Almost full night had fallen by the time the two Woodkin members got me back to my cell. My heels dragged against the dirt in twin streaks, leading into the shadow looming behind us. When we reached the decrepit shack, they dropped me in a heap.
I didn’t sleep. Each time I closed my eyes, the fire crawled toward me, splitting the wallpaper of my childhood home into fingers of ash. The dull, scraping sound of someone kicking against wooden floorboards reached my ears. Once, when I closed my eyes, I heard a scream, and I started to cry.
I heard her over the sounds of the PlayStation. Faint confusion at first, like she was calling for my dad with questions. Except Dad wasn’t home.
And her questions turned to shouts in a split second.
I remember walking out of my room, heart in my throat. Tingling in my fingertips, hornets under my skin. A small child who didn’t understand. I walked down the steps, stood in the front hallway. Looked at the kitchen door, slipped from the hook on the wall. I knew it was heavy, knew it had to be tied to the wall or it would lock.
And I knew Mom was trapped on the other side.
Her screams still echoed in my ears. Just like that day, standing in my front hall.
An echo shivered through the chilled air, and I blinked. That one wasn’t in my head. That one was real. I held my breath, unsure if I was about to slip back into my nightmares. Was I Josh or Switchback?
Which one was I?
The scream came again a few minutes later, this time blasting into my ears loud enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck. I snapped back to full consciousness. This was no dream.
Outside the eighteen squares of my cell door, a commotion was taking place in the clearing. I swallowed with no small amount of pain. Too long since water had passed my lips, my starved and dehydrated system answered. A full day, or two. A dull pounding beat in the back of my head that didn’t bode well. Dying of thirst didn’t seem like a great way to go.
Another scream. I looked at the first thing I could to distract myself—my injured wrist. Swollen, bright purple, and straining against the cuff of my filthy flannel shirt. It didn’t look good.
The next scream was longer, drawn out, and ended with a faint huffing. Like someone preparing to run a sprint was lifting four hundred pounds. A scream of effort, more than suffering. I dragged myself to the door of the cell, looking through.
A woman was kneeling, naked, her body lit by two torches jutting crookedly from the dirt. Her shirt lay discarded in the dead leaves. She hunched over her swollen belly, clutching it, teeth bared in a grimace. The muscles in her neck stood out in harsh relief, thick cords from the effort. Her eyes held a static place in the distance, narrowed in concentration. The firelight gleamed off the rivulets of sweat trickling down her arms. A sun with an eerily realistic face stared from her shoulder, inked in dark purple and reds.
A dozen other women surrounded her in a ring, kneeling, hands outstretched. In supplication. In worship. Not one of them lifted so much as a finger to wipe the sweat clinging to the woman’s brow or reach out and hold one of her twitching hands. They supported her in presence only.
Her, or her baby. At this moment, they were one rolled in the other, hand in hand. Like Josh and Switchback, except they weren’t fighting for control. The woman braced herself through another wave of contractions, breathing intentionally, carefully.
With each wave she half fell to the ground, panting in effort, only to pull herself back up to her knees afterward.
The wracking waves came closer together now, ceaseless, insistent. She flipped over onto her back, heels kicking the dirt. I felt like an outsider, witnessing a private moment. A moment between a mother and her child, a moment of toil and labor and love.
And the ring of supplicants with hands outstretched.
I took a shuffling step away from the door and her belly moved.
A knot of flesh rose from her stomach, bulging outward, surrounded by a corona of livid veins. Even after it disappeared, a red eye of broken blood vessels remained. She screamed, arching her back and hammering a fist against the ground. The tight concentration on her face shivered, wilting. This was different. Something changed. Just like that moment in the clearing, with the beast of black shadow. One split second, and everything was different.
Still, the other women did nothing.
I sagged against the weak walls. I thought I might be sick. It wasn’t human, couldn’t be human. The air reeked of low-tide rot, dying sea creatures buried in the sand. Of the layers of dirt and sweat coating my skin.
The chanting grew louder. Every eye watched the thrashing woman, but no one broke ranks to help. She lay exposed, alone. The message was clear; she has to do it herself or die trying.
I put my back against the door. I couldn’t watch—my stomach already churned in cartwheels. Images of the beast from last night floated in front of my squeezed-shut eyes. Writhing and bulging with limbs stretched like pulled taffy.
The chanting and screams surrounded me, painting their own garish pictures. I wrapped my good arm around my knees and bent forward, trying desperately to think of something, anything else.
