Adam's Woods (17 page)

The boy in front beckoned, and he walked slowly towards him. As Sean closed the gap, he became aware that although the boy could have been a classmate, his clothing was wrong. He wore what he thought were called breeches that ended just below the knee, with long white socks pulled up to meet them. His shoes were black with a large buckle on each. He wore coat with tails, buttoned up the front. He looked a kid dressed for the Fourth of July parade, missing only the pointy hat.

Sean stopped and looked around, for the man. Even presented with a field full of specters, he couldn't forget him.

"He isn't here. Not right now." The voice, a whisper, sounded far away and directly in his head at once.

Sean stepped closer, and the other figures began to resolve in the twilight. They were all children. Some boys, some girls. Some older than him, many younger. As with their spokesman, many were dressed in clothes that he thought originated in foreign lands, or times gone by, or both. Except for a few, dressed in blue jeans or shorts similar to ones in his dresser drawer. They began speaking again, in whispers rising and falling. He recognized some Spanish, and some German, and other languages he couldn't place no matter how hard he tried. Many looked right through him, indifferent or distracted, as if he were the ghost, but others fixed on him with malice, some with lunatic grins. They were all children in form, but more than that. Older, like him. But much older, made ancient by something. Someone. The man. He believed that some would hurt him if they could. A boy no more than seven regarded him with a face twisted into such hatred that Sean had to look away. But none of them moved towards him.

He drew close to the patriot boy, and stopped several feet away. He didn't feel threatened by this one, nor afraid, but saddened, the emotion rolling off of the boy like a vibration in the still and heavy air.

"You are Sean," the ghost said, but his lips never moved. It came as a sigh on the wind, faint but clear. He heard his name echo through the ranks of the children, spoken in spite and envy, with longing, mocked, vacantly and without meaning, as if naming a lover or a nemesis.

"Yes," the boy answered. "What’s your name?"

The ghost boy stared blankly, then looked embarrassed, pained. Ashamed. "I don't know. He's taken it. He's taken all of our names. He'll take yours too."

He heard the gibberish rise and fall from the others, and made out urgings and warnings and threats.

Don't tell him.

He'll know if you do.

He'll punish us all.

Sean will know soon enough.

There was glee in this last statement, and he glanced at the young boy, who leered at him with malicious pleasure. Sean scowled back, which surprised the boy for a moment, but then the certainty of what he knew returned with a small smile more terrible than the grin.

"What do you mean? Tell me, please!"

The patriot boy opened his mouth to speak. His ghost body spasmed in short, jerky movements, and he cried out in pain. The sound of his scream filled Sean's head. He dropped to his knees with his hands over his ears, but it did no good as the sound expanded inside his brain and he felt that his skull would explode with the mounting pitch and resulting pressure.

Then at once it ceased, and trembling he slowly took his hands away and let them fall. He opened his eyes, and all of the children had vanished. Something dripped from his nose, and he wiped at it with the back of a hand. The blood appeared black in the moonlight.

Eric drove out to a bar at the lake to meet Mary early the next morning. She said it wasn't unusual for someone to leave a vehicle at the edge of the parking lot there, usually the night before to ride with a designated driver, so it shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, they hoped to be back long before it opened.

He could feel the nervousness expressed in her quick kiss on the cheek as he got into the truck.

"Are you sure you want to do this? I can go myself. Not too late for you to go home." He would rather not go alone, but would spare her what they might find.

"Yes, I'm sure. I mean I don't want to, but if you're going I'm going. So let's get this over with."

She put her truck in gear and they rode back towards Lincoln Corners. They had decided to use her vehicle, as they would access the woods by following a hard-packed and rutted dirt track made by tractor tires as access to the corn fields, and better suited for the truck. Plus, if they left it at the bar, people who knew it and Mary might talk. His Toyota didn't have the same visibility. At least not yet.

They pulled into the dirt lot of the deserted firehall, a half mile down the road from the junkyard, and waited for a few cars to pass and disappear. Mary quickly drove the truck across the road and onto the track.

Eric felt queasy. He didn't want to find the bones of dead children. He mentally cursed JT as he held onto the handle above the door to keep his head from smacking the roof while Mary plowed through a deep puddle. Muddy water sprayed out around and onto the truck, and Mary turned on the wipers to clear the windshield. He glanced at her - white knuckles gripping the steering wheel, her mouth set in a taught line - and admired her courage.

They went around a slight bend, enough to shield them from anyone looking from the main road, and Mary slowed down. After nearly a mile, Eric saw the path where it came out from the smaller woods.
Adam's Woods
he thought, adopting JT's name for himself and knowing it would be that way from now on.

"Here," he said, and Mary slowed and then stopped. She blew out a held breath, and Eric reached over and squeezed her hand. She managed a weak smile and nodded.

"Do you want to hide the truck? We could maybe drive up to the gravel pit and put it behind one of the piles of dirt. Mountains. Remember that? We called them mountains as kids."

"Yes, I remember. I think we'll be fine. No one's going to come back here."

They got out, and Eric tied his bootlaces tight. They both had on jeans. Eric wore a flannel coat and had a backpack hung by one strap over his shoulder containing a garden trowel and some water. He had almost gone to the hardware store in Drake City for a spade, but from JT's description, digging should be minimal or even unnecessary. And the image of himself holding the long shovel appeared in his vision as an accomplice of death - a grave robber or grave digger - a role he wanted no part in playing.

