Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  He and his mother drove back, through Elkins, until they were passing the country that he knew so well, as well as he knew himself. But he hadn’t known it at all; for his entire life the woods had been full of a silent malice, which had only been waiting for the right time to reveal itself. Things would never be the same. He could not look at a rock, a tree, a leaf, without knowing who its master was. They were all tainted. He looked out on them with distrust. With fear. They came in the early evening to the house of Roy McKenton, their neighbor. His dogs began baying from the side of the house as they pulled up and did not stop until Roy himself appeared on the porch and spoke to them sharply. Tad got out the truck, standing carefully on his good leg and looking to the North, toward the narrow stretch of land between the McKenton farm and the Surrey’s, where his enemy was waiting. What was James Crawley doing right now? What occupied Jimbo’s time, when he wasn’t wreaking havoc on the lives of Tad and others? Was he in the midst of some arcane ritual, naked and smeared with pig’s blood, dancing around a pentagram in the cavern beneath the house his father had built? Was he resting like a vampire in some coffin packed with earth, sipping tea in the banquet hall, talking to himself in different voices? Or was he out prowling the woods, his woods, waiting for the perfect moment to enact the next stage of his plan? How close was he, right now? Were his eyes on Tad, even at that moment? He turned away from the trees, the outline of each distinct in the sun that refused to set.

  There was a patter of feet on the porch and Daisy came running out. She threw her arms around him and he winced, even as he laughed. Her he cared most about in the world. He’d suspected it, at one point, but he knew it now. He would sacrifice his life for her, the strange and beloved attic dweller, so fragile and perfectly unique, perfectly herself. She had never disappointed him, even when they’d disagreed, and she had always challenged him and forced him to question in a way that no one else had. It was strange, the clarity with which he was seeing everyone now. He didn’t know what had happened to him, but it was as though each of his family members was now laid bare, their true character shining through their very skin, like the auras of the guests he had seen at Decadence. She released him and looked at her feet, suddenly shy, but a second later she grasped the hand of his good arm in both of hers and held it fiercely to her chest like a small animal she would protect. She was crying, he saw. There would be time for explanations with her too, but like his father, this was a moment that required no words. They stood that way, as their mother thanked the stoic Roy McKenton, and then they both piled into the front seat. On their way home.

  Their mother made soup for them and stood in the kitchen door watching as they ate. The overwhelming emotion of the day’s events had passed, and the two of them were childlike and silly, pinching each other and grinning, in their own world again. As soon as they were done they hurried upstairs, Tad hobbling somewhat, and soon they were sitting in Daisy’s kingdom, where Tad, without being asked, began to speak of many things. He did not begin with what had happened to him, strangely enough, but rather of the moment that had passed in the hall between their father and himself. There are occasions when a person disappoints us for the final time, when we have given them more than ample opportunity to redeem themselves in our eyes, and they have squandered these chances time and time again. It is especially difficult when the one doing the disappointing is a parent, one of our models for male and female behavior, the influence of which we will carry with us throughout our entire lives. He spoke of their father’s failings, his limitations, his coldness. He spoke of the failure of Casey, not only as a brother but as a human being. He spoke of their mother’s passiveness that was like a shell he had always hoped she would break out of, standing up one day and throwing a dish to the floor, the shattering of which would free her like the destruction of an evil talisman that had kept her in bondage. And he spoke of his love for her, Daisy, and his appreciation for who and what she was. Because, he said, when bad things happen, it reminds us of the things we think but never say, and he was not going to squander the opportunity even if others were, because he felt there might not be much time left. He was sweating by the time he had finished, and she was crying again, and they clung to each other in the twist of blankets on the floor while the faces of the many human-like creatures in Daisy’s mural watched with their frozen eyes.

  Then he began to tell her of what had happened, the phone call that had set it under way, and Daddy’s control over Casey, and the skirmish in the woods, and the repeated flailing of Casey’s body against the wall like a piece of sodden driftwood against a rocky shoreline. As he spoke he saw it all again with frightening clarity. The evil, vacant look on Casey’s face as he sighted Tad trying to flee down the dried up watercourse. Daddy’s mad capering outside Tad’s hiding place and the frustration that had made him deviate from his game plan at the pivotal juncture, without a second’s thought about what would be the result to Casey. Not a human being to him but only his latest tool, his latest toy to be hurtled aside when it displeased him. He saw himself, injured and hiding, like a worm underground, an animal. It was like returning to a nightmare, a scenario that you wish more than anything had only been a bad dream. And even though he counted himself as lucky to have escaped with his life, even though he had not seen another choice at the time and he still didn’t now, he was ashamed that there wasn’t something else he might have done. He’d stopped talking, and he looked down to his sister’s tear streaked face, even as she took him gently by the shoulder, the good one, and spoke to him, firmly, earnestly. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. And when he tried to turn away, she applied pressure. “Look at me. It wasn’t your fault. You can’t blame yourself. It isn’t right to. You’re not responsible. As much as you’d like to make this about you.” How he wanted to believe her!

