by Jeremy Bates
Someone had painted what looked to be a white arrow about ten feet up on each trunk. They pointed in opposite directions.
“Are those arrows?” Mel said, frowning.
“I reckon the police made them,” Neil said, “to find their way to other trails.”
“Or bodies,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“You really think they lead to bodies?” Mel said.
“Maybe not anymore,” I admitted. “The police would have removed them already.”
“So which way do we go?” John Scott said, lighting up a cigarette.
“I don’t think we should leave this path,” Mel said.
“We won’t go far,” he assured her.
Ben nodded. “We will split up. Half of us will go left for an hour, the other half go right. If either group sees something, we will call the other.”
Mel and I checked our phones. We both had reception.
“What happens if neither of us find anything?” Mel asked.
Ben shrugged. “Then we meet back here in two hours.”
“So we good?” John Scott said.
“Yeah, man,” Tomo said.
John Scott nodded at Neil. “What do you say, big guy?”
Neil was gazing off into the forest. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about this place.”
“Of course you do. It’s fucking freaky as hell. We’re all freaked. But we’ve already come all this way. We’re so close to finding something.”
“Mate, that’s the thing. I don’t reckon I want to find anything.”
“You don’t want to see a body?”
“We don’t belong here. It’s wrong what we’re doing, disrespectful.”
Mel was nodding.
“Anyone else want to chicken out?” John Scott said.
This pissed Neil off. “I’m not chickening out.”
“Then come with us.”
“Yeah, man,” Tomo said. “Don’t be chicken guy.”
Neil threw up his hands. “I’m not a chicken! And if it will shut you two up, fine, I’ll come.”
“Hooah!” John Scott cawed idiotically. He looked at Mel and me.
Although I’d begun to rethink the wisdom of what we were doing out here, the arrows had admittedly piqued my sense of adventure. And John Scott was right. We’d already come all this way. Why stop now? It was just a little farther to see what was behind that final corner. Then we could make camp, eat, relax, and leave here tomorrow with a sense of accomplishment.
Mel saw my decision in my eyes, and she relented. “One more hour,” she said. “And that’s it.”
“One more hour,” Ben agreed, smiling. “Okay—Nina and me, we will go left. Who would like to join us?”
“I’m down,” John Scott said. He ground his cigarette under his heel, told us, “Peace out,” then started into the trees like a dutiful Boy Scout eager to earn his next merit badge.
The Israelis waved goodbye to us and fell into line behind him.
“And then there were four…” Neil said quietly.
6
The terrain off the footpath was challenging and slow going. This had less to do with the obstacles of trees than with the ground itself. Every few yards we were stepping over rotting logs and dead branches and volcanic rocks. I tried to grab hold of saplings for support, but they would often tear free from the thin soil as easily as a decaying limb from its socket. Most hazardous of all, it turned out, was the fact a massive network of lava tubes extended beneath our feet. Twice we passed areas where the solidified magma had collapsed beneath the weight of a tree into one of these underground tubes, creating jagged craters twenty feet wide. We circumnavigated the moss-covered and scree-filled depressions with caution. If you stumbled into one and the fall didn’t kill you, the sharp rock would shred your flesh and you would likely bleed to death before help could arrive.
The only positive to the difficult landscape, I thought, was that I was so focused on the topography and keeping a straight line I had little time to reflect on hanging bodies and rapidly approaching night.
When we stopped for a much-needed rest, I took out my water bottle from my backpack and passed it around. It came back to me almost empty. I finished it off, knowing Mel still had half a liter in her bag, which would get us by until tomorrow.
Tomo went to pee behind a tree. I decided to go as well. While standing on a log with my back to the others, staring out into the trees, I was struck by a sobering notion. If we got disorientated out here, we could become hopelessly lost. The signs had already warned us of this, of course, and Mel had mentioned it, but I had never taken the idea seriously until now.
Lost in Suicide Forest.
Tomo and I returned to the others at the same time. He was fastening his belt buckle, boasting that his dick had grown since the last time he’d taken a leak. Neil told him it must have been pretty small to start off with.
“How do you guys feel?” I asked.
“Tired,” Mel said.
“Hungry,” Tomo said.
“Hungry and tired,” Neil said.
I nodded. “Another thirty minutes or so. Then we’ll head back and eat.”
Mel looked the way we’d come. “We sure we know how to get back?”
“I know the way,” I said.
“Because if we get turned around…”
“I know the way,” I repeated.
“I guess we could always yell.”
It was true. If we began yelling, John Scott and the Israelis would likely be able to hear us and find us. Or if Mel called John Scott’s phone, and told him to yell, we could make our way to them. Yet this would be embarrassingly desperate for all of us, and I was sure it wouldn’t be necessary.
We continued in the direction the arrow had pointed.
After only a few minutes I was once more breathing hard, and I was glad I had quit smoking. In the back of my mind I heard Mel tell me, “See? I told you that you should quit.” She was always saying things like this. If we went to a restaurant, and it turned out to be good, she would say, “See? I told you we should come here.” Same if we watched a particularly entertaining movie: “See? I told you we should see this one.”
