In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  A scurry from somewhere farther on.

  The forest there had spared the maples from the hard winter winds. Dry, shriveled leaves hid the view. Allie tried calling Sam to her once more. Zach moved a branch in their way. He drew his hand back and rubbed his fingers together, studying them with two widening eyes. A tremble traced its way through his shoulders and arms. Allie told herself that was the cold getting into him, nothing more, but the voice inside her said that was wrong. And when Zach stretched out his hand to show Allie what he’d touched, she knew the voice had been right.

  There was a brief moment when the trees around her bent and swirled. Her knees gave way. Allie closed her eyes tight, opened them. The stain was still on Zach’s fingers.

  What she said wasn’t a question: “Blood.”

  Zach’s breaths came deep and hard through his mouth. He looked to where Sam had gone, trying to find something else that could be on a dead old leaf. Mud, maybe. Or maybe it was just a little frost turned red by a trick of light, the sun coming down sideways through the trees. Sam barked. He was close.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “I think it is.” He rested the staff under his arm and reached for his knife. There was a soft click as the blade locked open. He offered it to Allie. “Me first,” he said. “You stay back, Allie. Stay back and get ready to run.”

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  Zach shook his head. “I don’t know what’s up there.”

  “I’m coming, Zach. I have to.”

  Zach moved the branch aside and held it so Allie could pass. She did, bending as far to the right as she could to avoid the blood, only to run into more on the tree beside. Allie shrank back, fluttering her arms like the girly girls she and Zach always made fun of back home. She swiped at the blood on her jacket, trying to get it off. All she accomplished was to smear it more. Sam barked again from his place higher up—twice this time, hard and quick, like he’d found something incredible. To Allie, the choice was fast becoming either get to Sam or risk him telling the whole forest where they were. A cloud of vapor encircled her head, evidence of how quick her breaths had become. She charged ahead, holding back only long enough for Zach to retake the lead. The leaves shook as the two of them pushed through the branches. Rusty rain fell over their clothes. Allie wiped at her cheek, nearly piercing her eye with Zach’s knife.

  The noise that came at them was small but sudden enough for Zach to raise his staff. The steel blade bobbed in Allie’s hand. But it was only Sam that emerged from the trees. He woofed twice—all he could do, given the size of the leg between his jaws—and turned back into the trees.

  “Deer,” Zach said. “Maybe it was a hunter. Come on.”

  Allie followed behind, slowed by the battle between her voice and the voice of her other self:

  Hurry up, don’t lose sight of Zach.

  No, Allie. You have to run away. You have to listen to Me, because I’m the only one here who’s gonna save you.

  She followed Zach anyway. The trail of blood ended when the trees cleared enough to let in much of the sun.

  On the ground in front of them lay a brown lump that looked like a soft, wet blanket. A tuft of white tail lay perhaps twenty feet to their right. To their left, two more legs lay bent and twisted. Allie stepped forward. Her shoe made a sucking sound against the ground. She looked down to see her feet at the edge of a crimson river flowing from the top of the hill.

  Zach poked the lump with his staff, rolling it over. The inside was hollow but for a layer of fat on the underside. He walked on, following the blood from the carcass. The maple where he stopped was at the center of the hill and taller than both of them together. The deer’s severed head lay in the fork of two branches. Its eyes were the color of honey. Even in death they had held onto a look of fear and shock, as if the animal had carried the image of what killed it to the grave. A gray tongue poked from its open mouth. Drops of blood fell from the neck. They puddled on the ground and oozed down the slope in winding capillaries.

  “A doe,” was all Zach said.

  He did not attach any great meaning to that statement. The time for impressing Allie with his vast collection of wilderness wisdom had long passed, left somewhere miles back with their bikes and the compass. Yet those two words vibrated Allie’s very heart. Standing in the shadow of that hanging head, Allie felt that familiar sting in her eyes. This had not simply been an animal that had once stood where they stood now. It had not been only a deer that had met such a violent, awful end.

  It had been a doe.

