The Boy in the Woods

by Carter Wilson

  ‘He’s not going to talk,’ Elizabeth told the boys. ‘He just wanted to watch, and I wanted him to. I wanted all of you to.’ She slowly stood and brushed some dirt off her arm. ‘It was fucking amazing.’

  The man pointed the shotgun at the ground, gesturing. Tommy looked down to what he was pointing at and saw Elizabeth’s shirt. Put your shirt on, the shotgun said.

  Elizabeth smiled, bent down, and put on her tank top, caressing her breasts one last time.

  ‘Let me have your knife, baby.’

  The man hesitated, then unsheathed a long blade from his belt. Tommy felt his stomach churn, hollowing itself, as if he could feel the tip of that blade piercing his white, hairless belly, the cool steel penetrating him millimeters at a time.

  The man scuffled toward her, his black work boots crunching in the dirt. As he drew close, Tommy stepped back, but only a step. Two steps could’ve been a problem, he sensed. The man turned and Tommy saw soulful, brown eyes peering through the holes of the ski mask. There seemed no hate or danger in those eyes, and Tommy immediately determined himself a terrible judge of character.

  The man handed Elizabeth the knife. As he did, they exchanged words, which floated over to Tommy’s ears as unintelligible whispers. Elizabeth then reached up with her face and kissed the man’s neck, and as she did Tommy saw the man’s eyes close briefly. In pleasure? he wondered. Relief?

  Then Elizabeth turned to the others and held the knife above her head.

  ‘Like I said, we are all family now. And family helps each other out. I didn’t expect to run into you boys here today, but I did, and that’s that.’ She nodded to the man. ‘I’m happy I brought my friend here along to watch. Otherwise I don’t think you would all do what now needs to be done. He can make sure you all do what I tell you to do.’

  ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘And maybe you’re a faggot. All we can do is go off first impressions, right?’

  ‘You wouldn’t kill us all,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Is that a question or a statement?’

  Tommy’s chest felt like it was collapsing. He spun toward Mark, who always seemed to know what to do. ‘Mark, do something!’

  Mark said nothing.

  Tommy ran over to him, ignoring the man with the gun. Mark stood there, a zombie at the moment of reanimation, blinking slowly, his shoulders hunched forward, staring at nothing.

  Tommy grabbed him. ‘Mark, c’mon man. We have to do something.’ Tommy could hear his own high-pitched fourteen-year-old voice rasp and wheeze in short bursts of panic. He wanted to hug Mark as much as he wanted to pummel him. Anything. Anything to get some sense of normalcy back in his friend. But something about Mark had changed. Tommy could see that now clearly.

  Tommy grabbed Mark’s arm and pointed at the body. ‘Look at that, Mark, man, that’s real.’ Tommy jabbed in the direction of the dead boy with his free hand. ‘That’s fucking real, Mark. I knew that kid. How are we just supposed to do what she wants us to do?’

  The man spoke for the first and only time that day. ‘I will kill all of you.’ His voice had the light rasp of a pack-a-day smoker, and shook not once as he spoke. ‘And then I’ll go kill your parents. Brothers. Sisters. Pets. Everyone and everything. So you do as she says, and maybe I just won’t. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’

  Tommy dropped his arm. After a moment, after another short burst of cawing from what was seemingly the only bird left in the woods, in between Tommy’s heaving, plodding breaths, Mark finally moved. Just his hand. He moved it down to the crotch of his pants and slowly rubbed himself though his clothing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Four or five times. Then he looked up at Tommy, tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘Jesus, Tommy,’ he said. ‘I’m still hard.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m still hard.’

  Tommy had no response for this, because how do you respond to a nightmare? That’s what this all was after all, wasn’t it? The day had started with such mundane clarity, a summer day full of empty minutes to fill, and yet had descended into shattered glass, impossible to see through even if the pieces could be put back together. Scrambled and jagged, just like a dream. Tommy could command sense into Mark no more easily than he could bring that dopey smile back on to Rade’s face.

  Mark stopped rubbing and started crying in earnest, as if the tears could douse his erection. ‘We have to do what she wants.’

