Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  Something tied to the thing that now lived in the Old Wood.

  He came to live there when Nana moved into their house, came to live there so he could watch Nana and not be seen. Watch all of them, especially Sylvia.

  When they went together, that first time, they walked for what felt like hours through bramble and soft earth and cobwebs, through sticky branches and the false-bottoms of dead leaf puddles, filled with bugs that leapt onto Sylvia’s bare legs when her shoes plowed through them. Other insects landed on the back of her small hands and exposed arms, sucking blood or eating invisible flakes of dead skin. She slapped and swiped, but they were everywhere, and they were fearless.

  “Where are we going?” she’d asked Nana’s back, growing tired and scared of the darkening woods as they went deeper and deeper into the forest’s belly, further and further from the safety and familiar comfort of her home.

  * * *

  On the day Sylvia turned twelve, she and Beth walked the very same path through the woods. As they went, Sylvia looked up at the sentinel trees, the broad leaves, the beams of early-afternoon sunlight piercing the canopies. The ground was dry, it hadn’t rained much that summer, and there was the pleasant crunch and snip of twigs and dried leaves beneath their feet as they walked.

  Toadstools and moss pointed the way, even the lower branches seemed oddly bent to guide the girls toward the cavern, keeping them on the path.

  Why do so many scary stories take place in the woods? Sylvia thought as they walked, brushing the tips of her small fingers against the bark of nearby trees, enjoying the smell of nature, the familiar scent of him. What is so deadly about the energy of the trees?

  Beth had grown weary of the walk and was constantly slowing them down, distracted by a black butterfly, a coiling ball of worms—some only dried husks, others wet and feeding. A particularly large leaf.

  “Come on, Beth, we’re almost there,” Sylvia said. She could see the dark mouth of the entrance through the trees ahead, open and waiting.

  “When does the party start?” Beth asked in her high-pitched, pert little voice, her knees bent, pigtails sticking up into the air as she eyeballed a large beetle crawling through the dirt.

  “Not for a whole hour,” Sylvia replied, anxious to show her best friend what lay within the rocks. Despite what Nana said, despite what he wanted. “Now c’mon. I want to show you something.”

  * * *

  Nana had been bringing Sylvia into the woods the last few years, sharing with her the musk and flex of nature. The first time they had gone to the cavern, Nana had told her she might not be coming out.

  “Why?” Sylvia asked, not scared, only curious. “Are there bears?”

  Nana had laughed, her hands lifting the hem of Sylvia’s pink dress, tugging it up and over her head. Sylvia remembered that first time, that first touch. She had thought it a game then, but she was older now and could better understand what had been happening to her. She was learning how to keep secrets.

  “Nature has many things to share with us, Sylvia. He has many desires, and often requires companionship.”

  “He?” she said. “Don’t you mean she? Mother? She’s Mother Nature.”

  Nana laughed again, as if they were chatting before bedtime, and knelt to slip off her shoes. The ground had been so wet and cold beneath her bare feet. “What is gender, hmm?” Nana said. “What is sex?”

  Sylvia, still so young, did not know how to respond. She’d heard things, seen pictures, but she’d feel funny talking about it with Nana. She didn’t care, anyway. It was boring. “I dunno,” she said, shrugging her white bony shoulders, bared to the surrounding trees.

  “You see how beautiful you are,” her nana said, brushing her cheek, “without the burden of clothes. This is pure. That is what matters. He, she, it, they...” she waved her hands dismissively, “all creations of a feeble-minded race.”

  Nana smoothed Sylvia’s dress over one hooked arm, held the soles of her sneakers in the claw of her fingers. “Now, you must go. I have brought him close, I have prepared him for you. Do not disappoint me.”

  But she did.

  That first time, she most certainly did.

  Nana had left her naked, cold and alone, at the mouth of that rocky opening. Nothing more than a cut into the side of a tumble of stone at the base of a small rise. The wind from Lake Minny whispered through the trees and raised bumps on her skin. She did not want to disappoint her nana, so she went inside, to meet with what waited.