  It had been a mate to a strong buck that was now likely miles gone with all the rest of the forest’s game, mourning and alone. Perhaps it had even been a mother to a youngling that now filled the wide woods with cries for all that had gone lost.

  She turned away, knowing that to look any longer would bring a flood of tears that would not be held back. Sam lay nearby. He’d maneuvered the leg so that it was vertical between his two front paws. Blood and bits of brown fur ringed his mouth. He looked at Allie, woofed once, then resumed gnawing on the meat and marrow. Allie closed the distance between her and Sam before he could move. The bright eyes and thumping tail from seeing his master come close turned sour when he saw the grimace on Allie’s face. What followed was the bared teeth and low growl of someone intruding upon what was rightly his. He snapped his jaws as Allie reached him and yelped when the palm of her hand met his backside.

  “No,” she screamed. “You get, Samwise.”

  Sam jumped up, teeth gone and ears flat. He tucked his tail between two waning legs and scurried away. The leg remained in his mouth. Allie took hold of his scruff and turned him, wrenching the bone away. She used it to smack Sam again, this time on the nose. He yelped and went for the trees.

  “Allie.” Zach grabbed her arm, pulling her back. The leg fell from her hand onto the ground in a wet splat. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “He can’t eat it.” Screaming the words, not caring who or what heard. Sam poked his nose out from behind a nearby cedar. “You hear me, you mean old dog?” Her voice cracked, and in those gaps she felt springs of tears ready to overflow. “I hate you and you can’t eat it.”

  “Allie,” again, and this time Zach wheeled her around to face him. He dropped his staff and placed both of his hands on her shoulders. “He’s just hungry, Allie. Candy bars ain’t good for no dog. Sam doesn’t know better. Okay? He don’t mean nothing by it.”

  Allie’s shoulder shook beneath the weight of emotions too strong to express. Zach gripped her harder. She clamped her eyes and pursed her lips, pushing the tears back down.

  “She was somebody’s momma,” she said. “And now she’s dead.”

  Zach bent his head, putting her face in the shadow of his hat. Sam whined from beneath his tree. Allie stood there, unable to look at either of them. And then Zach did something she could have never expected, something that at any other time in any other place would have nearly burst her heart. He eased her to his chest and wrapped both arms around her tight, holding her there.

  They cared for the remains. The head was first. Allie could not bear to watch and so occupied herself with gathering the legs and tail instead. She heard Zach struggling to pull the neck away from the limbs and turned to see him cradling it in his arms like a child. They stacked everything on the blanket of fur. Zach took off his hat and bent over. His stomach convulsed into heaving sounds like fingers rubbing rough sandpaper. Afterward, he said it wasn’t because he was grossed out, that it was just his sick. Allie told him it was okay. She remembered what her father had said at the cemetery and told him sometimes people felt better after they got it all up and out of the way.

  Sam crawled out from his hiding place. He kept his head low to the ground and crept to Allie’s side, tail tucked but wagging. She felt her dog’s eyes looking up to her, begging for forgiveness, but she could not bring herself to pet him and say everything was all right. Because nothing was right. Nothing at all. Everything was plain to All
ie Granderson now. She’d had her suspicions since that morning at the pond, had gathered more evidence at the thing in the darkwood, but finding the doe had given her all the answers she needed. Zach wouldn’t believe it; that’s why he couldn’t put all the pieces together. Allie knew this as much as she understood the irony in it: Zach wouldn’t believe because he wasn’t fallen away.

  He offered to dig a grave. Allie said it wouldn’t do any good trying. All they had was one knife to dig in all that frozen ground.

  She bent and stroked the side of the doe’s face. Whispered, “I’m sorry, pretty deer. I hope you’re where there’s no bad things now.” It was all she could manage.

  They did not remain there long. The sun had reached the tops of the trees, signaling the wane of the day. The voice inside her spoke up again, telling her they had to go. Allie agreed. She decided that was the voice she would listen to from then on.

