She is at the doorway to her bedroom, which is to say, she has walked a short distance in a short time (though it has been time enough for her to wonder if the noise she heard was a vivid dream [not that she knows anything about those]), when there is another crack, louder than the first, the same crash of shattering glass, without a doubt from the living room. Barbara jumps, then turns and runs back into the living room, flashlight firmly in hand.
This time, she sees immediately that the mirror has fallen completely from its frame, which contains only darkness. “Shit,” she says, crouching to search for pieces of glass, which, she thinks, it's a wonder didn't slice her foot.
Although there are no lights on in Barbara's apartment except for the nightlight in her bathroom, there is enough light streaming in through the front window for her to be able to see around the living room surprisingly well. As she slides her hand over the floor, that light dims, as if someone had his hand on a dial and turned it all the way to zero. It's like the descriptions Barbara has read of losing consciousness: everything goes black; the only difference is that Barbara maintains awareness as the room vanishes around her. She is not afraid, only confused, wondering what has happened; some type of power outage, she supposes, which reminds her of her flashlight, whose switch she locates and slides on.
She is no longer in her living room. A corridor stretches in front of and behind her, its walls unstained plywood, its ceiling somewhere in the darkness overhead. Her apartment's hardwood floor has been replaced by gray concrete. The plywood walls are decorated with trees painted in black, white, and gray, some thick, some thin, as if trying to suggest perspective. All of them have been painted with branches bare. Looking at them, Barbara thinks of her dreams, of standing with the tall pale man in the woods on Frenchman's Mountain. Barbara points the flashlight from walls to floor, from floor to ceiling (undistinguishable), from ceiling to walls, from walls to ceiling, from ceiling to floor, unable to understand what she is seeing, the part of her brain that processes information jammed. The mundaneness of her surroundings only adds to her confusion. Were she to find herself transported to an alien jungle teeming with wailing blue flowers, slithering pink vines, a six-legged green beast with a mouth of curving fangs creeping toward her, the landscape and its inhabitants would be consistent with the strangeness of the shift; the weirdness of this move, however, strains against the ordinariness of her slapdash surroundings, the kind of thing you might expect at a low-budget haunted house at Halloween. Walls, floor, walls, ceiling, floor, walls, walls, walls: she jerks the flashlight from one to the other frantically, as if one of the surfaces is going to surrender the secret of what has happened to her. She drags her free hand through her hair, hoping the pain of her fingers tearing through its tangles will yank her out of this place and back to reality. But all the pain does is confirm the concrete cold beneath her, the painted trees shining on the coarse walls.
Barbara switches off the flashlight, plunging herself into darkness once more. She counts to ten, then turns the flashlight back on. When she does, she is again faced with the plywood walls and their arboreal decorations; this time, though, the sight of those walls prompts her to action. Perhaps a failsafe switch has been thrown somewhere in the depths of her brain; perhaps the neurons that had stalled have been bypassed. Barbara stands and approaches the wall to her right. It is solid, braced, it feels like, from the other side. Letting the flashlight dangle, she tries with both hands to move it, with no more luck. Annoyance prickles her skin, causes her to mutter, “What is this?” There is as much reason to walk forward as back, so Barbara starts walking forward. As she does, she sees a white light shining in the distance ahead. Thinking it might be the flashlight reflecting on a window or mirror, she slides the switch to off. When the light continues to shine, Barbara switches the flashlight on and hurries toward it. She keeps the beam on the floor in front of her, but the glow is strong enough for her to be able to see the walls on either side of her. The trees painted on them appear to writhe as she passes them; a trick of the light, she is sure.
