Watcher in the Woods

by Robert Liparulo

  Another step, and he did topple. His knees struck the dirt, as hard as tiles. He slouched down, needing to rest. His head felt like it was baking in his tight, cowhide cap. He pulled it off, letting his hair fall to his shoulders, over his eyes. He used the tip of his knife to flick it back off his face. He hitched in a breath and felt the wound in his side flare with white-hot pain. He tasted blood and spat it out. The reddish-pink glob evaporated on the scalding desert floor. He let his head roll back on his neck until he was staring up at the smoke-filled sky. There was no breeze to cool his skin, no water to quench his thirst. He closed his eyes.

  He imagined himself as a king. Instead of blood, his fingers would be stained with wine. Instead of death, he would dream of life, the people of his empire stretching to the horizon, honoring him for letting them live.

  His eyes snapped open, and he shook such imaginings out of his head.

  It was not his destiny to wear gold, but to wield weapons. He did not have the power to grant life, only the duty to take it. To think otherwise would lead to weakness and insanity.

  Gritting his teeth, gripping his knife, he forced himself to rise. His eyes found the prince, and his heart leapt with hope. The man appeared to be down, sprawled against the unkind earth. The sight put strength in his legs.He stumbled on, after his target.

  When the assassin was fifty yards away, he saw the two arrows he had let fly. They were jutting from the prince’s back. Their feathered ends swayed slightly, as though in a breeze. The assassin knew better: it was the prince’s breathing that moved the arrows. His muscles tightened with determination to finish the job.

  The prince stirred. His head lifted, and he pushed himself up onto his elbows. He turned and saw the assassin. His eyes flashed in terror. He got to his feet, every movement punctuated by a gasp of pain, a groan of effort.He lurched on toward the mountains.

  The assassin let out a heavy sigh. Didn’t the prince know it was over?Death was too near to hide from it any longer.

  The man of death followed. He tried to pick up his pace, but his injuries were taking their toll.

  On with it, he thought. End it now.

  Ten minutes on, he figured he had closed the gap by only a few paces.He forced his legs to move faster. He switched the knife into his left hand, so his right could hold the wound in his thigh.

  A scratch, he told himself. Is man defined by flesh and blood, or is he everything he has learned to be? I am an assassin because of my skills, my determination to perform well. My bones and sinew do not make me an assassin. My wounds cannot stop me from being one.

  The sounds of the invasion behind him had faded. The smell of smoke had left his nostrils. A slight breeze swept down from the mountains, carrying the musty scents of eucalyptus and juniper. He was alarmed to realize how far they had walked from the city. There was no chance of the prince escaping, but he wondered if he himself would make it back before succumbing to his own injuries.

  Great fissures came down from the foothills and carved jagged cracks into the desert floor. As the two men approached the first of these gashes in the earth, the assassin smiled. It was impossible to cross. The prince was as trapped by a rent in the ground as he would have been by a wall.

  The prince stopped at the edge of the ten-foot-wide crevasse. He seemed to appraise it, then shifted his gaze back toward the assassin. With no other choice, he stepped forward and fell out of the assassin’s view.

  The assassin shook his head. Of course the man would not make this easy. He did not want to even think about having to climb back out of the fissure once he delivered the prince to Charon, Hades’s ferryman.

  At the edge, he looked down. The crevasse was barely deeper than a man, but no man lay at the bottom, as he had expected. He looked to the left and right, able to see a good distance in either direction. No one. No footprints. No blood. No deeper holes in which to hide. Directly below, something shimmered. He squinted at it. The light and shadows were playing tricks on him. Was that a pool of water? The entrance to a cavern? He couldn’t tell, but something . . . something was there.

  He stepped off the ledge to the first foothold. The dry ground crumbled under him. He slid down, tried to hold something, found nothing. He dug in his heels, skidded, and stopped.

