The Devil's Woods

by Brian Moreland

  He felt invincible after facing his darkest fears. He had become one with everything—the earth, the trees, the rocks, the nocturnal animals that looked up as he passed. A night hawk fluttered up into the sky and his soul flew with it. His awareness soared over the evergreen canopy, the ponds, the mountains. In one bowl-shaped valley he saw a thick rainforest cloaked by clouds, the tips of pine conifers spearing upward. An iridescent-green luminance pulsed beneath the mist, resonating a heartbeat of a force that was older than old.

  The hawk changed course, flying over the vast stretches of woods and fields that made up the reservation. Kyle saw the village below, Jessica alone on the balcony with her telescope. He laughed as his winged companion swooped downward into the forest behind the village. His awareness returned to his body. Now Kyle was charging between the trees. The spirit of elk flowed through his legs. His body tingled as he thought of the woman who had awakened every fiber of his being.

  * * *

  When Jessica came back downstairs, the cabin was dark and quiet. She could hear Eric snoring up in the loft. She still wasn’t ready to go to bed. She poured herself another glass of wine.

  Chaser whimpered at the back door, so she took him outside. As the dog sniffed the grass and relieved himself, Jessica sat on the back porch. Her fingers played with her new ring. Maybe she should have had sex with Eric tonight. That always made her feel more connected to him. So why did she turn him down? The problem was she couldn’t imagine making love without kissing. That was the part she loved most, and Eric’s poor lips were swollen and split. The two of them needed to do something romantic for their anniversary tomorrow because she feared her heart was drifting away. All we need is some alone time. Tomorrow I’ll spend the entire day with Eric. And she would find a way to get in the mood to make love to him, even without kissing.

  The Rottweiler perked up his ears and woofed.

  “What is it, Chaser?”

  The dog started barking and then dashed off into the forest.

  Jessica ran into the grassy area. “Chaser!” She waited several minutes but the dog didn’t return. Then she heard movement in the trees. The branches parted and Kyle stepped into the clearing.

  Startled, Jessica took a step back. “Oh, my.”

  The moonlight illuminated the contours of his muscular body. He looked like some kind of Indian warrior with symbols painted on his chest and biceps. His hair was wild. He stared at Jessica with a lustful look in his eyes.

  * * *

  Kyle felt a primal lust when he spotted Jessica standing in the backyard. He didn’t care that he she had come here with Eric. Kyle wanted her and felt no shame about it. He walked straight up to Jessica and kissed her on the lips, his mouth hungry to consume her. She breathed his name then kissed him back. There was hunger in her kiss, as well. A tremble in her hands as she touched his face. Their bodies embraced, tumbled to the ground. He lay on top of her, kissing her lips, her face, her throat.

  His hands explored her body, squeezed her thighs. She kissed the side of his face, nibbled his ear. A fireball of heat built between them. The animal in Kyle had to have her. As he started to unbutton her shirt, Jessica grabbed his hands. “No, I can’t. Stop, please, stop, I can’t do this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m with Eric.”

  “Do you love him?”

  She paused. “He’s your brother.”

  “I don’t care. All I know is that I’m mad about you.” He kissed her lips again and she succumbed for several seconds before pulling away again.

  “No, this is wrong.” She backed away from him. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I’m engaged to Eric.” She hurried into the cabin.

  Engaged? Kyle grabbed his chest, feeling as if Jessica had ripped out his heart.

  * * *

  Jessica ran into the bathroom. Breathless, she flattened against the door as if trying to keep something from getting in. What had she done? She had lost all control. Never in her life had a man kissed her so ferociously. Part of her wanted to go back out there, let Kyle take her fully. Surrender to his rapture. She reached for the knob.

  No, this is wrong! She thought of Eric sleeping upstairs, oblivious to his cheating girlfriend. I promised to marry him.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was speckled with grass. Her shirt unbuttoned, her bra exposed. She pulled her shirt closed. The ruby ring sparkled on her finger, mocking her. She held it to her chest and cried.

  Chapter Fifteen

  So far Shawna’s vision quest had been the wildest trip of her life. She’d done acid, coke, heroin, shrooms and weed, but never with a medicine man. The entire night had been mind blowing. Grandfather had spoken Cree words that made her brain fizz like a shaken can of Red Bull. Then he’d done some kind of healing on her that made her body levitate.

  Now, she was running up the road, giggling. She climbed the main cabin’s porch steps and peered through a window. Zack was lying on the couch, reading a novel.

  Shawna looked around the room to make sure he was alone, then tapped on the glass.

  Zack looked up from his book. He gave her a funny look and came out onto the porch. “Hey, sunshine, what are you doing here?”

  She pulled him against her and kissed him. “I am so hot for you right now.”

  He pulled back. “Whoa, are you on X?”

