Savage Woods

by Mary SanGiovanni

  They clomped through the ferns and brush with over-wide steps and finally made it to the pathway. Immediately, Pete was hit with that same revulsion that Todd Mackey had initially triggered in him. It was like walking into a cobweb; sticky strands of unease clung to him all over. He shivered but kept walking. Perry, uncharacteristically silent, walked beside him.

  Though there was no immediately accessible reason for it, Pete couldn’t quite bring himself to call out to Julia yet; he felt as if he would be disturbing something he ought not to bother. That feeling deepened the farther along the path they went. He supposed it might have been a leftover thought from his experience with Todd Mackey, but Pete had the distinct impression that whatever was in Nilhollow was most definitely spreading outward.

  He also noticed that the longer they walked, the less ground they seemed to cover. It reminded him of those nightmares where people try to run but can’t gain ground. His legs felt heavy, not quite stuck, but like he was trying to move them through water. His arms felt heavy, too.

  The effect abruptly ended, though, when they found themselves in a small clearing Pete recognized as the one they chased Todd Mackey to. Trees hemmed it in on all sides, but those facing the clearing were stripped of bark in some places, the leaves or pine needles brown and dying. The carpet of forest debris covering the ground struck Pete as kind of mangy, more so than it had the first time he’d been there, and as he looked around, he realized many of those bald patches of ground were bleached to a bone color. Their shapes gave the unsettling impression of body parts uncovered from hasty burials. Pete didn’t remember the decay or the colorless patches on the ground when they’d picked up Todd Mackey, but then, he and the other officers had been focused just then on subduing a man they believed to be wild, possibly cannibalistic, and likely very dangerous. The odd twists of the branches, though, curling into shapes that tricked the eye into seeing faces—that he did remember. This was the same clearing.

  That couldn’t be right, though. They hadn’t been walking long enough or far enough to have reached that particular clearing. In fact, Pete was pretty sure the clearing was the other way.

  “Hey,” Perry said, his voice low. “Isn’t this where we picked up your crazy guy from cell four?”

  “Sure looks like it,” Pete said. “Not sure how we managed that, though.”

  Perry shrugged. “Probably a good thing we did. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that we and Cell Four found it. Maybe Julia did, too.”

  Pete considered that for a moment. Perry had an interesting point. Although Pete didn’t see or feel anything that made him think the area was the source of Mackey’s trouble, there might very well be something significant about the spot, something there that might give them an idea what had happened to Mackey and his brother, or to Julia and Darren, for that matter.

  They searched it in relative silence, each taking a side of the perimeter and cautiously working their way toward the center. There were no footprints that could have been Julia’s, nor was there the area of disturbed dirt where they had struggled to subdue Mackey. The dirty clumps that had fallen off the femur as Mackey chewed on it were gone, but that was no surprise; Todd supposed whatever wild animals lived in these woods had finished off any remnants. The leaves and grass were a bit churned up near the far edge of the clearing, but not so much that it would suggest a struggle. The few indications of drag marks were narrow, maybe the width of a tree root, but not nearly wide enough to mean a body or even the heels of feet. Pete examined the surrounding foliage for blood, but there was nothing.

  He was just about to suggest to Perry that they move on when he saw the waxy red X on a pine tree. It was facing away from him, away from the center of the clearing, and Pete would have missed it except for a glance in the direction he was considering next.

  “Perry, look at that tree.” He pointed.

  “What? There are a million trees. Which one are you—oh.”

  The two moved around the pine and closer to the mark. It was a large, crudely drawn X about face-height, in a dark red.

  “Well, that’s not blood . . . What is it? Lipstick?” Perry reached out and touched the X, smearing a corner. He studied his fingertips before wiping them on his pants. “Yeah, lipstick. Your girl’s color?”

  Pete nodded. “Smart girl. She was marking a trail.” He gestured away from the clearing. “I’ll bet there are more, maybe leading right to her. Come on.”