  He balanced on the edge of the pool, but it was no pool. The earth wavered at his feet. A mist stirred, obscuring whatever it was that caused the sight. Hecrouched and passed his hand over the fog. It cleared, and his knifed hand shot up, ready to plunge down.

  There was the prince! Down in the pit—but he did not appear to be whole. To the assassin’s eye, there was blood and body, not all together. An arm here. A torso there. Was it a trick of the air, the way it shimmered and moved? Or had an animal moved in on the prince?

  A fast, silent animal, the assassin thought.

  The assassin plunged his knife down. Coldness gripped his arm. It tugged at him. He tried to move back, but the earth under him gave way, and his feet went into the hole. More coldness, pulling . . . pulling. With one arm and both feet ensnarled by this trap, he knew he was going in.

  He raised his face to the sky and yelled—not in fear, but in defiance and effort: He would not die easily. Whatever pulled him would feel his blade, his teeth, his determination.

  Then, in a flash, he went in.

  And vanished.

  CHAPTER ten

  SUNDAY, 3:33 P.M.

  Sitting on the front porch steps, David bounced his soccer ball on a lower step between his legs. He had planned on practicing his dribbling and making some shots into a makeshift goal while waiting for Dad and Toria to return from the hardware store, but he didn’t feel like it now. He squinted up at the sun through the trees. His eyes were achy, and he felt groggy and ready for bed, even though it was midafternoon.

  “Not used to sleeping during the day,” he said.

  “Sleep’s sleep,” Xander said.

  David lowered his eyes to find his brother, but saw only his own ghostly image reflected in the lens of Xander’s camcorder. Xander paced in front of him, pulling in and out with the camera. Stooping almost to the ground to get weird—Xander would say artistic—angles.

  “Quit stalling,” Xander said. “What happened in that World War II village you went to this morning?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Just a little,” Xander coaxed. “We’ve gotta document what we’re doing here.”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, Dae. How many people can say they rescued their mother from time-traveling thugs?”

  “We haven’t found her yet.”

  “We will, and we’ll have the story of it on tape. We’ll be millionaires, I’m telling you.”

  “Are you filming my sneaker?” David kicked at the camera, connecting with it harder than he had intended.

  “Hey!” Xander yelled. He turned the camera to look at the lens. “You’re going to break it, and you almost jabbed it through my eye.”

  David just frowned at him. He had sat through Xander’s walking completely around him, filming and saying things like, “This is the boy who fought off a Nazi tank” and “Ladies and gentlemen: the wound.” Here Xander zoomed in on the place where David’s hair had been singed at the back of his neck and the collar of his shirt had caught fire. He hadn’t been burned, and there was no wound.

  Then Xander had started asking questions about his time in the French village, and David had realized that it wasn’t such a fun memory. He hadn’t found his mother as he thought he would, he was almost killed, and death and terror had been all around him. It wasn’t just this last jaunt to World War II that bothered him.

  “I know I was all gung ho about checking out these worlds. I mean, I insisted on going into that jungle where the tigers almost got me. And when I thought I saw Mom, I just went. But, I don’t know . . .” He shook his head. “I’m starting to think there’s nothing good about those worlds. It’s just death . . . and danger.”

  Xander
said, “We gotta find Mom, Dae.”

  “That makes it so much worse, that we have to go through.”

  He examined his brother’s face, looking for any sign that he was as worried and reluctant as David. But Xander’s expression was unreadable. Since Mom’s kidnapping, Xander’s determination to find her made all of his emotions—anger at Dad, sadness for Mom—look the same.

  David said, “After you came back from the Colosseum, you didn’t ever want to see those doors again. Aren’t you still afraid of what’s on the other side?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  “We gotta find Mom,” Xander repeated. “That’s all that matters. That’s all I think about.”

  “But you’re out here with your camera, talking about making a documentary. We’re getting ready for school tomorrow. Mom can’t be all you’re thinking about.”

