Adam's Woods

by Greg Walker

  They followed the path Adam had taken, and after a hundred yards it forked. The path to the left went to the edge of the swamp into which they liked to poke sticks and search for frogs and other creatures, and the main trail passed a bow hunter’s tree stand and then emptied into the cornfield. Just down from the field, at a former excavation site, garter snakes could be found hiding under large flat rocks, and Eric thought he might have gone there. Or to the swamp. He could see Adam choosing either attraction.

  “Let’s split up. I’ll go to the swamp and you go to the cornfield,” JT said. Whoever finds him can yell and we’ll meet back here.”

  “Okay,” Eric said, feeling like he’d become part of a stupid Scooby-Doo cartoon. He started down the trail of packed earth. They used them all enough to thwart the growth of weeds, but some briars did reach out far enough to scratch his legs and arms so that he was stinging and bleeding by the time he stepped out from the shade of the trees into the fierce sun. The corn had been harvested already, and the amputated stalks slumped in their rows like a routed army. He called out for his brother, but got no answer. Eric was hot and sweating and thinking maybe a swim in the creek would be better than fishing today. Probably too hot for the fish to bite anyway.

  He began to trudge to the excavation site, what they called the “gravel pit”, thinking that maybe Adam had heard but nursed a grudge, and would exact his revenge through silence. He glanced up at the “Big Woods”, always hoping to catch a buck standing at its edge or a Bigfoot fleeing for cover. He was thirsty and getting angry with Adam and himself, still unable to push away the pictures that had seared themselves into his brain. He vowed never to look again, and at the same time wanted to go back for another helping.

  Adam wasn’t at the gravel pit, and there were no stones that looked recently displaced. He stood still listening for JT’s yell but heard nothing but bugs and the croak of resident frogs in a shin-deep depression permanently filled with rainwater.

  He began to hike back, wondering if JT had returned to the cabin to be alone with the ladies instead of helping to look. He reached the fork in the path with a new collection of scratches - already felt the sting when he stepped into the bath tonight - and walked towards the swamp. Rounding a bend on the trail, he almost stumbled over JT sitting on the ground. His face was pale and something red covered his hands, with smears on his shorts and shirt.

  “JT..John Thomas. What are you doing? Did you find Adam?”

  He didn’t answer, but looked into his eyes without seeing and groaned in a way that frightened Eric, and then began rocking back and forth.

  “This isn’t funny, JT. Stop it. Where’s Adam?”A shiver ran up Eric’s spine as JT’s mouth opened and closed without sound. He began slowly shaking his head back and forth now without looking at Eric or even acknowledging his presence.

  Eric drew in a breath to shout for him to stop, but he happened to glance towards the swamp. Just visible from his vantage point - the fetid smell of the stagnant water exacerbated by the heat - something blue on the ground caught his eye. Adam had worn blue shorts today.

  He knew he should stop here, force it back, just drive away and leave this place but he couldn’t. Tears began to course down his cheeks. He closed his eyes, bringing the path and the woods and the smell of the swamp back into focus and remembered.

  He walked slowly towards the blue and the swamp and refused to comprehend even as he saw his brother lying with his small bare back towards him. He couldn’t see his face but did see things extended out onto the ground, things that seemed to emanate from his brother. He knew from books and road kill what was inside a body. But in the books they were so bright and colorful and easily to identify; this scene reminded him more of the opossums and raccoons and occasional deer decorating the road that they tallied from the school bus windows.

  He didn’t remember making a conscious decision but stepped over Adam, careful not to tread on anything, and removed sticks and leaves and tried to brush away the dark red mud and when he’d done the best he could he started stuffing it back in, not knowing exactly where it all went but he thought it wouldn’t matter so much as long as it was inside and not outside and the doctors could put it all back in the right place and then Adam could come home and they’d go swimming or fishing or do whatever Adam wanted maybe get a huge pile of comic books and take them to the cabin and make JT sit outside while he looked at comic books with his brother…

  “It’s okay, Adam. I’m almost done. Then we’ll go home and get mom."

  He looked at his red hands and thought he should wash them off but the swamp was the only place to do that and he didn’t want to put his hands in the dirty water but now flies were landing on them and a whole lot more on Adam and he began to wave them away, began to scream at them to leave his brother alone he wasn’t dead stupid flies and he kept screaming and screaming and hadn’t noticed that JT was gone and didn’t notice when Mr. Rice their neighbor a black man who managed to look pale found him there with Adam and picked him up and carried him home and called the police while his mother began screaming.

  He sat in his car and sobbed, heavy racking sobs that he thought would break something inside but thought the most vital things were broken already so it wouldn’t matter. He regained control enough to drive, saw a face in the window where the curtain had moved before and didn’t care and pulled out of the lot. He went north almost to Erie and found a motel to hide in, and there he broke down again and cried the tears for Adam and his family and himself that he’d refused to cry for all these years. He fell asleep with the lights and his clothes on, still wearing his shoes.

