"Somehow I found my way back, but I don't recall how. Apparently I blacked out—it might've been the alcohol but was probably yet another flick of the old lady's spellslinging wrist—and the next thing I remembered was waking up in bed the next morning with all my clothes on. My boots too, and for weeks I caught hell from Rosy for all the mud I dragged though the house.
"And you say that Rosy never found out?"
Phillip nodded. "Yep. Never told her. It was part of the deal. Old Lady Zellis told me that the sacrifice should be kept a secret from my family, otherwise they would fall victim to the savagery of the Isolates.
"Like the native legend..."
Phillip nodded. "Just like the legend."
Something he said then hit me like a sledgehammer. "Wait, Phil...a secret from your family? You mean Rosy? Or..."
Phillip nodded. At once tears filled his eyes. "You're probably wondering why I brought you here, Michael?"
"Suddenly...suddenly I'm getting the picture, Phil."
"Michael...this is extremely difficult for me to talk about. Although it's never left my mind after all these years, it also hasn't left my lips either. And if you ask anyone in town about it they'll pretend that you're as nutty as Old Lady Zellis, but believe me, they'll know exactly what you're talking about. Some things are better left unsaid, and this is one of them."
"So why are you telling me?"
"For the same reason Old Lady Zellis told me all those years ago."
"For my protection?" I added an ineffectual tone of incredulousness to my voice.
"You're a resident of Ashborough now," he said. "Your new government lives right here in these woods, Michael. You best live by their laws."
"This is crazy..."
He shook his head. "It's not." He pulled a fresh cigar from his pocket, unwrapped it and stuck it between his lips. His hands were shaking a bit.
I laughed uncomfortably, then said, "Gee whiz, Phil. For a second I thought you were gonna pull a dead possum out of your pocket."
Phillip grinned. At that moment I thought he was gonna burst out in laughter and brag about how he really had me going, but that didn't happen. Instead he said, "No, the animal can't be dead, Michael. It has to be sacrificed on the big stone."
In a sudden jerk, Phillip's cigar fell from his mouth. He brought his hands to his face as if in shock or pain. My paranoia was instantly replaced with concern and I stepped over to him. "Phil? You all right?" He pulled his hands away from his face. There were dense tears filling his eyes.
"I didn't listen to her, Michael," he coughed. "I should have, but I didn't."
"Listened to..?"
"Old Lady Zellis." His voice was a strangled mess. "This place...it seemed too special for me to hold inside. It'd haunted me for weeks, years, all day long and then in my dreams. There was no escaping it. It'd grabbed me, held on until it became a part of me...like a virus in my veins for which there was no cure." He sat back down on the stone and broke down in sobs. He looked like a sickly old man in wait for the reaper to come sow him into the earth.
"I'm sorry Michael...I'm so sorry that I have to do this to you. But I have no choice...it is my duty. I know, I know, it is impossible to find it in yourself to understand me right now. But in time you will."
"I think I understand..." I lied. There was no proper way to express the alarming images rolling around in my mind, nor was there a way to make thing less painful to Phillip. But what I had to say wouldn't quell my sudden fear either. "You did tell someone else, didn't you? About that night. About the Isolates. Didn't you, Phil?"
Weakly, he nodded.
"Not once, Phillip, have you ever mentioned anything about your daughter to me. But I saw her picture on the wall in your bedroom the day I moved in, when I went upstairs to fix my wound."
He stayed unspeaking. His sobs lightened, but remained constant.
"If I'm to believe this story you're telling me, and I admit I'm having a difficult time doing so, then your daughter...are you trying to tell me that your daughter was killed by the Isolates?"
He nodded.
"And Rosy?"
He nodded again. "Not Cancer."
"I'm a doctor...that much I figured out." I paused, then said, "And it's also in this doctor's opinion that you seek some professional help. To help you deal with the trauma of losing your child. You may be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."
"You don't believe me, do you?"