Tomo picked up a long vine that continued for as far as I could see ahead of us. “We follow this,” he said. “We don’t get lost.”
Less than five yards later he shrieked and tossed the vine aside.
“What happened?” I asked, thinking something had bitten him.
He was sniffing his hands. “It pee on me!”
“What?”
“Feel!”
I picked up the vine hesitantly. It was coarse and dry.
“There!” Tomo said, pointing to a spot further down the stem.
“Yeah, I see it,” I said, noticing a six-inch section that seemed to be covered in some kind of liquid. It appeared to be the only wet spot.
“Smell it!” Tomo said.
I did so and detected a faint ammonia odor.
“It does smell like urine,” I told Mel and Neil, who were staring at Tomo and me like we were talking apes.
“So what?” Mel said. “An animal—”
“You see animal?” Tomo said. “Where? I don’t see none.”
“Where else would it come from?”
“I piss on forest, it piss on me.”
Neil harrumphed. “Please, Tomo.”
“It’s true! Go smell!”
“Forget it.”
Tomo turned to me. “Taste it.”
Rolling my eyes, I started off again.
A vine peeing back on us. Fuck.
I flirted with thoughts of the paranormal for a while. A sentient forest that lures people and animals deep into its heart with the illusion of green tranquility, then, when they become hopelessly lost and expire, it feeds on their carcasses. If I ever wrote a book, I could call this story The Venus Forest, or perhaps The Flytrap Forest. There would have to be a large cast of characters so the forest c
ould pick them off one by one. And the protagonist would have to somehow survive and defeat the forest. This stumped me for a while, because how could you defeat an entire forest apart from burning it to the ground? Then again, I decided eventually, if the genre was horror, it didn’t need a happy ending, did it?
When I tired of amusing—and frightening—myself, I purposely blanked my mind and focused on keeping in a straight line. Unexpectedly, I began to think of Gary. That’s when it always happened. When I least expected to think of him. Of course, in the months following his death, I thought about him incessantly. But time had a way of dulling the pain, distancing the memories. You never forget something like your brother dying, you never accept it either, but at some point, for good or bad, you learn to live with it.
Gary was shot early in the morning on December 12, 1999, while heading to practice at the Giant Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He’d played for the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League. Although he went undrafted by the NHL in ’96, he was signed as a free agent by the Washington Capitals the following year and spent the next three seasons bouncing between the Capitals and the minors. Most sport pundits agreed he could become a permanent fixture in the pros if he could recover from a knee injury, which had required reconstructive surgery. The injury should have ended his career, but Gary had a determination like no one else I’ve ever met. He must have trained twice as hard as anyone on his team to get back into playing condition, and the last I spoke to him, about a month before his death when I called him on his birthday, he said he was as good as new.
The guy who shot him was an eighteen-year-old heroin addict who’d been in and out of juvie his entire adolescence. He didn’t know Gary. They’d never met. Gary had simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Gary used to jog every day along North Hockersville Road, which cut through secluded woodland. On the day he died he’d left the road to offer assistance to someone slumped against the trunk of a tree. The person, Jerome Tyler, pulled a gun and demanded Gary’s wallet. Gary refused and was shot with a .22 caliber gun. Tyler took Gary’s wallet and fled. Gary managed to get back to the road before collapsing. He was taken to the hospital where it was learned the small bullets did a huge amount of damage, piercing his liver and aorta.
I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and had been sleeping off a mild hangover when my mother called me in hysterics and told me Gary had been shot. I flew to Pennsylvania and arrived at the hospital that evening. My parents were there with Gary’s wife, Cheryl, and their infant daughter, Lisa. My father took me aside and explained Gary’s condition. His eyes were red, an indication he had been crying, something I had never seen him do. Walking into Gary’s hospital room was the hardest thing I have ever done. He was lying on his back in a mechanical bed, hooked up to a life-support machine. He was pale, his skin oily, an oxygen mask taped over his mouth. I didn’t know it at the time, but he wasn’t getting circulation to his feet and brain. I remained at his bedside for as long as I was allowed, not speaking, not doing anything except holding his hand.
I fell asleep on a sofa in the visitor area and was woken in the morning by my parents and Cheryl. It was written all over their faces: bad news. Doctors had told them that Gary would likely never wake from his coma, and even if he did, he would be brain dead. The decision had been made to pull the plug.
I flew back to Wisconsin in a daze. I don’t remember the flight. Don’t remember anything about the days that followed. I vaguely recall the funeral. Most of the people present were family. The rest were Gary’s teammates. It was an open casket service. Gary looked remarkably lifelike, and I half expected him to open his eyes and say it was all one big joke. I brushed his cheek with the back of my fingers. His skin was gravestone cold, almost rubbery. The knowledge that this would be the last time I ever saw him was like a physical blow, I found it hard to breathe, and I went outside for some air. Three of Gary’s teammates were there, smoking cigarettes. One of them was smiling as he told a joke, like this was just another day in the locker room. I walked over and asked the joker what he was saying. He had the sense to appear suitably ashamed. I didn’t care. I punched him in the face, pushed him to the ground, then dropped on top of him, raining down more blows until I was pulled off.