  It was so cold, so very dark. The air was moist, and her hair stuck to her shoulders, her cheeks. Her toes dug deep into soft, wet earth. Bugs crawled across the knobs of her ankles, but she absently brushed them away when they’d skitter up her legs.

  Nature waited. Nature and his dark secrets. He tried to tell her so much that first time, show her so much. Like a coarse dark blanket he covered her, all muscle and sinew, harsh rough skin, monstrous teeth like stubborn roots, ivy eyes. She screamed, escaped from him.

  She’d run.

  She’d run as fast as she could, shooting out the mouth of the cavern like a naked arrow of flesh and fear. The trees swept branches at her, slowing her down, cutting her skin. Roots pushed up, tripping her, but she was light, and fast. He followed, bellowing like a storm cloud, keeping pace parallel with her, his stomping feet shaking the earth, his panting breath flexing the air around her, suffocating her, squeezing her lungs as she gasped for more oxygen, more energy, more speed.

  She burst from the edge of the trees screaming, crying. Wet with mud and bits of leaves, covered head-to-toe in red-lined scratches, one eye filled with blood from something that went wrong inside her head, where her veins had ruptured at his touch, her heart swelling wildly at his need.

  She ran to the large glass door of the rear deck as the great lake and the dark forest watched carelessly. She pounded against the glass, knowing her parents were traveling, that only her nana was home to help her. She spun to look for him, but saw nothing come from the forest. He didn’t dare.

  She slapped her hands hard against the glass, ashamed at her nakedness, cold and wet and frightened. She heard his rumbling laugh on the wind, carried to her like a promise. When she turned back around, tears streaming down her face, Nana stood on the other side of the glass, frowning down at her granddaughter’s small naked body, hand clenched tightly to her stomach, hatred in her gray eyes.

  Nana did not make her go back that day. Or the next. But eventually, she did coerce Sylvia back to the Old Wood. To the cavern, and to him.

  As time and Nana’s efforts wore her down, Sylvia finally relented. She thought she finally understood.

  She was wrong.

  * * *

  Now Sylvia wanted to share her secret with Beth, her best friend. Even though she’d been warned. Even though she knew Nana would be angry, that he would be angry. It was her birthday, she was almost a woman, and part of her didn’t want the burden, didn’t want to hold onto the great weight of the not telling, the stone of truth hiding in her shoe.

  “Look, it’s right there. I want to show you something just inside.”

  “My gosh, okay,” Beth said, exasperated but giggling, too. But when they got closer, she hesitated, held back. “It looks scary.”

  Sylvia took Beth’s hand in hers and smiled, all teeth and bright eyes. “It is.”

  After, Beth tried to run, just as Sylvia had.

  She tore past Sylvia, who gave chase. Sylvia screamed when the trees kneeled, wrapped themselves around Beth’s small body, plucked her from the path and lifted her high into the air. Sylvia leapt for her hand, brushed only fingers. Beth’s shocked, screaming face looked down at her as it was lifted higher and higher. Sylvia yelled for him to stop as Beth’s glasses were violently shaken from her head, hitting Sylvia in the face when they fell from up high. She looked away, for just a moment, and in doing so missed seeing her friend’s body torn apart. She felt the hot spray of blood shower onto her head, saw it pattern her new white birthday
dress.

  When she looked upwards once more, they were devouring her. Stringy bits and tiny limbs being swallowed by the swelling trunks, long twisted branches mashing pieces of her into the orifices of other trees. A shoe fell to the ground and was swallowed by the earth. The tip of Beth’s dotted yellow dress was sucked in between two shards of bark at the height of a woodpecker’s perch.

  When Sylvia bent to retrieve Beth’s glasses, they too were gone.

  Silently, dazedly, she returned home. Rescue teams were called in. Police and dogs flooded the woods. Spotlights attached to small generators; screaming parents arrived, tearing at the rough grass at the forest’s edge. Countless questions were hammered at her while they took her birthday dress away for analysis.

  The entire time Nana frowned at her, and Sylvia knew it had been all her fault. But she could not cry, could not seem to find the part of her that should care, that should have been horrified. Someone said she was in shock.

