The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  “Have you been out here all night?” she said. “You're going to catch pneumonia in this wind.”

  He was wearing his clothes from the night before; his shoes were untied, the laces hanging down and tickling his ankles. There was a wind blowing; he felt it now.

  “What time did you get in last night? I didn't even hear you.”

  “I don't know,” he mumbled. Last night, last night . . . he tried to recollect it all. It seemed so very long ago.

  “Peter,” she said, crouching down beside him now, “do you remember seeing Dodger when you got in? Did you go into the kitchen for anything? Did you let him out, by any chance?”

  He tried to lower his legs from the balustrade, but they were as stiff as stilts. He winced as he straightened up in the chair. “What?” he asked. “What do you want to know?”

  She repeated her question. But Peter couldn't recall. “Why?”

  “Because Byron just discovered he's missing. He's not in the kitchen, and By asked me to ask you if you knew anything about it.”

  Why should he know anything about it? It was Byron's damned dog—let him keep track of it. He told Meg he had no idea where Diogenes was.

  She stood up again, clutching the neck of her bathrobe shut. “I better go tell him,” she said. “He's starting to get frantic.” She paused before going. “Are you coming inside now?”

  “If I can move,” he grumbled.

  On his way to the bathroom, he glanced over at the clock—it wasn't even nine yet. And already the place was getting into a panic. Meg had left the door to the hall open; he stopped to close it. No use encouraging any more visits just now.

  What did happen last night? He remembered that little soirée at the Caswells. And a game of billiards afterwards. He'd lost some money, too—he remembered handing a twenty-dollar bill to Jack. Not a lot else came to mind. He ran some lukewarm water into the sink and lapped it over his cold hands and wrists. He rubbed his face, then looked at it in the mirror. He had a thick, dark stubble, even the beginning of a faint moustache. Hadn't he shaved just last night, before going to the Caswells? God, this was getting to be a nuisance. Maybe he should just let it be. Grow a beard and forget it.

  He'd seldom seen himself look so bad. His eyes looked puffy and dull. His skin was dark from the sun, but at the same time sallow and inelastic—it felt taut. As for his hair . . . well, maybe it was time to get a regular haircut, after all. It was getting so long, particularly on the sides, that he was starting to look like a musketeer. Jesus, he thought, noticing a tiny bit of twig caught in the curls above his right ear, he was even starting to collect things in it. When did that get there? He plucked it out—at first it didn't want to come—then irritably swept back his hair behind both ears. More like he used to wear it. Now he looked a little more like his old self again.

  Except for one thing.

  He looked more closely into the mirror, then, still not sure of what he was seeing, went in search of his glasses. He found them outside, under the chair on the balcony. He opened the medicine chest mirror to get a better view of the side of his head. He held back the hair with his fingers.

  Now there was no mistaking it. His ears, or at least the one he was looking at now, were—he could hardly believe it—pointed. He quickly felt at the other. Yes, it, too—and worse. His fingers recoiled at the first touch, at the first contact with the fine—so fine it was almost invisible—matting of short, soft hairs. They had sprouted like fur all over the lobe and up around the outer rim. He hurriedly touched the first ear—and felt the same downy cover. So blond it was almost white, so soft it was like the first hairs on the head of a baby. His breath stopped. He stared, refusing to believe it, into the mirror.

  When had this happened? Was it actually happening now? His mind was torn between finding some rational explanation for the change and denying it altogether. Maybe his ears had always been shaped like that. Maybe those fine hairs had always been there, and he'd just never noticed them. He tried desperately to believe it, to tell himself there was nothing wrong. But the evidence in the mirror wouldn't go away—no matter how he angled the glass or tilted his head. His ears were different; they had never before looked like this.

  He moved away from the sink, sat down heavily on the thick ledge of the sunken tub. He'd have to think; he'd have to concentrate. Something was happening, something needed to be done, and he'd have to shake off his stupor and deal with it. He heard the bedroom door open, then close again. Meg called his name, and before he could get up and close the door to the bathroom, she was standing on the threshold. He dropped his head and swatted his hair forward, over his ears again.

