by Gene Lazuta
* * *
Norris opened his eyes and stared straight ahead, seeing the memory so vividly that it was as if there were a movie screen in his head. Superimposed over that screen, he saw that he was still standing on the south shore of the Killibrook River, and that the forest on the other side looked dimly flat—like a two-dimensional approximation of reality washed in lifeless, running shades of grey.
He blinked.
And realized that the day had slipped away.
Around him, the nebulous, transitional period between the setting of the sun and the coming of the moon had fallen, and twilight shadows haunted the darkening trees with twisted, murky stillness. The sky—still bloody with the last vestiges of a fading day—was perfectly clear. And the air was cold. Not as it had been earlier, when it was just at freezing, so that the snow that fell was wet and heavy. But really cold, almost bitter. Soon the Valley would crack underfoot, and slushy mud would turn to ice.
He hadn’t seen Dr. Green’s house in twilight. He’d seen it in full dark. His father’s face—stained an alien green by the glow of their Rambler’s instruments—had hung expectantly over the steering wheel as he navigated the winding path of the old State Route 6. It was Bobby himself who first spotted the sign, bent and pointing in the antiseptic glow of the car’s headlights, reading “Doc,” at the end of what he thought might have been a road, but that was actually a gravel driveway. And he remembered thinking that the place looked a little like the gingerbread house in that old fairy tale as they pulled through the trees and saw it, built right into the side of a hill, where neither of them had known a house to be before.
“Well,” his father had said, “let’s give this one a try. Maybe he won’t throw us out.”
In the wake of such memories, and beneath the cold shadow of approaching night, Norris gazed across the river, feeling as if time itself had begun to fade from his consciousness. There didn’t seem to be any difference between what had been and what was anymore—the present had become a constant. Maybe he had stepped into a warp in the fabric of reality, a pocket of existence that never changed. That might explain it. But he was certain that, if he didn’t move, he could stay here forever—right in this spot—caught in a permanent now. If a mastodon wandered up beside him at that instant and dipped its trunk into the stream for a drink, it would have surprised him no more than if a Civil War soldier had appeared to fill his canteen.
He lowered his arm, the muscles in his jaw working beneath his skin, his eyes fixed on the tiny, smoke-grey chip he held between his thumb and index finger.
“My life was in two parts,” he said to the stone. “And you made it one again. But what’s it all mean?”
The Man in the Woods was standing on the other side of the river, and Norris sensed him before he saw him there.
Lifting his eyes from the stone once more, he studied the figure he found, half hidden in the forest, about thirty feet away. In the shadows, the man’s form was somewhat vague, ill defined, and dark. His face was constructed more from the negative impressions of patterns created by tangled foliage than anything solid. His body seemed comprised of the spaces between two trees, or three.
If you didn’t know he was there, you might have missed him. If you didn’t expect to see him, you probably wouldn’t. If you wanted to touch him, you’d have to do it with your heart, because your hand would find only frustration.
In that moment, Norris appreciated just how much effort it had been for this creature to take on the substantial, human shape it had for so long. He realized how painful it must have been, how…demeaning. That was the word! For this being to coalesce itself into the body that various people had seen over the years, it would have had to deny its own true form…its own true identity. It was a creature made entirely of the spaces between things! To see it required only that one know how to look.
Woodie had said that!
Or something very much like it.
He believed that for everything the natural world presented, there was another, deeper meaning that was hidden so long as the observer was limited to a single, stable reference point.
Like the Man in the Woods: see the trees with your eyes, see the Man with your heart.
By altering the way a person saw things, it was possible to discover the truth about the world.
Norris swallowed, and squeezed the stone beneath his fingers…it had certainly altered the way he saw things.
So what was the truth?
That a piece of the moon had fallen a million years ago and was found by a caveman to whom Robert Norris, twentieth-century park ranger and nature lover, was directly related? That because of that rock, a demon had been drawn into the real world from the imagination of that man, and that now that demon was willing to do the bidding of the stone’s keeper in return for sex? And that, also because of that rock, a group of cannibal kings had come together and had been imbued with the power of drawing a man’s or a woman’s most secretly hidden urges to the surface, thereby turning that person into a werewolf slave?
When Norris looked back at the trees, he found that the Man in the Woods had moved, and was now to his left, and back nearly a hundred feet.
Norris felt compelled to follow. Wrapping his fist around the stone, he lifted his rifle across his chest, set his jaw, and stepped into the stream thinking, Why the fuck not? And besides, you’ve only got two choices here, sport. One is that you believe that Woodie did all the things you saw him do and that he left his eye on the floor of that motel knowing that you’d come along and use it the way you did. You can believe that your brother consciously opened the way for you to follow him into the woods, or you can believe that those nightmares you’ve been having all your life have finally started coming while you’re awake, which means that you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not anymore. The word for the last one there, is “crazy.”
They lock crazy people up, don’t they? They put them in big grey buildings with rubber rooms.
No way—not me.
So what’s the choice?
The woods, or…
Some choice.
If it’s all true, then, well…Christ!
But if it’s not, then the Valley is as good a place as any for a park ranger to blow his goddamn brains out.
