Savage Woods

by Mary SanGiovanni

  When one looked at the circumstances a little more deeply, though, there were a few unsettling aspects that set it apart from other similar cases. For one thing, when the police saw him staggering along the side of the road, he had vines wrapped tightly enough around his neck to have bruised it. He’d taken off when he’d seen them, and they’d followed him to a small clearing to find him gnawing on a bone of the right size and shape to be a human femur. The sounds had been pretty horrible, between the crunching of the bone and the odd choking sounds his throat made from under the vines . . .

  Pete had been disgusted on an almost primal level before he’d even seen the man’s face.

  The guy was an odd case, to be sure. Under other circumstances, he might have been normal looking. His strawberry-blond hair was strewn with leaves and tiny twigs but it had been cut recently, and his jaw displayed no more than a day or two’s worth of stubble. There wasn’t much to explain how he’d descended into such wild savagery in what, by Pete’s estimation, couldn’t have been longer than a week. The man’s blood tests and tox screens were still out, but the preliminary medical exam had shown no track marks, no dilated pupils, no outward signs of brain damage or disease. He looked well fed, with an athletic body, but appeared not to have slept in days. His clothes and hair smelled like old leaves and dirt as well as campfire smoke, but that could describe just about any camper a few days into an expedition in those woods. Hell, it could describe a hiker after a few hours on the trails. Still, there was something unwholesome about him, and while it wasn’t a smell, exactly, it clung to him all the same, a cloying kind of wrongness hanging on him the way cigarette smoke lingers in people’s hair and clothes the day after a party.

  A lot of individuals the state police picked up, particularly from near the Nilhollow area, had to some degree a kind of wrongness about them. It was off-putting, but not enough to induce the kind of repulsion Pete felt toward the man in cell 4. No, with him, it was something more than that. That guy was not just another derelict with sunstroke or dehydration or some bad trip; he’d been chewing on someone’s bone, for God’s sake. There was something cruel, something malicious about him. He was dangerous. It was a gut reaction Pete couldn’t quite explain but found impossible to ignore. The man seemed both restrained and feral, a coiled thing biding its time. The few words he did speak gave him an air of having a much older soul than body. His guttural laughter and smoothly animal mannerisms were cautious, deliberate, nearly silent, like a predator.

  A predator. Cunning darkened his eyes.

  The Red Lion Station was to keep him for a few hours in a holding cell until Sanchez and Wilkes from St. Dymphna could pick him up, and Pete, being the new guy, had drawn the first half of the night guard shift. Between those beastly eyes watching him and the weird choking noises the man still occasionally made despite being freed from the vines, he had set Pete on edge. In truth, it made Pete want to hit the guy in the face. It took a surprising amount of restraint not to.

  He had finally dozed off on the cell’s cot at about eight thirty that night, to Pete’s relief. He was sure to sleep awhile; he needed it, if the bags under his eyes were any indication. Hearing the light snores from cell 4, Pete finally began to relax. Night shift would be smooth, then. After all, the man was behind bars. Even if he hadn’t been sleeping, what was he, really, except wild eyes and weird breathing? Just a nut job. Pete was a trained New Jersey state trooper with a gun. It had been ridiculous of him to have been unnerved by it. It wasn’t like the guy could actually cause trouble from inside the cell anyway.

  As he made his way to the coffeepot in the back-room kitchenette, he realized with some consternation that all his self-reassurance had done little to dispel the distinct feeling that whatever had happened to the man out in Nilhollow had broken something inside him irreparably. Something had infected him, and was rotting him from the inside out. And when his shell cracked and whatever it was leaked out of him, would it spread to others?

  And what the hell kind of thought was that? Pete shook his head. The man in cell 4 wasn’t some rotten piece of fruit, overripe and ready to burst from its putrid interior. He was a guy—just some guy. Maybe violent as well as crazy, maybe not. But he was just a guy.

