Lost in the Woods

by Chris Page

  LOST

  IN

  THE

  WOODS

  By

  Chris Page

  © Copyright December 17, 2020 - All rights reserved.

  It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or places, events, or locations is purely coincidental.

  Benny wriggled against the constraints, a thin, yellow rope that tied him to the thick base of the sycamore. While he felt some layers loosen, still more remained tightly fastened, just shy of suffocation where they scratched at his throat. He was stuck. Yet, he remained determined.

  Across the clearing, the man approached the other boy, his name Benny never learned. He’d only come to discover the other boy’s scream, a high pitched screech of terror that burrowed deep into Benny’s subconscious. The boy was younger, likely preteen, and his body thin and frail. He was pale, with brown, shaggy hair and an overbite that extended his upper teeth over his bottom lip. His eyes were large, and as they watched the man step nearer with the risen blade, grew wider with fear. Benny wanted to look away, to remove his eyes nearly more than he wanted to remove himself from his constraints. They were fixed, neither the sting of tears nor the breeze pushing against them were enough to cause a blink. The blade, the boy, the man, the tree, elements of a scene intent on carving itself into his memory, like lovers’ names in tree bark. He felt the texture of the sycamore dig into his back, the rope holding him tightly against it. The more he struggled, the harsher the sensation, little jagged edges tearing at his soft flesh. He could feel it rip, and begin to bleed, but there was nothing in his body capable of overpowering the terror his eyes delivered him.

  The boy screamed, his eyes now closed, his cheeks wet, his upper lip coated with his own mucus. Nothing of his protest affected the man, his blade proceeding in its path towards the child’s belly. It swiped through the air and cut into the shirt, and without much effort, buried into the body of the other boy.

  Benny watched it all, watched the other boy’s eyes open and turn red, his two front buckteeth and the small gap between them, shown beneath a lip pulled back in pain. The child’s screech reached a pitch entirely new to Benny. The blade was retrieved, then reinserted.

  The scene devolved into facts with the blink of an eye. It was motion, and flesh, and blood, and noise, not horror, nor terror. The world became void of meaning as Benny’s body fidgeted with his constraints to introduce slack. All his focus drained from his pain and misery and fear and funneled itself into survival. In his newly acquired focus, his instinct informed his hand’s maneuvers. It became freed while the man proceeded to slice the boy’s throat.

  By the time the blade reached the other ear, the rope had given up an arm, and with autonomous motion the arm slung around and his fingers gripped the rope where it held his other arm against the trunk. He shoved the rope down over his body, using his toes to lift himself until he managed to slip the rope to his waist. Now with both hands he pushed against it, downward, as he leaned forward to leverage his upper body’s weight. The task proved difficult, straining his stringy arms, and he groaned.

  The man turned to face him, the knife dripping out to his side.

  Benny lifted his gaze and his mind calculated the time allotted for escape. It came down to six paces, and he watched the man’s feet tread over the leaves while he used adrenaline to force the rope over his hip bones and down along his skinny legs.

  Three. Two.

  Benny hit the ground, having lifted himself up and out of the rope.

  One.

  Benny rolled to the side as the man came upon him, plunging his knife into the dirt alongside Benny’s back. Benny shoved against the earth and pounced onto his feet, which swung through the air in a sprint that carried him down a gentle slope away from the scene. The forest at his pace would ordinarily have blurred together, smeared in his periphery. Instead, as he listened to his heart threatening to tear his eardrums apart, each detail separated itself from the others. The branches stood out against their backdrop of deep forest and sky. The earth, as he peered down to steady his stride, was covered in dead leaves, each, in faded orange and red, laid finely outlined against the dark soil. Birds darted across, his eyes caught them and released them each, wary of all motion.

  When he turned his head to his shoulder, the thumping in his left ear gave way to the sounds of the man, the struggling breath, the heavy steps pounding boots against the ground. He caught a split second image of the man’s face, a snarl twisting the shape of it into something demonic, unreal. He imagined the man growing in size, his arms extending far beyond their natural length to capture him, and in the manic delusion Benny’s breath caught in his throat. His legs lost their rhythm, and he began to stumble. He peered down and watched them, the shins swinging, the joints of his knees beginning to bend in the wrong way.

  As he went down, he saw the man mirror him, tumbling to the ground. Though the man’s undoing was not his own step, but a slick patch of earth, a bit of mud that slipped beneath his boot and collapsed him onto his back.

  Benny crashed his nose into a root and opened a gash. The blood flowed over his upper lip and he could taste the iron. He spat as he rolled to his side, his limbs shivering.

  He peered back. The man laid out, rolling with pain. The knife had dislodged from his grip, landing a distance away from him. It lied only feet away from Benny where he still lay on the ground. Benny stared at the soot and blood on its blade. Then he looked at the man. He was incapable of standing, the man’s aching back prohibited it.

  Benny pushed himself slowly off the ground, testing his legs’ ability to uphold him. Once upright, his body locked. In his rigid stance, he looked down at the man, then the knife, then back to the man, whose eyes had found Benny’s intentions. Benny felt his hand stretch forward, reaching towards the knife.