  5

  Zach bent his face to the high sun and measured the way. Neither of them had much heart to move east, as he had intended. Not yet, anyway. Allie didn’t really think her compass had ever been pointing in that direction in the first place, considering where they’d ended up. And though Zach fought the chill seeping into his bones by telling himself it had been his decision alone to take them off course (temporarily, he vowed), the bigger part of him held on to an image of his head and Allie’s hung from the limbs of another tree farther on. Sam’s head was at the top, forming the world’s most awful Christmas tree.

  Had they found the courage to press east only a couple miles more, the woods would have finally yielded to a golden field and a wide, oval stretch of water. They would have seen the wooden pier jutting out from the south end and noticed the single-lane dirt road leading over the soft rise beyond, and they would have known they had just gotten themselves found. Allie and Zach were well acquainted with Boone’s Pond. It was where both of their families often went to play and picnic on those summer weekends, years before everything ended. Zach caught his first fish in those calm waters. And on one particularly steamy summer night some twelve years before, Marshall Granderson had lain on that pier with his wife above him and the full moon shining down over her bare shoulders, and they had made a daughter.

  Sam would have drunk deep from those still waters, and Allie and Zach would have found a wellspring of energy that only the assurance of continued life could bring. They would have circled the pond and followed the dirt lane to its end, where a sign reading 664 pointed to town along a flat, paved road. They would have met the first home seven miles on, an aging farmhouse owned by Hollis and Edith Devereaux. A long way to walk, no doubt, but on that day it was only a half mile past Boone’s Pond where Hollis, Marshall Granderson, Grace Howard, and forty others were searching for the town’s two missing children.

  Marshall had gone sullen. As had Grace, who was still making good on her promise not to leave his side. His shaking had worsened to the point where he thought she’d noticed. There was every reason to believe she had. Despite his attempts to hide his addiction, everyone in Mattingly knew that Marshall Granderson had turned to drink after Mary’s death. Grace understood his need to put up a chaste front, even if most in town did not. It wasn’t alcohol that Marshall Granderson was trying to conceal; it was his despair, and Grace knew what would come of it if she abandoned Marshall to himself. The curtain he drew down over his world was the same that her father had once drawn down over his own, long ago now but not much further than yesterday in Grace’s mind, back when she was not much older than Allie. Her mother, too, had died early, though not from wind. The cancer had come in a rage and eaten its way through her mother’s body. In mere months, she had nearly been hollowed out.

  It was a horrible death, but one that at least had the blessing of speed. Not like Hank Howard’s, whose death had gone on for years. He tried to sink his loss into the deep waters of drunkenness. Grace stood by him. He fell silent and withdrawn as his pain became a wall between himself and his daughter. Grace stood by him. He succumbed to a despair that neither God nor drink could cure, and still Grace stood by him, had at times even helped her father draw down that curtain, because that at least dulled his hurt. Hank Howard remained that way for years, not wanting Grace there, not wanting her help, his only desire to wallow in what he could not rid himself of. For some, the only thing worse than feeling pain is the embarrassment of bearing it for the world to see. Hurt is weakness, these people think, and the inability to cope with an aching heart a sign that all hope is lost and can never be gained again. In the end, Grace Howard could only say that she had killed her father just as much as the gun he stuck into his mouth three days before her high school graduation. She’d stood by and done nothing.

  Marshall knew there wasn’t much left in the bedroom closet—three bottles, four at the most. He’d have to lose Grace long enough to go see Bobby, and soon. Their search party combed the area to the pond all that morning but found nothing. Jake radioed back, cautioning Marshall not to take that as bad news. There was no way Allie and Zach would have strayed that far from home, not in the winter. Not in that cold. And as the state police quartered back in Mattingly began planning not a rescue but a recovery, Allie, Zach, and Sam walked on deeper into the wilderness.

  The pace Zach set from the hill was as quick and steady as he could manage—a purposeful gait, though he really had no idea where they were going and didn’t care. It was still a race, one the stronger part of him was still determined to win. But the stakes were higher now, more immediate. The fever in him, the rot in Allie’s feet, the cold. These were things that stalked them, and yes, they were all dangerous. But as menacing as those things were, they could all be controlled, held at bay by a good fire or a warm place to stay or food in their bellies. Zach did not really consider any of those things as living. That’s what set this new thing apart from the fever and rot and cold.

