Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  An Offer

  It was fully daylight, the sun merciless as ever, when Tad Surrey emerged from the trees at the edge of the driveway by his family’s house some hours later. But how many hours? The silver watch on its chain said that it was half past eleven, presumably late morning on Monday, July the eighth. This meant that, if the watch could be trusted, he’d been gone for approximately eleven hours. But according to his internal clock, that wasn’t even close to accurate; he felt that he must have been gone for at least a week. Never once during the course of Decadence had his eyes strayed to the watch, so he couldn’t have said whether he’d been a victim of another one of the mysterious time lapses that seemed to be routine when dealing with Daddy and his associates. One thing was for sure, though- he hadn’t made it back in time to slip into bed before Walt Surrey, the early riser, awoke, and he hadn’t been back for breakfast either. He had broken one of the cardinal rules, the Governing Principles of Surrey Family Life. He was headed for trouble.

  And yet he’d found, as he neared the house, that he didn’t really care. He had reached a strange and lofty mental plateau where he felt invulnerable, impervious to anything that might happen. He had made a supreme sacrifice and taken a tremendous risk by participating in the event that Stitch had warned him against with such strident urgency, and he had come through alive and well. He felt that he had passed some sort of initiation. All else, family concerns, were secondary. Somehow he’d known, in the back of his mind, as he’d lain in bed hours before (or was it days?) that if he did this, he was going to be caught. And he had accepted that. He had made his peace with it, even if the family and the life he was returning to had not.

  True, maybe a part of it was that the Essence was still in his system. He could feel it, a low, persistent vibration, humming away at his core, and every once in a while it would send the tiniest of shivers along his limbs or spine. But the farther he’d gotten from Daddy, the house in the woods, and the whole sideshow, the less he felt it. The newfound thirst that had driven him to the edge of insanity was gone. Only the memory of it remained, like a particularly vivid dream. He felt that he should be exhausted, asleep on his feet, but strangely, he was not. He felt only a sense of satisfaction and inner calm. It had been a night for new feelings and sensations, and this one was perhaps the best of them all. He felt that for the first time in his life he had done something that was his and his alone. He hadn’t done it because it had been suggested to him, or because it was simply a thing that he was “supposed to do.” This was something that he had carved from the very elements of nature, an exploration and an exultation, that he could own, that he could cherish, till the end of his days. This was about self discovery, empowerment, the first step into another world with more and greater rewards to offer. And it was his. Nothing and no one could take it from him.

  Walt Surrey seemed to feel differently about it. The hazel-eyed family patriarch was standing on the front porch with his arms folded across his chest, waiting, as Tad sauntered up. I’m hot. Anyone else hot? Tad stood at the base of the steps, his hands in his pockets, and waited. It would come. He just had to stand and take it. There was no other option. In all honesty, he didn’t know quite what to expect. He’d been disobedient before, but never in his life had he done anything approaching this. This was above and beyond. In a household where discipline was like another member of the family, this was an entirely other level. It was some time before Walt spoke. Perhaps he too was unsure how to proceed. Or perhaps he was just taking his time to enjoy the moment. He stood there and studied his son as if he were a solar eclipse or some strange sight whose like he had never seen before. Walt had inherited his father’s poker face, and he was using it to its full advantage here. He looked at the hat on Tad’s head with something approaching wonderment. “Take that damn thing off,” he said, and Tad removed it. “I called off work today,” he continued. “I believe it’s the first time in six years I done that. First time since your Ma sliced her hand open with that kitchen knife. Cus of you, I called in sick. And they knew I was lyin’ cus anybody can tell you that I don’t get sick. Never a day in my life. But they took my word for it, cus they knew that if it was somethin’ serious enough for me to call off, then it was damn important. And I didn’t like to do it, because I’m a man who prides himself on being dependable and responsible both. But I reckoned that in this case, it was just about important enough for me to do it.” He stopped and took a deep breath. Tad waited. All he could do. “And you know why what you did was important enough for me to call off work to deal with it, don’t you boy? It’s because you’ve taken it into your head to disobey me, and I don’t know why you felt you could do it, but I’m goin’ to take this entire day that I’m not workin’ to feed this family to convince you that it was a bad idea, and I’m goin’ to do a proper job of it this time, because it’s clear I’ve been too lenient. Now you get on into the barn.” As Tad was turning back toward the driveway, he caught a glimpse of his mother’s face in the window, her expression grim. Then the blind jerked and she disappeared from sight.

