The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  “Of course.”

  “And we’ll go see her soon?”

  “Yes, under the cover of darkness. I’m no Navy Seal, but common sense claims that if I am going to enter a building in stealth I don’t want my approach or escape to be a neighborhood show.”

  She set up the needles and tubes and syringes, and when she was finished the drawing Rudy felt weak. She took the two bags of his blood and stored them in an old cooler she got from the same storage space under the stairs that the groundcloth had come from. He rested for an hour. Caroline again ran the dogs out in shifts, both to “go outside” and this time to hunt for food.

  When Rudy woke from his nap, he holstered up one hundred of the biggest canines, arming them with two loaded weapons apiece. He put on his disguise. Right before going down to the tunnel ramp, Caroline told him that their video had gotten fifteen hundred hits already.

  Rudy went down the ramp, to the tunnel’s opening, to the new world he’d partially created.

  And didn’t quite get what he’d expected.

  The going on the outside was rough at first. Rudy didn’t worry all too much about getting flagged at the entrance by some passerby, since the riverbank sat in the middle of what had been uninhabited woods five hundred yards removed from the street. There was even a nice cross-hatch of fallen wood right there at the cutout, acting like a bridge over the cold waters rushing below. But the dogs moved too quickly, packed together like a large diamond with Rudy trying to jog in the middle. Of course, the forest was a tangled mess, and he hadn’t gone ten feet into it before turning his ankle, barking his shin, skinning his knee, slipping, and getting stuck in a couple of voids. They made it to a glen of sorts, still bordered up by masses of overgrowth patchworked into a rough circle about a hundred feet in diameter, and Rudy called, “Stop!” They waited patiently, and he tried to catch his breath, hands on the knees, sweat streaming down his cheeks. The mask was off-center, and he readjusted the thing, thinking that the dirty moisture building up there under the gauze was making it cling in places. Yeah, he was a “ten” when it came to “creepy,” and a flat zero in terms of practical mobility. He thought of King Richard III and said, “My kingdom for a fucking horse.”

  Something came from behind him then, pushing under his butt, sliding between his legs. He lost his footing. Dogs to both sides moved in for balance maintenance, and before he could fall backward the body beneath him completed its positioning. His feet were off the ground entirely, and he was perched on one of the wolves, huge and dark gray with black streaks going in two parallel lines up the back of its head. It had gone cold, and the wolf’s breath was misting. The side support moved off a bit, a few renegade snowflakes fell, and Rudy suddenly felt comfortable and sure. The animal bore his weight easily, and the seating was so flush and specific that Rudy was suddenly positive he wouldn’t need reins. He was sitting on a crisscross of leather, and hanging along the wolf’s flanks just behind Rudy’s heels were two of the long pocket holsters he had so meticulously jury-rigged. He reached behind for the weapon on his right. It slid out and gleamed in the cold sun, Mossberg 500 Special, and the withdrawal hadn’t skewed his balance in the least. He felt the animal adjusting beneath him moment for moment, but it was a natural thing like breathing. He sheathed the shotgun and reached back to his left, withdrawing the Bushmaster M4 Patrolman. Somehow, he was certain that he could shoot and hit a target in full stride. In fact, it didn’t seem it would be too difficult to fire both weapons simultaneously, he was sure of it. He raised the gun over his head, and called, “Ride!”

  The animal beneath him burst into a dead-run, and the pack galloped along, all close, backbones working around him in bobs and thrusts, haunches pistoning across the ruined forest floor.

  They made it out of the woods in about five minutes flat.

  And the world was an open wound.

  The first thing Rudy noticed was the lack of channels, dividers, “corridors.” The trees had acted as natural organizers, making one feel secure in the grid; and now with their leveling, the buildings looked, for lack of a better word, sporadic. The south edge of the woods abruptly ceased before a rather complicated highway junction at the border between Broomall and Havertown, and the Barnaby’s, the car wash, the closed-down Pathmark, and the houses curving up along the rises due south and northwest all looked like teeth in the cliché hillbilly’s maw. Isolated and crooked.

