Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  Several tense minutes passed. All three of the Surrey males were sweating, mostly from the heat, and in Tad’s case, partially from anxiety. When his father called out Daisy’s name, he jumped. “Do you see her?” he asked eagerly.

  “No,” Walt said. “Suppose I’m a fool for thinkin’ she might answer, just thought I’d give it a try anyway. When she gets…you know, that way, she’s dead to the world. Casey!” he shouted, looking across the drive. “Anythin’?”

  “Nothing!” came the faint response.

  “There,” Tad whispered.

  “What?” His father whirled around.

  “There!” Tad repeated, pointing. It was her. He saw her as a wild thing of the woods. She was not walking about, rigid and listless, as she had before. She was crouching down, her knees almost touching the ground, the palm of her right hand flat against the forest floor. He could not see her face, which was lowered. She wore the oversized Feral High sweatshirt, so large she was almost swimming in it. Her legs and feet were bare, and as she straightened up they appeared from under the sweatshirt like the pale stalks of some nocturnal plant. “Daze?” he said. It was a question and an entreaty both. The shadows shifted, racing back as above them the moon emerged from behind a cloud, and Tad heard his father’s sharp intake of breath. For a moment only they were able to see her face. It was as devoid of color as it always was, but the expression on it was one that neither father nor brother had ever seen before. Her eyes were angry flickers that stabbed through them where they stood. They did not welcome, but they did not discard either. They were the eyes of a trapped animal, some wary beast that turns at bay to face the hunter and the hounds. And even as Walt took one hesitant step forward, she snarled, turning on her heel and darting away, as swiftly and easily on the pads of her feet as an arrow from a bow.

  “Shit!” Walt said, taking off after her. “Come on, come on,” he called over his shoulder, and Tad followed, having little choice in the matter. “Here, here,” his father bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Casey, she’s over here!” Tad could not hear a response, and they were away, running, running, dashing through the trees in a desperate, panicked pursuit. Sometimes they passed through spaces where the moonlight shone, but most of the time the darkness here was deep and total and still, for Daisy was turning sharply south and west, away from the driveway.

  Tad ran in the grips of an icy fear that had settled about his shoulders like a cloak. He had the feeling that they were running toward some disaster as fast as Daisy’s possessed legs could carry them. For possession, he felt, was the proper word; for the instant, only, that he had seen her face he had seen that she was no longer the current owner and proprietor of her body. Someone or something else had the reins, and of course he had a better than average guess who or what that might be. The voices were alive again as he ran, following the beam of Walt’s flashlight as it jounced over the uneven ground. Run, run, as fast as you can, one of them urged. Run as though the devil himself were behind you! But he felt it far more likely that the devil was waiting for them ahead, whatever their destination might be. He had rapidly begun to lose his sense of direction, as was his tendency, but he kept looking over toward where he thought Casey should be. Of his brother there was no sign, though Walt continued to scream out his name and curse a blue streak. Walt and Tad’s legs were far longer than Daisy’s, but for the time it seemed she had been endowed with fairly preternatural speed. She sped over the terrain in her bare feet with a swiftness and sureness that only a true denizen of the woods could have duplicated. And as the ground beneath their feet began to grow softer, and the vegetation around then more lush even as the atmosphere remained heavy and arid, Tad began to have a sneaking suspicion where they were going.

  His assumption proved accurate, as they raced down the first of the series of gentle hills that led to The Bottoms. “Daisy,” his father called out, though he must have known it was useless. The tiny figure that fled on ahead of them did not so much as spare a glance backward. She ducked around and through the tangles of thorns, thrusting through clumps of ferns and splashing in the shallows of the pools of water that still bravely withstood the slow torture of the summer weather. The patches of moonlight revealed the places where the mud had dried and cracked, sending splintering lines across the forest floor like pieces of a giants’ jigsaw puzzle. Run hastily toward your doom. A whisper in the ear like some wicked pixie perched over his shoulder. Embrace it with open arms, as you would your true love. They’re going to eat you alive in there.

