Chapter Twenty

The Wooded Path

I stood up to stretch my legs and massaged feeling back into my butt. The utility closet was about eight feet by ten, the size of a small prison cell. The wind howled through the poorly maintained pavilion. It reminded me that Bay Beach was a gateway between worlds.

The utility door suddenly creaked open upon rusty hinges, allowing gray morning light to filter in. I realized I had slept the night away. The door opened further and I saw Amanda was waiting for me beyond the threshold.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully through the semi-open door. She shook her head. I could not mistake the sadness in her eyes.

“Isabel died last night.”

I couldn’t believe what she just said. “You must be mistaken.”

Amanda stared at me with grief so profound I could not doubt her. Her sadness seemed intended for me, as if Isabel’s death affected no one else.

“Your friends didn’t let her go gently.”

“The doctors?”

Amanda nodded. “She was suffering and just wanted to go in peace. They stuck needles in her. They pierced her side with that damned sword you people use to drain lung water. They violated her body.”

I could easily picture the scene Amanda painted. IVs to administer epinephrine. Chest tubes to drain pleural effusions. That is exactly how the resuscitation would have unfolded. “I’m sorry,” I told the deceased teen, as if I was the one responsible for filling Isabel’s final moments with pain.

She stared off into space, recalling the trauma. I sat back down upon the hard floor. A brilliant light had been extinguished, casting the world in darkness. Isabel’s death would affect me in profound ways, but my most immediate thoughts were selfish. Isabel was no longer available to guide me. She had left me only scraps of information and photographs of occult symbols. True Path, Broken Path, what did it all mean?

I was suspended from my job with no future source of income. My home had been broken into and probably ransacked. I was being hunted! My only meaningful contacts were dead adolescent girls. Isabel was gone...

What if I misunderstood her train of thought? What exactly had she intended for me to do? Sit inside a dirty utility closet and hide from Umbra’s buddies? Take her notes to the police so they could investigate Grace Station?

Amanda sensed my train of thought. “One child,” she said.

I returned my focus to the task at hand. “I think I’m supposed to walk into the forest across the street to find that—” I pointed at the symbol of the True Path engraved upon her earrings.

“You must cross Dark Woods,” Amanda agreed.

The name certainly sounded ominous. The forest was no more than five acres of woodland, but it was the subject of the last story Isabel told me. A ten-year-old hiked the hand-full of acres, yet ended up seventy-five miles north in a little town facing the Door of Death. “I just followed the path in the woods,” he said.

“I don’t suppose Dark Woods is so named because it is haunted by cute little elves or gnomes?”

Amanda crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. Humor couldn’t erase the tragedy of Isabel’s passing. Nothing could.

I left the safety of the pavilion and walked across the empty parking lot toward the entrance to the wildlife sanctuary. I looked down at my clothing and laughed, albeit with bitterness. Funeral clothing was hardly fitting for a hike through the woods.

The first quarter-mile of the wildlife trail was a poorly maintained cedar boardwalk, whose wet moldy planks made slipping a strong possibility. The remainder of the trail was a mulch-, grass-, and mud-lined pathway running northeast for several miles before circling back upon itself. I had been on this footpath many times and had fond memories of showing my son the deer as well as the wolves in their fenced habitat.

This particular morning I walked the planks, so to speak, searching for the inscribed stone that would lead me into uncharted territory. The woodland on either side of the boardwalk was little more than copper grasses, birch saplings, and blue chunks of fieldstone. The sun had risen enough to cast a weak light through the immature forest.

Beyond the boardwalk the muddy trail meandered west. The scrawny maple saplings and reed grasses were thin enough for me to see the bay beyond the amusement park. A majestic fifty-foot schooner with sails the color of fire sailed north toward Death’s Door. It was a beautiful craft, and I had never seen its likeness on the bay. I continued watching until it disappeared from view. I wasn’t the type to believe in omens, but until a few months ago I had not considered myself the type to commune with the dead. I told myself believing in signs was okay, just this once. The red sails could have meant anything, but I told myself the yacht was a harbinger of good tidings.

The spring morning had not lost its chill, and I made my way into the thickening wood. An occasional blue stone appeared upon the floor of spring grasses. The trees surrounding this part of the footpath were slightly more mature. Had it not been for the howling of the gray wolves I might not have seen the marker.

The pack stared at me from behind a tall chain-link fence twenty-five yards or so from where I stood. When the alpha male howled, the rest of the pack followed suit.

“Stop scaring the shit out of me,” I yelled at them from the safety of sufficient distance. I took another step forward along the muddy trail, but they interjected once again. I took a closer look at the leader. Just in front of him, on my side of the fence, sat a weather-worn blue boulder the size of a pumpkin. Inscribed upon the rock were markings I could not see in detail.

