Yes . . . there was something out there, something predatory that the dream had only alluded to. She knew it on a primal level of her soul. So a subset of her problem, then, might very well be needing to outsmart whatever that something was.
Outsmarting anything in the wilderness, with her limited knowledge of outdoor survival, would be . . . a challenge, to say the least. Still, Julia recognized that if ever there was a time to accept a challenge, this was it. She clutched her purse tighter to her. She was not going to give up on finding a way out. She wouldn’t give Darren or anyone (or anything) else the satisfaction.
Thinking of Darren, she felt suddenly angry, but it was a cool, forged kind of anger, justified and steady and absolutely necessary. This was his fault, and she deserved better than a life threaded through with fear of him. She’d been told as much before by well-meaning friends and family, but it was the first time she truly felt it for herself. She deserved better than to die out there because Darren couldn’t let go.
Fuck him, and fuck these woods, too, she thought. I’m going home. I just need to figure out how.
Her lipstick breadcrumb trail had failed miserably. She needed a method that was more consistent, more reliable.
Well, she’d already ruled out staying in one place, even if it would make her easier to find. As far as she knew, no one but Darren knew she was out there, and she certainly didn’t want him to find her. It seemed safer and more productive, more the act of an assertive and capable human being, to keep moving. Further, a little part of her suspected that given her directional troubles the night before, it might very well be that even if she didn’t move, Nilhollow would move around her anyway. It didn’t seem so crazy a thought as it might have yesterday afternoon.
If people came to look for her, she was sure they must have the means to find her, whether she moved or the forest did. She certainly hoped so.
She figured eventually someone would come look for her. She wasn’t sure who, though. If she didn’t show up for work that Monday, her boss might send an email or text or maybe even try to call her on the cell that Darren had crushed, but that was it. Her parents lived in Delaware now and wouldn’t be expecting a check-in phone call for probably another week or so. Her friend Mandy was in Florida for the week, and Pete . . .
Well, there was Pete. Thank God for him. He was a good friend and a cop. He was the one who had put her in touch with Detective Colby in the first place. Both he and the detective knew about Darren and the escalating threats, and Pete had been calling every other day or so to check on her since she’d applied for the restraining order. Maybe he would find her car and realize there was a problem. Or maybe he would think to come around to check on her at the house, and being unable to get ahold of her, would start a search. The idea of Pete coming for her made her feel better. He was a good guy, a loyal friend. He would most definitely look for her if he knew she was lost.
If. But how long could it possibly take for him to realize she was missing? It wasn’t like she could really stay lost for long, could she? Did people even really go missing in New Jersey in this day and age? With all the technology they must have had for locating people, they had to be able to find her, right?
Just because no one had found her yet . . .
The wind blew, indifferent to her thoughts. The trees rustled as if chuckling to themselves.
She sighed. That there were so few people who would even notice if she was missing put her life into a dispiriting perspective. No, her assessment the night before had been right. She couldn’t wait around for someone to find her. She’d go crazy just sitting there. She had to find her own way. She was on her own.
She remembered hearing somewhere that if someone was trying to find his or her way out of the woods, the best thing to do was to find a river and follow that, since a river ran down from a high place to a body of water, and bodies of water meant eventual civilization. She wasn’t sure what happened if the body of water was a lake in some even more remote part of the woods, but she supposed the idea made sense in theory. Water would mean people, because after all, people were always drawn to places where one could fish or swim, and at the very least, some governing body would want to own, monitor, and monetize such places. She supposed it was worth a shot. Maybe she could find a park ranger at some nearby lake.
She rose to her feet and listened for the sound of running water, but was not surprised when she didn’t hear any; she hadn’t been able to hear the traffic from the road she suspected was frustratingly close to where she was. She certainly hadn’t heard a human voice since she’d hid from Darren. No hikers or bikers, no trail-gazers or trailblazers. Not even startled animals. Nilhollow only let her hear what it wanted her to hear—the trees talking among themselves, the mournful wail of... wind, was it? Or something else? The whisper of the pines. And of course, her own footsteps. Her own breathing and heartbeat.
