Into the Woods (Anomaly Hunters, Book One)

by J. S. Volpe

  She got out her phone and dialed Donovan’s number.

  2

  With Officer Thompson’s cop hat perched atop his head, Roger pulled Patrol Car Five onto May Road.

  “Anna West’s house is on the west side of the library,” said Emily Faux, who sat in the cop car’s passenger seat. “Only a line of bushes separates the two.”

  “Right.”

  He pulled into the library’s parking lot. The building was ablaze with light, and a dozen cars sat in the lot. Thankfully the corner of the lot nearest the West home was far from the building and shielded from the nearby street lamps by trees and bushes.

  Roger parked facing the bushes and cut the engine. Through the foliage he could make out a pair of lit windows in the West house. He opened the car door and got out. The movement made the stink of blood rise up from the splotches on his pants and shoes. He hadn’t bothered to change. He had wanted to, but Emily had impressed upon him the need for urgency. The hour was late, and the time for niceties was gone.

  “Just follow my instructions and everything will be fine,” Emily told him. She stood beside him on the pavement now. She hadn’t actually gotten out of the car. She had merely vanished from the passenger seat and appeared next to him like a ghost in a movie. “Remember: Once the deed has been done, you’ll have nothing more to worry about. Everything will have been reset. But until then, you must maintain as low a profile as possible.”

  He nodded, then took a look around. A few figures moved about inside the library. No one else was in sight.

  He checked the cops’ belts, which he had stripped of everything except the guns and the handcuffs and one of the flashlights and now wore across his waist like a gunslinger’s gun belts. After ensuring that everything was good to go, he ducked into the bushes.

  3

  Anna threw down her pencil and sat back with a frustrated sigh, her white desk chair creaking. How could she concentrate on her spelling homework with Emily gone, with John slipping away, with a hundred thousand dollars burning a hole in her mind? Everything was changing too much, too fast. She felt lost.

  She looked up at the photo of her and Emily and John that was thumb-tacked to the bulletin board above her desk. It had been taken by Anna’s mom during the ice cream social last spring, and it showed the three of them holding up their cups of ice cream and grinning at the camera. Anna had vanilla, John had chocolate, and Emily of course had mint chocolate chip. It was practically the only flavor of ice cream she would eat. She was weird that way.

  Anna’s eyes misted up at the sight of the photo. She suddenly didn’t want to be alone anymore, so she got up and headed out of her bedroom and into the living room where her dad was watching the History Channel. Her heart sank to see that he was asleep in his easy chair, his head slumped to one side. Faint snores rose up in time with his slow, rhythmic breathing.

  She sat down on the couch anyway. Even asleep, Dad was better company than nobody. But then she saw that the show that was currently airing was about famous missing people. Amelia Earhart. Judge Crater. Jimmy Hoffa. Not what she needed to see right now.

  She thought about calling someone, but who? The person she most wanted to talk to was John, but she didn’t want to have to face the likely scenario that he wouldn’t want to talk to her. Maybe Katie? Katie would probably be working on the spelling problems right now, too. They could chat about that. Yeah, Katie would be good.

  She headed back to her bedroom for her phone. It sat on her desk, next to her homework. As she reached out for it she felt cool air moving across her face and heard the whoosh of a car outside, far louder than it should have been. Looking up, she saw her curtain moving gently in the breeze. Why was the window open?

  She heard a faint creak behind her, the creak the closet door always made, even when you were trying really hard to be quiet.

  She sucked in a breath of too-fresh, too-cool air to scream, but then a big sweaty hand closed over her mouth and another big hand waved a gun in her face and a voice hissed in her ear, “If you make a sound, I’ll shoot you, and then I’ll shoot your daddy, too.”

