by L J McIntyre
“So you sat with that knowledge for a few days?”
I nodded.
“That sounds like personal torture, Jack.” He tilted his head to one side.
“Personal torture is my speciality.” I unfolded my arms, and my hands played my thighs like a bongo. I’d never been able to sit still very long.
“After you broke up, how did you feel?”
“Nothing. Just empty.”
“And how do you feel about it now?”
“Everything.”
“Does some of that have to do with the attack?”
I nodded.
He wore a dark green jumper today, black-framed glasses, and god awful brown corduroys.
“Are you ready to talk about what happened?” He fixed his glasses and smoothed down his jumper.
“Nah.” I shook my head.
“Okay, that’s fine. So, going back to your ex-girlfriend—”
“Let’s just move on from her, too.”
“How come?”
“She proved to me what I always knew. No one can be trusted.”
“No one?”
I looked up at the ceiling. “My mother. She was the only one I could trust.”
Paul scratched his moustache. “But not your father?”
I didn’t respond.
“How do you know people can’t be trusted, Jack?”
“Look at my ex, Jesse.” I sat up, raised my voice. “Look at what she did to me. I always knew she was going to cheat on me.”
“Always?”
“Always. Right from the start.”
“Why were you so certain?”
“I know how people see me. A fucking loser. I’ve had a lifetime of it. Even when I was younger, I was just a pathetic little thing. A little thing with bruises that adults gawked at while holding their kid’s hand in the schoolyard.” I sank back into the sofa, started biting my nails.
Paul crossed his legs, stroked his chin. “I’m sorry to hear that, Jack.”
“They were sorry, too, when their angelic kids were caught throwing wet toilet paper at me. And they were really sorry when my lunch money was stolen off me time and time again. Everyone’s sorry. I didn’t want their apologies or pity.”
“What did you want, Jack?”
I looked at him. “What every kid wants.”
“And what’s that?”
I wiped something from my eye. “I don’t know.”
Paul nodded. “Inclusion?”
I bent forward, looked at my shoelaces.
“Why do you think they didn’t include you?”
“Because of him.”
“Your dad?”
I rested my face in the palm of my hands, felt the hot breath spread across my cheeks and eyeballs. I sat up. “Yes. No one wants a bruised apple.”
“He hurt you.”
“Fucking bastard. He hurt everyone.”
“Was he the red-faced monster?”
I nodded.
“Thank you, Jack.”
I wiped tears from my eyes. “And now you see why I don’t trust people.”
“Yes, I do see it. And it clearly was very difficult for you, but I have a question. An important question. One which may annoy you, make you feel attacked and therefore defensive, but that isn’t my intention, and I don’t expect an answer now. Maybe you’ll never give me one, but maybe you’ll find the answer yourself.”
He held my gaze.
“Jack,” he continued, “do you think a relationship of any kind can be successful and meaningful if one party knows to their very core, right at the onset, that the other will betray them?”
I crossed my legs and looked at the wall beyond him.
“I’m not saying Jesse cheating on you was your fault. I’m not saying that at all. I just want you to think about how a person with zero trust will behave in such a relationship, and how a person with absolute trust will behave, and what impact those two different behaviours will have on the other party.”
I unfolded my arms. “No one can trust another person 100%. You’ll just end up heartbroken.”
“Didn’t Jesse break your heart even though you distrusted her?”
I raised my chin, clenched my jaw.
“So being distrustful didn’t protect you. It isolated you.”
He sat forward, locked eyes with me. “Trusting someone isn’t easy. I know that. But if you want to have a balanced life, perhaps even a happy life, then at some point you will need to learn to trust. And I’m talking about friends here, too, Jack. Not just romantic trust.”
“I have a friend, Ethan. From university.”
“Do you trust him?”
I nodded.
“When you’re with Ethan, how do you feel?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Do you hear the fingernails just as loudly?”
“No.”
“So what does that tell you?”
I shrugged.
“Perhaps you need more people in your life, Jack. Perhaps we can look at the reasons why you trust Ethan, and develop a strategy that may help you to trust others. But first you have to be open to that idea.”
“What idea?”
“That you can trust others.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Trust me, I know. Someone just stole my car.”
“Shit, there’s my plan out the window,” she says.
“Plan?”
“I can’t figure out how to get out of here.”
“I’m not the only one, then.”
We walk across the road to the motel and up to my room. I put her backpack next to mine, flick up my laptop and sit down on the bed.
“I’ll just be a second,” I say to Annie.
I’ve had a burning need to check my social media, see what damage has been done since I deleted the photo. I’ve got dozens of messages from people I don’t know, a text-based sea of hatred waiting to be read, but I ignore them, snap shut the laptop.
My mind is reeling. Betsy’s gone. Dead body this morning. Career has taken a massive hit. I feel dizzy.
“I don’t think this day could get any worse,” I say.
“That’s the spirit.” She smiles at me.
