The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  So we let them click and watch and move through those narrow, dimly lit halls.

  The goal, as our Jaces and Alyssas and Cathys told it, was to fill the game’s leather knapsack with items. There were molded spaces to hold these items. According to the scroll that read itself aloud, the knapsack was all you got to take with you to the next level, and the items in there determined the scope of that level, so stock it for the adventure you want. Be thorough. Open every door, look into every corner.

  Hundreds of years ago, it had been a rat catcher who lured the children from their homes.

  Now, for our children, it was a mouse.

  Before presenting our evidence to the detective, we first of course tried to figure out the meaning ourselves:

  It is one hundred years since our children left.

  The possessive pronoun was the first issue.

  Was it meant to suggest it was one of us doing this? Was that “our” meant to act as a seed of doubt in our ranks, or was it actually a confession, a bread crumb?

  On the chance that it was, and because none of us could be trusted, we hired a sheriff’s deputy after hours. Where we found him was on a list the sheriff’s department keeps, of deputies willing to consider general security work—concerts and graduations and the like.

  With us walking behind him, a clump of parents in the street with beer and candles and a secret pistol or two, every basement in town was inspected.

  We considered it a mark in our favor that not a single home owner declined. To have declined would have been to invite suspicion. Right then, one of us would have taken up the first watch. The first vigil.

  In the old story, the children are either led into a river or they’re led into a cave.

  Either way, river or cave, they don’t return.

  The instruction we gave Deputy Moonlight, as we came to call him, was to push his nightstick into every last square foot of the walls of these basements. For tunnels. For hideouts that had been dug in secret, and soundproofed.

  We were playing the game now, yes.

  The dated lobby of the sheriff’s office was where we presented our evidence to the detective.

  “So it’s not the Abbot girl’s boyfriend, like you thought last time?” he said.

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” one of us said.

  The detective licked his lips, turned back to a page he’d already read.

  “Pied Piper, now?” he said at last.

  It was a name we’d been avoiding as well.

  Next would be Tin Men, Talking Wolves. Pigs.

  They could have walked into town single file at that point, though. So long as they each carried a sleeping child in their arms.

  We would have stepped forward for our own, kept our eyes down in respect, and waited for them to shift each sleeping form from their arms to ours.

  Counting Bradley Masters, there were now four missing. Four children in just over four weeks.

  School had been shut down. Not to keep the remaining children safe, but because the parents already were keeping them safe, at home. Or what they thought was safe. By the third child not in his or her bed in the morning—Cathy Gutierrez—the halls of the elementary had been empty of children. The bus stopped where it usually did, and opened its doors onto nothing, as if compelled by law to try.

  “We don’t know what he calls himself,” Doug Lawson said back to the detective, in response to the way the detective had said “Pied Piper.”

  “Does it matter?” another of us said.

  The detective looked from face to face of us, and if he lingered anywhere for a moment, it was on Claude Weissman, who had introduced himself that first meeting as—and he’d paused to swallow before saying it—Jace’s dad.

  The reason he could introduce himself like that, it was that there were no bodies.

  As long as there are no bodies, you’re still a dad.

  Leaving the grounds of the sheriff’s office that night, we of course cued on the low-slung, unfamiliar sedan parked at the curb. Not in front of the building, but off to the side.

  To our credit, we didn’t bleed across the manicured grass, cover that car with our bodies.

  Rather, we faked our good-byes, made sure our lips were moving, that our eyes held the proper regret, not the hope we were feeling.

  What we were talking about was who was circling back around this way, and with what, and who was keeping an eye on the car until then, and how much racket the trash can would make if kicked repeatedly, and whether that would be alarm enough for the rest of us.

  Six minutes later, four of us materialized from the shadows to each side of this sedan, make-do weapons gripped by our legs.

  In the passenger seat was a child of perhaps ten years old.

  Two of us on the right side of that car, we fell to our knees, our mouths open, our lungs empty.

  And then the rest of us were there.

  The ten-year-old looked up to us, from face to face.

  The doors of the car were already locked.

  He was doing homework, still held a transparent peach ruler in his left hand.

  When he saw us, he pawed onto the dashboard, for what his father had left for him to defend himself with: a shield.

  It was the detective’s son.

  We could all see the resemblance.

  We held each other up by the arms, drifted off to our kitchens and living rooms for another night.

  It started in the dairy section of our grocery store, what happened next.

  It was a grim Thursday afternoon.

  Four of us had found ourselves shopping for snacks and juice packs we no longer needed.

  If you stand in the dairy section long enough, over the open tub-cooler for butter and cottage cheese, your breath will frost.

  We were recounting the search Deputy Moonlight had conducted.

  At the end of that night of the official search, as we’d come to call it, instead of counting hours and doing math, we’d passed a version of an offering plate among the congregation we were, came up with what was probably a week’s pay for him.