Jerome Tyler, who’d been arrested by the police the day after Gary died, was convicted of first-degree murder. The trial lasted one week. The jury took an hour to return a unanimous verdict. The sentence was life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after ten years.
It wasn’t fair, I’d thought at the time. Jerome was a cold-blooded murderer. He didn’t deserve parole. He deserved death, an eye for an eye. I used to have fantasies about killing him myself; it helped me get to sleep at night. In each of these scenarios I would kill him a different way. Never instantly. It would always be a long, drawn-out process. I would talk to him during this time, mock him, celebrate my life in the face of his death, paint a clear picture of the nothingness he was headed for.
I don’t have these fantasies anymore. It’s not that I’ve forgiven Jerome. There’s simply no reason to continue to hold ill will toward him. After seven months in prison he was found in a bathroom, his head in a toilet bowl, seven stab wounds in his back. Official cause of death was drowning.
Not one of the ways I’d imagined it, but good enough for me.
We came to a white ribbon twenty minutes later. It was tied loosely around the trunk of a small tree and continued perpendicular to us deep into the forest. We stared at it, each of us coming to our own conclusions.
“Did the police leave this too?” Mel asked.
“Police or suicide guy,” Tomo said.
“Why would a suicidal person leave ribbon behind?”
“So his body could be recovered?” Neil suggested.
Tomo shook his head. “So he go back out.”
I was confused. “If he came here to kill himself, Tomo, it would be a one-way trip.”
“Some guys, they don’t decide. They still thinking.”
“So they spool out this ribbon behind them in case they change their mind about killing themselves?”
“Yeah, man,” he said, then started along the ribbon.
“Wait!” Mel said. “Where are you going?”
He looked back. “We follow, right?”
“You know what might be at the end of it?” Neil said.
“Don’t be chicken guy again.”
Neil scowled. “Don’t call me that.”
“What? Chicken guy?”
As we started along the ribbon, I tried to get into the mindset of the person who came to this forest, alone, spooling out a lifeline behind them in case they changed their mind and wanted to return to civilization. They would have been suffering for some time. Suicide wasn’t something you did spur of the moment. So what had happened to them that they’d want to end their own life? The death of a spouse or child? Financial ruin? Poor health?
Or just some really bad luck?
I pictured the person sitting at their computer late at night, perhaps smoking a cigarette in the dark, researching different ways to kill themselves, researching this forest, at least how to get here, where to park. Goosebumps broke out on my arms.
Researching your own death.
Man almighty.
I became aware I had begun to move faster. At first I imagined this was due to the fact I wanted to cover as much ground as possible in the time we had allotted to us before turning around. But I realized there was more to it than that, for it almost seemed as though the forest, like the sentient one I had imagined, was pulling me deeper into its embrace.
I didn’t realize I had left the others behind until Mel cried out.
She was twenty feet back, submerged in the ground to her neck. Her elbows were hooked over a twisting root, which was likely the only thing preventing her from sinking deeper.
From what I could tell when I reached her, she had stepped into one of those volcanic crate
rs, only this one had been obscured by a latticework of roots and debris. I guessed the mouth was almost six feet wide, but it was difficult to be certain because I wasn’t sure what was true ground and what wasn’t. My first thought was of a trapping pit used by hunters and camouflaged with branches and leaves—though this one was made by the forest, not man.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my mind racing for a way to help her.
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes wide with panic. She swiveled her head from side to side, searching for something else aside from the root to grab hold of.
I knelt at what I determined to be the lip of the hole. She was too far to reach. “How deep is it?”
“I don’t know.” She was trying to keep panic from her voice and failing. “I can’t touch the bottom.”
“Can you try to climb out?”
She struggled for a moment, twisting this way and that, until the root she was dangling from shifted, dropping several inches.
She yelped.
I dove forward and grabbed her wrists. It was a stupid move. Instinctual. Because I was now on my stomach, my upper body cantilevered over the crevice, and I had no leverage to pull her out, no way to move back on my own.
Beneath us, through gaps in the dead leaves and branches and roots, all I could see was darkness.
How deep was it?
“Don’t let go of me,” she said in a frightened whisper.
“I won’t.”
I heard Neil and Tomo coming toward us.
“Careful!” I warned them.
“Oh boy,” Neil said.
“Oh shit!” Tomo said. “The forest fucking eat her.”
“Grab my legs,” I told them, “so I don’t fall in.”
A moment later I felt hands around my ankles.
“Don’t let go.”
“I don’t, man,” Tomo said.
“Mel,” I said, doing my best to affect calm, even though I felt like a man on very thin ice. “Put your arms around my neck. I’ll put my arms around you. Then Tomo and Neil will pull us free.”
