Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  Doug had been in the woods once before. Not really in, he’d hid from kids in the weedy ditch along 115th. This was during a game of hide-and-seek, years ago, back in the fifth grade when being an odd duck could be overlooked for the sake of evenly numbered teams. The woods might’ve been out of bounds, but the boy didn’t want to get caught again. As he’d stretched to lie flat, something crinkled behind his ear—a tightly folded note with a pull tab. Curious, he opened and smoothed the note. Doug held a pencil drawing of the Devil. The drawing was ornate, geometric: an inverted triangle head, larger triangle body. He couldn’t redo the fold. Doug tossed the note. It returned on the wind and flapped against his neck. When he awoke, the street was empty of taggers. The drawing in his hands had protected him, he thought, impossible and terrifying if it was. He kept it in his back pocket, though he knew he shouldn’t. For a week, whenever alone, he peeked to decipher the weird markings on the arms and chest. Never for long—he feared losing his soul. Then his mom washed his jeans. Doug was even more afraid that she would find it. The note was still in the pocket. It unfolded blank, and he was so relieved. Thinking of it now, Doug couldn’t believe he’d ever taken such a risk. Maybe his boldness had washed out that day, too, as if with magic ink.

  As they trekked deeper, the woods became denser. The trail narrowed. Doug gazed homeward, to a train bridge also visible from his bedroom window. What direction was his house? Which way would he run if they were separated? He couldn’t say. An acute disorientation set in, as the immensity of the maze of trails gulped his reserves of comfort.

  Then he walked into E.

  She’d stopped at John’s signal, and she and Doug smashed and tumbled to the ground. They landed entwined, face-to-face in the middle of the trail.

  It wasn’t the fall, but the feel of her beneath him that bewildered Doug. They’d never been so close. He experienced the intimate lines of E.’s chest and hips through the swath of black cloth, and the fragile weight of each part, at once with maximum body contact. Her jolts and squirms combined with all he knew of E. to allow him to glimpse—or to believe he was glimpsing—her essence, the miracle of her, wonderfully alive. Doug felt wonderful, too, then. How many times had he dreamed of them touching like this and told himself to forget it, that being her friend was good enough. It wasn’t even close to this feeling. Doug wanted to be her boyfriend—an undeniable and visceral fact whose comprehension took a moment before he could wonder if she were thinking the same. He looked into her eyes for an answer. She winced, forehead wrinkling, theirs having dashed on the way down.

  “E.—I really—”

  “You’re really all over me.”

  The pressure she exerted, faintly pushing his chest to get him up, expressed little more than her physical discomfort, though Doug was launched aside by the force of his conscience and hope to never displease her. Kneeling, he helped E. to her feet. Above him, she brushed herself off and thanked Doug with a glance, not the monumental exchange of unspoken, though palpable desire he wanted her to feel.

  John stood before an offshoot of the trail that dipped between two trees. Their tops were arched to form a sort of shaded gateway down into the moraine and to Bachelor’s Grove. John had sipped beers a few times at friends’ houses to see what the big deal was, though he’d never partied in the woods. Before Erika, some guys on the team came regularly and had invited him out. They were the kids who played for the perks of baseball. John was committed to the game itself, and though his refusals had made him appear not yet grown up, a trip to Bachelor’s Grove represented the ultimate junior high transgression. Its initiation seemed to require a change in priorities that John hadn’t been comfortable making. He wasn’t sure how much his choice owed to wanting to preserve his reputation as “one of the good guys” and how much owed to fear of the other, wilder side of sports which relieved guys of the unyielding control needed to perform at one’s natural best, as if he might lose it or some other important but inexpressible thing down that path, the one beneath his feet, forever.

