The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  It wasn’t rats, but their winged brothers, beating the air with their membraned forelimbs and shrieking.

  Rudy reached out blindly with the hand holding the canvas to catch a rung, and the groundcloth drew up his back, exposing him. He dropped the canvas altogether, turned a shoulder, and waved the torch out behind him.

  The cloud pulled back, and the cement at his feet darkened with the torrent of oncoming rats. He turned and climbed, torch still in hand, things jumping at him, three or four rodents clinging to his pants cuffs and wriggling, bats darting in within an inch of his head and retreating. Barely. He moaned, kicked, and shook out his feet, waved and tomahawk-chopped the wand that was quickly losing its magic. He swept it back and forth, making short “whup-whup” sounds against the close air, and then gave it a last-ditch toss back into the fray. He only had four rungs to go, and he vaulted them two at a time, pulling with everything he had.

  He scrambled out of the opening, and the black cloud vomited hard out of the drain-chute behind him. He rolled off atop the crushed stone, loving the keen air. There may have been a bat or two stuck to him, but he didn’t think so. One or two might have bitten or scratched him, but he didn’t feel any pain, only the wide openness of the night and the ground beneath him. Above him, the sky was blotted with the shapes of those Halloween circus tent wings, at first marking the night in a random fluttering squall, and next taking form in a widened arrowhead, the mass making downward swoops across the landscape and dizzying rises up at the moon.

  The flock made two passes over the meadow and then returned in a massive plunge, forming a flickering cyclone whose funnel-mouth hissed within inches of Rudy’s nose. He was in the process of putting his arms in front of his face, but there was no need. They promptly shot back down the storm drain. It gave the illusion that they were actually being sucked down, like a video recording of an active volcano played on super-fast rewind. Rudy could only guess that they’d expected the outside world to be laden with landing pads, weigh stations, safe havens, trees. No more, and the rearranged outdoor furniture had distracted them from their goal of mauling the intruder. He got to his feet and brushed off, raising his arms, looking for tears in the cloth, bite marks, anything.

  He seemed to be all right.

  But there was something coming, there at the edge of audibility.

  It was a whispering, brushing sound gaining body and purpose. Closing. Rudy looked at the opening he’d just come from. Could rats climb ladders? He knew these kinds of rodents could walk along thin rails, squeeze into tiny holes, slip through cracks less than a quarter their size. They didn’t have bones, wasn’t that right? Or was that a myth? But either way they couldn’t scale wet concrete at a ninety-degree angle, now could they?

  Maybe not, but they could certainly find alternative exits. They weren’t coming from the storm drain. They were advancing through the grass from a ways behind it. Rudy made for the dirt leading up to the guardrail, legs feeling like lead. Halfway there, he awarded himself one last look over the shoulder.

  The high grass going back hundreds of yards past the concrete pipe was moving, like wheat and rye blowing in a soft Oklahoma breeze. Rudy didn’t wait until the interlopers started darkening the dirt. He ran for the curve of the guardrail, new sweat breaking out over the layers of the dried and redried, cold wind coming up over the asphalt stealing his breath.

  Rudy was going to die here on the highway, overcome by rodents who would disappear into the fissures of the earth like wastewater. He could not think of a passing more insignificant. He was a speck on the horizon, dust on the plain, alone in the universe.

  The darkened hulls of abandoned automobiles lined the roadway for miles, yet (just Rudy’s luck, it seemed) here at the bend there was a gap and the nearest vehicle was twenty or so feet to the right. Rudy cut across the lane and over the ribbed concrete divider to get to the heavier concentration of traffic that had been going south, toward town. He approached the nearest vehicle, parked at a slight angle. It was some sort of coupe with a red racing stripe going down the center and those quicksilver hubcaps that seemed to spin in opposite directions simultaneously. Locked. He cut across to the cruising lane and got to a hatchback. It had a bumper sticker saying “Be Nice to America or We’ll Bring Democracy to Your Country,” along with “Obama 2012.” Through the back window, Rudy could see duffel bags alongside pillow cases that looked as if they were stuffed with laundry. College kid making his way home to do a wash, ask for money, and most probably lie about his initial spring semester grades. Probably a philosophy major. Probably the type to click his pen up by his ear and interrupt the professor with snide, circular logic delivered in “elevated” vocabulary, slightly out of context. Then he’d get drunk at night with nine friends and go do the “lift and shove” to some freshman girl’s Smart car, straight into the handicapped space, leaving it to sit slanted across the blue lines with fucked-up brakes and damaged suspension. Rudy tried the door and cursed into the cold night air. This one was locked too, and from behind he heard that clicking once again. This time, it was the mad Lilliput people turning noisemakers backward fast against the grain and rattling miniature castanets in their flood across the asphalt.