  The party was cancelled.

  * * *

  Sylvia never went back to the forest. Her nana spoke to her only once more in her lifetime, something her parents hardly noticed, as Nana had stopped speaking to anyone. She ate little, drank whiskey, went for long walks. She often arrived home in the middle of the night, her dress torn, her breath reeking of booze and filth, her hair matted, her eyes bright and wild.

  Sylvia’s parents thought about putting her in a home, worried she was going mad.

  One night, over a year after Beth’s disappearance, Sylvia confronted her nana while she napped in her father’s favorite reclining chair. The television was on but muted. A garden show.

  “Nana,” she said, standing well away from the woman, out of reach. “Nana, why do you hate me now?”

  The old woman, decaying more each day, opened her rheumy eyes and turned to look at her granddaughter.

  “I don’t hate you,” she said in a whisper. “I despise your weakness.”

  Sylvia thought many times of returning to the forest, but never made it as far as the first line of trees. She remembered the speed and strength of them, the way they chewed and swallowed flesh.

  She thought of him, lying deep within, no longer waiting for her. Through with her. Disappointed, like Nana. Disgusted with her shallow, weak mind.

  A few years later Nana was dead. Over the last year of her life she wilted slowly, living on IV fluids, wasting away toward death because she didn’t care enough to live. Sylvia thought the woman might have killed herself long ago, likely right after the disaster of her twelfth birthday, but something told her it was forbidden. That whatever belief system her nana held, whatever power she prayed to, would be sorely dissatisfied at her for doing so.

  Instead she let herself die, like an exposed root drying in the sun, or a diseased tree rotting from the inside out, her hair falling out like dead leaves.

  Nana passed away on Sylvia’s sixteenth birthday.

  The party was cancelled.

  * * *

  Sylvia woke up, but could see nothing.

  She lifted her head, groaned at the effort. It was so dark, so dark... she couldn’t remember...

  Then she did.

  Cousin Terry. The large closet they’d found in one of the funeral home’s empty parlors. Only one funeral that day, lots of room to explore.

  He’d torn her dress, she remembered that now. She could still taste him in her mouth and nearly gagged. They’d finished the flask, then the rest of the pint he’d had in the car under his driver’s seat, warm and pungent from sitting in the heat.

  She kicked out with one bare foot, knocked the accordion door outward, exposed the gray room beyond.

  Where the hell is everyone? she thought clumsily, her head aching.

  She crawled from the closet on hands and knees, found a folding chair, used it to stand. She was barefoot, but she didn’t care. Her bra was horribly dislodged, and she felt the broken strap of her dress flapping like dead skin against her back as she moved.

  “Unbelievable,” she said, adjusting her clothes, looking around at the quiet building filled with long shadows.

  Everyone was gone. They’d left her. Not too surprising, she had to admit. She tended to wander off, find alternate rides home from gatherings without bothering to inform her parents. Sometimes coming home late, sometimes coming home the next day.

  Her parents knew they’d lost their innocent little girl years ago. By the time she’d turned fifteen, she could feel their having given up on her, could sense the palpable withdrawal of love for their wayward daughter—the slut, the troublemaker, the defiant teenager who made their lives hell.

  “She’s completely out of control,” her mother had said more than once to her father, hoping to convince him that another firm talking-to might do the trick.

  It hadn’t.

  Sylvia was as lost and damaged as a girl could be. As uncaring about herself and those around her as was humanly possible. He’d taken everything from her, he and her nana, conspiring forces of ancestry and nature combining to ruin her, degrade her, defile her.

  Secrets, they’d whispered. Truth.

  Bullshit, she thought, grimacing sourly.

  She found her way to the front doors, the night stale and flat beyond the glass, a curtain of black starless sky, a veil of nothing hovering outside the parlor. She pushed half-heartedly at the metal rod, shoved her meager weight against the cold glass, and laughed out loud when it held firm. There was no bolt to slide open, no lock she could turn. Just an empty keyhole, staring back at her with cold defiance. With disgust.