  “Shut up,” he cried. His father, concentrating on Daisy’s retreating form, did not turn back. He thought he could hear a great rustling and disturbance in the branches around them as they swept past, as though a mighty search party traveled with them, heedlessly trampling, cracking and tearing at the woods themselves. He thought it was his pain and anger that ran alongside and around him, a host without form and feature, unknowable and wild and distraught. It mourned, even as it ran. He was looking back and forth, swiveling his head about to try to catch a glimpse of Casey or the imagined others that had joined with them in the pursuit, when his father stopped. Tad ran into his back, hard, and Walt flung him off angrily.

  “Where is she? Do you see her?” Tad stepped around him and looked in the direction toward which she had been moving, but indeed, Daisy had disappeared. They had just come out of a kind of spinney, and all around them the noise of crickets and the rhythmic thump of frogs. Now that he had stopped the voices had stopped also. He looked down at his jeans and saw that they were flecked with mud again, as were the sneakers that had withstood so much punishment over the course of the summer that they now did not so much resemble shoes as they did unidentifiable brown lumps. Their former color entirely indeterminate. Turning around in a slow circle, he realized that he knew where they were, and was unsurprised.

  “Come with me,” he said to his father, without looking at him. “I think I know where she is.” He bent down, slipping his shoes off, and holding them in one hand he moved forward, traveling along the shallow watercourse toward the dense grove of reeds that stood tall and impassive, like a privacy hedge, some of them reaching much higher than his head, some of them as big around as his arm. Walt Surrey followed, thinking strange and unpleasant thoughts indeed. The notion that his leadership of this rescue mission had just suddenly been superceded by his very odd and unreliable son wasn’t sitting very well with him. He was having a feeling that he didn’t very much like; in fact it was exceedingly unpleasant, the feeling that things around him were happening that he had very little control over, and where he was, in actuality, just a passing observer, or even a total afterthought. This was not a role that Walt was used to, especially as it related to the doings of his own family. But when Tad told him to follow him, Walt obeyed, not because he was happy about it, but because he simply didn’t know what else to do.

  Tad sank into the mud, as before, feeling it ease up around his knees with a soft sigh as if it was glad, and even grateful, to be doing so. The reeds hemmed him in, he and his father, and in those moments of isolation, he felt once again a sense of detachment from the rest of the world, unable as he was to see anything but the green walls of the cage that were like a holding cell, where he must wait before being allowed access to the chambers of some dread and powerful overlord. He pushed his way forward with difficulty, unable to step so much as swim, feeling the pull of the very earth beneath his feet. Drops of hot sweat rolled down his cheeks. A mosquito whined by his ear and he slapped at it. His teeth were bared in a snarl as Daisy’s had been. In this way did he emerge from the reeds and come to the pond, the shimmering figure eight that lay waiting and still, his father at his heels.

  He had clambered up onto the bank when his father pushed him aside again. “Daisy,” Walt said, in a hushed tone. There was something in his voice that Tad hardly recognized. In a normal parent, he thought, it might even have come close to fatherly concern. Daisy was standing some yards away, facing them, half
in and half out of the water, a few feet from the shore. The water reached up past her waist, and most of her sweatshirt was already drenched. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. “Daisy,” Walt said. “Come here. Please come back to the bank.” Tad thought it might possibly have been the first time in his life he had heard his father use the word please. Daisy’s face was perfectly calm, but it was not a natural calm. Her eyes were open, and they were out of focus, the eyes of a shell-shocked veteran replaying the same slaughter over and over again on a mental projector. Her lower lip was trembling.

