What the Woods Keep

by Katya de Becerra

  I slither out of bed. My feet recoil from the freezing floor, my toes curling. All evening balminess is gone from the Manor. I dash for the door and run smack into the hard edge of the bedside table I used to barricade myself in. That sure will leave a nasty bruise on my leg. My clouded brain instructs me to go around the bedside table and press an ear against the door.

  I hear it again, that soft patter.

  Light steps. Barely there, already tuning out.

  My heart’s beating so loudly, it becomes the only sound I’m hearing for a long moment. I remain unnaturally still as seconds tick by. Then I shove the bedside table out of my way and open the door a crack.

  Nothing.

  Then, the unmistakable screech of the basement door—opening, closing—downstairs. Someone broke into the Manor and is now hiding in the basement? Now that doesn’t make much sense. Or maybe it makes perfect sense. Where else would you hide in an old house?

  I swing my door open and stumble into the black corridor. After checking Del’s guest bedroom (empty), I cling to a rabid hope that the noises I heard were Del, that she’s just getting a drink in the kitchen downstairs. But then … why would I hear the basement door?

  My heart’s suspiciously calm now, but my hands are still cold with sweat. I’m shivering as I move through the house, my teeth chattering out Morse code. I turn on the lights as I go—down the stairs, through the salon, coming to stand before the basement door.

  I listen.

  A series of weak noises, muffled but there. I clutch the door handle, turn it, let my hand wander inside until I find the light switch. Flick it on. Remind myself that all those Conjuring movies were written and acted by people and aren’t real. Though they were based on supposedly real stories, my inflamed mind supplies unhelpfully.

  Weak light floods the basement. I take the stairs, thinking about every horror movie trope there is. But what choice do I have? Del’s missing, and I’m hearing suspicious noises coming from the basement.

  You could’ve called the police, a rational voice in my mind suggests. Or at least armed yourself. Frantic, I look around me: To my right, a bunch of dust-covered boxes line the wall. A collection of gardening tools hang on the wall to my left. Nothing remarkable.

  Except for the partition covering what I suspect is a crawl space.

  It’s moved aside, revealing a dark hole in the basement wall.

  No way should you be getting anywhere near that.

  That’s when I hear a cough, followed by a whimper, coming from within the crawl space. It sounds a lot like Del.

  “Oh, damn it.” At random I grab one of the rusty gardening tools from the wall and approach the gaping mouth of the crawl space entrance. Lowering my head, I slink inside. The crawl space is wide and high enough to assuage my slight claustrophobic tendencies, so I move forward, hunching my back and clutching my weapon of choice, toward a dim light and some scuttling noises. My breathing becomes so loud that I have to stop and mentally run through the words of Mom’s lullaby a few times to ground myself.

  After crawling forward a few more feet, my eyes settle on a view that’s definitely B-grade horror-movie worthy.

  Del’s in a small area on the far side of the crawl space. She’s on her knees, her back to me. She’s digging up the dirt with her bare hands.

  I move closer. Del stops what she’s doing and looks at me over her shoulder.

  The only light down here is from a chunky candle on the ground next to Del. But even in the candle’s weak light, I see that Del’s eyes are glazed over, and her lips are moving.

  She pushes her hands further into the hard soil. Her mouth releases the words, “Dig deep.”

  HAYDEN B. HOLLAND MEDICAL NOTES: THE TIGER INCIDENT

  DR. THORFINN ERICH

  I was not scheduled to see Hayden for another month, but her father called my office yesterday to ask for an emergency appointment. Something terrible happened, he claimed, and he needed my advice on how to proceed.

  My receptionist took the call: Hayden’s father was crying on the phone, saying, “Something is wrong with my baby girl.” Hayden’s pet cat was found dead, and suspicion fell on Hayden. I was alarmed, yet awash with disbelief: Nothing in Hayden’s personality so far made me think of her as dangerous. Troubled, yes. Impulsive, yes. But not dangerous in a malicious way, certainly not dangerous enough to harm an animal (or a human being) on purpose.

  I cleared my schedule to see Hayden this morning.