  Because this new thing was alive, and it was hunting them.

  It had slunk into their camp the night before. Zach could no longer deny that. If he had any comfort at all just then, it was that he’d done such a good job building their hut that the thing—the It—had passed by without seeing them. Zach realized now that instinct had been what led him to build their shelter that way, the sort of inner knowing that could only grow in a man raised to survive in the woods. That same knowing was what had kept him from taking Allie through the underbrush that morning. Something in that notion didn’t ring true, but then oftentimes believing in a thing is enough to make it real. So no, it wasn’t the fact that Zach had been scared half to death by the sound of a snapping branch (which could have been anything, though now he thought there could have been only one hungry Thing waiting just inside that scrub). Nor was it Allie going on about how that darkwood had been a bad place because some kind of moon god lived there. It was Zach who had saved them. Zach and his smarts. Zach and his courage.

  That alone made him stand a little taller, though only for a little while. It was only a few hundred yards from where they’d said good-bye to the doe that Zach realized there would be no going quick and steady that day. Until that moment, Zach believed they both had clung to the idea that their time in the woods had been varnished with an almost holy purpose. Yes, there had been hardships along the way—losing both the helicopter and the compass, their dwindling provisions, their parents worried back home—but didn’t every adventure contain struggle? Mustn’t every hero leave home a boy in order to come home a man?

  But the cold—that deep winter, pressing down around and inside them—and the eyes Zach felt even now, watching from a hidden place . . . He felt trapped in those endless woods. He felt sick. He felt small.

  Allie walked hunched over, holding her stomach. Zach’s knife rested against her left sleeve. He wanted to tell her to close the blade, at least for now, but tripped over a hidden rock before he could. The ground beneath him gave way. Were it not for the club in his right hand (and that’s what it was and would be from now on—not a st
aff or a crutch or a hunk of old oak, but a club), Zach would have likely broken his nose against the ground. As it was, he managed to catch himself and stand again. The sound of all that stumbling over rocks and dead leaves bounced off the trees. Allie reached to steady him. Zach cursed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only trying to help.”

  He shook his head no, wanting to tell her he was only mad at himself, but Zach’s mouth wasn’t working so well anymore. The cold had separated his lower jaw from the rest of his face. It bobbed and fluttered, and each time his teeth clacked together a new wave of pain raced across his forehead. He wished his fever back, wanting to feel hot again.

  “Me,” he said. “Mad me, not you. Qw . . .” He stopped, clenching his jaws shut, trying again. The cold. So cold. “Quick and quiet. No noise.”

  “I’m cold, Zach. I need more branches in my clothes.”

  “M-moving. That thing was behind us b-back at the pond. It ain’t anymore. Could be any-any. Where.”

  He put an arm around her, hoping that would warm Allie some and steady himself more. That was how they continued on, one small step followed by another, pausing so Zach could cough up a little more of his lungs onto his sleeve and Allie could lean hard on him to raise one foot and then another, giving them a needed rest. Sam kept close. The memory of Allie whacking him had faded; he was again a loving dog with a loving master. He eyed Allie and Zach more than the trees, whimpering as they moved. To Zach, it was as though Sam knew something was wrong with them. He’d read stories about how dogs were like that, how they freaked out just before earthquakes and dialed 911 for their owners and sometimes even smelled death or cancer. It wasn’t a good look, what was in Sam’s eyes.

  The three of them had covered nearly sixteen miles since leaving their bikes along the road two days before, but they had managed barely one in the four hours since leaving the doe. By the time the ground began sloping up once more, their steps had become a crawl. The flecks in Zach’s vision had gone to swirls. Above them—it was either a few feet or a few miles, Zach wasn’t sure which and believed them both the same—an outcropping of ancient rocks jutted out from a hillside like sentinels guarding a lost kingdom. Allie huddled herself even closer. He felt her shudders and heard her own clattering teeth. Her feet kept listing forward—short, stubby steps that did more to scrape the packed leaves beneath them than move herself along. Her head pressed against Zach’s chest and lolled forward.