by Dan Padavona
Renee climbed into her car, and Evan closed the door for her. As she backed the hatchback into the road and turned up Standish, he waved and yelled, “See you in few!”
She was pleased he had made the first move. She liked him. There was something trustworthy about him, and she felt a tinge of excitement in her stomach as she thought about seeing him again.
Seven
A dead silence crept through the interior of the forest.
You could not have heard it, for you were not permitted this deep into its center. But if you were to venture this far, the silence would have overwhelmed you.
The silence was in the great trunks of trees which towered above their younger brethren, watching and waiting. It was in the smell of decay and rot in its soil. It was in the absence of birds and in the leaves which floated to its dirt and fed hungry roots spreading with quiet aggression under the forest floor.
It was in the wind that never reached its interior. It was in the darkness, too, for if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself here, you would stumble blindly among its sentries, and your screams would not be heard.
The dead silence emanated from the leaves that conspired to blot out the sun and the branches and roots that choked off competing vegetation. The silence crept toward what it craved beyond its borders. It had a purpose now.
Half a mile beyond the forest border, the sun's rays danced across the surface of Beck's Pond. The spring air carried the scent of wildflowers, and a hint of barbecued burgers drifted on the wind off Maple Street. The cerulean sky appeared as a tropical ocean held aloft.
Matted tall grass and weed marked a beaten path which wound irregularly from the pond back toward the northeast, a worn book eternally rewritten by the children of Storberry. As a lawnmower buzzed to life from the backyards of Maple Street, the distant voices of children playing carried on the wind to the meadow.
Tom Kingsley cast his line into the middle of the pond and brushed blonde locks from his eyes. The sixteen-year-old son of Chuck and Donna Kingsley was only mildly disappointed that the fish weren't biting, because she was here.
She sat on the end of a small makeshift pier, legs crossed with her toes dangling into the water. He was feigning interest in the fish and sneaking looks at her legs. She smiled and pretended not to notice.
Jen Barrows had grown up five houses from Tom on Maple Street. They had run with the same neighborhood friends and spent their childhood at Becks Pond and the surrounding meadow. Time changed a growing body. She was very pretty now, and he began to feel an ache in his stomach whenever he was with her. He thought about her before sleep, and sometimes if he was lucky he would dream of her, too.
Lately he wondered what it would be like to hold her hand or to kiss her soft lips.
“Dare you to jump in,” she said.
“I dare you to go first.”
“I can't. I'm not wearing a bathing suit.”
“That's okay. I'll hold your clothes for you.”
“Ha! You would like that, wouldn't you?”
She saw that he was blushing when he laughed. She thought of telling him that she thought it was cute but didn't want to embarrass him any more than he already was. He carried himself with more maturity than other boys his age. Tom Kingsley was brilliant, too. He was still a junior in high school, but Cornell and Princeton had already offered him scholarships to attend their schools.
As he concentrated on the line, which extended into the middle of the pond and disappeared into the cloudy bottom, the nylon strand danced left and right, pushed by subtle waves under the surface.
Now she stole a glance at him, and for a moment was lost in thought. When had this happened? Her feelings for him seemed to have appeared suddenly, but in truth she knew it had been a gradual process, like the way coral accretion builds a masterwork which is only appreciated in finality.
She wanted to tell him how she really felt, but she knew time was running out. A little over a year from now, Tom would leave Storberry, and her childhood friend would be gone. When someone as gifted as Tom Kingsley left a town like Storberry, they did not return.
“Let me show you how it is done,” she said.
She fixed her own hook with a worm and cast it into the pond. The hook splashed next to his line, and concentric circles expanded across the water.
“Don't even think about stealing all of my fish,” he said.
“You don't own the middle of the pond, Tom Kingsley. Besides, you're just making excuses because I'm whipping your behind again.”
“The afternoon isn't over yet.”
She felt a tug on her line, and then she reeled in another small sunfish. He looked incredulous.
“That's four to one. There's no shame in surrendering,” she said, and then unhooked the wiggling fish and tossed it back to the pond. It landed with a splash, and its shadow darted toward the murky bottom like an arrow shot from a bow.
“You must be cheating,” he said.
“Cheating? How can I possibly be cheating?”
“And therein lies the mystery,” he said.
He reeled in his line, swung it over his shoulder, and sent it toward deeper water. Jen smiled at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Why don't we take a walk? You can watch me catch more fish than you again tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh, sure. Just when I was about to stage my big comeback.”
They wound in their lines and placed their fishing poles in the grass next to the pier. Jen slipped on a pair of gray sneakers which had been white last fall.
There were still two hours of daylight left, and the sun's rays painted in amber swatches across the meadow of wildflowers and bluestem. Jen and Tom hiked southwest up the gentle slope of the hill, their long shadows following them through the tall grass. Robins grew more active with their songs, sensing the march toward sunset. The wind played through the meadow like distant breakers.
