I opened the door and flung myself outside.
One step, two steps, three, four—shit!
On the fourth step, halfway down the porch stairs, my foot came down on something that rolled. I tried to catch myself, missed a step, and landed on my knees in the grass. The shock of the fall slammed up my wrists and into my spine.
Do you remember when you were a kid, and you fell down constantly, and it was just no big deal? Somewhere along the way, that changes and you start to realize how old folks fall down and die as a result.
I knelt in the grass, not thinking, for several seconds. Adrenaline had whited out my mind completely. “You’re fine,” I said aloud to myself, in the same voice I use when Bongo gets the leash wrapped around himself. “Nothing’s broken.” (I had no damn idea if anything was broken or not; I was just saying it in hopes that it would be true.)
The panic faded. I sat up and flexed my wrists and my ankles, and nothing did seem to be broken. Okay. Okay. A deer monster hadn’t eaten me yet. I just had to get up.
My first reflexive thought was for my computer. I’m not proud that was the first thing I thought of, but there we are. Had I cracked the screen? Would it work?
It was still on my back. Okay.
My second thought, belatedly, was Bongo.
Had the sudden fall hurt him? Was he okay? I hadn’t heard a yelp.
I lifted my hand and stared at it.
It was empty.
I had dropped the leash when I tried to catch myself.
Bongo was nowhere to be seen.
I looked down at his tracks in the mud, deep and clear, with the nails sharply defined. They ran around behind the house. I was on my feet before I realized it and running, discovering that I’d skinned my knees in the fall, not caring.
He wasn’t behind the house. The tracks got into the grass and then into the leaves. He’d smelled something and while I’d been on my knees mumbling to myself like an idiot, he’d gone after it with all the single-minded intensity of a coonhound on the scent.
Hounds are almost all dumb as posts, but if their nose turns on, suddenly they are professionals on a mission. This is why you never, ever let them off the leash.
“Bongo!” I called. “Buddy! Bongo! Where are you?!”
Five minutes ago, I had been terrified to make a sound, because I thought the deer monster would get me. Now I was screaming, for all the good it did me.
I circled the house once, twice, not knowing what direction to go. What if it was the wrong way and I got too far away to find him? I was paralyzed with indecision.
“Bongo! Come back!”
I looked at the tracks again and thought I’ve really got to trim his nails, and then I burst into tears because I was already stretched past what humans should have to deal with and now my dog was gone.
I collapsed on the porch stairs and put my face in my hands.
I couldn’t leave now. I couldn’t leave him. He was wandering somewhere around these awful woods, probably chasing rabbits or deer or something, but what if the… the things got him?
What if he was scared, wherever he was? What if he wandered onto a road? He wasn’t that smart. He didn’t really understand roads. He’d try to make friends with a car.…
I cried until it became obvious that Bongo wasn’t going to show up and lick my face. Eventually I stopped, because I was on the porch, and the porch wasn’t safe.
Were the things still there? Had Bongo run out and chased them off? Had he saved me?
And I twisted myself around like the twisted ones.…
I couldn’t deal with that, so I decided not to think about it anymore.
“Okay,” I said. My voice was shaky, but I couldn’t dissolve into a useless pile of snot. Bongo needed me. I had to do the right things. “I will get up. I will make coffee. I will find a phone book in this wreck, and I’ll call every pound in the county and make sure they know he’s missing.”
I stood up. I felt light-headed.
Maybe you think I was stupid. Maybe you’re right. Never go back for the cat, right? That’s how you get eaten by aliens.
But I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t leave.
My dog was out there somewhere. Until I had him back, or had proof he wasn’t coming back, I was going to stay.
10
I drank coffee and then I called three different pounds on the landline. Yes, he was chipped. Yes, he’d had all his shots. Yes, he still had the collar with the rabies tag on it. No, this number didn’t have voice mail. No, my cell phone wasn’t working reliably, but they could leave a message. Or send an e-mail. Or they could call the coffee shop in town. I prayed Enid wouldn’t mind. I didn’t think she would.