  But when he looked down, his arm remained at his side.

  The man grinned.

  Benny inhaled sharply, then turned and fled further into the forest, his surroundings blending together now, as the adrenaline drained, and left him to his own faculties once more, thoughts racing, verging on panic.

  DEEP

  ROOTS

  1

  _________

  Carrie stared at the detective and found his image blurry. Really, she stared through him, at something far past him. She didn’t notice it at first, but it was something so far it began to reverse time.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard the detective say. His words were like fuzzy AM radio signals, crackling and flat. She didn’t internalize them, and as a result, continued her lengthy stare at the object in the distance of history. “I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear.”

  She felt a weight previously resting beside her on the couch suddenly remove itself, and in her periphery saw her husband Jake stand. His hands rested on his belt as he turned away from the detective, seated on the loveseat opposite the couch in their living room. The light from the front window cast a white hue into the room, dusting the detective’s shoulders with a faint glow. He was silhouetted and Carrie’s eyes fell into the center of his shadowed outline, the darkest spot, where a tunnel formed into her own past.

  She could see, through the pinhole that formed in the detective’s chest, herself as a child. From her short stature at age eight, she peered into the sky. It was criss-crossed with thick branches. They swayed. The breeze was fainter towards the forest floor, li
ke pursed lips blowing against her cheek. Her eyes were angled eastward. She knew the direction because her father had taught her to read moss. It grew thicker, higher on the north side of the tree. Plus, she knew the sun rose in the east. Now it was late afternoon, the sun was low behind her. The adult was also behind her, holding her hand, commanding her march. His sweaty palm wrapped around her little fingers tightly, it hurt her, but he’d told her not to run. He would find her if she ran.

  “It’s fine,” Jake said, covering the lower portion of his face with his hand.

  The detective cleared his throat and shifted his position on the loveseat. “Jake—”

  Jake stepped towards the kitchen, away from the living room. “You were never going to find him. That’s been made abundantly clear.”

  Carrie’s eyes lifted from their distant stare to find the detective’s. His were set in a face of consternation. She understood him to be frustrated with her husband’s reply, but that he also couldn’t speak it. She also understood this all to be absurd, surreal. She knew her son was still out there, even if the police couldn’t find him. He was wandering the forest, alone, scared, cold. But he was alive.

  This detective had seen too much death. He assumed it, always. She could see it in the lines of his face, drawn from years of disappointment. From every happy ending, there were a dozen unhappy ones. And every case closed was still another dead victim. He couldn’t wrap his head around optimism, and besides, he didn’t have the connection a mother did to her child. Carrie knew Benny, she held him in her heart where he set the rhythm of its beats. It was still beating. He was still alive. She also knew the forest, she’d been among its shadows before. Benny was her kin, and therefore shared her instincts.

  Jake swiped a glass from a cabinet overhead and slammed it onto the countertop with a force that cracked it. “Damnit!” he shouted.

  Carrie peered into the detective’s weathered face. He didn’t need to belabor his message. She decided on releasing him.

  Carrie reached forward and placed her hand over his where it rested on his knee. He looked down at their piled hands, then up into her eyes. “Ma’am,” he said, soft and sympathetic.

  “Thank you,” she replied. “I know how much you care about Benny.”

  “Now, cold doesn’t mean closed,” he explained. “This killer, we’re going to catch him, I promise you that. And when we do, we’re going to make him list all the sites—”

  “For what?” Jake interjected from the kitchen as he poured scotch into a second glass. “For a lesser sentence? Give him life instead of death in exchange for some bones?”

  Carrie watched the brows furrow above the detective’s eyes. She watched his mouth open, but squeezed his hand to redirect attention to her. “I’m sure you will, which will be a great comfort to all the victims’ families.”

  His lips trembled then. His brows pushed inward and up, while his eyes grew lustrous. His mouth closed and his jaw clenched. She knew what he wanted to tell her. She knew what he believed. She also knew he couldn’t say it, same as he couldn’t defend his department against Jake. He had to let them be, to grieve. But Carrie wasn’t grieving. Benny wasn’t dead. The detective couldn’t understand that. For that reason, he would never find him. He was looking in a procedural manner, lacking intuition.

  He lowered his head. Then he took his free hand and tapped it gently over Carrie’s soft knuckles. “Again, I’m very sorry.” He stood, retrieving his jacket from the back of the loveseat before exiting through the front door.

  He would never find Benny. It was up to her, with the greater tools of heart and intuition.

  2

  _________

  Jake slept in his shed the night after Detective Ben Harrison informed him and his wife the search for their son was being called off. He’d taken a bottle of scotch and dragged himself out back. His shed was a ten foot by ten foot wooden structure he’d built when they first moved in. That was a year before Benny was born, fifteen years ago. Its purpose began like most sheds. It housed the lawnmower, snowblower, other tools. Then, when he started his hobby, writing short stories, he’d turned a corner of the shed into an office. The office slowly grew out from its corner and eventually overtook the entirety of the shed, its previous occupants retreating to the garage. None of his short stories ever published. He’d submitted them a thousand times. When Benny began writing, he saw a better outlet for his passion. He coached his son. Until the day Benny went missing.