  Outside, the last red sliver of sun had slipped from view as though it had sunk into the very earth; the heat lingered, like the smell of cooking in an empty kitchen. The birds spoke to each other in the trees, as the harmless among them prepared for a night’s feathery slumber, even as the hunters stretched their wings in anticipation of a fruitful nocturnal prowl. Marta Surrey had washed the supper dishes, the work of a few seconds, and put them away. Now she sat at the dining room table. There was nothing to do, no more dishes, no knitting. She didn’t feel like reading. She was, at that moment, desperately lonely, and the intensity of her feelings surprised her. She often felt a certain isolation; she didn’t have many close friends, much like her two younger children in that respect. And with her eldest son being cared for by others, and her husband attending to him, with the two younger children gone to their play world to which she would be an unwelcome intruder, she felt completely and perfectly alone. The house was quiet. She might have gone upstairs anyway, joining Tad and Daisy in the attic, but for her pride. She didn’t want to admit that she needed her children’s companionship- even now, with the family in crisis, she was unable to do it, as she’d been unwilling to express to Tad in the hospital how much she cared about him and was glad he was okay. So she sat at the table, one leg crossed over the other, humming to herself tunelessly. The dining room brightly lit from the pair of bulbs in the ceiling fixture overhead. The kitchen and the den in shadow.

  Despite the worries that preoccupied her, Marta was beginning to feel drowsy. It had come upon her suddenly. One moment she was sitting in her chair, tapping one foot on the floor, the next she was struggling to keep her eyes open. She felt, with a strange certainty, that it would be unwise to go to sleep, though she couldn’t have said why she felt that way. She stood, groping her way toward the bedroom she shared with Walt in the same way that one stumbles to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She maneuvered her way past the door jamb, through the open door, and then pitched forward onto the bed. She rolled onto her back, muttering as her eyelids fluttered, and then blackness took her. Deep, impenetrable blackness.

  Upstairs, Tad and Daisy had also fallen asleep, simultaneousl
y. They had been talking, about nothing important, unanimously agreeing, without actually having discussed it, not to speak any more about the troubles pressing in around them. Then, the lights had flickered, and Tad had been about to say something, a warning, perhaps. Then he had fallen forward too, landing face first, fortunately, among the great pile of blankets, just as Daisy lay down beside him. But even in that first moment of sleep, when our mind is racing away from the conscious world, preparing to visit other places, there was a frown on her pale face, and she was biting her lower lip, and her tiny hands were clenched into fists. The nails biting into the skin.

  They lay like that for a few minutes, observed silently by the mermen in Daisy’s mural. Night settled outside, growing and becoming surer of itself. Then, Daisy stirred. She stretched, like a big cat, first one leg and then the other. Her hands swam against the blankets, making small strokes, as if caressing the material. Then she muttered something, some fraction of a word in sleep speech, opened her eyes, and sat up. She remained sitting there, as Tad slept on, he also frowning. For a full minute she appeared to stare blankly into space. Her eyes were crossed, out of focus. Then she stood, in her pajama bottoms and sweatshirt, and padded softly on her bare feet over to the trapdoor. She swung it down with practiced ease, allowing it only the faintest creak, and then she descended, leaving her brother, for the moment, to continue dozing. Unmolested, she walked down the hall, turned and marched down the stairs, through the living room and front hall. She turned the padlock on the front door and opened it, then she opened the screen door and stepped through it and onto the porch, making no effort to close the door behind her. In the master bedroom, her mother slept on, a sleep that clutched her fully, deeply. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and arms, but she neither stirred nor woke.

  Upstairs Tad came awake, a scream ripped from his lungs. He was on his feet and moving before anything approaching a conscious thought had entered his mind. He did not waste any time searching for Daisy, but instead flew through the house, taking the same route that she had only seconds before. The voices in his head were howling banshees; they wailed, laughed, cursed and lamented. She’s gone, gone, gone, one cried, and then all the others answered him, she’s gone, gone, gone! You will be too late, one said, and then the last word of that sentence was repeated, late, late, late! “No…” he said. He was outside, turning in a circle. The ground hot and heaving under his feet.

