The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  “We are not used to violence,” she said, still looking at the body. “We are a docile people, but men like this have taught us the concept of murder.”

  “He had it coming,” Rudy said.

  She looked at him.

  “It isn’t the way things were meant to pass.”

  “It never is.” He stood. “You’re a brave one.”

  “You are masked.”

  “Still, your sisters are frail, and they are afraid of more than just gazing at my mask.”

  “They’ll learn.” She came closer to him. “It was an honor to defend you. I didn’t realize I could do such a thing, but the saying ‘The Lord doth not kill directly’ has been in my mind since the ancient times, like a law, a commandment.”

  “I understand.”

  She made to walk past him and stopped.

  “I want to give you a list of the sisters who were burned here. Rebecca is not the only saint who died on the wood.”

  “And what is your name?” Rudy asked.

  “Elizabella,” she said, turning. “Will my Lord honor the names of those dead?”

  “I’ll put them in a book.”

  Her eyes flickered.

  “With new human laws.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “You will always have my sincere thanks, my Lord.”

  “And you mine for your acts of valor.”

  Elizabella bowed her head; awkward yet sincere, using the moment as an exit strategy to turn politely back to her girls. But she froze right there. The unbound witches were still on their knees face down to the ground, and there was a stranger behind them in the corn. It was a rather round woman standing there shivering, dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized Villanova University sweatshirt. She had a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets in her arms.

  “I lost my husband,” she said. “My house was destroyed, and my neighborhood turned to a disaster zone. I didn’t know where to go, and these men promised food and shelter.” She looked down. “By the time I realized what they were doing to these poor women it seemed it was too late. I panicked and hid in my tent.” Her voice went down to a whisper. “I am so ashamed.”

  “Help me get my girls down,” Elizabella said. “Can you do that?”

  The woman looked up.

  “There are others,” she said, “more with blankets, back in the tents. I can get them. We can untie the knots together, all of us.”

  Elizabella nodded, and the two women moved toward a cautious embrace. Rudy looked off, as moments of sentimentality had always made him feel odd and misplaced, and his gaze swept across the campground that had been laid to waste, smoke from the fireworks an acrid cloud floating above it all. There were bodies from both sides lying cold, too many bodies, sprawled in the dirt, lying across things in awkward positions, and Rudy was sickened inside. He’d always been a pacifist. Over at the tent area there was a lot of activity now, men and women gathering in small groups, making their way toward the corn. At the back end of the space a dark spot moved. It slinked and crawled and rose up to make a break for the far side of the pasture where the highway stretched off behind the mass of downed trees.

  It was Sullivan running for it, limping, favoring an arm too.

  Rudy cursed himself for his dress shoes and briefly considered kicking them off. At the same time he had to admit to himself that on a certain level he was considering just letting the bastard go. But the terrain was rough with debris, and a man didn’t run around in his stocking feet out here just to gain a step or two on his given adversary. And men like Sullivan didn’t halt their campaigns just because of a bum leg, a missing eye, a bruise on the arm, and one battle lost. These individuals were incorrigible cancers, popping up again and again even if you nuked the living shit out of them with radiation and drowned them in chemo. Best to cut them out with that metaphorical blade if and when you had that first chance.

  Rudy cut across the site, pausing only briefly to kick a dude in the face who’d held a stick underneath him, playing possum by the trash pit. Sullivan had a good lead and was fading, despite the intermittent flickerings thrown by the ebbing flames of the bonfire.

  Rudy took a deep breath. Then he jumped into the high grass and chased the wounded man in through the meadow.

  Professor Rudy Barnes suddenly wished he’d spent more time all these years gaining a higher level of personal fitness. He was a tall man, “big” in a sense, yet blessed with a high metabolism passed down by his mother. It kept him wiry-thin. Moreover, years of practice helped him bottle emotions most of the time, internalizing them, working them down and through the strong and silent way, and maybe there was a little bit of credence to the idea of manufacturing some kind of inner furnace that burned fat off by tension alone. But dissecting student papers with aggressive red slashes, planning lessons with a measure of competitive intensity, and stewing and poring over journal articles that only one percent of the population was interested in reading didn’t equal the toning and conditioning one got at the gym. Sullivan was wounded and still outrunning him. And though shadows were no longer existent in this world, there was certainly darkness, the kind Sullivan was steadily becoming a part of.