The morning was cold, in the low forties, and their breath plumed like unfilled captions from their mouths. A horror graphic novel, maybe, he thought. Mary briskly rubbed her arms through the yellow windbreaker she wore, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Even facing this grim task, he couldn't help but think how lovely she was.

He pulled the crude map from his pocket and looked it over. Should be simple enough. "You ready?"

"Yes, let's go."

They strode through the stumps of the corn plants with a resolve Eric didn't feel, the soil hardened by the cold but still spongy under their feet. The first maples had turned, and smatterings of red and yellow broke up the monotony of the green tree line ahead. Reaching the Big Woods, Eric turned around and scanned the field behind, and the dirt track in either direction as far as he could see. No one around.

They followed the stream for a while, as the map indicated. There were no regular trails here, but for much of the way their course followed a deer path. Several times they stumbled over fallen branches sunk down into last years leaf litter, and Eric fell hard on his wrist after tripping on a rock. The sharp pain at first led him to believe he'd sprained it, but after a few minutes it receded to a dull throb, and he tested it to confirm a full range of motion. They walked more carefully after that. Neither one wanted to break a leg or otherwise injure themselves. Eric thought he might be able to carry her out if it happened, but doubted she could reciprocate.

Two miles, JT had said, and Eric discovered how hard it was to gauge that distance without an odometer or mile markers on a highway. If they walked three miles per hour, he figured, it would take them about forty minutes. But add in the stepping over or going around obstacles, and two rock hopping trips into the stream to work around impassable fallen trees - the hillsides too steep to pass above - and Eric didn't know how far they'd come. He looked at his watch, and an hour and ten minutes had passed.

"How much further?" Mary asked. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail, and mud spattered her boots and jeans. There was a smeared handprint on the side of her windbreaker where she'd absently wiped her hands after stumbling. She stood facing him with hands on her hips, and blew some hair away that had settled over her eye.

"Should reach the rocks at anytime now."

"What I want to know is, with JT's leg like it is, how exactly did he get up here? I'm not ready to run a marathon anytime soon, but this is kicking my butt."

"I don't know. He was walking everyday then, and said he had to sit down and rest a lot. But probably just because he was determined to do it. He was searching for his limits, I think, from what he told me. I think he knew something about working through pain already."
In more ways than one.
Eric was glad for the rest her questions provided, even if he was only trying to convince himself with the answer. He didn't want her to know that the hike was kicking his butt too.

She nodded her head in agreement, but then said, "That, or he never came up here in the first place. You ready to go, or do you need another few minutes to catch your breath?"

He smiled at her ease at which she read him, and she smiled back. They pushed on another hundred yards. A large grouping of rocks came into view, and Eric knew they were the ones on the map; erratics, large boulders left by glaciers in retreat from the last Ice Age. They lay like God's cast-offs from creation all throughout the woods in all manner of sizes and angles, amongst the maples, pines, and oaks. But here a single rock as big as a house rested in the center of some smaller specimens, smaller meaning the size of a Volkswagon mini-bus. Moss and lichen clung to their sides in beautiful patterns and ferns waved from the summit.

"Here," said Eric, elated at finding the landmark, the feeling rapidly cooling as remembrance for what the landmark stood for returned. They both took a break, leaning against the giant rock and gulping warm water from the bottles in Eric's backpack. Sweat soaked his back and underarms, and he wished he'd worn something lighter than the flannel coat. He'd unbuttoned it and at first felt relief as the heat rolled out. Now that they'd stopped moving, the air seeped in to chill his damp flesh. Mary looked more comfortable in the windbreaker, it also open but the fabric more breathable even when zipped. She did have to take off her glasses and wipe off condensation forming on the insides of the lenses.

"Okay, Kane. Let's get going. I don't want to get comfortable and start enjoying myself out here. At least not until I know whether there's anything to this."

"Yeah, okay," Eric answered, looking into the woods where the map directed them. The thought occurred to him that they could just turn around, go back to Mary's truck and leave. If the bones were that old, assuming there were bones, then whoever did it could be dead or long gone. It didn't necessarily mean that whoever did this killed Adam, either.

But then he thought of a woman out there, decades older than him, waking up every day with a name on her lips to match a face staring out of a photograph by the bedside, at a grin missing some teeth and maybe ears that still needed growing into. Wondering. Everything inside told her that the face never had a chance to grow into the ears and new teeth never filled in the gaps, but she wondered just the same, with varying degrees of pain that had lessened through the years but had never entirely faded. What had happened? Could he possibly be alive? And could this possibly be the day that she called, or knocked on the door? What if Adam had just disappeared? What sort of ghosts would have haunted him then, when the spirit might still be flesh?

"Eric?"

"Sorry, Mary. I was just thinking..."

"No, don't tell me. My mind is already creating a reel of coming attractions, and I don't need a scribe of the macabre to add anything else to them."

They set off through the woods. The walking was easy as JT said. Away from the stream, the forest opened up with little undergrowth to hinder their progress, the mature hardwoods long ago the victors of a silent but merciless battle for sunlight. Squirrels leapt through the woods on food gathering missions, sometimes chasing each other over acorn rights. As they wound their way through the trees, several doe took them by surprise on cresting a small rise, and by the animals' startled reactions the experience was mutual.