It was all so normal and efficient. There was a system. I put on my pleasant doing-business-with-people voice and I answered questions, and all the time I wanted to scream, Do you know there are monsters in the woods, and if there are monsters in the woods, then the whole world is not what we pretend it is? Do you understand?
I did not say this, because that would have made me sound crazy, and it wouldn’t have helped get Bongo back. But every time I got off the phone, I had to pace back and forth for a minute, drinking lukewarm coffee while my teeth chattered on the edge of the mug. I wasn’t cold. I was jittery with knowledge and horror.
When I had called the last pound, I stared into the empty coffeepot. Apparently I’d drunk all of it.
I went to the front porch and looked down the steps.
The round thing that had turned under my feet was a bone. I know that sounds sinister, but when you have dogs, you get used to some things. I don’t know what kind of bone it was, just a normal bone with a knob on one end and a gnawed-off spike on the other.
It was stained deep orange-red. You didn’t need to be a geologist to know it was the color of the red clay that lay under the soil here, exposed every time someone dug a hole.
Had the effigy left it? Dropped it on the steps as it left the house, like it was shedding?
No. Get ahold of yourself. It’s just a bone. For all I knew, Bongo had dug it up sometime when I wasn’t looking and it had gotten kicked onto the stairs.
Should I call the police? And tell them what, exactly?
I saw a monster and then there was a bone on the stairs and my dog ran away after something.
I thought of Officer Bob. I thought of walking through the trees, looking for the effigy, and then I thought, Oh, sweet fuck, what if it was alive when I saw it? What if it was hanging in the tree watching me? What if it was just playing possum and laughing to itself? What if it was chasing us when we ran—
No. No. It had been daylight. Surely things like that weren’t allowed to come around in daylight, were they?
Allowed by whom?
This train of thought would end with me crouched in the bathroom with a shotgun aimed at the door. This would not help Bongo and also I didn’t know how to use a shotgun.
If I were a good owner, I would go out into the woods and call for him and bring treats.
I inhaled sharply at the thought.
I couldn’t do it. I knew I should, I really did, but I couldn’t go back out just yet. Not alone. Not even for him.
What if I go looking and I find another effigy and it’s Bongo?
What if they make another one out of him and he comes to the window with his skull flipped over and his paws on the windowsill and I twisted myself around like the twisted ones—
I screamed. I actually screamed and swept everything off the counter. It was only the ramen and the oatmeal boxes and a plastic cup of water. The cup bounced.
I never do things like that. I don’t throw things. I don’t scream. I never understood people who lob toasters at their boyfriends. Why would you waste a perfectly good toaster?
Well, I’m under a lot of stress. Monsters are stressful. And I should probably stop drinking coffee.
I paced back and forth. I went to the bathroom. I paced back and forth some more.
Why am I moving boxes when there are monsters in the woods?
I paced back and forth, clenching and unclenching my fists, and finally I said out loud, “Because the boxes have to get moved.”
I went to the doll room. It smelled of my grandmother’s malice, which was nothing compared to what had stared in the window last night. I hauled plastic bins out of the hallway, filled with dead baby dolls and plastic newborns with their eyes squeezed shut, and I felt only vague, impartial disgust.
I wrestled the bins onto the tailgate and into the bed of the truck. Somehow I’d thought there’d been more doll bins in the truck already—I vaguely remembered taking some out last night—but the bed was nearly empty, so that must have been the last load. Probably all the junk was starting to blur together.
Probably I wasn’t terribly reliable at the moment.
The truck filled with dolls. I slammed another plastic crate down on the tailgate, hard enough to make the truck bounce. The lid popped off and dolls flew.
“Shit!”
“Holy Jesus,” said Foxy, coming up the drive. “Was your grandma in a cult or something?”
I let out a thin laugh, choked on it, and put my face in my hands.