Cotton candy. The taste of a cheeseburger, where I was in the book American Gods. I think Shadow Moon just got to that town—
A scream from the woman shot up in pitch, and the chanting stopped as if cut with shears. For the third time in a day I lurched into a corner, stomach heaving. I ran beyond empty, so nothing came out but a weak string of sharp-tasting bile. That didn’t stop my gut from trying to squeeze out every last drop.
Don’t look, it’s not going to help, it’ll only make things worse, don’t do it—
I wiped my hand and turned, resting my head against the bars of the cell door. They were mercifully cold against my hot and flushed skin.
It lay on the pine needles. Surrounded by the afterbirth, blood-slick and covered with dirt and leaves. It wasn’t moving. The woman lay a few feet away, trembling from head to toe, and looked anywhere but at the mess between her legs. Her stomach was a riot of bruises already turning a dark wine red.
Father stepped forward, manifesting from the darkness. His face was as still as a grave. The women in the circle pressed their faces in the dirt, arms outstretched.
“Give it to me.” Father addressed the new mother, who was still panting from effort and dripping with sweat. He stopped at the edge of the ring, folded his arms across his bare chest.
“Give it to me,” he repeated. Other men detached themselves from the pooled shadows behind him.
She pulled herself onto all fours, heaving for breath, and crawled to the red mass lying in the dirt. The muscles in her arms spasmed, twitching like they were attached to strings. Even from here I couldn’t miss the livid-colored flesh, the twisted limbs of the not-human form, still slicked with blood. Not a child—something else.
She lifted it with a locked elbow behind its neck and got to her legs, shaking like a newborn calf. Father watched and said nothing, made no movement to help. A smattering of familiar-looking longish-brown hair coated the creature’s head, the only sign of faint humanity. I wondered how many of the swollen bellies of the Woodkin were a direct result of Ronnie’s drunken lechery, versus . . . the other thing. That creature of pockmarked shadow, buried beneath the granite slab in the clearing.
Stillborn—clear as daylight, even from my cell. No screams of indignation or rage escaped its lungs. It didn’t writhe or kick in protest against the cruel, cold air.
Father turned his head and spat into the dirt. “He was weak in life. Why should his seed be any different? Another failure. Another.”
His hands tightened as the lines in his face scratched deeper. For a second I thought he might do something unspeakable to the creature in his frustration. His bleak facade cracked, and the anger seeped through. Then, as soon as it appeared, it vanished, and he fell still once more.
The sky spat thunder, heralding a late-summer storm. Father lifted his face skyward, spoke too low. They took the child from his arms, whisked it away into a group of hard-faced men. The scene broke up; the child went in one direction, the men in another. The group of women carried the one who’d just given birth away despite her snuffled protestations.
The woman tied to the tree had looked on. I caught a glimpse of her, peeking around the massive pine trunk. Wide-eyed. She was just like me: a prisoner by any other name. We locked eyes . . . and she faded back behind the tree.
“You.” His voice was inches away and I jumped, jarring my wrist against the iron door.
“Motherfucker,” I hissed, clutching at the rod of molten iron twisting inside my wrist.
Father crouched in front of the door to my cell. His arms were slick with blood from the child—or the mother, I’m not sure which. His eye glared at me, unblinking.
“You’re coming with us tomorrow.”
“Come with you where?” I hissed through clenched teeth. Sweat beaded on my forehead.
He threw something between the bars of the cell. It thumped heavy against the rotten wooden floorboards. Rolled with a distinct sloshing sound. My heart leaped into my chest.
“Up. Into the mountains. Drink. You’ve got a long hike ahead of you.” And with that, he left. The torches were gone, the clearing dark and empty.
I fumbled for the object. A bag, made out of some kind of leather or hide. I pulled the stopper open. Despite the frantic screaming in my head I took a small, cautious sip, prepared to spit it out. I needn’t have worried—it was just water. It tasted of faint river silt with a hint of algae, but I didn’t care. I drained a good chunk of the skin in one go, until my lungs burned for air and white spots danced in my vision.
I made a pile of leaves in one corner and fished around for Appletree’s blanket, spreading it over my legs and hips. It was surprisingly warm, and only stank of unwashed bodies if I brought it close to my face. He’d had it wrapped around himself by the fire, and for a second—just a second—I wondered who had brought it back to my cell and why. I seized the precious skin of water and clutched it to my chest. With a belly full of water and a night free of screams or murder, I collapsed into a black and dreamless sleep.
I woke to the sound of tiny thumbnails being dragged in the soil.