  Pete took his coffee back to cell 4 and peered in. A part of him needed to confirm to himself that the man was still in his cell. Of course he was; he was still sleeping, although fitfully, mumbling through an argument with someone named Kenny. Pete shook his head and was about to walk away when the man screamed, bolting up on the cot. Pete flinched, spilling hot coffee on his hand.

  “Ow!” he shouted, switching the mug to the other hand to shake off the burning droplets. “Geez, man, you scared the hell out of me! What—what’s wrong?”

  The man in the cell looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. The feral look was gone now, replaced by one of abject fear.

  The man whispered something Pete didn’t quite catch, although it sounded a little like, “The trees moved.”

  “Um . . . sorry?”

  “And the vines killed him.” His words were a little stilted due to the sewn-up injury to his cheek, as if forming the words hurt, but Pete could understand him that time.

  Pete frowned at the man. Was this guy messing with him? “Who? Who was killed?”

  “My brother. The vines came out of the hole in the ground and killed him.” He held a hand to his cheek as he spoke.

  Schizophrenia, then, or dissociative identity disorder, maybe—it would explain the sudden changes in his voice, eyes, and posture. A sad thing for the guy, but it put his weirdness in perspective, and that tight uneasiness in Pete’s chest eased a little.

  Pete dragged the metal folding chair from the end of the corridor down to the front of cell 4, sat, then took out his notepad and flipped it open. He didn’t expect to get anything approaching the complete, undiluted real story, but Pete had found, even after such a short time on the force, that there were sometimes little glittering gems of truth in the rough rock of insane rambling. A statement from a crazy person was often stuffed sideways with useless babble, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have its own kind of logic, subject to the laws of the speaker’s alternate reality. If parsed correctly, sometimes it could provide at least some basic leads or groundwork information.

  This crazy man had blood on his shirt—blood that might very well be that of this mysterious brother. If Pete could find answers about that, however roundabout they might be, maybe it would help him fill in the blanks on his report and help the brother, or at least locate him.

  Pete clicked his pen and said, “Okay, tell me about it. Tell me what happened to your brother.”

  “The vines took him.”

  “So you mentioned. But how did that happen? Tell me from the beginning—whatever you can. Whatever you remember.”

  “I remember the trees pulling together. Laughing. They laughed a little. So did I. Kenny looked funny, all crumpled up like that.” The man’s eyes had taken on a faraway look, as if part of him was still back in those woods, seeing whatever had happened all over again.

  “Kenny? Is that your brother?” Pete looked at him, his pen hovering above the notepad, ready to take notes.

  The man nodded. “The chasm . . . they or it or whatever made the roots move . . . it killed him. Pulled him in.”

  “So . . . your brother fell into a hole of some sort then?”

  The man’s gaze shot up to meet Pete’s, suddenly clear. “No! You’re not listening!” His hand came away from his cheek, and Pete could see blood just beginning to seep through the bandage. “The vines, man—the vines came out of the chasm and pulled him back in. Folded him up like a paper airplane.” The man giggled a little, but it seemed more a nervous sound than an amused one, and then the hand returned to his damaged cheek.

  “Uh, sure. Okay, vines—got it. I think I’m following you.” He made some notes in the notepad about what vines might really mean. “Now can you remember where you last saw
your brother? Where this chasm is? Is it in the Pine Barrens? In Nilhollow?”

  The man didn’t answer. His head was bowed, and for a moment, Pete wondered if he’d fallen asleep again, or was shifting back to the predatory personality that had so repulsed him.

  “Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

  “Todd,” the man muttered.

  “All right, Todd, then. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Todd, can you give me your last name, so I can get the missing person paperwork started for your brother?”

  Todd shook his head. “Mackey. But he’s not missing, Officer. I’m telling you, he’s dead. I saw him die.”

  “Okay, I believe you. And you’re saying you had nothing to do with your brother’s death?”

