The Devil's Woods

by Brian Moreland

  Zano leaned back in his chair. “Well then, I wouldn’t worry about it. Knowing your father, he’ll turn up when the mood strikes him and not a minute sooner.”

  “I’d like to believe that. But we’ve tramped all over the rez and haven’t found so much as a recent campfire. And another thing, last night Carl Hanson’s dog ended up at the reservation.” Kyle showed him a photo of the Rottweiler taken with his cell phone. “He goes by Chaser. I’ve left Carl messages on his cell, but so far no response. Any chance he reported his dog missing?”

  “Haven’t heard a word about it, but we typically don’t handle missing pets.” Sam picked up his phone and dialed. “I’ll check the pound.” He spoke with someone on the line, nodded, puffing his pipe, then hung up. “Sorry, the Hansons haven’t called there either. They’re probably camping in some spot where cell phones don’t work.”

  Kyle frowned. “Maybe, but I saw them with Chaser. He’s a member of the family. If he went missing, they would be asking around.”

  Sam shrugged. “Tell you what, you make me a poster with that picture and I’ll put it on the bulletin board downstairs. How’s that?”

  “All right. And what should we do with their dog?”

  “You’ve got two choices. Keep him until Carl calls you back or drop him off at the pound. If the owners fail to retrieve the dog though…”

  “I’ll take him with me. I’m sure Carl will call back soon.”

  Sam picked up some files. “Son, that’s about all I can tell you. If you don’t mind, I need to get back to my reports.”

  “Actually, sir, there’s one other thing. You remember a case about fifteen years ago involving the murder of Nina Whitefeather?”

  The mention of her name seemed to deflate the inspector. Zano nodded. “Of course. I spent years trying to solve that one. Why?”

  “Just curious. My dad had saved a few newspaper clippings about the case.” Oh, and last night I was visited by her ghost. “Did you ever find her killer?”

  Sam sagged in his chair as his gaze turned inward. “No. Not long after you kids moved away, your tribe disbanded. Once the tribe was gone, the investigation stalled. Off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  “I always thought the killer was a fellow tribe member, who left with the rest. I couldn’t prove it though, so the case went cold.” He shook his head. “It still haunts me—finding her body in the lake.”

  * * *

  Eric sat on a stool at the tavern’s bar. The idea that he would be taking himself off the market was starting to sink in. He needed a drink.

  A stout bartender with slicked-back hair and a handlebar mustache tossed a napkin onto the bar. “What’ll it be?”

  “Crown and Coke,” Eric said. “Heavy on the Crown.”

  “All I got is beer. Moosehead, Kokanee, or the local mead.”

  “Okay, you pick it then.”

  The bartender popped open a bottle of Kokanee and slid it into Eric’s hand. He took a sip and looked around at the tavern. All the booths and pool tables were empty and the jukebox was dead.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Out on the lake or working at the mill.” The bartender wiped mugs with a rag. “Joint doesn’t get hoppin’ ’til happy hour.”

  Eric sipped his beer, unable to get Jessica off his mind. What was with her today? She had never acted distant before. And the things she’d written in her journal, what the hell was that about? Eric shook his head. Women. They’re so confusing sometimes. Especially mine. Until this weekend, Jessica had been easy to seduce. Deep down she was needy, and Eric knew how to push her buttons. With the thrill of the chase gone, the last few months he’d found himself getting bored in bed with her. But this morning in the loft, her feisty attitude had really been a turn-on. He had wanted to throw her down right there. And what did she do? Reject his advances. Just when she was becoming the fiery creature he had wanted her to be, Jessica was pushing him away. Eric remembered her blue eyes, ablaze with anger. The image both turned him on and made him feel uneasy. Would she say yes if he proposed? For the first time in their relationship, he feared losing her. What Jessica needed was a firm commitment and reassurance that he loved her.

  As he drank the cold beer, he began to work out a plan to win her back. His thoughts were interrupted when the jukebox turned on with slow country music. Patsy Cline crooned “Sweet Dreams of You”. Glancing up from his beer, Eric grinned as the redhead from the shop stepped up to the bar and smiled his way.

  * * *

  Kyle let Chaser ride in the passenger seat with his head out the window, as they took a scenic route through Hagen’s Cove. Not much had changed since he rode his bike along these streets as a kid. Olaf’s Bakery still advertised wienerbrød pastries and smørrebrød sandwiches in the window. And the wooden lumberjack statue remained a timeless fixture in front of Gamel’s Drugstore, where Kyle used to buy comic books and chocolate malts with his brother and cousins.

  “It’s like we’ve traveled back in time, huh, Chaser?”

  The Rottweiler panted as he enjoyed the wind against his face.

  Kyle smiled. “Coming back here sure stirs up a lot of memories.”

  They passed the ancient white church which stood prominently at the center of town. That was where Kyle and Eric got caught spying through the windows. Kyle, sitting on Eric’s shoulders, had witnessed naked people wearing strange masks and dancing around a wicker statue. Some angry men grabbed Kyle and Eric and drove them back to the reservation, where they were punished. That was when Kyle had learned that his tribe and the people of Hagen’s Cove had different spiritual beliefs. And the church was off limits. The memories of Kyle’s youth leaped from his childhood to his troubled adult years, when he returned here a few times as a young man.

