In my dreams I stumbled through knee-deep snow as my limbs turned black. Every breath hurt.
I woke back in my cell, the gently rotting room stinking of blood and fear. The world passed me by just on the other side of the door. The day dawned, raining again. Water dripped through soft spots in the roof, pattered against my already chilled skin. I didn’t care.
They ate him. They fucking ate him. I couldn’t credit the few and far-between pictures floating to my muddled consciousness. A dozen or more bloodstained faces, strings of muscle bulging in the spaces between their teeth. Human muscle, muscle that used to be a walking, talking person. A garbage person, but a person, nonetheless.
This was no issue of perspective. No other way to look at it. I couldn’t pretend it had happened to Switchback, and not Josh. Two lives I desperately wanted to stay separated drifted toward each other. Collision course.
In the corner across from me a pile of leaves shuffled in a frigid breeze. Appletree had hunched there yesterday, hiding from this place behind a tattered shred of cotton.
A glimpse of baby blue among the rust red of the dead leaves. Appletree. Ronnie Coors. I’d crossed paths with both, and both were now dead. For all I knew, they’d devoured Appletree’s remains when they were finished with Ronnie.
My stomach lurched hard enough to send me into the corner with the dry heaves.
Another cool morning, the freezing damp clinging to every surface. Fifty degrees, tops, and raining to boot. I clung on to the little bit of acidic bile left in my stomach and shivered, gooseflesh rising over my upper arms.
Something iron slammed against the door to my cell, loud enough to make me flinch and cry out. I stuffed my spine into the corner—they couldn’t sneak up behind me then; at least I’d see them reach for my throat with their bloodstained fingers, reaching to tear me apart like they’d torn apart Ronnie.
Two men stood on the other side of the door, wearing identical expressions of casual disdain.
They didn’t speak. One gestured with curt motions, a “come here.” The other spat over his shoulder, bored.
They were people. They might have been an insurance adjuster, or a chef—fuck, they still might be. But their faces . . . their scarred and twisted faces couldn’t be fake. Anywhere they went, people would point and stare, whispering about them. They were monsters now. Swallowed by the woods, by the outstretched arms of the old man. By the distorted column of smoke and malice.
“You can get fucked. I’m not going anywhere with you.” I thought of the small and lonely form of Appletree, surrounded by a red corona of dirt. I hunched deeper into my corner, and concocted a wild plan of darting between them, out into the trees—
The rusty squeal of hinges told me they didn’t give a good goddamn if I wanted to go with them or not. After my clumsy dive through the legs of one, they had me by an arm apiece.
A familiar woman crouched beneath the sprawling limbs of the enormous pine tree, shivering in the cold. The one who’d refused Ronnie, who slipped up and revealed something she wasn’t meant to show. The rawhide rope hanging from the tree closed around her throat. She stared at me, eyes flat and disinterested.
“Hey—hey!” A hand that tasted like sweat clapped over my mouth, sealing my surprise. She turned, watching us pass with flat eyes. Like a dead body sitting upright.
They dragged me through the same path in the woods. Between the two leaning houses, through the woods with their many-fingered oak trees. Into the narrow ravine. The box canyon loomed, every bit as threatening in the daytime. The massive slab of granite filled the horizon, heavy and glaring. Everywhere you looked it lurked in the corner of your vision, waiting. It pulled at your gaze.
We took the same path down the rocks.
The first face stared at me from the bark of a pine tree, watching the river roar beneath us. I frowned. It lacked real proportions or any grace in form or texture—almost like a crude child’s drawing. I spied another, scratched into a tree some feet away from the rough game trail we followed. This one, too, was a poor-quality imitation of a real person’s face. The eyes were black holes, punched so deep into the bark they wept cracked amber tears of sap. The mouth was a thin slash of curled bark, not even arched into a frown—just a straight line.
They spread by the thousands as we climbed the hill, growing over the trees like boils of a plague, sharpening in distinction as we neared the clearing. Mouths formed from straight lines, growing lips and teeth, stretching in wide screams. Punched boreholes turned into eyelids, brows, wide-eyed, terrified. With every step toward the slab of granite, they grew closer together, sharper. The agony and fear captured in so many strikes of a knife. The eyes watched us. Closer to the clearing, the real faces emerged.
