Bongo whined again, louder.
My thoughts were moving very slowly.
I think it’s real.
It’s really there.
Someone made this.
The slow flow of thoughts sped up.
Who could have made this?
Who would have made this?
Images stuttered through my head, none of them terribly coherent—sociopaths, serial killers, Satanic death cult, some stupid college kids, performance artists, monsters monsters monsters—
and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones
If someone had made this, then they had been here.
Where I was standing.
They might still be here.
They might be coming toward me right now while I stared at their grisly effigy.
My fingers closed convulsively on Bongo’s collar, and I turned and ran.
8
A coonhound in good condition is a superb natural athlete. Even a lazy, elderly one who can’t hunt is pretty impressive. Bongo half dragged me through the woods, for which I was grateful, because otherwise I don’t know if I could have run nearly so far or so fast.
I didn’t dare look over my shoulder. If I wasn’t looking at the ground, I’d break my ankle on a tree root. More importantly, if I looked over my shoulder, I might see what was coming after me.
Since I didn’t look, my fear filled the woods with black shapes, hunched over and shuffling after me.
If I was being chased, I couldn’t hear any footsteps behind me. That wasn’t a surprise, though, because I was gasping and my blood was pounding and my side stabbed with pain as if there were shards of glass in it. But I didn’t dare stop running because they could be close, they could be right behind me. In another second a hand could close over my shoulder and jerk me backward, and what if it wasn’t a hand? What if it was a hoof and the woods were full of dead deer with their heads on upside down and their rib cages full of clacking stones—
I believe we had gone a little more than a mile at an ambling pace to reach the effigy. I also believe that Bongo and I covered that distance back in less than six minutes. I could not have duplicated that feat for all the money in the world.
It was Bongo who got us home. I wasn’t looking where I was going beyond the next step and the next. Leaves crunched under our feet, and suddenly they stopped crunching because we were bursting into the backyard. I heard the tok-tok-tok rapping of the woodpeckers fall silent, probably because they’d just seen a woman and a dog go running by at full speed.
I didn’t even think about going into the house. If we went into the house, we were trapped. I could lock the door and drag things in front of it, but they could come in the windows, whatever they were
the twisted ones
so we ran around the side of the house instead.
I tore the doors of the truck open. Bongo went into the passenger seat without losing momentum. I slammed the door behind him and bolted around the front.
I couldn’t help but look behind me then.
There was nothing there, but that didn’t slow me at all. They could be hiding. They could be in the trees or behind the house. They could be invisible. The fear I was feeling was no longer a rational fear of other humans, but had cracked open some deep vein of childhood terror—monsters under the bed, shadows gathering under the basement stairs.
The truck started before I was thinking enough to be afraid that it wouldn’t start. I blessed the engineers at Nissan and peeled out of the driveway at top speed.
If there had been a cop on the road, he would have stopped me, since I was going at least eighty, but there wasn’t. Too bad. I really could have used one.
I looked in the rearview mirror, expecting to see… something. Black shapes on the road. A deer with its head on upside down chasing the car.
Don’t even think that.
I slowed down as I came into Pondsboro, because there were other cars, and if I rear-ended one, my truck might stop working, and if my truck stopped working I couldn’t get away.
For lack of anything better to do, I pulled into the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. I wanted to be around other people. Monsters didn’t get you in broad daylight. I had to tell someone. The police? The fire department?
The whole idea of having to explain it was so overwhelming that I parked the truck, threw my arms around Bongo, and burst into tears.
Hounds are very huggable dogs. He bore this patiently, tail wagging, and licked my face occasionally. He was very calm.
Dogs are lucky to have short memories. Then again, from Bongo’s point of view, he’d gone for a walk, been scared, ran away, then had a ride in the car with his person, and now his person was sad but that was okay because he was there to lick her.
Someone tapped on the window. I screamed.
“Whoa!” I heard, muffled by glass.
It didn’t sound like a monster.
The Goth barista from the coffee shop was looking at me. She was carrying a gallon of milk and had a worried expression on her face.
I rolled the window down.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re… uh…”
“Fine,” I said automatically. When people ask if you’re okay, you say “fine.” It’s a hindbrain function.
She looked at me skeptically.
“Not fine,” I corrected. I was suddenly aware that my face was covered in tears and dog slobber and possibly snot. I stank of sweat. There was hair sticking to my cheeks. “Yeah. Not fine.”
“Right,” she said. “Why don’t you come to the shop? You can use the bathroom and I’ll make you some tea.”
Tea. Oh God, I could have tea. I could get a cup and drizzle honey into it and watch it sink through the liquid to the bottom. I could put my hands around the mug. Everything would be awful still, but there would be this little space that I understood.
“Tea would be good,” I said. And then, “Wait. I can’t leave Bongo.”
“Bring him in,” she said. “As long as he doesn’t bite or pee on things, he’s fine.”
“He won’t.”
Somehow or other I got out of the truck. It’s probably good that she’d come along when she had, because otherwise I might never have left the truck again.