So Norris crossed the river.
And when he did, the Man in the Woods disappeared.
31.
At the same time that Robert Norris was splashing his way across the still unfrozen Killibrook River, Sheriff Conway was just coming back around from unconsciousness. When he first opened his eyes, he saw nothing but a kind of whitish-grey fluff, piled up close to his face. A chilling numbness made his jaw and the whole left side of his head feel as if some grainy mass had been poured into the opening of his right ear to run like sand in an hourglass into every low spot it could find. The light was bad, but in it he could still see the fluff closest to his eyes swirl when he exhaled. For a long moment his brain was as dry as that fluff—whatever it was.
And then the last image he had seen before his gun had gone off—and his own light had gone out—came rushing back in on him like a runaway freight, and he bolted up to find himself sitting waist-deep in a perfectly smooth sea of glowing white snow. There were dark shapes mounded around him in the night. And overhead, the sky pressed down in a purplish, mottled bruise that made him involuntarily think of skin seen in dim light.
This must be how things look to a fly when a boy does that old trick of snatching one out of the air so that he can hold his fist up to his ear and hear it buzz, he thought. This must be what it looks like inside a fist.
Thinking of a fist reminded him of his own arm, and if he could have screamed, that’s just what he would have done. Instead, his voice came out as nothing much more than a whimper.
From where he was sitting, he could see a dark, bristling line of shadow encircling his glowing field of vision. It was as if he had been dropped into a very large bowl of sug
ar sitting on a table in a dark room. The area around him was perfectly flat—except for those two dark mounds—so that when he raised his right arm, he saw its silhouette as the most starkly defined object of any available to him. Even in the dark, he could see how badly his jacket sleeve was torn—shredded, more like—and the irregularity of his skin’s surface, which at first he took to be attributable to lumps of half-frozen mud, adhering to him as he moved.
But that dark length of numb shadow hanging off his lower knuckle wasn’t mud.
No!
Christ Jesus, that dark thing about the size of a caterpillar wasn’t mud. It was a finger—his pinky! The pinky of his right, pistol-drawing, pencil-pushing hand! And it was hanging there, six inches from his staring eyes, by a thread of what he suddenly understood was his own skin!
He jumped at the realization, clutching his left hand over his mouth—because he had to keep the right hand away from his face—and feeling the spot where his tooth had been knocked out scream with pain. In response to the shudder that ran through his body, his pinky fell off.
“God!” he croaked through his fingers as his stomach spun inside him. And then, “Poison!” he said, trying to get to his feet but achieving only a drunken stagger up on one leg before falling back, straight down, face-first into the snow.
When he hit, his mind gave the rest of him a gloriously detailed and mercifully brief replay of those last few seconds of consciousness before he had awakened in this sugar bowl…
Detective Cooper was kneeling before him, at the business end of the sheriff’s .45. And an instant before the flash of detonation erased him from view, a face simply materialized and swallowed the sheriff’s arm.
He remembered how the thing’s black lips had looked, flexing as they pressed against his jacket. He remembered the plume of frozen breath that had curled from its glistening snout. And he remembered, most of all, its glaring, hate-filled eye, staring deeply into his own as the beast snapped its neck back and tossed him over his shoulder and into this hole…
“No!” a voice in his head piped up, contradicting the rushed chronology of his impressions. “I’m not anywhere near that spot. I’ve been carried, or dragged, miles into the Valley. This is the Indian burial ground. I’ve seen it. Never in winter. Never covered in a blanket of fresh snow. But I’ve seen it, and there’s no other place like it…”
He stopped, and even through the bubble of panic he felt struggling to burst his racing heart, he forced his thoughts into enough order to say, “There’s no other place like this on earth.”
And then he was moving…
It was like crawling over the surface of the moon. The air was cold, the night was quiet, and the white fluff around him puffed into tiny, drifting clouds as he struggled on his hands and knees toward the black mound closest to him.
It was a man.
And he was still warm.
Conway laid his hands on the man’s back and turned him over and…
The man’s teeth snapped, and his eyes flashed…
And Conway was on his feet for an instant before he fell, rolled, and came up with his dripping hands before him and a cloud of steam obscuring his face.
The man looked at him for a second and then writhed in on himself in the mud, squirming, naked from the waist up, and horribly scared. It was Detective Cooper, and as he moved, his jacket—which had been carelessly thrown over his upper body—was bunched into a ball and ended up tangled around his legs, which kicked spasmodically in an infuriatingly slow rhythm that looked as if he were dreaming that he was riding a bicycle.
A voice drifted in on the sheriff’s consciousness, and soon he realized that someone was laughing…softly…little more than a giggle, but insistent.
“Ha ha ha!”
He turned, and the remaining mound was sitting up in the snow.
“What’s funny?” Conway asked.
And the man hung his head as his shoulders rocked gently and he said, “Us. We. You and me. We’re funny…”
His voice was soft and empty.
“They’re going to eat us,” he continued, giggling between the words. “We haven’t got a chance. You and me. Any minute. They’re going to eat us alive.”
And Cooper kept squirming on the ground.
