Part One
The Barrens
It is a region aboriginal in savagery.
Atlantic Magazine , 1858
I have been shocked at the conditions I have found. Evidently these people are a serious menace to the state of New Jersey. They have inbred . . . till they have become a race of imbeciles, criminals and defectives.
James T. Fielder
Governor of New Jersey (1914–17)
Sunday, July 5
Here, rancid air hangs heavily in a void, its texture thick, liquid, clinging, in a night full of the hot smells of decay.
This humid oppression strangely amplifies the dripping, clicking noises: the moldy rasp of dead leaves stirred by tiny animals, the constant murmur of a brook threading the loamy ground, the oozing splash of something that moves heavily through water.
There is no moon, and clouds screen the light from the stars.
Gradually now, sunk in the still and viscous murk, the trees become vague shapes. Silent. Waiting. The ragged leaves of swamp elms hang motionless as insects in a web.
Slowly, the trees begin to glow.
Through the pines, the headlights were baleful eyes, lost and searching. They glanced off trees as the car first skidded around a turn in the soft sand, then veered from side to side on the narrow road. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, the driver grabbed at the girl’s T-shirt, while the car bounced wildly.
“Come on, just let ’em out a little. Come on, just let me see ’em.” The old man’s face glistened with sweat. “Come on, honey. Wouldn’t ya like a few bucks? I won’t tell nobody.”
“Terrific.” With her shoulder already pressed against the door, she couldn’t slide any farther away from him. “What are you, crazy? You seemed like such a nice person. God, all of a sudden, you’re an obscene phone call! Now, would you quit it?” She smacked at his groping hand. “I think you just better let me out of this car.”
He was undoing his pants, fumbling with one hand. “You don’t have to do nothing. Just play with it a little.”
“Oh shit, would you look at what you’re doing?” She made a sound halfway between a scream and hysterical laughter. “I don’t believe this is happening. Why me? Would you stop that, please? Stop it!”
“Well, I can make you do it, you know,” he rasped. “Come on, it’ll only take a minute.”
“I’ve got news for you. It’s not even gonna take that long. Just who do you think you are?” Clutching her string bag, she considered jumping out of the car. “Just because . . .” Frightened laughter burst out. “You mean that’s it?”
“What the fuck?” His face registered disbelief, then blood flushed darkly into his cheeks. Enraged, he grabbed her left breast. She punched him on the nose.
Brakes squealing, the car skidded to a halt.
“I’m bleeding! Get the fuck out of my car, you bitch! My nose is bleeding! Get the hell out!”
“With pleasure!” As she started to open the door, he gave her a hard shove, and the door burst outward. She fell, her knees and elbows making deep depressions in the sand. “Oww! You little shit! Who do you think you’re pushing?” Gears grinding, the car lurched forward as she scrambled furiously to her feet. “Hey! Wait a minute, you can’t . . . !”
“Whore!” he screamed, repeating the word as he gunned the
motor.
“Asshole!” she yelled back. “You’re only about two inches!”
Red taillights pulled away, disappearing around a bend, and droning cicadas drowned out the sound of the motor. She scanned the pressing tangle of vines and fir trees: a motionless horde of pines surrounded her, dwarf shapes with twisted and broken limbs, those along the edge of the road now showing gray beneath the rising moon.
Picking up the string bag, she brushed grit off her skinned elbows and knees and saw that one elbow bled slightly. “Shit.” The hot scent of blood drifted on the night air.
She could see tire tracks in the sand, but not many. That creep must have come this way because he knew it’d be deserted. Dark and deserted. That’s the last time I hitchhike.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Half expecting to see headlights coming back, she rummaged through her bag. Wet bathing suit, makeup, half a candy bar. To calm herself, she ate the candy, licking the melting chocolate off her fingers.
Even the beach wasn’t this dark at night.
Though plump, Mary Bradley had fine bones and delicate hands, possessing a limp quality that approached gracefulness.
Just now, the creamy skin she generally took such care of was sunburned as well as scraped, and her breast was sore where the old man had squeezed it. Yet she managed to grin at the way she’d told him off. At the office, she was famous for her shrill little rages.
The weekend at the shore had as usual been one long party. Too much sun, too much loud music and liquor. She had a regular ride home with her girlfriends, but she’d met this cute guy last night . . . and this morning discovered that the other girls had left without her. At least they took my suitcase with them. It had already been getting dark when she’d started hitchhiking. Bad move. She shook her head. Never again.
