She felt those tears of panic welling up in her eyes again, and she wiped at them good and hard with the hem of her T-shirt. She was not going to die in these woods. She’d been through too much, survived too much, to even entertain the thought another moment.
She dumped the rest of the contents of her purse onto the ground in front of her. A bunch of crumpled-up old gas station receipts fluttered out among some paper clips. Her wallet and a small bottle of water hit the dirt with soft thumps. There was also a travel-sized bottle of ibuprofen, a business card for the lawn guy, a heavily creased pamphlet about domestic violence awareness, a pen with TD Bank’s logo along the side, and a couple of batteries. It struck her all as useless junk, meaningless crap that people carried around every day, thinking they needed it all. It was funny how the whole meaning of the word “need” had shifted for her. She didn’t need to get her nails done or need a new pair of shoes or a glass of wine, not there in the woods. And she didn’t need any of the junk she’d thought so indispensable as to carry in that purse, she thought bitterly.
She was about to hurl the pile into a nearby bush when a voice inside her head told her to stop. Perhaps it was the voice of instinct, more urgent and less refined than conscience, a long-dormant part of her that was kicking in now that she was lost in the wild.
Maybe it wasn’t just useless junk, the voice suggested. Maybe some of it, at least, could be used for something. Just maybe it was all about looking at things a different way.
She scooped all of the contents back into her purse except the compact, the mirror part of which she held up to the feeble moonlight trickling through the treetops. She couldn’t quite angle it right to use it as a source of illumination. She sighed, tucked it into the front pocket of her purse where her phone had been, and zipped it all up. If, God forbid, she hadn’t made it back to her car by morning, she might be able to use the compact for something else. She knew people made fires with mirrors, and she had paper for kindling. Or she could break the mirror and use the shards for something. She didn’t want to think like that, though. She hadn’t wandered that far in. She was sure that with a little bit of hiking, she could find her way back. Traffic was sparse on the road where her car was parked, and the woods seemed to be dampening sound anyway, since she couldn’t even hear crickets or tree frogs . . . but still, it couldn’t be too hard to find the path and just follow it back to the road. Then she’d flag someone down, hopefully a cop, and get him or her to call a tow truck.
That Darren could be waiting for her back at her car briefly fluttered across her mind, but she shooed it away. Now was no time for thoughts like that. First things first: She needed to find the path.
Swinging her purse on her shoulder, she headed back in the direction from which, in her best estimate, she had originally come. As she walked, it dawned on her that she could avoid going in circles by marking the trees. She dug into her makeup bag and grabbed her lipstick. The next sizable tree she found had rough, heavily lined grayish bark, but she managed to draw a big wine-colored X on it. Satisfied, she moved on. Ten feet or so later, she marked another tree, and ten feet beyond that, another. It made her feel resourceful to be taking control of the situation. Ten feet more and she marked another tree, and when the overgrowth forced her to bear left, she marked that tree with an arrow.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, she felt a tinge of unease that she hadn’t found the path yet. It hadn’t taken her so long to get to that thicket as it had for her to get to this point, and there was no path in sight. However, she told herself she’d been running scared—she could have covered more ground than she’d thought in a short time and a blind panic. She’d just keep going. She looked at the nearly flat stub of lipstick she had left, and at the dark clump of trees ahead of her, and hoped she was closer to that path than it seemed.
Several more minutes of digging into the lipstick holder to get enough lipstick to continue marking trees brought her no closer, though. That pat on the back she was saving for herself was seeming less and less deserved. Then she happened to look up at a tree straight ahead of her, looming out of the darkness. A patch of faint moonlight had escaped the canopy of leaves above and landed squarely on the trunk, and what she saw made her frown in confusion.
The tree had a large wine-colored X, faintly waxy in the pale moonshine. It had been drawn crudely on the trunk, and her first thought was I didn’t do that. That’s not one of mine. Of course, it was a silly thought. She was pretty damned sure she was the only one out there marking trees with lipstick, so who else’s could it be?