  Xander sat on a lower step and twisted to look up at David. “I’ve been thinking about what Dad said, that our best chance to find her is if we have all the time we need to do it and none of us gets hurt. I want to find her today, right now, but what if it takes longer—a month or even a year? We can’t have people curious about what we’re doing, why we’re not in school, why we’ve become recluses. We need to look like a normal family.”

  “Even if we’re not,” David added with a half smile.

  “Especially because we’re not,” Xander said. “People will leave us alone if they think there’s nothing special about us. And Dad needs to make money. We need to live, eat. We might need to buy things to help in the search.”

  David thought about that. “Like what?”

  Xander shrugged. “Like rope,” he said, unsure. “Like the locks Dad’s getting now. There’s always something. I’ve seen movies where people lost wars because they couldn’t afford to keep fighting. If we want to keep looking for as long as it takes, we need money, and that means Dad has to work.”

  David pictured Dad going into his office at the school, listening to parents complain, disciplining students, hiring teachers . . . whatever else principals did. He imagined himself grinning at teachers, raising his hand to answer a question, making new friends. All with Mom gone—kidnapped. “I don’t think I can do it,” he said. “Just pretend everything’s okay?”

  Xander set the camcorder on a step and gripped David’s knee. “I don’t want to either. I wanna be up there now, going through every door, but that would be like jumping in the ocean to rescue a friend when you can’t swim. You both end up dead. Better to find a lifeguard or throw in a life preserver. That’s how Dad wants to handle it: smart and safe.” He smiled. “So be the gloomy kid, if you have to. Just don’t be the weirdo who never showers and always rambles about living in a haunted house.”

  David said, “It is haunted . . . in a way.”

  “Sort of,” Xander agreed. His eyes took in the front doors. “The past lives here, doesn’t it? I mean, really. ”

  “I wish it didn’t,” David said. “And I wish we didn’t have to keep visiting it.”

  “Maybe we’ll find Mom right away.”

  “You think so?” David asked.

  Xander didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  They heard the SUV’s engine and its tires crunching over the dirt road, and turned their heads to wait for its appearance around the bend. The sun flashed brightly off its hood and windshield, reminding David that it was a sunny world away from the woods in which they lived. The 4Runner swung around and stopped at the end of the road.

  Toria climbed out and waved. She waited for Dad to come around from the other side. She took one of three heavy-looking plastic bags from him, and the two of them trudged into the forest toward the boys.

  “Been out here the whole time?” Dad asked.

  “You told us to,” Xander said, a little whine in his voice.

  Dad’s eyes roamed the front of the house as he approached. It seemed to David that he was expecting to see something he hoped he wouldn’t. When Dad was close enough, David tossed him the ball.

  Dad grabbed for it, but the bags hindered his dexterity, and he knocked the ball into the trees. He shrugged and hefted the bags. “I’ll feel better once we have these locks on the doors.” He looked from David to Xander and frowned.

  David thought he was going to comment on the mopey expression on Xander’s face, which he was sure matched his own. But Dad simply shared their sadness. How could they feel any other way?

  He set the bags at the base of the stairs and sighed. He said, “Come on, all of you. I want to show you something.”

  “What?” David said.

  Dad began walking toward the side of the house. “You’ll see.”

  The kids threw puzzled looks at each other. Then Xander pushed off the steps to follow. Toria dropped her bag with the others and fell in behind him. David considered staying right where he was. He’d seen enough for that day . . . for that year. But curiosity got the better of him. He jumped down to the ground and hustled to catch up.

  CHAPTER eleven

  SUNDAY, 3 : 50 P . M .

  Dad led David, Xander, and Toria to the clearing. It was way behind the house, through an especially dense area of forest. David and Xander had been there before, and its strangeness came back to David as soon as he stepped into it. It was an almost perfect oval carved out of the woods. The ground here was flat and grassy. The tall trees around it bent in, forming what looked to him like a naturally domed arena. Stranger than its physical appearance was the way it affected people: it made David’s stomach feel funny, like plunging a long way down in an elevator; it seemed to allow them to run slightly faster than normal; and it caused their voices to be higher pitched, as though they were talking with their lungs filled with helium.

