Perhaps the voices were just a ghostly recording, the sound of men standing over the bloody body of a boy with a star-shaped hole in his eye, plotting how to bury him in a box. It played over and over again, like songs from the past on endless radio repeat. The past and present blended seamlessly into a new reality – a nightmare into which he was waking. The Gulch was an eternal recurrence and his life nothing but a minor detail, twists on the truth, a ruffling of the veil.
Jonathan stood at the edge of a hole. A deep hole, square shaped, a couple of yards long and about one yard wide. There was a pickaxe and shovels on the ground, partially covered in snow. It looked strange now, this hole near a stream in the middle of the Gulch. It seemed to be drawing him closer. He wanted to lie down in it. He was tired, so very tired. Clouds rolled overhead. The moon disappeared, and snow began to drift silent and steady across the land.
He could feel many things watching him. They were just over his shoulder, just hidden in the darkness of the tree line, just out of sight. He could not see them, but they were there.
He looked again into that hole and saw his own body lying there, head broken open, limbs at strange angles, eyes wide and partially set free from his skull – straining to see something in the sky, just before the bullet tore through.
Jonathan looked out into the distance, where the tall grass of the wetlands met the trees. A pair of yellow eyes shone in the darkness, high off the ground, bright as the moon, glossy and sinister. Someone spoke to him from the trees.
“Where is Jacob?”
He turned to look, but no one was there. The tree line was dark and impenetrable. He looked back to where he had seen the eyes shining in the night. They were gone. He walked to where they had been and stared up into the spiraling spikes of a dying black spruce tree. They seemed like a staircase or ladder climbing up into the darkness of space. Or perhaps he was at the top and they led downward into the earth. He was too tired and dizzy to know the difference anymore.
He walked to the southern edge of the valley and stood before the blackened trees as the land sloped gently upward toward the cabin. It wasn’t much farther now. He could hear the sound of the electric generator turning, a horrendous sound rendered soft by distance.
The broken spikes of tree limbs plunged into him like knives and scraped his numb face and bruised his hollow chest. He lumbered up the hill like it was a mountain, dragging his body along. There was whispering again in the trees, the sound of men’s feet running through the forest like a pack of unseen wolves closing in on an injured buck. He heard the padding and crunching of the snow, breaking branches, cursing and giggling, like children with low, gruff voices. They were everywhere in the darkness. Jonathan stared straight ahead. Through the trees, he could make out the faint glow of electric light from the rear of the cabin.
He pushed on farther. The light grew steadily brighter, reached into the trees and cast shadows across the snow. Large flakes of snow fell from the sky, drifting lazily through the pine canopy.
A face appeared from behind a tree, poking out into the light. A beefy man with a round face and fire-shocked beard. He laughed like he was playing a game, his smile ruddy, red and giddy. For a moment, Jonathan recognized him – the man from the bar in Pasternak, who had mumbled those strange words to Michael before the fight broke out.
“Where is Jacob?” he said and then disappeared from view back behind the tree.
Then another face appeared from behind a different tree. He was tall and gaunt, half-hidden in shadow. He smiled like death, his voice deep and cavernous. “Where is Jacob?”
Then another and another and another, all appearing momentarily from behind tree trunks, their faces suddenly visible like apparitions, giddily asking, “Where is Jacob?” and laughing to themselves before disappearing into the darkness as if they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. They moved around him, shifting places, breaking branches, but he could not see them until they popped a head out from behind a tree and whispered that same, awful taunt: “Where is Jacob?”
He recognized them all from that night in Pasternak, their elbows on the wooden bar of The Forge, half-finished beers falling over, faces bloated and heavy, secretive smiles and calculating eyes, sizing up the world for a fight. They looked different now in the winter night, cast in shadow and dull light. Their skin was gray and pockmarked, their eyes like beads on the face of a doll, their movements jerky and broken, like his own. He saw Daryl Teague among the pines. His massive body and head reached high into the tree limbs. He whispered, “Where is Jacob?” and raised his clawlike hand with only three fingers to his mouth to stifle a laugh. His strange eyes stared right through Jonathan as if he were sleepwalking, like Jacob during his night terrors – eyes open to the world, but trapped in his mind, simultaneously existing in two different worlds. Perhaps they were all trapped, animals who constructed their own prisons over time and suddenly realized what they’ve done. Their laughter sounded strange – an animal-like cackling of anger, pain and insanity.
Jonathan felt it somewhere out there – true reality. He had been half asleep for so long, trapped within his guilt and terror. His body moved, but he fell deeper and deeper. Something tried to wake him. He could feel it now.
Daryl Teague’s face pulled from both sides into a grin, and he stepped back into the darkness.
Jonathan could see the firepit and oakwood bench where they found Bill Flood’s body. He could see the doorway of the shed where they’d hung the deer and stripped it of skin and meat ten years ago. He could smell something gentle on the wind that moved softly through the trees and caused the snow to dance.
Where is Jacob?