As she moves ahead, Barbara notices that the corridor branches off on either side of her at irregular intervals. While she wonders where those branchings lead, she does not linger at any of them. Should this light in front of her be a disappointment, there will be time for her to return to them. It occurs to her that she is walking through a giant maze—being led through it, more like—and then she hears something. It is difficult to say what it is; it is one of those sounds that is so low, so soft, that you are not sure you even heard it in the first place; you are not sure it was not your mind whispering to you. If there is someone in the room with you, you will say, “Excuse me?” and the other person will look up from their book and say, “I didn't say anything.” Barbara stops walking, and the sound appears to halt as well. Maybe it was only her feet echoing off the concrete and plywood. There it is again, faintly, a sound, a sound like, a sound like someone weeping, like someone at the hiccoughing end of hours of unrelenting crying. It seems to be coming from the other side of the wall to her right; how far back from it, Barbara cannot guess. Could it be another person, someone else trapped in here with her? What else could it be? Barbara takes a deep breath and calls out, “Hello! Is there anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Hello! I'm over here! Can you hear me? Hello?” Her voice slaps flat against the plywood. She looks at the wall, which is painted with a series of spectral white trees that remind her of birches. There is no answer. The weeping fades. Barbara repeats her call, receives no answer, tries a third time. When she judges she has waited a sufficient time for a reply and has had none, she continues toward the light. She does not hear the sound of weeping anymore.
Before long, Barbara sees that the light in front of her is a single lightbulb, dangling at one end of a cord running into the darkness overhead. It marks the end of the corridor: a third wall connects those to either side of her, blocking her way. A single black tree, squat, enormous, its branches spreading out like a web of nerves, decorates the surface. Barbara's pace slows as a combination of anger and unease seizes her legs. She is on the verge of turning around when she notices what appears to be the outline of a door set in the wall, at the heart of the tree. Directing the flashlight's beam at it, she sees that there is a door: there is the doorknob; there are the hinges. With her luck, she thinks, it'll be locked.
She is wrong. When she grips the doorknob and turns it, the door swings open easily. Stepping through it, she finds herself in a large dark space, at the far end of which a man sits at a table, lit by a source she cannot identify. When Barbara sees the man, her pulse quickens, sweeping the anger and unease from her. From her place at the door, she calls, “Hello? Hello?” and walks toward him.
"Barbara, welcome!” the man says.
* * * *
11. A Cabin in the Woods
For the Police Chief, the narrative's climax begins on Frenchman's Mountain, to which he has driven this afternoon in order to revisit the site of the first murder—well, the first victim he discovered, when he pulled his cruiser up behind the dusty black pickup parked well back from the road up and over Frenchman's Mountain in a makeshift lot favored mainly by occasional hunters. In twenty years on the job, the Police Chief can count on his fingers the number of cases he's worked that have stymied him the way this one has, left him feeling he's playing perpetual catch-up. Of all the unpleasant sensations that attend his job, this is the one he likes the least; in fact, he detests it. Things are bad enough that were the State Troopers, or even the Feds, who appeared yesterday, to untangle this mess, he could not only live with, but be happy about, it. As things stand, though, the smug attitudes the State Troopers brought with them melted away at the sight of the first group of victims; nor have they had any more success stopping, let alone catching, the killer than the Police Chief and his staff. For the first time, he actually feels a certain solidarity with the men and women he generally considers his rivals. Should things continue the way they have been, h
e expects even the Feds will seem more human.
However, the Police Chief doesn't intend to let the situation progress any further, so he's driven out here, to revisit the scene of that first discovery. He's parked at one end of a dirt road that curves away from Route 299. To his right, the ground is straight for about fifty feet, then rises in a steep hill down which the marks of the first victim's run remain visible. To his left, the ground dips to a line of trees that stretches around in front of him and climbs the side of the hill. Directly ahead of him is the spot where the hunter's boots and jeans were visible sprawled beside the truck over which the rest of him had been splashed. The ground remains dark from the blood that soaked into it.
