The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  “She’s good.”

  “Vermont, right?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a hike.”

  “It is.”

  Carroll reached out and gave his arm a gentle squeeze: a strangely tender, intimate gesture.

  “You take care,” she said.

  “You, too.”

  Parker watched her drive away, and felt a loneliness that made his eyes burn.

  CHAPTER

  LXIII

  Daniel Weaver lay awake for what felt to him like a very long time, musing on all that he’d heard. The earlier conversation, he sensed, was something to do with Karis. Was she the one to whom they’d made the promise? And what kind of promise had they made, if it involved him? The answer prowled as a presence on the edge of his consciousness, but he would not, or could not, allow it into the light.

  In time he fell asleep, and dreamed confused dreams, until he was drawn back to wakefulness by the sound of his mother’s alarm clock in the next room, except that when he opened his eyes the dark was too deep for it yet to be morning, and the sound was coming not from inside the house, but outside.

  He pushed back the comforter. He climbed from his bed. He walked to the window and pulled back the drapes.

  There, on the windowsill, smeared with dirt, stood the toy phone.

  It was ringing.

  * * *

  IN HER BEDROOM IN Vermont, Sam was roused from sleep by the sound of a telephone. It wasn’t familiar to her, not like her mother’s cell phone, or her grandparents’, or even the landline in the main house that no one seemed to use, but which her grandfather refused to get rid of because, he said, “you never know,” whatever that might mean.

  The ringing of the phone came from far away, and had an unpleasant, jangling tone. Sam didn’t like it. She wished it would stop. She was weary, and it wasn’t even close to morning. It appeared to be coming from outside her window, but that couldn’t be right, not unless someone was in the garden, and anyone who was had no reason to be.

  Quietly, Sam got out of bed and padded to the window. She and her mother lived in converted stables adjacent to Sam’s grandparents’ property, linked to it by a glass-enclosed walkway that doubled as a conservatory. Sam’s room was on the second floor, separated from her mother’s by a small bathroom. The bedroom window was a mix of stained and clear panes, recently replaced following an incident involving a bird strike earlier in the year.

  Sam opened the window. The garden beyond was dark, and she could see no signs of movement, but still the sound of the phone came, although it was no clearer for being unimpeded by glass. It might have been coming from under water, so distorted was it.

  Sam turned to the figure sitting on the windowsill: her half sister, Jennifer, her face glistening behind the strands of hair that overhung it, concealing the worst of the damage inflicted on her by the Traveling Man so many years before.

  Jennifer, who walked between worlds.

  “Why are you here?” Sam asked.

  Jennifer reached out and took Sam’s hand. Her touch was cold, but not lifeless. Jennifer’s body appeared to exist in a state of soft vibration, as though a small electrical charge were constantly being passed through it. And although Sam had no fear of Jennifer, even loved her in her way, still she did not enjoy physical contact with her. It made her feel dizzy, and caused her head to ache.

  But sometimes it was easier for Jennifer to communicate through touch. Jennifer was a creature of emotions and impulses. Jennifer didn’t think so much as feel.

  Now Sam was made to feel too.

  The lake by which Jennifer sat, watching the dead pass, keeping vigil as they were called to the sea; the approach of Jennifer’s mother, or some manifestation of her, leading an unknown woman by the hand; an exchange of words, of concerns, with Jennifer by the water; then the departure, the two older women returning to the place whence they came, with a pause only for the familiar exchange between Jennifer and her mother.

  how is your father?

  alive

  and will you continue to stay with him?

  yes

  if you choose to leave, you have only to say

  i won’t abandon him

  then goodbye

  No kisses, no embraces. But then, this was no longer really Jennifer’s mother. It retained her form, and some of her memories, but one could not emerge unaltered from the Sea Eternal. To enter it was to be lost, the dissolution gradual but ultimately entire. Each time Jennifer’s mother came back, she brought with her less of her old self. In the end, Jennifer knew, her mother would no longer be able to recall her at all, or the man she had once called “beloved,” the father Jennifer and Sam shared.

  The contact between Sam and Jennifer was briefly broken.

  “Who was the woman with her?” Sam asked.

  her name is karis

  “And what does Karis want?”

  for the sad part of her to rest

  Jennifer touched her sister again, this time just brushing the back of her hand with an index finger, and Sam understood why the woman named Karis had come to Jennifer for help. In dying, Karis had gone to the sea, but she had left something of herself behind, a vestige entombed in a hole in the ground, surrounded by high trees and the cries of birds. It was a dangerous entity, filled with fear and anger and hurt, but also with a terrible, thwarted love. It had desires. It wanted its offspring close. It sought to take its child and gather him to itself, to hold him amid dirt and roots, and there they would lie together, until in time the child, like this version of his mother, slept in the earth.

  our father is trying to put a name to it

  Not “her,” Sam noted: “it.” Whatever remained of Karis was female in appearance alone.