  His last visit a year ago, he’d dined with his father and Wynona at her home, meeting his dad’s new girlfriend for the first time. She had seemed normal then, an attractive woman in her fifties who was friendly and clearly in love with his father. She had gone out of her way to make a good impression on Kyle. He had been surprised to learn that Wynona and her son were the town’s morticians. They gave Kyle and his father a tour of the mortuary and cremation room. Her son, Hugo, had fired up the oven with a sadistic look in his eyes, like a kid who loved to play with fire. Or in Hugo’s case, burn boxes of dead people. Instinctively, Kyle had disliked the guy, but he’d tried to get along that evening for his father’s sake.

  Wynona had seemed too feminine and demure to be an undertaker. He couldn’t imagine her embalming corpses and hosting funerals. But Kyle had liked Wynona. She was an avid reader, a talented artist and an amazing cook. Her hakkebøf, brændende kærlighed and rødkål (a dish of ground beef steak with caramelized onions, mashed potatoes and red cabbage) was one of the best meals Kyle had ever eaten. The only faults he’d noticed were that she drank too much brandy and that she had a strange relationship with her grown son. Several times during dinner Kyle had caught a look on Wynona’s face that made him think she feared Hugo.

  Now, Kyle was eager to talk with Wynona. She had approached Jessica yesterday and pleaded with her to convince Kyle and the others to leave the reservation. And to keep far away from the Devil’s Woods, the townspeople’s name for Macâya Forest. Why? Kyle hoped she knew something about his father.

  The sins of the father shall fall upon the sons, Wynona had warned Jessica. But what did it mean? What sins had Elkheart committed? And what was it about the Devil’s Woods that made the townspeople so afraid?

  Kyle hoped Wynona was sober enough to explain some things. He turned down a residential street lined with old houses on one side and a cemetery on the other. Chaser moaned like he needed to relieve himself, so Kyle pulled over. He hooked a leash onto the dog’s collar and took him for a walk in a grassy meadow next to the graveyard. The Rottweiler eagerly sniffed the ground and marked a wrought-iron fence that bordered the burial grounds. Weathered tombstones dotted the hill. Many of them tilted sideways
. The grass was overgrown, and some stones had been taken over by ivy. As he walked Chaser up to the gate’s brick archway, the gravestones began to whisper.

  The fur on the dog’s back spiked.

  Kyle petted his back. “Can you hear them too?”

  Chaser whimpered and tugged at the leash, urging Kyle to return to the Jeep.

  After putting the dog in the car, Kyle stared at the cemetery.

  You know you want to go in there, said Detective Winterbone.

  Curiosity prodding him, Kyle stepped through the archway entering the cemetery. The ground vibrated through his hiking boots, same as the forest had. He walked between the whispering tombstones. The dead buried here were restless souls. Many wanted to communicate with him. The murmurings grew louder the farther he walked. None of the headstones were engraved with names or epitaphs. At first he’d thought the names and dates had been removed by time. But even the most recent grave markers bore no inscriptions. The blank headstones horrified him. There were hundreds of them, each one identical with a circular symbol near the top of the stone. The symbol reminded Kyle of Druid seals he’d researched for one of his Winterbone novels, although he figured this emblem was Scandinavian in origin rather than British.

  Hoping to get an imprint, he pressed his palm to one of the tombstones. He heard a man’s wailing cries but saw only darkness. Kyle touched other stones, but they were all the same—tortured voices screaming from pits of darkness. Oddly, they were all male. Where were the women buried? Perhaps they had their own section on the opposite side of the cemetery.

  At the center of the graveyard, beneath a pair of tall oak trees, a gray-stoned mausoleum stood. Unlike the nameless headstones, the crypt had the name THORPE engraved above the door along with a Danish epitaph.

  I mørke dyb,

  evige søvn,

  hvile i hæder på Store Fader.

  Kyle pulled out his cell phone and logged on to a website that translated foreign languages to English. He typed in the phrase. The translation came back:

  In darkness deep,

  eternal sleep,

  rest in the glory of Great Father.

  As Kyle walked up the steps, the entire cemetery hushed to an eerie silence. He tried to open the stone door, but it was sealed shut. He pressed his palm against the door and felt a chill as if he had touched a slab of ice. Inside the mausoleum, he sensed an infinite darkness, a space that stretched farther than the physical borders of the granite walls and deeper than the floor. He felt the darkness within pulling at him, as if trying to leech his soul through the stone. Kyle yanked his hand loose and stumbled down the steps, his heart racing. The whispering voices returned as he hurried back to the Jeep. He sat behind the wheel and locked the doors, as if that were enough to keep the spirits out.

  Chaser licked Kyle’s face.

  “Yeah, yeah, you were right. I shouldn’t have gone in there.”

  * * *

  At the tavern, Eric felt a twitch in his crotch as the woman in red stood at the bar, ordering a pack of Marlboro Lights. Her face was angled with high cheekbones. Her lips were thick and luscious. Eric imagined all the wonderful tricks she could do with them.