I felt a surge of exasperation well inside my lungs, and I blew it out. This conversation, which began on mindful intellect and radiance, had three-sixtied into opinions that danced solely on the tips of our nerves. Phillip and Michael: we were two well-cooked men more than ready to call it a day.
There was no way I could answer him truthfully; frankly, I didn't know what to believe at the moment. So on my suggestion we called it a day, and kept silent while walking back home. During this time my mind raced, and it became all too obvious to me that the entire experience—seeing the circle of oaks for the first time, hearing Phillip's tale of the Isolates and Old Lady Zellis—seemed much too rehearsed, much too convenient to be true. I told myself that even though nature works in mysterious ways, there wasn't enough disorder here to make it all non-coincidental. I took one last look back into the woods upon crossing the backyard of my home, and it wasn't until later that night while I lay in bed did I finally answer Phillip's last question.
No Phillip, I don't believe you. Not one little bit.
10
The next day I pretended that none of my conversation with Phillip had ever happened. I told Christine that I'd taken a walk into the woods, spent most of my two hours there following the random paths that sprung up. But I never mentioned Phillip, nor did I say anything about the circle of stones, much less what I knew about Ashborough's shadowy legend. Withholding this information was my only way of keeping it under a shroud of secrecy, and it helped me maintain my belief that the whole tall tale was nothing more than just that: a fable strong in the hearts of the town's staunchly devoted residents.
The day was filled with patients, and that kept me mostly distracted from Sunday's events. By the end of the day seventeen people had passed through my office with minor aches and pains, both physical and mental, and my mind's labored thoughts had been replaced with mostly work-filled specifics. That is, until Jessica came into my office.
A habit that had been quickly formed, I was seated at my desk itemizing the day's charts in addition to returning the dozen or so calls that had come in while I was busy with patients (Christine still hadn't settled in to her secretarial duties as of yet; the house had pretty much consumed her time. It became apparent to me that interior decorating and housekeeping was a full time job in itself, especially when you had a little one vying for your attention all day long. The advent of kindergarten would alleviate much of this strain however, and place Christine where I needed her most).
I'd heard her footsteps coming in from behind me and turned to see her slowly approaching, looking a bit worried. Placing the folder I'd been holding down on the desk, I wondered for a moment what retirement in Florida would be like: children all grown up, far away with all-new worries of their own. The moment was silent except for the arrival of the night's first cicada, which blared its toll from the not-too-distant woods.
"Hi dear. Whatchya doin?"
"Uh...looking for Page," she said, but I could see a tell-tale lie in her features, the unconscious twitch of her upper lip, the quivering downcast gaze of her eyes. She leaned against the desk, wearing knit shorts and a tee-shirt that said I may be small but I have my daddy wrapped around my finger. She smelled of lavender, which meant she'd just taken a bath.
She then asked, "What are you doing?"
"I'm finishing up my work." Suddenly I wanted a shot of brandy from the liquor cabinet. Neil Farris's stock was still a-plenty.
"Oh. Boring," she said.
"Yes, it is kind of boring. But it pays the bills."
Jimmy Page
had sniffed the lavender trail into my office. He three-sixtied around my legs then nestled himself under the desk for a snooze. Jessica backpedaled from the dog in a rather unusual way, as if somewhat repelled, or maybe frightened. This was odd considering the corny love she usually exhibited for him. She walked over to the bookshelf, thumbed the outside of one of the medical journals there as though she could actually read the spine, then asked, "Daddy, are there such things as ghosts?"
Once the words came out of her mouth, I knew there'd be a fair share of counseling sessions ahead of me. She'd gotten the idea from somewhere (those damn daytime talk shows; I'd have to have a word with Christine about this ASAP), and now it was sticking in her head like tar-balls on an unsuspecting wader's feet.
"Of course not, honey," I said. "And just where did you hear about such things as ghosts?"
"Scooby Doo," she revealed so matter of factly. Thank you very much.
I laughed inside. So much for my talk-show theory. No psychics in this girl's world just yet. "Scooby Doo. The dog from the cartoons?"
