Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  Still, Daisy thought, you would have to be a complete ignoramus not to see that there was something going on with Tad. At breakfast and dinner, the only points during the day when all five family members were together, his mind was entirely elsewhere. Her brother had always been a daydreamer, but this was different. He had a problem, a specific problem, she could tell, that he was puzzling over. She recognized the preoccupied expression as one she herself got, when one of her projects was picking up momentum and taking on a life of its own. At that point, doing anything else besides working on it, like sitting down to dinner with the family, for instance, was a complete waste of time, and an annoyance besides. He was at the stage where he wanted to get back to work on it then and there, whatever it was. If he was engaged in conversation by someone else at the table, breaking his reverie, then he would flash a look of such utter contempt at the perpetrator that she couldn’t fathom how they weren’t picking up on it. You are utterly beneath me, the look said. Let’s just get these pathetic domestic pleasantries over with, so I can be on my way again. He would leer across the table at his father and brother as they talked sports, and such a disdainful, haughty look it was! I know something you don’t know, either of you, anyof you, and how insignificant you all are. If Marta asked him how his day way, he answered in the most cursory way possible, spitting out monosyllables, rolling his eyes. How tiresome this all is. “Fine, fine, my day was fine. Nothing. I didn’t do anything. You know. Playing in the woods.”

  “Playing with yourself in the woods” Casey would say, and he and Walt would get a hearty chortle out of that, while Tad would just smile across the table at them. It was an expression that Daisy had never known her brother to make before, a kind of sneer with the sides of his mouth turned down and the eyes narrowed to slits. Seeing it made her shudder. But what bothered her most about the transformation were the looks that passed at such times between Tad and herself. Where before they had been full of warmth and humor, of that special kind that only siblings share, now they were only furtive. Guilty, almost. Either that or it was as though he was suddenly aware of her watching, and he was trying to make his face blank. As if he were trying to conceal things from her, and this was a hurtful prospect. She felt that the rapport they’d shared for all their lives was fading, and that filled her with a grief that was hard, damn hard for her to take. All of this she herself was able to communicate through her returning looks to him, and whatever was happening inside his head, he was not able to ignore the accusation. For he could not meet her gaze for long, and his eyes would drop to his plate, where they would stay fixed for the remainder of the meal.

  She had some inclination of what was going on. There was no doubt in her mind that when Tad left each morning just after breakfast, he wasn’t spending all day “playing in the woods.” He was meeting with the person he had told her about, the mysterious man in white. As for what they did together, or what the man’s intentions toward her brother might be, Daisy did not know. Until such time as Tad opened a dialogue between them again, she could only sit on the sidelines. For now, she could at least sense the presence of some vague and lurking threat, undefined, as yet, but hovering like a bulkhead of thunderclouds just out of sight. And she knew that, in due time, when the threat arrived at the Surrey household and presented itself, mounting the porch stairs and ringing the bell, it would be from out of the woods that it came, slinking from the shadow of the trees to make itself known, and she knew that it would be wearing the same smile that she had of late begun to see on the face of her brother. When that day came, she told herself, up in the attic again in the evenings with her hands and face daubed with paint, she would be ready to pit herself against it.

  The beginnings of an enmity, or at the very least a lack of communication between Tad and his sister, were but one of the effects of Daddy’s growing influence over him. As Daisy had surmised, Tad’s mind dwelled ever more on the man, and it permeated all other aspects of his existence. Each night, after dinner had run its course and the family had scattered again, Marta to the kitchen to bury her hands in the dishwater, Walt to his easy chair in front of the television, Casey in the direction of town to find his friends, and Daisy back into the rafters, Tad would repair to the back porch, there to sit in the gathering dusk. It was in the evenings, pacing back and forth over the wooden planks in the failing light, looking out past the imposing figure of the solitary tree and up the length of the hillside, that he felt a restlessness and a loneliness unequaled, unmatched by any previous experience. He felt that his life was stalled. That in the nights’ long watches to come, when he would lie awake with strange thoughts racing through his mind, that the flame which had been lit in him would sputter and go out for lack of fuel, and his mother would come into the room in the morning to find him a drooling idiot, or a vegetable, or dead entirely, with the lifeless eyes in his wizened face still staring out the window toward the distant, beckoning trees. For a fascination with the darkness had arisen in him and a desire to go out and meet it, to run barefoot across the grass and hear the wind in the trees, to taste the air and follow the nocturnal animals as they made their rounds. It was a fascination grown of fear, which can be the most dangerous kind, and also the most enticing. Time and again he went back in his mind to the night when he had followed Daisy into the woods, and the exhilaration of the terror he had felt, when he’d been sure that every tree had been alive and set against him. He wanted to be close to his fear, to study and savor it. He craved the sensations that it brought.