Should of made him let me out sooner. But the old creep seemed so normal. Some of her girlfriends told horror stories about their “dates from hell.” She couldn’t wait to tell them this one. Stranded in the frigging woods.
She peered up the road. Nothing. God only knew what time she’d get back to Philly. And she had to work in the morning.
Not that she worried about losing sleep: enough amphetamines coursed through her system to keep her going. Diet pills didn’t really curb her appetite any, but they sure were great for partying. Maybe one of the girls at work would have some Xanax or Valium or something to help her crash. Otherwise, she’d be a mess tomorrow.
It’s too hot to breathe. And I still need to pee. She had the jumpy, thirsty feeing she always got after a couple of days on speed, and the crickets set up an echoing vibration in her nervous system.
God, these bugs. A breeze stirred now, and it seemed the pines themselves began to resemble giant insects, prickly feelers twitching.
I hope I don’t have to wait here forever.
Soon she became aware of a sound besides the insects, faintly hollow above the constant whir. Cars on the highway? It seemed to come from all around her, and she strained to listen. On second thought, it was almost like the roar in a seashell. Could she be close to a beach? Then she recognized the sound for what it was.
Trees. Hot night air stirring in the trees.
She felt very strange and queasy, isolated. Even the air doesn’t smell right. No soot, no gasoline fumes.
“Shit!” The mosquitoes had found her, and they whirred in her ears and eyes. Mosquitoes and God only knows what else. One flew in her mouth. She slapped at her neck, slapped at her bare legs, squashing something bloated and wet. Terrific. Dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt, she’d be covered with welts soon. She really began to worry how long it would be before another car came along. An hour maybe? She could be sucked dry by then. And what if there wasn’t another car to night?
I almost wish the old guy would come back.
She tried to guess how far she was from the larger road they’d been on and, as she started to walk back that way, wished she hadn’t been so chatty and had paid more attention. This is weird. Spotted with weeds, the white sand glowed in the moonlight, making her feel unreal, as though she floated through deep darkness on fluid silver. A swarm of mosquitoes followed, swimming through the humid air, and she imagined that in the shadows of the trees, the crickets followed as well.
Her footsteps made no sound. It was like walking on the beach—her calf and thigh muscles began to ache, and the straps of her new sandals cut into her feet. When she took them off, the sand felt soothing between her toes.
Suddenly, she panicked. I’m lost! The patch of white trailed on into the woods, twisting onward into nothingness. Where’s the road? As she got her bearings and moved back, she shivered in spite of the heat, knowing she’d be in real trouble if she strayed far from this path. Something crawled down the back of her damp T-shirt, and she clawed it out, squashing it, wiping her hand on her cutoffs. She was pretty sure there were things in her hair.
Ahead, something glinted dimly. Just able to make out the shape, she raced for it, aching muscles forgotten. Bullet holes riddled the sign, the red lettering black by moonlight.
warning
do not pick up hitchhikers
harrisville state psychiatric hospital
4 miles
The needles of the nearer pines might have been thin talons, stretched out straight and clutching.
Warning
She took a deep breath then giggled shrilly. “Swell.” The sound of crickets receded. “If they find me laughing in the woods, that’s where they’re gonna put me.” The sound of her own voice made her feel better, and she giggled again. “Anyway, I bet they don’t really give weekend passes to the ax murderers.”
As it wove through massed darkness, the road seemed to narrow again, and she panted, glancing back the way she’d come. Just for a moment, it seemed the pines themselves moved, that they shifted almost imperceptibly, inching onto the road. The crickets resumed. She glanced back and wondered how far she’d walked, but there was nothing by which to judge, no landmarks, only her footprints in the sand. Plodding forward again, she told herself the main road couldn’t be much farther.
She carried only one sandal.
“Wouldn’t you just know? And I only wore them the once.” Reluctantly, she started to backtrack.
Just a few yards away, beside the imprint of her bare feet, the sandal lay on its side in the sand . . . another set of prints trailing next to it. Some sort of animal must’ve made them, she guessed. A deer, maybe. But didn’t deer have pointed feet or hooves or whatever? These tracks looked flat and broad.
She turned. The tracks were all around her now.
Clearly etched in moon shadow, the prints crossed her own, sometimes running parallel. She couldn’t have missed them if they’d been there seconds before.
The night breathed around her, and her teeth clicked together. A mosquito hummed in her ear, and something rustled in the woods.
She ran. The main road had to be just up ahead, just beyond this bend or the next. She sprinted heavily, fleshy arms jouncing, and one foot came down hard on something sharp. She cried out, hobbling, her full bladder feeling as though it would burst with every jolt.