  Tommy turned to Jason as movement caught his eye. The squirrel was now poking around Rade’s head. Tommy picked up a rock and threw it at the squirrel, appalled at the thought of some creature crawling on the dead boy. His aim was perfect and disastrous, thudding into the dead boy’s skull. The squirrel – its eyes tiny black marbles of curiosity and alarm – tore away up the nearest tree.

  The man aimed the shotgun at Tommy. Don’t throw any more rocks. Tommy turned to Jason, who had finally picked himself up. ‘Jason?’

  Jason would not look at him. ‘Tommy, we screwed up, man. We screwed up.’

  ‘Jason …’

  Jason hissed at him as tears spilled from his eyes. ‘I fucked her, Tommy. I fucked her. I didn’t want to, but … I just couldn’t help it.’ Snot ran from his nose to his upper lip.

  ‘Tommy, there’s a shovel over by that stump,’ Elizabeth said, letting Jason and Mark sob fitfully amongst themselves. ‘Be a dear and go get it, will you?’

  Tommy turned and saw the shovel, leaning against a rotted tree stump in the direction from which the man had come. He must have brought it with him.

  ‘No,’ said Tommy.

  Elizabeth glided over to him. ‘So defiant, aren’t you, Tommy? Didn’t think you had it in you, did you? You’re probably proud of yourself. Your friends are over there, crying like little girls, but you’re the strong one.’ She took a step closer, and Tommy looked down at the knife in her hand. ‘But I have a secret for you, Tommy. You’re going to do everything I say, because you know you’re alone.’ Then she leaned in close and began to whisper. ‘Your friend Jason is weak. He can’t help it, because he’s just a follower. Always will be. And Mark?’ She rattled out a small laugh. ‘He’s actually excited by this. He doesn’t want to be, but he is. Can’t help it. Just how some people are. He’s a sick fuck, and he’s not going to help you at all. And you, Tommy …’ She straightened and her voice was now louder. ‘You’re only as strong as your actions. And I’m guessing you’re just a fourteen-year-old pussy.’

  The blade flashed and Tommy barely had time to move before the tip swiped his forearm. Blood crested the small gash and spilled down his arm. Tommy let out a small rasp and tried to yank back his arm, but Elizabeth caught him by the wrist. She seized him with a strength that not only surprised him, but defied him. Elizabeth then pressed the flat of the blade against his blood.

  ‘There,’ she said, bringing the knife up and examining it in the filtered sunlight. ‘Now go get the shovel.’

  And so Tommy did. He went, the blood flowing slowly from the shallow wound, and every step felt heavier than the one before. As he reached the shovel he looked ahead, through the trees, knowing his neighborhood wasn’t far. He could run. Wanted to run. How good was the man’s aim? Would he really shoot? God, how Tommy wanted to leave. Run as fast as he could, anywhere away from back there. But he couldn’t. He wanted to tell himself that he couldn’t abandon his friends, but that wasn’t exactly right, was it? He had to go back simply because he had to, and he hated himself for it.

  He dropped the shovel at her feet and wiped his bloody arm against his pant leg.

  ‘Now,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We need to dig several feet down, I would think.’ She scanned the area, finally pointing to a dead elm tree in a small clearing about a hundred feet away. ‘Over there.’

  ‘I want to go home.’ It was Jason, who was sobbing again.

  ‘You will, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Soon, I promise.’ She turned the knife over and over in her hand, examining it. ‘We’re all goi
ng to bleed a little on this knife today. Because we’re a family. And that’s what families do.’

  Then she picked up the shovel and headed toward the clearing. The man grunted at the three of them, pointing the shotgun. Slowly, each of them began to move, following the girl. Tommy brought up the rear, and as they walked, the man poked the barrel of the gun between his shoulder blades, breathing heavily as he did.

  Tommy glanced back once. The squirrel had returned. This time, Tommy did nothing about it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Present day

  Tommy looked down at his forearm and saw the faded white scar, the straight line left by Elizabeth’s blade that had existed as a part of him for decades. It was buried deep enough in his arm hair that no one had ever asked about it, not even Becky. But he saw it every time he looked.