  Rudy burst down to the next vehicle and ripped open the driver’s side door of a sky-blue sedan, definitely a Ford, maybe a Taurus or a Crown Victoria. He reached for the steering wheel, pulled himself in, and scraped out for the door handle. The rats were in the lane, so close Rudy could see their sloped snouts and whiskers, the configurations of their curved, forked paws scratching forward. He shut the door, and the outside sounds became a muted screeching that dulled in his head, blurred, and grew fainter only because he succeeded in partially blotting it out.

  Rudy looked out the passenger window and saw the closest ones scrambling over their mates in a writhing, violent blur, jockeying for position, the ones a stage deeper forming strange swirling patterns as if conjuring some bizarre ritual or communicative effort, the lot a dark throng as big as a forest pond spilling back over the divider, through the other lane, and back over the slope. It looked as if the ones all the way at the rear were heading back the direction they had come, but he couldn’t be sure, too dark and nondescript out there to really tell.

  He looked down at his hands in his lap and breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Stalemate, and soon they’d lose interest, even the ones right by the car, so he hoped. He shivered. Just the sight of them, even from behind glass, filled him with revulsion. He had a headache and his throat hurt. His shoulder was aching right at its point where he had thrust himself at full force into the steel stepladder, and he’d put a welt on his knee at some point, he could feel it. He rested his forearms on the padded steering wheel. The car smelled new. It was an automatic with enough dashboard controls to warrant the good part of an afternoon figuring out the particular button combinations that worked all the bells and whistles, and there was a dainty little plastic bag hanging off the gear shaft. For trash. Maybe it was the story-doctor in Rudy, but he imagined the owner of this car was a lady, late thirties, pretty but worn just a bit. She was the type that was against texting while driving, yet found it appropriate to put on mascara at a red light, or on the highway if it was straight and she’d gone to cruise control.

  Suddenly, the car jerked down under Rudy, as if it were made of building blocks and someone had yanked one out from the back left corner. The rats hadn’t been just loitering and making swirling patterns as Rudy had foolishly assumed. Not all of them, anyway. Some industrious bottom-crawlers had been working the tires with their gnashing little teeth. There was a sudden burst rear right now, Rudy actually heard that one, and the car fell back tilting up, giving a wider view of the skyline. He fumbled for the ignition and came up empty, of course. A wry, sardonic laugh snorted down through his nose. Of course, trying to turn the key had been an instinctive response, but was this the best he had? And were the rats flattening the tires in some sort of mass anticipation that he might drive away i
f there were keys left dangling there for him like some all too convenient plot twist in a B-movie? Were they really as smart as he was . . . or as stupid, depending how you looked at it?

  Smarter.

  Both front tires burst out there, and the car sank down that last six or so inches at its bow, bringing the vehicle distinctly lower than the ones parked in front of it, close enough to the road now to make it more accessible to those little disease-ridden beasts that were just dying to test out their leaping ability. There was a muffled yet distinct thudding as multitudes of rats jumped and swarmed over the Ford from the rear, scampering across the trunk, over the roof, and down the windshield.

