The Trail

by Brian Francis

  “What do you think they’re doing right now?” Scott asked. “Jack and Kim. I’ll bet any amount of money they’re having sex right now. Tent sex. Yup, if I know Jack, they’re having sex.”

  “Probably. I don’t know. Who cares?” Susan said, exasperated. “I wanted to take a walk because I wanted to talk about us. Where we’re going. Our future.”

  “Our future?”

  “Yes, our future plans.”

  “Well, after this camping trip we can go to Rome for my magazine assignment. And then we can do Turkey, but I’m not sure if I can get you a plane ticket for that one. But I’ll see what I can do. And then, where else? Ireland, maybe. Our future?” Scott suddenly jumped up on a rock. “Our future is limitless!”

  “But what about other things besides travel?”

  “Besides travel?” Scott repeated. He paused for a moment. “Susan, look at that hawk up there.”

  She looked up.

  “See how it’s free! That’s me, Susan. Free. No nine-to-five job, no screaming kids, no retirement plans. That’s the way I want to live—free!”

  Just as Susan began to retort that the hawk Scott pointed to was completely alone, she heard Kim screaming.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Blood! Blood! It’s everywhere! Oh, my God! It’s everywhere!”

  “Nicole!”

  “Blood! It’s on the walls! It’s on the ceiling! It’s dripping from the ceiling. It’s everywhere!”

  “Nicole, calm down!” said Sheriff Adams. “There’s no blood. Calm down.” Hallucinations, he thought. Post traumatic stress.

  Nicole lay stricken on the floor, shrieking and yelping in terror, glancing off toward the back bedroom. Her eyes seemed focused on a grisly nightmare that only she could see. He had seen that look before, mostly in car accident victims. That ghostly gaze, as if the person was staring directly into the mouth of hell.

  He hovered over Nicole awkwardly, unsure whether to grasp her in his arms and comfort her, or maintain the cold distance of authority.

  “Nicole,” he said, scooping her into his arms and holding her tight. “Nicole, it’s okay, there’s no blood. It’s okay. Shhhhh…shhhhhh.”

  Her shrieking subsided to low whimpering, but her shoulders continued to convulse in violent spasms.

  Smells so good, thought the sheriff, as he buried his nose in her hair and stroked her back. Smells so good. It had been a long time since he last held a woman, and his body twitched with excitement. He wanted to kiss her. Wanted to do more. But the context was wrong. A move now would blow the possibility of being more than just friends with Nicole for good. He’d been alone long enough, he could afford to wait a little longer.

  She gulped in a breath and pulled free. “Barry,” she said, blotting tears with a tissue. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  He loosened his grip, but continued to hold a lock of Nicole’s brown hair. Adams thought of her hair that was always tucked away in a bun at the diner, and now it was in his hand. He let go.

  “I—I saw John. His face. His head was all…” She brought her hands up to her face in an attempt to describe the image, but collapsed into tears again. Adams held her.

  Nicole, you don’t need to describe his face, Adams thought. I was there. “It’s okay, Nicole. Shhhhh…shhhhhhhhh.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s okay, Nic.” He brushed the tears from her face. “It’s okay. Everything is okay. You probably just had a flashback. I encounter it all the time in my line of work. I’ll bet it seemed real.”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably thought of John because I was here the night…umm.” He paused. “The night it happened.”

  “That’s not it,” said Nicole softly.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I know why he killed himself.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “It was a face! I felt a face!” Kim screamed.

  “What are you talking about, Kim? Are you crazy?” Jack stood outside the tent in his boxer shorts. Kim’s right, Jack thought. I did visit the town of Blue Balls. He reached into the tent and yanked out his jeans, shirt, and hiking boots.

  “I swear there was someone out here, Jack. I felt it.” Kim was wearing only Jack’s blue flannel shirt and her black underpants.

  “Well, there’s no one here now,” Jack said. “Let’s go back inside, huh? Finish what we started.”

  Kim took a step backwards, “No way. I’m too freaked out.”

  “No one is here,” Jack said, as he turned and gestured at the woods. “Hello?” he bellowed. “Anybody here? Can you please come out and tell Kim it’s going to be alright, so I can have sex.”

  He laughed, then went over to the cooler and grabbed a beer.

  Kim pulled her blue suitcase out of the tent and began tossing clothes into the air. “Where is it? Where is it?” she muttered. Her hands plunged frantically into the twisted pile of clothing. “Where is it? Where is it? Here it is!”

  Jack dropped his beer.

  Kim held the gun above her head. “Nobody is gonna fuck with us! Okay, Jack. Nobody is gonna fuck with us!”

  Jack gasped. “Kim, what the hell are you doing? Why the hell did you bring a gun?”

  “It’s the woods, Jack. It’s dangerous out here. You don’t know what can happen. Like what happened to those missing hikers, Jack? What the fuck happened to those hikers?”