  E. touched one of the trees, traced the artful curve of the branches. They looked dead. They weren’t budding, and a few of last year’s leaves clung to the bark. Dark and crumpled, they didn’t tremble in the wind. She hadn’t peered ahead, yet, down inside the grim archway. She kept trained on her immediate surroundings—the knots in the smooth bark, the slowly dying breeze, the dank odor of drying mud. The physicality of the woods staved her anxiety, minus history, minus Erika. Many times E. had pictured the murder scene. She didn’t want to. She hated to think of it—a losing struggle in the dark, futile screams against the intention of the knife—Who did Erika cry out to before …? She shoved the torturous thought from her mind. E. didn’t know how she would react once they reached the spot—an uncomfortable notion, and more so in front of these boys.

  “This leads to the Grove.” John hung his head to show respect to Erika, whether the gesture meant anything to E. or not.

  “Yeah … Sad. I—” Doug stopped short, didn’t attempt to match John’s showy sympathy. Frankly, Doug didn’t understand the first thing about being dead, being almost dead, or being somebody with a dead person in the family. Not much had happened in his life, which really wasn’t his fault. Doug’s dad had lost his computer programmer job last year, and both parents sat their son down and swore to him that nothing would change right away other than his mom being gone more for work. Both pairs of his grandparents were still alive, including one grandfather who always roughed his hair and pinched his thighs and said, “Ham bone! Ham bone!” which made his family laugh. Then he wanted them to be dead. Not really. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. For Doug, death was as true as a rumor. He’d seen enough horror movies to know being killed was an excruciating event to be avoided, which characterized his relationship to it—abstract, yet observing. That was fine except again he felt excluded from some big secret shared by E. and the Dead Man.

  John searched their faces as he would fresh recruits at summer training for signs of physical and mental exhaustion. They looked nervous, but able to push much further.

  “Ready?” he said to rally them.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be an old graveyard down there?” Doug asked.

  “The Devil in the Woods,” John said.

  “Ronny Mickle said hooded figures—”

  “He says those things to scare you, Dougy,” E. said, and John laughed.

  Doug charged through the archway.

  “Yeah—well, come on.” He waved them forward. He didn’t want to fight over E.’s attention, but it seemed the Dead Man wouldn’t mosey along to the astral plane until this tribute to Erika was paid or the guy keeled over in the process.

  “Go, Dougy,” E. said, a nervous lilt in her voice.

  She didn’t smile at him, though. She looked shyly at the Dead Man, who smirked in return.

  Doug told himself to be strong and, not really knowing where he was going, led them down a steep and staggered path overrun with raised roots. At times, the path was barely visible. The drop took several sharp turns through the trees as it wound into a shaded ravine. They were plummeting to the very bottom. The thought terrified Doug. The forest’s belly was far from everything he’d known, no matter how miserable.

  Abruptly, the path leveled. They followed the narrow ravine toward the valley. From the end, the kids looked out onto Bachelor’s Grove.

  The overhead canopy glowed dimly. The valley floor was shaggy with clover and fern. A running creek bisected the Grove. Past that, a gigantic and ancient-looking tree grew aslant from the base of the opposite wall. Without a word between them, the kids headed to the unusual tree.

  The area appeared to be pristine woodlands, until they came upon several planks—a crude bridge, which they used to cross the creek. More signs of civilization appeared. To the right, an area of young trees was roped off with dirt-speckled police tape. E. went to them, leaving the boys, and allowed the sagging lines to stop her short. Inside, crudely hacked stumps crowde
d around a fire pit. Dead saplings wilted over the circle of stones, their tops crisp as marshmallow-roasting sticks upturned in the mud. Garbage littered the ground—pop bottles, chip bags, and objects indistinguishably charred. Partial shoe imprints, mostly gym shoes, were stamped around the stumps. The mess told of just how many kids Bachelor’s Grove had lured before the murder.

  E. caught herself searching the shoe prints for her sister’s pink flats. E. wouldn’t put it past Erika to have worn the flats in the woods in December. They’d complemented her every outfit for two months. She’d gotten the shoes on E.’s birthday. The girl had made their mother drive her and her BFF to the mall to buy Erika a present to feel better about watching E. open gifts later. A selfish-bitch move, in E.’s opinion. Except now, the act was clearly a cry for help. Though popular, Erika hadn’t felt loved. The thought of spotting one of those pink plastic-y shoes, sticking up in the mud, threatened to shatter E.’s composure and make her cherish the thing forever. Nothing was to be learned from that sort of behavior, E. reprimanded. She turned her back on the debris. Behaving like her mother would only open herself up to needless pain and a lot of blubbering.

