by Greg Walker
Away from Lincoln Corners, he also enjoyed being in a place for a while where if he were recognized, it was because of his writing. It had only happened once, at a bookstore they’d browsed in, and he’d signed an autograph and talked with a fan, a pimply teen draped in black, while Mary looked on amused.
Reaching the corner and waving to Janine sweeping the floor inside the store, Eric turned left and kept walking. The houses thinned out, and soon, after rounding a bend on the road full of potholes filled with dollops of asphalt, there were none at all. The woods ran up to the road on the left, and the rusted out hulks of vehicles in the old junkyard stared at him with empty headlight sockets. He thought of King’s Christine, and how a concept that seemed maybe silly in some context could strike the right nerve in others.
He listened for the sound of a vehicle coming up behind from Lincoln Corners or from further down the road. That way would be the volunteer fire department and the local Little League ball fields, then the lake, and finally a network of dirt roads. What they connected Lincoln Corners to he didn’t know, and never had. Satisfied that no one approached, even from a fair distance, he quickly stepped off the road into the weeds, then picked his way through some briars at the edge of the trees until gaining access to the woods and the cover it provided.
Since writing his last segment of the book, Eric had found himself stuck, had one more scene in mind and then didn’t know. And when he’d look out the window considering plot lines, the woods looked back at him and he knew that he would eventually have to go in. To see the cabin or its remains. To see the place where Adam’s body had fallen. He even decided, when he had worked up the nerve, to follow the same route, walking out to the cornfield from the cabin, to the gravel pit, and then back to the swamp. He didn’t know why, exactly, but felt it would re-establish a piece of himself left there. He wanted to connect again with Adam perhaps in the same way that family and friends built roadside shrines at an accident site, to reach out for the spirits of their loved ones. And to prove to the woods he wasn’t afraid.
Even though he was.
He’d finally mustered the courage, and so on this Tuesday morning appeared to anyone watching to simply have gone for a walk. He didn’t want to be witnessed entering the woods, especially by Arnie or someone who would tell Arnie or tip his promised but yet to be revealed sympathizers.
Once inside the trees, the smells of earth and foliage time-warped him back to childhood. The cabin would be more or less straight ahead, he reasoned, and pushed on through clusters of ferns and tangles of undergrowth.
Eric finally saw the structure ahead, surprised that it still existed in as near complete form as when erected. It certainly wasn’t due to any enduring craftsmanship. Approaching the building, half expecting to stumble on Adam sitting outside with his Batman comic and thinking for a moment that he’d give anything, even the remainder of his life, to make it so, he stopped right outside and took in the house that innocence had built.
The door was gone, and so were a number of the wallboards and a large piece of the tin roof that he spied rusting on the ground nearby. The posts still remained but listed in unison to the left. He could see their couch inside, more bare stuffing than vinyl covering now, bloated and dirty from rainwater. He realized he was holding his breath and let it out in a long, slow exhalation.
He ducked inside, stepping into some mud within a shallow puddle on the floor. Eric had to stoop to avoid scraping his head on the rusty metal overhead until moving over to the new skylight to straighten up. He thought of the magazines. He had never been able to look at any since then, and thought that probably a good thing. On a whim, he lifted up the old car seat, and found the tattered remnant of a Hustler. The cover was gone, the pages glued together, and black mold peppered the soggy paper. Eric could see slivers of air-brushed skin through various tears. He put the seat back down without touching the magazine and prepared to follow the remnant of the path to the field.
The snap of a branch caused him to freeze halfway out of the door. He nearly ran, propelled by the sudden terror of the ten year old boy come out to walk with him, but quickly mastered the fear and instead listened for more sounds. There was only silence and the occasional drone of a bumblebee or a birdcall that he couldn’t identify. A mosquito whined in his ear and he waved it away.
It was early September, the temperature in the high sixties, but physical and mental exertion drew sweat from his pores. He lifted up his t-shirt and wiped his brow. He considered his muddy shoes, and chided himself for getting dirty. It wouldn’t matter if no one saw him here if he advertised it with filthy clothing.
He listened intently one more time for another sound, dismissed the first to a rowdy squirrel, and began following the faint trail towards the cornfield. As he walked, Eric thought about his brother, tried to picture his face and peculiar way of bouncing on his toes when he walked. He remembered the games of hide and seek and the campfires in the fire ring out back, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and telling ghost stories. And he thought about the blank pages of the photo album in his mind, the ones that should contain prom and graduation pictures, maybe wedding photos and then a beaming young man next to an exhausted but luminous girl, cradling a newborn between them. He wondered too how the photo album of his own life would be different if these images existed. Maybe a wife and kids of his own? Maybe it even could have been Mary, except without the real life horror story.
