Blood in the Woods

by J. P. Willie

  “If he’s not real, then why did they write a book about him?”

  “It’s called make-believe, sweetheart. People just make these stories up from their imaginations.”

  “What’s imagination?”

  “Just go to sleep, baby. We’ll talk about that when you’re a little bit older.”

  “But, Mommy, I am five.”

  “I know, sweetheart, but let’s just talk about it later, okay? Mommy’s really tired, and I’m sure you are, too.”

  “Okay, Mommy...”

  “Mommy...?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “You would never let the Big Bad Wolf get me – would you?”

  “Never in a million, trillion years, baby.”

  Another memory came to the fore, jostling for attention in her mind; Amanda could see her father...

  He was running towards her because she’d fallen off her bike. She had struck the cement hard and split her knee wide open. Her father scooped her up into his big, strong arms and carried her inside the house. He brought her over to the water faucet to wash out the cut.

  “It hurts, Daddy.”

  “I know, baby, but I got to clean it so I can put the Band-Aid on. You have to be strong, okay?”

  “Okay... I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you too, sweetheart.”

  Then, as quickly as they’d come, the memories stopped, and Amanda wished she was back in her father’s loving arms and safe from the terrible people who had taken her.

  Amanda wondered how her parents were – were they crying? Were they looking for her? Did they call 911?- all running through her mind when someone removed the blindfold.

  It took a few seconds or so for Amanda’s vision to swim back into focus. And when it finally did, she wished she still had the blindfold on.

  She was standing in an ancient, run-down kitchen. There was dirt and filth everywhere, rusted old pots dangling from hooks in the ceiling and split, molding worktops. The three people who had brought her to this dreadful place were standing directly in front of her. They wore black, hooded robes and silver necklaces with circles and upside down stars in their center. Two of the people wore what looked to Amanda to be real human skulls over their faces, whilst the woman wore a thin, black fabric that barely concealed her face. One of the men stood proudly beside a severed goat head, which lay on the floor in a fresh pool of congealing blood.

  Daddy, help me! Amanda’s whirling mind screamed as she glanced frantically around. She could hear her father’s voice – you have to be strong, okay?- and it gave her a much needed boost of strength.

  It felt almost as if her beloved father was there with her, but Amanda knew in her heart he wasn’t going to swoop in and save her like the superheroes in the movies – Amanda had accepted back in the van that no one knew where she was, even her father.

  The woman from the van stepped towards Amanda and lifted her mask, revealing her face for the first time “It’s time, Princess,” she hissed with a salacious grin and she reminded Amanda of the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz.

  The two men circled Amanda as the woman grabbed her wrist and led her through a set of doors that went from the decrepit kitchen and into an equally derelict living room. Amanda didn’t understand how her legs were moving, her actions independent of her will, almost automatic and she realized to her shame that she was urinating on herself as she was manhandled forward.

  The abductors lifted their hoods over their masked faces, and struck up a dark hymn in perfect harmony and they sounded like an evil church choir as they marched forward with Amanda.

  Amanda thought to herself once more, Please, God, help me! Let this be over soon!

  In the area of the living room where the furniture should have been, there sat a table which had a black sheet covering it. Behind the table, there stood a masked man in a black robe that had devil’s horns sticking out on each side of its hood, his face was covered by a small cow’s skull.

  A row of black candles had been placed along the window seals, including the mantle to the left, their flames jaundiced and flickering weakly.

  Amanda felt as if her eyes were going to pop out of her head from the terror that raced through her brain, and she just knew that she was about to die. Maybe if they take the tape off my mouth, I can convince them not to kill me.

  “I’m only twelve years old!” Amanda tried to scream, but it came out from behind the tape as gibberish.

  The people laid Amanda carefully upon the table, facing up into the eyes of the horned man. They pinned her firmly by her arms and legs and the room fell quiet.

  The horned man began to speak.

