by Dale Bailey
The mayor, an officious little man in a dark suit, cleared his throat. “I propose we wait,” he said. “We can reassess in a month or so. Until then, care must be our watchword. Do not go out alone. Keep your pets inside. And keep a weather eye”—and now he swallowed—“keep a weather eye on your little ones.”
They did as the mayor ordered. They did not go out alone. They kept their pets inside. And they kept a weather eye on their little ones. For a time food was scarce for the pack. They were forced to keep to the dumpsters and the trashcans, but if they were seen skulking through the midnight streets, no one spoke of it.
March came. The snow melted and the first green shoots appeared on the trees. Reveling in plenty, the girls of Troop 9 once again retreated to the woods.
But in April they came back.
In April, things got worse. In April, they became very terrible indeed.
A Girl Scout Is Clean in Thought, Word and Deed
If they hadn’t been teenagers—The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty would turn seventeen in May and the youngest of them, The Girl Who Had Been Ann Miller, was already sixteen—things might have turned out differently. But they were in their sexual prime, and they simultaneously came into estrus, little suspecting or understanding what was happening to them. Yet at an almost cellular level they recalled the rich aroma of pheromones exuded by the boys they had once gone to school with.
Instinct once again drew them home.
This was in mid-April, just as the first daffodils began to bloom. The Girl Scouts of Troop 9 weren’t forgotten—their occasional chorus of moonstruck howls ensured that—but the townsfolk, lulled into security by more than a month without incident, had let their vigilance lapse. They still kept their pets leashed and no one was quite deranged enough to let children wander around unsupervised, but high schoolers, heady with the spring weather and their own vulnerability to the pheromones everywhere in the air—prom season loomed on the horizon—were another matter. You couldn’t keep them on a leash, though God knows enough parents had tried. Such were John Hardesty’s thoughts as he stood smoking on his porch and thinking about his daughter: where she might be in the encircling arms of the vast woods and what she might look like now and what thoughts, if any, ghosted through the wilderness of her mind. She had kept him going in North Africa and Italy, she’d walked beside him during the weary march through occupied France—visions of her and Mary and the boy he’d hoped yet to have. And now she was lost to him all over again and probably for good. He would never get to see her in a prom dress, never walk her down the aisle, never cradle her children in his arms—so there was a special ache in his heart that season as the high school kids in their dozens waltzed by his insurance office on their way to school or stopped in for a milkshake at Moore’s Pharmacy, across the street, when the bells rang at three.
That was almost the last place anyone saw Tom Anderson—a senior that year, a star in the classroom and on the gridiron, with a scholarship in hand from Brown, where it was preordained that he would quarterback the Bears to an Ivy League championship. That Tom Anderson. The previous fall, on an October night so clear and cold that you might reach into the heavens and snatch down a star, he’d directed a game-winning fourth-quarter drive against an arch-rival the town hadn’t beaten in nine years. The final play? Tom Anderson on a forty-seven yard scramble to the end zone as the clock ticked down to zero: it had been a dazzling run, so breathtaking that the local sportswriter found himself stymied for words to describe it in the next morning’s paper.