Bongo put on his best manners to be introduced. He sat down very politely and gave the Goth barista his very best tragic hound look. She scratched him under the chin. “Hi, Bongo. I’m Enid. You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
He put his ears down and wagged his tail to indicate that he was indeed a very good boy and also no one had ever petted him and he would like it very much if she was the first. She complied.
Enid. That was good to know.
We walked to the coffee shop. We were about two blocks away, down streets lined with houses that had been turned into offices. Enid kept up a stream of completely inconsequential chatter along the way. I looked behind me for monsters.
Bongo stayed close by my heels as we went into the coffee shop, then flopped down under the table. His nose worked, probably separating out coffee bean varieties, but the mile run, dragging my ass through the woods, had clearly exhausted him. He let out one of his deflating sighs. I put my feet under him.
Enid brought him a dish of water and then brought me a mug of tea. I put my hands around it and stared into it.
And I twisted myself around like the twisted ones.…
“You wanna talk about it? Should I call someone for you?”
“Yes. No. No, there’s no one to call.” (Really, what was I going to say to my father? Hey, Dad, there’s a monstrous effigy in the woods. Did you know about that?) “Wait, no. The police? Maybe? I’m not sure.”
She sat down at the table across from me and put her chin in her hands.
“Right.” I took a drink of tea. It was too hot and burned the roof of my mouth, but it was tea and tea was good and I was in a world where there was tea, not in a world where there were monsters in the woods. Those were two separa
te worlds. As long as I stayed in this one, I was safe.
“I saw a thing in the woods. Someone made a thing. A deer.” I tried to focus on what I was saying. My teeth wanted to chatter, even though it wasn’t cold. “It was like when a hunter hangs up a deer, you know? Except it wasn’t a hunter.”
Enid’s eyebrows were starting to climb under her hot pink bangs. “Are you sure it wasn’t a hunter?”
“Yes. Very sure. It was crucified. They’d taken off the head and put a skull on it, upside down. It was sewn to the neck all through the eye sockets. And the rib cage was full of—of—like wind chimes—made of rocks. I swear I’m not on drugs.”
Enid blinked. “That’s too bad. Sounds like you could use some about now. Was this by your house?”
I started to nod, then shook my head. “Behind it. But not right behind it. Like a mile. We went for a walk.” I reached down and rubbed Bongo’s ears. He leaned against my shins.
After a minute, I said, “I kept looking for a tag. Or a camera or something. Like maybe it was art.”
Enid drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “You know… that’s not a bad guess. We’ve got tons of artists around here. Somebody could have hung this thing up and be taking photos of it as it rots or something.”
I shuddered. “Why on earth…?”
“Oh, you know.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s a statement about mortality, or local food, or how their last girlfriend didn’t love them enough.”
I laughed. It wasn’t much, but it was a genuine laugh. For a few minutes that afternoon, it had seemed like I’d never laugh again.
“I don’t know,” I said. I remembered the blind panic I’d felt running from it—but yeah, I’d been on edge lately. Had I freaked out over nothing much?
No. Crucified deer in the woods are freaky. Even if it’s art.
Enid glanced at her watch. “Tell you what. One of our local cops comes in for a red-eye around three-thirty every day. If you hang out until then, you can ask him what to do, without having to… you know… call the police station and make a big deal out of it.”
“Will they believe me?” I asked. Listening to myself talk, I was having a hard time believing me, and I’d been there.
“I believe you,” she said. “I don’t know what it was you saw, but you don’t seem like the type who melts down for no reason.” She refilled the hot water in my tea. “Wait an hour until Officer Bob comes in, and then we’ll see what he has to say.”
* * *
I waited. After a few minutes, I even felt good enough to go and get my laptop out of the truck and do a little work. One of the e-mails that I was waiting for had come in, and I got to go through a file and see all the changes that the author had made. He was supposed to be fixing problems I’d pointed out, which he mostly had, but in a way that introduced several new problems.
Normally it might have been frustrating, but it was such a familiar problem that it was soothing. Bongo lay under the table, being very polite about the people who came in for coffee, and I slipped him bits of a day-old muffin.
Officer Bob was a tall man with big shoulders. He wasn’t fat, but middle age had definitely smoothed him down a bit, and his crew cut couldn’t quite hide the bald spot in back.
Enid pointed to me and said, “She needs to talk to you,” and I found myself telling him the whole story.
He turned toward me with an expression that said, very briefly, Oh Lord, now what? but he hid it well.
At “crucified deer” his eyebrows went up, and he actually brought his coffee over and sat down at the table.
He asked a couple of questions along the way. “How far did you go? Was it on your property? Do you remember where it was? Any landmarks?”
And then, “Did you take a photo?”
I stared at him, and then touched my jeans. My phone was still in my pocket. Turned off, because of the software bug, but if I’d turned it on, surely I would have had enough juice to at least take a photo of the effigy. It might have just made a camera noise and turned off again, but at least I’d have something.
“I didn’t even think… I… oh God, I’m dumb.”
