The People In The Woods

by Robert Brown

  Nick scrolled through the pages, ending up at the classified ads. There he found two notices for missing cats and a notice for a missing dog. One of the cats was a mature tabby, like the one that had been slaughtered. Nick sent an email to the sheriff, informing him.

  He then sat back in his office chair, musing about the person, or persons, who had done this thing. What were they up to? While on the surface it appeared to be just some twisted teenage rebellion, like an exaggerated version of the goths and metalheads who had infested his own high school, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something more was going on. The sculptures were too carefully done, the goading of the witness—himself—too deliberate. His initial suspicion that it was a group of wannabe Satanists seemed too pat, too obvious.

  Nick wondered whether the choice of location was significant—a dead town, a crumbling railway station, the old tracks. Or perhaps it was just a convenient yet still isolated place. Had the animal sacrifice—if that indeed was what it was—been intended to be seen by someone before it was taken away? Had he inadvertently become part of this twisted ritual?

  The following day was his easy day. He had no afternoon classes and could slip away to the Jackson County Historical Society, located in the basement of the underused municipal library. Nick had never been down there. After descending a flight of stairs, he passed through a wooden door that needed a paint job and entered a small room with a few tables and several rows of bookshelves. An even smaller room beyond an open doorway contained a couple of microfilm machines and some file cabinets. An old lady with a perm sat behind a desk, studying him through horn-rimmed glasses. She wasn’t reading, just sitting. Nick noticed they were the only two people there.

  “May I help you?” she asked. It came out almost as a challenge.

  “Yes, I’m looking for information on the towns that used to be along the old railway.”

  “Oh, yes, we have all sorts of information on that.” She stood and hobbled over to the bookshelves. “Did one of your ancestors work on the railroad?”

  “Not that I know of,” he replied, following her.

  “Most people who come down here are researching their genealogy. They have ties to the community,” the woman said.

  “I’m from out of state.”

  “Yes.”

  The old woman pulled down a book with gnarled, arthritic fingers and handed it to him. The title was Railway Memories of Jackson County, written in a simple font above a bad hand-drawing of a train on the cover. The book looked self-published. Then the woman went to a case and pulled out a map. Spreading it out on the table, she ran her finger along a railway line that traversed a map of a much smaller version of Republic. Nick looked at the date—1908.

  He found the campus, also much smaller, and the main street beside it. Where the new campus now was, the map showed private homes.

  “So, this neighborhood was demolished for the university expansion in the Seventies?” he asked.

  The librarian got a pinched-faced look, like she was sucking on a lemon. “That’s right. It was a forced buyout on very unfavorable terms. My uncle lost the house he was born in. His father, my great-uncle, had also been born in that house, as were his two sisters, my great-aunts. That’s the one right there.”

  She pointed to a little dot on the map. Nick guessed from the location that it was probably where the flashy new Biosciences building stood.

  “That’s a pity,” Nick said.

  “It was more than a pity; it was a crying shame. But the university chancellor had the ear of all those big shots in the state capital and got his way. The university always gets its way.”

  Nick was no longer listening. He traced the railway, which had once run along the edge of the main road before taking a sharp turn and heading out of town. That was where the modern trail had started. The portion where the tracks ran parallel to the road must have been removed or buried when the road was expanded from two lanes to four.

  He traced the route with his finger and found a cluster of buildings where he had seen the ruins. Unlike today, when a highway ran less than a mile away and a housing development was only half a mile away, back then the town had been isolated. Only a couple of paths connected it to the outside world. One led to Republic and the other ran off the edge of the map. Nick saw no name and no railway station.

  “What was this?” he asked.

  “Oh, that was the nig—the black part of town.”

  Nick glanced up at her, then away.

  “Did this neighborhood have a name?”

  “I suppose they called it something.”

  “Do you have any maps on a larger scale?”

  “Certainly.”

  She produced another one, and Nick could trace the railway going both ways out of town. He found several villages dotting its route, some with names, some without. This map dated to 1940 and it indicated that a station had existed in the unnamed settlement that Nick had visited.

  He paid for photocopies of both maps and sat down to read the local history. It was full of typos and amateurish drawings but also plenty of interesting anecdotes from various contributors. There was a lot about working on the railroad in those days, the track being laid in 1887 and abandoned in 1964, plus some nostalgic laments about the vanished communities that had sprung up along its route. There was nothing about the black village near Republic. In fact, it was an entirely white history.

  “Would you like to look in the vertical file of newspaper and magazine clippings?” asked the librarian.

  “I think this is fine for today.”

  The maps were the most useful. He could compare them with Google Earth and try to find the locations where the ruins would be nowadays. With luck, some would still be standing. Perhaps the cat killer had a penchant for abandoned villages.

