Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  “Oh, let’s do.”

  “Leave him alone,” the other man said, speaking for the first time. His the voice of someone just waking from a long sleep. “Leave him be. He’s just a fledgling.”

  “You’re no fun.” The woman.

  “You know what really bothers me,” Tad said. “People talking about me like I’m not in the room.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” the seated man said.

  “Come over here,” the woman said, stretching out a green finger to him. “Let me touch you so we can be sure.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh, he’s shy,” said the woman, and she and the seated man erupted into giggles again. They eventually quieted, but the woman continued gyrating, moving her hips in a slow, sensual circle. Her legs were tightly entwined around the thigh of the seated man, and she stretched her arms up over her head languidly, one after another, and smiled up at the ceiling.

  “What are you looking at?” asked the seated man.

  Tad had been watching the lights again. It was hard not to. At all times they were awake and alive and active, fading dull along the baseboards before quickly blooming up and clashing with each other and then vanishing. Like a system of glowing conduits in the walls conducting an unknowable energy from one place to another and meeting up and exchanging information before hurrying away again, or spirits of that same energy fighting tiny instantaneous battles with weapons of pure light. “The lights,” he said. He thought that he could sit and watch them all night. “They’re beautiful.”

  The woman’s face was still pointed upward, and now the over-wide painted lips split open as she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth, leering at the ceiling. “Yes,” she breathed. “The old girl is alive tonight. All her gates are open.” It was oddly reminiscent of what Daddy had said; the similarity was not lost on Tad.

  “It’s some sort of funny little hex,” said the standing man, running a finger around the rim of his cup. “Probably the master’s. I’ve seen it before. Sometimes it’s called Foxlight, or Wytchlight. You get it out in the wild, sometimes, where there’s been an unnatural death. Or to mark the entrance to a portal or a skip.”

  “Yes,” said the seated man. “Same principle, on a smaller scale. But here it’s on a timed cycle.”

  “The seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year,” Tad murmured. The other three looked at him with unreadable expressions. The woman rose with a jingle, handing her cup wordlessly to the man on the couch. She bent over, placing the palms of her hands flat against the floor. Then she lifted her legs into the air and walked casually along the ground on the flats of her hands. The tails of her cap brushed along the floor as she came nearer to Tad, who stood and watched, trying not to reveal how impressed he was by this acrobatic feat. How strong she must be, to be able to do that so effortlessly. And what balance! When she had come within a foot of him, she lowered her legs, swinging them gracefully forward, and locked them fast around his waist, at the same time using her arms to push herself up off the floor. In order to keep her from falling, Tad had to reach around the small of her back to hold her up. They ended up with their faces an inch apart, Tad using all the strength in his arms to hold her aloft. Her thighs had a death grip around his ribcage. Small in stature though they might have been, there was no denying their crushing power. Tad could feel his own legs turning to jelly; he wanted nothing more than to sink to the floor. The white oval of the woman’s face filled his vision. The bells jingled by his ear. All he could see were her eyes, floating out of that whiteness, and the grinning, grinning red of her clown’s mouth. Her eyes a deep, dark green, the green of the trees with the unknown names that surrounded Daddy’s house. The old girl is alive tonight. The woman bent forward so that her face was nestled against Tad’s shoulder, and she inhaled deeply, sniffing at his neck, the act unmistakably animalistic. He could see the other two in his peripheral vision. There was no mistaking their amusement now. They were both grinning, enjoying this show. He was breathing in the woman in his arms, hers a high sweet smell like Pumpkin Spice tea, a muskier, richer aroma of feminine excitement that he lacked the experience to recognize but which his body knew to react to just the same. She began to laugh again, a sound cruel yet tantalizing, feeling his legs strain to remain standing, his arms tremble as he held her up. He would not allow himself to fall. “Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty,” she whispered into his ear. “What you must understand is that Decadence is not a spectator sport. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to touch it. You have to feel it. You have to taste it.” Her tongue snaked out and ran along his neck, from his shoulder up toward his ear. His legs were trembling. Only the wall was holding him up. He could feel the pulses at his back racing frantically like warm bullet trains of orange and red.

  He did not fall. He grunted, some other force having taken control, and heaved off the wall, squaring his shoulders roughly and jogging her body to a more comfortable position. His hat tumbled off his head, onto the ground. He interlocked his fingers underneath her tailbone and swung her head around so that she was forced to look him in the eye again, and he fixed his stare on the two surprised green spots in the white and growled at her. It was a true growl, a long sustained grimace from the diaphragm coupled with a narrowing of the eyes and a baring of the teeth. They were both surprised, he and the woman. Tad had never done such a thing before in his life. He felt her grip around his midsection loosen, and at the same time he let go of her so that she slithered to the floor. He thought for a second that he might have hurt her, but instead she arched her back into a bridge and lifted herself lightly up on her hands again. This time instead of walking she did a back handspring, landing crouched a few feet away from Tad, with one arm held out away from her body. He didn’t know whether he had offended her, or the others. He was relying on instinct again; never in his life had he felt that he had so little else to go on. But a moment later she grinned at him, and he smiled back delightedly, breathing an inner sigh of relief. He felt that he had passed another test. “He’s frisky,” the woman said. There was a heavy tread and Tad turned to see Stitch’s massive frame cross the threshold. The large man was wearing a hooded, chocolate colored cloak, tied around his ample waist with a length of rope; he looked like an oversized monk or druid. In one hand he held an enormous beer stein full of a clear liquid. As he turned toward the assembly, Tad saw that his face was painted too. There were single black horizontal lines under each of his eyes, and his forehead and cheeks were covered with tiny white dots, like freckles. When the woman saw him, she squealed and rushed at him. “Tiny!” She leaped for him and he caught her effortlessly with his free arm, hoisting her up to face level.