  He stayed for almost three days and didn’t return Harry’s phone calls. After waking each morning he drove into Erie and went to Presque Isle State Park. He avoided the swimmers and the bicycle riders, finding secluded beaches on which to sit and watch the waves and let their calming rhythm seep into his soul.

  The detective wore a suit and Eric wouldn’t have known he was a policeman if he hadn’t shown him the badge. He asked Eric questions about what had happened. He asked a lot of questions about John Thomas. Eric told the truth. Even about the magazines. His dad sat with him during the questioning, his face lined, eyes hollow, hair standing up from an absent gesture of running his hands through it, and Eric glanced at him expecting a rebuke but his father only smiled a tight smile and said nothing.

  Later, after the detective left, just him and his father and the death of his brother in the house, his mother next door at the Rice’s, he told his father he was sorry. It sounded so stupid, "sorry", as if by saying it Adam would be alive but he didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’m sorry about the magazines dad. I shouldn’t have looked at them. Maybe if I hadn’t…” he couldn’t finish the sentence. He wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come.

  His father wrapped his strong arms around him, his calloused hands rough on Eric's smooth skin, the sweet smell of sawdust embedded into his shirt, and he kissed the top of Eric’s head. Eric felt a tear on his cheek that didn’t belong to him.

  “Eric, you were curious. It wasn’t your fault and I don’t ever want you to think it was. I wish you hadn’t looked at them, but we’ll talk about that later sometime. If you’d have been there with Adam I might have lost…two sons.” His father’s voice cracked and more tears found his cheek and he wanted to mix them with his own but he couldn’t.

  After the murder, the town of Lincoln Corners contained the same houses painted the same colors and the same people lived within them. But the village belonged to someone else now that had killed a small boy in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. They went to bed that night listening to the rain on their roofs behind locked doors that the nights before weren’t. They went to bed but not to sleep. The rain had fouled the search, potentially washed away traces of a killer. The police hunted in the woods for days after, and then in frustration and defeat left them with business cards and numbers to call, and left them with their disbelie
f and fear.

  Unsatisfied, and with a near religious frenzy, the men of Lincoln Corners deputized shotguns and rifles used to kill squirrel and deer and pressed them into service for a higher calling, to flush out a new type of game. They searched the woods to the cornfield, stretched out in a line extended by friends and cousins and brothers and fathers from other towns. They drove out squirrel and deer. They marched through the corn stalks in boots still covered with traces of cow manure, metal shavings from machine shops, sawdust from sawmills and lumber yards. Their honest sweat dropped into the earth but could not re-consecrate the defiled ground. They pushed on into the larger woods but their numbers failed against its vastness and if it kept secrets it held them. Eventually the guns returned to their accustomed places, but the men could not. Some of the women took them up and fired them for the first time to know how.

  The murderer denied their children their childhood: the woods, the fields, the creeks that lay beyond a parents’ ability to look out a window and see them alive. He stole from them all innocence, trust, and more than one of them their faith.

  The police had questioned John Thomas but when they left he remained. Eric rarely saw him, and he never spoke to him again before moving to Drake City. When a For Sale sign in the yard failed to attract a buyer, and under threats from his mother to take Eric to Ohio to live with her parents, his father lowered the price to a loss and all but gave the house to an elderly couple looking to make their last stand. Other residents might have entertained thoughts of flight, but their lives were too entwined in business or family, their roots too deep to pick up and leave the ground that poisoned them. Eric thought now his family’s departure was probably a necessary sacrifice for Lincoln Corners to heal. In their midst they’d be the constant reminder of what the world really was, not what they hoped it could be again.

  Moving didn’t change the fear Eric felt. Several nights after Adam’s death he lay awake listening for the first creak on the stair, convinced the man had come, his knife still coated in Adam’s blood, praying that his father would wake up in time, knowing the pills prescribed to his mother guaranteed she wouldn’t. In his terror that night he wet the bed. His father changed his sheets without a word, then held him until he slept. But each day after he spent the hours in fear of the night, and each night prayed for the day. He ate very little and then ate only what his parents forced him to. He went to school and endured the stares and whispers directed at the brother of the dead kid, and learned the limits of former friends that didn’t know what to say so said nothing and cut their losses, looking for companions free from the taint and pall of death unwelcome to those so new to living.

  Months stretched to a year, and he reacted to his mother’s concern at his obsession, then her frustration, then her barely contained anger, with quiet sobbing in the night, lying to her in the morning and saying he felt better. He sensed she needed to move on and needed him to stop reminding her everyday that Adam wouldn’t be coming with them. His father had taken him to a man in khakis and a polo shirt that scribbled in a notebook and tried to get him to talk about Adam. Eric refused to speak, felt numb and detached from the experience and wanted it that way, resented this man that expected him to spill his guts about Adam’s spilled guts (he thought that turn of phrase rather clever). He sat mute in the office and stared at the floor and his hands and watched the man’s foot tap out his impatience until they stopped going.