I sat up in a rush, fast enough to smack the back of my head against the wall of my cell. A vise tightened around my skull. Through the eighteen rectangles holding my freedom from me, the night grew cold. The thumbnails I’d heard against the ground were only leaves, skittering in the face of an early-autumn wind. They swept the clearing, dancing through the spaces between the decrepit and leaning shacks. A thousand shadows forming jagged silhouettes. Like tiny many-faced shards of glass.
Dead, and free to fly on the breeze as they wanted.
I pulled Appletree’s blanket tighter around my shoulders and pressed my head against the iron door. It felt good against my hot and fevered skin. Like the touch of an alpine lake on a brutal summer’s day, after hiking all afternoon. So cold your skin ripples in goose bumps, your breath catches in your lungs and threatens to drag you all the way to the bottom. I breathed now like I did then: controlled, slow. Trying not to sink below the surface. Switchback was doing just fine. Switchback was surviving. A couple of scrapes and bumps—or a broken wrist—but he was still alive. He was still here.
A few breaths later, and the skin of my forehead started prickling. I looked up.
A pair of eyes stared at me from the shadow of the pine tree. Floating, disembodied for the moment. I blinked, rubbed my eyes. I stood up, and crept toward the door. A sense of déjà vu—the night I’d rolled out of my sleeping bag to pee and saw a silhouette watching me. Except this time, it didn’t break apart when I took a step to the left. No moonlight split its growing shadow, no rocks and distant lake speared the pieces my imagination gave corporeal form.
She was watching me. Sitting, like she couldn’t feel the chill of the night air, the early teeth of autumn. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t so much as twitch. Like a statue, or a shade conjured by my fevered brain. The only thing that tied her to reality was the noose, strung up to a bough.
We stayed like that for a time. Staring at each other. Two animals, ensnared.
“Can you hear me?”
I don’t know why I spoke. I didn’t mean to—the words slipping out from between my lips surprised me as much as they did her.
She didn’t blink. Didn’t budge. Gave no indication that my words reached her. And then . . .
“Yes.”
She might have nodded. There was no way for me to know; shadow shrouded her face, her dark hair blending into the dark trunk of the tree behind her. A pale face, floating in black. Staring at me.
“Are you okay?”
She looked at me squarely. “Great. You?”
Despite everything, the still-snarling pain in my wrist, the low ache-turning-into-pain in the back of my head, despite the cold and certain knowledge that I was cattle waiting its turn at the slaughtering pen, I laughed. What a stupid fucking thing to ask, Josh.
Or Switchback.
I stared at the ground. At the charred remnants of my sad attempts at a fire. At the dead leaves curling into static mildew in the corners.
“How did you get here?” I asked. It was the first question that popped into my head, the only voice in the growing darkness. I rushed to fill the gaps, to seal the places in my question where the water would drain out. She had answers. She could teach me things. “Not, like, here, here. I mean . . . like . . .”
“How did I get with them?” Her voice detached from her, floating between us. Just another leaf on the wind. Just another piece of us, dead and free. One of her hands reached up, testing the rope. Delicate fingers, pulling at the coarse fibers. I imagined them pricking at her skin like tiny wires. How many necks had that rope held fast? How many lives swayed at the base of that pine tree?
Another batch of faces, carved into the bark. The skin on the small of my back twisted in a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. She stayed silent. I slumped to a crouch, pulling the ragged edges of my—Appletree’s—blanket over my shoulder. Another stupid thing to ask, I suppose.
“I was doing a midnight hike. Heard about it from some guy in a town when I stopped in for gas. He was pretty insistent. Best views for miles, he said. I’d been having a tough time at work lately, and that day I got written up for making a simple mistake. I just . . . needed to get out for a bit, so I figured why not. I was planning on doing Mount David, south of Glacier. The moon was full, and I wandered off trail to get a better view of it rising over the valley. I made it about fifty paces when I heard the voice. It sounded . . .” She paused. Considered her words. She stared at her hands in her lap. “It sounded like my boss. Begging me for forgiveness for something, I can’t remember what. I followed it. Off the trail, down a hill. I felt . . . I don’t know. Different. Looser. Like I was dreaming, I think. I walked off the trail, followed the voice. The woods felt better than they had at the top. Warmer, closer. Like a hug. I know it sounds stupid.”
“I don’t think it sounds stupid,” I said, quickly. I did, a little bit, but I didn’t want her to stop talking. As long as she was talking, I wasn’t alone. At least she wasn’t hounded through the woods like a petrified rabbit, running for its life. Although, given our current circumstances, it was tough to suss out if that was a net positive or a negative.