  Nick knew what he’d be doing Saturday morning.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The village of Mason was just where he thought it would be. The old map indicated it was five miles west of Republic—far enough in the horse-and-buggy days to feel like a separate community instead of an outlying district. It was the next closest settlement along the railway, besides the black neighborhood whose name the cartographers hadn’t bothered to record. The book had made brief mention of Mason, a town founded in the early settler days as little more than a crossroads and a general store. When the railway came through, that general store had become the loading point for agricultural goods and the town blossomed. It reached a population of a whopping two hundred before the railway was discontinued. There was no record of when the last person died or left but it was unincorporated in 1980.

  Using the map and Google Earth, Nick had figured out that it was near the end of a dirt road off a county road a couple miles from the interstate. He had told Cheryl, already buried in work in her home office, that he was going “out” for the morning and he let her assume that he was doing his usual jog and visit to the department. Instead, he found that county road, drove it to its end, and then drove slowly down the dirt road, the bottom of his Ford scraping at times against the rills in the rutted, poorly maintained surface. Young trees grew close to either side.

  He hadn’t passed a farm in over a mile when he came to a moldering wooden house on his left. It looked like it had once been a prosperous home, its two stories now almost overgrown with vines. The porch was warped. In spots, plants were actually growing through gaps in the floorboards. The doorless entrance and the windows, all without glass, were black rectangles, revealing nothing of what lay within.

  The front yard was too overgrown and Nick couldn’t find any other place to pull off, so he simply got as close to the edge of the one-lane road as he could and parked. It wasn’t like anyone else would be driving along there.

  Cicadas hummed and the sun felt unseasonably strong as he stepped out of the car. He estimated that the dirt track on which he stood was one of the original roads that had created the crossroads, but he didn’t see the other road. No doubt, it had f
allen into disuse and had been covered with new growth, much like that settlement closer to town.

  Nick stood by his car, staring at the farmhouse for a minute. He saw no sign that the animal killer had been here. But perhaps this was too obvious a place, too plainly in sight.

  Pushing through high grass and bushes, he entered the darker, cooler shade of the forest and spotted the settlement almost immediately. Beyond the farmhouse stood a couple of outbuildings, one a collapsed heap, the other listing to the side like a drunk who had lost his way home. Farther in, through the dim light of the forest to which his eyes were just beginning to adjust, he could see the remains of more buildings.

  He walked among them. They were better preserved, perhaps better made and newer than the old black neighborhood of Republic. Nick was amazed at how quickly it had all been covered up. He hadn’t been able to see any of this from Google Earth. In just four decades, perhaps a bit longer, trees and bushes had taken over to the point that what had once been a village was now just a few sad ruins in the forest.

  None were as well preserved as the house on the main road. Nick chuckled as he found himself thinking of it as the “main road,” but it had once been exactly that.

  He spotted another house in decent shape. It was a tidy, two-story wooden farmhouse like the last, standing by a clearer area in the forest that he recognized as the remains of the other road. He wondered why that had been allowed to grow over and not a stretch of the other one. Maybe the farmhouse he had parked in front of had been the last to be lived in, its road maintained for a time.

  Yet who was keeping it up now? The house had been abandoned for years but that road, despite its sad shape, wasn’t overgrown. Who used this area, and for what?

  That question dogged him as he approached the second house. Like with the first, trees crowded close around it. The porch roof sagged, its two wooden columns having fallen away. On the left-hand side of the house, marigolds bloomed in wild profusion. To the right, Nick recognized cabbages and beet root. Some farmer’s wife had planted these long ago and still they grew.

  He was just stepping onto the relatively bare patch of the road, its surface noticeably firmer than the forest floor, when he heard a metallic click behind him.

  Nick froze.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” a rough voice demanded.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Slowly, his back tense and his knees watery, Nick raised his hands.

  “That’s right, buddy, you put those hands in the air if you don’t want a double load of buckshot in your back. Now turn around slow so I can get a good look at you before I call the cops.”

  “I’m not a criminal,” Nick said, embarrassed at how his voice came out in a high-pitched squeak.

  “You’re trespassing. That makes you a criminal, don’t it?”

  Nick turned and saw a man in filthy jeans and a wifebeater t-shirt that exposed an American flag tattoo on one skinny arm. The man was lanky but gave the impression of strength. He looked about thirty-five or so, with a thin, angular face made more youthful by the inadequate fuzz of a moustache. His had prominent ears, a buzz cut of brown hair, and suspicious brown eyes that didn’t stray from Nick for an instant. In his hands he gripped a double-barreled shotgun. The twin barrels stared at Nick like a pair of dark eyes.

  “I was just out for a walk,” Nick said, realizing how lame his words sounded.

  “Just out for a walk, huh? Turn out your pockets.”

  Nick did as he was told, producing his wallet and a set of car keys.

  “I have about a hundred dollars in here. You’re welcome to it. Just let me go and I won’t tell anyone.”

  The local glared at him. “You think I’m going to rob you?”

  “No! Um, not at all. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “What’s with the camera?” asked the man, gesturing with his gun.

  Nick tensed. For a second there he’d thought the guy was going to pull the trigger.

