Grimm Woods

by D. Melhoff

  He glanced over his shoulder, back in the direction of the camp, and half-expected to see a giant crow rising above the birch trees and plummeting straight for him. No, he countered. The crow’s busy tearing apart helpless chicks while no one’s around to defend them.

  He pictured Brynn running toward the square and shuddered to think of Charlotte hiding in the shadows, ready to leap out and take her by surprise. Or worse, holding a knife to Stephanie’s throat and telling the big sister to do as she was told. Who knows how that monster will react when she finds out her main target got away. She’ll snap. I won’t have the blood of one person on my hands—it’ll be the blood of all those kids.

  He considered the water ahead, and his hardwiring told him to keep rowing. You’ll live with the nightmares for the rest of your life, but at least you’ll live.

  Scott reached down and grabbed the oar by his feet. When he picked it up, there was a dull tink-tink-tink of something metal rolling across the hull. Frowning, he bent over and felt under the bench, and when his hand came out again, it was clutching a circular band the size of a nickel.

  His lost ear plug.

  Immediately, strong sensory pulses shot through his body: the electric feeling of a tongue slipping in and out of his ear, the sound of sliding denim, the touch of smooth skin beneath his fingers…

  Skin.

  He flinched at the thought of Brynn’s burn marks. God, how she had cringed every time they read a fairy tale where the characters were burned to death: “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “The Six Swans,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Twelve Wild Ducks,” “Fitcher’s Bird.”

  You’re burning her, he told himself, quivering. Charlotte might be tying her up and chopping the wood and lighting the matches, but you’re burning her, you sack of shit. You’re burning her.

  He pictured Brynn being pushed into a fire pit and doused with gasoline. All of the camp’s children—including Stephanie—were gathered in a circle, forced to watch.

  The plug tumbled out of his hand, tink-tink-tinking away.

  He looked at the oar in his lap…

  And grabbed it by the handle, taking a deep breath. The paddle dipped in the water, and Scott made a firm stroke, propelling the boat ten yards downstream. He didn’t switch sides. Instead, he let the vessel swerve, and when it bumped into the shore, he jumped over the side and ran along the tree line, making his way back to Crownheart.

  ____

  Twenty minutes later, Scott was still sprinting.

  He felt nauseous, but he refused to stop. Another hundred yards brought him to a walking path on the edge of the beach. It wasn’t the path from before—I must have gone farther than I thought—but he followed it anyway, assuming it led to the only other entrance of the camp he was aware of.

  The woods began to thin…

  And that’s when he spotted it—the first glimpse of Crownheart above the pines.

  His heart stopped.

  It wasn’t the drawbridge, which he had expected.

  It wasn’t the zip-line tower either, nor the fort’s parapets nor the roofs of Storybook Square. It was higher than all of those: a thin line, almost invisible, curling and coiling menacingly into the sky.

  A tendril of smoke.

  31

  Scott saw the smoke above the trees and pictured Brynn burning in the fire pit, screaming as her skin melted off like Meegan’s and Bethany’s and Ella’s.

  I’m too late!

  He veered left and skidded down the path from Lake Mer, hoping to locate the drawbridge and reach the fire pit without having to cross the clearing in broad daylight. Warblers blasted out of the way as he crashed through the bushes and emerged on the road that led to the camp’s entrance, blazing forward, eyes locked on the tendril of smoke.

  The fire’s not roaring yet. Maybe it just started. Maybe I still have time.

  The drawbridge reared up, barring his entry. Its planks were too high to climb, but—thank God—he spotted a door in one of the towers and slipped through it. Avoiding the bus’s arrival zone, he ripped into a copse of trees and jogged toward the campfire ring.

  The hiss of the smoke intensified.

  Ssssssss. Sssssssssssssssssss.

  Something’s not right, he thought. No one’s screaming.

  Sweat poured down the nape of his neck as he approached the fire pit from behind a wall of ferns. Sticking his hands in the leaves, he parted them like drapes…

  No one was there.

  In the background, the clearing was empty too. No kids, no Brynn, no Charlotte.

  Where the hell are they?

