“Come up.”
Tad reached up and took hold of the rope, giving it a practiced tug. The trapdoor slid down with a slight hiss and stopped above Tad’s head, revealing a ladder folded in two attached to its underside. He was easily tall enough to reach one of the rungs of the outer section of the ladder, which he now unfolded so that it reached down so that the bottom step rested on the floor of the hallway. He left the pole leaning against the wall as before and padded his way up in his bare feet, still holding the rolled up socks in one hand.
“Pull the ladder up,” Daisy said. She was sitting in one of the far corners with her back to him. He did so, standing on the upper section of the ladder and reaching down to tug on the lower one. As it swung up he stepped off of it and into the attic. The ladder slid the rest of the way up of its own accord and the trapdoor snapped shut with a dry click. Tad sat next to the folded ladder and pulled his socks on one by one. The attic was much larger than his room or Casey’s. The walls slanted up to form the peak of the house fifteen feet above, supported by six tremendous wooden beams that stretched from one end to the other. Daisy’s bed was in one of the farther corners opposite the trapdoor, though it wasn’t actually a bed. It looked rather like a large nest consisting mainly of old blankets and rags. Tad knew that there was a pallet under there somewhere, not that there was any real use for it. When Daisy slept, she didn’t stretch out so much as burrow under all the quilts and things, rolling herself into the tightest ball possible and leaving only a tiny chink in the armor to allow her to breathe. There were two light sources in the room. One was a large oriental lantern, a sort of circular globe inlaid with wire, violet in color, and covered with scarlet blossoms and leaping carp. It was suspended by a rope from the beam nearest to where Daisy was sitting, hanging about three feet from the ground. All other light in the room came from a night light plugged into an outlet in the far wall, about four inches in diameter, shaped like the head of a grinning orange and white cat. It was, in fact, meant to be the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. The pale tangerine light that shone from the cat’s head, dim as it was, illuminated barely a third of the attic, leaving most of that side in deep shadow, while the light from the lamp was fairly magnificent by comparison. It was the same rich violet as the source from which it emanated, and it colored everything on that side of the room, from the walls, to Daisy’s nest, to the several other objects that sat about, most of them covered by drop cloths like pieces of furniture being saved from the painters. These might have been called Daisy’s art projects, though she hated that particular term. In addition to these, there were a great many books, most of them shoved under the eaves of the house in untidy piles, and there were others scattered across the floor, some of them open. There was also a mural taking up a good portion of the wall to Daisy’s left and climbing partway along the ceiling. It was a seascape in murky blues and greens that included mermen armed with tridents riding giant turtles, the spires of castles in the distance, rocks encrusted with barnacles and starfish, and several finned sea creatures that likely never existed, some having the bodies of sharks but torsos and faces that were disturbingly human. These were clustered together, and they all had the same expression, one of intense concentration. They all seemed to be looking in the same direction, at something off in the distance. It so happened that they were painted in a small section of the attic only, close to its center, where the tangerine and violet met, and the light on the floor and walls from the melding of the two was a kind of burnt fuchsia that gave some strange credence to that particular section of the mural. Tad didn’t like to look at it.
“What are you working on? That sculpture?”
“It’s almost done. I think.” She was seated Indian style, and now she turned to look at him where he sat by the trapdoor. She was very small for her age and thin, fragile looking. Her hair was the same consistency as that of her father and brothers, but a little lighter, more tawny, like her mother. It hung loose past her shoulders and covered her ears. Her eyes were darker than Tad or Casey’s. By her body she might have passed for younger than she was, but anyone who met her eyes would have taken her for older. They spoke at once of detachment, sadness, and indeed, distance. More worldly, perhaps, than the eyes of any twelve year old girl should be. A fierce perception and intelligence. She wore a heavy gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants, both of which looked too large for her. On her feet a pair of white slippers made to look like rabbits. “Did Mama talk to you?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she say?”
“I’m grounded. For a week.”