Tom stole glances at Jen as they walked. She appeared more beautiful to him every time he saw her. He paid her too much attention and almost walked headfirst into a low hanging maple branch. She giggled as he clumsily dodged it.
“Smooth move,” she said.
They passed the Liberty Cemetery on their left. The sparse population of headstones was cordoned off toward the southern border of the property by empty grassland, almost 100 yards from them. In a town as small as Storberry, it would be a long time before the sizable property began to fill in.
It seemed a little creepy to have the cemetery so close. Becks Pond had been a fun escape for them since they were kids, but now the cemetery always loomed in the background. Tom wasn't superstitious, and he certainly didn't believe in ghosts, but there was something about the way the new cemetery butted up against the hill forest that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. The cemetery placement seemed a tragic mistake.
As their footfalls became soft whispers against the thick meadow grass, Tom realized that he didn't quite know where they were walking to, though their path was toward the forest edge. The destination wasn't important. He was happy to go wherever Jen wandered. Just as long as she didn't want to cut through the cemetery or enter the forest.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I heard something in the old garage again last night.”
“We've been over this.”
“And every time that you tell me there is nothing to worry about, I hear it again.”
“It was probably a cat. I see them sneaking into our garage all the time.”
“It sounded a lot bigger than a cat, Tom.”
“Okay,” he said.
Jen had been afraid of the old garage behind her house for as long as he had known her. Her stories of a monster hiding in the dark crawlspace above the garage had haunted him when he was young, but they were teenagers now. It was past time to reason this out.
“Why don't you tell me exactly what you heard, without the opinion of what you think it was.”
She sighed. She knew it sounded ridiculous.
“There were loud creaks, very loud creaks, like something heavy was walking across the floor boards. And a scratching noise, like it was trying to tear right through the front wall.”
“Well, the scratching could have been anything. A cat, a mouse, even a skunk. The creaks are a little more difficult to explain if they were as loud as you say they were. But my guess is that the old boards were settling after all of the warm and cold snaps we have had lately. That garage is older than dirt, and I doubt your father maintains it. Heck, I've never seen him park in it.”
“You make it all sound so logical. How would you explain the growling?”
“You heard growling, too?”
“Well...no. Not last night. But sometimes at night, I do hear something that almost sounds like a growl.”
“Have you heard this growling during the day?”
She considered the question for a moment.
“No, I'm sure I haven't.”
“And we are ruling out the obvious – that your imagination runs wilder at night than by day?”
“You're on shaky ground, Tom Kingsley. Your answer?”
“Physics.”
“Physics?”
“Yes. It has to do with the way sound travels. When the sun sets, the ground cools off, and the warm air rises into the air above it. Sound tends to travel differently at night, and sometimes you hear something from a long way off, and it sounds closer than it really is. Like if a bear wandered to the top of the copse and growled. You might hear it at night, but not during the day.”
“I think you are trying a little too hard to come up with an explanation.”
“Well, what is the alternative?”
“The alternative? I guess the alternative is there is a monster above the garage.”
“Exactly. And since I live five houses away from you, I would also be in imminent danger of said monster. So you understand my need to offer a more logical explanation.”
“So what you are saying is that I'm not crazy, you're just a wuss?”
“At least I don't cheat at fishing.”
She laughed, and when she looked into his eyes, his heart beat a little faster.
After talking to her for so long that he hadn't noticed how far they had wandered, the joy Tom felt from being with Jen faded, and he felt a dark pall fall over him. The hill forest loomed over them, the trees like gangly giants laughing.
It was thicker than any forest in these parts could naturally be. Younger maples, oaks, and elms crowded the front line. Behind them rose a greater diversity of trees, many with thick, imposing trunks.
While the trees across town had just started to bud out from the unusual warmth, the leaves at the top of the hill forest were near maturity, creating an impenetrable canopy that repelled sunlight. The early growth might have spoken to the rich soil and health of any other forest, but here it seemed to whisper of aggression and something unnatural.
More unsettling was the lack of activity within the forest. Where was the wildlife? Except for the odd chipmunk or bird along the periphery, there was no visible activity deeper into the forest. It grew dark after several rows of trees, and they could see only blackness beyond.
For reasons Tom did not understand, Jen was utterly frightened of the old garage behind her house, but seemed only mildly unsettled in the presence of the forest. Tom had hiked through the mountains and forests of Virginia with his parents many times. He knew about the diversity of life which inhabited it and how the rich fecund smell of the forest floor promised growth and life.
Those smells and sounds were absent here. In their place was something reminiscent of pond water out of balance.
An alarm from the back of his mind pushed past his ability to reason with his fear through logical argument. It may have been an instinct which was instilled in everyone, borne of a time when people understood that true evil walked the earth. It awoke and called to him, and in the shadow of the hill forest, he heard it.
He wasn't afraid of horror movies, monsters, or the boogeyman, but he was afraid of what he couldn't see in this forest.
