The People In The Woods

by Robert Brown

  “Have you ever seen stick sculptures like this before?” Nick asked.

  Sheriff O’Connor shook his head. “Nope. That’s a new one on me. Looks like some dope-smoking lowlife has a touch of artistry.”

  The sheriff rose heavily from his chair. He was well into middle age and not at all in shape.

  “Guess I’ll have to investigate this myself,” he said. “All my spare men are down on the business loop cleaning out a motel room that got used as a meth lab. Happens a lot. They come from another county or another state, rent a cheap motel room for a few days, and mix it up in the bathtub.”

  “Did you catch them?”

  “Nope, just the leavings. Got some fingerprints, though.”

  “Good. Maybe you can get another one of those,” Nick said, jerking his thumb toward the commendation.

  Sheriff O’Connor let out a little laugh. “That? No, I got that years ago. Got in a gunfight with a weed dealer. Caught a ricochet but nailed the piece of shit. I won’t get anything for busting a meth lab. I do that at least once a month. If they gave me a plaque for every meth lab, I’d be able to tile my kitchen floor with the things. Not sure the old lady would like the change of decor. Well, thanks for coming in, Professor. Guess I’ll have bad news for some cat owner.”

  They shook hands.

  “Thanks for seeing me, Sheriff. Oh, they spray painted the university sign again.”

  Sheriff O’Connor smiled. “If we see them, we’ll bust them, but that crime has about ten thousand suspects.”

  So few? Nick thought. Republic’s population outside the university is fifty thousand.

  Nick drove home.

  Home was in a leafy suburb where most of his neighbors were associated with the university, along with a few professional locals. Lawyers. Doctors. The county treasurer lived two doors down. Nick and Cheryl’s place was a two-story, four-bedroom house. Two of the bedrooms were used as his and Cheryl’s home offices. He rarely used his, which was mostly stuffed with books. Another room was for their thirteen-year-old daughter, Elaine, over at a friend’s house for the day.

  “You’re back late,” Cheryl said from her office, located just off the living room to his left as he came in. “Go for another marathon?”

  “Har-har. No, I was speaking with the sheriff.”

  “Huh?” That got her attention—something that was proving harder and harder to do these days.

  Nick entered her office. Tidy paper piles of varying heights were arrayed on the computer table like an architectural plan. A desktop Mac with a large screen was running some sort of simulation. Nick had never really understood what she did except that it took every bit of Cheryl’s high intelligence and organizational skills.

  Cheryl sat at the desk. Shoulder-length brown hair, slim figure, still pretty at forty-six. The bags under her eyes didn’t help, though. She worked too damn hard. He didn’t work enough. Nick wasn’t sure which was worse.

  At least he didn’t need pills to sleep at night.

  Maybe tonight, though.

  Nick moved a stack of term papers off the spare seat. Cheryl leaped up, fussed around to find a spare spot, and ended up setting them on the floor.

  “So, what happened?” she asked once they had both sat down.

  He gave her a rundown of what had happened the day before and that morning. Cheryl sat in silence, sipping coffee from a huge mug. “Science runs on caffeine,” she always said.

  “That’s awful. Why did you go back after the guy spotted you?”

  “Um, I don’t really know. I guess I figured he wouldn’t be back the next day, and he wasn’t.”

  “But jeez, Nick, it’s still dumb. Don’t you remember that sophomore kid last semester?”

  Brett Dawson had been hiking along the river near town when he’d gotten into an altercation with some locals out fishing. It was unclear who started what, but the kid had gotten beaten to within an inch of his life. Someone found him unconscious with a dozen fishhooks stuck all over his body. He’d been beaten so badly, he couldn’t remember his assailants’ faces.

  Nick gave an embarrassed shrug. “Yeah, well, I didn’t think whoever did this would be there the next time, and he wasn’t. I guess I just wanted to follow it up, see if it was some old bit of folklore.”

  Cheryl set down her coffee mug and gave him a sympathetic look.

  “Missing research?”

  “I’m missing having the time to do research.”

  “How about you do something this summer?”

  “You know how summer gets filled up. Trips to your parents, trips to my mom. Elaine’s million activities. Besides, I want to spend time with you guys.”

  “That’s all important but you’re not satisfied here. I can tell.”

  He threw his hands up. “My career is at a dead end!”

  Cheryl put a hand on his knee. “Then make the time to move it forward. I can do more cooking.”

  “You’re busy.”

  “Maybe you can apply for a sabbatical?”

  “I need a solid research proposal for that.”

  “Yeah, I know. But find something, Nick. Even if it’s something small. You need it.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  His wife gave him a playful slap. “Just don’t go looking for more eviscerated cats. What would the neighbors think?”

  Cheryl did a couple more hours of work as he prepared dinner.

  Elaine came back, having been driven by her friend’s mom. She trundled through the door, all lanky limbs and flowing brown hair.

  “Hey Mom! Hey Dad!” She gave each of them a peck on the cheek. Nick cocked his head.

  “What’s with all the makeup?” he asked. The girl had caked on so much of it, she looked twenty, not thirteen. And not a classy twenty, either.

  “Oh, Tammy and I were trying on some stuff.”

