Savage Woods

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Can’t take the whispering anymore.—Joe

  While the crime scene unit finished up inside the house, Mallon had sat a long time in one of the old lawn chairs in Joe’s backyard, smoking a cigarette as dusk crept in all around him. Joe was the first officer he’d ever lost, even if he hadn’t been an officer at the time. And why? Will-o’-the-wisps and whispers? What had happened to Joe in Nilhollow?

  Little green glowing beacons of lightning bugs in Joe’s garden had left faint and fading trails, and Mallon shivered in spite of the warm summer air.

  He remembered concluding that Nilhollow didn’t just take drunk and drugged-up teens, or woefully underprepared hikers and campers. It took smart, capable cops, too. Sometimes it followed them home, and that made it seem somehow more sinister, more calculating, more predatory than the usual indifferent natural world.

  Most of the guys working for him today hadn’t known Joe Franklin. They knew about Nilhollow, though. They joked about it—half joked—but among them was an unspoken, understood unease about the place, which Mallon did little to dissuade. It kept them alert. One had to be alert in Nilhollow, always. He knew that, not just from work-related run-ins but from his own personal experience, as well.

  It wasn’t anything the other guys at the station knew about. It wasn’t in his file, wasn’t going to follow him through his career and come back and bite him when he was up for promotions. It was on his own time, off duty, and he’d handled it on his own. It was a big contributor, though, to the fine-tuned sensitivity of his gut when it came to Nilhollow.

  When he was a younger man, back before his current position at the Red Lion Station, he’d actually very much enjoyed taking walks in the woods. He’d grown up in northern Jersey, back when there were still acres of woods to walk through, and he’d spent many a sunny Sunday afternoon along the wooded paths of Ramapo Mountain, Stokes, Jenny Jump, and Worthington State Forests. He’d even done little hiking trails in the forested parks of Morris and Sussex Counties. He hadn’t really thought of it as hiking, or of himself as a hiker. Those were the folks who did the Appalachian Trail with big rolled-up packs on their backs and bottled water in their hands. He just liked to stroll along the paths and reconnect a little with the beautiful things. His job consisted of a lot of ugliness, a lot of the insides of rooms where angry, tense, or traumatized people, usually unhappy to see him and his ilk, were holed up answering questions they really didn’t want to answer or simply couldn’t.

  So Mallon took any chance that came along to get away from that, to be where things made sense, where if violence had to take place, it served a purpose, and if death happened, it was only to make way for new life. Mallon didn’t think about mortgage or alimony payments in the woods, nor did he worry about heart attacks or paperwork or how much it would cost to get his wife at the time the new washing machine and dryer set she wanted for Christmas, while still saving to fix the roof and update the septic system. In the woods, there were no office politics or Facebook politics, no reality TV and internet memes, no late payments or mounting bills. He didn’t worry about getting too old or too tired or too fed up with the people he was supposed to be protecting and serving—not out there in the woods, he didn’t. Among the trees, there was a sense of vibrancy, immortality, and extraordinary magnificence. There was a feeling for him of a majesty bigger than himself, of life unfazed by the little daily, weekly, or even yearly minutiae that most people worried themselves into early graves over.

  Every detective Mallon knew had an escape—fishing, poker, woodworking, car restoration, booze, women, volunteer work, cooking. It was necessary to have a pressure valve in a job like that. For Mallon, getting out to the woods was his escape.

  Then he started working for the Red Lion Station.

  Mallon had looked forward to the idea of exploring a new state forest, especially one as virtually untouched as Nilhollow. He imagined it was a little like how astronauts must feel, stepping onto land that had never felt the tread of human feet.

  The rumors didn’t much phase him. If Mallon had ever been inclined to admit to a flaw, it was that he believed too much in his own wits and his senses, and was disinclined to accept that there was a challenge he couldn’t meet if he had half a mind to. If anything, the old-timers’ warnings to stay out of those woods only spurred that little stubborn aspect of his character to prove to them that their ghosts didn’t know who they were messing with.