  Rudy called out suddenly, “My kingdom for a fucking horse!” but no dog came running, no wolf conveniently sliding between his legs. He had acted impulsively, running like a madman into the pasturage, and now he was out of earshot, alone.

  The meadow-grass was iced over, and the further he got into the depths of it, the more dampness accumulated in the fabric of his pants, weighing him down. Ahead he thought he could hear Sullivan’s breathing, but he couldn’t be sure if it was just the haunt of his own footfalls, like a residue of dark hope.

  Up ahead was the dim spread of the highway curving off right to a fine point that got lost in the rise of the valley. There were abandoned vehicles hulking there in the darkness, and Rudy pounded toward them. By the time he made it to the edge of the blacktop his chest was heaving, and his legs ached as he pulled them over the guardrail. The roadside gravel made loud, guttural sounds beneath his shoes, and after a step or two he paused there, hands on his knees. He wanted to quiet himself so he could continue to monitor the exhalations of his foe, but the more he tried to tone it down, the harder he seemed to pant and wheeze.

  Something clanked.

  It was distinct, some iron product, two hundred or so feet north. Rudy strode forward through a toss of broken glass in the breakdown lane. There was a shredded tire he had to step over and a bent sign to his right with a picture of a truck tipping on a sharp curve.

  Now he heard grunts, cursing, more clanking, and at the top of the mild crest and a bend left he looked down over the guardrail.

  There was a graded dirt slope leading to a wide bed of crushed stone. Directly behind was a huge concrete pipe built into the landscape and a massive storm drain at the foot of it; hence the sounds of steel on steel. Sullivan had been struggling to haul off the grate cover. Rudy got a fleeting glimpse of the man’s head disappearing down into the hole and then slid down the slope after him, almost tripping over his own feet and taking a header. What he planned to do when he caught up with Sullivan in the catacombs was not entirely clear. He wasn’t going down there to talk, that was for sure.

  Could Rudy take him?

  That wasn’t clear either. There were a lot of factors, a lot of unknowns. How injured was the man? Was he really blind in one eye, or was the patch just for show? He was younger, but Rudy was taller. The man was more buff, but Rudy had that wiry leverage going for him. Seemed kind of even.

  Right . . .

  Sullivan was a football coach, built like a brick shithouse, using the super-gym at his disposal through the school to model the advantages of sheer and brute muscle mass to his players. Even injured, he was the favorite in this little “cage match” to come.

  Rudy advanced to the lip of the hole and peered over. There was a rusted stepladder bolted into the wall and the chute was cylindrical. There w
as the sound of running water and a foul smell akin to swampland, black gutters, and waste.

  It was not entirely dark.

  There was a light flickering and wavering down in the recesses, and it didn’t take long to connect that with the fact that Sullivan had not been in possession of a torch during his retreat from the campsite. He’d been down the storm drain earlier, prepping it. Advantage bad guy.

  Rudy bent, took hold of the ladder, and turned ass-backward.

  Slowly, he climbed down into the hole.

  ***

  The curved block walls were slick with old moisture, dank with mold and networks of stains from nitrates and phosphorus accumulations that webbed their way down the ceiling of the shaft. It gave a distinct skeletal illusion, as if Rudy were trapped inside some ancient, malignant beast. Every one of his steps was trailed by a hollow echo, and there was background dripping. The cylindrical tunnel was fifteen feet high and was riddled with cracks filled with moss and sediment directly across from the entrance point. There were torches jammed into the shattered light boxes every thirty feet or so, burning steadily, leaving black arcs on the damp cement behind them and simultaneously reflecting down their sickly flames in the sludge staining the tunnel’s base in a wide, brownish runner. Rudy was no mechanical engineer, but it was clear that this drainage system was a combination of storm run-off and sewage. Somewhere, this nasty stream was siphoned off into the river, probably the Schuylkill, and if circumstances had been different, Rudy would have considered sending a letter to his congressman about it. Thick patches of rotten leaves blocked the dirty flow in places, making it churn up and re-route, and horizontal ghost-lines along the sides indicated that during flooding this place filled near to the one-third mark. Rudy walked first on the right side, then hopped across to the left for haste, letting his momentum bring him forward. The fact that he had no shadow leading him on was a comfort, but his shoes were louder than cannons down here. His glasses steamed up, and he withdrew his mask and hood, almost laughing to himself that he’d sort of forgotten they were there.