  Everyone but David stopped at the edge of the clearing. He continued toward its center. He said, “Dad, we already know about this place. Remember, you found us here the other day?”

  As he walked farther into the clearing, his voice rose in pitch until “the other day” was as squeaky as Mickey Mouse’s. Despite the sour mood he had carried with him from the porch steps to the clearing, he laughed. It came out like a little girl’s giggle. That got him laughing harder, which made his voice seem even more distorted and ridiculous.

  The others began laughing as well, but at the edge of the clearing their voices sounded normal. Xander laughed so hard, tears streamed down his face, and he fell to his knees.

  Toria managed to say, “Why are you . . . why are you talking like that?”

  David beckoned her to him. “Come here!” he squeaked.

  When she was near, she said, “What?”—as high-pitched as a rusty hinge. Her eyes went wide, and her hand flew up to cover her mouth.

  David cracked up again.

  “Was that me?” Toria squealed.

  Xander rose and walked into the clearing, wiping at his face. “Dad,” he said. The last part of the word was higher pitched than the first. “Dad. What’s this about? Do you know?”

  Dad shook his head and joined them. “I know what this clearing does, but not why.” Even his deep voice was no match for the squeakifying power of the clearing.

  “Is this why you brought us here?” Xander asked. “For a . . . I don’t know, a break from the doom and gloom?”

  “It worked,” David said. “I’ve been frowning so much, my face hurts.”

  It was about four in the afternoon. He could not believe that his mother had been gone for only twelve hours. He knew he shouldn’t feel as lighthearted as he did, but he couldn’t help it. He wondered if the laughing gas some dentists used had the same effect: making you feel like laughing when you should be crying.

  David smiled at Toria. She was holding her arms out from her body and rising up on her tiptoes and down again, rising up . . . she was feeling the lightness, the bounciness David and Xander had noticed the first time they were here.

  Dad said, “This isn’t the half of it, guys. Watch.�
� He moved deeper into the clearing and stopped near its center. He faced them, but his attention was on something they couldn’t see. He looked around as though tracking a flying insect. Holding his hands out, seemingly for balance, he rocked up onto his toes. He took a step, rocked up again.

  Xander and David exchanged a look of complete bafflement.

  “Hold on!” Dad squeaked. His foot rose high, but instead of coming back down, the rest of him rose up to its level.

  David gasped. Toria made a noise that might have been a startled scream. Xander spat out a word: “What?”

  It was as though their father was standing on an invisible platform—an unstable platform. His feet wobbled around beneath him. He kept shifting his knees, his weight whipping his arms this way and that, apparently to keep from falling. Instead of coming down, he slid sideways and rose higher. Still wobbling, his eyes came off his feet to take in his startled children. A wide grin stretched across his face. His hair rose and fell as though blown by a breeze. He said, “What do you think?” The act of speaking seemed to distract him from whatever concentration he needed to—

  To what? David thought. Fly? Float? The way Dad was balancing himself, David would say Dad was grinding a rail on a skateboard.

  Dad wobbled and went higher.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Xander said, stepping forward. “Are you . . . are you flying?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Dad said. He shifted his hips, moved sideways and up.

  Correction, David thought. Not grinding a rail—more like riding an escalator. An invisible escalator that isn’t very stable.

  The smile never left Dad’s face. He said, “We discovered this when I was a kid. There are like . . . air currents or something. But more than air. If you find them, you can kind of step on them, ride them.” He suddenly sailed thirty feet through the air, going sideways, straight up, then plunging down a little. His body wobbled as he tried to stay balanced. He let out a long, high “Aaaah!” and laughed. “Not so much a ride as it is like surfing on whatever currents are moving through this clearing.”