  Enclosed is a transcript of our conversation, taken down from my recording, with additional notes from memory.

  Dr. Erich: Hayden, how have you been doing since we last talked?

  Hayden: [shifts in her seat, not meeting my eyes, hands firm on knees] Fine.

  Dr. Erich: Did you have any unusual dreams?

  Hayden: [Looks up in surprise. I can barely hold her gaze. Her eyes appear darker, especially the right one. A wave of primeval unease—the kind, I’d imagine, a human would feel in the presence of a deadly predator—comes over me.] I dream of Mommy every night. Sometimes she sits on the floor by the side of my bed and whispers secrets in my ear. Sometimes I sense her hands touching my hair. Her hands are very cold.

  Dr. Erich: And when she visits you, what does she talk to you about?

  Hayden: Some of it is in a language I don’t know. But sometimes, she sings to me. [starts singing softly]

  Dr. Erich: What does it mean, Hayden? The lyrics, they mean something to you?

  Hayden: Mommy used to sing it to me every night before I’d go to bed. And whenever it rained outside, she’d just hum it.

  Dr. Erich: Interesting lyrics. Do you think your mom wrote this song?

  Hayden: [When she looks up at me, it takes a good effort on my part to keep her gaze. As if she can sense my inner struggle, she sighs and looks away.] You want to ask me about Tiger, but you’re worried about what I’m going to tell you.

  Dr. Erich: Is Tiger your cat?

  Hayden: You already know the answer to that, Dr. Erich.

  Dr. Erich: What happened to Tiger, Hayden?

  Hayden: When we first got him, Daddy said I could name him. So I named him Tiger. After Einstein’s cat—he was also called Tiger and he always got depressed when it rained.…

  Dr. Erich: Hayden, what happened to Tiger?

  Hayden: Yesterday was a foggy day. And in my head it was foggy, too.

  Dr. Erich: Hayden, we’ve been through this. It’s not helpful when you evade my questions.

  Hayden: [sighs] I’m sorry. I’m upset because Daddy thinks I did it. He thinks I killed Tiger. He didn’t say it to me like that, but I know he was thinking it. Daddy thinks something is wrong with me, doesn’t he? His thoughts are like little piranhas; they eat everything. Eat all the good things, like memories of my mom.…

  Dr. Erich: Hayden, do you know what really happened to Tiger?

  Hayden: I didn’t plan for it to happen. But, Dr. Erich … when Tiger died, I was thinking about what went down with Jen at school, and how Jen was mocking me, and how she made other kids make fun of me … and I got so angry. I felt these odd feelings come over me, and Tiger was there, in the room with me. And the next moment, he was on the floor and not moving, and he was very silent. I miss him. I miss Tiger. I’m so sorry.

  End of transcript. Dr. Erich’s recommendation: Start on medication. Review condition in six months.

  14

  DIG DEEP

  Sleepwalking is fascinating. Or at least, the mystery around it is. I’m sure those who suffer from the condition may not find it particularly attractive. I’ve never seen sleepwalking in action, but I’ve got all the cultural codes about it burned into my blood. I hear “sleepwalker” and get a stereotypical image: a regular-looking person walking around, eyes open but glazed over, hands outstretched, zombielike. Maybe the sleeper is brushing his teeth, or combing her hair, or doing something else equally mundane. The creep factor kicks in when you—the omnipresent observer—realize something’s not quite right wit
h this picture.

  Modern science has come a long way in its understanding of sleepwalking, but the olden explanations are so much more interesting. Take the Freudian ideas about sleepwalkers enacting sexual wish fulfillment. Or outright absurd ideas that fall firmly into the domain of pseudoscience, like Baron von Reichenbach’s Odic force—some kind of energy, present in all things, living and not. The force, as the Baron figured, was linked to specific lunar phases, hence the term lunatic used by some Slavic languages to denote sleepwalkers, literally meaning “one who walks under the moon.”

  Sleepwalking may be fascinating, but seeing Del totally under its control puts an extra twist into my already twisted gut.