  4

  Donovan sat on his bed staring down at the fringed beaded Native American medicine bag he had bought Emily for her birthday next week. He remembered how excited she had been when she saw it in the display window of the Whole Shebang gift shop downtown back in August. Even the fifty-dollar price tag hadn’t dissuaded her from leaving finger- and nose-prints all over the glass while she raved on and on about all the cool stuff she would keep in it. Donovan had practically had to drag her away so they could meet Dad for lunch at Subway. He had returned to the Whole Shebang the next day and spent his entire doob fund on the pouch. He hadn’t been able to afford any weed for nearly a month after that, but when he imagined her expression when she unwrapped it, he knew it was worth every penny.

  He wondered what he would do with it if she never came home. Would he hold onto it? Probably. How could he get rid of it? He imagined himself as a little old man with the bag still tucked away in a drawer or on a closet shelf. It would become some weird and depressing family heirloom.

  He felt tears threatening to form, so he thrust the medicine bag back into the Whole Shebang’s plastic “Thank You Come Again” bag and shoved it back under the bed.

  Shit, he needed a smoke. A regular one, this time. He got out his Marlboros and his lighter, then headed over to open the window.

  He had just flipped the latches when his phone rang. It was Cynthia.

  “What’s up?” he asked, looking in the direction of her bedroom even though he couldn’t see it through his closed door. “Why are you calling me? Why don’t you just come over and—” He frowned. “Wait. You’re not in the house, are you?”

  “I’m with Calvin at the May house,” she said. “We’re thinking about resuming the investigation, if only to check something in Grey’s house. Do you and Violet want in?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Well, do you think you can wrangle her up? I don’t have her number.”

  “Um, actually, she’ll probably be here in about ten, fifteen minutes. We were gonna, you know, hang out.”

  “Again? If Mom and Dad catch the two of you smoking and drinking and—and stuff…”

  “They haven’t yet.”

  “Well, look, if you think you guys can slip out without anyone knowing, then come on over here. Hopefully this won’t take too long.”

  “I should be able to get out okay. Last time I looked, Mom was zonked out in front of the TV, and Dad was on beer number three.”

  “Great.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed. “One way or another, we need to end this soon.”

  “I hear you. Violet and me’ll be over there as soon as we can.”

  5

  Roger Grey pulled up at the curb outside John Coyote’s house. He looked up and down the street. Picture windows shone in the darkness. Occasionally a shadowy form passed across a drape or curtain. The street itself was empty. Nothing moved under the cones of light cast by the streetlamps.

  There was a faint scuff and thump as something moved inside the trunk.

  “This one will be trickier,” Emily Faux said from the passenger seat. “You’ll have to deal with his aunt, too. They’re in the living room watching television. You can threaten them with the gun, but don’t use it. Not yet.”

  Roger nodded. “Right.”

  He got out of the police car and softly shut the door. He paused beside the car, listening. He heard no more sounds from the trunk. Good. She must have been shifting position rather than trying to escape or attract attention. His slow and detailed descriptions of exactly what he would do to her mommy and daddy if she didn’t do as he said must have done the trick.

  He strode up the driveway and headed down the walkway past the picture window. The drapes were closed and too thick to allow him any glimpse of what was going on inside.

  Emily was waiting for him at the top of the front
steps.

  “Remember what I told you,” she said. “No gun, if you can help it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  After one last look up and down the block to make sure none of the neighbors had decided that now would be a peachy time to take Snoogums for a walk, Roger rang the doorbell.

  A few seconds later the inside door opened. A middle-aged woman smiled out through the screen in the upper half of the outside door. She was short and frumpy, with graying brown hair and a pair of small round glasses. Her eyes widened when she saw the policeman’s cap on Roger’s head.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Roger said. “We’ve got important information we need to share with you. Mind if I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  She pushed open the door. He moved around it to step inside. She started to edge out of his way, then froze, finally registering the civilian clothes he was wearing. And the bloodstains on his pants and shoes. And the gun in his hand.

  “Oh,” she said in a tiny voice. Her eyes, now huge and alarmed, rose to meet his.