  It had been an early fall day, and Nilhollow was beautiful, a blazing conflagration of reds and yellows and oranges where the oaks and cedars grew, and deep greens and purples bristling along the groves of pines. There were no hiking or biking trails, no signs or paint squares on trunks to indicate human taming, only Mallon and the wild nature all around him, and he loved it. Sure, he had noticed the unearthly stillness of the place, the distinct absence of birds and squirrels and deer. He had noticed the occasional odd scent. But it was autumn, and the smells of earth turning over, of life giving over to death for a while so that new life could start again, were not all bad. There was a powerful sense of that grandness in Nilhollow, the passage of ages right over the heads of men. The fact that Mallon couldn’t hear the dull roar of traffic seemed appropriate, even reverent. What was that quote about trees being temples and forests being cathedrals? That was about right. It was the closest he’d ever felt to what other people thought of as God.

  And there may very well have been gods in Nilhollow, but not the one his dear old Irish-Catholic grandmother seemed so fond of.

  Mallon had made it a half mile or so into Nilhollow when to his delight, he discovered a small grove of trees that seemed clustered in an almost perfect circle. Within the circle was a clearing containing piles of cairn stones, some of them about waist high, forming small angular inward spirals around a deep, narrow ditch in the center. It was an amazingly painstaking work of art, really, the way the stones were placed, like tiny upward-facing solar systems in tiny galaxies all over the universe of the clearing. The tallest stacks occurred at random intervals, or so it seemed to Mallon, and featured wide, flat stones on top, while many of the smaller stacks featured flat stones as bases with smaller ones forming small pyramid-like mounds. Mallon was no expert, but he heard once that many cairn stones, particularly those of the indigenous people of the area, were meant to represent people and animals. He imagined they might represent something more celestial or at least spiritual, though. All of the flat-top stones had dark brown smears of finger-painted markings on them, symbols vaguely reminiscent of eyes or mouths, arrows, stars, and trees.

  From the branches surrounding the cairn stones, small lashed-together constructions of twigs and branches hung, mostly somewhat X-shaped. There weren’t many of them, and they weren’t all the same formations or size, but Mallon found them fascinating—found the whole grove fascinating. It had obviously once been a very sacred, very carefully constructed monument to something, and although Mallon didn’t know anything about the ancient people who might have made it, their respect for the place was palpable. He couldn’t help but share that respect, too.

  The most unusual aspect of it was a small center table (it reminded Mallon of an altar), which stood waist high and was wide enough only to straddle the center of the deep ditch. On it lay a kind of corn-doll thing with a crown of sticks and leaves. It was small, the size of a child, clothed in scant strips of hide and fur. A burlap sack formed its head and hands, and its body was a collection of bound sticks. A crudely painted face consisted of two black-orbed eyes, and a small, jagged mouth had been roughly torn into the fabric beneath a little painted nose so that it appeared to be screaming. That silent scream was choked off by a clump of black feathers and little bones stuffed inside the mouth. On its body sat a little piece of blue checkered flannel.

  A discarded scarecrow of some kind? No, there was something about the look of the corn-dolly that suggested it had been made specifically for that grove. It was old and faded but still decades, maybe centuries newer tha
n the stone slab on which it lay; someone had to have put it there recently, a new offering in an old church. While it nettled him a little that someone else had recently been through what he’d come to think of as his private sanctuary, what nagged at him even more was that piece of flannel. There were faded stains on its underside that he thought could be dried blood. Who had put it and the corn-dolly there, and why? Glancing around, Mallon saw no beer cans, no cigarette butts lying around, no wax drippings or graffiti, and no plastic or bits of glass—essentially, no signs of teenagers playing Satanist in the woods.

  His gaze traveled back to that piece of flannel. His gut told him it meant something.

  It seemed sacrilegious in a way to step among the cairn stone spirals, but he did, carefully picking his way around the rocks so as not to disturb any of them. Instinctively, it seemed important that they remain just as they were.