  And there were sounds of infestation from beneath the floorboards, from under the hood, scratching, burrowing. Rudy wished he had access to a Ford parts and body schematic right about now. How enclosed was the interior of a car, really? There weren’t gaps and holes, were there? You wouldn’t be able to heat or cool it properly, right? Check. But where were the weak spots? He wasn’t encased in solid steel. Could they get in the trunk? Was that area steel-encased, or was there possibly a strip made of cheap vinyl or thin plastic fastening one area to the other? And how about the fancy instrument panel right here at his chest? Could they get up through the undercarriage and infiltrate from under the hood? All these buttons and dials were set in recesses, voids, possible entranceways. Rudy could hear the rats presently, right above his knees, gnawing and pawing and scurrying. Any second now, he expected them to get inside the steering column, set off the airbag, stove in the radio unit, pop through the air vents.

  Something on the windshield exploded, and Rudy jerked back against the headrest. The moving mass of swarming rats scattered and one of them slid down the glass, leaving a red streak. By the time he came to rest on top of the right-hand windshield wiper, his whiskers had stopped flickering. He’d been impaled, and the bird that had done it in a suicide dive had its head buried almost entirely inside the body of its victim: Rudy could see the point of its beak poking out through the rat’s bloated underside.

  Now there were pops and bangs all over the car and around it, pounding along the roof, the trunk, the front hood. Through the side window, Rudy could see a dark wave of rodents retreating off toward the grasses and others up on their hindquarters, paws dangling, doing really good impressions of deer caught in the glow of oncoming headlights. The sky was a stormcloud of fowl, thousands of sparrows and swallows and various other winter birds swooping down in dark waves, driving torrents that speared rats who were scattering all along the asphalt, across the concrete divider, and into the meadow-weeds.

  The onslaught continued for about forty-five seconds, and Rudy didn’t remember ever seeing so much relative gore even in the movies; pierced underbellies, exploding innards, smashed eggshell craniums, blood-darkened fur. The street was slick with it, the top of the car littered, nine or ten pinned to the hood, four lying along the base of the windshield—paws up, soulless black eyes staring open as if they had X’s drawn through them. The birds were dead too, most of them buried neck-deep inside their victims, the others who missed their marks making wet spots on the asphalt.

  The invasion within the underside of the vehicle had ceased, it seemed, or at least it had paused, and Rudy opened the driver’s side door. Three brown rat pups that had been trying to worm through the recesses fell into the cab space, two of them running across Rudy’s thighs, the other squirming in behind his back. He jumped out of the vehicle, clapping and brushing himself off, stamping and cursing, teeth clenched. A small dark blur soared in from the front side and swooped down into the cab. There was a squeal, and the baby rodent that had wormed in behind Rudy was pressed against the seat cushion, pierced straight through the belly, rubbing its tiny paws along the face of his assassin in a manner that would have seemed loving in any other circumstance. Then it went limp. The black bird shook off its prey and stood there on the car seat, looking at Rudy sideways with that dead glassball stare.

  “Thanks,” Rudy mumbled.

  It jerked its head in stutters, pooped on the seat, and flitted off looking for stragglers. From under the vehicle Rudy could hear things dropping to the blacktop, and he stepped away cautiously. But they didn’t form up, make a pack, organize a charge. Like drops of oil in water they spread from under the car in all directions, one of them scampering across the tip of Rudy’s left dress shoe. Most of them made it to the edges: up or down the highway, straight ahead to the high bluff on the far border all brush and rockface, back to the guardrail, into the meadow grass. There were still birds knifing down out of the dark sky, but they were spot-shotters, the last of a drizzle. The curve in the highway was littered with roadkill, and Rudy started to make his way through it. At first he was careful, stepping between the bodies to avoid the old squelch and burst from under his shoes, but when an awful sort of dawning realization began forming in his mind, he started to jog, to trot, then to sprint.

  Desperately now.

  For these birds didn’t show up just by chance. . . .

  He tore down the road in the breakdown lane.

  The math wasn’t difficult. In fact, it wasn’t math at all. This was an interlocking analogy, and it didn’t take long to fill in the blanks: dog is to Rudy as rat is to Sullivan, and therefore rat is to Sullivan as bird is to Patricia. Yet that was the wrong order, now wasn’t it? Rudy’s ex-wife was the first to retain said power over a particular animal with her painted birdhouses and fishing-line tripwires. And considering the slaughter on the blacktop that Rudy had just witnessed, this was advantage Dark Guardian, certainly heads and shoulders above ratpacks and canines.