  Ease up there, he warned himself. You came here to drink and nothing else.

  But thoughts of the redhead’s lips filled his mind with fantasies. He tried concentrating on Jessica, but that didn’t help matters. Every girl he’d ever dated had done whatever he wanted. Jessica refused to dress up for him or wear handcuffs. Besides lacking sexual adventure, she didn’t know how to let go herself. He liked to make a woman come. He’d made sort of a sport out of it, but Jessica couldn’t orgasm worth a damn.

  Is that the kind of woman you want to spend the rest of your life having sex with?

  Getting married didn’t mean he had to stop seeing other women.

  Down the bar, the redhead looked his way again.

  The bartender went into the back storage room, leaving Eric alone with her.

  As he watched, her hand slid up her bare thigh, disappearing into the folds of her skirt.

  Eric felt himself swelling in his shorts.

  The woman’s hand moved higher, lifting her skirt. He saw red panties and her slender fingers toying beneath the lace.

  Damn, he was going to bust a nut.

  Little miss devil in a red dress looked his way with a flirtatious smile.

  Then with the grace of an exotic dancer, she slid her panties down her legs and stepped out of them. Walking over, she put the panties in his pocket, her fingers grazing his erection. “A wedding gift for your bride-to-be.”

  To his relief, the bartender returned with a pack of cigarettes. The redhead released her hand from his pocket and paid for the smokes. She lit one and sauntered over to the billiard area. She bent over a pool table, showing off a hint of bare ass, and racked the balls.

  Eric grinned at the challenge. So she wants to play.

  * * *

  Kendra Meacham awakened from a heavy slumber, feeling disoriented and afraid. She was lying in pitch darkness. She tried sitting up but her head hit a low ceiling. She felt around her. Cramped walls, padded, smooth as silk. She was inside a coffin. Had she been buried alive?

  Claustrophobia kicked in. Her throat clenched. She couldn’t breathe. She banged on the wooden ceiling and the top part of the casket gave a little. She pressed against it and the lid opened upward. Kendra sat up, gasping. The shadowy room was lined with displayed coffins. A funeral parlor.

  “What the fuck?”

  The last thing she remembered was hiking out of the forest and being picked up by a man in a maroon hearse. Hugo, that was his name. Why had he brought her here?

  Faint light filtered in through a crack in the crimson curtains. Kendra searched the shadows, but there was no one else in the room.

  She climbed out of the casket, her sprained ankle shooting spikes of pain up her leg as she landed on the carpeted floor. She cursed under her breath. Limping, she stepped into a hallway. Opera music was playing from somewhere within the funeral home. She moved down the hall, using the walls for support. They were covered in vintage wallpaper and framed black-and-white photos of families posing with dead people lying inside coffins.

  The female opera singer’s voice grew louder as Kendra searched for a way out. She tried the windows, but they were nailed shut. Halfway down the hall she reached a doorway that opened into a brightly lit room with a tiled floor. The man who had brought her here was sitting at a metal slab, stitching up a dead woman’s chest. Hugo’s head moved with the rhythm of the opera.

  Warm urine trickled down Kendra’s leg. She hobbled past the door, fumbling down the wall. A framed photo fell to the floor, the glass breaking. The hallway led into some type of den with antique furniture and a ticking grandfather clock. Over the fireplace mantle was a portrait of a mother and her son.

  “Did sleeping beauty finally wake?” Hugo stood in the hallway, holding a rag over a jar.

  Kendra bolted, half-running, half-hopping across the den. She entered a kitchen. Frantically searching the drawers, she found a butcher’s knife. She whirled around, holding the blade out in front of her. She stood alone in the gloomy kitchen.

  The volume of the opera music turned up until it was maddening.

  She tried a back door, but it was dead-bolted. She needed a key. She had to find another door. A dark opening in the wall led to a crooked hallway that disappeared into uncertain darkness. Christ, was there no end to this place?

  Swinging the knife, Kendra backed her way through the kitchen, into a dining room. Arms grabbed her from behind. A strong hand squeezed her wrist and the knife dropped to the floor. Hugging her from behind, Hugo pressed his cheek to hers. “Where do you think you’re going, pretty girl? You and I are just getting started.”

  She felt his erection swelling against her back. A soaked rag covered her nose. Kendra inhaled chloroform and the walls started spinning. The last thing she heard was Hugo saying, “You’re mine now.�
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  * * *

  Continuing his drive down the cemetery road, Kyle passed the Thorpe Funeral Home and Crematorium sign and turned onto a long driveway lined with trees. It ended before a rambling, two-story house. The left side was made up of white clapboards covered in ivy. The right side had been cobbled with dark brown bricks, and the front windows were uneven, giving the funeral home a Jekyll and Hyde appearance.

  As Kyle got out, Chaser started barking. The dog’s eyes were fixed on a maroon hearse parked in the driveway.

  “Calm down, boy.” But nothing Kyle said had any effect. Leaving the dog barking in the Jeep, Kyle peered into the hearse’s back windows, but they were too tinted for him see anything.