Despite his belief in humanity's innate depravity, the Police Chief has been shocked by what he has witnessed this last week. Like listening to a talk in a language he only partly understands, his mind cannot process everything it has taken in. He has not felt afraid so much as amazed, as if he has voyaged to a strange new country whose people follow customs utterly alien to him. Before now, the worst thing he had seen had occurred when he was in the Navy and serving on the flight deck of the Intrepid. In a moment of fatal carelessness, a sailor walked into the spinning propeller of an airplane. That had been worse than bad, but it had been an accident. The savagery of this past week reeks of intention, but an intention neither the Police Chief nor anyone of his fellows has been able to see to the bottom of. It's the kind of over-the-top behavior you find in Hollywood melodramas, not daily life. And yet, here they are.
As a rule, the Police Chief is not afraid of the woods. Over the course of his life, he has spent a good deal of time in them, and he possesses the confidence that comes with experience; in addition, he is sufficiently large that most things he might encounter in the woods of Upstate New York have the good sense to avoid him, and any that do not, he has more than a fair chance of being able to handle, and well at that. (The handgun riding his hip doesn't hurt his confidence.) Now, though, he feels a finger of fear tickle the base of his spine as he realizes that he is being watched. The forest is quiet, so much so that his breathing, the leaves crackling under his shoes, sound loud as thunderclaps. With the certainty of religious revelation, he knows that the killer, the monster behind the murders of twelve men and women, is standing about halfway up the hill to his right, just far enough back in the woods to prevent him from being seen. He is watching the Police Chief's actions with a keen and rapacious intelligence, a savage humor. Were the Police Chief's sense of the killer's location a shade more definite, he could draw his gun and do his best to validate that hunch. Since it isn't, there is nothing for him to do but sprint in that direction, certain that, by the time he arrives at the man's position, he will long since have been reabsorbed by the trees.
As his quadriceps and calves burn with the effort of propelling him up the hill, as his hand grips the butt of his pistol, ready to haul it from its holster, the Police Chief realizes that the killer is not moving, that he can feel the man's gaze on him still, a spotlight illuminating him as his feet push off soil that slides away beneath them. He knows that it can't be this simple, that the killer isn't just waiting for the Police Chief to take him in, that either he's ready to bolt or this is a trap, but if the killer will wait until the Police Chief reaches the top of this hill—if he judges there's no way this big a man could catch him, the Police Chief is ready to put that conceit to the test. If the man has laid some sort of trap, the Police Chief is ready to try that, too.
He gains the top of the hill and keeps going, pushes himself not to slacken, to slow. His lungs are bellows full of fiery air. Ahead and to the right, about fifteen feet into the trees, is that ... ? A tall figure regards his approach, its shadowed face broken by a bright grin, and the Police Chief's gun is out and in his hand. Now the killer turns, but it's too late, even as he breaks into a run, the Police Chief is too close for him to escape. He considers dropping to a firing crouch, but there are too many trees, not to mention the possibility—though faint—of a random civilian out for a walk. It's no matter: the sight of the tall man running has sent a tide of adrenaline through the Police Chief, and the prospect of closing his hands on this maniac fills his pounding heart with fierce joy.
The killer leads the Police Chief along a trail so faint as to be nonexistent, cutting right, left, right, left and left again. Leaves crash, sticks snap, the occasional stone shoots away from the toe of the Police Chief's boot. One misstep and he's down with a broken ankle, but he doesn't slow his pace. As the killer turns right, down a short rise, then left along a dry stream bed, the Police Chief stays on him. When he dodges right over a large mound and along another trail barely there, the Police Chief draws closer to him. He does not recognize the place to which he has been led. Rows of evergreens zigzag away like the walls of so many hallways. The air is full of the Christmas smell of pine. In front of the killer, a line of evergreens lock branches in a dark green wall.
Without breaking stride, the tall man plunges into the trees. The Police Chief follows. For a long moment, he can see nothing. Branches whip his face; he raises his forearms and lowers his head. The trees extend deeper than he had anticipated. He can hear the killer pushing through trees mere feet ahead of him. If the man wants to ambush him, coming out from this thicket offers a perfect opportunity: a second to gain your bearings, and then turn your attention on your pursuer. Guarding his face with his free hand, the Police Chief lowers his gun.