The pack put an end to all that, sweeping down a wooded embankment to snatch him from the sidewalk not two blocks from home. Their winter deprivations had served them well. They knew the secrets of the hunt in their bones. Be swift, be silent. Be, above all things, merciless and cruel—though by then the concepts of mercy and cruelty had passed beyond the ken even of The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty. Driven by instinct alone, they lived entirely in the moment. They no more planned the abduction than salmon plan their run upstream. They’d been scouting the town for days by then, moving unseen through the early spring nights, waiting for their opportunity. Tom, flush with the overconfidence that attends great talent and beauty, provided it. One moment he’d been sauntering along the sidewalk beneath the great overarching maples just then coming into bud, his satchel slung carelessly over one shoulder as he dreamed a lazy dream of the way Allison Baker’s sweater had pulled tight across her breasts at Moore’s Pharmacy that afternoon—and dreaming too of the warm pressure of those breasts against his chest as he kissed her goodbye at her doorstep (the true last place anyone had seen him; Tom Anderson wasn’t the kind of young man to let his girl walk home alone even if the woods hadn’t been haunted by the howling specters of Girl Scout Troop 9)— one moment he’d been doing all that, and the next, those very specters had come screaming silently out of the dark trees to encircle him. For a single heartbeat, maybe two, Tom’s vaunted scrambling abilities might have given him a chance to escape, but he was so shocked at what he was seeing—six lean, inhuman girls, their filthy arms and legs corded with muscle—that he did not react in time. When he did, feinting to his left, the satchel tucked under his arm like a football, it was too late. His mother’s admonition—
—don’t walk home alone Tom whatever you do—
—rang in his mind like doom as they hurtled down upon him, their long knotted hair swinging before their faces like veils. A confusion of impressions washed over him—the stench of them and their eyes aglitter with animal cunning in the twilight, their lips skinned snarling over their stained yellow teeth, and, most of all, perhaps, the graceful, curving talons of their fingernails, ridged with strength. Then he felt something crash into the back of his skull (it was a rock the size of a softball, though he never saw it and there was anyway nothing soft about it). A flare blazed up behind his eyes, and then he was plummeting down a long well. The light receded above him until it snapped abruptly out of existence, and Tom Anderson was gone. In his place rolled the deep, subterranean waters of unconsciousness.
As the other girls faded into the shadows, The Girl Who Had Been Mildred Allen and The Girl Who Had Been Kate Robinson seized him by the collar of his letter jacket and dragged him up the slope into the trees. But for his abandoned satchel and a smear of blood upon the concrete, he might never have been there at all.
Three hours later—three hours of endless, cuticle-gnawing anxiety—his mother was on the phone with Allison Baker. Yes, they’d been together and yes, Tom had been fine when he left and no, she hadn’t heard from him since and was something wrong, Mrs. Anderson? Something was, something was terribly wrong, and in virtually the same moment that Tom’s mother hung up to call the police, a distraught Allison phoned her best friend, Edna Kowalski, who told her mother over dinner who called her best friend Shirley Thomas, and so the news hop-scotched across town until the telephone rang in John Hardesty’s house. It must have been 9:30 by then—late in those days for a call—and he had a sense of foreboding as he picked up the receiver.
Mary, cradling little Frankie against her breast, could tell from the clipped tone of her husband’s responses—
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Of course.”
—that something awful had happened, and she did not want to hear the words he would speak when he put down the phone. In the months since that ill-advised camping trip, she’d had enough bad news for a lifetime. Not a night passed that she didn’t weep when the pack lifted their howling faces to the moon, and the mattress sighed beneath her as John stood up to leave the room and keep his lonely vigil.
He hung up the phone.
For a moment Mary had a wild thought that if she didn’t ask, it wouldn’t be true, whatever it was, but the words rose in her throat against her own volition. “What is it, John?”
“Tom Anderson,” he said. “Missing.”
“Missing?”
He said nothing. He sat across from her, holding h
is body stiff, like it might shatter if he moved too suddenly. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
“The police are looking for him now,” he said.
“They’re not saying—”
“Of course they are.”
“But they can’t,” she said. “They couldn’t believe—”
But the horror of it was, if she let herself, Mary could believe it, too—did believe it. If she let herself, she believed it all. She believed Ed Grier, despite the drinking, and she believed Max Brock when he said he’d seen the girls scatter like coyotes into the trees. She believed that Fred Stockton really had glimpsed a naked girl—maybe Susan herself—when he’d stepped out onto the loading dock of the A&P for his midnight smoke. She even believed that the Lost Girls of Troop 9 had hunted down the town’s pets and eaten them alive, and might do worse yet. And she knew that John believed it as well, whatever he’d said at the town meeting. Those howls. Those awful howls in the night.
She squeezed little Frankie so hard that he began to cry.
Rocking him on her shoulder, she said, “What do they want you to do, John?”