  But why here and now? What purpose did it serve his ex-wife to save him out here in the semi-darkness? Rudy would have imagined she’d have been on Sullivan’s side, partying with the bonfire crew in whatever given shape she had chosen, raising her beer can, cheering the mass crucifixion of witches. Were not her winged subjects the enemies of the recently buried prisoners, taunting them all these hundreds and thousands of years from between the flittering leaves of the prison stalks? And they’d killed Wolfie. Still, one could not ignore the fact that this particular action caused the mass emancipation of those long incarcerated. But on the other hand, one had to consider the idea that Wolfie’s violent death also acted as a defense mechanism that protected men, the descendants of the fiends who had put the women under the dirt in the first place.

  And so, after all the back and forth, who was Patricia finally siding with?

  Scary version—no one. She was a free agent with no loyalties to bog her down, no fellow pioneers to dampen her purpose with compromise.

  And what was that purpose exactly?

  Unclear, yet only blurred if you included in the equation the fact that she’d just saved Rudy’s life out here. Maybe the key word was “saved,” a term that made perfect sense if offered in a different context. Rudy had done nothing to earn anything but wounded scorn and righteous rage from Patricia, and maybe she had saved him out here, yet just for herself, for the chance to concoct a direct confrontation that more fit her melodramatic vision of poetic justice.

  She was here somewhere. Waiting.

  Rudy raced toward the hill overlooking the battleground, the latter a dull vision off left and below, all smoke and dull light and silhouettes, most of them congregating back by the crosses that were currently half-relieved of their unwilling occupants. One strategy would have been for Rudy to have taken the straighter course back through the ice-coated meadow grass. But he was banking on the possibility that Patricia was not with him out here in the dark within a stone’s throw, watching. No, she was blending in back at the campsite, ready to draw him into the dying firelight. The woman was a drama queen at heart and she was setting the stage, he could feel it. And Rudy didn’t necessarily want to play into her little scene with a clumsy telegraphed entrance, thrashing through the weeds. Maybe he’d learn a bit by hiding in the wings for a hot minute. The hill was a perfect spy point. Du
ffey hadn’t seen him arranging the dogs and their riders there at the back edge of the Franklin Heights football field because of the height of the rise. If he could scale it from the side here, he would be able to crawl to the front lip. Get a closer view. Check things out. Weigh his options and see if he could pick her out of the crowd by her mannerisms.

  Of course, if she could sense his trouble out here on the highway, she’d know if he went back up to the high school the long way. Or would she? Many of the “powers” allotted to the players in this new state of being seemed incomplete. Wolfie was defeated. The rats had failed. Rudy had dogs, but they weren’t magic nor omniscient. If they had been, he would have gotten a “giddyap” and gained the ability to run down Sullivan long before the bastard got into the concrete piping. Patricia could actually have sensed she was going to lose her face-to-face with Rudy unless she somehow intervened, all without a detailed vision of his peril. A blind intuition kind of thing.

  Or not.

  Either way, they both were getting what they wanted. She was going to be awarded her confrontation and he was going to enter the arena in his own way. And even if she “saw” him doing it, the very audacity of it had a chance of enraging her, making her more prone to folly.

  Rudy made his way down and around the bend in the road and had to slow a bit, shimmying between vehicles that had finally cluttered the shoulder as well. They all had gone nowhere fast. Even though this particular stretch of highway was void of the treeline, down in the grove where the industrial green road signs had been catty-cornered, massive trees had toppled down making the forks and arteries for merging a clogged, scrambled mess. Rudy strode straight down for the signage area, worked his way through it, and vaulted a concrete culvert at the rear. The mountainous terrain ascending before him was quite steep, possibly forty-five degrees, but the timber lying across it made for a crude sort of graded stepladder, at least for most of the journey.