  At a juncture, he made a right and then halted.

  There at the far end of the tunnel was Sullivan, straddling the murky runnel at his feet as was Rudy. The eye band had been removed, and there was a crater there tailed by a recently dried scrape that ran up the side of his head, then curling back down like a ram’s horn. He didn’t have long hair, but what was there was matted and curled. His five-o’clock shadow had turned to heavy black stubble, and his teeth glistened from within it in a crooked smear.

  “Professor . . .” he sing-songed.

  Rudy shivered. There was something about being addressed directly by this individual that was unnerving, like a wife-beater faking some “sincere” plea for women’s rights and looking at you with that reddened edge in his eye, ready to thrash you within an inch of your life if you admitted you didn’t believe him. And Sullivan was taller than he’d seemed on television. Where was that pair of scissors Rudy had brought with him to the battle? Did he drop them back by the lean-to? What if Sullivan was armed? Rudy would have been if he was Sullivan, that was for sure.

  “Why didn’t you ambush me?” Rudy said, motioning back with a jerk of his head. “At the juncture there’s a concrete edge to hide behind. Seems like something you’d be good at.”

  Sullivan laughed, and for the big man that he was it was high and sheer and razored, cascading off the curved array of wet polished block like a siren.

  “Ambush?” the man said finally. “As in an attack? Like fisticuffs? Like a little barroom brawl down here in the pipes?” He stopped grinning and his eye gleamed out from his dark face. “We aren’t down here to fight, Dog-Boy. If you live, you live . . . all the power to you and bless your sweet soul. For me, I wouldn’t dirty my hands with you, but before any of the fun stuff begins we’re meant to know each other. Form boundaries, just in case this winds up being one of those . . . prolonged sort of disputes.”

  Rudy stepped forward two paces and straddled the sewage water.

  “No boundaries for a child molester, Sullivan. I’d die before drawing any lines in the sand with the likes of you.”

  “Really,” he said. “I hope you’re willing to stand by those words. They’d write books about them, different from the old ones.”

  “What books?”

  “Biblical ones, of course. The ones you already have yourself starring in, hmm?”

  Sullivan had lowered his voice to that soft, condescending, nearly effeminate tone so often utilized by those careful pricks in Human Resources who were going to nail you to the wall for some minor infraction that was going to go on your record. It bothered Rudy immeasurably.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. He was really judging the distance between them, estimating how much momentum he could build in a straight rush. Sullivan took a step closer himself.

  “For every action, there’s a reaction, Professor. When the zombie-girls came up, someone had to go under.” He pointed with the lame hand, its pinkie finger broken and crooked. “You’re the king of those dogs, but as subjects . . . as infantry, they’re of no use to you here in the sewers, Professor, even if they could climb down the ladders. They’re too clumsy, too big-boned and slow, don’t you see? In the new world, you’ve got to think about mastering the smaller, unnoticed parts of the earth, you’ve got to learn the cracks and crevices, understand the secrets of the dark, at least if you’re going to make your way down into the bowels where I’m the one you’ll have to answer to.”

  Sullivan smiled. Allowed himself a giggle, and right on cue something came up from behind his head. Rudy thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, for it looked like a shadow at first, then a curious black cat with its paws clinging for purchase in Sullivan’s hair, crawling up and over his crown, then sliding around behind his ear, along the shoulder and up under his jaw, mewing, nuzzling.