  “I’m sure they’re just missing, Kim! People get lost in the woods all the time. That doesn’t mean someone killed them. It doesn’t mean that some creep was looking in our tent. The woods are safe.”

  “What the fuck would you know about the woods, Jack? You live in a gated community that has a few trees in it. You don’t know shit about the woods. You don’t know shit.”

  “I know that the woods are safer than the city. Come on, Kim. You got scared. But it’s fine. We’re fine. No one is here.”

  Just then they heard footsteps running along the path. Jack peered down the trail. “Great. It’s Scott and Susan. You freaked them out with your screaming. Will you please put the gun away? We don’t need to freak them out even more.”

  Kim gave him a long, hard look, then put the gun back into her suitcase.

  Jack shouldn’t have been surprised with Kim and the gun. He’d been to her house a couple of times, and knew her old man had a ton of firearms. A number of them were on display in the dank cottage where Kim lived. Jack had fired a gun a couple of times in the woods behind Kim’s house. He didn’t really enjoy the experience. Too loud. He recalled Kim’s cottage. It was filled with guns and animal heads. Kim’s dad was a hunter, and all sorts of animals lined the walls of the living room. Bears. Deer. Boars. It made Jack a little sick looking at the “trophies.” The dead, black eyes of the animals staring silently. Jack believed there was a part of Kim’s world that he could never understand. And it was a world he didn’t want to understand.

  Scott reached the campsite first. “Kim, what happened?”

  “Nothing,” Kim said, looking directly at Jack. “I thought I saw a bear…but it was just a tree.”

  Scott laughed. “Uh-oh, sounds like Jack broke out the weed again.” Susan didn’t smile.

  Scott and Susan began a half-hearted search of the campground. Kim followed behind them. Jack walked around to the other side of the tent and examined the walls. The nylon was marked with greasy black handprints.

  He went back inside the tent, reached into Kim’s suitcase, pulled out the gun, and tucked it into his backpack.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A house in the woods isn’t better than a shore house, Clair thought. She leaned back in the passenger seat of their Chevy Suburban and looked out of the window at the whirl of green trees that buzzed past her. Jerry had convinced her that a house in the woods was a better place to retire because of its “four season potential”.

  Clair had wanted a shore house. She loved the beach, the waves, the board
walk, and the way the salt air made her feel alive. She thought the woods smelled like mold and decay.

  Clair had asked her husband what they would actually do in the woods. How they would spend their time.

  “What will we do?” Jerry repeated with a laugh. “We’ll do everything! We’ll hike, we’ll fish, we’ll camp.”

  In their seven months living in the woods, they had yet to go fishing. Or camping. They had gone on exactly two hikes, and both ended in failure. The first one was cut short from a vicious thunderstorm. The second hike had stopped because Jerry’s knee was bothering him.

  So, now they spent their time doing nothing, really. Watching TV. Reading trashy novels. Wondering what their grand kids were doing back in the city. Jerry took her to the lake, but it couldn’t even compare to the beach. They went to the “Upper Beach”, as the sign said, at one of the few access points to the lake that allowed swimming. Clair thought the term beach was a joke. The lake offered nothing more than a small rocky clearing where it was easy to break an ankle and nearly impossible to lay down a blanket. The beach was empty except for one middle-aged lifeguard with a shaved head and bushy beard. He was perched silently on a lifeguard stand.

  “Hi,” said Clair. The lifeguard ignored her. He spit on the ground and continued whittling a wood carving with a knife. Clair wanted to leave, but Jerry urged her into the water.

  The water was freezing. Clair’s feet touched the bottom but she did not feel the familiar soft comfort of sand. Rather, her feet became engulfed in mud, clay, and rotten leaves. The trip to the lake was not a success. Again, she wanted to leave.

  Clair secretly believed that Jerry was disappointed in the woods, too. That something had not lived up to his expectations. Jerry still studied the city paper with a keen interest in his former life. That’s the thing with retirement, Clair thought. You can only do it once. They’d invested all their money in the house in the woods, and now they had to make it work.

  Clair believed that the bird-watching trip was Jerry’s attempt to make it work. They were currently driving to a nature sanctuary to observe birds. Jerry had bought Clair an illustrated bird identification book for Christmas, and she had to admit she enjoyed the hobby.

  “You’re gonna like this,” said Jerry from the driver’s seat. The tone of his voice sounded like he was half excited, half trying to convince himself.

  “I do enjoy bird watching, Jerry.” She reached over and patted him on the knee. He was trying hard. He really was.

  Clair looked out of the car window at the trees again and saw a man in a red shirt. He staggered out of the woods and stood motionless on the shoulder of the road.

  “That man!” Clair said. “He has blood on his pants!”

  “He does? My God,” Jerry exclaimed. “Maybe he’s hurt.”

  Jerry slowed to a stop, glanced into the rear view mirror, and put the Suburban in reverse. He rolled down the window. Gravel crunched under the tires as the vehicle eased backwards.