  “Hail unto my Master, the Devil, the Lord of this world and Prince of Darkness! The Red One of Darkest Brilliance, whose eternal shadow is the light of my life. Surely, I belong to thee in both body and spirit; I have taken thy name as a part of myself, and I rejoice in thy spirit. For in the shadow of Lucifer there is love and warmth, and in the midst of his darkness there is undying light. O mighty black goat of the Wilderness! O mighty serpent of Eden’s demise! To Thee I give praise forever and ever.”

  “Amen!” shouted the group.

  Terrified, Amanda tried her best to squirm, but the men had a too firm grasp on her limbs.

  “Master, I call thee forth from the bottomless abyss. Master, I call thee forth from the ends of the earth. Master, I call thee forth from the nighttime sky. Come forth from within my flesh and my spirit, and greet me as thy humble servant and friend. I wish to worship and honor thee, to commune with thee and to be still and know that thou art my God.”

  Amanda felt that the people who held her limbs were uneasy and anxious as the horned man spoke his sinister words, they had the air of little kids waiting for someone to bust open a candy-laden piñata. Out of the corner of her eye, Amanda watched the woman slip the horned man a silver dagger from out of her robe. The knife was about ten inches long and had an ornate skull at the end of the hilt, and glinted wickedly in the dim candlelight.

  The horned man placed both hands around the knife’s shining hilt and held it high above his head and Amanda’s heart beat hard and fast with terror, blood pumping ferociously throughout her body. “I give thanks unto thee, Prince Lucifer, my master; for all that you have done for me. I give thanks unto thee for guiding me, for giving me strength in my hour of darkness,” his voice was incredibly shaky now, but he continued, “and for never leaving my side. Thou art truly a most noble and loving God, and to thee I am forever devoted in both spirit and flesh!”

  Then the horned, deep voiced man brought the dagger down with all his might piercing the young girl’s bare, vulnerable chest.

  It was a pain that Amanda couldn’t have ever imagined, and she screamed out at the top of her lungs as the horned man repeated his retched task again and again. Everything began to spin and her blood was flying everywhere. The pain was insurmountable.

  Moments later, the horned man halted and Amanda, barely alive, heard him clear his throat and shout: “Hail to thee, Prince of Darkness! Lord of the elements, beloved master! He who is of the Darkness, but who brings the light. All praise unto thee, my Prince of Darkness! This offering is for thee! Hail Satan!”

  “Hail Satan!” the group repeated.

  Amanda was bleeding out, dying, the pain a distant memory now, and as her head fell limp to her left shoulder, she saw the man who stabbed her. As her gaze began to fog-out, she watched him remove the skull mask from his face, and once it was off, much to Amanda’s surprise, she recognized him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hanging with Justin: 1990

  It had been about three weeks since I’d last heard the drum solo from the woods.

  Momma had been acting a little funny ever since Pepaw had a talk with her a couple of weeks ago. She went to one of the sports stores downtown and bought a silver whistle like the ones the coaches’ use during football practices. She told me when I heard her blow that whistle, I had about two minutes t
o get my skinny ass back home before she started swinging Mr. Belt around in my direction like some deranged Viking warrior.

  Naturally, I just nodded and went on my merry way. I mean, I was always either at Jack’s house or in the backyard; it wasn’t like I was going to China anytime soon, so I couldn’t understand why she was freaking out about where I was going to be all the time. It didn’t matter much to me, though, I just did as I was told and all was okay.

  I was over at Jack’s house one day and we were hiding in the bushes and shooting his pellet gun at the transformer attached to the old, peeling telephone pole that stood sentry at the front of his house.

  “Bet you can’t hit it, Jody,” Jack teased me.

  He only got to antagonize me because we were best friends, and best friends can get away with digging under each other’s skin from time to time.

  “Yes I can, fart-mouth. I just need you to be quiet so I can aim.”

  “Just hurry the hell up! I’d like to get a shot in sometime this year,” Jack spat.

  We both started laughing at this and I couldn’t wait to shoot that damned hunk of junk sat up there on that pole like it owned the whole damned street.