Still, it was displeasing to see one X ahead of her when she thought they’d have all been behind. She was sure she’d been going in a straight line, so how had she managed to double back to any of the marked trees anyway? The idea resurfaced that it wasn’t one of her Xs at all, and that was why—which was silly, wasn’t it?
She glanced behind her and around the marked tree, but couldn’t tell what was familiar and what wasn’t. She took a deep breath and tried to exhale the unease she felt. She’d just check out that X over there and at least see if she could remember when she’d made it and thereby figure out at what point she’d started retracing her steps.
Moving cautiously, as if the tree itself might bite her, she approached the trunk and examined the X. It certainly looked like lipstick. She touched it, smearing the mark, and rubbed the waxy residue between her fingers, then held them up to look at them. It was her lipstick, all right. So it had to be one of her Xs—no entertaining silly thoughts otherwise. But how could she have gone so wildly off course? Was it when she had gone left past the overgrowth of grasses and shrubs?
She took a few steps back and studied the X again. She just couldn’t tell in the dark, in unfamiliar woods, where and when she’d made the X. That tree, as far as she was concerned, looked just like every other one—at least every other one she’d marked. She supposed she should have marked distinctly different types of trees—skinny and fat, short and tall, pines, cedars, and oaks. But could she have even remembered what she marked and when, well enough for that to make a difference?
Julia let out a little growl of frustration. Her brain refused to accept that all that walking had been for nothing, and that she was no closer to the car than she’d been before. But there was the X, her X, on the tree. Tears welled up in her eyes and she let them blur the X for a moment before wiping them away with the back of her hand. Damn.
Well, she couldn’t stay there all night staring at a tree. It occurred to her that if she really had doubled back, then there would be another X ten feet ahead of her, and at the very least, she could follow her own trail of Xs to where she’d gone off course. She peered into the dark beyond the tree and wished she had her cell phone for the flashlight app. With a sigh, she plunged forward into the inkiness.
Arms outstretched to help her navigate the lightless woods, she walked for what seemed like a long time. She could barely make out the trunks in what little moonlight filtered through the leaves, but she was pretty sure she’d come across no more Xs. It was useless. She was just about to turn back when there it was—an X on a tree that caught enough moonlight to look glossy. As she got close enough to make out its details, she saw that one of the legs was smeared, and for a second she had a horrible sinking feeling that she had managed to wind up where she started again. However, as she studied it, she noticed that this smear was on the opposite side, and tapered off in an odd, wiggling way around the side of the trunk. Maybe a bear had brushed against it, or a deer. She moved closer for a look.
Up really close, it didn’t look like a smear at all. There were marks more deliberate than just squiggles and swirls—actual symbols, it looked to her, and not smears at all. Her stomach tightened as she followed them around the trunk.
“Wait,” she murmured out loud. “That can’t be right. I didn’t . . .” It was difficult to make out details—the moonlight was a little fainter here—but she was sure the trail of markings ended with a pair
of crude stick figures. One was running, its hair streaming out behind it. It carried a bag on a strap. The figure behind followed, its legs tented in exaggerated movement. That one held a line from which protruded a triangle on its side—a simple stick-figure version of an ax.
Like the symbols, the figures had been drawn in lipstick. Her lipstick.
I can’t be seeing that. I can’t! No no no no no! her mind screamed. She snapped her head back and forth, frantically searching the Stygian patches between the trees. Could it have been Darren? Was he out there still? Had he seen her Xs and drawn this to scare her? Confuse her? But where would he have gotten the same color lipstick? She glanced down at the tube in her hand, what was left of the lipstick itself clinging to the nearly hollowed-out base. She threw it as hard as she could, disgusted.
A funny thought, an alien idea really, passed through her mind that she had done it herself, that the trauma of the day had somehow played itself out as she marked the trees and she had just blocked it out. But that seemed as crazy to her as Darren lurking around in the shadows, drawing on trees with lipstick to torment her. It was ridiculous. This whole thing was—
Long, bony fingers on her shoulder made her cry out, spinning around. No one was there. A low-hanging limb from a nearby tree had caught a chill breeze and bounced a skeletal branch just enough to tap her on the shoulder. She glared at it, wanting to both laugh and cry in relief and frustration, before turning back to the tree.