  At the center, standing by that stone altar, his head had begun to ache and his limbs felt heavy. It had felt a little like that point where drunk starts to transition to hangover. The feeling wasn’t coming from the doll, it seemed, but from the stones. No . . . not the stones, but under them, from the ground itself. From that ditch beneath the altar, which he noticed now was longer than he’d first thought and much deeper, its bottom shrouded in caliginous obscurity. The longer he stood there, the more pervasive that sluggish, queasy feeling got, spreading across his face and down to his chest, his stomach, even his groin. Impulsively, he snatched the flannel, and then as quickly and carefully as he could, navigated out of the stone spiral. Once he had returned to the woods proper, his head cleared immediately, and he felt much better. He looked from the grove to the tiny bound sachet of flannel he had removed from the corn-doll’s mouth. Carefully, he untied it, and spread the contents out on his palm.

  There was a quartz crystal, some herbs he didn’t recognize, tiny bones that crumbled a bit when he touched them, and a small piece of wood about the size and shape of a Scrabble tile. On the piece of wood was a series of minutely painted symbols way more complex than any on the cairn stones or in any of the lattice works. They didn’t look at all like the symbols of an indigenous tribe’s language to him. In fact, they didn’t look like any symbols or language he had ever seen. His gut told him they were meant to counteract ideas from a language and philosophy he probably was better off never knowing.

  He had tied everything back up in the little piece of flannel and without really thinking it through, he pocketed it. That night, he had put it on a small shelf in the hallway outside his bedroom, where he kept interesting things he found on his walks, and then he’d mostly forgotten about it.

  That was before Hurricane Sandy and all the flooding. Out of curiosity, Mallon had gone back once after the storm to see if the cairn stones had been knocked down, but time and nature had changed the area so much. The spot where the grove was located was now a barren, somewhat unhealthy clearing—no stones, no circle of trees, standing or otherwise. The only thing even remotely familiar to him in that clearing of sparse and strangled vegetation was that deep, narrow ditch in the earth and the dead-things stench it emitted. Once after that, he went back to what he thought was the same spot, and even though he’d always had a pretty good sense of direction, he couldn’t even find the clearing, let alone the ditch. If he had been the type given to imagination, he would have thought the woods rearranged themselves between every trip he made to Nilhollow.

  He’d lost track of the area somehow, but it hadn’t lost track of him. He’d had terrifying nightmares after finding the clearing the first time, the kind that jerked him awake, soaked in sweat. In each of the nocturnal scenes the most heinous acts unfolded and he couldn’t stop any of them. In many, he was bound by vines and tree roots while the people he loved most were tortured to death in the most archaic and barbarian ways. All of the atrocities occurred in the heart of Nilhollow and all of them featured that tiny flannel pouch in some way. So he’d gotten rid of it—he’d swiped it off his shelf and burned it in the garbage can outside, in fact, before gathering up the ashes in a bag that he drove to a dumpster the next town over. He wanted it as far away as possible. That had helped with the nightmares a little; they weren’t as frequent or intense as they used to be. But they still haunted his sleep from time to time, just to remind him of all the sadistic, depraved things he couldn’t stop people from doing to other people, no matter how good a cop he tried to be.

  As Mallon sat at his desk drinking coffee, he thought of that little flannel pouch and what he’d found inside. He’d done occasional research on its contents over the years, ever since the nightmares started. Some spiritualists—Wiccans, pagans, and whatnot—believed quartz had purifying properties. They believed the same thing about certain herbs. Practitioners of voodoo often used flannel to make protection sachets. Corn-dollies were a Celtic way of appeasing and offering shelter to corn spirits after harvests. He’d even found something about using bones as a talisman, but the article online was not terribly specific as to what for.