  Roger smiled and thrust the barrel of the gun in her face.

  “Don’t make a sound.”

  6

  “It’ll probably be at least fifteen minutes,” Cynthia told Calvin as she put her phone back into her pocket. “Probably more like half an hour, given that it’s Violet we’re waiting on.”

  “Well, that’ll give us some time to think stuff through,” Calvin said.

  “What stuff?”

  “The big picture. The whole history of the woods and all the weird shit that’s happened in and around them. If Roger Grey is part of it, then how does he fit in? How does it all tie together?”

  “Do we really need to answer that right now? Shouldn’t our main concern be figuring out how we’re going to get into Grey’s house and check out the chest freezer? I thought we were going to focus on the micro-level for now.”

  “I don’t think we have that luxury anymore. I think it’s all too tied up together to parse out like that. Remember how Grey seemed to know we were there before there was any way he could have seen or heard us? If that’s what happened last time, it’ll probably happen again. Which means we need to take it into account and figure out how he knew. And I bet it ties in somehow with all the macro-level stuff, all the dreams and visions and weirdness in the woods.”

  “What, are you thinking he’s psychic or something?”

  “Maybe. Or he’s having, I don’t know, outside help or something.”

  “Outside help?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Like what? The fairies are telling him stuff?”

  “I don’t know. But I think there’s definitely something unusual going on. And if there is, it’s something we need to know about if we want to try to get into his house again.”

  “But how do we know what it is? How do we even begin to figure it out?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought for a moment, then circled around the desk and studied the satellite map up close. Cynthia joined him.

  “Let’s go over what we know,” he said.

  “Okay,” Cynthia said. She gestured at the dark, blotchy green that covered most of the map. “First of all, it has something to do with the woods. Or something in the woods.

  “Or under the woods. Let’s just say something in this vicinity. Not necessarily the woods themselves.”

  “And it’s connected with people seeing things that aren’t there, or at least things that other people don’t see.”

  “Right. So what causes people to see things other people don’t see?”

  “Lots of things. Insanity. Psychedelic drugs. Dreams. Brainwashing. Psychic powers…” She frowned. “What if all the people who saw weird things were psychically sensitive?”

  “That would be an awful lot of psychics.”

  “Maybe a large proportion of the population is psychic. Maybe their psychic abilities are so minor they don’t even realize they’re psychic. At least not under normal circumstances.”

  “But if they’re exposed to whatever is in the woods…”

  “Right. Maybe whatever’s in the woods is some kind of weird psychic energy source that’s so powerful it affects people whose psychic abilities wouldn’t normally be noticeable.”

  “But didn’t Mr. May say he had some psychics come out here, and they didn’t really detect anything?”

  “Oh. That’s right. I forgot. Crap. So what else causes some people to see things that others don’t? Imagination? Optical illusions?”

  Calvin didn’t say anything for a moment. He just studied the map in silence. Then suddenly he stiffened.

  “What about the obvious?” he said. “What about something that doesn’t want other people to see it?”

  “Like what? A ghost?”

  “The Indians had lots of stories about shapeshifters. Things that could turn into whatever person or animal they chose. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe it all connects back up with the Mima.”

  “What, Wakansa was real, and it was a shapeshifter?”

  “Sure. Maybe Turner and Hamilton were wrong. Maybe the dragon they saw didn’t appear and disappear out of nowhere; maybe it turned from something tiny, like a spider, into a huge dragon, and then back into a spider.”

  Cynthia eyed the map, deep in thought.

  “It’s an interesting idea,” she said finally. “And it would explain some things pretty well. But don’t forget: A lot of people saw and heard things even when other people were present. Olive Crow heard music when no one else did. Luther Jones had conversations with people no one else could see or hear. And then there was the light my aunt and I saw. I didn’t see it at first, and my dad didn’t see it at all. All of which means we’re talking about something primarily psychic or psychological.”