  “Still no sign of him,” she said, as if that's what he'd been thinking about all that time. “I'm going to get dressed and go help Byron look.”

  She went back into the bedroom, and he could hear her moving about, putting on her clothes. “One thing did occur to me,” she said in worried tones from somewhere near the closet. “We left the gates open for you. If Dodger got out of the kitchen after we'd gone to bed and before you got home, he could be anywhere by now.”

  He heard hangers being pushed along the rod.

  “Though I'm amazed he can get around at all yet, with that shoulder still healing,” she added. The closet door swung shut. “What are you doing in there, anyway?”

  “I was about to shave.”

  She was over by the bed now; he heard her robe being thrown across the mattress, then her jeans being pulled up. “Well, as soon as you're done, if you could come downstairs and help us with the search . . .” She zipped the zipper.

  “I'll be down in a few minutes,” he said. When would she finish up in there and leave? “I'm sure nothing's wrong.” Now she was buttoning her shirt; he could hear the plastic button click against her fingernail, then slip through the starched fabric.

  And then, it occurred to him what he'd just heard—such infinitesimal sounds, hardly sounds at all, but as audible and clear to him now as the roaring of a cannon. He hadn't even strained; he'd simply heard them, effortlessly, and with perfect clarity.

  She was tying the laces on her sneakers now. “I hope you're right,” she said. “I hope Dodger is okay, wherever he is.” The beating of her heart—he could hear that, too, as if he'd laid his head against her breasts. She finished with the shoes and got up off the edge of the bed. “I'll see you downstairs,” she said, and just before leaving, added, “and maybe later on we can discuss your new al fresco sleeping arrangement.”

  He heard the door close, her footsteps on the stairs; if he'd wanted, he felt he could even listen to her thoughts somehow. As Leah seemed able to listen to his. He got up unsteadily, his legs still aching, and left the bathroom without even a glance at the mirror. He'd worry about shaving some other time. In the bedroom, he changed his shirt, straightened himself up, and still feeling too shaken, too irresolute, to face anyone downstairs yet—and who cared what happened to Diogenes? he'd turn up—went into his study.

  First, he locked the door behind him. Then, after flicking on the desk lamp, he took the key to the latticed bookcase from its new hiding place under an empty thermidor and opened the cabinet. He withdrew the squat black box—the pyxis—and put it on the desk. According to Byron, its original purpose had probably been to hold salves or medications; well, here it was, doing just that again. It crossed his mind, as he took out the plastic bag of cocaine, that maybe this had something to do with what he'd seen in the mirror—or thought he'd seen. He still wasn't prepared to admit it as fact yet. Maybe the drug was giving him hallucinations. It wasn't supposed to, but who knew? Maybe it had.

  Not that he'd quit, even over that. His hands methodically went about pouring the coke onto the inner lid of the box, then chopping it into powder with the razor blade that he kept in the folder of Ko-Rec-Type beside his typewriter. With the edge of the blade, he gathered the fine white silt into two equal piles, then straightened the piles into two narrow lines. There wasn't a lot left in the bagg
ie; he'd have to call Lazaroff. Or ask Jack. Jack virtually pressed the stuff on him—and gratis. He rolled an index card covered with notes on Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy into a tight funnel, put one end in his left nostril and the other to one end of a line of coke; with the right side of his nose pinched shut, he inhaled in one swift snort. He threw back his head, felt the hot, familiar tingling in his nose and septum. When it subsided, he repeated the procedure on the other side, then flopped into the leather armchair to wait for, and enjoy, the full rush.

  It came quickly, and with it the surge of energy and vitality that he'd come to count on. To do his work. To face his doubts. To get through the long, hard days. What he had, or hadn't, seen in the mirror that morning became increasingly irrelevant—everything lost its terror for him, its power over him. He was the sole master of his fate, and what he didn't will to happen wouldn't happen. He closed his eyes and rode the wave for a while. This was the way he always wanted to feel. Fast, and abandoned. There was one other thing that made him feel it, too—and that was Leah. When they made love. In the bay. Or her bedroom. Or the secret glade she'd shown him. The coke made him want her, made him want her right now. He could feel the blood pulsing in his thighs, and in his crotch, and in his hands. But that wasn't possible now. Diogenes was missing; he had to put in an appearance downstairs. A concerned appearance. A command performance. He flew up out of the chair, stashed the drug paraphernalia back in the bookcase. He glanced at the notes on the index card, laughed to himself, and dropped the card in the wastebasket.

