“Well, let’s go then,” he said to Kenny, gesturing off toward a wild and pathless tangle of woods. “You’re wasting daylight.”
Kenny grinned. Todd couldn’t tell whether it was relief, excitement, or nervous energy that flooded his brother’s features. It may have been a little of all three.
Todd found that as they got ready to go, his anxiety about their surroundings began to wane. For that, he was glad. He supposed the distraction of actually doing something, of taking charge of himself in his environment, restored some sense of control. They yanked on their hiking boots and loaded up their backpacks with water, Power-Bars, knives, and other essentials, secured their food in a bundle that they hung from a nearby high tree branch, and then headed away from the campsite. By the time they’d gotten their sleeping bags rolled up and bundled inside the tent, he found he was even kind of looking forward to finding his brother’s ghost chasm, or whatever it was supposed to be.
“You know,” Kenny said with a grin as he led the way down a sloping path toward some shadowed underbrush, “some say this chasm bounces. It’s like your black hole, right here on earth.”
Todd laughed, shoving his brother lightly. “Yeah, whatever. A magical, bouncing black hole in the ground.”
Kenny shrugged, the mirth suddenly gone from his features. “That’s what they say.”
“So how do you know how to find it?” Todd asked.
Kenny glanced back at his brother with a knowing smile. “Those friends I mentioned.”
Todd shook his head. “Still think this is bullshit,” he muttered, but Kenny didn’t answer.
For a while, the only sound was the crunching of the underbrush beneath their feet and of Kenny humming softly out of tune to himself; they’d gone off-trail through a dense expanse of pines, and the deeper they went, the more it seemed Kenny was going out of his way to find the hardest route to get there. It was maybe half an hour or so in before it occurred to Todd that Kenny was leading them without a GPS or map. He seemed to know exactly where to go, as convoluted as it was. At least, Todd hoped his brother knew where he was going. He’d mentioned those friends again, but Todd knew most of Kenny’s friends from school and around the old neighborhood. He’d never heard any of them talk about the Pine Barrens, let alone Nilhollow. Furthermore, he couldn’t imagine even the combined brainpower of any of those potheads could provide so detailed a set of directions to such a remote location that Kenny would be able to find it without a map or compass or anything. So who were the friends, exactly, with such intimate knowledge of the place? Todd was just about to ask him when they broke through into a small clearing littered with dead pine needles and cones. Kenny stopped short and Todd, who had been watching the unfamiliar ground beneath his feet to avoid a spill, nearly plowed into him.
“What?” he asked, waiting.
Kenny exhaled with what seemed to Todd to be a mixture of relief, satisfaction, and awe, and dropped his backpack.
“Here it is,” he said with uncharacteristic reverence. “The Nilhollow Chasm.”
The Nilhollow Chasm wasn’t a hole, exactly; it was more of a jagged tear in the earth. As they approached, Todd saw that it only ran about six or seven feet long and was no more than three feet wide. Peering in, though, he suspected it ran pretty deep—so deep, in fact, that beyond the jutting rocks and tumbles of dirt was nothing but black. He thought that if he were to drop a quarter down there, he might never hear it hit the bottom. That idea was followed immediately and inexplicably by the thought that if he were to drop anything down there, something from beneath the earth might very well reach up and grab his arm, sinking shining black claws into his skin and muscle, and drag him in. He might never find himself hitting bottom, either.
It was a crazy thought. Stupid. Still, he took a step back from the edge.
“So,” Kenny said, spreading out his arms to indicate the breadth of the area. He stood right on the cusp of the chasm, inhaling that stale air deeply. “What do you think?”