  “Does our father know about the child?”

  not yet

  “You can’t let the boy go to it. It will kill him. It won’t mean to, but it will.”

  i know

  Only then did Sam notice that she could not hear the ringing of the phone. It had stopped.

  And Jennifer was no longer present.

  CHAPTER

  LXIV

  Daniel didn’t want to answer the phone. It wasn’t just that he feared to hear the voice on the other end of the line. He had buried the toy, and now someone had dug it up and placed it on his windowsill. No, not someone: Karis had dug up the phone, which meant she wasn’t just some disembodied voice speaking to him over a plastic receiver. She could sift through dirt. She could walk beyond the woods.

  She could hurt him.

  But he couldn’t leave the phone ringing, because his mother might hear, and then he’d have to lie; or worse, explain to her why the phone was on the windowsill to begin with. Karis had warned him against telling others of their little talks, and while Daniel was starting to wonder if that was more for her benefit than his, he was aware that the injunction contained within it an unspecified threat, one that now assumed a new potency given the reality of Karis’s physical presence in the world.

  Daniel picked up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  He thought that Karis’s voice sounded clearer than before. It might have been the rage in it, but Daniel also detected a faint echo, just as he did when his mom allowed him to converse with Grandpa Owen over her cell phone when Grandpa Owen was only in the next room. Not one voice, but two: the first real and speaking from nearby, and the second transmitted through the instrument in his hand.

  Just like now, because Karis was close.

  i’m very upset with you

  how could you do what you did?

  how could you put the phone in the ground?

  “I’m sorry,” said Daniel.

  sorry doesn’t cut it, mister

  why did you do it?

  tell me

  Daniel began to cry.

  crying won’t help either

  crying is for babies, and you’re not a baby

  why did you bury the phone?

  �
�I was scared.”

  scared of what?

  of me?

  Daniel didn’t want to say any more. He didn’t want to make Karis angrier than she already was.

  i’m waiting for an answer

  What choice did he have?

  “Yes.”

  But then suddenly Karis wasn’t angry any longer.

  oh, honey, i’m sorry

  you mustn’t be scared of me

  i’d never do anything to hurt you

  i love you

  you must understand that

  i love you so very—

  The phone went dead in Daniel’s hand. His attention moved to the yard outside, where a girl was standing on the grass, her head inclined slightly away from him so he could not see her face, her gaze seemingly fixed on the woods at the end of the property. Her hair was blond, and her feet were bare; they gave the illusion of not quite touching the grass beneath. She did not move, but when she spoke, her voice—smaller and softer than Karis’s, but with a tonality that was not entirely dissimilar—came from very near, as though she were in Daniel’s bedroom instead of twenty feet away on ground still cold with the memory of winter.

  go back to bed

  Daniel replaced the receiver. It did not occur to him to ask the girl who she was, or where she came from. He could not have said how, but he knew that neither question would have been answered in any case.

  “What should I do with the telephone?”

  He hiccupped the words some, because he was still crying.

  i’ll take care of it

  “I tried to get rid of it, but it made Karis mad. I don’t want to make her mad again.”

  i will speak with her

  “And she won’t be mad?”

  i will ask her not to be

  “I want her to go away. I want her to leave me alone.”

  i know

  “But don’t tell her I said that.”

  i won’t

  Daniel took a last look at the phone before closing the window and pulling the drapes. Seconds later, he heard a sound from the windowsill as the phone was removed from it.

  “Don’t make her mad,” he prayed. “Don’t make her mad, don’t make her mad, don’t make her mad . . .”

  * * *

  JENNIFER STOOD AT THE edge of the woods, the two Weaver homes behind her, the trees before her degrading from tangible presences to shaded forms, and thence to darkness.

  you must leave him be

  No response came, but Jennifer knew that Karis—or what was left of her, the residue that bore her name—was out there, listening. From what materials it had formed itself, Jennifer could not tell: other bones, remains perhaps both animal and human.

  you’re scaring him

  A flicker, gray against the dark, moving low like an animal. Jennifer’s eyes followed it.

  you’ll hurt him

  Yes, there it was. Upright now. Watching her.

  and i can’t let you hurt him

  Hating her.

  Jennifer placed the telephone on the ground before stepping away. The toy began to blacken as wisps of smoke rose from it. The eyes melted, and the wire connecting the receiver to the body liquefied and dripped to the forest floor. Finally the rest of it smoldered and caught fire, the telephone burning freely now, the flames illuminating Jennifer and the surrounding trees, until at last the toy was reduced to ash that was taken by the wind and scattered over the forest floor until not a trace remained.

  But by then, Karis was nowhere to be seen.

  3

  Thomas: Who shall have it?

  Tempter: He who will come.

  Thomas: What shall be the month?

  Tempter: The last from the first.

  Thomas: What shall we give for it?

  Tempter: Pretence of priestly power.

  Thomas: Why should we give it?

  Tempter: For the power and the glory.