  On he walked through the woods, and ten minutes later Tommy found the grave. He hadn’t been sure he would be able to, as thirty years of memories had collected in his mind since he last stood here. Thirty years of thoughts, each new one eroding all earlier ones just a little bit at a time. But he remembered where it all happened. He remembered it perfectly.

  Tommy stared at the clearing, the small path of scrub and dirt next to the dead elm tree. After all these years the dead tree still stood, crooked and defiant like an ancient tombstone.

  The sky darkened as a bruise-colored cloud crept in front of the sun. A small gust of wind rustled the leaves on the floor of the woods.

  Tommy looked around, expecting someone to come walking into the clearing at any moment and ask him what he was doing. The woods seemed silent and filled with noise all at once, and Tommy felt he could hear even the sound of a bird twitching its head. He would hear someone coming, he was certain, but it might be too late to do anything about it, especially once he started digging. He just had to hope for the best, which, as he had discovered in years of researching criminals, rarely worked out well.

  Tommy’s steps grew smaller as he passed the area where the actual murder had taken place. The pile of rocks, the one they sometimes used as a make-shift fireplace, was still there. To Tommy, this was unbelievable, as if no one else had bothered to come out this way since that summer day. He walked over and picked up one of the rocks, feeling its cold heft in his hand. It was about the size of the rock Elizabeth had used on Rade, maybe a little smaller. That rock, of course, was no longer in the pile. That rock was buried next to Rade, along with the hunting knife with all of their blood on it.

  We’ll cut ourselves, Elizabeth had said. On the palm, just enough to bleed a little. And then we’ll each put our blood on the knife, and that will make it official. Our secret forever. Our blood secret.

  Tommy hadn’t needed to do it. She had already taken his blood, so he had stood and watched while Jason and Mark acquiesced at gunpoint. The Watcher hadn’t participated in the ritual. He had simply watched.

  Tommy remembered the moment of panic, way back in the early 1990s, when he heard about DNA testing being used to solve crimes. He had thought about all their blood on the knife, sitting next to the corpse of a child. But he had been too scared to do anything about it. What was he going to do – dig up the body? No, that would have been crazy. Twenty-something Tommy had been too scared to do anything, so he did nothing, just as he had always done.

  But not anymore.

  He walked around the old bike path and through knee-high wild grass to the gravesite. Flashes of that day stormed his mind. Their callused hands, unaccustomed to labor, blistering as they took turns with the shovel. It was so much work digging wide and deep enough to fit the small body. All the while the Watcher surveyed the scene, pointing his gun, resting his aim on each of them a few seconds at a time, back and forth, like an animatronic figure in an Old West theme-park attraction. Elizabeth had watched as she leaned against a tree, smiling and saying nothing. Then, with the hole finally big enough, they had to roll Rade into it, where he landed face-down with only the lightest of thuds. Kid probably hadn’t weighed more than seventy pounds, after all. Then Elizabeth, Mark, and Jason added their blood to the knife and Elizabeth had thrown the knife down in the hole, where it landed sticking into the middle of Rade’s back. It was at that point that Tommy had finally lost all bearing and fallen to his knees, a sweeping wave of nausea overcoming him until he puked in the dirt, retching as Elizabeth simply stared at the body with fascination.

  Tommy remembered being thankful Rade hadn’t been looking up at them when they again took turns with the shovel, this time spooning the cool earth on to the body, covering it a little at a time until the last thing visible was the handle of the kitchen knife. That, too, eventually disappeared under the dirt, until there was nothing left of Rade in those woods except his blood trail from the killing site to the burial site.

  They had used dirt to cover that as well.

  Tommy now entered the clearing as a small rumble of thunder rolled above. Almost immediately afterwards came the sound of rain falling on hundreds of leafless trees, a million matchsticks dropping from the sky. The clouds had lied to Tommy.

  ‘Hell,’ he muttered, dropping his supplies to the ground and keeping only the shovel in his hand. He had thought digging up a body would be the worst part of all of this. He hadn’t thought about digging up a body in the rain.