At last she slowed to check the road behind her. The itch of insect bites was maddening, and her clothes clung tightly.
Nothing. Beginning to feeling silly, she balanced on one foot and pulled something thorny from the sole of the other. “What’s the matter with me?” Out of breath and trembling, she wiped sweat out of her eyes and gazed down at the imprints her feet had made in the sand. “Talk about being scared of your own shadow.” The pounding of her heart slowed, and she examined the sticky mixture of sand and blood on her foot.
A rumbling vibration startled her. Blinding lights jerked through the night as a truck shuddered past.
The highway lay right there. Not twenty yards away in the dark, this dirt track emptied onto it. She went limp with relief and put her sandals back on. The shadows of the pines had shifted heavily, and she decided it was lucky a car hadn’t come along on this narrow road—she could easily have been run down.
The pressure in her bladder still throbbed.
More approaching lights. As another car passed, she smiled at the prospect of bending the ear of whoever picked her up. What a story!
Oh well, last chance to use the facilities. She considered crouching where she stood but figured—just her luck—a car would come along and spotlight her. It wasn’t fair, she thought, scanning the area to her right: men had it so much easier.
Spotting a clump of pines that might do, she took a few steps toward it. One foot sank deep in muck, and the ground oozed. Her foot made a squishy suck coming out, and she almost lost the sandal. “I don’t believe this.” Fouled with slime to the ankle, she began picking her way back across the marshy ground.
There came a hideous stench. Behind her, something moved heavily in the underbrush.
Her legs and arms ached with the sudden pressure of blood, and her bladder voided as, with agonizing slowness, she turned.
The darkness moved.
Unaware of the sudden hot tears on her face, she groped her way backwards toward the road.
A shape lurched toward her from the shadows.
Branches slashed at her plump bare thighs as she ran. Something exploded out of the thicket behind her. Propelled by terror, she ran faster than she’d ever thought she could, her brain screaming too loudly to register sights or sounds. Only her bones felt the pounding that gained on the road behind her.
Lights! A car ahead—she cried out, but the sandals, plowing through soft dirt, slowed her so that . . .
Slammed into from behind, she was spun around with incredible force.
Distantly, strangely dislocated from herself, from this body whirling through the dark, she wondered if she’d been hit be a car after all. Had the old man come back? It was her last coherent thought.
She lay, pain humming through her in the night, then felt herself being lifted.
A large bat scurried across the sky as a car flashed past the side road, red taillights retreating. The thrashing in the thicket gradually diminished, and soon there remained only the droning of insects.
* * *
“You can slow down now, Jack. I told you, there’s no hurry— this one’s DOA. I’d rather we didn’t all wind up that way, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you saying my driving ain’t all it should be, Doris?” “You mean to tell me you didn’t finish filling that out yet?” Ignoring him, she sat down next to the woman in back. “What’s taking so long, kid?”
The narrow stretcher creaked. Perched on one of the cushioned seats of worn orange vinyl, Athena looked up. “The first one got a little messed up,” she responded, trying to keep dark arterial blood from getting on the report.
“Big surprise. Darn, would you look at my jeans? I throw away more clothes! You should’ve seen it coming out of my hair last night in the shower.” Doris Compson was a short, solid woman. Steel gray hair, steel gray eyes. The patch on her sleeve read captain . Originally from the Tampa Bay area, she’d been living in these woods for almost twenty- five years but still spoke with a slight Southern twang. She’d once avowed, “Jersey’s the crookedest state in the Union—Mafia runs the whole damn place, like Mexico,” but she’d said it with pride, swearing in the next breath that she’d never want to live anywhere else: it was the local style.
With a loud rattle, the ambulance shuddered, spattered ceiling lights faltering. Tires shrieked, leaving twin streaks of acrid rubber on the road.
“What in hell was that?” yelled Doris, jumping to her feet.
The ambulance regained speed.
“I hit a dog.” Shirtsleeves rolled on his muscular arms, Jack Buzby wrestled the wheel, steering the rig around a series of sharp turns.
“You what?”
“You heard me, Doris,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.
The thick glasses he pushed back on his nose gave him an incongruously studious air. He was twenty years old, good- looking and normally easygoing, though just now trying hard not to look upset. “It ran outta the woods in front of me. That headlight’s so outta whack, I didn’t even see it till too late.”
“Kill it?”
“Prob’ly.”
“You think it might’ve been one of those wild dogs, kid?