  His mother, he thought, was undoubtedly awaiting him downstairs. So it was time to put a face on, a bright and happy and optimistic face. He mustn't, he reminded himself strongly, betray even the slightest doubt about Dodger's safety . . . even though something—a flickering image of fire and a forest by night—kept bobbing up in his mind's eye, like a ripe, blood-red apple, temptingly close but impossible to catch hold of.

  “Where haven't you looked?” Meg asked as Byron paced along the edge of the fountain.

  “I don't know,” he said, becoming more and more worried. “I don't know where he could be that I haven't already looked.” He was wearing his brown sport coat; the wind was still blowing, cool and damp.

  Though she was almost afraid to ask, afraid of what the answer might be, she did ask if he'd been to Nikos's cottage; had the mastiffs been locked in their kennel?

  “Yes,” he said, quickly and decisively, as if reminding himself of that provided some fleeting comfort. “They were asleep, in fact. Nikos said he was obeying orders.”

  “You saw Nikos? Did you tell him about Dodger?”

  “He didn't look like he was going to lose any sleep over it. He was tending the vines along the side of his house. He said he'd help us look as soon as he'd finished with whatever the hell he was doing with them.”

  “And you've been up and down the road outside the front gates?”

  “Yep,” he said, “though to tell you the truth, I can't believe Dodger would have left the estate. He just ain't that adventurous—at least not when he's alone. I don't even know how he got out of the kitchen.”

  “Well, we can figure that out later,” Meg said, “after we've found him.” She tried to make his discovery sound certain. “Let's do some reconnoitering.”

  With Mrs. Constantine manning the phone inside, just in case anyone called to say Dodger had been found wandering the streets of Passet Bay, Meg and Byron set off around the grounds again. They started with the land in front, combing through the wooded acres, hollering out Dodger's name, looking, often with their hearts in their mouths, into particularly dense patches of shrubbery. Byron picked up a large fallen branch and, stepping on one end, snapped off a four- or five-foot length; he used the staff to swat aside bracken that obstructed their path and once or twice to help with his footing when climbing over moss-covered tree trunks. Meg, in her sneakers and jeans, scrambled along beside, or after, him.

  In the area between the house and Huntingdon Road, there was no sign of Dodger. But when they were halfway down the back lawn, Meg thought she detected, on the stiffening breeze from the water, the faintest scent of something burning, like a pile of leaves on an autumn day. She waited to see if Byron would notice it, too.

  He dropped his hands. “Do you smell something?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Like smoke?”

  The first night in Arcadia came back to Byron—with the chase he'd witnessed on the back lawn and the smell of something smoldering. “Where's it coming from, do you think?”

  “I'd say that direction,” Meg said, pointing toward the woods that bordered the lawn. Toward the thick ranks of black-trunked trees, whose leaves rustled and swayed under the gray morning sky. Toward the hidden glade that she had discovered, weeks before, with Diogenes. She had told Byron about the incident there; he remembered it too, and squinted at her.

  “You’d better lead the way, then.”

  Lead the way? It was only by chance that she had stumbled upon the glade that day. How would she find it again now? They cut in through the trees at roughly the spot she had come in before. It was difficult to make much progress; everything was so overgrown, and what paths they could find brought them, as usual, to dead ends or, as far as they could tell, back to where they'd started. Unlike the last time she'd been in these woods, today it was dark and gloomy. There was no sun blazing through the treetops, but only a dull gray light ineffectually filtering down.

  “Doesn't anything in here look familiar to you?” Byron asked in frustration.

  “No,” Meg had to admit. “It all looks the same to me. But I wasn't the one who found that glade in the first place—Dodger sniffed it out.”