  “Hello Justine,” he rumbled. Depositing her gently on the ground again, he turned toward Tad and gave him a huge wink and pat on the shoulder that nearly felled the boy, whose legs hadn’t fully recovered from their recent trials. “And a fine evening to you too, my lad. I’m glad you could come.” He seemed so genuinely delighted to see him that Tad felt more at ease at once.

  The woman named Justine was running her hands along Stitch’s round belly. “And where did this come from?” she cooed. “Hiding a spare tire under there, my love? Or a beer cooler?”

  “Now, now,” Stitch said. “You’ll hurt my feelings. We all have to get old sometime, you know.”

  “Not all of us,” said the well dressed man, taking a sip from his cup.

  “Enjoying the night?” Stitch asked, speaking to Justine.

  “Loving it. Just love-ing it. I’d like to tie this night up and flog it.”

  “Been finding plenty to keep yourself amused?”

  “You know us, Tiny. We make our own fun. We were just playing with our new toy,” she said, turning back to Tad. “Wherever did you find him?”

  “Master Surrey is a neighbor of ours. A fellow denizen of the woods.”

  “A local, then. How exotic!”

  “That’s a new one,” Tad said. He
was going to express his annoyance again at being spoken about like he wasn’t in the room, but he decided to let it go. There didn’t seem to be any point in making an issue of it.

  “You mustn’t mind Justine,” Stitch said, perhaps reading the expression on his face. “She doesn’t mean to offend, or if she does, it’s only her way. You have to learn to have a thick skin around here.

  A buxom wench, by all accounts, and pleasing to the eye

  But ask her for a kindly word, you’re waiting till you die

  Tongue sharper than the cruelest thorns that lurk within the thicket

  Though if you’ve got an ice-cream cone she’s always sure to lick it!

  Justine gave a horrified gasp and clutched both hands to her chest. “Why, you filthy-minded rhymester! The indignity! The humiliation! The cheek! The…unmistakable ring of truth,” she finished, sidling up to Tad and reaching up to give his hat a meaningless adjustment. “You’re not being a very good host,” she said, turning back to Stitch. “A drink. Get the boy a drink.”

  “A drink,” said the man on the couch.

  “A drink,” said the man in the corner.

  Stitch nodded to Tad. “It is sort of a tradition. Everyone has a drink as part of the celebration. To expand the mind and mark the conclusion of the old cycle and the start of a new one.” He raised the stein and took a deep swallow. He closed his eyes as if savoring or deep in thought.

  “I’m underage,” Tad said. He meant it as a joke, but he instantly regretted saying it. He felt self-conscious about his age in this atmosphere as it was.

  The woman named Justine laughed and tossed her head with a tinkling of the bells. “Never worry.” She pointed to Stitch’s glass and the clear liquid inside. “It’s water. Only that and nothing more. The clear, untainted water of rejuvenation. There’s not a drop of alcohol in it. We wouldn’t think to corrupt you, pretty pretty. What do you take us for?”

  “The Essence contains no alcohol,” said the man on the couch. “It never has.”

  Tad turned toward Stitch, but he only shrugged, with an enigmatic smile. “Come,” he said. “I’ll shepherd you through the rabble.” He clapped one hand around the boy’s shoulder. Justine had returned to the couch and she waved to them with mock coyness.