“Oh, honey! What’s wrong?”
Before I quite knew what was happening, I was sobbing on Foxy’s nonexistent bosom. She was all collarbones and necklaces.
“Bongo’s gone,” I choked out. “He ran off—I hope he ran off—there’s things in the woods, Foxy, I saw one—I think I’m going crazy—oh God, what if they got him?”
“Easy now,” said Foxy, patting my back. “Easy, hon. We’ll get it sorted.” She patted me for a few minutes, just long enough for me to start feeling horrified and embarrassed instead of horrified and overwhelmed, and then produced a handkerchief from somewhere in her pockets.
I wiped my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. You ain’t the first to cry on me. Or the tenth. Now, let’s go to my place and have some lemonade, and we can sit on the porch and you can tell me all what happened.”
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” I whispered. My throat was raw.
“Sure, but I won’t hold that against you.”
Foxy led me across the road as I leaned on her arm. I felt like I was limping with both feet.
As soon as I was sitting on her porch, I felt better. Foxy had wind chimes hanging all over the porch, and some of them were stones with holes in them. But they went click-clack-jangle in a cheerful manner, like Foxy’s bangles rattling together, not like a monster with stones in its ribs.
There were other people around. I had an idea somehow that the thing wouldn’t show up in front of other people. Maybe that was a horror movie idea, that monsters only show up when you’re alone, but I felt… safe.
Foxy went inside and came out a moment later with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. I took one and drank it while the condensation ran down over my fingers.
“All right,” she said. She sat down beside me on the steps, and we looked out over the winding driveway in the grass. I couldn’t see my grandmother’s house from here. From the very slight elevation, I could see a little way over the woods behind the house.
There was no hill, and no ring of hills, and somehow that didn’t surprise me.
I told her everything. I started crying again when I had to explain that Bongo was missing, and then I said out loud the thing I hadn’t wanted to think, which was that the thing would get him and I should have protected him and I’d failed and he’d trusted me because I was his human, and then I burst into tears again.
“Now, stop that,” said Foxy sharply. “You don’t know that at all. He might come on back tonight, full of deer ticks and smelling like skunk.”
I scrubbed at my face. “Do you think so?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Dogs are smart enough to be afraid. If he ran off, I can promise it wasn’t after one of them.”
I took another gulp of lemonade. “You believe me? About the thing?”
“Believe you? Shit.” The lines of her face deepened, and for a minute she looked a lot older than sixty. “Of course. Didn’t realize until just now that you don’t know.”
“Know what?” I said blankly.
“ ’Bout them. The people in the hollers. Whatever you want to call ’em.”
“I don’t know anything!” I spread my hands. “What am I supposed to know?”
Foxy shook her head. “I messed up,” she said. “I thought you had to know about them, at least a bit. Figured your granny would have told you.”
“Ha!” I said, and took a slug of lemonade.
“Yeah, not the brightest thing I’ve ever thought. But when you said you saw the hill, I figured you had to know something, ’cos you got up there in the first place, and then got out again.” She glared into her lemonade.
“I don’t know anything!” I repeated. “What am I supposed to know about? Who’s in the hollers? There aren’t even any hollers around here, are there?”
“Ehhh. Sometimes there are, sometimes there ain’t. It comes and goes. Most times there’s no problems, you understand. Sometimes things get turned around and you end up in country that ain’t supposed to be there.”
“Like hills that don’t exist?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“But how is that possible?” I flapped my hands. “Hasn’t somebody made a topographic map or taken photos or something and noticed that there was a hill that wasn’t supposed to be there?”
Foxy shook her head. “Don’t think it’s that easy to get there. I only done it once myself. And you show up spouting foolishness about hills being where everybody knows there’s no hills, who’s gonna believe you? They can look over and see there’s no hill there.”
“But what…? How…?”
Foxy sighed. “I dunno. I mean, people say they know things and try to look smart, but I don’t think anybody knows anything for sure. The hills’re just where the holler people live. Old-timers talk about seeing ’em now and again. Tall and skinny and white like nobody you ever saw.”
