Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  He came to Larkspur Lane and turned onto it, spotting the pickup parked about halfway down the block. Larkspur ended in a cul-de-sac where the doctor’s office was located, on the bottom floor of a white house with perennials growing in pots on the front porch. The doctor lived above. Horowitz was the second physician of that name to have served the town of Feral, the first being his father, a man of such similar appearance and mannerisms that the younger one might easily have been a clone of the older. They were bluff, likable types, the sort that puts you instantly at ease. But there wasn’t a whole lot that might serve to ease Tad’s mind on this particular day, and he hoped the examination was almost complete. He wanted to speak to his sister alone, without delay. He hurried up the front walk and across the porch, but no sooner had he reached out a hand for the door knob then it turned on its own volition and his father stepped out. The mild look of studied irritation on Walt’s face was one that Tad saw often enough so that he didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it was bad news. “There you are,” Walt said. “We were bout to come lookin’ for you.”

  Tad nodded, wanting to ask his father what the diagnosis had been, but knowing that it would be futile. Walt would tell him to mind to his own business, a phrase that would have earned Tad a point for the month, had not the game been shelved due to recent distractions in the lives of both the participants. Tad felt a pang of sadness as he thought of this, and he turned away from his father to look out on the street. Across the way an older woman in a yellow sundress was sitting on her porch in a rocking chair, watching them, swaying back and forth almost imperceptibly. Tad had the feeling that this was one of her games, that she played, sitting there watching the townspeople go in and out of the doctor’s office. He didn’t like her looking at him, and he glared across the street, never thinking that his expression at that moment was much akin to that of his father. His mother appeared next, guiding Daisy in front of her with a hand on one shoulder. Marta’s face was at least more composed than it had been before. Daisy’s was impassive, but when she saw her brother she looked up and met his gaze for a moment before dropping her head again. Though she hadn’t smiled or shown any trace of good will toward him, she at least seemed more in control of her faculties, and Tad was heartened by this. The four Surreys walked away from the house, the procession turning in the direction of the pickup, Tad nodding slowly to himself, his mind hard at work.

  They arrived back at the house shortly after two. At one point Walt might have asked Tad why he’d wanted to go to the library and had then returned without borrowing any books or other materials, but he and Marta had other things on their minds, or perhaps they simply didn’t care. Both were equally likely. Such was the level of their concern for Daisy that Tad was probably in a position in his life to get away with more reckless or rebellious behavior than at any time in the past, should that have been his desire. But it was not. His priorities had changed yet again, just as theirs had. Now what he wanted more than anything else was to get things back to where they were before, and most especially to ensure Daisy’s safety. He wanted to sever ties with Daddy and see him crawl back under his rock again. But it was true, he thought, as he lay on his bed again, nibbling on a less than clean fingernail, there was yet one more thing that he wanted now. He still wanted to know the truth of it all, the how and the why, and he wanted to know if it had anything to do with a woman named Madeline Crawley.

  He stood up, opened the door to his room, and walked out into the hall. He took the wooden pole from where it stood leaning against the wall and knocked on the trapdoor. For some time there was no answer. He was just about to knock again when he heard her speak, very faintly, from just above his head.

  “Who is it?”

  “The middle child.”

  There was an even longer silence, then at last he heard her say “Come up.” He pulled down the trapdoor and reached up for the outer section of the ladder, stepping back to avoid a small shower of dust. Then he ascended, pulling the ladder up behind him as he went. When he turned around he had quite a shock. It had been a good while since he’d been up here to see her, and while he’d been absent the mural that formerly had been restricted to one wall had spread until now it covered every available bit of space. All four walls and the ceiling were included. Even the crossbeams that supported the roof had received the attention of Daisy’s brush. On the right hand side there was the undersea area that he was familiar with, complete with the brutish merpeople, clustered about with their faces turned in unison toward some impending disaster. Everything on the other wall was new, some of it quite fresh. There Daisy had painted a forest, a place of twisted, knotted root systems at the base, snakelike vines clogging the spaces between the stunted trees. Much of it was thrown into shadow, soft browns and tans giving way to deeper greens where the broad leaves of the fronds climbed partway up the wall as if stretching for a bit of sunlight, but the sun did not exist in Daisy’s world. This was the forest at night, and where the two worlds met, the aquatic rising up and merging with the terrestrial, there was a dark patch of sky, with many bright stars shining in it. But the sky was not purely dark, containing many subtle shades, especially near the outer corners where velvety purplish tints could sometimes be spotted, if one looked closely, for there was no denying Daisy’s skill at manipulating the tools available to her. Tad had always thought her talented, but it seemed to him that her skills had grown since the inception of the project. Though no art expert, he could see the passion, the fount of unholy energy that it had taken to produce this wonder, not only the finished product, but also the execution of it, and he was amazed, and a little frightened. It was as though he had suddenly found himself inside Daisy’s head, and a mysterious and intimidating place it was, where worlds collided in the sky. But what Tad failed to grasp was that it had not been Daisy’s objective to create an outside world to match her inner one, but rather to exorcise that world and expel it through the medium of her brushes, and it had taken all the available canvass space to do it. The project now being finished, Daisy could not remember much of the actual work, but she felt some relief at its being so. For her the question remained, what was she to do now that all the space was gone?

