They went to bed shortly after, curling in their sleeping bags on opposite sides of the tent. After an hour or so of silence, huddled into her sleeping bag against the chilly night, Daphne began to feel frightened again. The image of the boy hanging himself wouldn’t leave her mind. He was so businesslike about the whole thing, so determined, and then his body convulsing at the end of the rope was something she was certain she would have nightmares about the rest of her life.
She finally gave breath to her fears, “I want my mom.”
“She’s not here and it’s too late to go home now,” her father replied.
“I’m scared and I want my mom,” Daphne repeated.
“You should have realized that hours ago when I asked if you wanted to go home. Now go to sleep.”
Daphne whimpered into her sleeping bag. It was so quiet, so tranquil in the woods at night, she was certain her father heard her, but he made no move to comfort or scold her. She continued her soft crying until she finally dozed off without a peep of any kind from her father.
5.
Daphne’s sleep was remarkably dreamless. She awoke the next morning to the soothing sounds of the forest, coming to when the sun’s light began to warm the tent enough to make her sleeping bag uncomfortably warm. She crept from her bag and looked to her father. He was still asleep, turned with his back toward her, his wild red hair, which was beginning to streak with gray, was the only part of him visible outside his sleeping bag.
She wasn’t sure how to wake him. He’d always awoken her on camping trips. “Dad,” she said, with no response. She placed her hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle shake with still no response. Panic began to rise in her and she gave his shoulder a strong, two-handed shove. His body rocked in position but limply returned to the same place. She grabbed the top edge of the sleeping bag and pulled it toward her. His entire body, sleeping bag and all, made the roll, knocking her backward.
His face was slack, his eyes clenched tight, and his skin looked pallid and clammy. She touched his face. He felt cool and sweaty at once. She held her hand above his mouth and below his nose, feeling only the ragged traces of breathing. He was alive, but barely.
She remembered her mother saying her father was a diabetic and not the kind who would get sick if they missed their shots, the kind who would die if they didn’t pay attention to their condition. She’d also said he wasn’t the type to care for himself the way he ought to.
Daphne scrambled from the tent and futilely scanned the surrounding woods as though someone, anyone might materialize to help her. She retrieved water from the truck where they’d locked their perishable supplies and tried to help him drink, but he was unmovable and unresponsive to her urgings. She searched through his stuff, through her stuff, through every possible hiding place in the camping supplies for his insulin shots and testing equipment but couldn’t find it anywhere. She knew what it looked like, a little leather satchel, brown with a brass zipper. When she couldn’t find it, she searched for just the syringes and little glass bottles of medicine. Even this was nowhere to be found. After her search yielded no medicine or means of contacting help, she plopped down on her sitting rock and cried into the tops of her knees.
6.
She made two attempts to find the road that afternoon. After the second attempt barely returned her to camp, she decided becoming lost in the woods wouldn’t help her or her father. She couldn’t say if his condition was worsening as he’d seemed near death when she woke up that morning and hadn’t done anything different since. She re-started the campfire and waited as night came on. They weren’t expected back until the following evening, and she didn’t believe her mother would truly become concerned for another day after that as she remembered her father saying he might just keep her out of school on Monday to make up for lost time. That was the sort of fun, but ultimately irresponsible thing he’d do, like leaving his insulin at home.
The sun set low through the trees and with the darkness came a chilly edge to the night air. She huddled closer to the fire and deeper into the blanket she’d wrapped around her shoulders. The boy from the day before was nearly forgotten until she heard the strange, but unmistakable creaking of something heavy dangling from a rope and the strain it put on an old branch. Shivers crawled across her skin like icy bugs and she strained her hearing to make sure what she thought she heard wasn’t simply her mind playing tricks on her. The creaking and groaning of rope and tree limb continued, quickly adding to it the sounds of frantic feet kicking against bark. She stood and stared across the darkened creek toward the source of the sound, but couldn’t see anything. She bolted into the tent when she heard the splash of something heavy landing in the swift moving creek.
She grasped her father’s shoulders and shook him with all the strength she could muster. His body was rigid, cold, and completely lifeless in her hands. Frightened, mournful tears streamed down her cheeks with every futile attempt to awaken her now dead father. He’d saved her the day before but she didn’t believe she’d done nearly enough to save him. She searched through the side pockets along the inside of the tent until she found his keys. She couldn’t drive the truck, but she could lock herself inside until the morning or help arrived. She found her father’s keychain with the telltale metal Chevrolet insignia. She scrambled from the tent, losing her feet in the process, nearly stumbling into the fire as she tried to regain her balance. Hunched over her father’s sitting rock, she searched the ground around the edge of the fire for where she might have dropped the truck keys. Her gaze traveled up over the top of the dwindling fire where a new figure was standing at the edge of the creek, barely illuminated by the dying embers of her campfire. It was the boy with dead white eyes, drenched from the waist down, the hastily tied noose still around his neck.