  John came and stood beside her then and gazed with his world-weary and goddamn beautiful eyes at the scene of the crime. He didn’t press her to talk about it, and E. was glad for that. Dougy came over, too, and stood on her other side. Good old Dougy, her closest friend ever. If that boy had a clue about what she was feeling, just one, so that she wouldn’t have to say any of it to him, E. would sink into him for support, her body urging her to avoid the handsome ghost and this haunting world. E. took short, incremental breaths to restrain these and other pathetic notions flooding her brain, such as how stupid she was for having let these boys get even this close to the empty grave of her heart and how good it felt to have two people beside her that cared enough to be here with her now.

  Doug had noticed E.’s body stiffen, and so he’d gone to her side in front of the creepy, roped-off murder scene. Despite that the woods around them teemed with wildlife, ghost girls and boys, and knife-wielding murderers, Doug’s only concern at that moment was for E.’s well-being. She’d become so still and quiet that, this close to her, E. seemed to radiate cold. Her withdrawal was unlike when they read at the library, shunning the world for a few hours of respite. Here E. seemed to be imploding emotionally and renouncing life in the process. This was his second chance, he realized, to show how he felt for her in a way his intentions couldn’t be misunderstood. Doug adjusted his glasses and contemplated taking her hand.

  E. expected John to stalk inside and begin sleuthing where it’d happened, playing young Sherlock Holmes. The boy turned from the site and walked away. E. watched him retreat toward the Big Tree, and his absence allowed the weakened doors of her heart to close and lock again, pleasantly tight. Her sister was dead. Like John soon would be. Like she and even Dougy and the person or persons who’d murdered her sister would be one day. And everybody else, too. Those were the known facts. Case closed.

  Something touched her hand—

  Had he waited too long gathering the courage to grope past the boundaries of their friendship? Watching her gaze over her shoulder at the Dead Man, Doug thought, I’m what you need. Then he went all in. He clumsily missed, brushed her pinky knuckle with his fingertips. He’d meant to take her hand, as in to hold it to comfort her. He had no intention of intertwining her fingers with his. That would be taking things too far too fast, unless that was something she wanted. He would give her that and anything else she needed to be happy again, and to hear that she needed him as much.

  E. spun and pushed him down hard. Doug grasped for the loose tape, and fell on his ass in the mud.

  “What’re you doing?” she demanded.

  “You looked … I thought—and I wanted to—”

  “Dougy, no.”

  “Do you … feel …? Because—”

  “I don’t feel anything, OK?” Her tone softened, seeing her friend beneath her and filthy. He didn’t move. She thought he might cry. He was only trying to be there for her. But she couldn’t help him up, couldn’t touch his hand, yet. “Just let me be … me.”

  “I do,” Doug said with defeat. His glasses had been thrown someplace, and he was glad that E.’s face was a red blur. He didn’t want to see how badly he’d blown it.

  “You do,” she said lukewarmly. “That’s why I appreciate you.”

  Her appreciation stung worse than the fall. The opportunity to express his feelings had passed. Yet Doug continued to try, speaking limply, losing at every word: “But maybe—maybe you’d like—with me—to be—”

  “Dougy, I know. You want to help,” she said, eager to leave the grossly sentimental moment behind. “I’m fine. OK?”

  E. found and handed him his glasses. Before he could put them on, she called to John to wait up, something she never imagined doing in a million years. Wasn’t the boy supposed to be “honoring Erika’s memory” by investigating her murder like the well-meaning do-gooder he supposedly was? Just like that, she’d sealed away the exchange with Dougy to be forgotten.

