All Green, Part 7
A serialized short story.
Continued from Part 6:
“C’mon, Ray,” said Henry, click-click-clicking his safety switch and peering into the trees. “Looks like a nice little trail through there. Big hunter like you ain’t scared of a few little bones, right?”
“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” I said.
Ray blew out a breath and yanked his hat back onto his head. “I swear to God, this is the last job I do with you all. Lord have mercy.” He stepped aside and swung a welcoming arm toward the trail. “Henry, my friend, you can take point this time. I’ll follow you. Quiet and slow, for God’s sake. And if we see any blood on those trees we’re pulling out. Got it?”
Henry grinned. “All green, boss.”
We stepped past the dangling bones and into the shadow of the forest.
The path between the trees led us on like a dare.
Moss traced a faint line through a wide stretch of ferns, a knee-high jungle underneath the forest canopy. It might have been a deer trail—except that, above the ground, a tunnel had been carved through the undergrowth: wide enough and tall enough for a person to walk comfortably, without getting snagged on either side.
The quiet pressed in around us.
Not silence, exactly. If I listened, I could hear the rustling of living things among the leaves. Birds called softly in the branches, too shy to raise their voices. Nothing echoed. Saying it was hushed isn’t quite right, either. It seemed like there had never been a sound among those trees that needed hushing. Maybe it had been quiet ever since God wrapped up His work on the Sixth Day and clocked out for a rest.
“What the fuck,” said Henry in a low voice.
“Keep your voice down,” whispered Ray.
“Why?” Henry whispered back. “You hear something?”
“No. You just don’t shout in a church.” He pointed at Henry, then gestured down the path, tipping the flat side of his hand forward, twice: move out.
Henry replied with a tight smile and a raised middle finger, then adjusted his grip on the carbine and stepped into the lead.
Ray waved me and Tucker along after him, then followed us, bringing up the rear.
We walked on.
There was no thrashing through the brush. No cursing. Our shoes made hardly any noise on the moss below. The sound of water sloshing in Ray’s half-empty canteen seemed loud enough to wake the dead.
It felt as though we had shrunk, somehow.
I grew up playing in the woods around Madison: climbing trees, building forts, playing soldiers with branches for guns. When I got bigger and hungrier, I tried running trap lines with snares made from baling wire and hunting squirrels with a homemade slingshot, hoping for a little extra meat on our table. I lost patience for it eventually. After that, I spent most of my time in the woods hunting for parties and chasing girls. But I was always at home among the trees. Never felt afraid.
I’d never been in a forest like this.
Maybe it was an old forest preserve. Or it had been overlooked by the loggers, somehow, an accident of property lines and economics. The trees around us made the ones I grew up climbing seem like feeble broomsticks. Tall pines stretched up into a sky that was screened completely by branches. We walked between oaks and hickories that were bigger around than my arms could reach.
I felt like a kid playing under the kitchen table while the grown-ups ate and talked: hemmed in by the legs of people much bigger than me, unnoticed down below in the shadows, listening to the murmur of serious conversations happening far above my head.
It should have been peaceful.
But there was a wrongness that dogged me as we slunk between the feet of those giants.
At first I thought it was just nerves, knowing that we were getting closer to Bone Man and whatever waited for us there. I told myself that everything was under control, as much as it could be. I just couldn’t shake the feeling off.
Ray’s words from back along the blood-marked trail kept echoing in my head: the woods are probably full of traps.
Full of traps.
Traps.
All at once, a picture bloomed in my mind, like a memory that hadn’t happened yet. A spiderweb made of metal. A fat black spider waiting in it. Full of poison. Ready to jump. Gleaming coldly among the branches.
I shoved past Tucker and shouted along the path toward Henry, startling the whole forest.
Henry dropped into a crouch and ducked into the shelter of a big oak, pressing his shoulder into the bark and sighting down the carbine’s barrel. “Where?” he barked as I ran up to him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Watch for traps.”
“The fuck are you—”
I looked down at the path and the ferns that reached over it.
There was a line stretched over the path, hidden among the green fronds.
Kneeling down carefully, I pushed the greenery aside. A black length of wire ran six inches above the ground. It was strung between two trees on either side of the path, almost invisible. I followed it to the base of the oak that Henry crouched beside, where it fed through a metal eyelet and ran up the trunk, hidden from Henry’s side of the tree. On the other side, at head height, the wire hooked onto a spring-loaded hammer from an old gun. It was set to strike the capped end of a metal pipe that was bolted onto the tree trunk.
Tucker and Ray were behind us. “What the hell is going on?” said Ray.
“Fucking tripwire,” muttered Henry.
Ray reached his foot out and nudged me. “Move aside,” he said, and stepped up to look at the makeshift bomb. He studied it in silence for a moment. Then he turned to face me.
“Mark,” he said in a low voice.
I thought about Henry lying in gore-splattered ferns beside the path, clothes smoking, half his head blown away.
“Mark,” Ray said again. The steel was back in his voice. “Look at me.”
My knees wouldn’t stop shaking.
I looked up at Ray.
His jaw was clenched, and his eyes were hard. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“You said there might be—”
Tucker gasped as Ray grabbed my pack straps with both hands. My feet barely dragged across the dirt as he pushed me a couple steps down the path, away from the tripwire. His face bent close to mine. “Don’t you lie to me this time,” he hissed, still holding onto me, shaking me to emphasize every bitten-off pause. “Tell me. What the fuck. Is going on.”