Murder begets skill. They had plenty of practice.
We finally made it to the clearing, all of us breathing hard and slicked in a faint sheen of sweat. I looked around. Some part of me expected to see the bleached white bones of a human skull grinning at me. A hunk of leg-sized meat hanging from a tree, where the bears couldn’t get at it. But the clearing was empty. A ring of soot-covered black rocks from the bonfire sat in the center, but there were no bones, no moldering corpses. As if they’d scrubbed last night away, footprint by footprint. As if it had never happened. As if I’d imagined the whole thing. The slab of granite towered over us and stretched to either side, vanishing into the trees. I craned my neck, trying to gauge how tall it was. Hundred feet, easy. Two dozen holes, some as big as fifteen feet across, some smaller than tennis balls—gaped at me in the weak sunlight. Perfectly round, gouged into the rock.
He sat cross-legged on a boulder at the base of the slab of granite. The priest, wearing the same leather jacket. I rubbed my arms and tried not to be jealous of the extra layer. It grew colder. A gust of wind touched my sweat-soaked shirt to my back and I flinched.
The man on my right pushed me toward him. “Go on.”
“And do what?” I snapped but received no reply. I approached at a snail’s pace. A stack of pale logs sat beside him, partially obscured, sending plumes of blue smoke into the cool air. He watched us enter the clearing, watched me come closer. He still wore the smudged ash and dirt from last night. Smeared and faded in large streaks, it revealed pale skin beneath. The scar on his face engulfed his left eye. A curled mass of filmy scar tissue, like cauliflower, gaped from the depths of his socket. The sight of it made my stomach clench.
“Come closer. Sit,” he said. He gestured to a nearby boulder.
I thought of Ronnie’s corpse and the way the priest eyed it last night.
I stayed where I was. “I’ll stand, thanks.”
A muscle clenched in his dirt-covered cheek. He gestured to the boulder again in a curt snapping motion. “Sit. I’m not the one you should be afraid of.”
I laughed. Nothing to fear. Right.
“Sit or I’ll have one of them come over and break your ankles and you won’t have a choice,” he snapped. He sounded like a normal person in the cold light of day. The charade was thinnest here.
I cradled my wrist and sat, shuffling on the hard rock. He stared at me, weighing. Analyzing. Was he a lawyer, in his not-far-enough-behind-him previous life? A banker?
“I know who you are. I saw the secret.” I went with a straggling kind of bravado. Why not? I figured. Go for broke.
“We are the Woodkin.”
“No, I—not that. I mean, I’ve seen the tattoos, the piercings. The way you all act like you don’t speak the lingo. You fucking speak the lingo, don’t you? Like you, specifically. Not everyone, but you—” I thought of the Father’s terrible double-face from last night. “You do. I know you do.”
“We are the Woodkin,” he repeated, but he didn’t try to hide the smirk tickling at the corner of his mouth.
“What do you want from me?” I asked the question but didn’t want the answer. “I didn’t do anything; I was hiking—”
A fist-sized chunk of rock skittered down the massive boulder face, echoing from the trees. I flinched, put my arms up to ward off any stray shards, which fell hard enough to leave divots in the dirt a foot away. The mountain, answering my pathetic whining. When I looked back at the man in the leather jacket, a smile stretched across his face. It wasn’t a nice smile.
“To make you see the truth.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
He snapped his fingers.
One of the men approached, head bowed and eyes cast downward. He bent to the pile of logs on the ground and fumbled with something out of sight. In less than a minute the smoke turned white and curled upward, heavy, perfumed. The man straightened, handed something to the priest. A palmful—brown, black.
Mushrooms.
Ronnie’s voice floated a dozen yards behind me, whispering behind the tree trunks. I grow my own strains, up in the mountains.
He wasn’t the one doing the growing.
