Savage Woods

by Mary SanGiovanni

  It was the first time it occurred to her that maybe she should kill Darren. Just kill him and be done with him and all the trouble he caused. It was not that the idea of Darren simply disappearing, going to jail, or delightfully dying of a heart attack hadn’t occurred to her during those endless days of frustrated helplessness—it sure had. This time, though, she seriously considered that she might have to do it herself, in self-defense if it came to that, and the idea made her feel both numb and strong at the same time. Maybe not here and now, while she had the disadvantage of being weaponless, but maybe someday. It was an odd feeling, like the breaking of something inside her—or the sprouting of something new—and she couldn’t quite say she disliked it.

  Julia rolled under a thick clump of ferns and waited, listening.

  For a long time, all she heard was the occasional snap of a branch. She couldn’t attribute any of the noises to Darren for sure. Maybe he finally had given up and gone away. She hoped he had, but she knew him better than that.

  Then she caught a whiff of his cologne on a passing breeze; it instantly brought a welling of mixed feelings that she wrangled and forced down. He was close. She also thought she could smell the moist, sickly sweetness of sweat on her own skin, and wondered if Darren could, as well. Her heart pounded silently in her ears. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and waited.

  “Julia,” he called. He sounded like he was still on the path, maybe looking for her footsteps or some other indication of the direction in which she’d gone. “Julia, you bitch! You’re really pissing me off now. Where the fuck are you?”

  She willed the ferns around her to cover her, to hide her away from him. Acutely aware of every breath, every heartbeat, she tried to determine whether the crunching sound of footsteps was moving closer or farther away.

  How many times had she been just like this, keeping her breaths shallow, avoiding his wrath, hoping he’d just get tired of terrorizing her and go away? How many times had she hoped the earth would swallow her up, just so she could get away from him? Tears escaped the tightly shut lids of her eyes, but she didn’t dare move even so much as to wipe them away. It had often been like this, she realized—to lesser degrees, sure, but most of her relationship, most of her time, had been wasted in this very same kind of dynamic. She had been afraid of him, afraid of what he’d say or do, enough to pull away just a little, but not enough to break from the ground on which he wished to keep her. Ever since the police station, she’d been wondering how things had come to this, how things could possibly have escalated to such disastrous proportions. She had been a fool, she realized, swallowing the lump of bitterness in her throat, to have thought her relationship with Darren had been anything else than a steady coast downhill to where she was right now.

  His next words, mumbled cursing, seemed right above her head. She was sure he must be able to see hear, or at least hear her heart, her breathing, something. To her surprise, however, the footsteps seemed to be retreating. Her shallow breaths caught in her chest. Was he . . . ? Yes! Finally, he was moving away from her. She said a silent thank-you to whatever forces in the universe might be listening as first his mumbling, then his movements, faded to silence.

  She didn’t move, though—not yet. She didn’t want to do anything to bring him back. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could move, even if she wanted to. It was warm under those ferns and peaceful, and for the first time in a very long time, she felt . . . well, not quite safe, not out there where he could come back and find her, or she could be stepped on by some bear or something. But she felt she was where she belonged at that moment, where she ought to be. The danger had passed. She had won. She would just stay there, then, for a few minutes and wait for her heart to slow down and her breathing to right itself. She was okay now . . . not a lumberjack, ha ha, but she was okay. She felt very tired, her limbs weighed down by the trauma of the day, so she closed her eyes. Just for a few minutes, she’d rest her eyes. She was okay. She was okay . . .

  She fell asleep with the ferns above shielding her eyes from the rays of the setting sun, and dreamed of being watched over by eyes formed in the shapes among leaves, her hair stroked by tree branch-fingers. In the dreams, finally, she felt safe.

  * * *

  While Julia slept, the manëtuwàk watched the ax-wielding one stalking through the woods. He was an angry, howling beast, a thing as yet untouched by Nilhollow and already riddled with the same blood-hate and insanity as anything that lived in its depths. For that reason, he fascinated them a little. Out of curiosity at first more than anything, the manëtuwàk protected the sleeping one, shielding her from the other’s notice to see what he would do, but what he did was swing that abominable ax, sinking it into the flesh of their trees and carelessly wrenching it free, then cursing the wilderness.