  There was nothing like a hiking trail in Nilhollow, but the going was easy enough; Pete supposed they were following an animal trail, with slightly tamped-down grass and spaces wide enough between trees to move without a lot of ducking and weaving. It was likely that Julia, who was not an outdoorsy type at all, would try to find the easiest way to traverse the unfamiliar terrain, and in lieu of an actual trail, the path they were on would have seemed safest to her.

  Serving as confirmation, another X-marked tree appeared in front of them, and Pete felt both a glimmer of hope and of relief.

  “Got another one!” He jogged over to it, with Perry right behind.

  Pete frowned as he studied it, though. This one was a little different than the last. For starters, the color was an even darker shade than wine—almost blood-clot black. And it wasn’t quite an X, but rather, something closer to a headless stick figure with arms raised. Above it was a table shape that inexplicably reminded Pete of a dolmen, and above that, stacked on top of each other, three words:

  NO

  ONE

  LEFT

  “What the fuck is that?” Perry asked, his voice soft with amazement.

  “I—I don’t think Julia drew this. I don’t know what it is, but . . . but that’s not hers.” Pete reached a hand out to touch it, to see if it was lipstick or something else, thought better of it, and pulled his hand away.

  “Is that meant for us? Was it actually left for us? ’Cause if so, that’s fucked a hundred ways to Sunday.”

  “No idea.” At that moment, it didn’t sound so crazy to think someone knew they were out there—someone who wanted them gone and thought they could be scared into leaving. Maybe that someone was Darren, or maybe there were others. Maybe, he thought dryly, it’s a message from the killer trees.

  The wind rustled the trees around them as if in anxious and impatient reply, urging them to leave. Pete looked up to the treetops and the pale patch of cloudless sky above them. He felt swallowed and claustrophobic and helpless, like he was looking up from the pit of a deep throat. To stifle the beginnings of panic, he dropped his gaze back to the waxy symbol and words on the tree. “Maybe we should move on.”

  “No argument here,” Perry said. His hand rested on the handle of his gun.

  They moved deeper into the forest, and the wind seemed to blow against them, carrying a vaguely unpleasant scent. The farther in they went, the more frequently they came across a tree with a mark in that same dark, waxy substance: not a sign of Julia, but of someone—something—else. None of the subsequent marks were Xs, nor were they anything quite like the odd stick figure. Some were simple arrows pointing up, down, or deeper into the woods, while others were those same headless, cheering stick figures that bothered Pete for reasons just below the place his conscious mind was willing to go. Though no two marks were the same, Pete was inclined to believe that they were all made by the same hand; all had the crude heaviness of one who was not used to writing, and all appeared to be made in that same blood clot–like stuff. He wondered if Julia had seen them and whether it had scared her. He also wondered if whoever made them had Julia already, and if so, what was being done to her. It took effort to banish the possibilities from his mind.

  “Let’s check the time,” Perry said. He held up his cell phone to check. “Aw, it’s dead. That’s weird. I thought I had at least half a battery left.”

  Pete, who had fully charged his cell phone that morning, took it from his pocket and tried to turn it on. The screen remained black. He held down the button for a few seconds, but it still
wouldn’t turn on. He exchanged glances with Perry. “I’m getting nothing. Maybe something’s draining the batteries?”

  Perry glanced up. “I have a theory. I figure it’s what, ten, ten thirty? Midmorning sometime. But it’s dark as hell in here. And not just because of the tree cover, Grainge. Look.” He pointed up, and they paused to jointly examine the sky.

  The patch of sky above them had gone from ashen to a twilit blue.

  Pete frowned.

  “Electromagnetic energy,” Perry said.

  “Huh?”

  “Electromagnetic energy coming up from the ground, man. Read an article on it online. Well, actually, it was a click-through from a porn site. ‘Science is sexy,’ the ad said. Go figure.”

  “What about the electromagnetic energy, Perry?”