“Perkins?” Conway asked.
“That’s right,” the laughing man said. “Deputy John R. Perkins. That was my name before you sent us into the woods after that park ranger. Now my name don’t matter. Nobody’s name matters no more. Now, we’re just meat…nothing else. We’re all just meat, and they’re gonna eat us alive, soon as the moon comes. They’ll eat us both, and there’s nothing we can do no more to stop ‘em.”
Somewhere along the way, the laughing man’s laugh had turned into a series of sobs.
Staggering up, Conway tried to get the deputy on his feet, but after a brief struggle he just left him sitting where he was, shaking his head and preparing to die. When he leaned over and took the man’s gun out of its holster, he didn’t even seem to notice. And when he stepped up to Detective Cooper, the sound of the hammer being drawn back was loud in the night.
Cooper stopped rolling and looked up at the gun’s barrel. In the gloom, his face was smeared with mud, and his eyes glistened white. He stared for a moment without expression and then he broke down and laughed, weakly, pulling himself into a ball as pain seemed to rack his body and his voice said, “Christ, you never give up,” before a gurgling sound choked him and made the rest of his sentence nearly unintelligible.
“No,” Conway agreed, grimly. “I don’t.”
“You…c-c-can’t kill me…like…th…that,” Cooper hissed through clenched teeth. “Wish you…could. But it’s not the way of the…Wild.”
Conway looked at the gun and then back at Cooper, seeing the terrible marks on the man’s chest and studying the bullet wound near his left shoulder.
“Guns don’t work,” Cooper added.
“Why?” Conway asked.
“How…should I know?” the detective suddenly shouted, his strength seeming to increase in a rush. “They just fucking don’t! You shot me once, and it didn’t work! It just hurt. And now…God…I can feel something inside. Go….God…it feels like it’s getting bigger.”
“It’s who you really are, who you’ve always been, coming out.”
“I’m not like this! I was never like this before now!”
“It’s always been there.”
“I’d like to kill you, Conway! I’d like to rip your goddamn heart out!”
I’m sure you would.”
“Gggggrrrrrr!”
This last came out as a gob of spit and steaming breath, spraying from between the detective’s teeth as he squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at his stomach.
Conway raised the gun.
And the laughing man suddenly jumped up and said, “That’s it! That’s what we can do! As he bumbled over and grabbed the sheriff’s shoulder. “Do me, Sheriff! Please. Do me first! Shoot me, Sheriff! Shoot me, then shoot yourself. It our only way out!”
The man was crying again as he slid to his knees and pressed his forehead to Conway’s thigh.
“For the love of Christ, Sheriff!” he sobbed. “Shoot me before it’s too late!”
Conway shrugged the deputy off but he ended up hugging the sheriff’s knees and crying like a child. Conway was tempted to kick him away, but he didn’t. Instead, he disengaged himself as gently as he could, looked down at Cooper again, then up at the sky.
Then he froze.
There wasn’t any moon up there.
He was standing beneath a perfectly black sky, sprinkled with starts and clear as a bell.
But there wasn’t any moon.
“It’s over,” the crying man said. “Just face it, Sheriff. They won.”
Conway’s body went rigid when he heard this. His spine tensed but he became suddenly very hard where he stood. Without another word he lifted his arm and shot the whimpering deputy once through the head,
sending his body over with an anticlimactic plop and making Cooper howl with delight. He then turned and, with a grunt, kicked the detective in the stomach as hard as he could. The sound of the blow was dull, and wet, and Cooper buckled around the sheriff’s boot for a second. This person-to-person contact seemed to make an impact on the detective’s body, and when Conway drew back as if to repeat the blow, Cooper flinched.
“Fight it,” Conway demanded, and there was something in the black spots of the detective’s eyes that made him think that maybe he was getting through. “You told me that you didn’t want to be what you are. If that’s true, then fight it now because I need you!”
“You don’t understand…” Cooper hissed with obvious effort. “You don’t realize…”
“I do understand,” Conway interrupted. “I can feel him coming.”
“Then…you should know,” Cooper snarled. “Then you should…”
“Don’t tell me what I should do!” the sheriff exploded, kicking out again and connecting so hard that the sound of his boot on one of the detective’s ribs was like that of an echoing home run in a major-league park.
Then he was squatting with the detective’s hair bunched up in the remains of his right hand’s fist, pulling his head up at an odd angle and screaming into his face, “Fight it you son of a bitch!”
And then a series of dark shapes stepped onto the stark whiteness of the field’s edge, emerging from the trees like specters.
Conway saw them almost at once, but he didn’t react. His mind was whirling too fast, and his body was trembling. Releasing the detective, he remained in his crouch, thinking, It’s come to this. It’s me and them…and I’m alone. It dawned on him at that moment that he was seeing people—though they were awfully big to be just ordinary people—moving almost sixty yards away, in the dark, without any moon for light, at night. Curiously he sifted a handful of snow through his fingers and watched it sparkle as it fell. It looked like neon dust, glowing an electric white, yet cold to the touch. Its light was eerie and sterile in an almost alien sort of way that reminded him of…