My knees wouldn’t stop shaking. Ray was holding me up almost as much as he was holding onto me. I couldn’t find the words to answer him.
Underneath the anger and the sweat and the dirt, I saw the fear rising up on his thin, weatherbeaten face.
“I don’t know,” I said weakly.
Tucker stepped up next to us and reached up, putting his hand on Ray’s arm. “Ray, take it easy,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “He’s scared.”
Ray dropped his hold on my straps and brushed Tucker aside. He started to walk back the way we came, toward the sunny opening that marked the entrance to the forest. “I quit,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening here, but I’m not—”
I didn’t wait to hear the rest. Turning, pushing past Tucker and Henry, I hopped over the tripwire and walked quickly away from them, further into the forest.
Tucker’s panicky voice called my name. I worried he might chase after and try to stop me. I started jogging down the path.
I didn’t care if anyone followed me. Didn’t care if I died—snagged another tripwire or got murdered by Bone Man. Didn’t care if I made it back to Madison, with or without the mushrooms.
I needed to figure out what was happening to me.
The path among those elder trees stretched on, and I kept running.
More bones appeared along the path. Ribs and femurs were twined together into strange shapes, crowned with the skulls of small animals, lashed and hung onto tree trunks. Like signs written in another alphabet—warnings, or invitations, or both.
The smell of woodsmoke crept into the air.
I kept running.
Finally, up ahead, the shadows of the forest lightened. Straight lines and flat surfaces showed between the trees. There was the pitch of a roof and the walls of a building, down in a clearing. Silver-white sycamores stuck out around it like exposed ribs.
I stopped to catch my breath at the top of a small hill, crouching behind a stand of mountain laurel. My pulse hammered in my ears. I couldn’t hear anyone behind me. Couldn’t hear anything except the train-engine rush of my own breathing.
After spending the whole day in the clear air of the empty country, everything washed by years of rain and untroubled by people, the scents of settled life coming up from the clearing were three-dimensional. I could smell the hot iron of a stove within the woodsmoke. Simmering coffee. The venison that somebody had cooked, maybe even the potatoes and onions that had gone with it.
My empty stomach grumbled: even if it was my last meal, I would have traded everything in my pack of barter goods for a few final bites of that fry-up.
The path led down out of the forest, into the backyard of a broken-down house with white siding. Most of what I could see looked like every other hard luck home in Madison. There was a battered shed held together by a patchwork of scrap wood, the stubbornness of old age, and the grace of God. Next to it was a chicken coop. A few hens ambled around the rusted carcasses of a small tractor and an ancient car. Piles of sheet metal and mouldering lumber nestled in the goldenrod around the yard’s edges. A washline ran from a post on the sagging back porch to the branch of a crabapple tree, barely holding the scraps of drying clothes above the seedheads of the uncut grass beneath it.
But then there were the stones. As big as garbage cans, somebody had dragged them into the yard and placed them in a wide circle. There were the stripped logs sunk upright into the ground, carved with swirling designs and strange, staring faces. There was the bloody haunch of a deer placed on a flat stone in the center of the circle, buzzing with flies in the afternoon sun.
And there was a man standing over it.
He was facing toward the forest. His eyes were closed, with his arms raised to his waist, palms skyward, as if he were carrying an invisible load of firewood. He swayed gently, back and forth, head bobbing like a sunflower. His gray beard waggled as he spoke noiselessly into the air. A white band was wrapped around his bald head, shining in the sunlight. He wore a long, colorless shirt that hung to just above his knees. A leather belt was cinched around his thin waist, with a few small pouches dangling from it. Pale legs stuck out below the shirt’s ragged hem, naked and skinny, with bare feet planted in the dirt.
From where I crouched behind the bush, the closest thing to a weapon I could see was an antique axe sunk into an old stump, next to the woodpile by the back porch.
I’d crawled through the woods all day long—past blood and bones, scared to death, thinking I was heading into an Old West shootout with a gang of murderers, or about to be sacrificed to the Devil by some bloodthirsty cult.
And here was this half-naked old head. Probably stoned out of his gourd. Talking to the trees.
I started to laugh—until I remembered that somebody down there was crazy enough to make a pipe bomb and wire it up to a tree.
Maybe the old nut was all by himself. Or maybe he was just a decoy, with the rest of the gang still lurking in the shadows of the house.
If Tucker and the rest had followed me, they’d be close to catching up. If they’d given up and gone home, I was on my own—with no gun, no bow, and only the goods I had in my pack. I could wait and see if they showed up, or turn back myself.
I thought about going home empty-handed, with nothing but the memory of that voice creeping around in my skull.
The old guy down in the clearing looked like he knew some things about hearing voices.
I took a deep breath and held it. Without giving myself a chance to think twice, I stood up and started walking down the path, in full view of the muttering man and whoever might be watching from the windows of the house.
I stepped out from under the trees and into the yard. As I edged carefully toward him, the old man kept whispering to himself. I had almost reached the nearest side of the stone circle before he seemed to notice me.
His mouth paused mid-verse, half-open, and looped into a droopy smile. Slowly, his eyelids rolled open. When he looked at me, his pupils were as big as storm drains, whirlpooling all the light in the clearing into them.
If he was surprised to find a stranger standing in his yard, interrupting his prayers, he didn’t show it.
“Hey, man,” said Bone Man, casually, smiling, as if he’d just woken up from a nap. “You hungry?”
Continued in Part 8, coming soon.