  —T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

  CHAPTER

  LXV

  Anyone who still liked to believe that the United States of America was a classless society had only to set foot inside the walls of Boston’s Colonial Club to realize the error of the notion. But since anyone who believed the United States of America was a classless society was unlikely to be considered for membership of the Colonial Club, or admitted to its Commonwealth Avenue palazzo through any door other than the service entrance, such illusions were likely to remain intact. It boasted a grand staircase rivaled only by that of the Metropolitan Club in New York, a humidor larger than the Union’s, and a wine cellar valued in the seven figures. In a classless society, it could not have existed.

  One did not ask to join the Colonial; to do so was a guarantee of lifelong exclusion. If invited to join, one handed over one’s bank details without inquiring about the cost of membership. The mention of fees would be enough to cause the sudden and irrevocable withdrawal of the invitation, as well as to suggest that one’s finances might not be as watertight as previously imagined. Share prices had been affected by the offer or withdrawal of Colonial membership, or even a failure to renew, and at least two suicides had resulted from rumors arising from such incidents.

  In the Old World, blood was the indicator of class: the older the bloodline, the greater the claim to aristocracy. In the New World, money was the indicator, and the older the money, the better the class. At the Colonial, most of the money was very old indeed. The list of rules was considerable, but could be summarized thus:

  No Vulgar Displays of Wealth.

  And No Poor.

  * * *

  QUAYLE ARRIVED AT THE club shortly before noon, and was immediately admitted to a dark lobby, where a functionary behind a desk recorded his name in the visitors’ book before rising to open the inner door, where a second functionary was waiting to escort Quayle to one of the smaller private dining rooms. There, the Principal Backer was already seated at the room’s only table, built for four but set for two, sipping a dry fino sherry before lunch.

  The two men did not shake hands. They were not friends, colleagues, or business associates. They had nothing in common beyond the covenants they had signed, and even these were fulfilled with different gods.

  A waiter materialized to take Quayle’s drink order. Quayle announced that he would prefer to wait for wine with his meal, but requested a large glass of cold milk in the interim. Both men chose venison for their main course, and afterward were left in unquiet communion.

  “How do you find the colonies?” the Principal Backer asked, in a manner that suggested he would have preferred if Quayle had not found them at all.

  “Perturbing.”

  “Have you visited before?”

  “I never felt the desire. No man at all intellectual is willing to leave London.”

  “Dr. Johnson.”

  “Paraphrased, but yes.”

  “They say he was a melancholic.”

  “Among other deficiencies.”

  “Then perhaps London was not so beneficial to him.”

  “Perhaps not, but I find its surroundings conducive to health and long life.”

  “Remarkably long, one might say.”

  Quayle acknowledged the sally with a small bow of his head. The sommelier appeared, and the wine was poured. Since the main course was to be venison, the Principal Backer had selected a Grand Cru Classé Pauillac from 1996. The wine, having already been tasted and decanted, was opening up nicely. Quayle accepted his glass of milk, and the soup quickly followed. The Principal Backer tested it, found it to his liking, and commenced eating. Quayle, by contrast, left his bowl untouched.

  “You haven’t asked why I requested this meeting,” Quayle said.

  “There is only ever one reason for anything you do, or so I’m told: your Atlas.”

  “Not my Atlas. The Atlas.”

  The Principal Backer was not about to argue articles or possessives with Quayle. He wished only for Quayle to be gone from these shores as quickly as possible, a
nd was making no effort to hide it. But Quayle would have understood this even had the Principal Backer made a greater effort to conceal his true feelings.

  “You should be more concerned about it,” said Quayle.

  “Why?”

  “The Atlas has changed the world—is changing the world—and will ultimately alter it permanently.”

  “I see no proof of that.”

  “You’re not looking closely enough: war, famine, flood; bigotry, hatred—”

  “Has the world not always been so?”

  “Never in such supposedly civilized times. I see regression. The Atlas is slowly having its way.”

  “So you say, but you’ve been claiming as much for generations—or so you’d have us believe.”

  “You doubt me?”

  “You’re a lawyer. I doubt you on principle.”

  “And beyond my profession?”

  The Principal Backer shrugged.

  “I hear tales of a man who lives in rooms that haven’t been dusted since Queen Victoria died; who claims to have been born before the Reformation; who sits waiting for a book of maps to reconstruct itself because he believes it will transfigure the nature of the world enough to permit the return of the Not-Gods, thus bringing about the end of days and freeing him to die at last. Correct me if I’m in error about any point.”

  “By your telling, it sounds almost mundane.”

  “I’ve heard stranger tales.”

  “No, you’ve just managed to convince yourself of such. And this is no tale.”

  The exchange precipitated another period of silence until a waiter arrived to remove the soup bowls. The Principal Backer studied the lawyer in all his rumpled elegance, and decided that he did not resemble previous descriptions of his appearance. He was leaner; younger, even. If the rumors were true, Quayle’s longevity passed unnoticed in London because, at irregular intervals, one reclusive member of the Quayle family would pass away only to be replaced by another—a son, a nephew, a cousin—into whose possession the estate of his predecessor would pass. Thus one became many, and many became one.