“I walked for a long time. The voice kept pulling me, talking to me. It changed. From her to my old man, to my grandma. People I cared about, people . . . people I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. It promised me things. Things I knew should have been impossible, that I shouldn’t—shouldn’t—have wanted, but I wanted anyway. By the time I got to the valley, I was sunk.”
“Sunk?” She was like a reclusive animal just stepping out of its pen. I didn’t want to scare her. Didn’t want to scare her back into silence. The noose was already doing a fair job of that, I imagined.
“That’s how I think of it. It’s hard to explain. Like . . . like your brain sinks backward into your spine. Draining, all the way down. Something else took the front seat for a while. Something . . . not great. I think that’s how it got a lot of us.”
“Who?”
“Feast.”
The word slipping from her lips sent a chill through the air. We sat there in silence for a little longer. Separated by the night, by the chilled air. By the leaves tap-dancing between us.
“How did you get out?” I stared at my own hands. The fingers of my right hand were swollen, tinged red. My wrist bulged in spots I was fairly sure it wasn’t supposed to.
This time, she was silent for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. I thought the moment between us had passed, and we were alone with ourselves again. The woman with a noose around her neck and the man with the broken wrist. Animals both, trapped. Waiting for the final touch of the knife. Cold steel, cutting flesh.
“My old man wasn’t great. He had a thing for . . . he was . . . he liked pain. For himself and . . . others.”
“Fuck.” I didn’t mean to say anything; the expletive fell from me, hollow and already bruised.
“My mom, mostly. My brother and I slept in the basement, Mom and Dad’s room was on the top floor. Some nights, you could hear him through the vents. What that dickless wonder said—‘I’ve got an itch I need you to scratch’—that’s what Dad used to say too, before going a few rounds with my mom. The same words. Like it was Dad, standing in the clearing with me, and not that douchebag.”
Once more and likely not for the last time, a wave of nausea at the thought of Ronnie Coors rose through my chest like a trash-filled tide.
“I hadn’t heard those words in . . . God, decades. But I still remembered them. I still remember how they made me feel, lying in that shitty twin bed in that stifling basement. Telling myself that everything was okay, that they were just talking. That it was the TV in the background, and not him. But when I heard Ronnie say those words . . .” The icy breeze plucked at her words, sending them fluttering around us like deadfall. “It all just hit me. That my dad was a bastard. That I’d been lying to myself this whole time. I finally got it. I guess.”
“Lying to yourself.” I whispered so only I could hear it. Like Josh Mallory, holding the box of Plan B over the trash can. Telling himself that he could fix this, that he and Deb could find a way out.
The silence returned, steeping the night. The wind moved through the trees, rushing almost water-like, and tiny creatures ruffled the grass beyond my cell door, but the two of us were silent.
Lied to. Trapped. Like a pair of stars caught in the gravity of a dying sun, we’d both run into the valley. She had been promised something she desperately craved. Me, running from the smoking ruin that was my life outside the trail. Briefly I wondered why I didn’t hear the same voice she did. Why I wasn’t called from the trail, to ‘sink.’ Maybe it was just as simple as I was food, not fodder. I lacked something, anything concrete to my life. I wasn’t even an entire person; Josh, Switchback, Josh, Switchback. Round and round we go, where we stop, no one knows.
It had to be the lie. The reason we were different, the reason we weren’t . . . like the rest of them. It was the only place our stories synched, the only common ground. That moment where you whispered to yourself that you weren’t what you were, that things could be different. That you could change your life just by looking at it differently. That you could make the pain go away simply by wishing it wasn’t so. But look at it differently, pretend it was something else, run from it—the truth always waits for us. Waits to sink its antlers sharpened like knives into your spine. The truth will set you free, or death will. Everything in between is simply the hunt.
One more question pushed against the inside of my lips, chitinous and bulging like a cockroach shell. It tasted sour. It tasted like death.
I had to ask it, or I was sure it would end me.
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“They’re going to kill us,” she said simply. She was leaning her head against the tree, staring up into the boughs. “I’m not sure how they’ll do me. But I’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’ll do to you.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. Me too.”
The image of Ronnie’s face, frozen in terror and agony. His hand outstretched, begging for help.
We didn’t talk after that. The wind died down, and the exhaustion welling up inside my chest finally dragged me to the floor of the cell. This time, the nightmares waited for me.
This time, my mother was already screaming before my eyes closed.