She nodded. And then she blew me away. "On the cartoon Scooby can always smell the ghosts before they come. And so can Page. He smells the ghosts at night in my room."
Hearing these words coming from my little innocent daughter's mouth sent wild shivers across my skin. It wasn't so much that Jessica might've spoken of a common childhood fear of things going bump in the night...it was more the fact that she said her dog was smelling something otherworldly in her room—an uncommonly alarming choice of words for a five year-old. Such a revelation might be expected from the daytime talk-show psychic, not my daughter.
"Honey, he can't possibly smell ghosts in your room because, as I said, there's no such thing as ghosts. They don't exist. Except in cartoons of course, and in the movies. But not in little girls' bedrooms. Not anywhere."
"Well...I guess Page can be wrong." There was a pause where I smiled and admired the naivety of my daughter. Her imagination had run amok, and I realized at that moment that the stressors of moving into a new home in a whole new town had finally taken hold of her mindstrings and given them a nice healthy tug.
"Does he bark in the middle of the night? Wake you up?" I'd never heard any late-night barking before and it occurred to me that Jessica might have simply dreamed it. Until she said:
"Yes, he does bark at night. Out the window. At the lights."
"The...lights?" There were sounds in the room, that of shuffling: Page finding a new position by my feet to lie in. His tail brushed against my exposed ankles and it exacerbated the sudden fear racing through my blood. Her words, at the lights, they'd been nothing I hadn't heard or seen before. But now they had a meaning, and her articulation of them equaled a slight form of horror, now out from the mouth of an innocent and into the open for me to case once again.
She began to cry, not unlike Phillip Deighton had. "I'm scared of the lights! They're ghosts. Page growls at them."
I drew Jessica close to me. I felt her tears soak through my shirt. Christine must've heard the commotion and was standing in the entrance, eyebrows raised and leaning against the doorframe. I rocked Jessica gently, knowing that there'd be no battling her impenetrable fear, that for now it would remain obstinate until her maturity grew with time, and with that would come an erosion of her respect for the unknown. At this moment I realized that all people, children and adults alike, had a wonderful yet ruinous knack to render unexplored frontiers into conclusive issues that might very well be somber and offensive. Ghosts in the woods? A fitting deduction for floating firefly lights and a dog's aggressive response to them—at least to a young child.
What about the Isolates, Michael? Those lights might be little malformed people seeking out a sacrifice from the new kid in town. Certainly that would get Page all riled up.
Jessica pulled away from me, sobbing and looking awfully adorable with her big wet eyes—a timid expression thankfully shattering the black thoughts racing through my mind. Isolates? Bullshit. The idea of their existence was ridiculous, pure folklore. Wait...I stand corrected. Not folklore. Legend. There's always a bit of truth in legends, right? Phillip had said that. And here, my child was feeling out the presence in its ancient golden impressions.
"Jess," I said, "There's no ghosts out there. Those lights are fireflies. They're small glowing bugs that come out only at night. We didn't have them in the city, but there's tons of them out here in the country. Page never saw them before either, and that's why he got all excited."
I wanted to scold myself for making up this little story, after all, I really didn't know for certain that those small golden lights were indeed fireflies. I'd promised myself in the past that as a father to my child I would never make up a lie to preserve the sanctity of a situation. Yet here I was, for the sake of protecting my daughter's rationality, creating excuses for an unknown glow in the woods: the golden lights I'd seen a month ago when I first moved in. The same lights my now distant neighbor claimed were the eyes of an ancient race of wood-dwellers called Isolates. The same lights my daughter thinks are ghosts from the Scooby Doo show.
"Fireflies?" she sobbed, sounding a bit relieved.
I nodded and hugged her once more until her tears stopped. I glanced at Christine, who, unacquainted with Phillip's clinging tale and the golden glows, smiled in a purely innocent and loving way, her beaming eyes pleading for another child that we might someday dissuade from fear.