  Everything was alive and moving and growing. There was no more hidden intention in the natural world. It was all there for him to see. The trees all had grinning faces in the dark, but there was light everywhere too, flung down by the brightest and most audacious of night skies. The moon hung huge and terrible, not quite full, the yellow of new cheese. Everything was glowing, not only the stars and moon, but the very trees themselves, and the ground. The bushes and the house. He looked down at his arms and they were glowing, and he could feel himself and everything else making the light by processes that were for the first time almost visible to him, processes that had always been going on while he was unaware. It is like turning your head quickly, he thought, when you are in an empty room. No matter how fast you turn it, you are never supposed to be able to catch what is happening behind you. But now I have, I’ve turned around too fast and I’ve caught the world doing things, secret things that no one is supposed to see. He was aware of it all, too much of it, and it threatened to overwhelm him, to blow him at last out of all reality into whatever else there is. Because there was something else, he had realized, it was close enough so that if he turned his head just right he could almost see it, objects superimposed into other objects that if he shook his head rapidly became distinct, if only for a millisecond. Is this what it’s like to be James Crawley? To be an open conduit, your senses at all times bombarded, continually shattered and reassembled? He was aware of the currents in the air, going about their invisible work. Like gentle zephyrs that could not be felt on the skin.He was aware of the correlation between his breaths and his heartbeat. The new, fine hairs standing up on his arms. The texture of the stiff grass matted down before the porch, trampled and trampled again by the comings and goings of his family. And the heat, oh, the heat. All the moisture had been sucked out of the air. He was living in a vacuum. A continual agony, to draw breath and force oxygen from air. To separate one from the other.

  He could not stand marveling. He could not be afraid. He must act without thinking, because to think was to go mad. Who could tell if he was thinking his own thoughts, when there was a psychotic war council in his mind that all spoke in their different voices, their different languages. It is open mike night in the mind of Tad Surrey. Try the veal. To go into and among those trees, each trunk with the many faces! The first one he came near to would snatch him up and devour him, throw out a creeper and grasp him by the legs, pulling him into its dark heart where all he would hear at the last would be the dry creaking of the timber as it enfolded him, crushing his bones to powder, his flesh to so much pulp. No. The trees will let me pass. If they truly serve him then they will not molest me. They want me whole and unharmed for their master. Unharmed. His arm in its sling did not hurt, nor did his leg. Perhaps it was the adrenaline. Or perhaps he had simply moved into a place beyond pain, where hurt is expressed in new and better ways, or worse. Everything was new again. He was an infant. The world was remade, reformed in Daddy’s image.

  He walked away from the house, and hadn’t he always known it would end out here, in the woods, very secret, very private. Just the two patients in their own natural asylum, an asylum with no walls. But that wasn’t the case, was it; Daisy was there, an unwelcome third. It was his fault, all his fault. He had revealed, carelessly, thoughtlessly, what he most cherished, and now it would be used against him. If he could trade his life for hers, he would. It wasn’t even a question. But would he get that opportunity?

  He thought he heard a gentle sigh as he stepped off the drive and into the trees on the left side of the house. Welcome, brother. Just another tiny, insignificant animal moving about at night among the feet of giants. He could feel the foliage, the fallen leaves, the twigs, the pebbles beneath his feet. He hadn’t bothered to put on shoes, and there wasn’t time now. He did not hesitate, but walked purposefully, making a beeline for Daisy’s signal. For he knew how to find someone now, didn’t he. Yes, all he had to do was concentrate on her, not forcefully, with all his might, but calmly. And that was difficult just now, with his thoughts racing and his fears all standing near. But he forced himself to breathe, it all starts with the breathing, and when he reached out for the trailing lines that bound all humans to the invisible grid, she was there, not far away. Her beacon shone strong and bright. What happened to someone, when the breathing stopped? Could you still find them? Or did they fall off the map, their light fading and going out like the flame of a candle? The other he did not need go search for. Where she was, there he would be. But truth be told, he didn’t even need to fasten onto Daisy. He knew where he was going. He had a hunch again. He knew where he was being led.

  Such a short while ago that he had been here for the first time, wondering what it was that called to him, marveling at his own audacity that he had disobeyed the words of his father and trespassed on what he’d thought had been Roy McKenton’s land. What had he been risking then, a thrashing from McKenton, from his father? How quickly the stakes had been raised. How quickly the blocks of rationality and reason had been kicked out from under him, the ones he’d taken for granted his entire life. He saw himself close by, weeks before, playing at danger, and he cursed himself for a fool. He began to run, ignoring his leg.

  He could feel her, almost see her, but he could tell nothing else- whether she was in danger. He was coming up to the fence, the three strands of rusted wire that separated the Surrey property from the narrow swath of land that had once belonged to Madeline Crawley. It was not dark, not even here under the trees. Not with the illumination of the celestial bodies that had come out in forc
e to attend the night’s amusement. He looked up to see the trees bending over him, rubbing their limbs together, as he thought, in anticipation. It was hotter than a blast furnace and stuffy. Heat radiating up from the ground. He stopped. He didn’t want to, but his breath had given out and he had to reclaim it; he leaned back, gasping, against the trunk of a tree, his bad arm held in place against his chest. The branches as he tilted his head back swam crazily, and he could hear about him rustling and breathing and dry crackling, laughter and whispers, squeaks and squeals. He stumbled on, his lungs on fire.