  Tad stood and walked, very slowly, toward the rear of the house where Daisy sat cross legged in her nest, wrapped in her many blankets. He stared stupidly up at the ceiling, like some yokel in the big city looking up at the skyscrapers, and he caught a glimpse of her grinning at his expression, but when he turned toward her it vanished like a mirage. He sat down near her and studied his hands, trying to get his thoughts in order before he spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. I’ve been a fool, and I’ve been behaving very badly toward you. I’ve been a bad brother, and a bad friend, and a bad person. I’ve made a mess of everything, and I put you in danger.” He paused, because the next part wasn’t easy for him to say. “The fact is, I’m in a really difficult situation now, and I don’t know who to turn to besides you, and I should have come to you before, but I thought I could handle it myself, and now I know that I can’t.” This last was said all in a rush, and when it was done he looked up from his hands again to see how she’d taken it, but she was as stone faced as ever. “Daisy,” he said, real emotion in his voice now, as it all came tumbling over him, all the disappointment, and the anger, and the hurt. “Won’t you please forgive me? I wouldn’t know what to do without you, and I don’t know what I would have done if…” He trailed off, his shoulders making small shrugging noises involuntarily as he struggled for the words. Her not speaking was just making this unimaginably harder, and had she really become so cruel that she would let him sweat it out like this?

  “I forgive you,” she said. “You are a fool, but I think I understand your motivations, maybe. Don’t cry, middle child. It’s not as bad as all that.”

  “But it is,” he sobbed. “He knows wherever I am, and I can feel him watching me, and pulling on me, and…”

  “Stop,” she said. “
Stop. What I want you to do is this. Close your eyes, and take a deep breath, and then I want you to tell me everything. Everything that you think is relevant. You have to do this now, because you’re right, I was in danger, and I am in danger, and so are you, and if we have a hope of getting out of it we need to be on the same page, and I need to know everything I can about what we’re dealing with.”

  Tad did as she asked, taking not one but several deep breaths, and when he felt himself becoming calmer, he began to speak, and when he did, he found himself unable to stop for quite some time. Once the dam had burst, it all came gushing out, and there was a lot of it too, accumulated over the past weeks that the two of them had become out of touch. He told her about the magical house in the woods, and how it was easy to find sometimes and harder at others, and how the woods themselves seemed to have moods, as humans do. He told her about the budding friendship between Daddy and himself, and meeting Stitch at tea, and his instant liking for the man, and playing hide and seek, and the costumes, and the nonsense talk. He told her about the furtive gazes, and the lack of disclosure, and his growing curiosity that had become an obsession, and he even went further back than all of that, and told her about the feeling that had led to the first meeting, that itching, burning sensation that drove one mad if it was disobeyed. And as she grew more enraptured, enthralled by his words, he told her of Decadence, and Essence, and the duel of dancers, and the debauchery, and the confusion, and the voices that hounded him even now, and Daddy’s mad threats, and prophecies, and all the evidence of his powers, real or imagined. It made for quite a tale, when it was told all at once like that, and long before Tad had finished speaking Daisy had shut her eyes and was nodding her head rhythmically, breaking in every once in a while but mainly waiting until he had talked himself out, when he concluded with the events of the day and the unearthing of a name, Madeline Crawley. At that point he stopped to ask her a question. “What did the doctor say?”

  She opened her eyes and frowned, adjusted her body inside the blankets. “He said that there isn’t anything physically wrong with me. Other than that I’m too small, and I should be eating more, like he always says.”

  “But he couldn’t find a cause for…you know…the…”

  “Sleepwalking. You can say it. I don’t see why you and Mama and Papa always do that, acting like if you say it you’ll somehow trigger it, or hurt my feelings or something. I know about it. It’s not like you have to hide it from me.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. So he couldn’t find a reason for it, then?”

  “He said the same thing as before. That it’s stress related. And then he asked me if I felt pressured about anything, and I said I didn’t, and he asked Mama and Papa if there were any problems going on at home, and Papa said no. You haven’t told them about any of it, have you?”

  “No. Do you think I should?”

  She thought about it for a few seconds before answering. “I don’t know. What do you think?” Tad shrugged. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about this before, but it had seemed like the longer he had waited to tell them, and the further he had become embroiled in the situation, the less possible including them had become. At one point, he had wanted to keep it to himself because he’d wanted to keep his wonderful new friends a secret. And then, when Daddy had been revealed to be something different than what he had first appeared, he hadn’t wanted to tell them because he was ashamed of the way he’d handled the situation. It was just another way he had messed up, and he’d wanted to deal with it himself. He tried to explain all of this to Daisy, and she said she understood. There was silence again as they both considered the pros and cons. Then Daisy spoke again. “I don’t think we tell them,” she said. “Only as a last resort. Now that we both know about what’s going on, I think we can deal with it. Together.”