  Holding the shovel with both hands, he scanned the small clearing where he would have to dig. Leaves covered the dirt beneath, and near the middle of the clearing they had gathered into an unnatural-looking pile, as if someone had built a small monument from them. Tommy stared at it, a sense of dread spreading over him, and fought to understand what could have caused the mound of leaves to form in that exact manner.

  It was at that moment Tommy realized he wasn’t the first one to have been here.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  He stared at the pile of leaves as the rain came down harder. The trees would shelter Tommy for only so long. Soon he and all the earth around him would be soaked.

  Yet he did not approach the … thing. It was no bigger than a football, but something was there. Under there. Under the leaves. Yes, it was a thing, of that he was certain.

  A lightning bolt cracked nearby, close enough to make Tommy jump. Pellets of rain made their way through the bare trees and began assaulting Tommy and everything around him. Within seconds, the top layer of leaves covering the small mound on the ground began to peel away.

  The thing underneath was white.

  Tommy bent over, wanting to look but not yet ready to touch.

  Another leaf fell off.

  Tommy saw ears. The white thing had ears.

  Rabbit ears?

  Tommy reached out and scraped off the remaining leaves, their once-dry skin now wet and slimy. He recognized the object immediately.

  It was an unpainted cement rabbit, its eyes wide and blank, hunched in a frozen state of chewing. And it wasn’t just any common garden ornament. This one had meaning.

  It was the exact one Tommy had buried the knife under in the back garden of Mark Singletary’s home in Charleston. The knife Elizabeth had used to slice open the homeless man’s throat.

  Tommy snapped his head to the side, staring deeper into the woods. She was here. Watching him. Must be hiding behind a tree. Laughing. But he saw no one.

  Then he looked back down. The rabbit was no longer a rabbit. The rabbit was nothing but a large white rock.

  He reached out and touched the rock, seeing if it was real. He felt the cool surface of the stone, the uneven bumps. It looked nothing like a rabbit at all, just as the PowerPoint presentation had suddenly morphed on the airplane.

  Tommy had done his share of drugs in his life, but never anything that made him hallucinate. Now he was hallucinating, and it was so disconcerting that he had to sit down on the cold floor of the woods just to ground himself.

  The rain didn’t give a shit if he was sitting or standing. It still came down on him.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. He rubbed his eyes, as if that wou
ld cure insanity. ‘Fuck.’

  Someone had been here at some point, Tommy thought, but Elizabeth wasn’t here now. She was a monster, but she wasn’t supernatural. If she moved the body, she did so at some earlier time. The rock was just a signal for me, he thought. But she’s not hiding behind a goddamn tree, or going to rise out of the ground.

  She’s just a person, he told himself. An evil, fucked-up person. But just a person.

  Tommy kept his eyes closed for another few moments and felt the drops roll down his face. He focused clearly on the sensation, letting it be the only thing he felt on his entire body. Water tickling his cheek, falling from his jaw. It cleared his mind, if only a little, and when he reopened his eyes he felt refocused.

  Tommy wiped the rain from his eyes and willed himself to ignore the deep chill that was starting to course through his body. He was ill equipped for this weather, but it was too late to turn back. He was going to do what he came here to do.

  Tommy picked up the stone and threw it as far as he could deeper into the woods. He kicked away the remaining pile of leaves from the mound and grabbed his shovel.

  Another lightning bolt flashed just as his shovel pierced the mud for the first time. It was like shoveling sand. With each clump of wet earth he heaved to the side, more water filled the growing hole in the ground, until he was eventually scooping a thick, slushy mixture. It felt fruitless – it would take him forever to reach Rade, if Rade was still down there.

  He kept digging, sweating through the chill of the rain, and his shoulders began to burn every time he flung a scoop of mud behind him.

  Faster. Deeper.

  He grunted as he picked up speed. His clothes were now soaked, and from the knees down his jeans were caked in wet earth. He struggled to keep his footing, and slowly his feet disappeared deeper into the rain-soaked earth. Yet he continued on, harder, faster. Deeper into the pit. The grave. The floating tomb of a little boy. Tommy drove into the ground with all his might, not even caring that his repeated spearing with the shovel could bisect the remains at any moment.