  All the while, the manëtuwàk grew angrier and angrier.

  It was their anger that finally wore through the last of their bonds. They felt good to be free, and more alive than they had in a very long time. The Kèkpëchehëlat still slept, but they could wander the whole of Nilhollow. They could reclaim their tèkëne, all of it—the trees, the grass, the ferns. And they could focus their full attention on the new ax-wielding one cutting into their trees.

  They rustled the branches above the narrow path excitedly, moving on the breeze along the forest’s undergrowth, converging around the ax-wielding one as he stomped, angry and directionless, along the path. He alternated between muttering and occasionally shouting in his odd, ugly language, and fuming silently.

  He stopped, seeming to listen or perhaps sniff the air for signs of danger. He could sense them, just like deer had sensed the far-moving ones of long ago, but it didn’t mean he could escape them. He turned suddenly, staring through them, unable to see more than suggestions of their faces and limbs in the leaf cover above or the waving fronds of ferns so close now to his legs. They were not strong enough to take a physical form just yet; they were still weak from having been held down for so long and because the Chasm was not nearby. However, they were not so weak that they couldn’t shift the direction of the path so that when he turned back around, it was heading off even farther away from the sleeping one.

  The ax-wielding one frowned, clutching his weapon more tightly. He moved farther down the newly drawn path, and they followed behind. They managed to shift the path again, clearing and redrawing it at only just the periphery of his notice, and he kept following it, deeper into Nilhollow, closer to the clearing where the Chasm was. They could feel him acutely, a foreign, almost unnatural thing among them with his seething hate, his desire to kill the one he thought of as “the bitch,” whatever that meant. He was like the Chasm and yet not like it, and it was whispered between them, over his head among the foliage of the towering trees, that maybe they should just push him in and let whatever had split the earth in the first place deal with him. He had already ceased to be a source of fascination, and had become a rather intense beacon for their enmity. The pine trees bristled at his approach. The cedars and oaks rustled in hostile anticipation.

  Every so often, he would turn around as if he could feel them, could hear the meaning in the words they whispered in the wind. Perhaps he could; some of his kind were more susceptible to sensing the manëtuwàk, particularly since the opening of the Chasm. It was shortly after one of these pauses where he scanned the tree line around him that the ax-wielding one stepped off the path without realizing it. More accurately, the path had been swept away beneath his feet, and he seemed not to notice that he now clomped through the sticks and roots.

  The manëtuwàk leaned in closer, scratching at his face with thin, woody fingers, catching up his clothes, toying with him. They chose to move cautiously, so long as he still held the ax. They suspected that even in their state, it might be able to hurt them, as it had in the past. From time to time, he buried it in a tree and the manëtuwàk, now able to feel as well as move, cried out. With the intensity of their connections to the trees restored, their collecti
ve rage surged forward, a sudden, sharply cold wind that the ax-wielding one certainly felt. He shivered, and although he did not drop the ax or quit his feverish mumbling, he moved more cautiously, without swinging the ax at anything but the air.

  It was not enough for them, though. The manëtuwàk pushed a tree root up in front of him and he tripped, swearing as the ax thumped to the ground in a fine spray of dust, with him alongside it. He cried out when one of them took the opportunity to sink a jagged branch into the flesh of his calf, just as he had sunk the ax into the trees, and rip it out just as carelessly. He scrambled away from the spot, away from the ax, his eyes wildly darting around every so often as he examined the jagged tear in his leg. Blood filled it and spilled onto the ground, and not far off, the Chasm shuddered. He spit out a word, a name, as if the one behind the name had injured him, then slipped off the overlayer of his upper clothing and tied it tightly around the wound. He spied a long stick and snatched it, then clumsily got to his feet, hopping and wobbling a little before righting himself with the help of his new crutch. He searched the ground around him, ostensibly looking for the ax, but the manëtuwàk had dragged it out of sight.