Still, something was giving life to what did manage to grow in Nilhollow. There had to be a water source somewhere.
She looked at the nearest tree and saw moss growing to the left of the trunk. She was pretty sure she remembered from Girl Scouts that moss always grew on the north side of things. Her sense of geography wasn’t great, either, but she knew there was a lake northwest of Nilhollow. Okay then, there was a place to start. She headed off on a diagonal in her best estimation of northwest of the moss.
She looked up through the canopy of trees. She didn’t think it was quite noon yet, and so maybe the position of the sun might confirm that she was, in fact, moving in the right direction. The treetops knitted too closely together, though, for her to make out more than a patch of cloudless sky. It was an unusual shade of blue, not quite right for that time of day. She sighed. Nothing about this undertaking was going to be easy, apparently. That was okay. She would do just fine. She told herself that, almost chanted it to the rhythm of her own footsteps. Just fine, just fine, everything is just fine. Regardless of the color of the sky, it was still daylight out, and that had to make it at least a little easier to find her way around without going in circles again.
Just fine, just fine, everything is just fine.
As she walked, she thought about her apartment. She had never wanted to be home so badly in her life. She missed her bed and her sheets, her toothbrush, her favorite tea mug. She missed her bathroom, her tub in particular. In her closets, she could barely fit two pairs of shoes side by side, but the apartment could boast one hell of a tub—sleek, cool porcelain, long enough for her to stretch out in. She would have loved a bath just then, to soak in the hot, sudsy water. Some people had comfort foods or glasses of wine, some had a favorite pair of pajama pants, but for Julia, baths made everything and anything better. There was something about the cocooning warmth of the water that made her feel safe and secure. A bath could ease cramps, ease tension, make her feel complete, clean, and whole again in a way that even a shower couldn’t quite do. She enjoyed dozing in the tub, and despite the half-joking warnings of well-meaning acquaintances that she could drown like that, she’d never once even slipped under the water. Perhaps it was that she never slept heavily, or maybe it was the occasional lapping of the water against her skin that reminded her, even in the haze of half sleep, that she wasn’t really in bed. Whatever it was, she had never been afraid or even anxious about anything once the bathwater was running.
Julia missed her apartment so much that it felt like suffering through a death. Maybe she’d never had much in the way of lasting, deep, and meaningful relationships, but she’d built herself a true home, a sanctuary, a haven of security and peace that was all her own, and if she could just get back to it, she could take a bath and wash all of yesterday and today from her memory.
Just fine, just fine, everything is just fine.
There was no clearly defined path, but she thought she was doing a pretty good job of heading northwest as the crow flies, as much as she was able. It felt like she walked a long time. She had no one to talk to, and rather than talk
to herself—she was doing enough of that inside her head—she made occasional comments to her purse. It didn’t feel as weird as she thought it would. Mostly, she whistled. She found, though, that the whistling grew labored as the terrain became a little tougher to navigate. There were a lot more roots and upturned rocks, as if something had been digging or kicking up dirt. Her feet were getting tired, as were her shins and calves. It also felt like she was heading uphill . . . but if she was supposedly heading toward a lake, shouldn’t the ground be sloping downward? She wasn’t sure. Maybe the lake was on a plateau or something. Besides, there would certainly be dips and crests along the way regardless.
There was a crack of wood and some rustling sounds nearby and for a terrible second, she half expected to see one of those mutated creatures from her dream. She turned her head in the direction of the sound just as she stepped down on a few loose stones. They slipped out from under her, and her legs were suddenly moving in two different directions. She managed to keep one foot from sliding out from under her, but her other kept going, bending sideways and twisting painfully at the ankle as she tried to regain control of it. Despite her best efforts, she spilled clumsily into the dirt, swearing as her legs splayed out in an uncomfortable V. Her ankle pulsed pain like a beacon, and a momentary flare of panic engulfed her. She may not have known much about the outdoors, but even she knew an injury like a sprain or a broken bone could mean death for someone alone in the woods.