  When they were both inside the barn, Walt said to Tad, “Shut the door.” Tad did so, and it was then, when he turned back around, that Walt hit him. He struck him with an open palm, backhanding him across the left side of his face. Tad staggered and put a hand up to catch himself against the wall. The hat fell from his hand to the straw covered floor. “Now,” Walt said. A tone of voice that Tad had never heard before. “We’re goin’ to get some shit straight, by God. The first thing you’re goin’ to tell me is where you went last night and just what the hell is goin’ on with you. And no bullshit now. You just answer me truthfully, where you went.”

  Tad stuck the end of his tongue out, feeling his lower lip, which was going to be swelling up very shortly. “No,” he said. “It’s none of your business.”

  Walt took two giant steps forward, grabbed Tad by his shirt collar, and slammed him backwards against the wall. “No,” he shouted, “that’s where you’re wrong. It is my business, because you’re a part of this household, this household that I govern, where I am the law, where what I say goes, and you’re tryin’ to undermine my authority! And I don’t know who put it in your head that you could do that, but until the age of eighteen you’re mine, you’re property, and I’m gonna teach you that if it’s the last thing I do. You’ve turned into a real smartass, but I’m gonna fix you up. By Christ, I’m gonna fix your wagon.” He forced Tad’s head down, and ripped the shirt off his back, tossing it aside. “As if I didn’t have enough to worry about with your sister the goddamn fruitcake holed up in the attic and the hell I catch from your mother because of it.” To Tad it didn’t even sound like he was addressing him anymore so much as just venting. Walt threw Tad to the ground and bent one arm behind his back. The arm not meant to bend that way, and Tad screamed out. The straw scratched at his face and naked chest. He spat some of it out and stifled another groan as Walt drove his right knee into the arm, pinioning it, while he struggled to remove his belt. After the situation that he had just been in such a short while ago and the things he had seen, this now seemed to Tad like unreality, this return to “real life.” He could still feel the Essence, not out of his system by any means. His eyes, having but lately grown used to the gently enchanting Wytchlight (or Foxlight), were still having a hard time adjusting to the dizzying glare of the sun again, which flooded the barn in dazzling rays. He wondered, if he turned his head and looked hard enough, if his father, in his anger, would be surrounded by a glowing aura like the guests at Decadence. He thought that if he could look at him in just the right way, he would be, and the absurdity of the idea struck him as hilarious. He started laughing, the noise muffled by the straw. Walt, who had succeeded in removing his belt, heard him and yanked his head up with his free hand. “What in hell is so funny?” he hissed in his son’s ear.

  “You are,” Tad gasped.

  The answer did not enamor him to Walt. “That right?” he shouted. “I’m fu
nny, huh? I’m a joke to you, that it?”

  “You aren’t anything,” Tad said, still chuckling manically. “You don’t even matter. You are so irrelevant.” And then there was only a prism of pain, writhing and the poking spines of the straw, the sun’s steaming rays and the gunshot crack of the leather lash striking him again and again and again, on the back, shoulders, chest. The head. His father ranting, implementing his own fury language. But all the while, as the blows rained down and the tears streamed from his eyes, Tad continued laughing. Even when he vomited a thin, burning yellow bile into the straw, and wisps of it stuck to his lips and in his hair and the world had become a hazy, featureless red, he kept on laughing.

  When they got back to the house, there was no one to be seen. Marta was absent from her usual place in the kitchen, and the door to she and Walt’s room was closed; Casey, presumably, was not around. Only the faintest, occasional creak from above suggested that the aforementioned fruitcake of the Surrey family was awake and stirring. Walt did not speak to Tad again. He had failed in making Tad reveal where he had gone, but he’d made his point. He gestured with his head wordlessly and Tad ascended the stairs, slowly. Part of him was in agony, but it was a small, insignificant part. Most of him was far away. Before he reached the landing he heard his father open the door to the bedroom he shared with his wife, and he heard, distinctly, Marta sobbing, and his father’s voice drowning her out. Then a firm click as the door closed. He made the turn, walked down the hallway and entered the bathroom. Then he stripped off his clothes, streaked with dirt, a slow, painful process. He sat on the toilet brushing off straw and glitter. Then he started the shower, the water lukewarm, not as hot as he normally preferred. He still could not keep from crying out softly when the water streamed over his freshly swollen face and the long, crisscrossing welts across his back and torso. He sagged against the wall, out of the flow of water, and it took him a couple of moments for it to register that he was crying, noiselessly. When he realized it, he pushed himself off the wall, and centered himself, and then and there he made an oath. That is the last time that man makes me cry. And then, still moving slowly, he sat down under the flow of water, curled up into a ball, lowered his head to his chest, and closed his eyes.