I smiled back, then peered out the study window into the growing darkness, seeing nothing at all but feeling that something might be out there.
Watching us.
11
One hour and two short stories later Jessica was asleep in bed (Page alongside her). Christine was in the kitchen brewing a pot of decaf. She forced a weak smile in my direction while digging out two mugs from the cabinet.
"Looks like our daughter inherited a bit of her father's anxiety," she said curtly, as if the entire scene tonight was all my doing. Christine, being serious again. Great.
I ignored the cutting remark. "I take it you got the gist of our conversation."
"Yeah...I heard most of it. You know," she said, sounding suddenly congenial, "I did hear Page growling in the middle of the night last night."
"Really?" I smiled, half amused, half unnerved.
"Yes, really. It woke me up and I thought it odd that Page would rile up like that in the middle of the night. I heard Jess moving the sheets around a bit and thought about getting up to check in on her but I fell right back asleep."
"Well, apparently she's all spooked out because she thinks there's ghosts in her room. When I asked her where she got such a silly idea from she said she learned it from the Scooby Doo show. That doesn't make sense, does it? A kid frightened by cartoons?"
"She's beginning to show some signs of stress," Christine decided. "The move from the city to this small town with no other kids nearby, it's a bit testing on the mind. We've been here a month and she still has no friends. And then in September she's going to start kindergarten. That alone is a lot for a five year-old to handle. Wouldn't you agree?"
"You don't have to tell me. I know."
"So then help your daughter."
There we go again. She's my daughter. "I think I did a fairly good job of cooling her spirits tonight."
She nodded but didn't look at me, which meant I did a fair job in her eyes. Not a great job, but passable nonetheless. Nothing she really wanted to give me credit for. "I don't want you taking her into the woods," Christine demanded after pouring two cups of coffee in silence. "There's animals and bugs and poison ivy and who else knows what kinds of things. It's dangerous, even unhealthy."
I shuddered for a moment, wondering if perhaps Christine may have heard Phillip's tall legend from Rosy. She peered out the kitchen window along the side of the house, into the woods. "Chris...I never took her—"
"I didn't say you did. I just don't want you to, that's all. For all we know the dog that got Dr Farris might still be o
ut there."
My mind said, Oh, it's out there all right. But it ain't no mad mutt. My common sense disagreed with my mind however, and my words followed suit. "Not to worry. I won't."
There were moments in a marriage—if that's what you wanted to call it, after all the going rate for divorce hovers around fifty-two percent these days; so it might be better off referred to as an 'associational coinflip'—when you might have trouble knowing exactly which part of the ballpark your partner feels like playing in, despite how well you think you know her. Here Christine had decided to change positions, and instead of tapping soft easy grounders in my direction, she elected to smack a couple of line-drives at my head. Of course, this left me no margin for error lest I walk away with a fat lump of shame on my face. And there ain't no erasing that injury.
"I don't like those woods," she repeated. Tears started rolling down her cheeks.
"Christine...what's wrong?" For a moment I had a crazy impression, something like déjà vu only with a heaping spoonful of reality thrown in. An hour ago I had to console my weeping daughter. Now my wife was sinking into her own unwarranted depression. That made two meltdowns in one night for this family man. Yeah!
She shook her head then peered up at me with wet soulful eyes, holding out a plastic pregnancy test strip she plucked from her front pocket. "I'm pregnant."
I immediately sulked, not because I was unhappy with this revelation...but because I'd missed it, the weeks of obsessive-compulsive behavior, that commingled with the on-again, off-again crying. It had been thrust before me like a great big vista and I, Michael Cayle, educated physician who's paid the big bucks to catch these kinds of things, never saw it. I might as well have been sleepwalking all along, thumbs in my ears, pinkies up my nose. I took the pregnancy strip from her and eyed the positive result.
"Christine...that's wonderful news." I put my best smile on, despite the confusion of the moment.
She stared at me resentfully. "Depends on how you look at it."
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