The ones Barry and Steve were talking about?” Athena glanced up. She felt light- headed, nauseated by the heat.
“We had that happen around here once before, couple years back,” Doris went on. “Remember, Jack? A gang of dogs got to running wild in the woods, raiding farms and the like. Hmm, dog days,” she muttered, wiping her face. “That’s what they call it when it’s thick like this. Damn air feels like a dog’s breath.” “Feral dogs.” Athena stared at the small puddle of blood sloshing around her shoes. The disposable blankets they’d used to sop up some of the liquid lay wadded and soaking.
“You say something, honey?” Doris peered at her.
“Feral dogs, they’re called.” Absently, she massaged her leg. “Like feral children.”
“Leg bothering you again, hon?”
“No.” Scowling, she tried to ignore the ache in her knee while she completed the accident report.
The corpse that sprawled across the stretcher was immensely fat and mangled. The accident had taken place barely a mile from the ambulance hall, and blood had still been spouting from him when they’d arrived. Despite his wife’s protests, the drunken idiot had gone up a rickety ladder to prune a tree at night. He’d landed beer belly–first on the chainsaw.
Athena shook her head, writing up the particulars. Her faded work shirt was drenched and sticky, her hair pulled back in a tight bun.
“Hey, Athena, why don’t you come up here and keep the driver company?”
“Just ignore him, honey. What’s the matter, stud? Need some help with your stick shift?” Doris waved at the air around her face; in truth, it was an old, familiar odor. Before an early retirement, she’d been the local coroner. The appointment had been political, and her professional survival through a succession of graft- ridden administrations had been no accident. She was tough, an expert at cronyism. The fact that Mullica Emergency Rescue, with its small volunteer crew, kept operating at all was due entirely to her fund- raising activities, the shambling wreck of an ambulance itself having been donated by a neighboring township at her instigation. “Christ, this job is a bitch during the summer,” she muttered, resisting the impulse to hold her nose.
The bald head of the dead man was splattered and darkening, and he stank of booze and other things, his abdomen a shredded pile that slopped through lacy layers of fat. When the ambulance rattled through a series of rapid lurches, the ruined organs quivered, slipping farther down, and fleshy tendrils vibrated toward the floor. Doris mumbled something about the damn road, and Jack replied with something about a tune- up and new shocks. Athena tossed a blanket over the body. They were still a good twenty miles away from the nearest hospital.
. . . and Mary Bradley knelt in black water. The marsh was a darkly flooded vision of hell, and the nightmare landscape revolved, rushing with the blood that streamed down her left side.
“No! Please!”
Circling, the thing lunged. It tore at her, ripped her soft breasts, and the force of the attack sent her rolling in the morass. Now glimpsed in scattered moonlight, now invisible in shadow, the thing backed off, moving through dark water with incredible speed, again circling.
“Stay away from—!” A mouthful of warm, stagnant water stopped her screams as something spurted from beneath her rent T-shirt. She staggered to her feet, slipped in slimy muck and went down in a sitting position. Half submerged, she watched the red spot on her shirt spread, watched the water around her darken. “Don’t hurt me.”
It surged toward her. She was jerked upright. Struggling, she beat wildly, beads of blood flying as it lashed at her. She was thrown against a dead sapling, and the pine toppled, easily uprooted in the muck.
She came down on one knee in shallow water. Splashing, slapping noises surrounded her in the dark. She slid backwards, falling across a mound of hard earth. If she could only rise . . .
Scrambling on all fours, she heaved out of the ooze, tried to get to her feet.
With a leap, it was on her back, wet and heavy. “Help me!” It pounded her to the ground with hammering blows. “Oh God!”
Again, it backed away.
Face in the mud, she listened, struggling to stay conscious. Her skull felt as though it had been crushed. Distantly, she heard it snarl with obscene ferocity.
Then it closed again and flipped her onto her back.
Weakly now, she flailed, as cloth and flesh ripped away. Belly exposed and white, she lay quivering, throbbing with pain. The thing leaned over her—huge, hot, dripping—and she trembled convulsively, closing her eyes hard, her body rigid, as the thing pressed against her, reeking breath in her face.
And then the forcing . . . enormous pressure . . . her screams emerging as mangled chokes.
“No!” it hurts “Don’t!” oh dear God oh it hurts “Please!”
It gripped her, plunging, clawing.
“don’t”
Her body arched in spasms, legs jerking as the bloody remnants of her urine- soaked cutoffs bunched at her knees, bound her stiffened limbs. She heard her own flesh ripping, as a sound emerged from deep within the thing—a groan of pleasure. Her mind retreated.