She stayed put for a while, holding her aching ankle between her hands. She couldn’t ice it, and wasn’t sure if binding it tightly would help. She opted not to bother, since she couldn’t think of anything to bind it with. She breathed deeply, slowly, willing the pain to go away, and by degrees, it eased up a little. She checked beneath her sock for swelling. The skin was red, but not puffy, so far as she could see. She thought that meant her ankle likely wasn’t sprained, and that made her feel a little better. She sat for a few more minutes, though, not wanting to take chances, and waited until her ankle was no more than a dull throb above her shoe.
She rolled onto her knees and got up with slow and measured movements, taking care not to lean too heavily on the injured foot. It occurred to her that a walking stick would help to steady her and maybe take some of the weight off that foot. She supposed she could also use it as a weapon if she needed to. Her thoughts briefly flickered to Darren and how she’d wanted to kill him, but she brushed them aside.
Peering around her, she spied a long, fairly thick branch half-covered in pine needles and oak leaves. It had a small Y on the end. She picked it up and was surprised to find it was light. The stick was a little too long to use as a crutch—she’d have to break the far end off to fit the Y under her arm—but it was otherwise perfect.
She set off again with her stick, the just fine, just fine mantra renewed but now to a hop-step, hop-step, and had covered maybe a tenth of a mile when she saw the beginnings of a clearing. Her heart felt lighter, and she allowed herself the small hope that this might be all over. A clearing could mean civilization, or at the very least, a ranger station or something. A faint, bilgy smell wafted in from that direction, and Julia thought it just might be the smell of dead fish. Unpleasant as it was, dead fish meant water. Water meant a river or lake. And that meant people.
Oh, please be a lake. Please. For the love of all that’s right and good in the world, please be a frigging lake.
She broke through the clearing and the hope in her immediately withered and crumbled. The clearing was disappointingly devoid of a lake, or of water of any kind, for that matter. In fact, it was very dry, with bushes and tree leaves unnaturally curled and brown and unhealthy-looking. Certainly no oasis, this, she thought, and tapped her stick against the ground as if punctuating the thought. The smell there was stronger, and she realized it wasn’t of dead fish. Of something dead, most certainly—something rotting out of the sight of prying eyes—but not fish. It turned her stomach.
Then her mind finally registered what was in the center of the clearing, and was immediately filled with a revulsion so intense it made her light-headed. The smell no longer mattered, because she couldn’t breathe. She dropped her stick and gasped for air in a desperate attempt to hold on to the clarity and detail of consciousness.
Before her, a chasm stretched like a tight, wicked grin across two-thirds of the clearing, small vines twitching upward along the edges like tiny tongues licking lips. It was just like she’d dreamed it, not wide but infinitely deep, and as she stood rooted in horror, willing the world to remain in focus and the air to fill up her lungs again, there was a small tearing sound. The ground at the corner of one end of the chasm fell away in a little spray of rocks and dirt, and just like that, the grin was wider.
From her distance, she couldn’t see into its depths, but she was glad; it might very well have broken her mind if she had looked straight down into it. She knew that as surely as she knew her own hands. It made her know, made her understand its nature somehow, just by her being near it. She could feel what radiated up from there and it was terrible, more awful than anything she had dreamed about it. It wanted to pull her in, feed on every part of her, straight through to her soul. It was a sickness, a poison that had damaged Nilhollow and everything that lived in it, everything that came in contact with it. It filled her head with ugly images of what was to come and suicidal thoughts. It stank of rotting blood.
There was another tearing sound, this one louder. More earth fell away. More long tips of vines sprouted into view, whipping and lashing at the foul air.
The chasm was widening.
“No. No no no no no,” she whispered. She staggered back into the woods, to the cool shadow between the trees. Everything was most definitely not fine. Then, forgetting her ankle, she turned and ran.
