Sacrifice

by James, Russell

  Marc’s heart jumped into his throat. He felt the overwhelming need to piss. He stepped back and nearly fell into the pit.

  “Remember me?’ the Woodsman said. He stroked the edge of his hat with his long, bony fingers. “I sure remember you. We met out on the dock a long time ago.”

  Marc, so full of confidence before, felt his courage desert him. Being in the Woodsman’s presence, feeling that awful, powerful force so close, sent him back to age three, just a scared little boy on a wintry dock.

  “The toddler who was going to swim with the turtle,” the Woodsman mocked. “How cute the little turtle was.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Marc managed. His right leg shook like he was keeping beat for a band.

  “Oh, but you are,” the Woodsman said. “You’re a founder child. I’d be justified in killing you. But here’s what’s more fun.”

  The Woodsman shrank and shimmered and when he came back into focus, he was Marc’s mother wearing the same brown dress she wore to work that morning.

  “See here,” the Woodsman said in Marc’s mother’s voice. “I can take this form for you if it makes you happier.”

  Marc recoiled in horror and hopped back across the pit and against the wall. He fought back the urge to vomit. The Woodsman followed to the edge of the pit.

  “I know it’s you,” Marc said.

  “But he won’t,” the Woodsman said. He reached out and touched Marc’s forehead with a finger.

  Marc’s brain lit up with a vision of the Woodsman sitting on the roof of Marc’s garage in the guise of his mother. Danny looked out from a second floor window.

  “Ma?” he said. “What are you doing there?”

  “Danny,” the Woodsman said in Marc’s mother’s voice. “Come out and help me.”

  Marc’s defensive instincts overrode his fear. He swung out to slap the Woodsman’s hand from his forehead. He passed through the spirit, and his arm went numb from cold. The vision winked out.

  “He can’t see you,” Marc said.

  “Yes he can. He does have the mind of a child, just my playground. And when you jackasses try your little incantation to send me away, the last thing I’ll do is get little Danny killed. He’s so simple, I can get him dancing on that rooftop before you get to the top of the stairs.”

  “You bastard.”

  “So, here’s what you’ll do for me instead. One bone, one doorway, stays right in this hole. Or I’ll drop your brother in one permanently.”

  Marc thought of Danny, the loving, innocent little brother who would never grow up, never grow out of the grasp of the Woodsman. There were other kids at stake though, a future full of them. But weighed against Danny, at this moment, they amounted to nothing. He flicked a finger bone from the pile with the toe of his shoe. It dropped into the dirt.

  “Now upstairs, Turtle Boy,” the Woodsman said. “And that bone gets touched by anyone but you and Little Danny reaps the whirlwind.”

  The Woodsman winked out.

  Guilt spread through Marc like malignant cancer. He gathered the corners of the decaying sack and hoisted the pile of bones off the floor. They clinked together like unholy wind chimes, and the sack felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He looked down at the stray bone in the pit. The impulse to pick it up struck, but then he remembered Danny’s sweet smiling face declaring “Marc’s here!” from the kitchen table. He trudged up the stairs. Feet pounded on the floorboards from multiple directions. He pushed the trap door open.

  Ken’s face greeted him at the top of the stairs.

  “Are you all right?”

  Hell no, he wasn’t all right. He was as far from all right as he’d ever been.

  Marc nodded. “Yeah. Hey, there’s no constable down there. I think it was—“

  “We know,” Ken said. He pulled the sack from Marc’s hands.

  Marc almost snatched it back, knowing that, short one bone, its power to destroy the Woodsman was incomplete. But Danny…

  “We all stay in Dave’s sight for the rest of this,” Ken said.

  Marc argued with himself internally about the wisdom or cowardice of his decision. The argument would continue for decades, until he found his answer at the Sagebrook water tower.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Present day.

  Later that night after dinner and the revelation of Marc’s letter, Ken sat alone at the desk in his room. A blank piece of Village Green Inn stationery lay on the desk and taunted him.