As it pounded and clutched, her bare back jerked from the mud again and again, her skin grinding against the coarse sand with each thrust. Her eyes opened: flesh hung from her left arm in a flap, veins laid open and pumping fluid, bone exposed to the moonlight.
It pushed hard, harder, until something swelled and burst within her. Numb, she rocked with pressure, the flap of skin swaying, dripping, as dark rivulets ran along the folds of her stomach and trickled over her side, making thick black coils in the sand.
The crickets sang.
my string bag . . . I’ve lost my . . . Her hands twitched feebly on the ground, nothing but wet sand in the flesh between her fingers.
“Hey, we got company.” Jack leaned out the window.
Outside, swirling lights and a siren gained on them, the siren switching off suddenly. Somebody yelled, and Jack laughed.
“What’s that? Yeah, she’s in here.”
“Watch what you’re . . . !” Doris sputtered. “What the hell you slowing down for?”
Athena stood up, wobbling. “Is that Barry?”
“What?” Outside, the siren screamed on again, cutting Jack off in midshout, and the police car swiftly pulled away from them. “They must of got a call,” said Jack over his shoulder.
“Barry’s going to hear about this! He can’t be holding us up like that—we could’ve had a patient in here for all he knows. For crying out loud, you’d think Steve at least would have better sense.”
“Come on, Doris,” Jack said. “They got a radio. They must of heard us call the hospital—Steve knows we got a dead ’un. Hey, before I forget, you know you got to drop me back at my car, don’t you?”
“I know it.”
“Just so’s I don’t get stuck like last time. I can’t believe I was the first one on the scene again. That’s three times in a row.” Athena limped toward the front of the rig. Doris stood aside to let her pass, watching her walk, feeling the familiar tug, deep inside.
“Can you raise them?”
“You want to try?” asked Jack, not looking up.
Athena sat next to him and impatiently fiddled with the radio. “I can’t get anything. What did he yell?”
He navigated a series of rough turns. “Something about meeting
you at the diner.”
“Real discreet,” Doris muttered. Slipping in blood, she lost her footing for a moment and steadied herself against the soft pile on the stretcher. “Shit. You’d think by now I’d at least know how to ride in an ambulance without falling over.” She wiped her hands on her jeans and reached behind the oxygen cylinder. “This tank’s almost empty. I’d like to know how in hell I’m supposed to run a rescue team without O 2 .” She found the thermos bottle. “ ’Kill for a cigarette.”
“What’re you grumbling about back there?” yelled Jack.
“You know you ain’t allowed to smoke in here, Doris.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered and concentrated on sipping coffee without spilling it. “Just shut up and drive.”
“Forget it,” said Jack, noticing Athena’s attempt to roll down a window. “Stuck again.”
“Great.” As pines rushed past on either side, Athena felt the ground drumming beneath her, lulling her. Yet she sat very stiff, very straight. “In this heat.”
They all lapsed into a hot, weary silence. The right headlight, pointing upward at a crazy angle, raked across roadside trees. Athena tried to concentrate on the radio but could only get static. “One more thing that needs fixing.” Hypnotic, the woods rolled endlessly past the window, formless as storm clouds. Suddenly, she leaned forward. For an instant, she thought she’d seen a beast trotting at the edge of the road.
“The woods still bother you, don’t they, kid?”
She started. Doris had come up behind her.
“ Doris, don’t you know by now our ’Thena ain’t afraid of nothing?” Jack laughed. “Hey, you found the coffee? Gimme some.”
Athena looked away from the window. “What happened to his wife?”
“Whose wife, honey?”
She jerked a thumb toward the back of the rig. “I thought she wanted to ride with us.”
“I wasn’t going to let her in here. You kidding? The way he looks? I don’t know where she is though. Jack?”
“Neighbors had her when we pulled out.”
He switched on the siren, and it drowned his words, washing them away from Athena. Headlights gleamed off orange reflective disks by the roadside, and she watched as—faintly lit—they sank, dissolved in darkness one by one.
“No, they don’t bother me,” she began. “As a kid, I used to have nightmares about being lost in the woods. When you consider it, that shows rather a lot of imagination for a child in Queens.” She tried to laugh. “Don’t you think?”
“That all there was to the dream? Just the woods? Go on.”
But the younger woman stayed silent, lost in memories of lying awake, of the crutches by the bed, of her dream closing on her. Knowing that she couldn’t run had always made it worse. She’d always known that her grandmother would come if she cried out. But she hadn’t cried. Not ever. Too proud, even then. And throughout her childhood, through her adolescent spells of sleepwalking, every night the dark had swallowed her.