  “Oh, yeah. Shit.” He looked at the map again and sighed. “Back to the drawing board…”

  7

  “Get moving,” Roger growled. He gave John a hard shove between his shoulder blades. John stumbled forward and nearly fell. He couldn’t steady himself very well because his hands were cuffed behind his back with Officer Carter’s handcuffs.

  John glared over his shoulder at Roger and said something that the silver rectangle of duct tape over his mouth reduced to “Mmmm mmm.”

  The cold, hateful look in the boy’s eyes conveyed his meaning well enough. Roger leaned down till his face was level with John’s then pointed the gun at John’s aunt, who lay on her stomach on the couch, her arms and legs bound with electrical cords torn off the room’s lamps. Her cheeks were red and wet with tears, and a rill of snot glistened on the duct tape covering her mouth. Her fluttery skirt had gotten hiked up, revealing her pale, cellulite-dimpled thighs.

  When she saw Roger point the gun at her, she emitted a shrill squeal. She sounded like a piglet.

  “Remember,” Roger told John: “If you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll shoot the old bitch. And then I’ll go out and shoot your little friend Anna. And then”—he swung the gun around so that John was looking down the black tunnel of its muzzle—“I’ll shoot you. Won’t that suck?”

  John’s eyes shifted from Roger to his aunt, then back to Roger. The icy hatred in them never wavered, but nevertheless he turned and strode toward the front door exactly as Roger had demanded. Roger followed him out, one hand on the boy’s shoulder. On the couch behind them John’s aunt whimpered.

  Outside, not a soul was in sight except a kid on a bike whizzing through the intersection at the end of the block. Traffic hummed on Potts Road two blocks east. Roger guided John to the trunk of the car, then kept the gun trained on the boy with one hand while he unlocked the trunk with the other.

  He raised the trunk lid, revealing Anna West curled up on the carpet inside, her hands likewise cuffed, her mouth likewise taped, her tear-filled eyes white and gleaming in the shadows. John stiffened at the sight of her, then fixed that hateful look on Roger again.

  “Get inside,” Roger ordered.
When John merely continued glaring at him, Roger shoved him against the back of the car hard enough to make the car rock on its springs, then waved the gun at the trunk. “In.”

  John glanced at Anna again. Her eyes were huge and scared and pleading. She emitted a small muffled sob.

  John climbed inside. Roger slammed the trunk shut.

  Roger sat down behind the wheel. Emily was waiting for him in the passenger seat. As he inserted the key into the ignition, the radio crackled and a woman’s voice said, “Car Five, what is your status?”

  Roger frowned, then craned his head out the window and looked at the 5 on the side of the door.

  “Car Five, please report,” the dispatcher said.

  Roger looked at Emily.

  “Ignore it,” she said. She nodded at the steering wheel. “Just hurry. Things are starting to happen now.”

  8

  Colleen listened to the police car start up and pull out of the driveway. Then she sucked in a deep breath through her nostrils and heaved herself off the couch. She crashed to the floor hard enough to make the picture window rattle. A spike of pain shot through her hip. She ignored it and rolled across the carpet to her purse, which sat next to her rocking chair.

  When she reached the purse, she turned her back to it, then wriggled about until her cuffed hands came into contact with its imitation leather surface. She unzipped the main compartment and thrust her hands inside. A pencil tip jabbed her finger. She winced, but kept groping about until she found her phone.

  She pulled it out of the purse, then felt about on its surface in search of the button to turn it on…

  9

  As the police car accelerated down May Road, John planted his feet against the side of the trunk and slid his cuffed hands down the back of his legs until they were even with his heels. He stepped one foot backward over the handcuff chain, then the other. Now his hands were in front of him, exactly the way a stage magician had done it on a TV special John saw last month. Who said watching TV was bad for you?

  He raised his hands to his face and pulled off the duct tape. Then he scooted close to Anna and whispered in her ear, “I’m gonna take the tape off your mouth, okay?”