He was out of the Gulch now and stood beneath the electric floodlight, facing the wooden wall of the cabin. He could see the driveway from here. He saw Conner’s Suburban parked in the driveway, large and heavy, the light glinting off the body, the tires new and polished. He turned and looked again into the doorway of the shed, its entrance black and beckoning. The snow fell silent through the shadow and light. He still heard them in the trees; he heard their rustling feet, their whispers and taunts. He waited and breathed and then turned to look.
In the light of the overhead lamp his own footprints leading from the trees to the cabin were the only ones he could see. The tracks curved slightly with the small incline, showing a line of indentations and slash marks where his right foot dragged like an animal with a broken leg. The wind pushed the snow sideways for a moment but then ceased, and the snow fell dead and straight again. He waited there in the night for what seemed like hours, and they waited in the trees, watching.
He heard a tree snap somewhere in the darkness. He unslung his rifle and waited. All went silent, and he could hear only the beating of his heart – it sounded a million miles away.
A face appeared from behind a tree like a mannequin pushed slowly into his range of vision. It showed no movement or life – a wooden mask painted by a disturbed child who saw the world in flashes of carnival terror. It stared with unblinking black eyes. Atop its head was a crown of antlers. Its impossibly tall body was clothed in a Druid robe. It floated farther out from behind the tree and faced him directly. Then it began to float toward him over the snow.
Jonathan chambered a round in his rifle and raised it to his shoulder, aimed and fired. The sound echoed off the mountains and disappeared.
The figure did not flinch or move, as though the bullet hadn’t touched the cloth of its robe. It simply continued to float silent and unmoving toward him. It didn’t look real, but it was there, in front of his eyes. He could see it – the light landed on its wooden mask, which grew larger and larger with its approach. It existed, and yet it did not because it could not be killed.
Jonathan chambered another round and fired again. The figure continued toward him. It grew large in Jonathan’s eyes, coming so near now it seemed he could reach out and touch it.
It was what hid behind the veil of this dream world. It was where Jacob, his little boy, would be taken to suffer with this unspeakable thing keeping watch over him like a monstrous father figure, reveling in the terror of a child woken from a dream, plunged into a cold, empty hell.
He chambered another round and fired again and again till the rifle was empty and there was nothing but the hollow click of the firing pin.
The figure stood before him now, face-to-face. An arm like the broken branch of a tree rose up from beneath its robe. A long, bony finger reached up to the wooden mask and pushed it aside. A deep, croaking and guttural voice rose up from the darkness, as if the land itself had cracked open and, from a great crevasse, its words filled Coombs’ Gulch and poured down into him.
“Do you see?”
Jonathan stared into its true form. He could see. It was all he would ever see.
He could not look away.
Chapter Thirty
The lights flashed on bright, making Mary’s eyes water. A small microphone nestled in her lapel. The Channel 8 news reporter – Sonya Martinez – sat across from her in a chair, pleasantly pretty and covered in makeup.
“What would you like to say to whoever took your son?” Sonya said.
Despite the rehearsals, the words she had memorized and the coaching from detectives and experts, Mary could only bring herself to say, “Please, bring him home.”
And even that was choked and dead on arrival.
It had been three weeks since Jacob disappeared and her husband, Jonathan, had returned home, crazed and alone, talking nonstop about something in the woods, some kind of ritual, demons and children lost in space. The police immediately hauled him away. He put up a fight in the middle of the police station and tried to escape, injuring a couple of officers with strength she did not know he possessed. They placed him in a locked psychiatric hospital and charged him with assault.
The New York State Police began their search of the mountains where Jonathan and Michael and Conner Braddick had taken their last hunting trip. They found no trace of Conner and only found Michael’s backpack and gear high on a mountaintop – a place where few people would tread on their own – but no other trace of either man. They had disappeared as well.
Jonathan would ramble nonstop when she was allowed to visit him, his eyes wide, desperate and insistent as he tried to convince her of something incomprehensible. It was all gibberish. Something had happened, of that she was sure, and his already fragile mind had snapped. Mary still had that horrible sense of alienation from him – of seeing him completely lost and yet standing right in front of her. He looked like a madman, his hair matted to his scalp, his pale face gaunt and soured with desperation, sweat and grime. His eyes, once blue, now looked nearly white. She had needed him so badly in that moment, needed him to hold her so they could find a moment of strength together and gird themselves against the horror of what had happened to their son. But he was untouchable. It was like watching a dead and broken branch finally fall to the ground.
The police questioned him extensively. They suspected him of murdering his two friends. They tried to connect him with Jacob’s disappearance. It was all too strange – too coincidental to just be coincidence, and the detectives looked for any connection between Jacob’s disappearance and the disappearance of Michael and Conner.
The newspapers and television had a field day. It was on the evening news; even some national publications picked it up. The multiple disappearances fueled all sorts of insane theories spread over the internet, television and newspapers, which twisted in her head and caused her to feel dizzy. Everyone had ‘facts’, and yet there were zero facts at all. Those ‘facts’ were woven into a tapestry – multiple tapestries – and hung like a veil before the stage of the world. She was so desperate sometimes she almost felt herself succumb to Jonathan’s story; it made as much sense as anything else at this point. He kept telling police to search the forests surrounding their town, to find a place with markings on trees and a ritualistic design in the ground. A place where trapped and possessed men offered gifts of children to a demon-god. They laughed and shook their heads. Mary kept her arms across her stomach, trying to keep her insides from spilling out.