  When they moved to Pittsburgh a year later, his father opening his own furniture store, his mother keeping the counter and the books while he filled orders, Eric found some relief in his new school. No one knew his brother was dead and he didn’t tell them. His fear no longer kept him up at night, but became the force behind short stories that won him friends with their gruesome plots. They were silly and over the top, but fit easily into junior high standards. But it lived in him still, a low level hum that contained ingredients of anger and sorrow, distrust in the God he once loved and an inability to form any real close relationships. Life went on. His parents found comfort in church but he stopped going when they let him make that choice. He felt a betrayal by their willingness to trust a God that would let Adam die that way.

  He recalled a picture of Jesus surrounded by children on the wall in the Baptist church in Lincoln Corners. One child he had always thought looked like Adam, the one making eye contact with the Savior, his trusting child’s grin reciprocated by gentle, loving grace. Nothing in Jesus’ omnipotent gaze, however, said that he’d skip town when most needed, that the child to which he directed such love would end up field dressed in the woods next to a stinking swamp and He wouldn’t lift a finger to stop it. And He knew it was coming. He knew. What a Friend we have in Jesus. Right. Eric had no use for a Friend like that.

  But he couldn’t discount faith entirely, in a theoretical if not a personal sense. As he grew and entered college, the question of God’s existence tormented him. If not God, then what? Others seemed happy to believe in nothing more than a beer and a blow job on a Saturday night and the hope of a six-figure salary somewhere down the road.

  Eric wanted life to make sense, wanted a philosophy that gave meaning to hopes and fears, dreams and sensations beyond the random firing of neurons in a grey mass of machinery perched in his skull. Because if there was nothing else, then all the laws and ethics and resulting justifications for them were nothing more than a ballroom gown on an ape. Many put their faith in science and the small cabal able to understand esoteric concepts and dilute them for the masses. Eric trusted good science, but had an aversion to any group of people with too much power. History marked too many mass graves as proof of what men did with that power. And in any case, any directive to save the planet, think about the children, preserve the species, really held no more authority than did a personal desire to experience pleasure at the expense of whoever it required suffer for it. Literal survival of the fittest as just another day at the office. Cull the herd. Eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

  And so as he continued to write, his characters reflected this struggle to understand, and sometimes he even provided them with resolution, a faith that he himself could not surrender to. He found himself envious of the redeemed ghosts and vampires and repentant serial killers that he’d created.

  And his father never did talk to him about the magazines.

  Chapter 4

  The stair creaked again, and the boy felt his blood thicken to cement. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and the keening sound that escaped reminded him of a small animal cornered by a predator. In his mind he cried out to his parents, their bedroom right next to his, but he found it impossible to speak and doubted they would hear over the bass drum of his heart which might burst before the man could make it up the steps. Sweat drenched his sheets and blanket and pajamas.

  He counted the stairs from memory and matched them with the sounds. He tried to deny them existence, tried to revive his reason which only a moment ago had denounced the man as a myth, explained his fear as a choice and not a reaction. But the shuffle and creak persisted until it stopped just outside his door, and he knew the scent of his own fear would betray him.

  The silhouette appeared as he’d seen it a hundred times in his waking nightmare, exactly the same shape and size, and the boy experienced something he’d never expected. He felt relief. Finally, it would end. Finally he could have peace. The man could only kill him once. His body, rigid with pure animal terror, relaxed, and he waited, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much before he died.

  The man peered in at him, his face a void, his body a shadow, a shape of a man only defined by the lack of light, the dark from the deepest cavern kneaded, shaped and then fired in Lucifer’s kiln and sent forth. He could smell the swamp, an odor of decay and scorched meat, feel the smile so perfectly innocent of good, almost childlike in its evil purity.

  He closed his eyes and waited. The man shuffled into his bedroom, sniffing for the tang of his terror, then breathed deeply when s
cented, sighing in approval of its vintage.

  The window next to his bed exploded inward, shards of glass catching the moonlight as they spread outward like a new miniature universe. An animal, maybe a large dog, moving fast, landed on the bedroom floor and stood up on hind legs. It’s yellow eyes, reflective not of the moon but some inner light of unknown source and allegiance, turned to the boy. Its massive head dipped in what seemed a nod, and then swung to lock eyes onto the man with the knife, who stood shifting side to side in the dark, appearing unsure whether to attack this creature or flee.

  The beast didn’t wait for a decision but launched across the short space and closed with the predator become prey. The man slashed wildly at his attacker. Too late he appeared to understand that killing children in their beds did not qualify him to stand against this monster. The boy watched, amazed at the swift and violent movements nearly devoid of any sound.

  The werewolf, he was sure of it now, grabbed the man’s knife hand as it came down for another useless blow and twisted. The arm fell to the floor with a thump, and the boy could sense the man's mouth open for a scream, but the fangs in his throat prevented it from escaping.

  A violent shake of the beast's head ended in a sharp snap, and the man went limp. The werewolf easily caught the dead weight and gently lowered the body to the floor. He bowed his head in what seemed a prayer, and as he turned around to face the boy his long snout receded, hair and claws retracted, the size of the skull decreased, until a muscular man with dog tags around his neck smiled at the boy. His hair was cut close to his skull, his chest massive with a long diagonal scar that began at his abdomen and ended at his clavicle, a pair of shorts the only clothing he wore.