Todd looked around. At first, nothing struck him as being any stranger than where they’d set up camp. When he looked closer, though, he saw it—a subtle difference in the healthiness, the naturalness of the surrounding flora, as if the essence of Nilhollow’s weirdness started right where they stood. Along the circumference of the clearing, the branches of the trees grew twisted in painfully odd angles, with most of the bark a rot-gray color. The pines and oaks there were sparser, an odd, washed-out gray-green not indicative of life or vitality but rather of illness or poison. That was the impression they left on Todd—a kind of unwholesomeness, a landscape barely able to fight through its strangled existence. The surrounding brush was strange, too. Had they just tramped through all that? How hadn’t he noticed how . . . infected everything looked? The thin grass, pale yellow in some places and nearly colorless in others, clung to the ground in clumps like fists determined to claw their way to that chasm. From beds of desiccated ferns, odd thorny bushes grew, black and talon sharp. There were no sounds of bugs or birds, no frogs, no crunching of leaves beneath anonymous hooves or paws. There was nothing but a silence heavy with expectation, a silence so dense as to almost be a low hum. It seemed as much inside his head as out, a heavy, cottony feeling that dulled his thoughts. He felt tamped down, in a way. Run through. He swayed a little where he stood, aware in the periphery of his mind that something . . . someone . . . something had changed. It hurt his head, though, to try to focus, to bring any kind of sharper awareness to himself and his surroundings.
The low hum seemed to be getting louder. It sounded to him vaguely like the churning up of something, a kind of atavistic crunching and turning over of living things into oblivion. And beneath that, there were windy whispers that clotted his ears. In the whispers, he thought he heard a myriad of voices, anxious and insistent.
That faint death smell was stronger here.
Todd was sure in that moment, standing there, feet away from that narrow chasm with the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck on end, that whatever was wrong with Nilhollow had originated in there, in the clearing. In the chasm.
That was when Kenny turned on him, and with a grim smile, buried the sharp end of a stick about an inch or so into Todd’s shoulder.
Todd staggered back, as much in surprise as in pain. The sight of his own blood made him feel a little queasy. “Ken, what the fu—”
Kenny punched him in the mouth. His eyes flashed wildly, turned entirely black and shining for just a moment, and then returned with a murderous fervor. “You arrogant, ungrateful son of a bitch,” he snarled.
A flood of anger replaced the pain in Todd’s jaw. “Dick,” he said, a trickle of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. He swung at Kenny, landing a blow squarely on his brother’s eye. Kenny tumbled back and then, tripping over a root, fell on his ass. His hand slid toward the edge of the chasm in a spray of pebbles that tumbled into the darkness. He looked up at Todd with a dazed expression, as if awaking in a strange bedroom. The fire in his eyes was gone.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Todd swayed where he stood. The blood trickling down his arm was getting sticky. He swiped at it with the hem of his T-shirt and grabbed the stick. The slightest pull sent electric sparks of pain through the length of his arm.
“Why’d you hit me?” Kenny mumbled. “What—what happened to your arm?”
Todd gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? You—you fucking stabbed me and then punched me in the face. What the fuck you been smoking this morning, huh?”
“What? No. I-it wasn’t me,” Kenny said. “It wasn’t—it was—”
Todd flopped down in front of him. Kenny was sweating profusely, his skin flushed. His injured eye had grown quickly and alarmingly bloodshot. It was swelling to a waxy red. Todd frowned, feeling a little guilty. He hadn’t thought he’d hit Kenny so hard. “What the hell’s going on, bro? You okay?”
“What time is it?” Kenny asked absently. “Where’s the car?” He retched and turned sudde
nly on his side, vomiting onto the grass. What came out of him was clear and kind of jellylike, with threads of loosely clotted blood, and it smoked as it hit the ground.
“Oh my God, oh my God. What the fuck?” Todd dropped to his knees and put a hand on his brother’s shoulder with the intent of helping him up. “We’ve gotta go, man, get you help—”
“No.”
“Look, you’re sick or something, Ken—”
“No!” Kenny’s voice dropped to a growl Todd had never heard before. Kenny rolled onto his back and glared up at him. “I’m fine.” His eyes closed for several seconds as Todd gaped, then he opened the uninjured one. When he did, there was nothing in it that Todd recognized as his brother.