As he walked, he did see a few footprints in particularly wet portions of the trail. So someone did come out here. And why would that be so strange, really, except for one that saw these woods as haunted. They were adult sized, male and rather large, and he tried to match someone from Lincoln Corners to them but failed, had never paid much attention to a man’s shoe size. As Red, in his narration of Andy Dufresne's escape from Shawshank Prison as he strolled back to his cell wearing the warden’s footwear, said, “The guards simply didn't notice. Neither did I... I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a mans shoes?” He smiled. Seemed like Stephen King was going to accompany him through his entire journey. He felt that his story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and the resulting movie, were in many ways a finer effort than any of King’s horror work. Essentially a story about hope. Maybe he could follow that example in his next work.
Eric arrived at the cornfield, and felt naked without the concealment of the woods, afraid of detection. But as decades before, the harvest was past and the corn stalks lay defeated and stripped of their bounty. Looking at the Big Woods, he realized that not everything came in a miniaturized version when returning home as an adult. It was still imposing, the treeline stretching as far as he could see. He knew it wasn’t a true wilderness, but still a man could get lost in there.
He caught movement at the forest's edge, and with his heart in his throat saw a large black shape rise from the ground. It had to be nine feet tall. A black bear, he realized, and laughed out loud. The animal dropped back down to all fours and scampered into the trees. He admitted to himself, that for the briefest of moments, he had believed that by writing a story about a boy who with his terror draws a killer, he had actually drawn that killer here. Having an active imagination could be a hazard of the job, he thought, especially for horror writers. But in reality, the killer that had inspired the story had already been here, so it would just be completing the circle. Not that it would be any comfort.
At the gravel pit, Eric found that much had changed. No longer assaulted by heavy machinery to gouge its surface, the land was reverting back to a wild state. Sumac and maple trees grew throughout, and goldenrod, the king of late summer/early fall, bent in unison with the breeze like Muslims at prayer. He turned over a few rocks but found no snakes.
He took a deep breath and looked back, steeling himself for the hard part of the journey. Back to the fork that led to swamp, and to Adam.
Returning to the path, he retraced his steps then realized he’d gone too far and turned around.
By walking slowly and looking carefully, he found it, almost non-existent, more like a game trail now. If the woods wasn’t considered haunted by at least the someone that had made the shoe prints, it seemed that this path might be.
Too soon he had arrived. First at the place where JT had sat in shock. He could smell the swamp, its resident mosquitoes rushing him but he hardly felt their bites, slapped at them absently. He looked at his palm and saw the small spots of his own blood knocked back out of the insects and almost threw up. He hadn’t needed any stage props for this - first the magazine and now real blood. He couldn’t help but see his hands covered in Adam’s again.
For the most part growing up, except for knowing he’d had a brother once and didn’t anymore, this place had felt unreal. But here it was, and he felt the tears again on his face, glad that he could cry for his brother again, pushed beyond his own pain. He wondered if Adam had seen his executioner approaching and understood his intentions. He hoped it hadn’t hurt too much but suspected a pure agony no child should ever know. Thinking about what Arnie had said, he wondered if there had been shock beyond the violence as the knife slid in, Adam looking at a trusted, known face, or at least a face he thought he had known.
Eric had considered before whether it could have been someone in the town, someone that maybe still lived here even now. But the police had left satisfied with the stories and alibis offered by those they had questioned, which according to his father was nearly everyone. Even his father. The investigator had theorized that a drifter or some other outsider had arrived at Lincoln Corners, avoiding access by road and intending to enter from the woods. Whatever motive he’d had for killing Adam was all speculation. Had he come to steal from them and been surprised by a little boy that could identify his face, and then killed and fled back the way he came? Could it have been some sort of horrible accident? Or had he come for that very reason, to slay a child?
Eric thought this stranger theory more likely than the other. In such a small, tight-knit community, he couldn’t imagine that someone capable of killing a child could live unsuspected among them. But of course there was John Wayne Gacy: life of the party, clown, killer of boys. But “boys” was plural and denoted teens and young men. He’d lived in a city, Chicago, and eventually had been caught. Could someone commit such a brutal murder only once, then hang up the costume of a killer in exchange for the everyday, having expelled some hideous bug out of his system? He thought this unlikely, too. No, the older he’d gotten, the more the police’s theory made sense. Wrong place, wrong time, nothing personal, but still Adam was dead.
He had tired of thinking. He sat down on the ground next to where Adam had been, moisture seeping into his pants, and reached out and touched the soil.
“I’m here, Adam,” he said. “Sorry it’s taken so long, but I’m here now.”
He didn’t expect anything so wasn’t disappointed when Adam’s spirit failed to materialize. But he felt his presence just the same, the impression of his brother had left on his soul, the marks covered up but never erased. He closed his eyes and just let them come, in whatever order they came, stopped trying to make sense of it.