“The truth,” the priest repeated, looking back at me. His expression didn’t change. His mouth still stretched wide, but his one working eye was cool, humorless. In a single motion he slammed the ruffled fungi back, chewing with effort. His shoulder shook, and for a moment I thought the mushrooms were coming back up. He gritted his teeth and inhaled through his nose. His hands clutched his knees with pale knuckles, and he shook, like a kid trying not to upchuck in the car on the way home from school. The moment passed, and he relaxed.
“Look, man, I don’t know what your deal is, but I just want to get the hell out of here. Can you—” I licked my lips. The smoke grew thick, now a dirty gray color, and drifted into my face. “Is there anything we can, like, work out?”
“You can’t leave,” the priest said. “You are . . . necessary.”
“Fuck—necessary for what?” I cleared my throat; a sour taste coated my tongue. The smoke didn’t seem to be obeying the breeze moving through the leaves. It gathered around us in thick clouds. I realized the two men who took me up here were gone, I couldn’t see the way back. My body grew heavy. Movement—even wiping my eyes from the stinging smoke—seemed to take much more effort.
“The Feast,” the priest said. He took thin, shallow breaths. His cheeks were paler than five minutes ago—sweat gleamed in the hollows.
“Feast?” I felt dumb, thick. The trees grayed out, thinning, lost in the smoke. Shadow, Josh. Concentrate. “I don’t understand.”
No, not Josh. Switchback. Switchback, now. Perspective.
Shadow, wearing the face of Ronnie Coors. That I remembered.
The buck skull, the smoke. Ceremony. Death.
Sacrifice.
“The truth. You’ll see,” the priest answered around a suppressed cough. A red tinge spread around his working eye, and a trickle of sweat dripped down the hollow at the base of his throat.
A tingling spread in my fingertips, like they were falling asleep. My legs and hips stopped complaining about the rock shards jabbing at them. My balance faltered—or at least I thought it did; thoughts came slow and heavy.
The opening notes of a panic attack, familiar. Not here.
“What—” I swallowed, struggling. “What is the thing?” Not what I wanted to say. I tried again, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. I searched for the panic, the adrenaline, but it wasn’t there. “I—”
“Can you feel it?” The priest’s voice hissed, sharp. He sounded close, right next to me. I flinched, but my body stayed still. I tried to cry out but made no sound. His eye stayed open, blood red, glaring at me. I swear his lips didn’t move when he spoke. No—that didn’t make any sense, did it?
“He’s here. Close.” That time, his lips definitely didn’t move. My heartbeat spiked, distant and removed, like it pounded in someone else’s chest. How did he speak without moving his lips? I didn’t understand. I struggled for every breath. I coughed, and my vision shook.
The face of the granite slab glared down at me, somehow more massive than before. I couldn’t see the sky around it, the trees, the mountains. Only the pockmarked granite, staring me down. Like the black holes punched into the tree, weeping sap. Just another face, hiding in plain sight.
I was spinning now. Reeling like I’d been drinking, but with my body frozen in place. I sank into my own head. I felt like my brain had turned to liquid and drained down my spinal cord. I tried to open my mouth and scream, but none of my muscles worked. Was I breathing? I didn’t know. What if this was how I would die—locked in my own body, unable to draw breath?
Spots danced in my vision as it blurred and dimmed at the edges. Would my lungs burn for air?
Did hers burn when she went rushing into the kitchen?
Something lingered there, some deep truth I didn’t want to remember, attached to the thought. I didn’t see her rush into the kitchen. I didn’t see her do anything. I was not in the house.
“There we are. Much more comfortable now, aren’t we?” The voice inside my ear sounded like glass splinters scraping along a blackboard. I wanted to recoil, wanted to run away from it. It stabbed deep into my head.
“Come, come now, it’s not all so bad. Just . . . relax. I need you to relax.” The warm scent of honey and gardenias slipped into my nostrils, and my heart slowed a fraction. The second time around, the voice wasn’t so bad—it was familiar. It had an accent that tickled the back of my memory. The priest spoke too. His lips moved with the voice in my ear, framing the words. Curious. I think I should have been upset or scared to notice that, but there wasn’t any fear. I reached for it, but it slipped beyond my grasp.