  With a muttered word of anger, he turned back toward the direction from which he’d come. Seeming to have given up his search for both the ax and the sleeping one, he hobbled a few feet but then stopped, his head snapping around. It had finally dawned on him that he was lost; his helpless frustration seeped from him like sweat, and they could smell it. He was also beginning to feel genuine fear, though not of them—not yet. He was not in control, and clearly, he hated that.

  He chose a direction, and with the help of the stick, he swung his weight forward in a graceless hop. He’d nearly made it back to the spot where the ax was hidden when the stick flew out from under him, skittering across the forest floor. He cried out as he tumbled forward face-first and smacked his forehead against a protruding root. His blood rushed to fill the dent in his head, and he groaned, swearing, as he rolled over.

  The manëtuwàk held back. That time, they hadn’t touched him . . . but at that moment, they felt the approach of the one who had.

  It had taken its tree-form, the size of a small oak. Sheathed in gray-brown bark, its head, shoulders, and body were formed from knots of solid wood entwined with thick, curving branches that roughly defined sinewy musculature and features not unlike the far-moving ones. It glared at the ax-wielding one from twin impressions in the head filled with pale blue lightning. Its arms, also tightly corded with vines, ended in large, rough hands with long stick-fingers. Thin, jagged branches grew from its back and the top of its head, ending in sparse foliage that trembled with its rage. Its powerful legs were wrapped in roots and vines that it could uncoil and dig into the ground at will.

  The lipless slit of its mouth parted, and it roared so loudly that the surrounding vegetation shook. The manëtuwàk pulled back, out of fear as much as respect. The one who had wielded the ax belonged to the Kèkpëchehëlat now.

  He blinked a few times when he saw it; perhaps he thought the blood in his eye was blurring his vision, or that he’d whacked his head so hard on the root that he was hallucinating. But when the Kèkpëchehëlat, the once-mighty elemental god of the woods, roared at him again, he screamed.

  Its movements were uneven, even jerking as it worked its power through physical limbs it hadn’t used in thousands of years, but it came at the cowering one who had wielded the ax, with a speed that seemed to surprise the man. He scrabbled backward on his hands and feet until he thumped against the trunk of a nearby tree. The Kèkpëchehëlat closed the distance in seconds and loomed over him, its head tilted as if in consideration of the weak little thing bleeding at its feet. Then it reached down and hoisted him in the air by his good leg. Holding him up so their eyes met, it shook him a little and he struggled, screaming. His body twisted and squirmed as he tried to free his leg. His terror did not overcome his anger, that blood-hate in his body that held him in an even tighter grip, and he pounded his fists against the wood of the Kèkpëchehëlat’s hand, when he could reach it. The whole time, he shouted a word they had heard before, and understood: No. “No, no, no, stop, no, fuck you let me go, don’t kill me, no!”

  The Kèkpëchehëlat grabbed his flailing leg with its other hand, and pulled the two limbs in opposite directions. There was a terrible wet wrenching sound and a crack like many twigs snapping at once, and the one who had wielded the ax came apart down the middle. The Kèkpëchehëlat dangled the two pieces in the air a moment, splattering the ground beneath with blood before crushing one of the halves in one hand, then tossing the crumpled mess to the ground. It studied the other half a moment, then pulled off the arm and what was left of the head and dropped those, as well. Then it threw that final, dismembered piece against a nearby tree. With a wet slap, it hit the bark and flattened against it, then dripped, bit by bit, onto the ground until the whole mess landed with a plop.

  Having lost interest, the Kèkpëchehëlat wandered away. It was awake now and free. It was crazy, because it had long found sustenance in what it dug from the depths of the chasm. And its rage was a blazing sun compared to that of the one who had wielded the ax.

  The manëtuwàk knew to stay out of its way.

  Vines wrapped around what was left of the body and dragged it beneath the undergrowth, where the manëtuwàk set about disassembling it and giving over its parts to the wilds.