  * * *

  “Oh my God … Del! Stop!” My fingers go slack, releasing my weapon. I rush at Del as fast as the tight quarters of the crawl space allow. But she doesn’t stop with the digging. If anything, she forces her already-raw hands even harder into the dirt floor. I can’t look away from her nails: filled with grime, cherry-red polish peeling off. Worse, Del’s fingertips are blistering—angry welts spiraling on her hands, covering her skin up to the elbows. My stomach turns, barely able to keep its contents down.

  Stiffly, awkwardly, I lower to my knees and face Del. I try to capture her attention by grabbing her shoulders and giving her a shake. I say her name. But she’s out of it completely. With the determination of a girl possessed, her hands keep digging, their motion spookily robotic.

  Unlike her hands, Del’s eyes are motionless, trained down, fixated on the dirt floor. She’s whispering, and, despite the queasy panic surging through me, I lean in closer to listen. Having forgotten to blink, my eyes are burning, releasing tears that I barely feel. My entire world in this moment is Del. I listen. Some of her mumblings are in English, something about digging, and digging deep. The rest’s in French, too fast and too low for me to understand. But when Del says clearly what sounds a lot like vieux sang, I’m about 75 percent certain I know what it means.

  Old blood.

  “Okay, that’s enough digging for tonight, young lady.” I wrap my fingers around Del’s elbow (her skin’s shockingly cold) and heave her upright. I expect resistance, but she complies, pliant under my touch. My treacherous hands start to shake; I have to tighten my grip on Del’s arm. I try not to reveal in my voice how completely terrified I am. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

  “You need to dig deep.” Her earnest tone tricks me into believing she’s back to her nondazed self. But a close look confirms that she’s clearly not. A veil of dreaminess is cast over her dark eyes. This Del—the physical shell of my best friend, of the girl who’s the epitome of vitality—is giving me the creeps right now. Hard to imagine this is the same girl I was just hanging out with, drinking stolen wine and talking about my mother. The same girl, now minus her lively persona and plus minor burns on her skin. At least, I hope those are minor burns. Del’s not screaming in pain, but she might be resistant to it while she’s in this trance.

  Then Del says in a ghoulish voice, “Abigail Reaser is thinking of you. She says: Stay away from her son. She says your kind has done enough harm to her family.”

  My kind? “What did you just say?” I release Del’s elbow, and she wobbles on her feet. The confines of the small space are pressing down on me, and I get a spill of dizzy claustrophobia.

  Del replies, her voice softer but still creepy, “She’s in a keeping place, but she remembers everything. She says she gave your kind everything she had, but you can’t have her son. You can’t have him.”

  I wish I could just write off Del’s statements as sleepwalker ramblings. I really do. But I can’t imagine how Del would know about Abigail Reaser and my history with her son. I have no idea what happened to Abigail after Mom went missing and Dad took me out of Promise. All I know is that Abigail was close to Mom. I also knew their friendship was not about dinner parties and carpools. It was something misunderstood, sinister even, judging from the shadows coating their faces when they were together, their mouths sagging with the weight of unspoken secrets.

  Shannon had a sleepover in the Manor whenever his mother was in a “bad mood.” At times, he’d show up with little cuts and scratches on his skin, but he dismissed those with an impatient smile, and I was too interested in exploring the woods with him to interrogate him about his home life. I shudder now, angry at my childish obliviousness. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess what really went on in that house behind closed doors.

  “Del, how do you know about Abigail Reaser? How do you know anything about her at all?”

  “Dig deep.”

  “I will. I will,” I assure her. I’m about to ask her about Abigail again, but this dig deep business reminds me of Mom’s card, the one that came with the deed to this house. It pictured a girl with a bleeding heart, and Mom wrote on the back: Dig deep. I dismissed it as poetic nonsense, thinking Mom meant it metaphorically, as in soul-searching. But what if I’m wrong? Maybe Mom wanted me to literally dig something up? Maybe Mom’s using Del to communicate her will to me. The thought gives me the shivers.