They regarded each other for a moment, breathing heavily. Todd was aware that the cottony feeling in his head had dissipated a little, but not enough for rational planning. The car . . . yeah, getting to the car would be good. But where had they parked it? For that matter, where was the campsite? Hell, where had their backpacks gone? And what time was it, after all? He thought he might be hungry . . . or maybe thirsty; he couldn’t tell which. As he rose to his feet, he absently tried to pull out the stick again, but fresh fireworks of agony set him off in a flurry of oaths.
Kenny coughed and sat up. There was blood on his chin. The emptiness in his un-swollen eye, the hollowness of his whole expression, unnerved Todd.
The heavy earth scent of old, wet leaves rotting filled Todd’s nose and throat as he breathed in, and he started coughing, too. “Ken, something’s wrong here. We gotta go—”
Kenny leaned forward as if to get to his feet, but stopped. He looked up at Todd in surprise. At first, Todd couldn’t wrap his mind around what his eyes were seeing. A root or vine from the depths of the chasm behind Kenny had wrapped itself tightly around his arm. The flesh beneath was already bright red and a little shiny. Kenny clawed at it with his free hand. It took another root snaking up from the chasm and wrapping itself around Kenny’s waist before Todd was jarred to action. He dove for Kenny’s free arm and pulled. Kenny’s grip on his own arm felt like a steel vise, and Todd had the crazy notion that his brother’s fingers would punch right through to his muscle. He pulled. Kenny’s eyes were wide. His mouth gaped open, but no sound came out. Another vine had wrapped around his neck and was now working its way down Kenny’s throat. His face was bright pink, and he’d begun to make little gagging sounds. From his pocket, Todd snatched the pocket knife he always carried and flicked it open, immediately going to work on the vines. He stabbed and sawed, stabbed and sawed, and finally broke through the one on Kenny’s neck. It burst open in a spray of that same clear jelly that had been in Kenny’s stomach. It splattered on Todd’s face and he flinched; it reeked of rotting leaves and bad earth, and it burned a little on his skin.
The moment of distraction gave the vines a chance to yank Kenny nearly out of Todd’s grasp, but he clasped his brother’s hand at the last moment and held tightly. Todd sank the blade of his knife up to the handle in a vine that was working its way toward his ankle, and the vine jerked back, then whip-lashed his face. The sting across his eye socket was immense; his vision blurred and Todd lost his grip on Kenny. He fell onto his back just as another vine whipped along the other side of his face, splitting his lip and biting into his cheek. In the next moment, Todd was aware that his mouth felt too large, somehow lopsided. The blood that spilled down his neck confirmed the tear at the corner of his mouth into the meat of his face.
Then Kenny started screaming.
And that, thought Todd as he lay dazed on his back, seemed surreal. His brother shouldn’t have been able to scream. The remnants of the vine around and down his throat should have made it impossible to get enough air. He shouldn’t have been able to scream. The thought played in a mental loop, eclipsing the horror in front of him. He shouldn’t have been able to scream, but there it was, an ungodly wail, a howling whine that broke through the haze in his head and the pain in his face and body until Todd understood.
It wasn’t Kenny screaming. It was whatever was below him, in the chasm.
The vine around Kenny’s waist yanked him backward toward the yawning maw in the ground—and it did seem to yawn, or at least to waver in width as Todd watched it. Kenny’s eyes, still wide, now looked glazed over, as if whatever had been behind them was winking out. The vine jerked him back again, and this time, Kenny’s ass disappeared in the hole. It looked to Todd like Kenny was sitting in an inner tube, floating down the grass on that hot summer morning, and the absurdity of the comparison made him laugh—just a bark before the pain from the jagged flaps of his torn face put an end to that. The good side of Todd’s mouth was turned up in a smirk, though, as Kenny sank through that imagined doughnut-hole of inner tube, his knees smacking against his chest. Kenny made no move to reach out to him, but a flicker of understanding registered in his eyes before they glazed over again. They didn’t close, and somehow, that made Todd want to giggle, too.