I groggily stand up and there’s just this reel of mental images flipping through my mind of people bashing their keyboards, every word, every sentence another nail in the coffin of my life as a photographer.
“So, how do we get out of this hellhole?” Asks Annie.
“Let me get my head straight for a second.” I look around the room.
“Why don’t we go for a walk,” She says. “Better than sitting in here. Smells like an old man’s undies.”
Outside, we follow along the main road in town, the sky clear and blue, Nesgrove still dormant like an unwanted memory, and I feel I could walk forever, or run like Forest Gump did that time. Just run and see what happens.
“This place is like a bloody pitcher plant,” I say.
Annie looks at me. “A what?”
“They’re these types of plants that lure insects, you know, using things that interest them, like nectar, and when the insect gets inside the plant or the leaf of the plant, it can’t get out again. It’s stuck. And then the plant starts to devour the insect really slowly.”
“What was your nectar then? Why you here?”
“There’s a lake around here, Lake Fisher, that I wanted to photograph. And you?” Normal conversation isn’t easy when you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but I try to watch my footsteps, one foot in front of the other and listen to Annie.
“I didn’t want to come here. I was just trying to hitchhike to Queenstown. Some delivery truck guy said he could take me as far as Nesgrove before he headed east. I didn’t realise this place was like a black hole.”
We pass the petrol station, and I eye the one-armed man through the window. He’s hunched over the counter, flipping through a magazine, cigarette hanging loosely from his lips.
He not
ices us walking out front, balances his smoke on the edge of the counter, picks up a phone and starts calling someone. I stare at him. I’ve almost reached the end of my tether, or whatever it is that keeps me level-headed, and I feel like letting the monster loose and bricking his window.
I shake my head and look at Annie. “What’s happened to you so far since you’ve been here?”
“It’s just all so weird, you know. The people, I mean. Some of them stare at you like you’re an alien, and others act like you’re not there even when you’re trying to speak to them.”
“Right, I’ve had the exact same experience.”
“Like some sort of fucking zombie-android hybrid. But last night it was a whole different level of weird.” She brushes the hair away from her eyes. “They were outside my room, looking in my window.”
“What did you do?”
“Hid under the bed.”
“I went out to confront them.”
“They did the same to you?”
“Yeah, but every time I opened the door, no one was there. It was strange. Started thinking it was in my head.”
“I doubt it was in both our heads. Crazy bastards.” She shrugs her shoulders. “At the bar as well, when you left, the table of guys near the window just turned their seats around and faced me. They didn’t even have drinks in their hands. They just sat there staring at me. I put my drink on the bar and legged it out of there, locked myself in my room.”
“Jesus, that is weird.”
“What about you? You said your car was stolen. Anything else happen?” She looks up at me with those huge, blue eyes.
“Where do I begin?”
I explain everything to her, the body in the lake, the creeps in the forest, the police, the car, Ben the mayor, the social media problems, the hanging tree—everything. When I finish, I notice we’re walking along the pot-holed road that leads to the highway. And up ahead in the middle of the road I see that damned rabbit corpse.
Annie sniffles and a tear streaks down her cheek.
“You okay?” I ask.
She wipes her nose and cheek on her jacket sleeve. “Fine, yeah, just you talking about the girl in the lake. My best friend back in New Plymouth, she killed herself.” She wipes both of her eyes. “That’s why I went backpacking. We always planned to do it together but never got round to it. After she died, I just went for it, kind of in her memory, you know.”
I go to put my arm around her but I hesitate, and my hand just hovers above her shoulders a few inches away. I decide that I’m coming across as creepy. She glances down as I lower my hand back to my side.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I say.
She nods and sniffles. “Fuck it, you know, that’s life. Some people stick around and some people prefer something else, I suppose.”
We walk in silence for a while until we come to the narrow road that leads to the lake trail.
“You know,” I start, “the lecturer guy, Gerald, I think his name was, said a Maori shaman was living in here not far from the lake. Said he has a truck and might be willing to drive us. What do you think?”
She shrugs. “Couldn’t be stranger than that town.”
Again we walk in silence, and I think morbidly about the girl in the lake, remind myself things could be worse, and I distract myself by concocting theories about the town. A cult, maybe? A community founded by psychopaths? Could be drugs, a town full of addicts. That would explain why so many of them look pale and thin.
“What now?” asks Annie when we arrive at the forest trail.
“Straight through here. It’ll take us to the lake. Apparently the trail to Tamati’s is to the right when we get to the lake. “
As we walk, I feel alert, primed by the yeeping weirdoes from a few hours before, but now the forest sounds natural, rhythmic, exactly as it should: chirping birds and rustling leaves and our feet crunching the stones below. We follow the trail until it ends and see the lake in front of us.
I search for the girl’s body in the water. She’s gone. There’s no police cordon, no high-vis jackets, no grieving family members. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that someone died here just hours before.
Up ahead we spy a pile of stacked stones, and right of that is another trail that we start along.