I left the path and walked across a field of copper grass toward the fence. When I reached the boulder, I noticed the mysterious symbols carved into it. For all I knew, they had been carved thousands of years ago. A circle above two lines, the first horizontal and the second diagonal. The sun’s path of fire. The mark of the True Path. But nothing changed. The wolves were still in front of me, albeit much closer, as were the links of rusted steel. When I turned to face the way I had come, things became clearer.

The muddy path continued to meander northeast, but a fork in the trail appeared where previously none had existed. I walked back through the field and found another blue stone placed methodically between the two forks. The mark of the True Path graced this rock as well. In fact, I think this was where Isabel’s photo had been snapped. The boulder was chipped, as if the corrupting influence of the Great Deceiver was present even here. I took the trail which had not been there earlier. The path less followed, I chuckled wryly to myself.

Within several feet the landscape changed dramatically. The ground was littered by a mosaic of scarlet and gold, the colors of autumn. Somehow the Wisconsin seasons shifted in the span of mere seconds.

This was virginal forest, as pristine as when the Chippewa and Menominee first walked here, thousands of years ago. It was an absolutely remarkable and magical piece of land, made more so by the loss of neighboring woods to logging, development, and environmental toxicity. However, the sun rose here reluctantly and gave off little warmth. Burgundy leaves rustled like the flapping of leather wings. Flocks of Canada geese flew out of their way to avoid this haunted place. It may have been whole long ago, but this Path belonged to a world spinning off its axis.

The narrow forest path was strewn with huge boulders whose blue shoulders shrugged upward deliberately. Lichen of various hues clung to the boulders. Bursts of sea foam, gun metal, blue, and slate marked my way as I traversed uphill. Little sunlight penetrated the dense growth of trees, and I reached deep into my coat pockets for warmth. Small rodents chittered nervously in the distance, and somewhere overhead a wounded killdeer cried out boisterously.

Tall swaths of cattails, honey-colored in the dark forest light, marked a bubbling creek to the west or it could have been north. I was in uncharted territory and didn’t have a compass to guide me. The sweet smell of fallen leaves and damp earth wafted in the frigid wind. The woods grew denser as the sunlight seemed to be leaving this world.

I felt myself growing increasingly isolated from the town that bordered the forest both in front of and behind me, and I began to understand the trees might, indeed, not want me trespassing. The loneliness of the wood bled into my bones. The quivering of crimson foliage became more threatening while stands of gnarled trees were so dense that sounds began to echo back. The crunching of brown spruce needles underfoot reached my ears from many places as if unseen hunters made their way toward me from all directions. Leafless branches reached toward me violently and jerked back again when I looked closer.

The wind blew out a great elemental tune that sounded like the battle call of a ruthless band of warriors. The howling of a wolf competed with the discordant wind to celebrate the darkness of the day. I took no consolation in the sensation that I was walking toward a pack of wild animals. I shivered involuntarily as I lifted my collar against the autumnal cold and sped up.

I walked for miles, far longer than the length of trail that existed on the other side of the fork. I wondered what spirits inhabited this lightless place. Had I accurately interpreted Isabel’s intent? I was pretty freaking angry with her. She left me alone to fight her battle but gave me so little direction. Was I even in the right place?

The cry of wolf and owl within the darkness conjured images of sacrifice and blood. Madness lurked in these woods. Dark things, winged things, spirited things of malevolent intent. I had no choice now but to walk ever onward, making my way toward whatever sanctuary existed at the end of the footpath.

The wind picked up speed and sounded like voices crying or whispering conspiratorially. The earth sank soft and slimy beneath my dress shoes. The forest floor became marshy and running water burbled to my left. The passage only ran in one direction, but I feared I had gotten lost. The forest thinned ahead, and a marsh was just visible.

I began to panic as a gray fog ascended from the marsh to meet the deepening violet of early dusk. How had daylight vanished? Ghostly tendrils crept up my legs in search of vital tissue. The cry of the lone wolf informed me he was closer. Somewhere behind me the rustling sound of footfall over dead leaves grew nearer. In the deep shadows of nameless trees I thought I saw figures crouching. I was not alone.

“Hello,” I called out. No voice returned my call. The silence deepened behind me. I began to run, tearing through cattails and brambles. The growth of spruce and hemlock mercifully thinned in this marshy stretch, and I ran as fast as my terrified legs would take me. Something in here survived the onslaught of humanity. Something sinister and ancient.

I forged a path through bronze-colored grass and came upon a hollow white cylinder of paper birch. The bark had outlasted its fallen trunk and remained delicately intact. To the right of the paper birch I spotted a fallen shagbark hickory that had been struck by lightning. The fallen tree was cracked in two places, causing it to fold upon itself into a rectangular frame. The trunk was charred and stripped of its loose, shaggy bark. A creature emerged from beneath the birch frame. It snarled at me when we locked eyes.