The mouth of a side road rushed past, opening deep into the woods.
“Yeah, honey, dreams can sure be rough on a little kid.” Even as she spoke, Doris felt the inadequacy of her words, and when Jack snorted in derision, she turned on him gratefully. “So what’s your problem? I suppose you never had a bad dream?”
“Who me? I never had no kind of dream in my whole life.”
“That’s not the way your mother tells it.”
“Shut up, Doris. What happened to that coffee anyways?
Don’t I get any?”
“Not from what I hear. Watch your driving. Besides, it’s against the rules to have coffee in here anyways.”
“You’re drinking it!”
“I’m the squad captain.”
Athena only half- listened to them. The night overwhelmed her. Swelling like a huge black wave, it could flood across the highway, crush their tiny particle of light and movement, drown them all in darkness. She forced herself to look away, then leaned over to check Jack’s watch. “Did Barry say anything else?”
The thing in the back had stopped dripping, and as the ambulance barreled through the night, streetlights began to emerge, beacons of order in the chaos of the dark.
* * *
A thought stirred. ohgodohgod it hurts The amphetamines coursing through what remained of Mary Bradley’s blood system inexorably forced her toward something near consciousness.
She had no body, no localized perceptions. Enclosed by silence, she knew only the shape and size of absolute blackness, hot and suffocating.
Memory leaked—a nightmare of herself whirled and slashed through bleeding skeletons of trees. Awareness seeped back. She lay inside . . . a cave? A pit? A grave? And she seemed to be soaking in a puddle, could feel it on her shoulders and buttocks, thick and sticky like paint, crusty around the edges.
where It seemed she should have arms, and she recalled things done in the mind to move an arm. ohgod what She wondered if her eyes were open. Dead
A hand fell upon herself, and memory flooded. swamp and Her fingers slipped along her gouged and oozing stomach, slid to wet and softly mangled places. She shook with nausea, and the movement created searing pain.
An oval area of lighter darkness was eclipsed, then reappeared, like an entrance momentarily blocked. She realized her eyes were open, and through the dampening field of pain, she heard sounds: straining breath, slavering growl.
It scrambled closer. She barely felt its damp breath on her thigh, barely felt the teeth.
The old Plymouth rushed along the paved road, headlights lancing the haze. Telephone poles loomed past repetitiously. Even dead tired, Athena Lee Monroe drove extremely well. But then this girl is good at everything. She grinned humorlessly at the thought. She’d been stood up again.
The Chamong Diner was shabby and none too clean. This evening, Doris and Jack and some buddy of Jack’s named Larry had all stopped in, and the talk had been loud and cheery, what with the guys bullshitting about scuba diving and backpacking and all the women they were screwing, and Doris regaling them with hair- raising anecdotes from her days as coroner. Drinking coffee and watching the door, Athena had sat at the booth for hours, barely joining in the conversation, just toying restlessly with little packets of sugar and choking on the smoke from Doris’s cigarettes.
When she’d finally given up hope of seeing Barry, the others had tried to keep her with them, but she’d resisted, knowing they’d be there till dawn or until old man Sims chased them out. Passing the phone booth in the parking lot, she’d longed to call Barry . . . but Cathy would have gotten suspicious.
She smiled sourly. Now why should calling at two a.m. make his wife suspicious? Shaking her head, she recalled the contempt she’d always felt for her aunt’s sordid little intrigues. How Aunt Jeanie would crow to see her now . Not that she would see me. She understood too well how completely her family had disowned her after her marriage.
The car lost speed, drifting to a stop at the mouth of a sand road. The way home. Just beyond the bright haze of her headlights, the side road plunged deep into the forest.
Dashboard dials gleamed a pale, plastic green, and her hands looked ghostly in the glow as she touched the radio scanner beside her on the seat, drew her fingertips across its tiny red light. Bracing herself, she fought down the familiar moment of panic. The way home. Mindful of the bogs on either side of the road, she drove carefully, fervently wishing she had somewhere else to go.
Home. She thought of her grandmother’s house and smiled. On Athena’s ninth birthday, Granny Lee had given her a collection of children’s stories and poems. Vaguely, she wondered what had become of that book. Did she still have it somewhere, packed away with the rest of her past? She could still recall one of those stories, about a hag who lived along a dismal swamp. She tried to convince herself that it amused her to have become that woman.