  Felled trees were everywhere and traffic had come to absolute gridlock. By now, most of the cars were abandoned, many of them crushed by the mass of decorator foliage that had broken through the graded sound barriers leading to the 476 entrances, other vehicles crimped up trunk to hood from chain reaction rear-endings that wound for miles up West Chester Pike.

  There was smoke threading through the air, and it made the light snow look like ash. Victims still pinned and trapped were honking horns, there were a couple blowing whistles, and someone all the way up by the Manoa shopping center was shooting green flares off into the gray sky. There were scatters of do-gooders moving in groups looking for victims, but surprisingly few in Rudy’s immediate area. And no police. Yet how could there be, really? They depended on roads for access. Moreover, there were only so many officers, and it was never made clearer than by this stark illustration that they were but tokens, placed strategically to handle the few making trouble or in the process of getting in it, based on the probability that the balance of society basically managed itself.

  Rudy then thought of the military, the National Guard, and got the same answer. There were only so many soldiers. No agency or system could help literally everyone all at once.

  The world was on its own. At least until they got the chainsaws running.

  Directly in front of Rudy at the corner, there was a thick twist of street-wreckage including an old station wagon with wooden side panels, a black Lexus, two pickups, three minivans, and a jack-knifed eighteen-wheeler, its cab turned sideways and run half up the light pole. The driver had gotten the passenger side door open like a broken wing, and he was hanging upside down out of it, leg stuck back up in the cab, hands splayed, long salt-’n’-pepper hair dangling. Rudy wondered why no one had tried to help him and surmised that the guy had passed out on impact, then lay hidden by the angle across the floorboards until waking up with a start, reaching down for the door handle, snapping it open, and falling down after it.

  “Hey, friend!” Rudy called. The truck driver snapped his head around, took one look from upside down, and started flailing like a fish out of water. Stuff fell from him then like bad slapstick: keys, sunglasses, a pencil stub that had been set behind his ear. Rudy got down off his wolf and ran over, straddling two vehicles and climbing up the backside to get to the driver’s door, hard as all hell to open straight upwards, thank you very much. Inside, the guy’s boot was stuck between the smashed instrument panel and the front seat, his wooden bead seat cushion wedged into the affair like a seed caught between a pair of molars. Rudy gave it a yank, and the guy’s foot came loose, sending him to the street. By the time Rudy got down, however, the trucker was gone. He wanted nothing to do with a masked man accompanied by dogs and wolves, especially those wearing gun holsters and waiting for their master like a battery of storm troopers sitting in the “at ease” position. More personal irony. Not only was the one preaching love and togetherness destined to walk alone, but his paradigm of charity was misunderstood.

  “Who are you, mister?” someone said.

  Rudy turned, and there were at least twenty-five people looking back at him, clothing disheveled, sleeves ripped, blood and oil stains on the trousers, grease and dirt on the skirts and pants suits. Right. Acoustics worked both ways, and they’d heard him coming, seen the dog pack, then gone to hide behind the cars to watch silently as he climbed up to save the trucker. Up front, there was an African American woman in nurse’s scrubs ripped at both knees. She was fingering her I.D. badge, looking at him critically. Three women in business attire and sneakers had th
eir heads together and were whispering; one had her arm in a makeshift sling and another wore a glistening scrape on one side of her forehead. A buck-toothed boy with a back-turned baseball cap held the hand of a skinny guy wearing khakis and glasses with one of the stems broken off, and there were five filthy women huddling together under a huge Phillies blanket, all of them blondes, all of them twins, all shock-blue eyes, high cheekbones, heart-shaped lips, and legs, legs, legs; someone in the group had a Scandinavian fantasy and was secretly thinking he’d crashed into heaven.

  Rudy wanted to say something prophetic. He wanted to show his appreciation for what seemed their philanthropic effort up the avenue, and their clear acceptance of the ground-dwellers as people that needed a blanket for the sake of modesty and comfort. They were a signpost for hope and didn’t even realize it.