  “Something even better.” She held up a bag of shrooms. “Ready to have some fun?”

  Zack looked back into the den. “Not with your brothers around. They’ll kill me.”

  “Then go get your sleeping bag,” she said, kissing him seductively. “We’re sleeping under the stars tonight.”

  * * *

  Kyle walked alone down the village road. Every part of his body felt as if it were caving in, his bones compressing his insides. The tree branches scraped against the hollow cabins. He heard rattling, like the sound of a mystic shaking a can of bones. He saw a black scarecrow-shaped creature standing at the edge of the road, a long curved finger summoning him into the woods. It was there and then it wasn’t.

  There are many tricksters here that draw power from your fears, Grandfather had once told him.

  Kyle tried to think positive but there was too much pain in his heart. He was such a fool to believe that Jessica would leave Eric for him.

  You belong only to me, whispered the wind. You promised, remember?

  The vision shifted. Kyle saw himself standing at a tombstone, promising he’d never love anyone else. That eventually he’d find a way to meet his wife on the other side. A pact with a ghost who couldn’t let go.

  Or was it Kyle who couldn’t let go?

  He remembered the lonely nights spent in his apartment, contemplating suicide.

  We can be together again, spoke Stephanie’s voice.

  He looked at the edge of the road. Now it was his wife’s hunched specter that stood there, the trees visible through her head and body. We can journey through these woods forever.

  “Leave me alone.” He walked faster.

  Don’t turn your back on me, Kyle.

  The pines began to pop and stretch, branches curving over his head. Vines snaked along the road. Long limbs with wooden claws reached for him. He sprinted into the Great House. It was empty now, except for sleeping bags and backpacks. Where were the others? The fire at the center had dwindled to glowing embers.

  I’ve got to get back to the cabin. Kyle dressed and grabbed his backpack. He could come back for the sleeping bags tomorrow. He started for the door.

  Branches and vines came in through all the windows, breaking glass. More foliage clotted the skylight. The long room darkened. Kyle ran to the far corner, hiding in the shadows. Twisted roots and creeping vines slithered toward him along the floor and walls, protruding like sickly veins across a junkie’s skin.

  “Stop! Stop!” he yelled.

  The roots stopped within feet of him.

  Clump-scraaaape echoed from the darkness.

  Kyle dumped
out the contents of his backpack. Flipped on his flashlight.

  Clump-scraaaape…

  He aimed the beam.

  Moving toward him was the hunched corpse of his wife, dragging her broken leg.

  * * *

  At a campsite deep in the woods, Zack sat on his sleeping bag, feeling like he’d found Nirvana after eating his second mushroom. He smiled as Shawna danced naked by a campfire. She moved with the fluidity of a belly dancer. The tattooed vines on her arms spread leafy tendrils across her entire body. Her purple fairy wings flapped on her back as she teased Zack with her pixie charms.

  Feeling as horny as the goat-legged god Pan, he pulled his little wood nymph onto the sleeping bag. He sucked her pierced nipples and kissed his way down to the fiery sun that circled her navel.

  “Zack?” She tapped his back.

  “Yes, sunshine?”

  “What’s that shed for?”

  He looked across the campfire at the long gray shack. “How would I know?” He returned to kissing her belly.

  “Does anybody live in there?”

  “I doubt it. There aren’t any windows.”

  “Will you please check? It’s freaking me out.”

  Zack stood and walked around the fire pit, feeling pine needles pricking the bottoms of his feet. He opened the double doors. A god-awful smell of a wet dead animal smacked his senses. He pinched his nose and peered inside. The campfire only lit up the front half. He could hear flies buzzing toward the back, probably nesting in a dead raccoon.

  “It’s an empty shed.” He closed the doors, not wanting the reek to reach Shawna. She was already edgy about camping outdoors.

  Zack hopped back over and landed on his side next to her. “Now where were we?”

  She smiled. “I believe you were heading south.”

  * * *

  As Zack’s mouth pleasured Shawna, her moans rippled through the forest in seismic waves. And then her whole body shuddered. When she felt the next wave coming, she said, “Hurry. I want you inside me.”

  They merged like wild animals in heat. Shawna cried out as Zack penetrated the deepest part of her. She ran her fingers through his hair, kissed his face, hugged him tight against her. Their bodies moved together, faster and faster.

  As she yelled out in ecstasy, she felt a hard impact against her shoulder and wetness splatter her face. Shawna opened her eyes and screamed.

  Blood dribbled down Zack’s face.

  An axe blade had split the top of his head.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the Great House, Kyle hunkered in the corner. “Stay away from me!”

  Stephanie looked the same as the night she had flown through the windshield of their car. Her face was full of glass. A flap of skin hung over her head, exposing her bloody cranium. A sharp bone stabbed upward through her broken leg.