The stick figures were gone. So was the X. Julia sucked in a breath. She touched the trunk, felt the cracked, uneven bark beneath her fingertips, then drew back her hand as if bitten. In truth, she would have sworn it had been cool to her touch but the bark itself had moved under her hand.
She was losing her grip, just like in all the urban legends about this place. Maybe that was how it happened to people. Maybe traumas or stress or fugues or whatever made them see, hear, and think crazy things, and those hallucinations kept them wandering around until there just wasn’t anything left in them. Or maybe she was overtired, sad, scared, and lonely, and her mind and the flimsy light were playing tricks on her.
Or maybe all that time with Darren and no other support network had done more damage than she thought.
Pull it together, girl, she told herself. Come on now. Get it together and get out of here. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.
Julia turned away from the tree and headed in a different direction entirely. She was very tired suddenly and very confused, but she was most definitely done with X-marked trees for the night. A new direction, any direction other than the insane circles she’d been making, would be a welcome change.
She realized with some frustration as she backtracked that the last X she had come across, the one before her little hiccup of unreality, was nowhere to be seen. She was, if possible, even more lost than she’d been to begin with. She couldn’t quite bring to a conscious level of her mind the idea that she might actually have to spend the night out there in the woods, but it was pushing closer to the surface all the same.
As Julia reached a small clearing she didn’t recognize at all, she sighed audibly. She wanted to scream, but the frustration stuck in her throat. She looked around helplessly. Which way should she go now? She didn’t want to be stuck here, but she doubted she’d ever find her way anywhere at night. Most of her surroundings were swathed in shadows so thick that she could have been buried alive, for all she could see.
Common logic dictated that when people were lost—in the woods or elsewhere—they were supposed to stay put, to make it easier for rescuers to find them. That assumed, of course, that someone—anyone—was out there looking. Even if someone was, it could be hours, maybe even days before anyone found her. The Pine Barrens spread for miles and miles over a few different state forests, and no one knew she was in Nilhollow specifically—not unless by some chance they’d found her car. Even if they had narrowed it down to Nilhollow, even with dogs and helicopters and search teams, it could be . . . well, longer than she thought she could stand being there. Not to mention, what would she do if she ran into a further problem? The heat could dehydrate her. She could starve or break a leg or get cut and develop sepsis. She could fall off a cliff or get attacked by a bear, or . . .
No. No, she wouldn’t, and she just couldn’t sit there waiting. God, she’d already been out in the dirt and heat and dark longer than she’d have liked on a good day, let alone all that had happened that afternoon. She wanted out of there, and sitting like a lump on a log, figuratively or literally, wasn’t going to help her case.
Then she saw the figure.
A silhouette, it emerged from the darkness between the trees and into a patch of moonlight just beyond the far edge of the clearing, about sixty or seventy feet away. She couldn’t make out any features or details, but the build was tall and wiry, masculine, and so was its stance. It stood motionless, neither moving toward nor away from her. She felt a surge of hope; maybe whoever it was could help her get out of there.
“Excuse me,” she called, taking a hesitant step closer. “Excuse me, I’m lost and—”
She shut her mouth. What if it was Darren? Oh God . . . She squinted, trying to make out whether the silhouette held anything like an ax in its hands, but the harder she tried to discern the outline of its shape, the more it seemed to waver and meld with the shadows around it.
“Um, hello?” Her voice sounded odd in her own ears, out of place and tiny.
The figure didn’t answer. It didn’t move.
“Okay,” she said uncomfortably, the hope she’d initially felt draining from her. She hesitated to move away, to turn her back on it, whoever it was, but she didn’t think getting any closer to it was a good idea, either. Did it mean to hurt her? It looked like it had rolled around in leaves and twigs, if the silhouetted crown of sticks around its head was any indication. Maybe it was lost, too. Was it as startled to see her as she was to see it?