  “Aim high! Aim higher!” Jack shouted with glee as I finally took aim and shot at the transformer.

  BING!

  Nothing happened, nothing at all.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Give it to me. You got to pump it up more. The more you pump it, the more powerful it gets,” Jack explained.

  “Well thanks. I wish I’d have known that before I took the damned shot.”

  “Get over it,” Jack said with a smile on his face.

  Jack’s hair had grown a couple more inches since we got out of school for the summer, and he now looked like the blond-haired Don Johnson in Miami Vice. Jack put the gun between his legs and began to pump it up until his little arms couldn’t pump any more.

  “Help me out, Jody,” he demanded.

  I walked over to him and did my best until the last bit of air went into the gun.

  “Damn!” I said.

  “I know!” Jack agreed. “That was like trying to push a fat chick into an ice chest.”

  “I bet it wouldn’t be hard to push a fat chick into an ice chest if it had hamburgers in it, though,” I chimed in.

  “Yeah, fat chicks love food. Remember Stephanie who rode our bus?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah, I do. She used to eat paper out of her notebook when she thought nobody was looking; I caught her doing it a couple of times.” I began laughing at this point and couldn’t help it. “She also said that Coke makes her fart!”

  “HA-HA! She only said that because that boy she liked heard her fart one time on the bus, so she blamed it on the Coke she was drinking,” Jack elaborated.

  “That fart sounded like a little kid screaming – and it smelled like one of those dead raccoons you see on the side of the road,” I added.

  “Yeah, my Dad rips some pretty nasty ones, too,” Jack told me. “Me and Jamie just laugh when he does it because Momma always gets pissed at him. She always yells, Shawn!! And then Daddy says, who stepped on that bullfrog?!”

  Jack and I laughed uncontrollably at that point and fell to our knees, bellowing away.

  Jack’s dad, Mr. Shawn, was freaking hilarious. Every time I came over to Jack’s house, Mr. Shawn would be outside smoking a cigarette on the swing that was attached to their carport. I’d walk up to the side door of the house and Mr. Shawn would say, “It’s the Return of the Joe-die.”

  I would just look at him and give a big smile. I’d seen the last Star Wars movie that had come out – Return of the Jedi (and I wish it would have stayed that way, too; those new ones are complete poo-berry-stew) – and Mr. Shawn just loved to replace my name with the Jedi part.

  He’d said it two days ago at Jamie’s funeral, and it brought tears to my eyes. Even when he was at one of his most miserable points in his life, Mr. Shawn still put on a smile and said the Joe-die thing to me; that just shows you what type of man Mr. Shawn is.

  So, Jack and I eventually got our giggles under control and focused back on our goal – the transformer. If we could hit it in just the right spot, we could quite possibly cause a badass power outage that would stretch out for God knows how far. We just knew that it would be more than great; it would be freaking awesome.

  Jack put on his game face and aimed the gun at the transformer. I never admitted it to anyone, but at the time, Jack had a way better shot than me; as kids you have pride, and I was just a little bit jealous about that. While Jack took careful aim at our target, I carefully made my way behind him, squirming so much with excitement, it was like I had fire ants invading my underwear. Jack placed his finger on the trigger.

  Squeezed.

  The last thing I remember was hearing a pop and something metal flew past my head with a loud ZOOM sound.

  “Holy cow!” I screamed as we both took off running toward Jack’s house.

  Whatever Jack was aiming at, he’d hit it, and although it didn’t cause a power outage as we’d hoped, he had broken something and we were both just delighted with that.

  “Did you hear that thing zoom past our heads?” Jack asked me, beside himself with excitement.

  “Yeah, that was so sweet!” I said, still pretty stoked at our achievement, for some reason, Jack and I just had one big hard-on for destruction – don’t ask me why, we just did.

  We went back into his house to put the pellet gun away, when Mrs. Renee bustled into the kitchen.

  “Sorry, Jody, but Jack has to go to the store with me really quick.”