  His voice rang out then, but it wasn’t him. It was the recorded Rudy Barnes on somebody’s iPad, and the group gathered around a guy with wild curly hair, a gray hoodie, and cargo pants. The recording was relatively poor, and Rudy’s voice sounded tinny. When he’d made the speech in the basement it had seemed a solid piece of sophisticated prose, but here, out on the street, it came off insincere, almost silly. He had once sent an e-mail to his chair at Widener, casually bragging about making an APA go-to sheet that morphed that awful blue text with bits and pieces from Owl Purdue, and she’d called a private meeting, reading his words back to him, making him squirm a bit for his inappropriate bravado. This felt similar, and when there was the cut to the crucifixion, mouths fell ajar. A little girl buried her face in her mother’s thigh, and the boy with the baseball cap started crying. When it had concluded, the nurse looked up at Rudy and whispered, “You did that to your son?”

  The group just stared, eyes cold judgments cutting across the double yellow line.

  “It’s obscene,” someone said.

  “Blasphemy,” another chipped in.

  “Disgusting.”

  “Disgraceful.”

  “Insanity.”

  “Murder.”

  They had formed a semicircle and closed the distance a bit. The dogs behind Rudy let out a collective and rather bone-shivering growl, and the group halted. To the left, the witches were on their knees, foreheads flat to the asphalt, hands splayed out palms-down. A woman with tight red jeans, a jet black ponytail, and exceptionally high eyebrows came forward a step and pointed back toward the youth with the iPad.

  “Do you really want people to see that? These children are in shock!” She dared another step forward and hissed, “There are so many bodies we can’t hide their eyes from them all! Then you come and show us a horror movie? A snuff film? How dare you!”

  Rudy had no response. How many people wore Jesus on a chain, hung him from the rearview, placed him on the wall above the mantel? Crown of thorns, javelin through the ribs, nails in the hands and the feet, all wonderful in metaphor removed from the current timeline, but horrific, gratuitous, brutal, even pornographic in the here and now.

  “It was the way,” he managed.

  “Well, we don’t want you here,” she replied. “We don’t need your guns and your masks and your dogs and your murder.”

  Rudy turned without another word. He walked to the pack that made room for him to reach the middle, mounted his wolf, and made a harsh call into the wind. They bounded off in a blur, jumping the guardrail and going back fast to the fallen woodland from which they had come.

  “It’s all for shit!” Rudy called.

  “What?” Caroline said. She was standing on the lip of the cutout, and the rushing water was rather loud beneath her. Rudy and his pack were on the far riverbank. He ripped off the hood and the mask.

  “I said it’s all for shit,” he repeated. “This world, this life, my role in it. They don’t scoff at me out there, they despise. And they don’t come forth with a child’s ignorant violence, but rather a hardened, deserving disdain.” He tossed the costume into the creek and four dogs splashed in after the articles, loping downstream across the slippery stones to an area before a bend thirty feet south where the canvas and gauze next caught on branches and brush. Rudy started taking off his clothes: shirt, belt, pants. “The world has ruptured!” he shouted, “and I am its prime offender! I murdered my own son . . .” He broke off for a moment to get back control. “I sacrificed my own flesh and blood—”

  “A demon bent on revenge,” Caroline finished for him.

  “I caused this natural disaster.”

  “That obliterated the many dungeons of the innocent.”

  “The ‘Great Fall’ killed hundreds of thousands!”

  “And freed millions!”

  “But who am I, Caroline? There’s no place for my masks and my guns and my dogs. People want to heal. They don’t want some new belief system based on metaphor; they want security and order, tradition and the familiar. They want better health plans and stronger retirement programs, hope and opportunity. And what am I to them but a monster? What’s my purpose—was that in your book? Is it my job now to shoot teenagers breaking into the Giant or the Super Fresh, looking to steal energy drinks, Nyquil, and a few DVDs? I don’t fit into the master plan anymore, and you know what? I’m making a pledge. No more bloodshed, not by my hand. There will be no more broken spells, twisted prophecies, or speeches. I’ll rot in your basement, and we’re going to set these dogs free one by one.”