“How about another dare?”
“Oh I don’t think so, Jen.”
“I dare you to enter the forest and go as far as that big oak tree at the edge of the darkness,” she said, pointing about 30 yards into the forest.
Her dare was not taken lightly. They had run with neighborhood friends through the meadow all their lives, and sometimes they even entered the boundary of the forest to hide. But nobody ventured into its depths.
The reason, most kids claimed, was that the forest was too dark to safely run through. What if you stumbled into a hunter's trap, or fell into an unseen hole? What if there were wild animals waiting in the dark?
But the real reason was more likely borne of the stories they told to each other around campfires and at sleepovers. Stories about the evil things that lived deep inside the forest, the people who disappeared in it never to be seen again, or the dead which returned from its dark interior. Every town has its haunted house, and for Storberry, it had always been the hill forest.
“How about you do it instead?”
“Oh yeah? I will. Not a problem.”
As Jen walked toward the trees, fear welled up in Tom's chest, and he grabbed her by the arm.
“That was a joke. You're not going in there. Forget it.”
“Now who's afraid of monsters?”
“I'm not afraid of monsters. Let's be serious here. I hardly see anything at all past that oak. How do you know there isn't a bear or a coyote just waiting for you to walk right up to it?”
“Or a ghost?”
“Stop that.”
“Or a crazy man with an ax,” she said, her eyes large and exaggerated.
“I doubt it. But all sorts of things live in that forest. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't out there.”
“Well, one of us has to go in.”
“No, one of us does not need to go in. This is just one of your dares, and it's not a very good one. Let’s fish some more. Best two out of three?”
“Tell you what. We'll do it together. We'll both walk to that tree, touch it, and get out of there. One minute, tops.”
At that moment he would have done most anything she asked of him, but the farthest reaches of his brain screamed danger!
Consciously, he reasoned that it was just a forest and there was nothing to fear. If there really was a bear out there, they would have heard it by now. And did he really believe in monsters? No. So what was the harm in walking with Jen into the forest? And how would she view him if he didn't?
His unease remained. Nothing seemed to make sense about the hill forest. Why weren't crickets chirping in the dark and wildlife rustling through the leaves? Why was it that the breeze bending the tall grass around them didn't reach inside the tree line?
Why is it so quiet?
“Tom Kingsley, don't tell me you are too afraid to walk into the forest with me.”
And that was all she needed to say. The internal scale tipped, and the right side of his brain claimed control. Rational thought prevailed.
After all, this was no more dangerous than walking into a dark room at night and flipping on the light switch. Hadn't he always been afraid of the dark? Many times as a child his fear was greatest the moment before the light turned on. What would the light reveal, waiting for him?
Irrational fears were never realized. There was never a decrepit witch cackling, or a crazy man with a butcher's knife crashing out of the bedroom closet. There was always just a room, his dirty clothes piled in a corner where the left side of his brain had interpreted the shadow shape as writhing snakes.
“No, of course not.”
“So let's go.”
“On one condition, Jen. No messing around.”
“Scouts honor,” she said, raising one hand in the air in mock sincerity.
“I'm serious.”
As they started into the woods, walking slowly side by side, the first trees passed behind them, and weak sunlight filtered through overhead branches. Jen smiled at him as if to say, See, there is nothing to be afraid of. Tom's eyes darted back and forth, scanning the forest for hidden dangers. The stillness beyond the inner boundary unsettled him.
Halfway to the big oak he saw that the first layer of darkness had been an optical illusion. With the sunlight cloaked by the forest behind them, his eyes adjusted to make out larger trunks behind their target. But the darkness became more absolute past that point. He was certain that was no optical illusion. The trees deeper into the forest grew huge and crowded together to form a barrier of foliage and branches impervious to sunlight. The only available light would be in small pools of gray widely scattered across the forest floor. The darkness would only grow in the coming weeks as the foliage filled in, spurred by the coming heat.
The brown mat of twigs and dried leaves crunched underfoot like brittle bones. The crackles died with each step, without natural reverberation, as though they walked within a soundproof room.
Tom did not approach the oak so much as he was drawn to it against his will, as if he stood on an invisible conveyor belt. Closer and closer it drew him, the deep contours of its bark further rendered with each step. The air quality, which should have overflowed with health from abundant photosynthesis, tasted stale.
When they were several steps from the big oak, Tom's anxiety grew stronger, and he began to fear that Jen might run into the woods, laughing and expecting him to chase after her. Tom didn't think she would take such a foolish risk in the low light, but he also knew it was not unlike her to do something unpredictable. He imagined her bolting into the darkness and daring him to follow. What would he do then? Would he be able to find her in the gloom without becoming lost?
The oak drew closer, Tom's eyes shifting between the unseen within the forest and Jen. And then their target was attained without incident. No boogeymen here. They reached toward the oak, and both laid their hands on its moss-covered bark. Jen shrugged her shoulders.