  “More than some,” Cheryl said. “You look trashy.”

  Elaine rolled her eyes. “I do not look trashy.”

  “Honey, the girls here wear too much makeup,” Cheryl said. “You’re not going to get respect from the boys looking like that.”

  “It’s the style,” Elaine whined. “Why do you have to be so conservative?”

  “Go rub it off,” Nick said. “There are no boys to impress here.”

  “Puritans,” Elaine moaned, stomping to her room.

  But her words held no real anger. Elaine was a good kid, her teenybopper phase having been remarkably relaxed so far. Nick and his wife did worry about the influence of the local kids, though. They had enrolled her in the town’s one private school, which offered a discount for the children of university professors, but some local influence did creep in. Tammy was one of them. Plus, there were the kids Elaine met at the mall and the park.

  The rest of the day was spent in the usual routine—dinner, Netflix, early to bed for both of them. Another exhausting week was coming up.

  Nick arrived at the office early the next morning to look through a couple of journals in the departmental library. He had an idea for a spinoff article he could write on the ayahuasca research he’d done for his PhD. He nodded at the department secretary and one of the linguistics professors who happened to be in the front hall, then went upstairs. The library was at the end of the hall, near Bennett’s office. He hoped that guy wasn’t looking at porn again.

  Instead, Bennett had some sort of archaeological site report spread out on his desk. Nick wouldn’t have spared it a second glance except a drawing on one of the pages stopped him cold.

  It was the wolf—the wolf from the assembly of stick figures. It looked exactly the same.

  Nick stared from the doorway for a moment. Bennett looked up.

  “Oh, good morning. Can I help you with something?”

  “What is that?” Nick asked, pointing.

  “This? A sketch I did for a field report. Rock art at a site on the other side of the state. From the local variation of the Mississippian culture.”

  “Aren’t w
e a little far from Mississippi?”

  “It’s named after the river, where the core of the culture was located. The culture spread over much of what is now the central United States. We’re at the western fringe, so we get some interesting local variations.”

  “Do you have the photo you sketched that from?”

  “Sure.” Bennett opened a folder on his computer and started looking through files. Nick hoped none of them contained any porn images. He wasn’t sure who would be more embarrassed. “Why the interest?”

  “Oh, it looks like something I saw once.”

  Bennett brought up a photo. It showed a boulder in the woods. Nick could see faint lines on it.

  “Here’s a better one,” the archaeologist said, clicking on the next image. This was a close up, and Nick could see the outlines of the wolf, eroded with time but still fairly clear. Bennett moved to another image, where the incised lines had been filled with chalk.

  It looked exactly like the stick sculptures Nick had seen in the woods.

  After a moment, he managed to speak.

  “Did this culture make more designs?”

  “Oh, sure. The wolf was the most common, a symbol of hunting prowess. It was often prayed to for help in the hunt. The Mississippian culture had other petroglyphic symbols they commonly used. Deer, rabbits, the moon in various phases, abstract lines and patterns, human figures.”

  “Do you have any images of the human figures?”

  “Um, not from this site. I’ll email you a reference to a good book on the subject. It’s in the main library. I doubt any student has checked it out. Getting kids to read anything beyond the syllabus is well-nigh impossible these days. Are you working on something along these lines?”

  “Um, I’m intrigued at the modern appropriation of ancient symbols, how they are used and altered.”

  “Sounds like a good paper.”

  Bennett’s words stung. Nick hadn’t published a paper in years, while the archaeologist came out with a paper or an excavation field report like clockwork once or twice a year. Nick didn’t know how Bennett managed to find the time between his teaching load and his pornography habit. The guy was single with no kids, though. Go figure.

  “Glad to be of help,” Bennett said, extending a hand. Without thinking, Nick shook it.

  Then realized what he had done.

  “Gotta go. Bye.”

  Nick rushed to the bathroom to wash his hands.

  The rest of the day—his classes, his office hours, meeting with a graduate student who was working on her thesis—went by in a blur.

  The wolf had been identical. An exact match. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.

  Nick had to look at that book in the library.

  When he did, he got some more surprises.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The wolf wasn’t the only match. Nick sat in the library’s main reading room, which had an ornate white domed ceiling whose base was decorated with busts of the great thinkers of the past. Those busts looked down on an almost empty room. Three or four professors, a scattering of graduate students. When Nick had gone to university, finding an empty seat in the library had been a struggle. Now this library stood all but abandoned, the rows of shelves neglected and dusty, the students reading eBooks and the Internet—if they read anything at all.

  But the library was still a great resource for those who had the willingness to learn. The book Bennett had suggested turned out to be a goldmine—page after page of images of petroglyphs from the area, plus text on the period and analysis of its art.

  The wolf was the most prominent symbol, carved into rock outcroppings all over the region. Nick also found a few pentagrams, although that was such a common symbol in all cultures, including the modern world, that the cat killer may not have gotten the idea from this ancient style of art.

  The Devil’s head was more compelling. There were several examples of it carved into rocks during the Mississippian Period, which in this region dated from around 900 to 1500 AD.