Jagged darkness pressed around as the old automobile jounced over the uneven road. Downshifting, she slowed the Plymouth to a crawl . . . and the headlights found strange patches in the sand.
It could almost be blood. “Only children are afraid of the dark,” she said aloud. After that, she drove with deliberate slowness, fighting the urge to floor the gas pedal. Nothing is watching me. Mosquitoes roiled in her headlight beams. They swarmed along the road, teemed in and out of the windows in this muggy heat. A road sign, riddled with bullets, crawled past, warning motorists about the proximity of the state hospital. The insane asylum. She brushed away thoughts of her mother and resolutely searched for something on which to fix her mind.
Once, she’d seen an aerial photo of the barrens, the highways like razor- thin incisions. The photograph had trembled in her hands. She though of pictures she’d seen of Canada’s Great North Woods—giant and majestic—but here, in the forests that stretched through most of southern central New Jersey, the barren sands could produce no such growth.
No. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. The sands were not truly barren. They produced the stunted, twisted pines . . . as her body had produced her son.
Furious with herself for the thought, she jerked the wheel, and a dwarf pine rasped against the car. Cursing, she concentrated on driving. There were so many things to avoid.
She switched on the radio—a garbled voice. She twisted the dial but could find nothing clear, the distant signals a cacophony of chopped and liquid sound. She turned it off, and the car crept along. Nailed to a tree, a weathered plank indicated the fork to Munro’s Furnace.
The road narrowed until it became a sandy rut walled by brush, and now pine boughs crushed against both sides of the car. Around a turn, the brush thinned, and another winding branch diverted from the main trunk of the road. Dark shells of ruined houses passed.
Soon, her own home loomed, dark and ugly in the windshield. It was her late husband’s house really, the house he’d been born in, last surviving structure of an old mill town. The present- day town of Munro’s Furnace, such as remained, lay another three-quarters of a mile down the road.
As the car crunched to a halt on gravel, she stared unblinking. No matter how long she lived here, it always proved something of a shock, this reality. Funny, but in her mind she always pictured the place the way it had been when they’d first begun fixing it up—scaffolding and ladders, cans of paint and bags of cement everywhere. A royal mess, but she hadn’t cared because they’d been happy, working together until . . .
Glaring headlights held the cobbled- together structure in cruel scrutiny: clapboard walls beneath phantom paint; boarded firstfloor windows she couldn’t afford to repair; collapsing front porch propped up with old bed slats and cinder blocks. She switched off the engine, got out, and night fell on her.
Her grandmother’s home in Queens—no matter how miserable she’d been there as a child—had at least held life. This house lay black and silent. Looking up, she strained to make out the blind diamond panes of her son’s bedroom window. He’s been asleep for hours. She allowed her gaze to drift across the hanging eaves, along the tilting gabled roof . . . missing shingles . . . crumbling chimneys.
While she limped around to the back, shoulders straight, she forced herself to walk closer to the bristling shadows, farther from the house than necessary. She mounted the wobbling steps to the porch and stood, fumbling her key into the kitchen door. Why couldn’t Pamela ever remember to switch on the porch light before she left? Something wet and warm pressed against the back of her hand, and she jumped. “Stupid dog!”
From the darkness of the porch came a yawning whine and the scratching of claws on wood. “Get away, Dooley.” When she got the door open, the moldy smell of the house met her like an invisible wall. “Go back to sleep. You can’t come in.” She heard the dog yawn again and flop back down on the porch with a deflating sigh.
Pulling the door closed behind her, she could see nothing, and she stumbled across the rough wooden floor, feeling along the wall for the switch. She flinched when yellowish light flooded the kitchen.
A three- inch millipede tapped along the stove, waving its antennae in blinded confusion. Darkness bulged at the door. Pamela’s note lay on the crumb- littered tablecloth.
Granny Lee once had a dog put to sleep. Her thoughts grew fuzzy and, yawning, she crumpled the note. The cellar door stood slightly ajar. She closed it, turned the old key, remembering how they’d used to tease her about being afraid of the basement at her grandmother’s house, and how Aunt Jeanie had always been inventing errands to take her down there. Such a night for reminiscences.
The house returned to absolute darkness as she switched off the kitchen light, and a cricket began to throb beneath a floorboard. Groping her way into the living room, she walked into a chair and cursed, then felt her way toward the stairs. The other rooms on the first floor had been closed off. From outside, the voices of the night—the insects and the whispering trees— sounded low and indistinct.