She screamed, forgetting entirely about her search for the truck keys, and ran into the woods in whatever direction was closest. Away from the campfire, the darkness and cold of the woods encased her immediately. She could hear the boy chasing after her, making good time despite the fact that it sounded like he was dragging behind him the branch he’d tied his noose to. The darkness became all encompassing until she was stumbling blindly over uneven ground and bouncing off the trunks of trees that she couldn’t see until it was too late. She didn’t know how the dead boy was moving so quickly, but from the dwindling distance of the sound of his thrashing behind her, she could tell he wasn’t having nearly the trouble she was.
Somehow she’d circled back to the creek although she thought she’d run in the direction of the road. She heard the water an instant too late as she burst from the woods, slowed only by a low bush snagging her corduroy pants, and she was tumbling down the creek bank into the frigid, turbulent water. This time, with no father left to save her, she bounced along the rocks painfully, swept along by the frothy, cold water sputtering with growing futility to keep her head above as each snag and jolt dunked her back under. The tumultuous roiling of the river knocked all sense of direction from her until she wasn’t even sure she was swimming toward the black surface of the water rather than the black bottom each time she was sent tumbling under. On the verge of what she thought would be her last sputtering breath, she felt herself lifted from the water.
7.
Daphne relaxed in her savior’s embrace, allowing the angel to caress her hair and whisper sweet promises that she was safe, finally safe. Daphne believed every word of it. Her guardian angel was beautiful with strawberry blond hair and otherworldly blue eyes, but she also looked a little sad, and Daphne wondered why.
“My father is dead,” Daphne said, “back at the camp.”
“I’m sorry,” the angel replied.
“There was a dead boy, he hung himself and chased me,” Daphne continued. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the angel said. “He can’t hurt you if you’re with me.”
Daphne believed this to her very core. Her angel was powerful—she could sense it in some odd way. �
�I want to go home,” Daphne murmured.
“I’ll take you to a farmhouse on the edge of the woods,” the angel said. “They’ll know how to get you home.”
Daphne felt good about this plan and was exhausted by her trying day. She fell asleep in the angel’s lap to the gentle caresses of her hair and soothing whispered singing of the angel’s voice.
8.
Daphne awoke at the cusp of dawn as the angel carried her toward the edge of the forest. Before they broke the tree line, with the sky beginning to warm with the coming light of the day, the angel set her down on the edge of a still verdant pasture. She looked Daphne in the eyes, straightened her hair one last time, and smiled a hauntingly sad smile.
“The people who live in the house are named Aldridge and Rebecca,” the angel told her. “They were friends of mine from another life. If you tell them you were lost in the woods and call them by name, they’ll know I sent you to them and will help you.”
Daphne threw her arms around the angel and hugged her tightly, whispering into the angel’s silken hair, “my sister says all the old stories of the forest being haunted are just fairy tales, but they’re true, aren’t they?”
“Enough are to be cautious,” the angel said.
“But there should be good stories too, about you,” Daphne said.
“Maybe someday,” the angel replied. “Go before the sun comes up, so I can watch to make sure you make it to the door.”
Daphne reluctantly pulled herself from the angel’s embrace and began her slow walk across the pasture to the little farmhouse. She looked back when she reached the wooden back steps. The angel was standing at the edge of the forest, watching her as she’d promised. The rising sun crossed the field like a golden wave, bathing the angel in white light that seemed to almost emanate from within. It felt like Daphne was looking through the angel, into her true self, and what she saw was the essence of kindness and purity.
The angel vanished into the woods, leaving Daphne to ache a little at her departure. She steeled herself all the same, and knocked on the farmhouse door. A middle-aged couple came along quickly, and didn’t seem remotely surprised to see her on their back steps.
“Aren’t you a sight,” the man said, smiling down to her with paternal warmth.
“I got lost in the woods,” Daphne said. “I was told to ask for Aldridge and Rebecca.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” a woman called from the kitchen. “Come in and we’ll get you on your way home before you know it.”
Daphne took one last glance at the woods before stepping inside as Aldridge moved to allow her in.
“She’s gone by now,” Aldridge said, “but you may see her again someday, if you’ve got a sharp eye.” He winked to her as she passed him into the house and she hoped, truly hoped, he was right.
9.
Daphne kept a sharp eye out in the months to come, but didn’t see her angel again for another two years and then only in a picture. She was in the library with her mother, walking through one of the older sections to see her sister at her new job, and there she was, Daphne’s angel, dressed as the Harvest Festival Princess in a picture above a plaque on the wall.