Events are moving too quickly for the Police Chief to articulate what he expects on the other side of these evergreens. Were it possible to slow time, he might say that he judges it most likely that the killer will be on the move once more; however, he would not be surprised to find the man standing off to one side or the other, a knife or hatchet in his upraised hand. Whatever he expects, it is not what confronts him as he bursts free of the trees at last. It is a cabin, the kind of slope-roofed box hunters use to insure they're in proper position as the sun is on the rise. The entire structure sits a foot or so off the ground, raised by concrete blocks to discourage pests and keep seasonal floodwater out. Its walls are maybe ten feet to a side; the largest one holds a wide window. To the left of the window, a door hangs open.
Gun in front of him, the Police Chief circles the back of the cabin. It wouldn't do for the killer to slip out a back or trap door while the Police Chief frets a possible ambush at the front. A quick duck to the ground to glance up under the cabin confirms the front door as the only entrance. The Police Chief pauses his survey as he approaches the front wall and its large window. No doubt the killer can hear him rustling the leaves out here, but sound can play tricks on you; no need to assist the man with a clear view of him. Stepping close to the cabin, the Police Chief lowers himself and eases around it, well below the bottom of the window. In front of him, the open door blocks his view of the cabin's interior. The Police Chief has a vision of the killer standing in the doorway, a loaded shotgun in his hands. Or worse, a bomb, something that will reduce the two of them to burnt blood and carbon.
Never mind, he thinks, as he creeps around the door. As long as the killing stops, never mind.
A glance shows the doorway empty, the edge of what might be a couch on the right. The Police Chief's best guess, the killer is hiding behind the couch, using it for cover. The Police Chief is reasonably certain his gun will find that couch little of an obstacle. He releases the safety, clears the door. On the floor, gun to the right. On the count of three. THREE!
* * * *
12. Six Drawings Hung In A Coffeehouse
At last, the height of the Revel, the moment the characters gather to enact the story's culmination. Here exposition, explanation, digression, flashback, analysis, have ceased their usefulness; here we have reached the point of the pure image. How many such images does it take to convey a story's climactic actions? Two, four? How about six?
You may want to imagine these as large drawings, each one done on paper eleven inches wide by fourteen in
ches long. They're mounted on black cardboard that presumably intends to frame them, but each one has been placed slightly askew—apparently in error, since the misplacement adds nothing to each picture—and it's hard not to be annoyed by this. The pictures have been executed in pencil traced with pen and ink, colored in places with dabs of watercolor. Their style: if you know about such things, you will recognize the debt they owe to the early work of Bernie Wrightson, who illustrated the original Swamp Thing comic books; the figures display the same rubbery fleshiness that distinguishes Wrightson's drawing from this time, the same feeling of texture.
This is not the kind of display you are likely to find in your local museum, unless you live near one of those institutions that prides itself on surfing the cutting edge. You are more likely to encounter these images at your neighborhood coffee shop, whether corporate or independent, alongside samples of other local art. To see them—to study them—you will have to lean over other patrons at their undersized tables, drawing the irritated glances of couples clasping hands over their lattes, businessmen flourishing their copies of The Wall Street Journal like personal banners. Ignore them.
In the first drawing, Barbara Dinasha, her back to you, stands in front of an unfinished wooden table at which sits a man with the head of a beast. She is wearing a long-sleeved nightdress that descends past her knees; the man has on a soiled black suit and a white dress shirt whose top button is open. Although Barbara's face is not visible, the stiffness of her back, her arms close to her sides, indicate tension; while his face is visible, it is harder to read the expression on the man's animal features, which could be described as those of a wolf but which also suggest both a bull and a goat. Barbara's peach nightdress commands the center of the picture; to either side of the beast-headed man, blue-white semi-abstractions suggest open mouths.
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