She tried one more time. “I’m sorry if I surprised you. I’ve just been wandering around here for a long time and I’m lost and I was wondering if you knew which direction the road was?”
She wished she had a flashlight. A flashlight and pepper spray, she thought. Just in case. It occurred to her that the figure didn’t have a flashlight, either. Timidly, she asked, “Are you lost, too?”
The figure tilted its head to one side as if curious but said nothing.
Julia suspected she wasn’t going to get any help; it was best to disengage. “Okay, well, I’m going to keep looking, then. Have a nice night.”
She backed up a couple of steps, and was surprised to see the figure move toward her to match the distance. She paused, then took two more steps back. The figure took two steps forward.
She frowned. “Uh . . . Darren? Darren, if that’s you—”
A sharp crack to her left made her flinch. It was followed by a few echoing cracks all around her. When her attention returned to the figure, she saw that its hand was raised as if in a frozen wave.
She felt a chill under her skin, and recognized it as the certainty that this figure was the one who had drawn the figures on the tree. Further, she had the crazy but indisputable notion that despite the human outline, the figure watching her wasn’t a person at all.
She felt tears welling in her eyes, born of fear, exhaustion, and frustration. She didn’t think she had it in her to weather whatever it was that was standing across the clearing from her. Maybe it was easier to just stand there and let whatever was going to happen, just happen.
Then the figure’s eyes seemed to burst into twin points of green flame. She cried out. Something deep inside her disagreed with her about standing still, because she found herself running in the opposite direction, her purse banging rhythmically against her hip as she flew through the darkness, heedless of branches and rocks and roots. Behind her, she could hear that crackling, moving from treetop to treetop, keeping pace with her. Occasionally, heavy tree branches fell alongside her, but none came close e
nough to hit her. She didn’t know if it was the thing with the fiery eyes or something else, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to want to hurt her just yet. Rather, she felt helplessly shepherded deeper into the Pine Barrens, deeper into the heart of Nilhollow.
When her leg muscles burned and her lungs felt squeezed empty and she couldn’t run anymore, she finally stopped, panting heavily, and listened. The woods were utterly silent—no tree frogs, no crickets, no bats. No sound at all.
She sank against a nearby tree and burst into heaving sobs, shaking as she pulled her knees close to her chest. When she’d cried herself to exhaustion, she put her purse down and laid her head on it, and before her thoughts could drift back to the thing that had been chasing her, she’d fallen into a deep and uneasy sleep.
FOUR
Officer Pete Grainger found himself repulsed by the man in cell 4 almost immediately.
As a New Jersey state trooper at the Red Lion Station for three years, Pete had seen all different kinds of people brought in from those damned Nilhollow woods with the full spectrum of DSM diagnoses. This man’s story was, on the surface, more or less the same as numerous others. He had been picked up in the Nilhollow area of the Pine Barrens with blood all over his shirt. A quick look-over revealed only two major injuries: a sharp stick jutting from his shoulder, and a severe facial wound by his mouth. However, it was impossible to tell without testing the shirt whether the blood was his or someone else’s. He didn’t seem able to tell them whose it was, either, nor could he tell them much about himself. He had no ID of any kind—no wallet or driver’s license, no credit or bank cards, and whenever police or staff asked him for personal information such as his name, what he’d been doing, where he was from, how he was feeling, or even what year it was, he’d laugh wildly until the pain in his cheek caught up with him and he’d turn away. They’d taken him to the closest hospital to get his facial wound stitched, the stick removed from his shoulder, and that wound cleaned and patched up. However, the hospital was a small, privately funded one, and they had no free beds and no psych ward to assure that he wouldn’t hurt himself or others. It would be some time before the psychiatric hospital in the area, St. Dymphna Psychiatric Medical Center, could provide facilities for him, so custody of the damaged man fell on the state troopers until people from St. Dymphna could come pick him up. That kind of situation didn’t happen often, but it had happened before, and Pete was no stranger to it.
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