  “Daze,” Tad said. He felt tears springing to his eyes and was unable to do anything about them. His perspective changed, and only then was he aware that he had dropped to his knees. “Fight it, please. I’m begging you. Fight him.” His father glanced quickly in Tad’s direction, his jaw clenched, trying with all his faculties to grasp what was happening here. Tad moved forward, still on his knees, holding his arms out. He beckoned to his sister, who looked at him uncertainly. He was unsure whether she truly saw him, or understood what he wanted. She bit her lower lip, as if trying to remember something or to concentrate. Then there was a crashing among the reeds, and Casey’s voice rang out like an alarm bell.

  “Hey,” he cried, “Pa! I’m here! Where are you?” He came into view, plowing through the vegetation, swinging his arms among the broken stalks. Daisy’s eyes widened, and again she snarled mistrustfully. Then she turned away from them.

  “No,” Walt cried, even as Tad scrambled to his feet and made to enter the water. “Stay back, both of you! Daisy!” She was moving away from the shore, and even as Walt leapt from the bank she made an ungainly dive, falling forward head first. Her hair, soaking up the water, drifted for a second on the surface before swirling downward and out of sight as if it were caught in a vacuum. By the time Walt reached the spot where she had gone down, it had been a good twenty seconds since she’d sank. The water at that part of the pond reached up to Walt’s chest. From the spot where they stood, Tad and Casey could see him groping with his hands beneath the surface, trying to find her. He turned around in a complete circle, his eyes wild and staring. Then he took a breath and he too vanished in the black waters. Bubbles rose to the surface, and ripples spread from the spot where he’d submerged.

  “Oh God,” Tad said. “Oh God…” He was hardly aware that he was speaking, that he was scrubbing his hands together.

  “Shut up!” Casey said furiously. “Shut up!” There was a splashing, and their father resurfaced. He whipped his head up, causing his hair to be thrown back from his face. Then he made a quarter turn toward the shore and dove again. There was silence, apart from the frogs and crickets, who persisted with their incessant chirping and thumping in total disdain of what was taking place in their midst. Then there was a faint ripple to the right of where Walt had most recently ducked under. “There,” Casey said, pointing. “What was…” There was a disruption in the water and Walt’s head and shoulders appeared again. “Pa,” Casey called. “I saw something over there! Do you want me to…” He was already in the shallows, ripping off his shirt.

  “No!” Walt said emphatically, holding a hand out. “Both of you stay right where you’re at! Get back!” Casey did so, as Walt made for the spot he’d indicated, and down he went again. Once more there was an ominous silence, as Casey clambered back into solid ground to stand beside Tad, who was waiting now with his hands clasped together. He felt that there was something he could be doing, some incantation he could repeat, some charm to repel the sinister intentions of the architect of all this that he was sure had orchestrated and planned everything that was taking place. He felt Daddy’s presence, in the water, on the shore, all around, and he felt drunk with it, and fainthearted, and sick. Let her be safe. Let her be safe, that is all I ask. You can have me, you bastard, only let her be. You say that now, another voice chimed in, but are you really so noble? Would you sacrifice yourself to save her, truly, if it meant becoming his, one of his possessions? Are you that brave? He didn’t know. He had no answer.