  “I was going to take photographs of this old town. I’m a professor at Republic University. I’m interested in these old towns.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? Can’t I be interested in something for its own sake?”

  Nick was appalled by his tone. But he had dealt with indifference for years from clueless undergrads who went to college only so they could party off their parents’ money for another four years. He was sick of his lifelong pursuit of knowledge being dismissed.

  Now’s not the time to make a stand, idiot.

  The man with the shotgun shook his head and grinned. Nick had expected to see a ruin of snaggly teeth and gaps, but the man’s teeth actually looked pretty healthy.

  “Fucking eggheads. So damn smart and they waste their time wandering around abandoned houses. If you’re so smart, why don’t you figure out how to make pesticides that don’t cause cancer or how to keep Mexico from taking our jobs?”

  “Can I put my hands down?” Nick asked.

  “Sure thing, egghead.”

  Slowly, Nick lowered his hands, then put his wallet and keys back in his pockets. The man pointed the shotgun at the ground.

  “You live around here?” Nick asked.

  “In a trailer just up the road. Saw you come in and thought you were a troublemaker.”

  “You had trouble around here?”

  “Yeah, some group of weirdos was here last week doing fucked-up shit in the old town.”

  Nick’s heart leaped. “Did they kill an animal and hang up some figures made of sticks?”

  The gunman’s eyes widened. “How you know?”

  “Because they did the same thing closer to town, at the end of the jogging trail that runs out of Republic. They mutilated a squirrel and hung up a bunch of stick figures. When I went back the next day, the stuff was gone and another animal, a cat, had been killed a little farther into the woods. I took some pictures.”

  The local cocked his head.

  “You the law?”

  “No.”

  “Reporter?”

  “No. I’m a professor, like I said.” Nick pulled out his university ID and showed it to him.

  “Nicholas Upton, Professor of Anth-Anth …”

  “Anthropology.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The study of people.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Not that kind of doctor. I study cultures around the world.”

  “The university pays you a fat salary to run around the woods studying weirdos who cut up animals for kicks?”

  “Not exactly. What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Clayton. Clayton Miller.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Nick extended a hand.

  Clayton shouldered his gun and shook it.

  “So, tell me what happened here,” Nick said.

  “Oh, it happened last week. Monday, I guess it was.”

  “The day after I found the cat.”

  “Yeah, except it was a dog.”

  Nick’s stomach turned. “A dog?”

  Clayton looked hurt. “Yeah, a nice golden retriever. Cut his belly right open and cut off all his paws, too. How can somebody do that?”

  Nick shook his head. “I don’t know. They did the same to the squirrel and the cat. Where did it happen?”

  “The dog was laid out on that porch over there, and there were all these weird stick figures hanging from the trees right where we’re standing. That’s why I thought you were one of them. The night before, I heard a couple of cars pass the trailer. I didn’t pay it much mind. Sometimes kids come down here to get high or fuck. They never bother me. They just want to be left alone, same as me. Well, the next afternoon I came on down here to clean up.”

  “Clean up?”

  “Yeah, they always leave beer cans and rubbers and stuff scattered all around. It’s disrespectful. These were people’s homes. There’s a little private graveyard a bit farther in. People should leave this place alone. Well, anyway, I came down here
and I saw the dog and all those sculptures. Nearly shit my pants. Some damn Satanist coven summoning the Devil not a mile from where me and the little lady were sleeping. So, I took down one of them stick men to show Trisha—that’s my little lady—and ran back to the trailer.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “We don’t like the law ‘round here. We handle our own affairs.”

  “But you were going to call the cops on me.”

  Clayton grinned. “Because you’re a townie boy. Townie boys are always afraid of the law.”

  “I see,” Nick said. He turned and studied the house. Clayton gestured toward it and they began to walk.

  “Just as I was showing her that stick man thing, I see two cars pass right on by, heading this way. Trisha freaked out. I grabbed my gun, but she wanted me to stay put. Like hell I would. I was going to drive them off. So, I had her get the spare .22 and lock the trailer up tight. Then I went after the motherfuckers.”

  “I would have called the police.”

  “It would have taken them at least half an hour to get out here and by then we could have all been sacrificed to Satan. Naw, I needed to get this done my own self. I wanted to get the jump on them, so I didn’t use the pickup. Instead, I cut across the field and snuck through these woods here. That was a mistake. Gave them too much time. I figured they would be out here for a while doing their coven thing but really they just came out here to clean up.”

  “Like they did near Republic.”

  Nick and Clayton reached the house. At one corner of the porch, a dark stain mottled the warped boards. Nick’s mouth went dry.

  Clayton nodded. “By the time I got here, they were pulling out. Two cars. One a red Lexus and the other, the one in front, some gray four-door. Didn’t get a good look at it. And before you ask, no, I didn’t get a license plate for either of them.”

  “And everything had been taken away.”

  “That’s right. The dog was right here. Must have taken it with them because I searched all around and couldn’t see or smell a thing. Didn’t bury it, neither. I would have seen that.”