He grinned. “No. You had a shock, sounds like. Don’t feel dumb. Everybody does that. It’s just that if you took a photo, it would have GPS data on it, and we could figure out exactly where it was.”
I groaned. “I take photos of particularly good salads. I can’t believe I didn’t take a shot of the thing.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Well, people who put up a thing like that probably plan to leave it there for a while. We can go back and try to find it.”
I blanched.
“Tell you what. I can take what’s called an informational report. So we can document what you saw, and it’ll be on file.” (He didn’t say “So we can talk about this at the station afterward,” but I suspect that was implied.) “And afterward, we can go back out there and see if you can find it again.”
He leaned down and scratched Bongo. “Or if this fellow can. Dead deer should bring him running.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Bongo might have led me to the effigy in the first place, but of course that made sense. If it had been… well… dripping.…
Eww.
He glanced unobtrusively at his watch. “How about you write the whole thing down and e-mail it to me? I’d rather hear it in your own words than try to write my version and get it wrong. Then we can get it on file, and we’ll have someone meet you at the house later and you can show them where you saw it.”
“I can do that? E-mail you, I mean?”
“Sure,” he said. He grinned briefly. “We have e-mail and everything. We even read them.”
Enid snorted. I got his e-mail address and he got my physical address. “Someone will be around later. Hopefully me. And maybe Bongo here can lead us back to it.” Officer Bob paused. I don’t know if his sympathetic look was something cops learn to do, or if he was genuinely feeling it. It was a good look either way. “Really, it’s probably just kids trying to be edgy. But we’ll check it out anyway.”
He waved with two fingers around his coffee cup and went out the door. I suspected he was probably going to go tell the people at the station about the crazy lady who was seeing crucified deer, but that didn’t matter. If he came out, I could show him the deer.
If someone else saw it, then it was real, not a monster thing, and they could find out who’d done it and it would be their problem and not mine.
I wrote the e-mail. I don’t have too many useful skills, but I can by God write an e-mail. And this was good. I sounded very calm in e-mail and not like a woman who had driven at breakneck speed down the road and burst into tears in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. That woman would sound awful on a police report.
Subject gave the following statement: Holy shit there’s a nasty thing hanging up in the woods. Subject appeared agitated. Subject’s dog requested ear skritches, which were duly provided.…
I floundered for a bit trying to think of how to describe what I had seen. Eventually I wrote effigy and hoped that the police had access to a dictionary.
No, that was unkind. Officer Bob had seemed pretty sharp.
How do you end an e-mail to the police? You don’t write Love, Melissa. Even Sincerely seemed weird. By my hand on this twenty-third day of March… No, probably not.
Eventually I just typed my name and the date underneath.
Enid brought me more hot water. I swirled the tea bag around in it, extracting the last molecules of tea. “Am I nuts?” I asked her.
“Undoubtedly,” she said cheerfully. “But that doesn’t mean somebody didn’t hang something weird in the woods. This place is full of freaks, and I say that as one of them.”
I let out a long sigh. I felt better. I had told the police. I was being responsible. Whatever happened now, it wasn’t my fault.
“Thank you,” I said to Enid. I was starting to feel embarrassed. I’d bought coffee from this woman like eight times now, and s
he’d pulled me out of a truck, sobbing. “I swear, I don’t usually have breakdowns like that in the parking lot.”
She snorted. “If I ran into a crucified deer, crying in the parking lot would be the least of it. Dude. I’d run screaming through the town stabbing people.”
I paused. “How would that help?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t, but I’d have a great excuse.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and took my leave.
* * *
Going back to the house was not the easiest thing I’ve done in my life.
Deep breaths, I told myself. Deep breaths It’s just a weird sculpture. It didn’t chase you. It wasn’t alive. It was just some thing that somebody hung up. Officer Bob will show up and you’ll go find it and he’ll tell you that it was just some weird hunter’s idea of art.
It took me a few minutes to get out of the truck even so.
It’s fine. You’re fine. You don’t need to go out in the woods alone looking for it. It’s not like somebody dropped it on your porch. It has nothing to do with you.
and I twisted myself around like the twisted ones
Stop it.
I got out of the truck. I’ll be honest, if Bongo had been upset, I would probably have gone back into town and asked Enid if I could drink coffee until Officer Bob was available, but Bongo acted like nothing much was going on. So I went back inside and turned on the radio and heard all about the great programming that my pledge helped pay for. (I had yet to hear any of this great programming, but hey, it had been less than two weeks.)
Waiting for the police to show up is rather like waiting for a package to be delivered, except that you have a vague nagging worry that the package is going to tell you you’re breaking the law and arrest you on the spot. I tried to fill another garbage bag with old newspapers, while jumping up and going to the window every time a car went past on the road.
I thought about going across the street to Foxy, but it occurred to me that between Skip’s mental issue and Tomas’s not being white and Foxy being Foxy, they might not be on the best terms with the cops. I stayed put.
About five o’clock, when I’d nearly given up on anyone coming out at all, a black-and-white Charger pulled into the driveway and Officer Bob got out.
The Twisted Ones Page 11