  There was another aspect to these desires also. He was forbidden by his parents to leave the house beyond nine o’clock or so, though Casey was allowed to stay out as late as he wanted, fraternizing with his school friends. This was a privilege recently bestowed upon his older brother, and naturally it irked him, particularly because Casey liked to lord it over him at every possible opportunity. He made it a point of leaving by the back door each night, so that Tad would be sure to see him as he swaggered around the house and down the driveway in the direction of the Willow Road. To be out in the night, therefore, would not only be a slight to Casey, but also to his parents, and his father in particular, whose dominance, as has been mentioned, was becoming at this point increasingly difficult for him to swallow. Nothing would be so sweet, he thought, than to be able to come and go as he pleased. To top it all off, there was the weather during the evenings. While during the days the heat was intolerable, after the sun had set the temperature of these summer nights in late June was absolute perfection, neither too hot nor too cold. And so, after it was well and truly dark and he’d been forced to come inside, when he’d brushed his teeth and climbed into bed, when all that could be heard was the house settling and Daisy moving to and fro somewhere up above, he plotted, with increasing seriousness, on a nighttime escape.

  A day came that began much as many before it had done. The family ate breakfast together, and afterward Tad set off for Daddy’s. Though he left the house well before noon, it was already uncomfortably hot, with not a cloud to be seen in any direction. As Tad made his way up and down a series of gentle hills, heading in what, hopefully, was more or less the right direction, he could almost feel the heat that was to come, a pressure and a weight buzzing behind his eyes like the drone of a hovering insect. The heat was such that the trees themselves seemed listless, the limbs drooping, stripped of all the vibrancy that possessed them at night. There were no animals to be seen. All was silent. Not so much as a bird singing its summer song.

  On this day Tad found his way to the house without any trouble. It was as if the woods had tired of their games for the moment and were saving their mischief for another time. Tad broke out of the tree cover, perspiring heavily, and pushed his way through the tall grass toward the house. He climbed up the steps and entered, ignoring an unstable looking pyramid of clear glass bottles that someone had constructed near the doorway since his last visit. He found Daddy and Stitch in the banquet hall. The latter was seated in front of the firep
lace, busy with his knitting, nodding his head in a way that Tad had come to recognize; it meant that Daddy’s oration had been going on for a while, and that Stitch wasn’t really listening. The man himself was seated on the table a few feet away, his legs dangling over the edge, facing his companion and filibustering furiously. “…as if I needed to explain its importance to you,” he said. Tad had stopped while still a few feet away, and appeared to be, for the time being, unnoticed. Today Daddy had on a long white coat that was at least two sizes too large for him. It was unbuttoned down the front and pooled around him, the edges hanging off the table. It had a medical look to it. Tad could see several pens sticking out of the breast pocket. On his head was a crisp white cap with a Red Cross logo above the bill. Lanky strands of yellow hair, so light in color as to be nearly white, stuck out at several spots from under the brim. A stethoscope was slung around his neck. To complete the ensemble he’d chosen a pair of heavy denim jeans, dark blue, and a pair of red Converse sneakers. As he lifted one hand, pointing a finger in Stitch’s direction, Tad also noticed that he had on plastic surgical gloves. There were several unidentifiable dark stains on the front of the jacket. That’s one doctor I wouldn’t want to have tell me to look this way and cough. The voice today was a high, nasally wheeze, and he was speaking very rapidly and excitedly. Droplets of spit flew from his mouth. “The event!” he said, his voice echoing about the hall. “The significance! Convergence of the heavenly bodies! Nostradamus! Rampherincus! Brontosaurus! The first shall be last and the last shall be first!” Here he pounded both fists on the table. “The dates! Don’t discount the…” and here he looked over and saw Tad standing there, and went instantly silent.