  Tad had to smile. Even after everything that he’d told her, and even after her brush with death, she was like him- independent and self reliant, to the end. “Alright,” he said. “I agree, for now. But what’s our next move, then? We have to do something. The time for waiting passively for things to die down has passed. I tried that. He can strike out at us, and he doesn’t even need to be physically present to do it. He’s proved that.”

  “So what you’re saying, then, is that you believe he caused the sleepwalking. I don’t know if I agree with that. It happened years before, remember? You don’t think he was exerting his control over us even then?”

  “No. No, I don’t. But why would it just start happening again now? Let me ask you something. When it happens, do you…you don’t…remember anything about it, do you? I mean, you’re asleep. You’re not conscious of what you’re doing, or what’s happening to you. Are you?”

  She gave her head a small shake. “It’s kind of hard to explain. When it used to happen before I wouldn’t remember anything. But this last time…I remember having sort of a dream. I was walking, like, through a fog, and I felt really sleepy, and there were objects around me that I was brushing into. And there was a voice that seemed to come from everywhere, and it was saying things, but it was muffled. I couldn’t understand what it was saying. It seemed like I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. It was actually very nice. Very peaceful. I trusted the voice, and I wanted to follow it, and do what it said. I kept straining to hear it better.” She’d closed her eyes again, and as Tad watched, concerned, she wrinkled her face up, trying to remember accurately. “And then at the end I remember some flashing lights, and other voices calling out, and a feeling like I was about to wake, but I didn’t. Blackness closed in on me, and I felt weightless, like I was leaving my body.”

  “Daze,” Tad said, his voice husky, “you don’t have to remember any more. You don’t…”

  “It’s okay,” she said, slowly opening her eyes. “Really it is. That’s all there is anyway. The next thing I knew I was in the tub, and Mama was washing me off. She looked so worried and scared that I was scared too. Not for me, but for her.”

  “Daze, it was him. It was. I mean, it’s not like there’s a way to know for sure, or anything, but I do know. It’s just the sort of thing he likes to do. Trying to get to me through you.”

  “Then we have to fight back. We have to go back there.”

  “Where? To his house? You mean both of us?” He shook his head, even as she set her jaw in the way that he knew meant she was going to dispute him on this. “Daze, no. I won’t allow it. You can’t come with me. If anything happened to you…”

  “It already has happened!” she screamed at him. They both went quiet as they heard movement from the first floor. After a minute, when no footsteps were heard coming up the stairs, she went on in her normal speaking voice. “Do you really expect me to just sit here and wait while you go and face this alone? Do you think I would do that?”

  “Daze, I’m sorry, but you have to. I know that you take it personally, what he did, and you have every right to. And it’s not a question of you not being big enough, or strong enough, or whatever else. You have to stay behind, because if I can’t think of a way to make things right, and if something happens to me, then we’ll have failed, and you’ll have to tell Ma and Pa. Because then there will be no choice.”

  She had crossed her arms and was looking down at her chest. When she spoke again, her voice was very small, and it brought to Tad’s mind many images of when they’d been younger, especially when he’d done something mean in a game they’d been playing, due to a momentary flash of cruelty that he always hated himself for afterwards. She’s just so little and helpless, despite all the tough talk. “I’m just scared for you,” she said.

  He chuckled, one of those uncomfortable forced laughs. “To be quite honest with you, Daze,” he said. “I’m scared for me too.” And that was the end of the conversation for a time, because Marta’s voice could be faintly heard, calling the two of them down for dinner. They were four for dinner again, Casey being off with his friends somewhere, a detail not calculated to put their mother
in an easier disposition. But even though the agitation of her and Walt was easy to pick up on, between the siblings things felt free and easy, now that they had cleared the air. They were a united front, back on the same page and the same team, and whatever was to come, they would face it together. Tad actually had some appetite for the first time in days, and set a pace to match his father. When he and Daisy had cleared their places, they made their way back up to the safety of the attic, where the conversation resumed. Daisy sat in her nest, while Tad paced slowly up and down, answering her questions. She wanted to know more concerning his theory of the woods being alive.

  “So you feel,” she said. “That the mood of the woods is reflected in his moods.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or it could be the other way around. It’s sort of a chicken and egg type thing. Which came first, Daddy or the woods? And which one is drawing on the other?”

  “It seems like it would be the worst case scenario if the woods really did his bidding. That means that every time you leave the house you’re in his domain. Every tree is like a soldier in his army, set against you. Every twig. Every leaf. Every animal.”

  “And if that’s true, then is there anything I can do to counter it? It’s magic that I saw at Decadence, Daze. Real magic. What chance do I have, facing that?”