Adam's Woods (9 page)

He rounded the corner on return his house and saw the white van parked out in front. The back doors were open, and he made out a pair of skewed bare feet disappearing into the utter darkness of its interior. The sun should have provided some light within, but he knew now that places existed where the sun never reached. After a pause, the man appeared, a piece of that darkness that detached and took shape; a man shape wearing a pair of boots, bluejeans, and a plain black t-shirt. He wore a ball cap that shaded his eyes, the shadow like a pair of dark sunglasses that revealed nothing. He jumped down and shut the doors, and then turned around to face the boy, watching with eyes he couldn’t see that burned a hole through him.

He knew the man had taken the bodies from his house, just as he’d collected Randy and his parents, knew he’d witnessed the final swallow of the van consuming his father. The boy too understood the quiet, the magnitude of is origin amplified by the pressing weight of the silence filled with screams never uttered. Gone. All of them. All of them but him. But no, he did hear screaming, searched for its source before realizing it came from himself. His last remembrance, before collapsing into the middle of the intersection, was the wide grin and wave from the man before he turned around to get into the van and drive away.

Eric strolled down the road towards the grocery store, hoping his attempt to appear casual wasn’t overdone. He waved to a few people met only since moving in, not residents at the time of the murder. They were all friendly enough, but there existed a reserve that told him that they knew. Of course they did. If they hadn’t heard from Arnie Fisk, there were enough others to fill the grapevine with gossip about all things Kane. He had decided just to let things run their course. He reasoned that with enough time, he could eventually be just another neighbor, that the day would come when he could be just “Eric”, not, “Eric...you know, the one with the brother that...
”

If he stayed that long.

He had seen Arnie several times since his visit. On the first encounter, the older man had stared at him while riding his tractor mower in the lot that belonged with the Grange Hall, nearly across from Eric’s house, and then nodded once and looked away. It took Eric a few days to realize he’d been issued an apology, and that it was all he would get. The next time, when Arnie drove by in his truck, he stared straight ahead as though Eric weren’t there, demonstrating that the apology had limited provisions not covering the resentment felt at Eric’s presence.

Eric could live with it, had even come to sympathize somewhat but still bristled at his accusation. He kept an eye out for the others that Arnie claimed felt the same, but so far no one had tried to run him over or taken a shot at him. He had kept close to the house, settling in with the few belongings retrieved from Pittsburgh, so still hadn’t seen everyone. Perry Rice, the man that had found him in the woods, still lived next door but was away in Arkansas visiting his son. Pastor Burroughs, amazingly still preaching at the Baptist Church though he had to be in his seventies, stopped by briefly and promised to have him over for dinner. Janine West, that ran the grocery store and also another childhood acquaintance, had come around the counter and given him a hug along with his change. She had tears in her eyes.

For his part, Eric was determined not to mention the past unless confronted with it, would try not to stir up trouble even inadvertently or repeat the situation with Fisk if it could be helped. His career as a writer was all but unknown here, and that suited him fine.

Plus there was Mary.

Since the first kiss, they’d seen each other nearly every evening for a week. He’d been to her place in Drake City for dinner, they’d driven to Erie to see a movie and then take a moonlit boat ride on the lake with a fellow realtor and friend of hers, and spent a lot of time talking over coffee. At first the murder dominated the conversation, but eventually they worked through their lives beyond that and up to the present. He learned she had done a tour in the Army after high school and served in South Korea. He found out that she’d had a miscarriage she never told her husband about, already suspecting his infidelity. He wanted to know it all.

Away from Lincoln Corners, he also enjoyed being in a place for a while where if he were recognized, it was because of his writing. It had only happened once, at a bookstore they’d browsed in, and he’d signed an autograph and talked with a fan, a pimply teen draped in black, while Mary looked on amused.

Reaching the corner and waving to Janine sweeping the floor inside the store, Eric turned left and kept walking. The houses thinned out, and soon, after rounding a bend on the road full of potholes filled with dollops of asphalt, there were none at all. The woods ran up to the road on the left, and the rusted out hulks of vehicles in the old junkyard stared at him with empty headlight sockets. He thought of King’s Christine, and how a concept that seemed maybe silly in some context could strike the right nerve in others.

He listened for the sound of a vehicle coming up behind from Lincoln Corners or from further down the road. That way would be the volunteer fire department and the local Little League ball fields, then the lake, and finally a network of dirt roads. What they connected Lincoln Corners to he didn’t know, and never had. Satisfied that no one approached, even from a fair distance, he quickly stepped off the road into the weeds, then picked his way through some briars at the edge of the trees until gaining access to the woods and the cover it provided.

Since writing his last segment of the book, Eric had found himself stuck, had one more scene in mind and then didn’t know. And when he’d look out the window considering plot lines, the woods looked back at him and he knew that he would eventually have to go in. To see the cabin or its remains. To see the place where Adam’s body had fallen. He even decided, when he had worked up the nerve, to follow the same route, walking out to the cornfield from the cabin, to the gravel pit, and then back to the swamp. He didn’t know why, exactly, but felt it would re-establish a piece of himself left there. He wanted to connect again with Adam perhaps in the same way that family and friends built roadside shrines at an accident site, to reach out for the spirits of their loved ones. And to prove to the woods he wasn’t afraid.

Even though he was.

He’d finally mustered the courage, and so on this Tuesday morning appeared to anyone watching to simply have gone for a walk. He didn’t want to be witnessed entering the woods, especially by Arnie or someone who would tell Arnie or tip his promised but yet to be revealed sympathizers.

Once inside the trees, the smells of earth and foliage time-warped him back to childhood. The cabin would be more or less straight ahead, he reasoned, and pushed on through clusters of ferns and tangles of undergrowth.