  He stepped into the current, and it was a shock. He halted for a moment, and there in the rushing creek he stood, shivering, fighting off the image of baptism, the barrage of religious symbolism that had become so frequent and common in this new reality it was almost absurd. He was dirty, that was all. He had cuts all over his arms and legs, and he’d been wearing a soiled groundcloth, a squalid veil. This was practical, not allegorical.

  He washed vigorously. He kneeled on the hard stones and dunked his head, face freezing, temples pounding, and it gave him no sense of reconciliatory martyrdom. He was just soaked and cold.

  Once finished, Rudy climbed up and gained a foothold on the slapdash bridge of felled timber, taking his time going across it, the balls of his feet damp and slippery like polished jumbo marbles trying to gain purchase on concave oil-slicked glass. He reached the tunnel archway, and Caroline had stood her ground there, waiting and watching.

  They stared at each other for a moment, face to face, breathing heavily. He put his hands on her shoulders, he pulled her in, he pressed his lips hard to hers. Her arms were tight around his neck, and her mouth was open. He pushed through the split in the tarp and pulled her along by the hand into the tunnel.

  The dogs waited outside.

  After it happened, Rudy and Caroline lay on the sofa together cuddling, trading breaths and whispers. When they’d entered the space, the remaining dogs had bounded down the ramp and away as if on command, all except Killian, who’d stubbornly remained throughout the moments of foreplay, going up on his paws, nuzzling his little black nose into their ears as Rudy kissed Caroline’s breasts and felt her calves there on the sofa, making it awkward, making them laugh.

  Still, when Rudy had her stand there before him, slipping the band of her white cotton panties over the swell of her buttocks, the curve of her thigh, the dog yelped and ran down the tunnel. The rest was slow, affectionate, almost careful, and even after he entered her, they just couldn’t stop kissing each other. The lack of atmosphere, the bare bulb and squeaking sofa, could have made things seem trivial, but didn’t somehow as they worked their hips against each other, lips parted, eyes burning with this evolving storyline. At one point she burst into tears, shuddering, palms braced against his shoulders, and at another juncture he was gasping, working into her desperately, her ankles and heels making friction against his collarbones and ears. After the second round they’d joked about their given exclamations leading up to and during orgasm: hers a high mewing that almost sounded like pleadings for sympathy, and his, a series of hoarse and breathless “Oh’s!” and “Oh fuck me’s!” and various othe
r classy expletives.

  The dogs came back in, the smaller ones taking positions at the far edges of the space, those holstered making a ring around their masters, all facing away. Rudy and Caroline cradled each other, and just before he dozed off Caroline rose to hang up the clothing the dogs had retrieved from the river, clean and wrinkled, shirt, pants, mask of gauze, and groundcloth. One sock was missing, but no one was criticizing.

  Rudy slept and dreamed about being an embryo, falling in slow motion down an old rickety set of basement stairs. When he came awake, Caroline was dressed and sitting on the sofa up by his chest, knee propped there by his head. She had her iPad.

  “You need to see this, Rudy,” she said, “before you go hanging up your holsters.”

  He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and ran his fingers down the corners of his lips. And somehow, he knew that his assessment of things had been as premature as that of his critics out there on West Chester Pike. By now darkness had fallen, and they had gotten back to their homes finding that many had been destroyed, ripped open to the night.

  “It isn’t teenagers stealing Nyquil and Marlboros, is it?”

  Caroline shook her head slowly.

  It was a YouTube video, cued up and paused, the screen a bright blur as the cameraman had been roughly panning across something that washed everything out to stark whites and streaks. The title was “Message to the Dogman,” and Rudy said quietly, “Play it.”

  Caroline hit the button and enlarged the screen. It was a field somewhere, and there was a massive bonfire thirty feet wide at the least. At the fire’s right edge, there were skinned animals, whole-bodied yet headless, roasting on spits, angled up at the moon. The camera panned left and Rudy just nodded to no one.

  It was a mob five hundred deep, most of them covered with sweat, dirt, and blood. There were men and women, most of them physical specimens, a few kids, but not many. And there were police officers in the ranks, a few others wearing military fatigues, all with sidearms, some with rifles.