  A year ago he could have done this without thinking. He still remembered whole passages from translating Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries. He had lists of properties and prices at his beck and call. He remembered the mean distance of each planet from the sun because he once read it on a chart.

  But that was a year ago. Now he not only forgot his hotel room number, he had a hard time consistently knowing where he was at all. He’d filled pages in his notebook today with two truths and a lie. He was deathly afraid he’d disconnect in front of his friends and never find his way back. What hope was there that he could retrieve that old Latin prayer he’d last spoken on the worst night of his life?

  He’d even resorted to the Internet from his laptop. Three search engines yielded exactly zip. If the worldwide web didn’t contain obscure prayers to eradicate evil spirits, what the hell good was it? He was on his own.

  He colored in the center of the “g” in the “village” logo, as if getting the ink to flow might make his mind follow suit. No dice.

  He had two hours to get this finished. The pressure was on, and that only made the white space in his brain grow whiter. The harder he tried to remember, the farther the memory raced away.

  He was sure he’d never remember it. A three-decade-old prayer in a dead foreign language he hadn’t spoken since that miserable night in the mill? Who was he kidding, especially now that his memory had all the holding capacity of an inverted bowl?

  He thought about how he got back to the Village Green Inn when he had disconnected before. How parallel memories made connections to the one he sought. If he could remember that inconsequential moment in his life when he saw that moving truck, he’d damn well better be able to pull this little rabbit out of the same hat.

  A frontal assault wasn’t working. Perhaps he could sneak up from behind. He stopped trying to remember the prayer. Instead he tried to remember when he was studying the prayer. He’d looked at it dozens of times, but he seriously worked it the Thursday night before finals, when he and Jeff should have been studying…what was it…yes, physics.

  He put himself back in his bedroom circa 1980. He saw the old Boston concert poster on the wall, the tiny B-17 suspended from the ceiling. The bedspread was that awful avocado color that was the rage of the mid-70s. He saw Jeff at the desk, feet propped up like he owned the place, dumb-ass Mets cap pushed back on his head. He could hear Jeff’s voice, talking about getting into college, about how graduation would change everything.

  Then Ken saw it, in all its black-and-white glory. The missing prayer sat in his lap as he lay propped up against the headboard. He heaved a sigh of relief and began to copy it to the paper.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. In nomine Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigentum ajuvandum me festina.”

  As he wrote, sometimes the words went gray, sometimes they vanished completely, like animals scattered before a predator. Each time, he calmed his racing heart and zoomed back out from his mental picture of the page until once more he could see the whole room, with Jeff sitting at his desk and he on his bed. Then he would rotate the room and zoom back in. All the words returned, lured back like meerkats told by their sentinel that the coast is clear.

  By the time he’d transcribed the prayer’s closing, he was scant minutes from the Half Dozen’s parking lot rendezvous. Nervous sweat coated his palms and brow. He checked the prayer out for obvious grammatical or syntax errors, but there were none. This was the prayer, word for word, note for note. It was the heartfelt request
that God open the gates between our world and the hereafter, and let souls pass.

  Ken folded it and placed it on his shirt pocket. He pulled out his notebook and wrote:

  DIG UP THE BONE OF THE WOODSMAN TONIGHT.

  SEND HIM TO HELL WITH THE PRAYER IN YOUR POCKET.

  YOU ARE CERTAIN YOU CAN DO THIS.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Paul’s living room was the same, but at the same time it was different.

  With an hour to go before meeting back up with the Half Dozen, he sat on the couch, feet propped up on the end table, in front of the TV. The Yankees were batting against Oakland. He stared through the game, mind working overtime elsewhere.

  He’d grown up in this living room. The same four walls were here, the same creaking ceiling fan he’d been afraid to turn on since he was six years old still hung in the center. This was the room where his family ate TV dinners on Sunday night and watched The Wonderful World of Disney before being shuffled off to bed. This was the room where his mother cried on the shoulder of a dark blue uniform after she heard the news of her husband’s death. His family’s heart beat inside this small space.