  “Well, apparently it’s this natural phenomenon that occurs in some places. This energy, it, like, comes up out of the ground and does all kinds of weird things to your head and body. People used to think certain places were either cursed or holy, depending on how the electromagnetic energy made them feel. Now this stuff would mess up the phones, mess up our heads and stomachs. And I don’t mind telling you. I’ve had rot-gut like a wicked hangover since we got here, and my head is pounding. Feel that? Like something pushing on your chest, breathing on you? It’s messing with our sense of direction, our sense of time. Could even cause hallucinations.”

  “Hallucinations?”

  “Sure,” Perry replied. “Day looking like night, lipstick hieroglyphics. . . singing.”

  “Singing? I don’t hear—”

  But then he did. It sounded like both men’s and women’s voices, soft and rhythmic, almost chant-like, rising and falling on the wind. He couldn’t make out any of the words, but there was an unmistakable sense of sinister intent in the syllables, enough that his chest tightened. There was no musical accompaniment that he could discern, other than what might have been either pipes or just the wind.

  “I don’t think we’re hallucinating that,” Pete muttered.

  “I think we ought to get out of here,” Perry said. “Doesn’t much matter whether we are or not; if so, then there’s something very unhealthy in the air out here, and I don’t want to breathe in any more of it—or have those electromagnetic waves break down my cells and give me cancer or something. And if it’s not a hallucination, then by the sounds of those voices, we are way outnumbered. And I’ll bet law enforcement isn’t particularly welcome at whatever little party they’re having.”

  Pete hesitated. The voices seemed to beckon him, to remind him that Julia was out there, scared and alone, maybe hurt, maybe dying. Perry made a good point, however. They didn’t belong out there. They weren’t equipped to handle any kind of cult or anything without backup. Maybe a search party, dogs, a SWAT team even, would be the way to go. He remembered Mallon’s directive to call and check in on the hour. It hadn’t seemed so long before, but now it occurred to him that they had covered a lot of ground, however meandering it might have been. Just how long had they been out there? And what was out there in the woods with them? Pete didn’t have a headache or stomachache like Perry, but the constriction in his chest and the heavy fog in his head were making it difficult to think. Had he been feeling them the whole time? He wasn’t sure. He’d been so worried about Julia that he hadn’t thought much about it.

  “Pete,” Perry said, “I won’t lie. This place has me all messed up. There’s something very, very wrong here. Wrong like . . . like the guy in cell four, you know what I mean?”

  Pete nodded that he did.

  “We aren’t equipped for this. This is how cops get killed, dig? Fucked a hundred ways to Sunday—it starts with this kind of Satanist shit.” Perry, gesturing in the general direction of the singing, looked genuinely scared, an expression out of place on his face.

  “Okay,” Pete said with reluctance. He felt horribly guilty at the thought of leaving Julia alone out there, though. If not for her, he would have been the first one back to the car. He glanced toward the direction they had been heading and it vaguely registered in the back of his mind that the singing had stopped.

  “Look,” Perry said gently. “I know you’re worried about her. I am too, given what we’ve experienced out here. But we’re no good to her lost and crazy. Or worse. We need help to help her.”

  “You’re right,” Pete finally agreed. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Perry clapped him on the shoulder in relief. “Great. We’ll radio in to Mallon when we get to the car. Don’t want the mother hen worried about us.” He grinned for the first time since entering Nilhollow, and Pete tried to return it, despite his misgivings. They headed back the way they had first come.

  Pete still felt a little unsettled by the decision, but knew in his head that Perry was right about needing more help. They weren’t doing Julia any good wandering aimlessly around the woods. They needed to up their efforts, bring in assistance. Maybe what was wrong with Nilhollow could be dispelled or dissipated somehow with the presence of more people. Surely—

  Pete noticed movement before he actually saw the man.

  At least, it appeared to be a man. He wore all black, and most of him was obscured behind the thick trunk of one of the pines. He was only about twenty or thirty feet away, but it was difficult to see any details of his face. Pete momentarily entertained the chilling thought that the man had no real facial features, only rough-hewn impressions, then chalked it up to a face mask of some kind. The effect was unsettling.

  “Is that her ex—what’s his name, Darrel?” Perry whispered.