“We’re meeting down at the A&P in the morning. We’ll help in the search, I expect. They’ll want all the hands they can get”—and the irony of it struck him, that the fathers had been sidelined during the official search for the lost girls, while the resources of the entire community would be mustered to find Tom Anderson. He brushed a hank of hair off his forehead with one nervous hand, and looked up at her, forcing a smile. “He’ll turn up,” he said. “Probably snuck off with the boys for a beer and things got out of hand. It’s that time of year, the seniors’ll start sowing their oats. He’s probably holed up somewhere sleeping it off. You wait and see. He’ll turn up yet.”
But he didn’t believe it—she could see it in his eyes—and he was right.
Tom didn’t turn up.
Even his satchel didn’t turn up until the following morning, when Sam Rogers stepped out into the chill dawn air to walk his dog, a bullmastiff named Charger. As Sam saw it, neither one of them had anything to fear from a pack of feral girls. A veteran of Belleau Wood, the old man had taken to carrying his service revolver when the town’s dogs had started vanishing in February, and, at a hundred and thirty pounds, Charger could take care of himself. Still, in the dim light, the satchel gave Sam pause. At a distance, he took it for a dead animal—a raccoon or a possum maybe—but dead animals held dangers of their own, among them rabies, so he approached it cautiously. Only when he drew near did he recognize it for what it had to be: Tom Anderson’s schoolbag.
An avid high school football fan, Sam had last night gotten word that Tom had gone missing. Like John Hardesty he’d told himself that the boy had gone off on a youthful bender; unlike Hardesty he actually believed it. In fact, if Sam believed anything, he believed in a man’s—any man’s—ability to take care of himself, so finding the bag like that, spilling its freight of books and papers like the viscera of some slaughtered animal, shook him to the core. And that was before he noticed the brown stains on the concrete. He’d seen plenty of stains like that during the Great War (even now he could hardly believe that a second such conflagration had consumed the earth; the long span of his existence sometimes seemed to him like a never-ending nightmare of carnage, this merely the latest atrocity), and he knew without a wisp of doubt what they were: dried blood. The speculation was right. Tom Anderson hadn’t slipped off on some reckless binge, after all.
The pack had taken him.
Not an hour later, Sheriff Raymond Lewis stood in the bed of a pickup, brandishing the satchel before the host of armed men thronging the parking lot of the A&P. As Lewis described the bloodstains, a sulfurous murmur passed through the crowd, like a blighted wind combing tall grass, and Hardesty, clutching the rifle he’d pried from a dead Nazi’s hands, sensed the colossal will of the mob bearing down upon him. The mayor clambered up beside Raymond Lewis. At the edge of the crowd, dogs strained barking against their leads.
The mayor stared dolefully at the satchel for a moment, and then he faced the crowd. “Ten months,” he said, and the host fell silent, and his voice carried. “Ten months ago our daughters walked away into the trees. For reasons we cannot fathom, they abandoned us. Long we searched for them—for six long weeks we scoured the woods—and longer still have we grieved. We grieve yet. We will always grieve,” he said, and it seemed to John Hardesty that their gazes locked across the crowd. They held like that for a heartbeat, and then the mayor turned away. He stared at his feet for a moment, and when he looked up, his eyes swept the multitude and seemed to hold every man there to account. “We will always grieve.
“Yet we cannot, we must not, we shall not live in fear of them. For a while we saw them now and then, haunting the edges of our town, and we did not fear them. And then we saw them no more. We ceded to them what was theirs and we kept for ourselves these orderly streets, where our wives fulfilled unmolested their most sacred duties to home and husband and child, where those same children played freely and without danger, where our men—you men—could daily depart to your labors without fear of what might await you when you returned. And so we might have lived for many years to come.