“I didn’t see anybody like that,” I said. I thought of the hiker I’d seen, the one dressed like a hippie, but she hadn’t been particularly tall and pale, had she? Not unnaturally so, anyway.
“Yeah. Never seen one either. But the deer thing’s one of theirs. They leave stuff around sometimes. Mostly it’s piled-up stones and marks on trees. Talking to each other, like. But sometimes they make something that walks around.”
I clutched my lemonade. The porch didn’t seem quite so safe anymore.
“But why?”
Foxy shrugged. “Dunno. I only seen it twice. One was a hog, but they’d stuck a wasp’s nest where its head oughta be. It was out digging up fields and a friend of my daddy’s shot it. Couldn’t get too close to it ’cos of the wasps, so they threw hay over it and burned it. They’re uncanny, but they ain’t fireproof.”
“That’s a relief,” I said faintly. “What about the other time?”
“Raccoon. Thought it had rabies or something. It was sort of shuffling around, but you got close enough, you could see it was all held together with cords ’n’ junk.”
“What did you do?”
“Ran it over with the tractor a coupla times. Had to stop using that chunk of field, of course. Daddy said the ground would be bad under it. This was over in Bynum. When we sold the place, we told ’em that bit was bad, but I doubt they listened. Still, I figure if you’re growing all those weird-ass glow-in-the-dark soy beans, a little bad magic ain’t gonna make things much worse.”
“So it’s magic, then?”
Foxy rolled her eyes. “It’s makin’ dead animals walk around and hills vanish. What the hell else would it be? Aliens?”
“But magic—I mean—” I flailed. Magic in my head was a mix of stage magicians in white gloves and really well-meaning people who did yoga and believed in the healing pow
er of crystals.
I attempted to express this to Foxy, who looked at me like I was a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest and hit its head.
“I don’t think the holler people are doing yoga,” she said.
“But where are they?”
“I dunno. Little to one side of here, I think. Somewhere like this, but with hills and hollers. They come through sometimes and we go through sometimes, and sometimes the way’s open and sometimes it ain’t. You must’ve gone through when it was open. Dumb luck or something.”
“It was Bongo,” I said. “He found the way through.”
“Yeah. A lot of dogs would’ve thought twice, but hounds get a smell and their brain turns off. Well, you know. But even he was smart enough to be scared of one of their walking things.”
“And nobody reports this? Nobody says, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of scary people around here making—making dead animals walk around?’ ”
She snorted. “Yeah, that’d be good for a story. ‘Hillbillies Claim the Woods Are Haunted, Blame Little People.’ Or, if they did find one of the walking things, it’d be ‘Redneck Satanic Horror!!’ We’d have reporters in the shitter and nobody’d find anything. Assuming anybody even listened in the first place.”
“So nobody knows, then.”
“Eh, most old-timers around here get a notion. But you talk about it and you sound crazy, so nobody talks about it much. And the cops just shrug. That sheriff fellow who was out here earlier? He knows the stories, I’ll bet you, but what cop is gonna admit they believe in that kinda thing? They’d get laughed outta the station. And if you get any of them ghost hunter people, they head over to Chatham and the Devil’s Tramping Ground. Though I’ll tell you, I’ve been there, and the Devil needs to throw out them old refrigerators if he wants to do any serious tramping. Place is a dump.”
“But—”
She looked at me over the rim of her jar. “Think about it, hon. You tell somebody, how you gonna start?”
I took a deep shuddering breath and drank more lemonade, trying to think of an answer. Sure, Enid and Officer Bob had believed me about the effigy hanging from a tree, but if I tried to tell them it had been in the window, that it had been alive… Officer Bob probably already half believed that I was making things up. Enid seemed like she might be more sympathetic, but what was she going to do about it? Come fight the effigy off with a thermos of decaf?
The Twisted Ones Page 13