  Byron hollered once or twice; the only reply was a fresh gust of wind shaking the branches around them. But on that wind came the faint aroma of charcoal again; they both smelled it, and instantly set off in the general direction it seemed to be coming from. Meg tried not to think what the smell could mean, but she remembered vividly the burnt circle in the center of the glade. A raindrop touched her cheek. Then another.

  “I think we're on a trail again,” Byron said, slapping aside a bough, and when she looked down she saw that they had hit upon another path, one that seemed vaguely familiar. It had a worn, hard-packed look that she thought she remembered. They followed its meandering course deeper into the heart of the woods, through dark green brush just beginning to glisten with rain, up a slight rise carpeted with wild grass and clusters of toadstools, then down again, toward what appeared to be an opening beyond the trees. Yes, it was becoming familiar to Meg, that slight rise, and the slide down the other side. And the smell, that burning odor, was stronger here than it had been anywhere else.

  Byron was the first to thread his way through the surrounding trees, then leap the moat of scrubby bushes that enclosed the glade. Meg caught her sleeve on a batch of thorns, and by the time she'd freed herself and clambered over the rest of the obstructing brush, Byron was already on his knees, his staff flung aside, at the edge of the burnt—and now faintly smoldering—circle.

  He was leaning far forward, and Meg had to come around to one side before she could see what he was looking at. And touching.

  The fur was singed to a muddy brown, in some spots black or burnt away altogether. He was lying on his side, his legs stiffly outstretched; Byron was stroking the top of his skull with one finger. Meg gagged, and felt her stomach lurch. She thought she would be sick, but she couldn't turn away; that would have been one more betrayal. She dropped to her own knees; the grass was damp.

  “Dodger . . . Dodger . . . Dodger,” Byron was saying, like a chant, under his breath.

  The head was bent backwards at a strange angle, and it took Meg a second to realize, with even greater horror, that the throat had been ripped open—the fur there was darkly clotted—and the head pulled away from the body. The leather collar was charred to a twisted black strand, black as a coat hanger; the tags hung down into a pool
of congealed blood, thick and viscous as tar.

  Byron was gently rocking back and forth on his heels. The cinders hissed in the light rain. Meg cradled her cheek against Byron's shoulder, then reached out to touch one of Dodger's blackened paws. It was as cold and hard as stone, the leg rigid.

  And his tail . . . his bushy golden tail had been torn away to a blunt stump.

  Thirty

  THE NEXT FEW hours always remained confused and chaotic for Meg. Byron had wrapped Diogenes's corpse in his old brown sport coat and carried it up to the house. In the kitchen, he'd put the bundle down on the blue bath mat. Peter had come in, with the flushed, excited expression he often had now; Mrs. Constantine had been right behind him. Meg had said something, not much, to explain what had happened—there hadn't been much she could say. How could any of this be explained? Byron hadn't said a thing; he'd simply stood there looking lost and numb until Peter, nervously rubbing his unshaven face, had tried to get a closer look at Diogenes's remains. Byron, with his long, bony arms, had suddenly flailed out at him, one fist catching Peter on the chin and knocking him into the refrigerator. Peter, instead of swinging back, had charged at Byron like a ram, butting him to the floor, where they had wrestled wildly. Mrs. Constantine had screamed and slumped against the counter; Meg had tried to catch hold of their thrashing arms and separate them. But the fight was over almost as soon as it had begun; they had fallen away from each other, ashamed and disheveled. Meg had run upstairs to Mrs. Constantine's bedroom, to fetch a bottle of red capsules from her bedside table. Meg couldn't recall if anything had been said then, or whether Byron had helped them bring Mrs. Constantine up to her room, or how long it was before she found herself alone again, in her own bedroom. What she did remember was lying down on the unmade bed and listening as the rain, now pouring down, splashed on the flagstones of the balcony. She must have lain there for at least an hour, thinking first of nothing, then of Dodger, then of nothing. It was as if she could assimilate all that had happened only in small increments, and even then only by repetition.