  Sullivan reached and grabbed the animal by the scruff of the neck and gently pulled it off, pronged paws dangling in little curves, the long gray tail coming to hang down like the back half of a garden snake.

  It was a sewer rat ten pounds at the least, and Sullivan positioned his forearm to cradle it lovingly. Its paws played at the air, and he scratched its bald belly, bending to Eskimo kiss its sniveling nostrils, the top of its black muzzle oscillating rapidly up and down to expose two crooked front teeth that Sullivan took a second to flicker the tip of his tongue across.

  “That’s my girl,” he said. He looked up at Rudy with a sheepish shrug that said, Can’t help it, Jack. I just love her, and then he positioned his bottom lip into a widened clown’s grin. He whistled shrilly.

  There was a terrific clicking and tacking from the depths of the darkened tunnel behind, and then came the pouring out from around his feet as the army of rats flooded the space, skittering and yipping, jumping and scratching over one another in a bristling plague. In the swarm there were pups the size of fieldmice and others big as terriers, all filling the concrete tunnel in a spreading storm on both sides of the sludge. Rudy turned to run, and Sullivan’s voice rang out behind him,

  “The Dog King retreats from the land of the Rat God. Put that in a book, why don’t ya? Sic ’em, boys! Don’t leave anything behind but the bones if you catch him!”

  Professor Rudy Barnes sprinted back in the direction he had come, feet clapping along the dank cement, thighs pistoning furiously, arms pumping, neck straining forward. At the juncture he slipped making the half-turn and skidded against the far wall, almost breaking his elbow. Somehow he retained his balance, but he had to restart, feeling as if he were in one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons where the feet spun in place momentarily to the wacky percussion soundtrack. He willed himself forward to full speed again, stamping along the right of the murky runner for five steps or so, then jumping over to the left for the same. From around the corner behind him he heard the pack gaining, thousands of paw-nails clicking as if the entire population of Lilliput had been given ti
ny tap-dancing shoes and were emptied into some massive orchestra pit to charge through. With the echo it sounded like some sick sort of applause. Rudy heard splashes and sloshing and angry squeals. Nope. It ain’t faster in the pond, kids. Better to stick to the gunwales.

  Suddenly he was disoriented. The exit ladder should have been straight up ahead about forty feet stage-right, bolted to the block wall about a yard from ground surface. On the high side of the tunnel he saw a porthole in the curve leading to the outside with a faded wash of moonlight funneling through it, but now there was nothing below but shadowy grime-blackened walls leading down the recess where the tunnel dead-ended in a concrete half-moon, acting like a catch-basin for a channel at a higher level.

  Rudy hadn’t come from that far. There had been no graded concrete apron to jump down from. Of course, he hadn’t looked back over his shoulder down to the right upon entering in the first place. He had followed the torches to the left, so no, he couldn’t be absolutely positive that this blockade had been at his rear when he’d first made his way down the tunnel. In running from the rats just now, had he ducked back down the wrong exit shaft?

  He shotgunned his legs forward, looking at all the context clues. There was the torch jammed into the light fixture box and the spidery cracks underneath with moss growing out of them: check, this was the place.

  He ran forward with everything he had, dropping the gauze mask and regripping the groundcloth haphazardly.

  The key word here was “shadowy.” There were no more shadows. Grime yes, but the walls just weren’t that blackened from it. There was something else here, something covering the cement.

  Rudy ran for the torch and grabbed it out of its holder, next jumping back across the stream, aiming for the darkest area along the far wall beneath the high opening. Just before impact, he pulled over the groundcloth like a blanket in a house fire and lowered a shoulder.

  He banged straight into the right side of the camouflaged ladder, feeling simultaneous and dichotomous sensations: a give and burst as if he’d body-checked a host of leather-lined water balloons, and the hard resistance of the cold steel beneath. It was a bone-shivering jolt that rocked him back a step and detonated a terrible flapping that exploded in front of him and down the shaft; a thick cloud of them all around outside of his makeshift hood, the torch buying him what sounded and felt like a cushion of about a foot and a half.