  If you didn’t give all that was in your pocket, did you truly want your son or your daughter back? Or, if your child was safe at home with the other parent, could a wad of cash exempt him or her from these proceedings? Please?

  Deputy Moonlight took what he was owed, tried to hand the rest back, but none of us would take it.

  Now, in the dairy section, we finally said it: If the barber shaves all the men of Seville, then who shaves the barber?

  Substitute “Deputy Moonlight” into that.

  We didn’t know where he lived. Or if he had a basement.

  Trina Johnson’s nanny cam had been hidden in the right eye of a beige teddy bear in Alyssa’s bedroom.

  In the game all the fourth graders were playing, that It is one hundred years since our children left was inscribed on the baseboard of a room with only one door. But the words would only flicker into existence under the light of what was called a “Black Flame Lantern.” The only way to refuel your Black Flame Lantern, of course, was to stand in shadows for long minutes, its reservoir filling with the darkness it needed.

  Where you get this lantern is in an altar embedded in the wall early in the game. But you don’t realize what the fuel is until many sessions later—or until you study the cardboard slipcase the CD came in, which one of the fourth graders must have realized was a key of sorts. A clue.

  Within three days of finding the Pied Piper connection, all of us were looking for our sons and daughters inside that game. We didn’t hope to find them around every next corner, but we did keep alive the chance that there would be footprints in the dust, as it were.

  The words on the baseboard, though—perhaps it wasn’t just the Black Flame Lantern that revealed them? Perhaps the contents of your knapsack already mattered, even at this stage?

  We had to assume so. The words wouldn’t appear for any of us, no matter how faithfully we traced what we assume
d our sons’ and daughters’ footsteps had been. It wouldn’t even appear for us when we created new accounts, lied about our ages.

  Without Trina Johnson’s nanny cam, though, we never would have known about what happened after those words showed up on the baseboard in the game.

  What happened, what that bear saw—

  Of course Trina Johnson screamed when she saw it.

  The real question, it’s how she ever stopped.

  Imagine you’re in fourth grade.

  You’re in that saddle of time between school and dinner. There are no sports or clubs this afternoon. There’s homework, but you’re only going to play for fifteen minutes. It’s what you promised your mom.

  A cool half hour later you walk into a room that, unlike the rest of the labyrinth, doesn’t look as if it served as a dungeon, centuries ago.

  Maybe a storeroom? There are casks and jugs that will surely hold items—space is becoming an issue in your knapsack—but there are no other doors or windows, and no holes dug in the corners, as you’ve started to find and explore.

  Hold your lantern high now. Let that black flame lick at the stone walls like it wants to.

  Don’t ask yourself why there’s a baseboard in a medieval facility. You’re in fourth grade. It’s just a plank of wood. It doesn’t need an explanation.

  These words that are fading in, though.

  Smile. In the recording, Alyssa does.

  There’s never just graffiti in a game. There are only clues.

  In the recording—the bear was positioned on the shelf beside her monitor—Alyssa mouths the shape of the words, even reaches forward to touch the letters with the tip of her finger.

  And maybe that’s what refocuses her eyes.

  Not onto the game in the monitor, but on the reflective screen of the monitor itself, which only she can see.

  The bear can see behind her, though. Over her shoulder. Meaning we could too. A week later, we could see what had surely been in the reflection of her monitor.

  There’s a shape standing behind her.

  A trench coat would be scary, but there isn’t one. Male, female? It’s just a shadow of a person. At least until the hands open by the legs, right first, then left, even slower. When those long fingers uncurl, they have points sharp even in silhouette.

  At which point Alyssa flinched around hard enough to bump the desk, aim the teddy bear’s camera eye a different direction.

  Eight hours later she was gone.

  The group that piled into the cars and trucks for Deputy Moonlight’s house at the county line was a motley crew.

  One of the team moms had the black greasepaint quarterbacks wear under their eyes.

  She passed the little tube around without asking if we wanted it. Without asking if we were ready to admit what we were doing.

  Just one index finger of that can hide the shiny parts of a face, if you want it to.

  Because Deputy Moonlight was on duty, we let ourselves into his house.

  There were deer heads on the wall, magazines on the coffee table, beer in the refrigerator.

  “This is Anton’s old place,” Syd Gustavson said at last.

  It was.

  Old Man Anton had finally died five years ago. Syd wasn’t his son—Anton famously had no children—but somehow the property had found its way to this sheriff’s deputy. Perhaps rented from the county?

  “Cellar,” one of us said.

  We filed down. If we’d had torches, they would have been smudging the ceiling black.

  In the cellar, under the pull-light, was a rough workbench, at stool height.

  On the workbench a body had been meticulously opened.

  Julia Garrett threw up, her vomit splatting onto the dirt floor.

  Was someone screaming? Someone was screaming.

  “Whitetail,” James Teague said, simply.

  Because it was.

  Deputy Moonlight the apprentice taxidermist.