  After his mother’s death, he and Hallie had moved back in. The room felt different. The carpet was new and the couch was now leather. Except for his father’s pictures, the décor was all different. But the physical trappings were a symptom, not a cause of the change. The soul of the house was gone. Paul loved Hallie with an intensity he could never let himself express, but it paled in comparison to the power of the extended ties of family, where parental and sibling bonds weaved a mesh so tight the world’s troubles could not leak through.

  As soon as Hallie told him she was pregnant, his perspective changed. A hundred things that had previously been immaterial were now a priority. Prenatal care. Childproof cabinet locks. Elementary school quality. College tuition. The worries were near overwhelming.

  But the house’s soul would be back. His home’s emotional heartbeat would be restarted. His child would sit on his lap here on the couch, as he had with his father. The shallow roots he and Hallie had put out would grow deep. The living room would return to what it had once been, the family room.

  If the Woodsman came back, he could just pull up stakes, move out of range. But the idea was a non-starter. This was, and would always be, his home. He might be on his own ten-yard line, but he wasn’t going to punt. He and the Half Dozen would go for the Hail Mary pass tonight.

  “You okay, hon?”

  Hallie’s question jolted Paul back to the now. She came to the couch and sat down with an awkward lurch. Paul couldn’t see the baby from the outside, but he knew she could feel it from the inside. She spun around and laid her head on his lap. He ran his fingers through her hair. It was a cliché, but since Hallie had conceived, Paul had never seen her so beautiful.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said.

  “You’ve been distant the last few days,” she said. “Is it the Towers again?”

  Paul had a front row seat on 9-11, close enough to be enveloped in the dust when Tower One took the lives of a bunch of his fellow officers. What the NYPD psychologist called a slight case of PTSD followed, as if any case of PTSD could be slight. His first marriage had not survived it. Hallie had helped him tame it.

  “No, no,” he said. He gave her stomach a caress with his fingertips. “Nothing like that.”

  “If being a father is worrying you,” she said, “stop right now. You will be amazing.”

  “I’m not worried, I’m excited.”

  “Something’s been wrong since your friends arrived,” she said.

  Actually, something had been wrong since his friends left thirty years ago, something he’d hidden deeper than the horrors from One World Trade, something not even Hallie would ever know about.

  “Is it about Bob’s death?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. Not exactly a lie, just a circuitous truth. Bob’s death. Dave’s limp. The burned mill. The threat to his new family if he failed tonight. One long list of the Woodsman’s evil offspring. Paul gave Hallie’s waist a squeeze.

  “I love you,” he said. “And I’ll take care of you and our child. Whatever it takes.”

  “Why else do you think I married an ex-cop?” she said with an impish smile.

  He leaned down and kissed his wife. Her lips were warm and responsive. She wrapped her arms around his neck. She pulled away and whispered in his ear.

  “Take me upstairs and you might get lucky.”

  He lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the stairway.

  “I’m already the luckiest man on earth,” he said.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Jeff stood by his Cadillac in the wan light of the Village Inn parking lot. He’d broken out the Mets hat for old time’s sake. He saw Ken at the far end of the lot in a random search mode. He called to him and Ken looked over, relieved.

  “You serious with that hat?” Ken asked when he arrived.

  “Never hunt ghosts without it.”

  Dave arrived next, clearly favoring his right leg after the full day on his feet. “You know the Mets still suck,” he said.

  “I’ve heard.”

  Paul pulled up next to the Cadillac. He had the foresight to bring a shovel along with the box of talismans from Bob’s house. It would have been hell for the four of them to be digging with their hands.

  They got into Jeff’s rental, Ken in the front seat. Unlike thirty years ago, this time there was no elaborate deception planned for the trip in. If they hadn’t had to carry the conspicuous shovel around, they’d have walked over to the cemetery.