Then they found it. Three miles up Route 4 – a long scenic road that rose and fell with the hills – and deep in the woods off old hiking trails no one used anymore, police dogs picked up Jacob’s scent and followed it to a strange clearing in the woods with a ring of stones laid in the ground and a pattern of intersecting lines. Symbols were carved in the surrounding trees, just as Jonathan had said there would be. The cops came down on him ten times harder. Now he wasn’t just some unlucky sap with bad timing – now he was an honest-to-god suspect.
So far they hadn’t been able to fit the pieces together, though. The timelines didn’t work. They triangulated his cell phone to a remote meadow in the Adirondacks that bordered Coombs’ Gulch – exactly where Jonathan said he had been the entire time. The detectives had to drop it after a while, but still, she could see it in their eyes – they were constantly thinking about it – how he did it and managed to baffle them all. They would never let it go.
“What do you think happened to your son?” Sonya Martinez said with a built-in sympathetic voice Mary recognized from every other female reporter who interviewed the family of a missing child, a voice sweet enough to convince you she cared, easily digestible for the masses, but with a slight edge of skepticism to let the viewer know she was on the case, determined to solve the mystery.
The camera lights left a halo over everything and everyone in her range of vision, as if angels had descended from heaven to question her and dredge the pain. Maybe if she told them the right things, the angels would find her son.
“He was only a boy. A little boy,” Mary said. The tears were coming now. She couldn’t help it. She cried automatically these days. Anything set her off. The lights and the questions were overwhelming; the loss and the fear ran rampant inside her. “I don’t know. I just don’t know, and that’s the worst part.”
She lied to the angels. She had heard it said that not knowing what happened to a missing child was the worst part. Maybe that was true after years of searching and heartache. Right now what she feared more than anything was the phone call that a body had been discovered, that detectives and forensic technicians were descending on some lonesome wooded area to piece together some horrid and lurid story of what a monster had done to her only child. Waiting to hear confirmation of what she, deep down, knew was the worst part. She felt the dead emptiness of true loss, like she had been killed and gutted like one of Jonathan’s dead deer.
Maybe that was all she was now – a doe strung up, hollowed out, with everyone taking their pound of flesh. The media questioned her parenting: Where was she when Jacob got off the bus? What was Jonathan doing in the mountains? How was their marriage? Remember JonBenét Ramsey? They painted the portrait that fit their notions, stripped the meat from her bones and dined on the six o’clock news.
And yet here she was offering herself up as further sacrifice. It was what the detectives and the experts told her to do, so she did it. Her life was not her own anymore – it too had been taken. Now she only did what she was told to by her handlers, her puppeteers, and she walked to and fro in a daze. When she spoke, there was nothing but breath behind the words. She had lost her son and her husband. At this point, it was a miracle she could get out of bed in the morning.
Mary looked at Sonya’s pretty-but-not-too-pretty face across from her. Sonya was probably Mary’s age, hair highlighted with blonde and cut at a sharp angle to make her look sharp – a real go-getter. Her vacant eyes dampened on cue, her face well conditioned in front of a dressing room mirror to look deeply concerned but skeptical, caring but not without reservation. Mary couldn’t help but wonder where this woman would go and what she would do after the interview. This was just another workday for her. Fo
r Mary it was the culmination of the end of her life.
“You told the police that you had seen someone – a man – in the woods behind your house? That Jacob had told you he’d seen a man back there at night, watching the house?”
How do you describe something like that? She saw something back there. It looked like a man…but the eyes – they were larger than the world. She had lost herself in them, in their crazed look, and all her memory seemed erased. She didn’t know how to describe him. She didn’t know how to explain the way his eyes seemed like swirling pools of yellow, and his open mouth like a cavern. She tried to rationalize it to herself, tell herself she was upset and making a monster out of a man, but she could never quite convince herself. Man or monster – what was the difference? Weren’t we all just awful, godforsaken creatures anyway? She looked at her audience of cameramen and audio technicians and Sonya. Perhaps the halos and bright lights hid something darker. Demons were just fallen angels.
Of course, when Jacob told her of a man out at the edge of the woods walking back and forth like a zombie, she had dismissed it. How do you tell the world that sometimes, as a parent, you don’t have the time or energy to entertain every thought or story a child blurts at you throughout the day?
“I thought it was a dream. Just imagination,” Mary said. “I didn’t think he was real.”
“Do you mean when Jacob told you about him, or when you saw him yourself?”
Mary paused for a moment. “Maybe both.”
“Do you think Jacob’s disappearance is in any way connected with what happened to your husband on that hunting trip? With the disappearance of his friends, Michael and Conner Braddick?”
Boy in the Box Page 25