  The head looked exactly like the ones he had seen. That and the wolf made Nick feel sure that whoever had created those stick figures and killed those animals had looked at some of the ancient rock art, either in person or in a book.

  Flipping through the well-worn pages, he tried in vain to find a parallel with the stick men. He saw some human figures on the rock art, but they were completely different. The bodies were rectangles, with squares for the heads and simple lines for the arms and legs. The stick figures had been made out of a cross and an X—a simple yet evocative way to create a human figure. Strange that the most common image that freak had made would be of his own invention. He certainly had the skill to reproduce the block figures that the ancient Native Americans had made.

  Nick made the rounds of the library, gathering more books on the period, as well as books on animal symbolism in Native American mythology.

  He had some research to do. That fired him up with an enthusiasm he hadn’t felt in ages. His idea for that spinoff article on Amazonian religious practices had been forgotten.

  Before he left for home, Nick stopped at the library steps and called Sheriff Luke O’Connor.

  It took a couple of tries to get him.

  “Hello, Professor.” The sheriff’s voice finally came over the line. “Sorry for the wait. Busy day. Busted another meth lab. This one with some out-of-state scumbags in it. Just been processing them. How can I help you?”

  “I was wondering if you went out to the site of the cat killing.”

  “I did, only an hour after you visited. It was all gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Somebody had come and taken the whole kit and kaboodle, just like the last time you went out there. You sure no one was out there watching you?”

  “No one whom I saw,” Nick said, feeling a chill go through him.

  “Well, nothing’s there now.”

  “But there was, the sculptures and the cat, just like I said.”

  “I believe you. I saw the pictures, remember? I also found the knife. Had to go through the underbrush with a metal detector. Had some prints on it, but I guess they’re yours.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t fret about it.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “Do?”

  “Yeah, someone is going around killing animals and putting up occult signs. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Look, Professor …”

  “Upton. Nick Upton.”

  “Right. Anyway, Professor, I got enough on my plate as it is. I got meth labs, I got bar fights, I got domestic abuse calls, I got town-and-gown troubles, and I got to testify at a murder trial later this week. Some nutcase cutting up kitties is the least of my worries.”

  Nick started to object but the sheriff cut him off.

  “I’ll look into it when I have the time, and I’ll keep my eye out for reports of a similar nature. I’m keeping this out of the press, though. This sort of stunt encourages copycats, and we don’t want that. Now, if you don’t mind, Professor, I need to get going.”

  “All right, thanks for your help. Oh, one last question. What was that abandoned town?”

  “Oh, the ruins? I don’t know. I heard the branch line that came through here closed way back in the Sixties. I guess a lot of little towns that had relied on the railway just sort of up and died. You go hunting?”

  “No.”

  “Naw, I guess not. If you did, you’d find a bunch of those little towns along those tracks. A few have some buildings still standing, all overgrown and such. Local kids use some of them for parties.”

  “So, they’re pretty well known.”

  “To people tied to the area, yeah. Thanks for your help, Professor. Bye now.”

  The sheriff hung up. Nick walked to his car, deep in thought.

  Had the cat killer seen him a second time? If he had, he’d kept quiet, perhaps intimidated by the knife in Nick’s hand. The first time, when Nick had found the sq
uirrel, the killer—if that was who it had been—had run off. Once the coast was clear, he (she? they?) had returned, cleaned up the area, and left a warning.

  And then set up only a mile down the line. Hardly an effective way to hide if they had been worried about Nick returning.

  Or maybe whoever put up those things wanted to be seen again? Then why make it all disappear once more?

  That night, Nick stayed up long after both Cheryl and Elaine had gone to bed. The books didn’t help him as much as he had hoped. While he learned about various theories as to what the ancient rock art symbolized, he had no idea whether the person who had fashioned the same shapes out of sticks had intended for them to mean the same thing. Still, the act of researching fired up Nick.

  The book on Native American mythology was especially interesting. Wolves played a big part in almost all recorded tribal beliefs. In this region, they were considered powerful totem animals, spirit guides who would offer bravery and assistance in the hunt and in war. Because they were pack animals, the Native Americans saw in them parallels to their own hunting and gathering bands.

  Down in the desert Southwest, the Native Americans had a different view of their local wild canine, the coyote. He was a trickster god, sowing chaos while at the same time being partially responsible for the creation of the world. The Navajo also believed in skin-walkers, witches who could take on the shape of various animals, most commonly coyotes. They’d lay curses and attack lone travelers. Nick vaguely remembered watching a TV movie about skin-walkers, based on a novel by Tony Hillerman. He wondered if the cat killer had seen the same movie.

  He found plenty of examples of wolves in ancient Native American art, too, painted on pottery and carved into or painted onto rocks. Archaeologists had numerous theories as to what these meant but mostly they had to make assumptions based on historical accounts of Native American tribes. The necessity of projecting those beliefs back several centuries made any theory highly debatable.

  The next day, when he had a spare moment between classes, Nick checked the online version of the Republic Gazette. Like the sheriff said, the paper contained no mention of the slaughtered cat or weird symbols in the woods. Instead, there was a front-page story of the meth lab bust, complete with a picture of a smiling Sheriff O’Connor.