As she started up the stairs, her hand rode along the smooth banister, smearing the dust. She turned left at the landing. Boards creaked under her footsteps along the hall—a loud thump followed by the weaker, softer sound. She went straight to her room. Without turning on a light, she put the scanner on the dresser, then pulled bobby pins and elastic bands out of her hair. A hair band knotted, and she yanked it out, tossed it on the dresser. Feeling sweaty and dirty, but too tired to do anything about it, she fell across the too- soft, untidy bed. Mounds of laundry lay heaped around her, and her leg ached.
From the scanner, police calls muttered distantly. She listened to them drone and thought about getting undressed, knowing her reflexes would alert her if the tone that preceded ambulance calls sounded. The scanner’s small red light was somehow comforting, and her mind drifted to the night- light Granny Lee had given her so long ago. Even as a child, she’d thought it cowardly and every night had dragged herself out of bed to unplug it, loathing herself all the while.
Something rattled overhead. It could have been another tile that had worked loose, clattering across the roof . . . or it might have come from the attic. She listened to the house, to the beams that groaned like an old wooden ship.
She seldom truly slept anymore. Habitually, she’d push herself to exhaustion, then lie twitching on the edge of wakefulness, only to be active at dawn. The hours stretched long before her. Lying in the dark, eyes open, she always ran out of the distractions and evasions. In the woods. Whenever she was motionless, questions seemed to whirl around her. She’d expected so much from herself, but what had she done with her life? She was thirty- two years old now and trapped in the pines—ten years almost. It seemed so much longer than that . . . and so much shorter. All the things she’d wanted . . .
Too late.
But her work on the ambulance was important. She tried to hold to that thought as the redness of the scanner grew hazy. Her scalp still smarted from the hair band, and her thoughts drifted to how Aunt Jeanie, jealous of her light skin, had always teased her about her kinky hair, and how Granny Lee had always tried to straighten it with chemicals that stank and burned. No . . . I don’t want . . . Her hair would come out in fistfuls, and always there would be scabs on her scalp for weeks afterwards. No.
She closed her eyes, and the darkness was complete.
The bedroom window was open but with the shade drawn against the night. Ten yards from the house, beyond the waving grasses, pines swayed, making a noise like the sea, like a still boiling primeval element.
And the dream began.
Always, it was the same: torturous fragments raced through her mind, baffling glimpses of frenzy, the savage joy of forest revels, the crazed pursuit of those that fled, blood gushing hot, the rending of fawn’s flesh and the splattering of trees in infantile desecration, mad decoration, alone and not alone. She writhed on the bed.
A different noise filtered into her nightmare—a rhythmic groaning, full of the creak of bedsprings.
Half awake, she got up and made her way along the hall. At its end, steep narrow stairs were set in a closet- like alcove, and she went up them practically on all fours, feeling her way in the dark.
The attic room had a sour, baby smell. She felt in the air for the string, and the naked, insect- encrusted bulb blazed, dancing. The attic was a mad jumble of chairs, boxes, broken and unwanted objects from all over the house. Oh Christ . . . I have to clear out this mess. Maybe tomorrow she would get to it.
The cot shook, creaking with the boy’s efforts. Naked and sweaty, his ten- year- old body twisted into serpentine knots on the bedding, and his teeth locked in the rumpled pillow he ripped with convulsive jerks of his head. The boy was asleep.
She stared. His hair was curly like hers, coppery like his father’s, and in the leprous bulb light, his damp skin had an unwholesome yellow sheen. He was the source of the sour smell. She wanted to turn away, obliquely wondering what wordless images comprised his dreams. He needs a bath. His sleep- swollen face remained buried in the pillow.
He growled.
“Matthew.”
She simply spoke his name, and though his body remained tensed, all movement ceased.
Her son. For perhaps the thousandth time, she wondered about herself, about why she felt no tenderness when she gazed on this child. She would not pretend to herself. Her mind slid to her late husband: she’d let Wallace down in so many ways. The house. The boy. And the awful thing is I don’t really feel sorry, can’t even feel guilt anymore. Can’t feel anything. Like hot water scalding dead flesh, her thoughts brought only an echo of pain. I’m paralyzed.
There were long scratches on the boy’s legs.
He’d been in the woods again, she thought uneasily. In spite of everything I’ve said to Pamela, he’s been out in the woods.
She stared another moment. The sheet was a graying tangle, tucked between his legs, and she thought he might have wet the bed again. If I try to change the bedding now, I’ll only wake him. She switched off the light. Pamela can do it in the morning. As on so many other nights, she groped her way back down into the narrow darkness.