She turned away again. “You’re lucky that’s all it was. She was furious earlier. Furious. That way she gets, you know, when she doesn’t speak to anyone, but her mouth is hard and you can hear her grinding her teeth.”
“Yes.” Tad grimaced. “I hate that. At least when Pa’s mad at you he yells. I think I prefer that.”
“So where were you?”
“I went for a walk in the woods, down by the southwest part of our land. Down in The Bottoms.”
She swiveled back around. “Why on earth did you go down there? You know what Momma…”
“Yes, I know what she says.” Tad crawled across the floor, closing some of the gap between them. When he was a few feet away he stretched out on his back with a grunt and folded his arms behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. “Want to know something else?”
“What is it?”
“You have to promise not to tell. Pinkie swear.” She turned toward him again, looking at him. After a few seconds she stuck her hand out with the pinkie extended. He held his out to her and they hooked their pinkies together. Hers was very cold, as always; Daisy suffered from poor circulation. “I went over the fence,” he said.
“Over the…you mean over onto the McKenton’s property.”
“Yes. Well, actually…I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Tad ran his fingers through his hair, still looking up at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes and began to speak. He told Daisy much of what had happened, including the meeting with Daddy, the man’s appearance and mannerisms, his unsettling eyes. His overwhelming oddness. He tried to explain as well as he could the feelings of nervousness coupled somehow with those of excitement that he’d experienced. He found it difficult to convey a completely accurate depiction of the whole encounter and the lasting impression it had left, short as it had been. But Tad was blessed with an extremely accurate memory, coupled with a remarkable gift for description, and through his words he was able to capture much of the flavor of the event. He did, however, omit some rather important details, including the pulling sensation that had led him into that section of woods in the first place, and also the time lapse that had caused him to be so egregiously late and resulted in his being grounded for the first week of the summer holiday. Daisy sat and watched him, listening intently, not speaking. When it seemed that he had finished she gave a low whistle and shook her head slowly from side to side, frowning.
“He told you to call him Daddy. How perverse.”
“Yes.”
“And he said he lived there. He said that was his land.”
“Yes.”
“And he said he has a house, back in the woods somewhere.”
“I don’t know about you, Daze, but I never knew of anyone living between us and the McKenton’s, did you?” She shook her head decisively. “I asked Casey about it and he looked at me like I had two heads.”
“But you didn’t tell Casey about this person. Or Mama and Papa.”
“No. Of course not. Then they would have known I was trespassing, and I’m in enough trouble as it is. Besides, it just didn’t seem…it just didn’t seem right talking with any of them about it. I’m not sure why.” Because Daddy was something that you weren’t supposed to talk about. “Here’s the thing though, Daze. The McKenton’s own a lot of land, a heck of a lot. I have no idea how many acres, but if Daddy real
ly lives off in the woods some place, somewhere far back from the Willow Road, and there’s no easily accessible roads or trails leading to his house, then maybe he could have been telling the truth. Maybe he’s some sort of shut in who never goes into town.”
“And maybe he’s just some nut who likes to put on costumes and trespass on other people’s property. If he lived off in the woods and never went into town, then what would he eat?”
“Maybe he grows all his own food. Or maybe he has someone who delivers it to him.”
“Or maybe he doesn’t exist at all, and you fell down and bumped your head and dreamed the whole thing.”
“He exists, Daze.” Tad closed his eyes again and yawned. From two floors below, as though from a great distance or from out of the ground itself, the phone could just barely be heard, ringing. “He exists.”
The Town
In many respects, the town of Feral, West Virginia, was an ideal place for raising a family, if you held to the more popular, idealistic notions of American small town life and what it had to offer. With a population of less than thirty-five hundred, it was one of those places where you knew your neighbors and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Founded in the early eighteen hundreds, it was located in the northern part of the state, nestled somewhere between Buckhannon and Elkins, slightly south and east of Interstate 79, which stretched from Erie to Charleston. The outlying areas surrounding the town itself were farmland broken up by woods, consisting mainly of elder, maple, birch, and hickory, growing quite thick in places. There were also the many lowlands dispersed throughout, some of which formed wide expanses of marsh and bog similar to that on the southwest corner of the Surrey property that Marta Surrey was sometimes disposed to warn her children about. The countryside offered fine deer hunting in season, the streams freshwater fishing. The woods boasted a healthy variety of flora and fauna.