  He did not go down to dinner that night. He had fallen asleep the instant his head touched the pillow, and when he finally awoke it was past midnight. The fact that his mother had not even called him to eat with the rest of the family was an indication of the prevailing tension in the house; previously, he didn’t think that anything could have disrupted the Governing Principles of Surrey Family Life, which had continued since his birth with the regularity and predictability of a tidal flow. He suspected that his father may have told her specifically to let him be. All of this worried him. Consequences to every action. And yet, none of it really bothered him as much as he’d been expecting it to. And had he not expected this to happen, or something like it? He hardly could have been ignorant of the consequences his decision would have, and he had made it anyway. He felt, as he’d felt in the barn, somehow beyond it all. He thought that it was precisely this that had made his father so angry. Walt Surrey had heard the ring of truth in his son’s voice when Tad had told him that he was irrelevant, and it had worried him, though he didn’t understand it. The fact that your son, at the age of fourteen, is unperturbed by your beating him half to death does not bode well, because if that’s really the case, then how much power are you really still exerting over him? Walt Surrey was not a stupid man, by any means, but he was uncreative. Psychological warfare was hardly his area of expertise. If a problem arose in one of his offspring that couldn’t be dealt with by ignoring it, or screaming at it, or beating it, then he had pretty much exhausted his stock of parental techniques.

  But his son had laughed at him. That night, after dinner, and being rebuffed by Marta, Walt lay in his bed and tried to decode this riddle and what it might mean. He was concerned, not so much for Tad, who, sorry to say, he cared little for, but for himself, and the effect this all meant on his collective household and its operation. For Walt, continuity and routine meant comfort; in that, he was similar to his wife, and that might have been part of what made their marriage a success. When he was jarred out of his rhythm, and his complacency, then it forced him to consider the finer points of his existence, and that just wasn’t something he was inclined to do. If he was worried about the effects that Tad’s new attitude might have, then there was good reason for it, for his middle son was embarking on a quest for exploration of himself, and he was doing it both at a young age and in an exceptionally radical way, guided by the force and the entities in the woods, the existence of which Walt remained unaware of, for now. The act of introspection, being forced to take a closer look at his surroundings and immediate family was the last thing that Walt Surrey wanted to do, but like it or not, that was the direction his son was headed, and he was taking the rest of the family with him. Consequences to every action. So Walt lay awake, and thought about what his next move was to be, and also tried to remember what he’d been like at the age of fourteen. The conclusions that he drew, and this should come as no surprise, was that he’d been much like Casey, and also that he’d put the boy in his place that afternoon. So Tad hadn’t told him where he’d gone. What did it matter? Maybe Walt had been a little excessive in his handling of the situation, but he had no doubt that the boy would straighten up now. He was not without good cause in thinking that. After all, despite the change in Tad’s behavior over the past few weeks, he still had the boy’s fourteen year track record to fall back on, and disobedience had never been a problem in the past. Whatever was eating the boy, he had nipped it in the bud. He was sure of it.

  But of course, Walt Surrey was wrong. In fact, as it related to his wishes, the beating had probably been counterproductive, because it had strengthened Tad’s resolve. And Walt certainly would have been a lot less sure of his footing had he able to see what his son was doing right then. As Walt was assuring himself that the situation had been rectified, Tad was even at that moment crossing the driveway in the moonlight, a symphony of crickets greeting his latest foray into the welcome shadow of the trees. The decision had come quickly, with the speed of an impulse buy in a checkout line. One moment Tad had been laying in bed, mulling over the events of the past day, the next he was up and dressing, walking down the stairs and casually out the front door. This time he didn’t bother with any attempt at stealth. He assumed, completely correctly, as it turned out, that Walt’s guard would be down tonight. Tad would have to be crazy to try the same trick two nights in a row, wouldn’t he, after a thrashing like that? The very irrationality of it made it an impossibility, and that was exactly what he was counting on. Besides, as he’d lain there, he’d felt another one of those stabs of intuition that he’d come to trust and rely on so much of late. He had business tonight, out of doors, which would not wait, business with the wind and the leaves, the grass and the hillocks and the tangled branches and the still waters, and business with the man with many names. There was no doubt who Tad was going to see, as there was no doubt that Daddy would be waiting for him. Tad knew it as well as the nose on his face.

  He moved slowly, deliberately. His body was racked with pain- his chest, his back and shoulders were all alive with steady jolts of agony from many points. His arm ached steadily where his father had held it behind his back. He took the pain with him and did not dwell on it, only gritting his teeth and muttering to himself every now and then. In such a short period of time, he felt remarkably changed. Where weeks, or perhaps merely days before he would have been battling his fright, in the woods, in the dark alone, that was no longer true. He was wary, but it was born of alertness. He was aware, watchful for any real threat, rather than beset by blind fear.