“And then they came among us again. They walked our streets and stole of our discards and we did not act. They took our beloved pets and we did not act. John Hardesty pled for time, and we gave him time. We surrendered even our streets to them. We imprisoned ourselves behind locked doors that they might live, in vain hope that they would return to us, the daughters we had lost. But they did not return. And now”—He reached out and took Tom Anderson’s bag from Raymond Lewis. He held it high above his head and said—“And now they have stolen away our best and our brightest, our most brilliant light. We see here the bag he left behind. We have seen his bloodstains on the concrete not two blocks from the house where his mother waited dinner for him. We have seen all this, and my friends, my friends and neighbors, this must not stand—”
A cheer exploded from the crowd. It built upon itself until it rolled out of the parking lot to fill the streets beyond, an enraged chorus of This must not stand!—and this, this was the voice of combat and discord, of blood and vengeance, that Hardesty had come to despise, in others and himself. This was the voice of the rabble and the mob.
The mayor held up his hand for silence.
There was silence.
“We must scourge the land of these vile women,” he said quietly. “While there’s still time we must recover the young man who has been stolen away from us. While there’s still time we must bring Tom Anderson home.”
But by then time had long since run out. Tom Anderson was dead.
A Girl Scout’s Duty Is To Be Useful and To Help Others
He’d been dead eleven hours by the time they found him, in a grove of tall, spindly beech, not two miles from the street where the Lost Girls of Troop 9 had scooped him forever out of the world of men. He lay on his back in the khaki chinos and the crimson letter jacket he’d died in, one arm extended, his fingers curled, his cheek flat against the damp foliage, staring through cloudy eyes out into nothing at all. As the little band of four men—John Hardesty among them—stood over him, a black and yellow centipede trundled across his cheek and disappeared into his gaping mouth. Someone—Dave Brown, by the sound of it—gasped and turned away. But John Hardesty did not turn away. Death had stolen all the grace of that dazzling run from Tom Anderson’s young body—but a kind of beauty lingered. Sam Rogers would have recognized it—he’d seen it a hundred times at Belleau Wood—and John Hardesty during his time at war had seen it, too, horrible to behold. Yet it fixed the eye: in death Tom Anderson had ceased to be human at all. He’d become a surreal artifact, made lovely by the strange eruption of stillness into flesh that had been so quick so soon ago, and by the striking juxtaposition of colors, too—the black earth, and the grass almost unbearably green in its thriving, and his alabaster flesh against it, and the wash of awful sun
light, moted and dim in its dapple beneath the spectral trees.
A scrap of poetry ran through Hardesty’s mind—
—how do you like your blue eyed boy, Mister Death—
—and then one of the other men—it was Jack Thompson—said, “It was his head they got him,” and all the grotesque beauty of the tableau was gone. How could he ever have seen such a thing, Hardesty wondered, thinking suddenly of Frankie, thinking of his boy. There was no beauty here, only obscene travesty, a mockery of everything sane and kind. The blood-streaked rock they’d done the thing with lay nearby, the size of a large man’s fist. And the boy’s skull—
Dear God, they’d crushed the back of Tom Anderson’s skull into a stew of red pulp and curdled brain and shocking white shards of bone. My daughter did that, Hardesty thought, and though it had not been his daughter who swung the stone—The Girl Who Had Been Elizabeth Smith had done that—The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty would have done it in her place. In any case, none of them had intended it, none of them had intended any of it, even at the beginning when they could intend and it had all been a lovely prank, a wonderful wonderful prank, the best prank of all pranks (had it ever been a prank?) and nothing more. Tom Anderson had come swimming out of unconsciousness to find one of the wild girls—it was The Girl Who Had Been Elizabeth Smith—caressing his crotch, that’s all. Horrified to find himself responding, he’d scrambled away. The beautiful boy had tried to get away and The Girl Who Had Been Elizabeth Smith wanted to keep him. They all did. And in stopping him, she’d killed him. An accident, nothing more.
They were long familiar with death by then—two of their own had died, and they’d killed countless times over the long winter—so they did not linger to prod him back to life. That possibility was gone from their minds now. Even the concept of death was gone. There was merely life and not-life; Tom Anderson dead might as well have been a stone or a tree.