  He checked for the smoke again and saw it coiling in the north. The fuck—I went the wrong way? It’s not coming from the fire pit. His eyes blew open. It’s coming from the maze.

  The hissing grew louder, and a second realization hit. He stepped forward, peeking into the pit…and drew back in disgust.

  The rattlesnakes were coiled around the broken pallets at the bottom of the crater. Among them, strangled and missing whole chunks of flesh, were the disfigured corpses of Denisha and Norma. A rattler glided across Denisha’s face, covering her bloody wounds, and looked up at Scott, daring him to come down and get bit.

  “Fuck,” Scott swore. He kicked a rock into the pit, and it landed on the snake’s tail. The serpent lashed back, but he was already gone, running toward the maze.

  Dead, he thought. Two more people are dead because of—

  “No,” he blurted out loud. Guilt wouldn’t change anything. All he could do now was keep going, keep pushing to save the others—if it wasn’t too late for them too.

  Emerald walls, tall and leafy, drew nearer and nearer.

  What if the kids are trapped inside? he wondered, examining the maze. His sides ached, but the pain seemed distant and secondary. Shit, this thing’s the size of a football field.

  There was only one entrance trimmed into the hedges, and Scott bolted straight for it. He arrived, panting like a sheepdog, and spotted a familiar object lying in the maze’s entryway.

  It was the book of fairy tales from the fort’s playroom.

  He snatched the tome and noticed the tip of an envelope poking out of the top. Tearing the envelope open, he found a piece of paper inside with two lines scrawled across the center:

  Bonfire starts at 2:00 p.m.

  Bring the tenth key.

  “Tenth key?” he muttered. He checked the envelope again and saw a golden key glinting at the bottom. “The hell you getting at?”

  His eyes darted back to the note. 2:00 p.m. He spied the smoke drifting into the sky—coiling around the sun that had already passed noon—and snatched the key out of the envelope, diving into the maze without wasting another second.

  ____

  The hedges stood ten feet tall and five feet wide, too brittle to climb and too thick to beat down. The dirt path stretched ten yards in and hung a right.

  Scott followed. Ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty. The entrance vanished behind him, and the walls closed in tighter, drawing him in, disorienting him. Even the smell was dizzying: a potent perfume of ragweed and shrubs.

  He picked up speed, taking another corner, and came face-to-face with his first fork in the road.

  “What the fuck?”

  A signpost was planted in the middle of the intersection with two arrows pointing down opposite paths. A picture of Roddy was taped to the arrow that pointed left—the word GREED etched across his face in red marker—while pictures of Meegan and Bethany were taped to the arrow that pointed right, each labeled VANITY.

  Nailed to the center of the signpost was a wooden chest. Scott didn’t hesitate. He thrust his key in the chest’s keyhole and cranked it open, discovering a rolled-up piece of parchment inside with another gold key. “Bring the tenth key,” he muttered. He unfurled the parchment, and the story of Snow White appeared, ripped from the book of fairy tales.

  Snow White?

  He looked from the fairy tale to Roddy’s face, then to Meegan
’s and Bethany’s.

  Vanity, he thought. Snow White’s about vanity. Go right.

  He crumpled the roll of parchment—“All right, bitch, let’s play your damn game.”—and took off in the direction of Meegan and Bethany’s arrow.

  He made his way north and rounded another corner, arriving at the second fork in the road. Again, there was a signpost with pictures taped to the arrows: Chase and Kimberly pointed left, IMPURITY scrawled across their faces, and Dominique and Erin pointed right, graffitied with TEMPTATION.

  The box popped open and revealed the next fairy tale alongside key number three.

  “‘Sleeping Beauty,’” he whispered. He studied the counselors’ headshots and recalled the two murder scenes: first Dominique and Erin on the floor of their hut, and then Chase and Kimberly dangling from the zip-line cable. “No.” He shook his head. “Needles, drugs. Like the spinning wheel. Dom and Erin.” He dropped the “Sleeping Beauty” page and bolted down Dominique and Erin’s path. The choice paid off, and in twenty yards he took a sharp corner and almost careened into the third post.

  Mai, COVETOUSNESS, left. Roddy again, GREED, right.