  When we rose back into the living room, our detective liaison was waiting for us, a look in his eyes we were more accustomed to giving than having to turn away from.

  The timbre and the tone of our dreams that month—the screaming didn’t stop in Deputy Moonlight’s basement.

  Did we all at one point or another see a beige teddy bear wobbling up the hall for us?

  If we all did, how many of us ran from that bear and what it knew? How many of us fell to our knees, waited for it to climb our torsos, latch its mouth onto our necks?

  And how many of us, in our sleep, where our deepest fantasies writhe and have license, how many of us let out a little “Oh,” then, very businesslike, very parentlike, walked down the hall to that bear, scooped it up, held it to our chest, waiting for its small footpad to wrap around to the back of our neck, clutch us like it needed us? Like it had just been sleepwalking again?

  How many indeed.

  When the words in the game wouldn’t show up for any of us, at our age . . . can you blame us?

  No, you can’t.

  Lincoln Adrian would be the sixth fourth grader to go missing. The sixth to fall to what the national news was calling this “epidemic.”

  He was also the only remaining fourth grader to have had a cousin in his own class, a cousin among the missing. Because his mother, Veda Robbins, still had to work, he was spending his afternoons with Bradley Masters’s parents, Trace and Abby.

  What Veda assumed was that there could be no safer place, could there? That this plague of disappearances, it had already visited this house, right? And could there be any more vigilant parents now than Trace and Abby Masters? Could anybody watch Lincoln better or more fiercely than his own aunt and uncle?

  She wasn’t wrong, either.

  But she wasn’t right.

  Because this stealer, this Pied Piper, because he or she wasn’t camera shy, Abby set up her mother’s borrowed video camera under an out-of-place doily in what she was still calling Bradley’s room, where his cousin Lincoln was supposed to be doing his homework.

  If he needed anything, he was to call down the hall. Even just a glass of milk, a piece of toast, anything.

  He never noticed the doily or the camera.

  Inside of five minutes he’d made his way from social studies to the game.

  Not on purpose, but not not on purpose, Trace had left the game paused in the doorway of that room with only one door. So the day wouldn’t keep ticking past while the player stood there, Trace had clicked the knapsack open. It was a holding pattern that held until Lincoln Adrian licked his lips and reached to the right, out of frame, for the mouse.

  Just like Abby, he smiled when the words appeared.

  They were still there when Veda Robbins picked him up after dinner that night.

  They were still there when she found his bed empty the next morning.

  It would be the last she ever talked to her sister in anything but a scream, one that welled up deep in her, deeper than she knew she had.

  And maybe she saw the recording, or maybe she never did.

  We did.

  The lace edge of the doily drapes down into the frame like a gauzy eyelid, but Lincoln is still there. There’s Lincoln’s guilty smile. There’s Lincoln, reading these words to himself.

  And now, a figure is stepping in front of the camera, blotting out the recording.

  It wasn’t Mr. Dockett, our librarian, we know that now—“Mr. D” to the students, which was a little too suggestive for the circumstances—but before we knew that, he had what the sheriff’s department ruled an accident.

  It was because he had no children.

  But didn’t he pioneer story time on Saturday afternoons?

  He evidently liked children, and of course he knew books, knew stories.

  Being single, too, there would be no monitor on his behavior. His hours after work were a complete mystery to all of us.

  It was Deputy Moonlight who found him.

  Mr. Dockett had apparently lost control of his hatchback and
turned over into the creek, which was unusually full that year.

  There were no photographs of his hatchback’s rear bumper to suggest that any dents or scratches there were recent. To suggest they were day-of.

  We didn’t say anything, even when Deputy Moonlight came back around, fastidiously returned each crumpled bill we’d paid him with.

  For the next three days, not a single son or daughter disappeared.

  The next meeting with the detective, it was story time as well.

  The look on his face told us he knew it, too.

  “What if this is a test?” he said, cutting from face to face.

  “Test?” one of us offered, playing along for the group.

  “You believe in fairy tales, right?” the detective said.

  Our stone faces betrayed nothing.

  “Say there’s a group of children in an empty septic tank out there somewhere right now,” the detective went on. “Say somebody just wants to judge . . . reactions. Probe for inevitabilities in human nature. See if he’s wrong.”

  “Or she,” one of us said.

  “Or them,” the detective said back.

  What if, right?

  Because of the librarian’s accident, were we now failing? Was a cap being screwed onto the top of that empty septic tank?

  This was the meeting where James Teague, longtime stepfather to Martin Able, Jr. and onetime linebacker, charged the detective, slammed him into a wall of Tom and Julia Garrett’s living room. Every glass figurine arranged on the entertainment center crashed to the carpet. Not a single one broke.

  After it was done and over, all bloody lips and torn jackets attended to as best as possible, many hollow assurances given, we looked from face to face in the living room.

  The detective was gone.