  Stitch answered tiredly, still not having looked up. “Right. Heavenly bodies. I got it, Jimbo.”

  “Quiet!” Daddy hissed. “Little pitchers have big heads! The game’s afoot. The foot’s a game.” And without another word he leapt off the table, froglike, dropped down on all fours and disappeared beneath it, knocking over one of the chairs in the process. Tad could hear him under there, muttering away to himself.

  Stitch looked up from his work and smiled. “Ah, hello, my young friend. Make yourself comfortable, you know the drill. Don’t mind him.”

  “I never do,” Tad said. He reached down and picked up the fallen chair. As he did so a glove-clad hand at the end of a long white sleeve shot out at him from under the table, along with a fierce growl. Tad responded with a kick and it withdrew again, along with an indignant yelp. He set up the chair a safe distance from the table and seated himself in it. “Someone’s got his panties in a bunch.”

  “What my panties are up to is between myself and the Almighty!” screeched a voice from the shadows beneath the table. “Keep a civil tongue in your head! I’m a trained physician!”

  Tad grinned. He’s in rare form today. “What’s he so excited about?”

  Stitch looked up it him. Tad observed with admiration how his fingers continued their nimble work without the man ever needing to look at them. Stitch hesitated for several beats before responding, looking at Tad steadily. “There’s something happening soon. To tell you the truth, I’m probably as ramped up about it as he is. I’m just a little better at controlling myself,” he said, raising his voice and looking past Tad underneath the table. There was no response.

  “What’s happening?”

  “An event, taking place here. A very special event. One that has great significance. It only takes place around midsummer, and it only happens once every seven years. On the night of July the 7th, to be precise. Every seven years, on the seventh day of the seventh month. This is the sixth time it shall be taking place.”

  “What exactly is it?”

  Stitch took a while to think that one over too. “It is…uh…very difficult to describe.” He nodded his head, seemingly lost in thought.

  Tad waited patiently for more, but apparently nothing further was forthcoming. “You two,” he said. “You and your secrets.”

  “It is a gathering, of sorts. A kind of epic family reunion. Or maybe extended family, anyway. There’s more to it than that, a lot more, but I really don’t think I ought to be talking about it.” He looked at Tad again and winked. “Not age appropriate, my young friend.”

  Tad sat and digested this. The last comment bothered him a great deal. This was the one place where he’d always felt himself an equal, where the subject of his age had never been an issue. Besides, that hadn’t been the actual reason for Stitch’s not telling him about it; the man just wanted to give him the brush off, and he’d seized upon that as a handy excuse. The secrets, he thought disgustedly. The never ending goddamn secrets. “Family reunion, huh?”

  “Reunion, yes,” agreed the voice from beneath the table. There was a clattering of chairs legs being disturbed, and the white cap with the Red Cross logo appeared for a moment, disembodied, bobbing up and down above the other side of the table like a puppet without strings. Then Daddy’s wide-eyed face shot into view as he hopped up onto the table again, upsetting two more chairs in the process. He did a frantic jig, waving his hands above his head as he capered about. The stethoscope flew off his neck and went skittering onto the floor. Every time he landed his sneakers made a resounding CRASH that echoed the entire length of the hall. Drops of sweat fell from his forehead to land on the tabletop.

  “In the name of the tailless one!” Stitch said, exasperated. “Come down off of there. You’re giving me the fits. Remember your blood pressure!”