  I snuff out the candle, plunging us into semidarkness. “Dig deep,” Del whispers, her legs weakening as I lead her through the crawl space, into the basement, up the stairs, and into her bedroom’s en suite bathroom. Once the water’s running cold, I direct Del’s burnt hands under the stream. Careful with her damaged skin, I gently clean the burns before focusing on getting all the filth from under her chipped fingernails. The mundane task keeps me busy, distanced from the whirlwind of scary thoughts threatening to take over my mind.

  When I turn off the water, the Manor becomes too silent for its muteness to be natural. No creaking wood, no groans coming from the old walls settling as the cold rolls in. The house is listening, watching. A layer of sweat covers my forehead. I’m beginning to think there’s a chance I made some kind of horrible mistake by coming here, that this place—the Manor, Promise, the woods—is a lot more than it seems and that maybe I’m messing with something I don’t understand. Ancient evil that poisons the soul. Mom’s darkest secret, her hidden treasure, her heaviest burden …

  I push these thoughts to the very back of my mind and focus on Del. To my relief, by the time I guide her out of the bathroom and toward the bed, Del has come to her senses. More or less. “Is it time to go out for a run?” she asks. “But it’s still dark out … and I’m so tired.”

  I lower her onto the bed and sit next to her. Trained at me, Del’s eyes pose a silent question. Then she winces and cradles her hands against her chest. “I think I got burned. I don’t remember how. Or when. My skin hurts.”

  I urge her not to move, not that I think she’ll be going anywhere right now, and run into my room, returning with a travel first-aid kit I packed for the trip. It’s not much, but I did bring a tube of aloe vera, since I’m prone to burning myself when I’m left alone next to stovetops and irons.

  I take one of Del’s hands and apply the gel, moving my fingers in gentle strokes. “You’ve been sleepwalking. Gave me a fright. I thought we had a break-in. You’re lucky I didn’t bash your head in.” I let go of her hand and take the other one. Her burns don’t look too bad now, already fading. Maybe they weren’t burns or blisters at all but some kind of allergic reaction?

  “Crap! Sorry.” She massages her temples with her free hand, wincing at what I imagine is a monster headache. “I must’ve had too much to drink last night, must’ve forgotten to take my pills. Can’t remember much.”

  “So you don’t remember what you were saying?”

  “Was I talking, too? Oh … this is so embarrassing.”

  Hiding my disappointment that she’s got no recollection of her nocturnal adventures, I finish with the second layer of aloe vera and let go of her hand.

  “It wasn’t too bad,” I lie, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her in for an awkward hug. Her skin is so cold. I pull the blanket up to cover her back. Del still seems out of it and, I suspect, she’s barely not
icing me fussing over her. When her eyes regain that distant-dream quality, my heart twinges with concern. If she goes into her trance again, I won’t know what to do to make her safe. But, I wonder, if she does zone out, would it be totally unethical for me to question her more about Abigail and Shannon Reaser?

  “You think you can fall asleep again?” I ask, already feeling guilty for even considering taking advantage of Del’s powerless state.

  “I’ll try.” Del relaxes onto her back, stretching out across the bed. Once her eyes close, I leave the room.

  Deafening thunder shakes the Manor to its foundation, sending a quiver through my bare feet. The wrongness of it is not apparent at first, but then I realize: I saw no lightning flash preceding the thunder. As a kid, every time lightning would flash, I’d count down till I heard the thunder. The act of counting calmed me—something to do with the inevitability of thunder always following the lightning. A memory I didn’t know I’d lost comes now, fresh and bright: Shannon, the boy with dark hair and attentive gray eyes, would tease me about my counting compulsion, saying that one day the rules would change and I’d be forever counting, waiting for thunder that would never come. This brings me back to Promise, where the elements follow their own rules, it seems. Did Shannon know what he was talking about then? Would he tell me what all of this means if I marched across the field and banged on his door now, in the middle of the night?

  Raindrops drum against the Manor’s shingled roof. Rattled and with no sleep left in me, I return to my room and find my cell phone, which I left charging. There’s no reception and no Internet. The glowing digits claim it’s only half past midnight. Mom would call it the witching hour and wink at me. On my phone, I bring up my observations journal and make a third entry in my latest project. I title it “Promise” and record Del’s sleepwalking episode.