to jump). North around the pond had been possible as well. Even south had not been beyond the reach of possibility. That would’ve meant going in the same direction where the stampede had come, but Zach thought it might be worth trying to find the hill again. And they’d stay there this time. He would pray for a helicopter, and Allie would tell him not to bother.

  But in the end it was east Zach had settled on. Not because that was where the compass maybe had been pointing or because that was where Mary waited, but because east was Mattingly—if not the town itself, then the farms and roads that surrounded it. The sun had been at their backs when they’d left the town square. It stood to reason that same sun should be at their faces when they returned. So long as the sun shone, they weren’t lost at all. And though Zach had been wrong about a great many things in the past two days (and would be proven wrong about a great many more in the days to come), on this point he was exactly right.

  “I like the God of the sun,” Allie said.

  He turned. Allie had fallen perhaps ten steps behind. Sam remained close at her side. Zach had gone to great lengths that morning to tell himself everything was fine, that nothing had happened in the past day to warrant freaking out. That was of course a lie, one Zach acknowledged deep down where only the truths of our lives lay. Much like the other lie, that the stout piece of oak branch currently in his right hand was more an aid to help him walk than a weapon he would perhaps have to use. But the sight of Sam clinging so close rather than wandering out ahead was bothersome, as was the way Allie had been acting all morning. To Zach, it was like something fragile had broken off inside her.