  “Whatever,” she said, and turned around, resting her back against the glass.

  Outside, the gray parking lot was still and empty. Nothing moved, no wind blew. Her partially-bared back was a white smear against the glass door of the entryway. The surrounding brown brick structure swallowed her as she stepped away, back into shadow.

  She walked into the parlor where her nana lay. She found a series of light switches, flipped one, left the rest for dead. The room spit out light from three standing lamps. A yellow dusk settled on the room. Nana’s coffin—closed now on a table up front surrounded by heaps of flowers—glistened softly, the glossy stain of the wood reflecting the meager, broken light.

  “Hey, Nana,” Sylvia said, lifting a hand in greeting.

  She walked to the coffin, laid her hands on its surface. She looked around at the many bouquets filling the parlor, the massive white sympathy spray of snapdragons and mums and hideous carnations next to the coffin. She ran a hand through the cream roses and blood lilies that lined the dark wood table supporting the corpse.

  The fragrance of the flowers filled her nostrils, made her dizzy. She closed her eyes, her fingers found the groove of the lid.

  She opened her eyes wide and heaved the split-lid of the coffin open, exposing the body. Her nana. A spill of white in red, a stoic face, concrete fingers folded for eternity.

  “You bitch,” she said, not feeling enough to cry, nothing left in her heart to mourn. She poked a finger into the dead woman’s cheek, was surprised when the indentation lingered. “I kept your secrets, you filthy thing,” she said, leaning over to breathe liquor-tainted fumes into the dead face. “You should have trusted me. You should have loved me, Nana.”

  Sylvia was surprised when a tear spilled onto one of Nana’s closed eyelids.

  “I could have been special,” she said, caressing a cold cheek with her warm fingers. “You could have let me have what he gave to you. You should have let me have him.”

  The stitches holding Nana’s lips closed stretched taut when her mouth pulled apart.

  Sylvia gasped, stumbled back. Her legs hit a chair and she fell to the floor, her dress riding up her bare legs. She looked up in time to see her nana sit up inside the coffin, mouth agape. Bones clicked as the head turned, stitched eyes aimed down at her splayed granddaughter.

  Sylvia stood, started to run, but he was there.

  “No!” she said, terror free
zing her blood. “You can’t be...”

  He laughed, the sound of splintering wood, but she saw the pity on his face, felt the shame of her failure.

  He waved a hand and petals erupted from the flowers of the room, filling the air like a cloud of butterflies driven to madness. Spinning, Sylvia raised her arms and screamed. She looked past the storm of whipping petals, saw the door, and ran for it as the first one stuck to her bare shoulder. She stopped and a sob escaped her as she tried to wipe it away. She could feel the pinch as it bit into her flesh. She cried out as another, and another, stuck to her dress, her skin.

  She stumbled and tripped, fell to her knees as petals slapped down onto her face, over her eyes, into her mouth. She gagged, hands pulling them away, tearing them apart. Everywhere they touched flesh burned like fire. Her tongue dissolved in her mouth. The flooding stench of them, of him, filled her. She collapsed to the floor, a writhing form, covered in a thick blanket of petals as she fought, clawing rotten flesh, begging for forgiveness.

  The pulsing, twisted shape of fluttering petals rose into the air, what was left of Sylvia squirming inside, screaming as the cocoon of shifting colors drifted toward the open coffin, where her nana waited, arms open wide.

  * * *

  A few more moments of pain, of fear… and it is warm. Quiet. In the dark, she hears a beating heart. Her own, perhaps.

  How much time has passed, and where will she run to now?

  A scratchy voice whispers into her ear.

  Behind the words, she hears the hollow sound of dirt spattering against the coffin’s outer shell. There’s a clank, and a jerk, and she feels them being lowered into the cold earth. Back to him.

  Her nana continues to prattle. Dry sour breath warms her cheek, comforting her, putting her at ease. The coffin hits bottom, comes to rest. Sylvia listens to the heavy thumps of shoveled earth cover them. After a few minutes, the sounds fade as they are buried ever more deeply.