  The matter resolved itself. Daddy, who had been in the act of spinning on one leg, overbalanced and went sailing off the back end of the table. There was an awful THUD, and the sound of something bouncing away along the hardwood floor. Tad was about to go see if he was alright when he crawled out from under the nearer side again. He sat with his arms resting across his knees, panting, his tongue hanging out. Tad tried not to look at him, which was difficult, as his chair was facing in that direction. Even after the recent physical exertions, his face retained an unpleasant grayish pallor, despite the lines of sweat tricking down it.

  “You poor, poor peasant child,” he said, in that awful voice, “You cannot conceive, your fragile mind could never grasp, the momentousness of what is about to occur, in just a few more passings of the sun. Over the past seven years, the anticipation has been building, till now it had reached a fever pitch.” He had lowered his voice to a frantic whisper, and as he spoke, he was glancing continually from side to side as if afraid of being overheard. “For the first time in seven years this old dump will awaken completely from her slumber. She will yawn and stretch. She will dust itself off. All her doors will be unlocked and flung wide. All her skeletons will emerge from their closets. She shall be lit by the glow of a million candles. Oh, and the guest list! All the world’s finest people have been waiting, so very anxiously, for this event, gala of all galas. The height of society, we are speaking of. The crème de la crème. They have spoken of nothing else. They have been plotting their escape from the asylums, and all those lucky enough to have broken out and eluded the orderlies will be here. We shall have guests who have spent the past seven years tunneling through prison walls with dull spoons; the princesses shall come down from their ivory towers, the trolls shall emerge from beneath their bridges. They shall arrive by planes and trains, by horseback and flying carpet. The dead shall rise, the sky shall fall, there will be symphonies and earthquakes.” He was getting worked up again. Tad couldn’t tear his eyes away. He had never seen anything like it- it was right there in front of his face, the excitement, and yes, the madness, coursing through this creature before him, running up, down, and through his body like an electric current. The expression on his face was one of fiendish delight, like a cruel child torturing a kitten. “There will be hangings and christenings. We shall drown in our tears and burst our sides with laughter! It will be Halloween, Mardi Gras, Disneyland, and Debbie does Dallas! It will be all that it is, and all that it could be, and perhaps even some of
what it isn’t, rolled into one glorious, glorious night of whiz-bang, hyphen, ampersand, semicolon!” He had been shouting again, but now his voice leveled out, as he raised his arms up toward the heavens in supplication for one last pronouncement. “It shall be….it shall be…it shall be…decadence!” He fell blissfully silent, utterly enraptured.

  “You just had to ask, didn’t you,” Stitch said.

  “Sounds like quite a party.” Tad couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Daddy slowly opened his bulging eyes, looking past Stitch into the fireplace to some galaxy beyond. “My young friend,” he said at last. “You don’t know what a party is.” And there was silence for some time after, except for the soft click-clack, click-clack of Stitch’s needles.

  That was June the 29th. The days that passed after were the longest of Tad’s life. He felt things that he scarcely knew how to comprehend or explain even to himself. It was as if each moment was bringing with it some epiphany of the senses, an elation akin to what a child must feel, taking its first steps. He felt, moment by moment, an inexplicable sense of wonder and bewilderment. He didn’t hear the banter of the family around him at dinner that night, or taste the food as he put it in his mouth, or see his sisters’ worried look from across the table. He felt himself standing at the hatchway of the spacecraft, teetering on the brink, about to take his first step onto the surface of an alien world. He was afraid, terribly, terribly afraid. He was in a fog. The material world was melting away. His head had detached and was floating up toward the ceiling, while his body remained behind, the motor skills still functioning on some basic level. My life has not begun yet. But it will soon. At dusk he walked out from the porch with the cool grass under his bare feet, to lie beneath the grandfather oak with his head resting in its roots and watch the stars come burning through the ethereal firmament like fiery pinpricks as the breeze blew past, stirring the new-grown hair on his legs. Again and again he saw in his mind those thick, too red lips in that pale face as they repeated the phrase. It shall be…it shall be…it shall be…decadence. I’m hot. Anyone else hot?