  The shed, in the seven months since, transitioned its purpose. It was where his grieving and his anger festered into a new goal. All around, hung up from the walls were pictures, notes, string, and suspects, forming a webwork of his own sleuthing. The police weren’t going to be of any use, they’d made that abundantly clear from week one. In the first days of the search, they overlooked a boot print Jake had discovered on his own near one of the crime scenes. It was where one of the other boys was found. Michael. Stabbed against a tree. Twice in the belly, then throat slit. It was at that crime scene they realized Benny had been abducted. While the body of young Michael was slain and left against the tree for authorities to discover, wrapped around another trunk were the loosened ropes that contained flecks of Benny’s skin. All the other boys had been murdered and left, but here, containing evidence of Benny’s presence, was an exception. It indicated escape, that Benny was able to postpone his fate. Michael was less fortunate.

  Jake’s belly burned when he thought of the man taking the knife to young Michael, or any of the other three boys. Or his Benny. He felt the scotch singe the lining of his guts. A fire there was already brewing, born out of hate, hate for a man he didn’t yet know, but would come to, intimately.

  Benny was gone. Jake knew this, his son wasn’t athletic. His escape was a fluke, no doubt the murderer had recaptured him. It was a scenario that played out in Jake’s mind ad nauseum. Benny’s stringy body flailing itself down the wooded hill, probably stumbling, collapsing, falling back into the hands of the killer. He saw the grin on the man’s face, he could feel the sense of victory the killer felt. It hollowed out Jake’s core and refilled it with fire. He kept it contained, however, with help from liquor and isolation. His shed was his church now, where he came to worship the gods of retribution as he conducted his work. The mystery of where Benny’s body rested didn’t plague Jake, a quiet inquiry left to the back of his mind while in the forefront his vengeful obsession loomed.

  It consumed that following week. A reprieve from his job provided ample time to delve into his investigation. With the frustration of the authorities’ failure came renewed strength in his own resolve. And while Carrie reeled in her own stupor, Jake blissfully dove into the study of his chosen suspect.

  A man. Middle aged. Employed by a hardware store. David Marko.

  The evidence had been collected. Jake had rounded up a collection of facts and rumors that amounted to a profile he aligned with murderer. The man, from a list of several others, emerged the culprit.

  The case was simple, the facts were these: The same rope used in the murders was sold at only two locations in town, his being one. His estimated shoe size matched the boot imprint. A former Eagle Scout and son of an abusive father set him on a trajectory of malice. Single. Lived alone. Edge of town.

  One woman by the name of Kathleen Deboar had once gone on a blind date with him. Upon her third martini, she revealed to Jake a disturbing item she uncovered in his home. A pair of boys boxers, stained.

  David Marko had never once entered the conversation of the official investigation, never once been made a person of interest. Even after the importation of higher officials, they’d not done the right work. Jake had. Now, Jake had his man.

  It was time to befriend him.

  3

  _________

  The man’s slimy hand slipped away from her own as he lowered himself, bending his knees to stare her in the eye. His face was dirty, sweat mixed with soil. His nose leaked clear, thin mucus. His lips were thin and
chapped, and the whole of his face was an ashen appearance Carrie likened to a ghost. A ghost dragging her into his netherworld.

  In his small, beady eyes Carrie found something she didn’t like. It was akin to fear, but more potent, something she didn’t quite understand yet, but considered dangerous all the same. She remembered the neighbor’s dog, whimpering until she approached, when it snapped its jaw and snarled at her. She’d run away then, back home, afraid of the hound, happy for the fence that separated the two of them.

  “Listen to me,” he whispered to her. His voice was shrill, almost feminine, but unmistakably adult, and male. She watched his Adam's apple bob with his speech, rising and falling along his slender, fuzzy neck. His face wasn’t hairy, but his neck had lots of little, curly black hairs covering over his pale flesh.

  A twig snapped in the distance. His head twisted in the direction of the sound, spinning like in Saturday morning cartoons, nearly all the way around. His body obscured Carrie’s vision of the forest’s expanse behind him, but knew it couldn’t be another person as he turned back around to her, undeterred.

  “Listen to me,” he repeated. “The world is a very scary place. Do you understand that? Have you seen what it can do yet? It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me, just nod or shake your head. That’s all. Nod or shake.”

  His words were pronounced and quick, rushing from his mouth as he spoke them. She’d never watched someone’s mouth move so quickly, so closely to her face. There was an urgency she didn’t understand. What was so important about what he was telling her?

  She felt his fingers wrap around the puffy shoulders of her jacket and squeeze through the fabric to hurt her arms. She took it to be a stronger cue for her answer. She shook her head no.

  He smiled quickly, laughed once, then settled into a more saddened expression. “No, no, of course not, a little girl doesn’t know these things. That’s what makes them little girls. They don’t know. When you learn, you become a woman, understand?”