  “Jerry, do you think we should stop?” asked Clair, peering anxiously at the man in the red shirt by the side of the road.

  “Of course we should stop, Clair. If he’s hurt, he may need help. You have to help each other out in the woods.”

  Jerry put the car in park. The man in the red shirt approached Clair’s window and stared in. He had thick, black, curly hair and a dirty face. And a strange smirk. Clair hit the power lock button on the side door panel.

  “Jerry! Don’t let him in. Something is wrong with him! Don’t let him in!”

  “What’s wrong with him? He seems…”

  Martin pulled out his favorite knife, the one with a dull green handle, from the cargo pocket of his pants. Blood encrusted the blade. He stared at the two feeble white-haired people in the car. The outsiders who had dared to call this area home. Rage filled him. He lunged around the car to the driver’s side.

  The old man scrambled to put the car in drive, but Martin was already at his window. Martin grabbed the old man’s sparse hair and smashed his head against the dashboard.

  He thrust the knife deep into the old man’s neck, killing him instantly.

  The woman appeared too scared to scream.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “My husband was just a boy when it happened,” Nicole started, then paused, looking as though she didn’t really want to go on.

  The sheriff sat down on the floor next to her. He grunted heavily as he settled into a comfortable position.

  “My husband’s parents were very religious. They would make John go to bed before sundown, wash his mouth out with soap, say the rosary all the time. And girls—they never wanted him talking to girls. Which is why when John met me...” Nicole gave a little laugh, and trailed off.

  Adams waited patiently.

  “John grew up with a boy across the street, whose parents were even more religious than John’s. They used to lock this poor boy up in the tiny woodshed behind their house for days—as punishment for not cleaning his room, or forgetting to pray before dinner.”

  “Didn’t people do anything, Nic? Didn’t people stop them?”

  “It was different then, sheriff. People were different. Crenson was different…or I believed it was different.”

  Adams had grown up in Shrewburg, about ten miles east of Crenson. Stories of Crenson had been campfire spook tales when he was a kid. Even his parents used to tell him bedtime stories about Crenson to keep him in line. Stories about insane religious fanatics. Animal sacrifices. Incest. Inbreeding. Deformities.

  Now that he lived and worked in Crenson, he was finding out that some of the stories were true. As a kid they had scared him to death. They still scared him now.

  “What was it like growing up in Crenson?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, sheriff.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard them. Are they true?”

  She shrugged. “Some of them. It’s like any small town. Some of the stories are true, and some of them are just that…stories.”

  Outside a gust of wind knocked something over with a loud crash. “My trash can,” Nicole said, and started to stand. A dog barked nearby.

  Adams jumped up. “I’ll get that for you, Nic.”

  Sheriff Adams walked outside and looked at the dark storm clouds. Across the street he saw a black and tan German Shepherd chained to a fence. The metal chain rattled furiously. The dog’s yellow teeth snapped in between barks.

  Adams gathered the swirling trash, picked up the can, and placed it next to Nicole’s house.

  When he returned to the living room, Nicole was sitting calmly on the couch.

  “I want to apologize again for screaming earlier,” she said.

  “It’s okay, Nic. Really.”

  “But I have to tell you why I think my husband, umm…died.”

  Adams twisted uncomfortably in the chair and leaned forward. “Okay, Nicole. Why do you think he died?”

  Nicole took a deep breath, looked at the ground, and started talking. “Well, remember I told you that John’s parents were very religious? Well, they were even more religious than your average citizen in Crenson. They wanted a brand of religion that was dangerous, hateful, and unnatural. There was a priest named Father Glick. He was a bad man. I think he did things to John. I think he did things to other boys, too. Father Glick was eventually kicked out of the congregation, but he started his own religion in the woods. A filthy religion. Glick’s followers built an old stone church, just off the trail. South of Tucker’s General Store.”

  The sheriff’s radio crackled.

  “Sheriff Adams, this is Cindy. Do you read me?”

  “Yeah, Cindy.”

  “Sheriff, we got an abandoned vehicle report. A white Chevy Suburban out on Willow Way near mile marker four. Can you please check that out?”

  “Sure, Cindy, over.”

  Adams stood up to leave, still shuddering from Nicole’s story. He had hoped to God that he would never hear about that sick priest or that old ch
urch again.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Martin drove the knife deeper into the old man’s neck. Blood splattered the windshield of the Chevy Suburban. With each stroke, the knife ripped through muscles and popped large arteries. The hemorrhaging was tremendous. The slashing only stopped when the blade became stuck in bone or wedged between vertebrae.

  The old woman in the passenger seat began wailing, a primal howl. Martin smiled. He was not concerned about the noise. He knew that this secluded stretch of asphalt led to a bird sanctuary and miles of untouched forest beyond. Only sporadic hikers and campers penetrated this area of the country.