Eric finally saw the structure ahead, surprised that it still existed in as near complete form as when erected. It certainly wasn’t due to any enduring craftsmanship. Approaching the building, half expecting to stumble on Adam sitting outside with his Batman comic and thinking for a moment that he’d give anything, even the remainder of his life, to make it so, he stopped right outside and took in the house that innocence had built.

The door was gone, and so were a number of the wallboards and a large piece of the tin roof that he spied rusting on the ground nearby. The posts still remained but listed in unison to the left. He could see their couch inside, more bare stuffing than vinyl covering now, bloated and dirty from rainwater. He realized he was holding his breath and let it out in a long, slow exhalation.

He ducked inside, stepping into some mud within a shallow puddle on the floor. Eric had to stoop to avoid scraping his head on the rusty metal overhead until moving over to the new skylight to straighten up. He thought of the magazines. He had never been able to look at any since then, and thought that probably a good thing. On a whim, he lifted up the old car seat, and found the tattered remnant of a Hustler. The cover was gone, the pages glued together, and black mold peppered the soggy paper. Eric could see slivers of air-brushed skin through various tears. He put the seat back down without touching the magazine and prepared to follow the remnant of the path to the field.

The snap of a branch caused him to freeze halfway out of the door. He nearly ran, propelled by the sudden terror of the ten year old boy come out to walk with him, but quickly mastered the fear and instead listened for more sounds. There was only silence and the occasional drone of a bumblebee or a birdcall that he couldn’t identify. A mosquito whined in his ear and he waved it away.

It was early September, the temperature in the high sixties, but physical and mental exertion drew sweat from his pores. He lifted up his t-shirt and wiped his brow. He considered his muddy shoes, and chided himself for getting dirty. It wouldn’t matter if no one saw him here if he advertised it with filthy clothing.

He listened intently one more time for another sound, dismissed the first to a rowdy squirrel, and began following the faint trail towards the cornfield. As he walked, Eric thought about his brother, tried to picture his face and peculiar way of bouncing on his toes when he walked. He remembered the games of hide and seek and the campfires in the fire ring out back, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and telling ghost stories. And he thought about the blank pages of the photo album in his mind, the ones that should contain prom and graduation pictures, maybe wedding photos and then a beaming young man next to an exhausted but luminous girl, cradling a newborn between them. He wondered too how the photo album of his own life would be different if these images existed. Maybe a wife and kids of his own? Maybe it even could have been Mary, except without the real life horror story.

As he walked, he did see a few footprints in particularly wet portions of the trail. So someone did come out here. And why would that be so strange, really, except for one that saw these woods as haunted. They were adult sized, male and rather large, and he tried to match someone from Lincoln Corners to them but failed, had never paid much attention to a man’s shoe size. As Red, in his narration of Andy Dufresne's escape from Shawshank Prison as he strolled back to his cell wearing the warden’s footwear, said, “The guards simply didn't notice. Neither did I... I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a mans shoes?” He smiled. Seemed like Stephen King was going to accompany him through his entire journey. He felt that his story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and the resulting movie, were in many ways a finer effort than any of King’s horror work. Essentially a story about hope. Maybe he could follow that example in his next work.

Eric arrived at the cornfield, and felt naked without the concealment of the woods, afraid of detection. But as decades before, the harvest was past and the corn stalks lay defeated and stripped of their bounty. Looking at the Big Woods, he realized that not everything came in a miniaturized version when returning home as an adult. It was still imposing, the treeline stretching as far as he could see. He knew it wasn’t a true wilderness, but still a man could get lost in there.

He caught movement at the forest's edge, and with his heart in his throat saw a large black shape rise from the ground. It had to be nine feet tall. A black bear, he realized, and laughed out loud. The animal dropped back down to all fours and scampered into the trees. He admitted to himself, that for the briefest of moments, he had believed that by writing a story about a boy who with his terror draws a killer, he had actually drawn that killer here. Having an active imagination could be a hazard of the job, he thought, especially for horror writers. But in reality, the killer that had inspired the story had already been here, so it would just be completing the circle. Not that it would be any comfort.

At the gravel pit, Eric found that much had changed. No longer assaulted by heavy machinery to gouge its surface, the land was reverting back to a wild state. Sumac and maple trees grew throughout, and goldenrod, the king of late summer/early fall, bent in unison with the breeze like Muslims at prayer. He turned over a few rocks but found no snakes.

He took a deep breath and looked back, steeling himself for the hard part of the journey. Back to the fork that led to swamp, and to Adam.

Returning to the path, he retraced his steps then realized he’d gone too far and turned around. By walking slowly and looking carefully, he found it, almost non-existent, more like a game trail now. If the woods wasn’t considered haunted by at least the someone that had made the shoe prints, it seemed that this path might be.

Too soon he had arrived. First at the place where JT had sat in shock. He could smell the swamp, its resident mosquitoes rushing him but he hardly felt their bites, slapped at them absently. He looked at his palm and saw the small spots of his own blood knocked back out of the insects and almost threw up. He hadn’t needed any stage props for this - first the magazine and now real blood. He couldn’t help but see his hands covered in Adam’s again.

For the most part growing up, except for knowing he’d had a brother once and didn’t anymore, this place had felt unreal. But here it was, and he felt the tears again on his face, glad that he could cry for his brother again, pushed beyond his own pain. He wondered if Adam had seen his executioner approaching and understood his intentions. He hoped it hadn’t hurt too much but suspected a pure agony no child should ever know. Thinking about what Arnie had said, he wondered if there had been shock beyond the violence as the knife slid in, Adam looking at a trusted, known face, or at least a face he thought he had known.