“Welcome. I’ve been expecting you.” His lips moved, but I wasn’t talking to the man across from me. I was talking to . . . Jesus, it sounded like I was talking to Dwayne Phillips, the varsity football coach at Austin High. The same purling, south-Savannah laziness dripped from the words. I couldn’t be afraid of Coach Phillips, right? He brought home-baked snacks to practice. He taught me what a back-sweep position was on the football field.
“I’m—I feel strange.” My tongue rasped like sandpaper, rough against my lips, scratching.
“No, that can’t be right. You’re fine. Isn’t that right?” Coach Phillips whispered. His bushy white mustache dominated his face.
I took a breath, prepared to protest . . . but the air stayed in my lungs. No more coughing. I inhaled again—testing, shallow—but again, no coughing. I still felt like I was floating, attached to my corporeal form by a few dozen threads, but at least I could breathe. There, there. Things were going to be all right. Switchback felt great. He had perspective. Josh . . . well, Josh could handle being in the backseat for a while.
“I brought you here for a little chat,” Coach Phillips murmured, settling onto his boulder. He wore his varsity coach jacket, orange and black, pushed up around his beefy forearms. The bear was missing. He’d had a custom, snarling bear head on his jacket, a more ferocious take on the high-school mascot. Rumor around the locker room was that his wife had made it for him.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, I thought I felt something slink in, way in the back of my brain, above my spine. A cold, curious finger, like a breath of winter air slipping through a door left ajar—
“Whoops. Gotcha right here, son. Almost missed it.” Coach tapped a fat finger against the jacket, where the embroidered bear snarled. I relaxed.
“Coach, what are you doing here?” I remembered a clearing, trees and mountains and a village, set deep in the trees. It didn’t seem important now. I couldn’t focus on the details. Like a water slick around a tub, the only evidence of a bath.
“I went for a walk, found you. I wanted to sit down so we can get to know each other for a bit. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
I laughed, a stupid and slow huck-huck sound. “Coach, come on, we already know each other. I’ve been to your house, remember, with the boys ’bout six months back. Doris made us tea, you remember . . .?”
Coach Phillips smiled, letting me ramble on. It wasn’t until I paused to draw breath that he reinserted himself, neat as a pin.
“So, I understand some things happened yesterday. Some things that . . . might not make all kinds of sense to you.”
Black smoke, streaming from the buck skull. Ronnie, screaming and thrashing as it consumed him. Seeing him, hunched over in the black mass of shadow.
“I thought we could sit down, the two of us, and discuss it. You know, hash it out.” He looked at me, his eyes full of sympathy. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I just—I don’t get it.” My breath caught in my throat. I did want to talk about it. He knew me so well. “Why is this happening to me? What is all this, what was that thing, last night?”
“Oh, that?” He laughed, his tidy little beer gut pushing against the yellow polo tucked into his khakis. “Just a little fun, that’s all.”
An image of deformed monsters floated to mind, melted skin around a scar dug in each of their faces. “Fun?”
Coach Phillips twisted the ends of his mustache with one hand. He did that when he got excited. His eyes gleamed. “Aren’t you having fun, Josh?”
The beast of black shadow, writhing and growing. The touch of it as it brushed past me, dragged back into the unwilling form of Ronnie. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t Josh anymore, my name was Switchback now, but I didn’t have the words. I shook my head, trying to clear the packed cotton slowing down my thoughts. I wanted to cry.
Coach tutted in sympathy, shaking his head. “Ah, Josh. Always the last one to figure it out, am I right? This must all seem so confusing to you. See—” he leaned forward, gesturing for me to do the same. My body moved mechanically, ratcheting forward, mirroring his—“you’re a smart guy. Smart guy, who thinks he knows what’s going on here. Parts of it, at least, right?”
I wanted to be wrong, wanted to think of something else. But every thought led back to Ronnie, reaching out to me from the cloud of black smoke. Fear etched in every line of his face. What did he know? What did he see?