The town’s main street was the Willow Road, a brown ribbon that traveled lazily on for nearly thirty miles, beginning as an unpaved dirt lane to the west of town, where the Surrey family lived, not far from a green metal sign with white lettering featuring the rather innocuous message- Feral, West Virginia: A Fine Place to Live. The Willow Road narrowed and widened in turns until it became a two lane blacktop, dotted with potholes, that cut through the center of Feral proper before petering out at the end of a steep hill another five miles beyond. The downtown area, if it could possibly be referred to as such, consisted of ten paved roads, the same length, equidistant from each other, running from north to south. These all bearing names like Larkspur Lane and Alder Avenue and Primrose Place. Feral’s main businesses were a pair of grocery stores, a bait shop, a few diners, pizza parlors and ice cream shops, a flower shop, a hardware store, a five and dime, an auto mechanic, a bookstore, an antique store, drug store, movie theater, and a McDonalds. There was the library that also served as the hall of records, a church, and the town hall, a solemn, impassive stone building with a fountain in front that was dry year round, and the sheriff’s office and the fire department nearby. Slightly east of downtown were the high school and the combination middle-elementary school, the pair of educational institutions that both Walt and Marta Surrey had attended in their youth and which were now frequented by their offspring. Both buildings were located in the same complex, separated by the athletic fields, kindergarten through eighth grade in one, and ninth through twelfth housed in the other. If Tad Surrey thought of himself as being in limbo for the moment, In Between, perhaps he was justified. After all, upon completion of the eighth grade, he would now be required to make the switch to the high school next fall, where he would be a freshman and Casey would be a senior. Freshman at Feral High were usually referred to by the seniors as “Fresh Meat,” and subject to any one of a variety of tried and true hazing rituals that ranged from theft of their lunches or pants to being whipped thoroughly with slim tree branches or homemade paddles. Normally the younger siblings of any of the football players were off limits, but Tad suspected, and rightly so, that instead of being able to rely on Casey for protection, the rest of the team would probably be on standing orders from his brother to thrash him as often as they could catch him.
Casey was probably the closest thing that Feral High School had ever had to a football prodigy. Though he couldn’t have told you who Wordsworth was, or located the state of Idaho on a map, or multiplied seven by nine without stopping to puzzle over it for a few minutes, he had no trouble playing any position on the field. He excelled at both offense and defense, having the size and power of an interior lineman and the speed and agility of a wide receiver. He was all over the field, and never felt better than when he was mowing down the opposition, meting out bruises, bumps, and the occasional compound fracture. If his younger brother felt most comfortable and fulfilled when he could escape to one of his self-manufactured fantasy worlds, Casey felt most himself on game day, on the battlefield, when he could tell friend from foe by the color of their jersey and by which side of the field they were facing.
Casey was far and away the most well liked of the Surrey children, though he didn’t particularly revel in the attention that was lavished on him by his classmates. Not to say that he disliked it either, it was just that his popularity stemmed mainly from his neither following the herd nor stepping up to lead it. He was content to merely subsist and let his actions on the field speak for him, ignoring those around him until such time as they irritated him. This quality, along with his football prowess and physical stature, made him possibly the most sought after male at Feral High, as indifference may arguably be the most powerful aphrodisiac in attracting women of the age group to which Casey belonged.
Tad’s place in the social hierarchy was, at this point in his life, not so firmly established. He was neither extraordinarily popular nor unpopular. Among the males in his class, the rest of whom would also be making the transition to Fresh Meat status in a few months, he had several friends, and many more with whom he was friendly, but none that he were very close with, and none that he confided in. He had no best friend to speak of, and when there was something important that he had to get off his chest, it was Daisy that he turned to. Tad was a dreamer, a late bloomer, living very much within his own mind. The kindling of the man that he would become was in place, but on the surface, at least, no spark had been lit. Yet within, the pilot light twinkled away, and could be seen sometimes, from a distance, if you knew when and how to look.