The vine that was wrapped around Kenny’s arm gave a sharp yank and Kenny toppled sideways, a spray of blood painting his face before that, too, disappeared down the gap in the earth. His other arm flipped up in an exaggerated good-bye wave before the Nilhollow Chasm finally swallowed Kenny whole.
At that point, Todd did start laughing despite the pain—long, loud brays of harsh, dry laughter that eventually became crying.
TWO
The last of the police reports that Julia Russo filed against her ex-boyfriend, Darren, was right before she got lost in the woods.
If anyone had told her at twenty that her taste in men was only going to get worse over the next decade and a half, she might have laughed it off, at least outwardly. In her own mind, though, it wouldn’t have surprised her. She had never had good luck spotting what others called “red flags.” She’d come to think of those little odd and sometimes jarring behaviors in other people, particularly in men she dated, as simply personality quirks, many of which she made an effort to accept for a number of reasons.
For one, Julia’s parents had long drilled into her head that she was not perfect—far from it, in fact. Each day had been an inevitable catalog of all Julia’s personality flaws, everything from the way she did her hair (a shoulder-length face-frame of shining black with a dip always over her eye) to the way she dressed (things that were too tight, too short, or too low-cut). She was, at times, too thin or too chubby. Her job as a corporate administrative assistant was a dead end. Her apartment was a disaster. Her sense of time was nearly nonexistent. Her parents’ list of her shortcomings was quite extensive, and it drilled into her the idea that if she wasn’t perfect and yet still wanted to be loved, the very least she could do was try to accept the flaws of others. Give what you want to receive, she’d heard once, and it seemed like a pretty good general rule to live by.
She also didn’t much care for confronting people about how those quirks affected her, another lesson she’d learned from her parents. To voice a concern, to stand up for herself, to offer a constructive criticism, all met with icy silence followed by a cold shoulder. Confrontation was another surefire way to lose affection.
The irony of her parent’s criticism of her love life, she’d come to realize, was that they had driven her eventually to date Darren, someone as critical and prone to withhold love as they were. Darren, who at first had seemed so completely opposite her parents—so nurturing and loving and patient, so enamored with all the unique qualities that defined her, so very attracted to her looks and physique.
Darren, who had spray-painted WHORE across her garage door while she was out with her old college roommate in a noisy restaurant one night, because he had called her six times and she never heard the phone. Darren, who had once tried to burn her hands by holding them tightly against a mug full of hot coffee.
Darren, who’d received the restraining order and then buried an ax in her front door.
Their relationship had been strained for a long time, probably longer than Julia
had truly realized. It had only been maybe three or four months into the relationship before the first of the quirks appeared. These came in the form of mildly critical and condescending comments toward her and disdain of her relationships with others. He didn’t quite call her fat, but he’d shake his head and comment that it was a good thing he was so accepting of her body and the weight he saw she’d gained. He didn’t outright accuse her of cheating, but he’d get so mad when he even thought she was looking at someone else, or paying too much attention to another man at a party. His tone of voice, his implications and suggestions, and his disapproving looks said far more about his thinking her stupid than any name-calling could. And those things made her second-guess her own words and actions. She began to watch everything she ate, even when he wasn’t around. She watched what she said, avoided eye contact with most men, even watched how she dressed. Suddenly, all her endearing quirks had come to annoy him, as they inevitably did everyone, she supposed. She was, after all, flawed, and maybe she wasn’t quite seeing the impropriety of her behavior. Maybe she was letting herself go. Maybe she really was embarrassing herself, and him, too. She tried to be more on top of her looks, more conservative and tasteful in her dress, more thoughtful and sensitive to his needs, more careful, more observant of how she conducted herself. She tried to be more.
It wasn’t enough, and over time, she let him convince her that she had changed, as all women eventually change, revealing their shallow self-centeredness, their capacity, like feral and predatory things, to lie and manipulate their way into men’s beds and wallets. All women, he told her, were that way underneath. It was a survival mechanism to be so, because they were essentially weak and worthless. They wanted men to think for them, take care of them, put them on pedestals, but that only gave them a sense of entitlement to run roughshod over everybody and everything.
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