  Todd sighed. “I didn’t kill him. The vines did. I tried to . . . to pull him out again. Tried to save him. But I couldn’t.” He looked up again and Pete was reminded once more of an old soul, weary and sad, in a young guy’s body. “And they’ll take the lady next.”

  This time, Pete’s gaze shot up to meet Todd’s. “Lady? What lady?”

  Todd shrugged. “I don’t know. The ax-wielder’s lady. The trees told me. They are whispering about it. I can hear them still . . . even in here.” He looked pained by more than just his face and shoulder.

  Pete made a note in his pad about a missing woman; he thought it might very well be one of the man’s delusions rather than anything meaningful, but he put a question mark next to it all the same. A quick run through the Red Lion missing persons files couldn’t hurt.

  “I’m tired,” Todd said suddenly, and lay down on the cot. He rolled over to his uninjured side and pulled his knees up to his chest. He clutched the pillow as if it would keep him from falling off a tilting Earth, and then closed his eyes. “Good night, Pete,” he whispered.

  Pete hesitated a second, then rose to his feet.

  “Uh, okay, well. Good night then, Mr. Mackey. Sleep well.” He made his way back to his desk with his pad and mug, what was left of his coffee cold now and his mind unsettled.

  I didn’t kill him. The vines did . . .

  He detoured to the coffeepot in the kitchenette and topped off his mug.

  From time to time, dead bodies turned up in the Pine Barrens—accidents, suicides, guys offing their wives, lost hikers . . . it happened. The Pine Barrens, especially those lost acres known as Nilhollow, had a sordid history in that regard. That this guy Mackey had seen his brother fall into a chasm of some sort, or get tangled up in roots as he fell off a cliff or down a hill, well, that was sad, but not so far out of the norm. But Pete felt that there was more to it, something more akin to the other kinds of things that supposedly went on in Nilhollow. He had a nagging feeling that he was missing something important, something that would explain that feral, predatory demeanor that had first gripped Todd Mackey. He wasn’t sure what that important something was, but he knew the whole situation was more than just some crazy guy—You’re not listening! The vines, man. The vines came out of the chasm and—witnessing some horrible accident or worse, causing it. Pete glanced around the bull pen at the empty desks of the other officers and then at the clock. Maybe he was overthinking it. Perry, Epps, Alvarez, Carver, and Holland would be checking in soon. Sanchez and Wilkes would be picking Mackey up in an hour and a half. Then he would be someone else’s problem.

  It wasn’t until he’d settled back in at his desk that he realized the man had called him Pete. He looked down at his name plate. It read: OFCR. GRAINGER. He frowned, glancing back in the direction of the cells.

  I’m tired. Good night, Pete.

  Had he told Mackey his first name? Not likely. He wasn’t in the habit of giving out his first name to people on the wrong side of the cell bars, for any reason.

  The trees told me. They are whispering about it. I can hear them still... even in here . . .

  Pete shook his head and made the decision not to put too much thought into it. There had been other officers around when Mackey was picked up and brought in—any of them could have said Pete’s name.

  He logged into the missing persons database of police files and began looking around. There was something about seeing the numbers, the cold statistics of people who had gone missing in the Pine Barrens, specifically the Nilhollow area, that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. In the last two years alone, eighteen people had disappeared. Four were later updated as suicides, three as murders, and five of them were accidents.

  Accidents. He paused, wondering how many were actual accidents, and how many were—The trees moved. And the vines killed him—simply labeled accidents because the coroner couldn’t determine otherwise.

  To say nothing of the other six, who were still open missing persons cases, people who had vanished without a trace. Four of them were men, none named Kenny. The last two were women, a Holly Evans, twenty-four, and a Carol Siegfried, fifty. He wrote the names down so he could ask Mackey if either was the lady in the woods he had mentioned. He thought it also might be worth checking the reports over the last week or so regarding abandoned vehicles, wellness checks, and the like. There were a bunch of them; he narrowed the search to the area of and immediately surrounding Nilhollow.