He heard another crack of a small branch, but this time didn’t flinch or open his eyes. There was too much of the real stuff to worry about the things his mind could conjure. But he did feel the barrel of the shotgun pressed into his neck, and did hear the voice low with menace growl, “You move and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
Chapter 8
Eric sat still, waiting for the man to say something or pull the trigger. He couldn’t see anything, only feel the cold surety of the gun and the presence of the man that held it. The barrel, or barrels it seemed, were pushed into the back of his neck right below his occipital bone, with enough force to cause his chin to touch his chest. It hurt, and he didn’t think he could endure it for any period of time without moving, would find out if his attacker kept his promises. He knew it wasn’t Arnie, but wondered if he could be so upset to arrange an eviction notice this extreme.
“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing here? You’d better have a damn good answer, man.” He didn’t recognize the voice.
“My name is Eric. Eric Kane.”
The gun barrel relaxed some, and he breathed a sigh of relief and started to straighten his head only to have it pushed back down harder than before.
“You’re a liar. You think you’re funny? You think I won’t pull these triggers? Do you have any idea what a double barrel twelve gauge will do fired point blank?”
The voice sounded young and old at the same time, and there was something excitable in it he didn’t understand. Could it be possible that Adam’s killer had returned, following the same circuit? It would be a coincidence for the record books, but stranger things had happened, he supposed. If so, and if the man planned to kill him, he hoped to have time to ask and hear the answer to one question.
Why?
“I do believe you’ll pull the trigger,” he said and meant it. “My name is Eric Kane. I used to live here when I was a kid. I just bought my old house and moved in. That’s the truth.” He was afraid and had no desire to die, but he took consolation in the fact that he’d at least begun to come to terms with the forces that had compelled him and was actively wrestling for control of the buttons and levers. He hadn’t solved the God question yet, but that all might be moot in a moment or two and answered with certainty. His thoughts drifted to Mary, and he was sad that he wouldn’t get to see how that turned out. And his poor parents.
The pressure lessened again, and he held his breath this time in response. He even kept his head bowed, expecting the gun to come back and didn’t want to waste his energy on hope. He could hear the man breathing.
“If you’re Eric Kane, what's your brother’s name?” The voice was still hostile, but there seemed to exist within it an uncertainty now.
"It was Adam. Past tense. He’s dead.”
“Anybody could know that. Not good enough. Let’s see...did you ever catch that huge rainbow trout back behind Fisk’s lumber yard?”
“It wasn’t a rainbow. It was a palomino trout. And no, I didn’t."
There was a pause and the gun barrel withdrew, bumping the back of his head lightly several times first, and he thought the man was shaking. He didn’t dare turn around, waited, knew a shotgun didn’t have to be sitting right on the spine to sever it.
“What did I show you that day? Were they Penthouses or Playboys?” The question seemed a mere formality, its author no longer homicidal, and there was only one person that could have asked it.
He turned his head slowly, caught sight of a pair of large feet and gauged them to be size fourteen or so, and said, “They were Hustlers. JT...John Thomas Groves?”
He looked up, and JT’s face was nearly as white as it had been the last time he saw it. Eric might have felt angry, but the stricken look on his childhood friend’s face pushed it away, and he just felt glad to be alive.
JT was a big man. Some of the bulk was fat, but most of it wasn’t. He had a full beard with mustache, wore jeans and sneakers, and a Harley Davidson t-shirt that looked right at home on him. He stood at least six foot five, the shotgun like a toy clutched in his huge hands, its barrel now pointed well away from Eric.
“Eric...shit, man. I could have shot you. I really could have shot you. What the hell are you doing walking around out here?” He sounded angry again, but not buckshot angry, and Eric thought he heard a hint of disappointment. At what he couldn’t guess.
“Remembering. Trying to come to grips with it. That’s why I came back to Lincoln Corners, but it’s my first time here, back to this spot.” He wasn’t sure what to say beyond that. Due to the circumstances under which he’d left, and the events of this reunion, a handshake and a “Hey, it’s great to see you, buddy. What have you been doing with yourself all these years,” didn’t feel appropriate.
“Eric...look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. If you want to call the cops o
n me I understand, but... I’ve got to go.” He began backing away, keeping eye contact, appearing to want to say so much more. Eric could see the pain in his eyes.
“John Thomas, wait. It’s all right. I'm not going to call the police. Seems like it was just a misunderstanding and I still have my head, right?”
“Nah, I can’t stay...really need to get going. Take care, Eric. Hey, like the books, man.” He smiled then, and through the biker persona and facial hair Eric recognized his childhood friend. “But it’s JT now, so no more of that John Thomas shit. Makes me sound like I’ve assassinated a president.” Then he turned and began loping through the woods, the shotgun thrown over a shoulder. Eric noticed a limp that accounted for the altered gait, a stiffness in his right leg that didn’t allow him to bend it fully.