SEVEN
Mallon was worried, and so he drank coffee.
A half hour after the appointed check-in time, he’d tried calling both Pete Grainger’s and Vince Perry’s cell phones several times, and neither had answered. It was possible—no, scratch that, likely—that there was poor-to-no cell reception out in Nilhollow, so he hadn’t really expected an answer the first time. By the fourth time with no response, though, Mallon’s gut had kicked in.
It had served him well over the years, that gut, that instinct for knowing when trouble was happening or about to happen. It had been a guiding force in both his personal and professional lives, as much a burden as a safety net. It had given him the heads-up that his first wife was gambling away their retirement fund and that his second wife was cheating on him with his old friend Paulie Foreman, and it had kept a bullet from tearing through his chest during a Wawa holdup back when he was a patrolman. It let him know Fred Houston had sucked up a few good lungfuls of carbon monoxide from his Audi in the double garage of his fancy Ocean County beach house, and let him know his niece was pregnant with her first baby.
It was his gut that told him now that Grainger and Perry were in trouble out there in those damned woods.
If one looked at the current situation with that pair of abandoned cars—a lady and her stalker ex-boyfriend possibly lost in the woods—those were bad circumstances, the kind with ugly endings. Mallon was sure the woman, Julia, was a lovely person, particularly if Grainger held so ardent a torch for her, but it didn’t look good for her. He knew that, and he supposed Grainger did, too. The thing was, he was concerned that no responses meant circumstances might be just as bad for his guys, too. Grainger and Perry were trained law enforcement officers with guns. Further, Grainger had grown up in the area, and probably knew parts of that state forest as well as his own backyard. Maybe he didn’t know Nilhollow so well, but Grainger knew those woods. His officers should not have had any trouble doing a preliminary search of the area, and if circumstances had gotten more complicated than that, even Perry had enough common sense to call for backup.
So where were they? Why weren’t they checking in like he’d told them to?
Mallon had had a
bad feeling about the whole thing from the moment Grainger and Perry walked out the station door. His gut had told him it was a mistake to let them leave. It wasn’t that he couldn’t trust them or worried inordinately about them. They were good cops, capable men. But there were the stories about Nilhollow, some more credible than others, and every once in a while, a reason for those kinds of stories reared its leafy head. Something might very well be going on in that forest that was more than just a lover’s spat gone wrong, something Grainger and Perry would be unprepared for. It was starting to feel more and more like a stupid move to have let them go out there.
Most of the stories the Red Lion Station had investigated and filed about Nilhollow were little oddities, little unexplained circumstances that gave the responding officer a good story to tell at the bar or at worst, a night of uneasy sleep. Of course, there had been one guy, Joe Franklin, who once had investigated lights in the woods, what Mallon’s grandmother used to call will-o’-the-wisps. Joe wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen or heard that night, but his resignation was on Mallon’s desk the next day. All Mallon could get out of him was some mumbling about the way dead girls whisper.
“What?” Mallon had asked, unsure he’d heard the man correctly.
Joe had grimaced like he’d eaten something sour. “Old, old memories. Old voices from the past. But it’s shown me I . . . just can’t do this job, boss. I’m done.” And he was. He’d turned in his badge and gun and never looked back. Mallon had thought at the time that Joe probably just wasn’t cut out for the job. Plenty of people weren’t, and that was okay. But then, after a drunken night at a popular cop hangout in town, called O’Malley’s, Joe had blathered on about a cold case from when he was a little kid, where a bunch of little girls had gone missing, and how the wind could blow such a way through the trees in Nilhollow that little dead girls told you all their secrets, and Mallon had wondered if Joe maybe would have failed a psych evaluation. When a year and a half later, Mallon was called out to Moorestown to cut down Joe from one of the rafters in his dining room, Mallon wasn’t so sure a psych evaluation would have revealed the crux of Joe’s problem. He supposed the suicide note did, though. It was only one line, hastily scribbled across a piece of notebook paper:
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