  This time it would be simple, small. One bone rated a ring of fire about ten inches wide. The talismans would be so close together they would damn near touch. All would be under control this time.

  “Something you guys should know,” Paul said before Jeff started the car. “Hallie’s pregnant. Founder or not, if this thing is ever loose again, my child will be target number one. We have to get this right.”

  “No problem,” Jeff said.

  “Congratulations,” Dave said, “And when we have time later, I’ll give you crap about being so old you’ll have to coach your son’s Little League team from a walker.”

  Jeff pulled out of the parking lot. He had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The four of them were together, going out to hunt a demon in the night in Sagebrook village. They even had a shovel.

  Jeff turned to Ken. Ken had that thousand-yard stare again, like some shell-shocked doughboy. Jeff had caught him with it a few times before.

  “Ken, you up for kicking some evil spirit’s ass?”

  Ken didn’t look back into the car. He just tapped the breast pocket of his shirt. “Ready, willing and able.”

  Jeff felt rejuvenated. When he was with what remained of the Dirty Half Dozen, he felt no older than he was when they last stood together. The personal jading brought on by his three marriages, the mental grind of running a major corporation, the minor aches and pains that seemed to multiply each year, all these things retreated. Now in the darkness of the car, where the gray hair and the deepening wrinkles could not be seen, there was nothing that said they weren’t all seventeen again.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  The ancient headstones stuck from the ground at odd angles, like rows of teeth in need of braces. Many had cracked in half where the elements had exploited the stone’s imperfections, and now had only half each decedent’s story to tell. A breeze blew two plastic shopping bags through the cemetery like ghostly tumbleweeds. The wind gusted. The bags took flight and blew over the spikes of the rusting wrought iron fence.

  The four knew exactly what tree Marc referred to in his note. One oak dominated the otherwise clear space, a sapling left standing when the first settlers cleared the land for their dead. The indirect light from St. Andrew’s security floods were enough to make out the north side of the tree’s base. Two thick roots broke the surface in a narrow ‘V’.

  “Now
if I was a teenage violin player,” Dave said. “I’d bury it here.”

  Jeff grabbed the shovel from Paul and thrust it into the ground. The earth gave way easily. The other three watched the small hole grow.

  Jeff was only two feet down when the blade thunked against something solid. Paul knelt down. His hands disappeared into the darkness. He excavated by feel for a moment then pulled a rectangular object up into the light.

  The rusted metal made identification difficult, but enough of the picture remained to make it possible. Will Robinson and Dr. Smith stared at them from the lid of a Lost in Space lunchbox.

  “I just figured out the real reason Marc didn’t want to be here,” Dave said. “The humiliation. I remember he had that in like fifth grade.”

  Paul pried at the lid and it gave way with a tiny, rusty wail. Inside laid a yellowed finger bone, almost an inch long.

  For a moment they all stared at the last remnant of Thomas Silas, the Woodsman’s last window to their world. Thirty years melted away, and Jeff felt the same way he did the first time he saw those bones on the mill basement. Anxious. Excited. Scared.

  Ken pulled the prayer out of his pocket and unfolded it. “Let’s close the door,” he said.

  “How about we take it from here?” a woman’s voice said behind them.

  Jeff recognized the voice immediately. She was the one on the taped message on Bob’s phone.

  They whirled to find they were surrounded by four men and a woman. The men were in their early twenties, the woman perhaps ten years older. She had severely short black hair, and the tail of some enormous tattoo crawled up her neck from under her black shirt. Two silver studs pierced the right side of her nose.

  The men were variations of scraggly Goth with their own variety of facial piercings. One of the men leveled a pistol at the four around the hole.

  “Put the box down,” the pistol-wielding man said, “and step away from the tree.”

  Four middle-aged men versus five people half their age and a pistol. Jeff didn’t like the odds. Hell, he hadn’t been in a fistfight since junior high school. He checked his friends. Dave leaned on his cane and looked like a deer in the headlights. Ken looked alarmed. Paul…