  Even through smudged lenses, E.’s weirded-out-ness was plain. She strode eagerly to John Walker, which made Doug want to throw himself down on purpose this time as a sacrifice to the Devil in the Woods. The only reason he’d tried so hard to connect—reconnect?—with E. was because of the Dead Man’s interference. Doug had moved too quickly and now looked like a huge idiot—twice. His backside was covered in mud as if he’d shit himself with such force that it’d blown through his pants. Doug scraped at his rear with a long stick, squeegeeing and then flinging the loosened mud off the end, as if engaged in some primitive method of ass wiping. Never mind that he’d failed at the boldest thing he’d attempted in his life. E. hadn’t outright rejected him, only the idea of being touched by him tenderly. His vision went blurry. This time it was tears of self-pity. Don’t do that, he told himself. His pitifulness made him number two—two trillion. No, number one was her books and learning. That wouldn’t change, that was E. And Doug was her closest friend, her number two. Not in the way he wanted, but a high number, still—really as good as one, considering E. was adamant in dealing with her feelings alone. There was no reason for that to change so long as he gave up trying to beat the Dead Man at his game. No one was better than Doug at his own—the long game. Good, he thought. Today he was the loser he’d always been, making fumbles that he and E. would laugh about one day, and John H. Walker was the adored star he’d always been, their fates as unalterable as Doug and E.’s bond, who they would be long after the guy died and left E. to Doug. Maybe then, when her sister and John were past, she’d choose a new life. Doug tightly retied the line of police tape that’d snapped during his fall, eager to leave this awful place and lurch on.

  John stood beneath the Big Tree. It had an enormous base and was easily the largest they’d ever seen. Only hand in hand might the kids have been able to wrap their arms around its trunk. The tree grew so close against a sheer face of the moraine that it projected from the rock on a slant and a few hearty branches reached over their heads. The bark was ashen with exaggerated black ravines, as if carved instead of grown. There was altogether something satanic about it, Doug thought.

  John wasn’t actually looking at the tree towering above them, but at a meter-deep hole beside a mound of dirt, ten or fifteen paces in front of it.

  “That’s not where they found her,” he said.

  He glanced aside at Doug, who hadn’t even asked—some kind of show-off-y alpha move. The guy squatted at the edge of the hole. Doug wanted to kick him in.

  “Yeah … obviously. She wouldn’t fit. I mean, not unless—”

  “This dig could be four months old.”

  “The murder weapon could be buried here,” E. suggested.

  “Half-buried?” John scooped soil from the mound and dusted his hands over the hole.

  Doug hated to see her play detective with the Dead Man. E. had responded
with her usual malaise, probably wishing John would shut up already to have another hour at the library before dinner. Still, she was playing, which wasn’t like her, especially since losing Erika. Doug was beginning to believe that the guy really did have mind control powers. Their being out here was proof enough. Luckily, he was probably so used to others joining the cult of himself that he didn’t notice that a girl too deep and fearless and real, too out of his league, was bothering to pay him attention.

  “Well, let’s—I’m not scared.” With his mud-smeared stick, Doug prodded inside the hole.

  E. grabbed his arm. “Dougy, I don’t want to see it.”

  “They weren’t burying anything.” John stood and scanned the area around the tree. He pointed out several other mounds, as old looking, thirty or so feet apart. “I think they were digging for something.”

  “They?” Doug said. “The police?”

  “No,” was all John answered. He looked to E. to comment.

  “Digging for what? Gold? China?” she said skeptically. John had possessed plenty of physical power before his sickness, sure. But in E.’s world, people weren’t blessed with brains and brawn—most weren’t given either—and she was glad for the studiousness bestowed on her. The boy sounded so confident, though. Not cocky, more like he’d been thinking hard about the murder for a long time.

  John hesitated before doing what he did next. He would need the help of a team to continue The Work and, without E., Doug was as good as gone, too. He clawed up a handful of dirt and showed his soiled fingernails.

  “Whatever it was,” he said, “Erika knew.”

  Darkness rimmed John’s eyes. The boy appeared undead with his withered-corpse hand and fingernails bared as if come to drag them into his grave.

  Doug stepped between him and E.

  “We don’t care about what some killers wanted,” Doug said, consciously speaking for E. He was glad when she didn’t object.