  “Darren,” Pete whispered back. “I don’t think so.”

  The figure placed a hand on the tree. The fingers were unusually long and bony, almost branchlike.

  Pete kept his hand close to his gun.

  “Police! Stay where you are!” he shouted at the figure, who stood motionless, more curious, it seemed, than alarmed. Pete and Perry moved in closer, acutely attentive to the figure’s slightest motion. It seemed to be wearing a crown of twigs, which stuck up from the bushy dark hair on its head. It watched them approach.

  Then another figure peered out from around a tree close to the first figure, a twin in its dark, shapeless clothes, twig-crown, and nearly featureless face mask. Pete and Perry stopped, their sense of alarm heightened, almost palpable. From a tree to their left, another figure appeared. The tree was too narrow to obscure as much of the figure’s body as it did. Pete had little time to wonder about it, though, before another figure, and another, leaned out from behind trees to their right.

  “Fuck me,” Perry said under his breath. His gun was already drawn, pointed down but ready to blast apart those pale, bland faces.

  It seemed to grow darker in the woods just then, and the fog in Pete’s head wavered, diminished, then returned with strength enough to make him dizzy for a moment. He blinked and shook his head. He had trouble telling how close or far away each of the figures was. Were they behind different trees now? Some looked as if they were growing out of the trees themselves. Next to him, Perry giggled.

  It took effort to turn his head, but Pete saw Perry doing an odd hop-skip toward one of the figures, an awkward, clumsy movement for the big man. His arms flailed at his sides, the gun forgotten. He hop-skipped forward again.

  “‘Through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go,’ ” he sang, and then laughed again.

  Pete forced the clouds from his mind, and for a moment, true fear rushed in to fill the vacuum. “Perry? Perry! Don’t go near them!”

  Perry stopped and slowly raised his gun to his temple. He turned and offered Pete a broad, knowing smile and for one terrifying moment, Pete was convinced his partner would pull the trigger. Perry laughed again, though, and the gun fell away. Pete, riveted in fear to the spot where he stood, was forgotten as Perry hop-skipped forward again, a weird, wounded bullfrog doing a death-dance ever closer to the first figure they had seen. And those figures were indeed deadly—Pete was certai
n of that right down to the center of his being, head-clouds or not.

  “Don’t touch them!” Pete called out, but the urgency was already being leeched from his thoughts as well as his voice. It was hard to concentrate. Something was wrong, very wrong, but not in this little patch of grass and pine needles, not right here. Something was wrong over by Perry, over by the figures emerging now from behind the trees to close ranks around his partner.

  The pale skin of the figures’ faces and hands fell away to reveal a kind of pale gray bark, like some of the trees behind which they had been hiding. The dusky clothes came apart like clumps of dead leaves, falling away as they strode closer to Perry. They were tree-things composed of branches and wood, only vaguely humanoid and tall as a man—a little taller, even—with pale, greenish lights filling the hollows where their eyes should have been. There were five—no, six—no, five . . . Pete couldn’t get a handle on exactly how many there were. They seemed to walk or stand one moment, and be several feet away the next, sometimes reaching for Perry and sometimes watching him curiously with their fire-eyes.

  I am not seeing this, Pete told himself, hoping it was true. This can’t possibly be real . . . It’s got to be in my head. It’s got to be whatever’s wrong with me right now. Was this what Nilhollow did to people? Did it make them see things? Hear things? He closed his eyes again and opened them, but it wasn’t like what happened with Todd Mackey. The tree-creatures were still there. He could hear the creaking of their old wood, and the murmuring noises of the scant foliage on their heads.

  And Perry was heading right for the center of them.

  Part of Pete’s brain, a part being smothered by the fog in his head, was screaming for him to do something, to get moving and get Perry away from those things, the little ones (That’s how It sees them, he thought, but didn’t know what any of that meant) before they speared their finger branches through him like they must have done to Todd Mackey, before they infected him with their seeds or spores or whatever and he had grown from the inside out. His legs wouldn’t move, though, and Perry seemed blithely content to dance among them.