  There was a thrashing and a heaving as his father’s body broke the surface, his arms full. Tad let out an explosive breath as if he’d been the one deprived of oxygen. Daisy hung from Walt’s arms. He could not see her face; her hair was draped down over it like the leaves of some dark aquatic plant. She looked like some unwanted, waterlogged article dragged reluctantly from its rest at the bottom of a riverbed. As Walt struggled toward shore, Tad could see that she was beyond filthy, skin and hair completely enveloped in the same thick, dark mud in which the reeds grew. The same vile, slippery ooze that threatened to suck down anyone who blundered into the wrong section of The Bottoms, the same sludge that acted as quicksand does, as a tedious annoyance one moment, and a mortal threat to life and limb the next. Walt staggered, as he lifted her up onto the shore, and Tad and Casey both ran to support him. He too was covered in the stuff, and it dripped from the undersides of his arms and clung stubbornly to his legs, black and malodorous and steaming. They lay her down on the bank and Walt tried to brush the mud from her face as gently as he was able. “She was trapped down there,” he gasped. “I felt her hand reach out and brush against mine, down there at the bottom, and I grabbed a hold of her wrist. But she was stuck down there, face first, and for the longest time I couldn’t get her free. Finally I had her round the waist and I just hauled away…” He trailed off, peering down into his daughter’s face. Her features could hardly be seen at all. She looked like some creature born of the slime at the bottom of the pond, something that could never hope to be called human. “I can’t tell if she’s breathing,” Walt said, in as close of a voice to panicking as Tad had ever heard him use. It seemed like a night of firsts. “Turn her over.” Very gently the three of them took hold of their slippery charge and positioned her so she was facing down. At Walt’s direction, Tad and Casey each took hold of one arm and lifted her slightly off the ground, while Walt knelt above her and wrapped her arms lightly around her ribcage and squeezed, trying to expel any of the filth and water that might be in her lungs. A small torrent gushed out. Walt wiped the hair back away from her face. “We have to get her home,” he said, “as fast as we can.” And without another word he lifted her into his arms and started toward the exit in the reeds, Casey at his heels.

  Tad made to join them, but as Casey’s body passed through the reeds and out of sight ahead, he felt himself compelled to turn back. He was standing on the edge of the bank, and it was there that he felt it again, the feeling with no name, the tickling that grew to the worst itch in the world if ignored. He spun around as if he’d been struck, and there he was, standing there in the moonlight, as the frogs sounded again and again their idiotic, toneless blasts. It was as if he’d emerged from exactly the same spot where he had slipped off into the woods the last time they’d seen each other, when Tad had turned down his offer. Tonight Daddy was wearing stately black robes and the ceremonial powdered wig popular among judges and the wealthier, elite members of the gentry at the end of the eighteenth century. Strikingly white riding gloves completed the ensemble, hands clasped together in front of him in a genteel way that positively screamed regality and culture. His cheeks delicately powdered, his smile cherubic. He bowed low, a gesture clearly meant to capture the full and glorious extent of his magnanimity.

  “You monster,” Tad said. “You utter monster.”

  Daddy gave him his most pained expression. “I? Why, you cut me to the quick, child.” His voice tonight was rich, the tones dulcet.

  “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  Daddy smiled at him. “Surely you aren’t serious? You already know the answer to that. I’m doing this so we can be together, you and I. Oh, the times we shall have. So glorious they shall be!” As if unable to contain his excitement, he stepped forward and spun in a graceful circle, one arm held out rigidly as if grasping an invisible partner. His cloak fluttered as he moved before settling about him again.

  “What have you done to me? What i
s this hold you have over me?” The questions from Tad this time sounded rhetorical, as he was facing the ground as he spoke them. Perhaps he was close to his breaking point; he was using the same tone of voice with which one entreats their deity of choice after a natural disaster has swept away all their material possessions, or after a fatal car wreck had claimed the lives of their dearest loved ones. Still, Daddy answered him anyway.

  “What have I done? Only offered you a better existence than any you might otherwise hope to know. And you were cheeky enough to turn me down, weren’t you, you silly goose? Well, that’s all right. You’re here again now, aren’t you, and I don’t think you’ll say no again. There’s such a thing as being coy, and there’s such a thing as playing hard to get, and then there’s such a thing as knowing when you’re licked. And you are licked, spirit of irrepressible youth, be sure of that. Thoroughly.”

  “No,” Tad said. He raised his head and looked across at Daddy, a quiet rage scorching the air around him. “You won’t have me, damn you, or any of my family. All tonight has done is serve as proof I made the right decision. I don’t know what you are, vile thing, but you are inhuman, and you are callous, and you are dangerous. You stay away from me, scum, and you stay away from my sister. Leave Daisy alone, and stop doing…whatever it is that you’re doing. Stop exerting your influence over her, and over me. You understand?” He pointed his finger at the man in the cloak. His entire hand was shaking, partially voluntarily, but mostly not. “I’m warning you.”