  THREE

  Julia awoke to tickling on her arms. She opened her eyes. It was dark and a light breeze brushed her skin, drawing out goose bumps. She squinted to make out the familiar shapes of her furniture. It was getting to be that time of year, she supposed, when the summer warmth of the day dissipated into a fall chill at night; she’d have to get up and close the window. Or maybe, if she could just find that extra blank—

  The day came back to her in one nauseating rush. She sat up quickly to discover the tickling on her arms was due to bugs crawling all over her—a little winged thing with needle-thin legs, a spider, some ants. She cried out and slapped them away, shaking out her clothes, her hair, standing up and brushing at her legs and face. For a moment, Darren and his ax didn’t matter. She hated bugs; they filled her with a shuddering loathing unlike anything else.

  When she was satisfied that she’d gotten them all, she sank back to the ground, tears in her eyes. Her skin crawled. Her left arm ached where she’d slept on it, and the bruises from her encounter with Darren were already turning purple. And she knew that her path of blind wandering made in the daylight would be just about impossible to retrace in the dark. She was lost. She was like the others now, an Internet news article, a footnote on a forum somewhere about people who’d gone missing in the Pine Barrens, the land of the Jersey Devil, portals, and mysteriously missing hikers as well as the mafia’s biggest body-dumping ground. It was not that she believed much in New Jersey’s urban legends, but an open mind about people usually led to an open mind about other things. Particularly when one was alone in the dark in a strange place, a deeper, more primal and instinct-based part of the brain took over, and that part of the brain believes it all.

  It didn’t help that said part of the brain reminded her that the part of the Pine Barrens in which she found herself lost was the Nilhollow area. The word itself was a muddied derivation of an old Lenape word for “murderous”—murderous woods, they’d called it. She remembered that from third-grade history class. It was a place where the Lenni-Lenape, and later the European colonists, left their crazy, their criminals, their sick and dying. It was there that people practiced dark and ancient rituals, and there that so many had literally gotten away with murder. It was there that Julia was lost.

  In spite of all that, or maybe because of it, her strongest and most preoccupying feeling was that of naked vulnerability, which made the other things, the physical things at least, almost peripheral. She had the specific and uneasy feeling of being watched from the darkness between the trees. In her mind’s eye, she could ima
gine a dozen or more pairs of eyes, animal in the thinking that went on behind them, curious and vaguely hostile. She scanned the area slowly, trying to make out the eyes or any other distinct shape—deer, squirrels, owls maybe. Men with axes. She couldn’t see anything at all, not unless she counted the odd clustering of leaves that suggested a face. It was funny, the way the human brain looked for faces in things, as if being alone in any environment so alien as to not have other people was intolerable. It was funnier still that the brain could find those faces—eyes, mouths, even hands—in the contour of a tree trunk, a clump of bushes, or a fan of leaves. She supposed it was a comfort thing, a mechanism of the brain to sooth anxieties and fears by imposing the familiar over the unknown. She didn’t find it soothing, though, that so very many foliage-faces and tree-bark scowls seemed to crowd her, watching, waiting to see if she’d scream in helpless anguish, cry, run in circles trying to escape them . . .

  Julia stopped and took a deep breath. Her thoughts were erratic, strange, disjointed. She needed to think—take another deep breath, assess the situation, and think.

  She felt around for her purse and found it nearby under a clump of ferns. She grabbed the strap and dragged it to her lap, opening it to rifle through—

  He has an ax. He smashed my car window with an ax . . . —and see what she had with her. The phone was gone. Darren had seen to that right away.

  In her makeup bag was a compact with a mirror, a lipstick in dark wine and a lip gloss of shiny pink, an eye-lining pencil, a tube of mascara, a pair of tweezers, some makeup brushes, and a couple of small palettes of eye shadow. Well, great, she thought. At least when they find my body, I can have my face on.

  She shivered. Have her face on—it was an old phrase her grandmother had used to mean putting on makeup, but in the context of her situation, it felt morbid. She had a sickening feeling that if it got to the point that people found her dead body, the animals would have already gotten to her face. Makeup or not, there probably wouldn’t be much to identify her except scattered teeth.