“Look at me,” Coach Phillips said, but for a second it didn’t sound like Coach—his voice grew deeper, hungrier. He didn’t sound that way in real life. He sounded friendly, nice. “Josh. Look at me.”
I squinted at him, trying to focus—my eyes didn’t seem to want to work right. Smoke filled them.
I looked at Coach Phillips, all right. Same balding hair, watery eyes, and bushy walrus mustache. The varsity jacket pushed up to his elbows . . . wait. No, but it wasn’t a varsity jacket at all, was it? A shadow, beneath the cream-colored fake leather.
“There I am. You see it, don’t you? What’s hiding beneath.” Coach grinned wide, a silver molar winking at me. “I need your help with something, son. A special . . . errand, let’s call it. A special task. And in order for you to help me with my special task, I need you to see.”
Parts of him grew see-through, the longer I looked. Beneath his fake jacket, behind the wide-stretched grin. I could see through the boulder he sat on, beneath the rocks and dirt below. My vision stretched as something unlocked it. Veins of water running quick and silent a dozen feet below the ground. Tree roots, bent and knotted as they plunged deep, shifting tons of dirt and loam.
Look at me.
The massive slab of granite. It went deep into the soil, deeper than I ever imagined. Riddled with holes, each perfectly round and large enough to swallow me whole. It looked like a tooth, suffering from an infection below the gum, rotten all the way through.
Look.
There, buried deep beneath the rock, hundreds of feet below the surface, I caught a glimpse of something black, split into dozens of wriggling, writhing limbs. Blood and slime slicked its hundred tendrils, riddled with holes like the rock above it.
I shut my eyes and screamed, and Coach laughed. Except it wasn’t Coach, and the laughter stabbed like needles in my brain.
“Are you scared, Josh?” Coach whispered, leaning close. He stared at me with stolen eyes. I wanted to look away, but it wouldn’t let me. “What are you scared of?”
What was I scared of?
Tears burned my smoke-stricken eyes, and the smile on Coach’s face widened, cracking at the edges. Blood beaded and trickled down his chin, seeped into the edges of that fat white mustache, but he didn’t wipe it off.
A boy, twelve years old with soot stains on his *NSYNC T-shirt, standing in front of a mirror in his neighbor’s house. His face streaked with tearstains and coated with black, greasy ash. He’s crying, his entire frame shaking with racking sobs. Not from grief—that comes later—but something else. He looks in the mirror, and swears he’ll never tell. From the living room he hears his father cry for the first time in his young life, and he knows he’ll never utter a single word.
But the boy knew. He was crying out of fear—fear that he’d be found out, that someone would tell. Tell his secret. The firefighters pulled him out of the house. Dragged him, kicking and screaming. If he says the words over and over again, he could change them. He could make them real. He could lie.
“Oh, dear,” Coach Phillips whispered, the bloodstained grin still stretching over his fat jowls. “Now, we have a few things to work with. See you soon, Switchback.”
He leaned back and disappeared. One second he was there, and the next he vanished, replaced by the priest, bent over, panting like he’d just finished running sprints. The fire beside him struggled. The edges of the clearing blurred, suddenly white and thin.
Beneath the smeared dirt, the priest’s already pale face was gaunt and gray. He bent double, caught his breath. When he turned back to the land of the living, his one working eye locked on mine. It glittered with fever, bright as a beetle’s shell. A bead of cloudy liquid bloomed at the corner and fell down his cheek, thick as blood.
“Take him. We have everything we need. His fear will be sharp.”
They dragged me out of the clearing, limp and listless as I stared at ghosts. My heart hammered in my chest, clawing its way up my throat. The truth, long buried, back again.
No one pulled that little boy out of the house. No firefighters came and snatched him. He smelled the smoke and came downstairs. He saw the kitchen door, slipped from where it was usually hooked to the wall.
And he did nothing.
Nothing.
I did nothing.
She burned, and I stood there.
I could hear the sound of china shattering in the kitchen. They sounded like bricks—the same bricks I’d stacked on that grave, one by painstaking one.