  The little hourglass on his screen began turning over, turning over, turning over, which meant the intranet was thinking. Impatient, he became so focused on getting the results from that search that at first his brain didn’t register the screams coming from cell 4. They grew so loud, though, that alarms went off in Pete’s brain. They were not screams of another bad dream. They weren’t of frustration or anger, either. They weren’t even the kind of random, crazy-person screams that jarred the soul simply because they seemed so out of place and time. The screams coming from cell 4 were expressions of absolute terror and very likely no small amount of pain.

  Pete ran.

  What he found in the cell made him a little sick around the edges. He’d been a trooper long enough to have seen death, but not so long to have seen . . . that.

  A tree was growing right out of Todd Mackey.

  At first glance, that was exactly what Pete saw—bloody roots, clotted with bits of flesh, protruding from Todd’s legs and ribs and extending downward to wrap around the metal legs of the cot in the corner of the cell in which he slumped. Thick vines had evidently climbed their way out of his stomach and up from his throat to reach out toward the cell bars. Great splinters of wood grew out of the skin of his arms and face, tiny sticky buds dripping blood that pattered like tiny raindrops to the floor. His eyes were wide, glazed over from the shock of sudden and unfathomable death. The bandage on his cheek hung by two pieces of surgical tape, and Pete could see the stitches had been torn out by one of Mackey’s throat-vines. A jagged branch, the big brother to the one they’d originally found in his shoulder, now grew from the bloody hole there.

  Todd Mackey had been choked, ripped through, speared, opened in places from the inside out, a mangled thing run ragged with wood. Pete turned away, trying to squelch that mental image he’d had earlier of Mackey being some overripe fruit rotting from the inside, but he couldn’t. The corridor was growing fuzzy around the edges and Pete felt his dinner churning in his stomach. He had to get away.

  It burst, he kept thinking without really knowing why. The thing in him, the thing went rotten, the spores or seeds or whatever got inside him in Nilhollow burst him open and oh GOD, what now? Bent over and slumped against the cinder-block wall next to the bars, Pete gagged, trying to suck in gulps of air to keep his gorge from rising any further.

  Once the world had righted itself, he stood, still clutching his stomach, and staggered back to the cell.

  And he frowned in confusion as the world swam a little once again.

  The tree roots and branches were gone. There was still blood—a lot of it—but it seemed to stem from the broken cot spring Todd still clutched in his hand. He’d slit his wrists, had pulled free his stitches, and had made several gashes in his throat as well. Long loops of clot
ted blood had splashed along the length of his arms, across his face, chest, and stomach, and even the wall behind him. There were no branches or vines. Pete didn’t quite feel up to opening the cell and stepping inside with Mackey’s body to check, but his search of the cell from outside in the corridor yielded no sign of anything treelike. How could he have imagined such a thing?

  Dazed, Pete made his way back to his desk and put a call in to his captain before calling Wilkes and Sanchez and then the coroner, Becky Simms. It was Captain Stan Mallon’s day off. Likely he was home, probably comfortably into his second or third beer and binge-watching Netflix shows, and a suicide on Pete’s watch, especially one that interrupted Longmire, was going to go over badly, but screw it. Pete was going to need his input, and frankly, he didn’t like the idea of being there alone with . . .

  With a dead body? Get it together, man.

  He wasn’t alone, though. Maggie was downstairs in dispatch, and Ellen was down there, too, in the evidence room, plus the others were due to check back in any minute.

  He was alone on this floor, though, with an empty bullpen and empty cells. With the body of Todd Mackey.

  But it wasn’t that, not just a dead body. He’d been around plenty of those. It was that he was alone with whatever had really killed Todd Mackey. His brain kept coming back to the unshakable idea he’d had earlier that the body was somehow contaminated by whatever had driven Todd Mackey insane in Nilhollow. Whatever it was had burst him open from the inside out, and was now sporing or seeding or floating around like smoke all over the cell, the corridor, the whole Red Lion Station . . .