  “Aww!” I hissed.

  “We won’t be gone that long,” Renee told me, “We’re just running up to Eckerd’s, it’s not like you’re never going to see him again. We’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Okay. See ya later, Jack. Bye, Mrs. Renee!”

  “See ya,” Jack replied.

  I walked out of Jack’s house, got on my bike and made my way back down to my trailer. Our homes were only like a football field away, but somehow it always felt further when I was going home.

  As I rode slowly along, I looked up from the road and noticed some other kid making his way toward me on a bike, wearing a D.A.R.E. t-shirt and red shorts. Once I got closer to him, I noticed it was Justin Richardson, a kid that lived a street over. He was husky, somewhat shorter than me, and had a mop of jet-black hair.

  “Hey, Jody!” he yelled.

  We stopped our bikes right next to each other in the middle of Rhine Road.

  “Hey, Justin,” I said.

  “You want to come with me to go see an old eighteen-wheeler trailer that’s in the woods? It’s across from Angela’s house,” Justin asked me, right off the bat. “It’s going to be cool, Jody. Trust me.”

  “I don’t know anything about an old trailer, and I live on this street,” I said, more than a little put out.

  “I was with my Dad while he was picking up some beer at the Kentally gas station, and I overheard some older kids talking about it. They said it’s a pretty spooky place.”

  “Why would I want to go see a trailer an eighteen-wheeler pulls around all day that’s stuck out in the middle of the woods?” I was being a complete smart ass about it, but I could tell the kid wasn’t picking it up. That’s still a great trait I have to this day, and God bless it.

  “I don’t know. I bet Angela will think you’re cool if you go there. I hear you like her.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Everybody knows, Jody.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You might even get to see her, too,” Justin said, clearly trying to influence me, and by God, it was working.

  “My Mom doesn’t let me ride down the street that far yet. I can only go a little bit past Jack’s house, and that’s it,” I told him.

  “Oh, come on, Jody. I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “You were going there just fine before you ran into me,” I countere
d.

  “Please, Jody. Come with me,” Justin whined.

  I stood there and thought about it for a second. I was trying to imagine the consequences that would unfold if I missed Momma blowing on that damned whistle. I would definitely get an ass beating, but then again, I’d already got plenty of those and was pretty used to them. I never got grounded from Jack, so that wouldn’t happen. The Nintendo wouldn’t be played for about a day, but I could live with that. You know what, screw it, I thought.

  “Sure, Justin, I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “Awesome!” Justin shouted.

  “Let’s just get going before my Mom blows her whistle. If she does, this trip is over.”

  We took off on our bikes like bats out of hell and headed down the street toward Angela’s house, not knowing the horrors that awaited us at our destination.

  Now, if there’s one damned thing I can’t stand about the summers in Louisiana, it would have to be the snakes. I’m terrified of those slippery bastards. When I was about six years old, my cousin and I were walking down a dirt road close to her house when a big-assed copperhead crossed right over the top of my feet. I froze in place – literally – I couldn’t move a single muscle or bone in my body. As the snake rolled over my feet, I looked down and caught a glimpse of his smooth, scaly skin and cold, black eyes.

  My poor cousin had to physically place her hands on me to get me to move and when we got back to her house, Momma asked me why the hell I looked so pale. So, ever since then, I can’t stand fucking snakes and, unfortunately Rhine Road had a lot of them.

  As we went past Jack’s house, it occurred to me that there were more flowers on the sides of the road than there were down by my house. Only a few little ones here and there popped up in the ditch in front of my trailer, but past Jack’s it was like a totally different street. I had never really been this far down the road, other than when I was on the bus or in the car and in those moments, I wasn’t paying much attention to the scenery.

  It all felt like a great, big adventure to me, like I was in some entirely new and exciting land. I looked to my right as I pedaled my bike and I saw some of the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen on Rhine Road, all growing up from a ditch. It was like the flowers here were reaching out, hoping that someone would pick them up from the earth and take them home.