Daisy had no friends. She was a loner, an outcast in every sense of the word, gifted, sharp, and miserable. In school she excelled at every subject but never volunteered to answer a question or actively participate in any way. She sat at the front of the bus in the mornings and stared fixedly ahead of her, then instead of socializing with the other children she would wait for the bell signaling the start of classes on the far end of the school yard, seated under a tree Indian style reading a book. If called on she would stare stonily ahead, refusing to meet the gaze of the teacher, while in a loud, clear voice she gave an answer that sounded as though it came word for word from a government issued textbook, as indeed it had. At lunch it was the same. She sat at one of the corner tables of the lunchroom, as far away from the other students as possible, reading, her fierce eyes darting back and forth across each page. Once each word entered the vault that was Daisy’s mind, it did not escape. You would think that this sort of behavior might have made her a prime target for bullying and ridicule, but that wasn’t the case; in actuality the other students gave her a wide berth. Such was the aura about her. She was a presence in the same way that Casey was, at half his size.
It was Daisy that had staked out the Surrey attic as her unchallenged territory some years before. At a very young age, in order to escape the noise and scrutiny of the other family members, and Casey in particular, who was the only one who ignored her mystique and went out of his way to torment her, she had begun wrapping herself up in the quilt from her bed, taking a book, and retreating to the lofty heights above, vent
uring down only at mealtimes, when she was forced to by her mother, and for school, the whole experience of which she tolerated with disdain. Eventually it got to the point where Marta had ordered her husband to remove the junk from the attic and transfer it to the garage, and to do everything he could to make the drafty space as livable as possible. “If she wants to live like a hermit,” Marta had declared, “I’m not going to stop her. Anyhow, I’m sure it’s just a phase,” she’d remarked to her husband, who’d nodded, his eyes not moving from the screen. But the phase had lasted five years and counting, with no signs of letting up, and Marta had long since resigned herself to the fact that her daughter might not come down from the attic until the time came for her to move out of house. Marta had a policy when it came to conducting household matters that essentially stated that if none of the Governing Principles of Surrey Family Life were being violated, then there was no harm in it, whatever it might be. The Governing Principles went something like this: all family members, without exception, would break bread together twice a day at a previously appointed time. We have already seen the potential ramifications that could result from the violation of this particular clause. At such times, the family was to make a concerted effort to be civil to each other and even engage in polite conversation when appropriate. Each member of the family also had a number of chores, daily, weekly, or seasonal, to contribute to the general upkeep of the house and grounds. If they shirked these duties appropriate action would be determined by Marta. The only one who was allowed any slack was Walt Surrey; in his role as husband and father he was the sole family member immune to her threats, though not, as has been documented, to her deserts. Although the Surrey property could be classified as a farm, and was sometimes referred to as such, there had been no livestock kept on it or crops grown for the past forty-odd years, other than Marta’s modestly sized vegetable garden behind the house. Percival Surrey had kept horses in a stable nearby until he’d grown too old to ride and had traded them, as the story went, for a dozen cases of Kentucky bourbon whiskey. He’d kept hogs and chickens as well, which he’d cared for himself, but the last of these had been slaughtered when Walt was an adolescent. Walt was no farmer. He’d worked full time at Bull Busey’s auto body shop in town since he’d graduated from Feral High in 1981, and was widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable mechanics in the county. If Walt’s holdings in every direction from the house were to be tallied, he actually owned nearly fifty total acres, but he did next to nothing with it. None of the Surrey’s fields were tended, having been overgrown since Percival’s time. It had been years since the chicken coops had been demolished; the stables were still standing, weather beaten hulks full of moldy hay occupied now by swallows and rats, at the edge of the field behind the house.
Woods Page 4