  Kyle snapped his eyes shut. Her nails grazed his cheek. When he opened his eyes, his wife was still standing several feet away.

  “You should have died with me.”

  “I know.”

  “We made a pact to stay together forever.”

  “I know.”

  “You promised to love no other woman but me.”

  Kyle nodded, spinning the wedding ring around his finger.

  “You can cross over to me right here, right now.”

  “How?”

  “The answer is at your feet.”

  He looked down at a bottle of sleeping pills that had fallen out of his backpack. He twisted the cap open. At least forty pills.

  “You can escape into a new dream with me.” Stephanie was whole again, as beautiful as the day they had collected seashells together on the Maui beach. “You can wake up in my arms.”

  More than anything he wanted to return to the sanctuary she had provided.

  He stared into the darkness of his mind. Stephanie, lying on a bed, was hooked to a life-support system. Tubes entered her nose and mouth. An IV fed into her wrist. An EKG monitor beeped. Kyle was sitting beside her, watching Steph sleep. Her face was bruised and swollen. Bandages covered her head where they had stitched her scalp back together. Kyle held his wife’s slender wrist, feeling its weakening pulse.

  Stephanie’s eyes had opened slowly. “Ky…”

  “Don’t,” he had said. “You need your strength.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek. “Kyle…keep going.”

  “No, stay with me.”

  She managed a small smile. “Keep going.” Then his wife’s eyes closed for the last time.

  Now Kyle’s eyes snapped open, tears streaming down his face. He studied the pills in his hand.

  “What are you waiting for, Kyle?”

  Keep going. He had said those words to her when they were hiking and she was too tired to go any farther. Whenever publishers and agents had rejected his books over and over, Stephanie had said those two magical words. Keep going.

  He looked up at the specter standing across from him. “You’re not her.”

  “What?” Her face began to darken.

  Kyle smiled. “You’re not Stephanie.”

  Her ghost shape-shifted back to a disfigured face. “Of course I am.” Her eyes were evil, not like Stephanie’s eyes at all.

  “My Steph would have never wanted me to give up.”

  “I am your wife! You made a pact to stay with me forever.”

  “You’re nothing but a figment of my own guilt!” Kyle hurled the bottle of sleeping pills across the room. The ghost that had been impersonating his wife wailed like a banshee as it was sucked back into the darkness.

  * * *

  Shawna woke to a horrible stench. She was lying on a damp mattress. The stink of it made her gag. Flies landed on her naked body. Where am I?

  Her eyes slowly came back into focus. A ceiling and walls made of gray wood.

  The shed…

  One of the double doors was open and she could see half of the campfire crackling outside. On the other side of the closed door a man was humming and making scraping sounds.

  Shawna sat up and felt metal biting into her wrists. She was chained to the walls. She screamed, shaking the chains, trying to rip them loose.

  Three wolf dogs ran into the shed, growling.

  She froze and held her breath.

  The other door opened and Ray Roamingbear stuck his head in. “Ah, sunshine’s finally awake.” He looked down at his dogs. “Arok, Kiche, Maskwa.” They wagged their tails. He made clicking sounds with his tongue and then threw out some scraps of meat. The three wolf dogs ran outside, eating and growling.

  “Arok, share.” Ray looked back at Shawna. “Sometimes they have such bad manners.” The tall Indian stepped into the shed, ducking his head. He carried a large blood-stained knife.

  Shawna recoiled to the back wall, trembling.

  Ray approached her without his usual limp. He sat down on a small stool at the foot of the mattress, scraping the blade against a flat stone and humming.

  Crying and quivering, Shawna lost control of her bladder and urinated on the red-stained mattress.

  Ray cocked his head. “Ah, now look at the mess you made.” He grinned and waved it off. “It’s not like it’s the first time that’s happened. I keep meaning to swap that old thing out, but it’s a mighty long way to drag a mattress and the trees just tear it up anyway.”

  Shawna had to be hallucinating from a bad shroom trip. Zack couldn’t be dead. But her mind couldn’t get rid of the image of the axe splitting his skull. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please, Ray…don’t hurt me.”

  “Don’t worry, sunshine, you’re worth more to me alive.”

  She covered her nude body as best she could.

  “I’m not going to fuck you either. I have somebody else in mind to be my plaything.” He scraped the blade. “That’s the arrangement, you see. I bring girls to them, and they let me pick out the cherries for myself.”

  They?

  His dark eyes traced her body. “Now I do I like your skin. All tho
se pretty tattoos. So I’m hoping one day they’ll let me have it for my collection. Your boyfriend sure has some nice tats.” He reached into a fur pouch tied to his hip and pulled out a long bloody flap of skin. It was covered in skull tattoos.