  In went the key and out came “The Little Mermaid.”

  Shit.

  His eyes scanned the story like searchlights as he flipped from one side of the page to the other. Back to front, front to back. Hold on. He bit down and winced, forgetting how Brynn had sliced his lip open with her uppercut. What was the story with the barrel and the nails? Something about midgets? Pretty sure this isn’t Roddy.

  “But coveting.” He talked himself through it, comparing the parchment to Mai’s headshot. “Coveting what? Mermaid wants legs. Right. Wants to live somewhere else.” He tried remembering Mai’s court record. Something about an expired work visa? “Leaving home,” he mouthed. “Escaping.” He shrugged, a fraction more confident, and thought, Okay, sure. As sure as I’ll ever be.

  He dove left, into a passage that channeled him deeper through the tapering jade walls. His inner compass spiraled out of control. Everything looked the same. There were no more clues, either—no hints, no signposts, no shortcuts. Just as he was about to turn back, a muffled scream pierced the air and cut through his head like a scalpel.

  Brynn.

  It was a cry of pure terror.

  He checked for the tendril of smoke, but the walls were too narrow to see anything except a strip of clouds overhead. Grabbing onto the nearest hedge, he hoisted himself up, but the boughs snapped and sent him tumbling onto the ground, knocking the wind right out of him.

  Coughing, he scrambled to his feet and stumbled forward, taking another corner—then another and another—hoping to catch the wisp of smoke.

  His eyes lit up. There you are.

  It wasn’t smoke, but it was the next signpost. Chase and Kimberly on the left, Lance on the right. His hands were shaking so bad that it took three tries to get the key in the hole.

  Come on…Come on…

  The parchment revealed “Rumpelstiltskin,” and the illustration practically gave the answer away. It was a picture of the mischievous imp grabbing his foot and tearing himself in two.

  Scott glanced at Lance’s headshot—“I’ll get her, man,” he swore under his breath. “Swear to God, we’ll make her pay.”—and he sped off, down the path of DECEITFULNESS.

  Brynn’s garbled screams echoed in the air, galvanizing him as he raced to the next intersection where the headshots of Chase and Kimberly reappeared with Nikki and Cynthia. He aimed the fifth key at the cruciform post, lunging forward, and tore the box open. “Rapunzel.” No-brainer. Three more turns led him farther away from the screams, but then the sixth route marker appeared with Nikki and Cynthia on one side and Denisha on the other. INDECENCY versus COWARDICE. He unlocked the box and withdrew “Red Riding Hood.”

  “Indecency…cowardice…indecency…cowardice.” Shit, I don’t know. It’s got that “girls shouldn’t crawl into bed with strangers” vibe, but maybe it’s about standing up to predators? Fuck, pick one and go with it.

  He bolted down Denisha’s path and curved left, then right, then left, his arms slicing the air like an Olympic sprinter’s. When he reached the next turn, he swung the corner—

  And crashed into a dead end.

  NO.

  He careened into the hedge and collapsed backwards on the gravel. Pouncing to his feet again, he doubled back, retracing his steps to the last signpost, and followed the path of Nikki and Cynthia instead, shuddering as he wondered what morbid fate related to Little Red and the hungry wolf had befallen the two girls.

  The maze curved tighter and tighter, its endless tunnels leading the way to the bloodthirsty Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. His spirits leapt at the sight of the seventh post: Denisha and Roddy.

  Come on, come on, I’ve gotta be close!

  The key slipped in, and the box popped open to reveal the story of “The Twelve Wild Ducks.”

  Scott frowned. The fuck is “The Twelve Wild Ducks”?

  He held up the story to the counselors’ headshots. GREED, right; COWARDICE, left.

  “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo.”

  He dove right, the joints in his legs ready to buckle, and thought, Keep pushing. Brynn’s screams were ringing in his ears, and the clock was ticking.

  He arrived at another fork in the road, but this time there were no arrows.

  Dammit.

  He dove left—

  All of sudden the path seemed familiar. He spun around, squinting down different routes, and spotted a post with a lockbox that was already hanging open. Shit. I’ve been here before. He circled back, but he confused one of the turns and wound up at another dead end.