  So what did it all mean? In Mallon’s mind, absolutely nothing. He had come to understand that it hadn’t been the pouch that had given him nightmares, but the force coming up from that chasm, the rotting essence that had made him feel sick, which the little flannel pouch had been marinating in for countless years. Probably, the flannel pouch had been meant to stop that force, and it had miserably failed. It was essentially nothing powerful enough, if one were inclined to believe in the power of those things to begin with, to have caused or prevented what happened—what was still happening, apparently—in Nilhollow. Neither were the cairn-stone galaxies and the little wooden lattice trinkets, however beautiful, or all the other occult odds and ends that his officers had occasionally pulled out of the woods with recovered missing people and dead bodies.

  People who knew a little about a number of magical practices in the world but not a whole lot about any one of them had been dabbling. Maybe they were well-meaning sorts who’d had their own run-ins with Nilhollow. Regardless, he was pretty sure that layers of halfhearted beliefs and amateur attempts at magic weren’t making things there any better. If anything, he thought they might possibly have made things worse. All that focused energy had done nothing more than scatter whatever was left tying that place down to the laws of reality.

  Maybe the power coming out of the ground among the stones had always been there. Maybe at some point it had gone bad. Maybe the earth moved, shifted, cracked open, threw up the bad things that made it sick, or maybe some other universe had sprung a leak under this one, and its bad stuff found its way to the surface. Maybe it was acid rain or pollution or global warming. Maybe it was secret government testing. Who the hell knew? It didn’t matter, because Grainger had been right about the increasing numbers of missing people, murders, suicides, and even so-called accidental deaths in that area.

  Still, it was a conflict between his very rational, proof-seeking brain and his animal-instinct gut. There might still be people, real people and not ghosts, monsters, or UFOs, who believed more fervently in all those stories than the average townsperson, the kind of people who would do whatever it took to manifest those things, or give the appearance of their manifestation. They might honestly believe there were creatures to be appeased in the forest, and they might not be above kidnapping the occasional hiker or assaulting the occasional investigating officer to make that happen. Did unexplained things happen out there? Oh, most definitely. But a lot of things could be explained by good old-fashioned human evil.

  So which was it, in this case? Where were his officers?

  Mallon drank more coffee, picked up his cell, and dialed a number.

  If Grainger and Perry didn’t check in by the end of that hour, Mallon was going in after them.

  * * *

  By the time the sun had swept past the midday position in the sky, Pete was exhausted—far more exhausted than he should have been. He was also hungry and a little thirsty, with no means to relieve either condition
. Those concerns weren’t as pressing as his fatigue, though. He knew some of it was shock, trauma, and the gradual dissipation of adrenaline. He thought some of it was the exertion of struggling through the wild growth of the forest. He feared it was also the constant inhalation of the air in Nilhollow, the constant brushes with its ferns and tree branches and pine needles. To keep himself going, he worked a problem over in his head, a disparity he couldn’t quite resolve.

  When Todd Mackey had been found, he most certainly had been exhibiting weird behaviors. He had appeared crazy enough that the local psychiatric facility was interested in evaluating him. But then while Pete had been asking him questions, he’d seemed normal . . . well, almost normal. Rational, at least. There was clarity in his eyes, an understanding of his words that suggested to Pete that he was okay, at least for a while. Then whatever he had carried with him out of those woods seemed to have doubled down on him, and it killed him.

  The first part of the problem was more what Todd implied rather than said: that the woods had gotten to his brother first and killed him outright. If that were true—and those tree-creatures he had seen, whatever they were, seemed to prove that—then why had one brother been killed and the other spared, at least for a time? Was it specifically to promote some kind of... seeding? Or was it just that Nilhollow was like rabies, in that once a person was infected, it was only a matter of time?

  The notion led to the second part of the problem. Perry had succumbed so quickly to some kind of madness, but Pete was . . . well, more or less okay. He didn’t feel great, granted; his mind and body felt hungover and he gladly would have sacrificed a few fingers for a couple hours of sleep. Still, he felt in control of his mind. His thoughts were his, and so far as he could tell, they were sane and rational. But were they? Was he really okay? And would he feel it if—when—Nilhollow finally got to him?