Daphne started to say she knew the girl, that it was the angel who had saved her, but then she saw the date—1955.
Part 6: Blood Red Riding Hood
Autumn 2005 – Annabelle
1.
Annabelle hadn’t thought anything could make her wish for the fast-paced action of her senior year of high school, but the drudgery of the miserable year after certainly managed to soften her opinion of how glad she was to be rid of the K-12 experience. She hadn’t taken much in her life seriously, and applying to college wasn’t any different. Her half-assed score on the SATs, slightly above average GPA accrued through some truly bizarre combination of classes, and no extra curricular activities or volunteer hours set her apart as a college applicant easily dismissed. She then compounded this folly by applying to colleges based on how far away from her home they were and how creepy the architecture was. She threw the University of Alaska Anchorage into the mix simply because it seemed completely unlike Vigil’s Rest.
After she clipped her way through the thin envelope rejections from all seven schools she’d applied to, her parents demanded she enroll in community college or get a job. Baskin Robbins seemed like a better option at the time of the ultimatum, but was quickly losing its appeal in practice. As the weather cooled and customers eager for ice cream vanished, Annabelle found she spent most of her time at Baskin Robbins cleaning the already clean glass display cases and staring off into space, ruing just about everything.
Halloween was coming up, the trees were bedecked in their full autumnal glory, the town was abuzz about high school football and homecoming, and Annabelle hated it all. The cluster of loyal friend’s she’d had through high school promised all summer they would be home nearly every weekend to spend time with her, but then the reality of plane tickets from colleges in Virginia, New York, and Wisconsin put a stop to that plan before it even started. They were all off enjoying college, and she was watching leaves blowing across the parking lot, waiting for her closing shift to end.
For most of September, Annabelle’s favorite teacher, Ms. Jensen the phys-ed instructor, would stop by to say hello, give her something of a pep talk, and buy a small, fat free, frozen strawberry milk. This was part of the other damnable hell about her choice in jobs. The ice cream parlor was right around the corner from the very same high school of her spectacular mediocrity, which meant reminders of what she should have done better strolled through the door on a fairly regular basis. Annabelle needed something, anything to happen to break up the crushing boredom of being the only 18 year old high school graduate in the entire town who knew she belonged somewhere else.
She popped her head up from the stretch of counter flanked by the ice cream display freezers when the bell above the door rang. She couldn’t completely remember having laid her head down or for how long she’d slept, but the sky outside was well on its way past dusk and the street lights at the other end of the parking lot were already on.
The girl who walked into the ice cream shop couldn’t have been much older than Annabelle, although she didn’t recognize her from school. She was around the same average height as Annabelle, but far more polished and beauty queen-esque in how she tended her appearance. Her strawberry blond hair stood in a version of a 50’s flip. The clothes she wore clothing store with a blindfold on, picking at random until she’d pulled together a complete outfit.
“Hey,” Annabelle said, still wiping the bleariness from her eyes with the heel of her palm. She glanced back over her shoulder to see how long until closing time. The analogue ice cream clock had little cones in place of numbers, stating it was always time for ice cream. She still had an hour and a half until closing, which meant she couldn’t run off the customer. As she became more focused, and got a better look at the woman who had awoken her, Annabelle wasn’t sure she wanted to run her off. The girl with the rockabilly hairdo and chaotic sense of fashion was a knockout, which wasn’t something Annabelle normally would have noticed, but in the particular, rarified fluorescent lighting of the Baskin Robbins at night, it was pretty hard not to.
“Hello,” the girl said in reply as she wandered along the L-shaped display freezers, inspecting the 31 flavors.
That particular Baskin Robbins didn’t actually have 31 flavors. Annabelle had counted and recounted, always coming up with 29. She wasn’t sure what the other two flavors were supposed to be or where they’d gone, but they never had more than 29. She’d thought a busybody customer would notice and demand a free cone or something for being traumatized by a lack of 31 complete flavors being in attendance, but nobody ever did.
The woman stopped on the far side of the L from the ice cream cake display near the door, in the vicinity of what Annabelle thought of as the pedestrian flavors, and her face lit up. Annabelle hadn’t seen anyone ever react to ice c
ream in quite that way. Even children weren’t as brazenly joyous over the mountains of ice cream in the cases. Annabelle wandered closer, not out of a sense of duty to do her job correctly, but more out of curiosity. When she smiled and her eyes lit up the way they did, the girl was really quite stunning. Annabelle got closer to see what the girl was beaming at, but paused when she noticed the lovely shade of ice blue the girl’s eyes were.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 12