  Stay calm, he told himself. Think it through.

  But he wasn’t calm. He was about to explode. Choosing a path at random, he bolted forward and took every first turn he could make while Brynn’s screams were lost amid the womp, womp, womp of blood in his ears.

  And then: Is that…?

  It was. A face at the end of the tunnel. Brynn! She was smiling at him from behind the word DISOBEDIENCE. He ran forward, plunging the most recent key into the keyhole, and removed the roll of parchment.

  His blood ran cold.

  Printed at the top of the page was the title “Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug,” then underneath, in parentheses, “The Dreadful Story of the Matches.”

  He tried to ignore the illustration, but he couldn’t. It was the image of a little girl blazing with orange flames as she ran for her life and disintegrated into a pile of ash.

  Another scream echoed over the warren, and Scott snagged the key from the box and rocketed down the only remaining path. The walls spiraled inward like a seashell—a swirling cyclone of green—until the towering hedges cut away, and he emerged, breathless, in the epicenter of Crownheart’s maze.

  The sky burst open above, blue and cloudless, and revealed an enclosure roughly the size of Stonehenge. Most of it was empty. A small wishing well was situated in the center of a circular lawn, and to the side sat a picnic table with a row of Mason jars resting on top.

  Scott didn’t notice the well or the picnic table. His eyes were fixed on the opposite end of the enclosure where Brynn was tied to a ten-foot stake, her hands bound behind her back and a red tunic stuffed into her mouth. She was standing on a heap of firewood, but it wasn’t lit; the smoke that Scott had been following came from a smoldering stack of logs off to the side.

  Charlotte was nowhere to be seen.

  “SCTT!”

  Scott raced across the grass toward the pyre.

  “Nnnnphm,” Brynn shouted, bucking her head, but he didn’t stop. He reached the woodpile and stumbled over the logs, swerving around the stake, and surveyed Brynn’s hands. They were secured to the post with handcuffs.

  Handcuffs?

  Scott vibrated, waves of hope and helplessness engulfing him at the same time. I’m so close. So, so close. He brought up the last key—which he knew wasn’t a handcuff ke
y, but he had to try anyway—and jammed it in the cuffs. The tip scraped inside, but it didn’t turn.

  He joggled the key left and right, but the metal clasp refused to pop. Throwing his head back, he tried tearing the links apart with brute force and let out an infuriated scream. “Ggghhhaaa!”

  “Having trouble?” said a cold voice.

  Scott stiffened. His head turned first, and then his eyes followed, as though they didn’t want to confirm what he already knew.

  Charlotte stood in the entrance of the enclosure. Her handmade bow—the same one she had used to kill Bruce—was clenched capably by her side, an arrow already nocked and waiting.

  “Come on, Scott,” she said. “Just use your key. Or haven’t you got the right one?”

  Scott smoldered, digging the key’s jagged teeth into his palm.

  “Why don’t you take a couple steps back?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

  “Charming, as always.” Charlotte lifted the bow. “Step aside. Now.” Scott didn’t budge, and she added, “Didn’t Bruce tell you? I’m pretty good with this thing.”

  Brynn had stopped screaming, but her eyes swam with fear. Scott looked down, no alternative on the table, and took a step away, hearing her whimper behind him.

  “Go to the well.”

  Scott leered at the wishing well at the center of the lawn, and a pinworm of terror threaded into his gut. When he had raced past it the first time, he hadn’t noticed the lockbox resting on its stone ledge—the same make and size as the ones nailed to the maze’s signposts. The tenth key. I missed it. I missed it, and now she’s going to kill both of us.

  He inched off the woodpile, avoiding any sudden movements, and crossed the enclosure in silence. Charlotte kept the arrow aimed at his chest, sidestepping with every stride he took, and arrived beside Brynn just as he got to the well.

  “Get in the cuffs.”

  Scott frowned. Refusing to break eye contact, he groped below his line of vision for the box on the stone ledge, careful not to knock it into the well.

  “Cuffs first,” Charlotte insisted, thrusting with her bow. “Around the pole.”