“If this Tamati has a truck, where does he keep it?” asks Annie.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s off the grid, lives in a forest. I don’t see any roads here, do you? So where does he keep the truck?”
“Hmm, good question. I hadn’t thought of that. You think this is dodgy?”
She blows out a little whistle through pursed lips. “Who knows. We’ve come this far, though. May as well keep going.”
We trek on; on through the thick trees; on through hunting territory; on towards escape from Nesgrove, until we arrive at a fork in the path. We both look left and right, trying to guess at the unguessable.
“What’s that on the tree?” Annie points to a large carving on the trunk of a wide tree along the trail to the left. A triangle with the shape of an open hand in the centre has been chiselled into the bark.
“I’ve seen that symbol before.” I take out my phone and show her the photo I took of the highway sign.
“Huh, weird,” she says. “Is this place some sort of cult?”
“I was wondering the exact same thing.”
“Or maybe Tamati did it, like a way to tell people how to get to his place.”
She starts along the left-hand trail and I follow behind. It’s too narrow to walk side-by-side, and the further we hike the narrower it gets. We push through overhanging branches that grow thicker and more numerous, and I begin to doubt if this trail leads anywhere. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a trail now. We’re more or less forcing our way, kicking and pushing, through bushes and branches, only the flattened dirt beneath our feet suggests that this was once a trodden path.
Just as the path gets impossibly narrow, we pierce through the bushes and fall into a small clearing. It takes me a moment to absorb the scene, and another moment to realise we’re in the setting of a horror movie, only this is real, and the realness of it makes this all the more terrifying.
Chapter Fifteen
Knee-high grass carpets the ground, and surrounding trees have filthy white rags like torn up pillowcases, dangling and flapping from their branches. The way the rags flap, slowly, side-to-side, it seems like they’re swaying in a thick liquid, and time almost slows down just looking at them. Heavy, that’s the right word. The atmosphere feels heavy. And hundreds of birds circle overhead, dancing in unison, like a buzzing, ever-changing cloud of black.
At the end of the field, beyond the birds, sits a single-storey house that Satan built. Or Ted Bundy. Or Jeffrey Dahmer. Or any creature you’d never want to find deep in a forest. It’s a cabin built of rotten wood licked with green moss. More white rags dangle from parts of the roof and wooden porch, like small fabric ghosts dancing slowly on the breeze. And in the garden, if you can call it that, three crosses stick out of the ground, the middle one tipping over. They’re graves, but we’re too far away to see if they’re marked or not.
“Christ, this place is wrong on so many levels,” I say.
“You think this is Tamati’s place?”
“I really hope not.”
“We should take a closer look, just to be sure.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
We both wade through the grass toward the house. The garden, ringed by a broken wooden fence, feels as though it has a second fence protecting it; an invisible one that feeds on fear and forces invaders to reconsider their motivations. We both stop at the invisible fence.
“Tamati,” Annie calls out. “Is this your place?”
Her voice doesn’t echo like I thought it would. Instead, it’s swallowed up by the festering wood, leaving us with a lingering silence and an atmosphere that grows weightier by the second.
“There�
��s something on the front door,” Annie points out. “Some writing. Go and check it out.”
I approach the door cautiously, slowly, not because I want to, but because I don’t want to look afraid in front of Annie. The three crosses sticking out of the ground have the same triangle-hand symbol engraved on them as the one in the tree.
When I step onto the porch, the floorboard creaks sharply and I wince for some reason. I take another step but this time no creak comes. I’ve been holding my breath the entire time. I can’t help wonder what it is I’m so afraid of.
I straighten my spine, muster some fake confidence and walk up to the door as if I were knocking on my friend’s house, about to ask him if he wants to come out and play.
There’s something carved into the door about waist height, a messily chiselled sentence. The grooves of each letter have been painted red to make them more legible. Somebody wanted this to be seen. The inscription reads:
One must leave, or sometimes two, but yours or theirs, it’s up to you
I take my phone out and take a picture of the engraving.
“What does it say?” calls Annie.
I swivel to face her but something through the window, inside the house—something white and terrifying—registers in my periphery.
“What’s wrong?” asks Annie.
I turn slowly around to see the thing in the house, to see if it matches the terrible image that has, in the brief moment that I swung my head around, burnt into my mind. There, through the window, staring back at me, is a skeleton-thin woman with lank black hair, wearing a long white dress. She’s sitting in a seat in the centre of a room of rotten blackness, and all she is doing is looking at me.
There’s an emptiness in her face, in her eyes, expressionless, no fear, just nothing, and it feels like I’m being swallowed up by that nothing. Just as I turn to run, she bears her yellow teeth at me, her eyes wide and black, face frozen, and I’m being eaten alive.
“Annie, run,” I scream, and we both sprint across the grass toward the hidden path. We burrow into the bushes and trees and just keep moving away as quickly as we can. My legs pump fast, my hands are in front of me, batting way branches. I slow down to force my way through a thick bush. I pick up the pace again but after a few more seconds, I look around and don’t see Annie.