  “Get your libation, pretty pretty, and come back to visit us.” And then Tad was in the next room, guided along by his large friend, as the warm lights played their incessant game of tag behind the walls. They moved quickly, and the things Tad noticed came as a rush of information. He had little time to quantify each new sight and sound and even smell as they swum past him, all part of the hodgepodge that was Decadence. One thing that he’d observed in the room with Justine and her friends and that he continued to notice now was that the house, like the porch, had been liberated from the refuse and the untidy state that he had come to expect from it. Gone were the beads and cans, the broken bottles and inexplicable objects that had littered the floor. He heard different sorts of music as they hurried along, the pounding of what sounded like many drums, the off-key plucking of a banjo, the lofty trill of a flute. All about the sound of laughter, coming from everywhere and nowhere. And the guests, of course, the guests. He had only glimpses of them, although at moments Stitch would stop to speak to someone, exchanging hugs or handshakes, and then Tad would try to take in all that he could, but there was so much. Many were in costume, as indeed he had suspected and imagined would be the case, lying up in bed night after night, unable to sleep, fantasizing about this event, the gala of all galas. There were some in brightly colored, sweeping cloaks, wearing fantastically detailed masks made to look like animals- he saw foxes, wolves, a rabbit, a stag. Some with their faces painted all a single color, or with dots, checks, or stripes, zigzags, lightning bolts. He saw men with horns, women with tails. Many were naked. Stitch stopped to speak to a dusky young woman wearing a chain mail cap and leather boots, and nothing else. Her breasts were high and pert, and there was an upturned slash of bright yellow paint dipping down to her navel and back up again, creating a smiling face. Tad saw this and looked away, quickly. He knew he was blushing, but the woman, catching his eye, only smiled at him warmly. He was too flustered to smile back. As they went further, he felt with every step and with each new sight that he was leaving his element behind, and in truth, he was frightened. But he was excited too, and perhaps that reaction is what set Tad apart, for there was a specificity about his reaction that would have been true of few boys in his situation. He wanted to own this experience and make it his, every part of it, and the apprehension and the fear not least among what he was feeling. A unique sort of thrill seeker, and maybe that was part of why Daddy had been attracted to him, weeks back, in a time that at these moments Tad would be hard pressed to even remember. He could feel himself changing, moment by moment. All around him the lights bled their radiance.

  They passed a room where guests were seated in a circle with their arms joined, and in the center of the circle, hovering in the air, a formless effluvium, like a kind of contained electrical storm, swirling gently, pure dark at its core, twinges of blue fire darting about its edges. A low pitched humming. Here the fire in the walls had shrunk to be replaced by drifting bands of shadow. For the glimpse that he had, before Stitch hurried him along, Tad was reminded of the undersea mural in Daisy’s attic, and it might have interested him to see his younger sister at that moment where she sat at the top of a ladder under the peak of the roof, her neck bent, working at that self same mural, the light of madness in her eyes. They pressed on, Stitch’s hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  It seemed to Tad that the mental layout of the house that he’d gathered on his previous visits, during his explorations and the games of hide and seek, was inaccurate tonight. There were more doors and more rooms than he could ever remember, and indeed, as Daddy had prophesized, no door was locked. All were flung wide. The thought was thrilling to Tad that the many rooms of the upper stories were accessible tonight, that he’d been unable to open but where he’d long suspected the greatest secrets to be contained. He knew that at some time he must break away from Stitch and find a way upstairs, but for now, he was content to have a guide through this dim new world and its strange occupants, especially one that he trusted. “What you have to understand,” Stitch said to him suddenly, his face flushed under the dotted paint, “is that things are fairly harmless right now. You know how in a party, the heavies don’t usually arrive until late. Well, it’s a long night, a really long night, and this is just the pre-party. So, you know, watch yourself. Keep a cool head on your shoulders, or try to, anyway.” He took another drink of the “water.” Tad had noticed that although Stitch drank with gusto, the level of liquid in the stein remained stubbornly the same. They were passing a room when a great shout went up, and Stitch paused. “Oh,” he said. “Just hold up one second and let me say hi to these fellows.” He steered Tad into a room with three couches, one on the left, one on the right, and the third against the back wall. They were all a hideous fluorescent green. There were a great many people inside, two dozen at least, and the room was full of an aromatic red smoke. In the center was a ceramic hookah, some four feet high, made to look like a Buddha, squatting with his hands on his knees. Six hoses branched out from his back, and in his lap was a semicircular bowl piece full of some sort of dark smoldering herb. Tad did not recognize the smoke by its smell, or the herb in the bowl. He thought it was neither marijuana nor tobacco, the only two plants he’d ever heard of that people smoked. The smell was reminiscent of overly ripe plums. Most of those in the room were dressed in shades of green, jade vests, emerald bowler hats. The men were bare chested, the women buxom. All had fiery red hair. They were tumbling all over and jostling one another, many laughing uproariously. Many of them were holding various receptacles, and swigging what Tad was willing to bet was the same liquid in Stitch’s stein. One man, a short, stocky fellow, disentangled himself from the throng and jogged over to Stitch, where he leaned against the shoul
der of the larger man, spent.

  “Gatey,” the man gasped. “These roustabouts will be the death o’ me.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Stitch asked. “They’re your relatives.”

  “Gatey!” one of the women called. “Sing us a song!”

  “No,” called another. “A rhyme. Spin us a rhyme!”

  “I’m not in the mood,” Stitch said, grinning, and the entire group raised a disappointed groan.

  “Young Thom just got hisself married,” one of them said, jostling the arm of another who sat near, tongue wrestling with one of the women. He held up his hand, proudly displaying the gold band. “Give him some advice to send him on his way!”

  “Nothing I say will do him any good now,” Stitch said. “He’s already taken the plunge.”

  The gallows tree, the bridal shower

  Both signal death, one signals power

  “Power for who?” asked one of the men.

  “Not the groom, that’s sure,” Stitch said, and they all roared again.