I snapped back to Bedal with a gasp. The air was sour and reeked of rot—it balled and hung heavy on my tongue, like rancid perfume.
“Why would you say that?” The voice booming from the bleached buck skull made the skin on the back of my neck shrink. It wasn’t Appletree anymore—it wasn’t even a voice of this world.
I inhaled again, struggling against the vertigo threatening to spill the contents of my stomach on my shoes. A bird lay on the street, crumpled and still. Another lay on the slanted porch of the diner, where it had fallen from the sky.
“No!” The thing-that-was-Appletree screamed. The skin of its upper arm bulged as something thrashed beneath. The scarred old man ran into the street, his face pulled tight in sudden, raw panic.
The inked darkness stuffed itself back into the skull, forcing its way into the eye sockets in thick ribbons.
My arms loosened a fragment as the men holding me took stiff steps toward the skull. Their eyes stared unfocused, their fingers twitched.
“No!” The skull-beast howled again.
This time the scream echoed from their mouths as well, stiff and unnatural.
I took the opportunity and shoved them back, overbalancing and falling to the street. I flipped over and one-arm crawled backward. The Woodkin ran toward us, closing in from the peripherals of town. The old man screamed something, pointing. The priest limped three steps but stopped and bent double, vomiting blood. When the thing screamed, it made a dull, tone-deaf keen. The priest thrashed with it, pantomiming agony.
In the skull’s black sockets filled with angry shadow, a pair of eyes glared at me. Tiny, red-rimmed, swollen with fury and fear in measure. They were eyes not of this world—the eyes of a beast. The fault lines in the bone were traced in black, bulging and looping like skull was overflowing with tar. It smelled of hot ozone, the electric stink of threadbare wire.
“Oh . . . fuck,” I whispered.
In a surge of limbs the thing charged me on all fours, heedless of the two men standing in its way. I watched a fragment of white antler pierce Mike’s knee with a wet crunch. He said nothing—behind the black beard, his lips murmured with the howling beast, flat and dead. His eyes stared at the rising sun, dull and blank.
“You pathetic wretch! I’ll kill you. I’ll crack you open like the sky and rain agony down on your every nerve—”
I bucked backward, desperate to get away, but the thing closed on me, rushing—it would kill me, eat me, take me with it—
A hand closed on my ankle, and I screamed hard enough to see spots.
“I will spend eternity exploiting your mistakes. I will bathe you in fire and put your every humiliation on display for the whole of time—”
Mike’s fingers pulled at my clothes, thick-fingered and clumsy, a child’s doll brought half to life. My wet hands slipped across the asphalt; I was losing the fight, they pulled me too close.
Run as I might, I could never get far enough.
I closed my eyes but found no peace in the dawn-tinted darkness behind my eyelids. The morning stank of iron and fury, resounded with the beast’s eardrum-splitting bellows. Echoed with Mike’s deaf-mute screams, a mockery of imitation.
This was the moment. I opened my eyes. Dawn crept over the mountains, spilling a flood of frost-hinted light against a pine thicket. I didn’t want it to be like this. I looked at the ridge, rough with conifer-tops silhouetted against the gold dawn. I thought of my mom. If I was to die, I wanted to die looking at beauty, not hatred. I thought of Deb.
I watched the sun rise and sought forgiveness.
The beast raised its fists to the robin’s-egg blue sky to slam them down again, but froze. A soft, surprised herk came from deep inside the buck’s mouth, so faint I almost didn’t hear it—almost human-sounding.
The world stopped in its tracks. Mike and the other guy froze in twisted, unnatural positions. Mike clutched my flannel shirt in a brittle grip. No wind sighed; no tree limbs moved. Even the river fell silent.
The beast collapsed sideways through the thick air. At first touch of the black asphalt, the skull shattered in a spray of glass-like shards, soft as snowflakes and twice as brilliant. They floated in the still air, borne upward in a shimmering column. Every inch of skull compounded on itself, broke into another wave of sky-borne pieces, until there was nothing left but the body, lying limp on the asphalt.
Where its head had been was a red ruin of still-wet flesh, mercifully hidden from me by the still forms of two men. I wasn’t looking at the twisted, heaped remains, though. I was looking just beyond it, where something struggled through the soggy viscera.
A single, wiggling black . . . thing slipped from the remains. The size of a thumb or even smaller, writhing along the pavement.
Father shoved the others aside, already running—he must have seen it on my face, the sudden decision.
“No!” The street split with his screech. I didn’t care what he would do to me after, what they would do to me—blood roared in my ears, drowning out rational thought. All I saw was the black silhouette of pain and suffering pretending to be my mother.
The thing they called Feast made a wet, squishy pop beneath my hiking boots.
Father fell like a marionette with cut strings, propelled forward by his own momentum to tumble and roll like a sack of bones against the road. Behind him the hunched-over priest groaned through a mouthful of bile and collapsed. He didn’t get back up. The scarred Woodkin stopped and stumbled in their tracks, confused, their twisted faces pulled tight. The echo of their hollow anger evaporated in the cool morning breeze.
For a single crystal, shimmering heartbeat, the world fell still. Nothing screamed or howled, cried, or shrieked. There was the soft white babble of the river, and the cry of a single bird, pinwheeling overhead. Everything froze.
Groaning, I pulled myself into a sitting sort of crouch. Every muscle screamed with exhaustion. If they decided to kill me, there wasn’t shit I could do about it. I couldn’t run anymore—not for lack of desire, I physically couldn’t run another step.
I heard them before I saw them. Creeping down the streets, peering from their porches. Their faces pinched into tight suspicion. The same suspicion, I assumed, that they’d been living with for God knew how long. Their whispers were like leaves, skittering over the street.
“What the—?”
“Are they all together?”
“Who the fuck are they?”
“Are—are they part of—”
The anxious whispers turned to angry muttering. Fingers pointed at the corpses cooling in the early dawn light, then back to the scarred strangers creeping into town from the woods.
One of the split-faced Woodkin—the one who stood by to witness the death of the girl in the cave—whirled around. The eyes on them multiplied as people came out of their houses, outnumbering them in twos and threes. Frozen in place, the scarred men threw one another wide-eyed looks of confusion. One man toward the front made the first move. He took a slow step backward. The others didn’t know what he was doing. Some stepped toward him like they were going to huddle and regroup; others moved to the side, making room for him to pass. Still others held their stance, staring in open shock at the fallen figures of their former leaders. Whispers I couldn’t catch ran through them like mist through the trees.
“Rich!”
The scream made me jump. A woman, wrapped in a threadbare rose-colored robe broke through the stiff-shouldered crowd, her bare feet slapping against the asphalt. A small child was pressed to one shoulder, secured with a strong-armed elbow.
“Rich!” I followed her eyes to a scarred man. His eyes were downcast at the hardpan beneath his feet. The Woodkin melted away from her like fish swam from a shark, peeling off toward the bridge. The man called Rich stayed where he was. He used one hand to cover one side of his face—the side split and frayed into their shared scar. The woman stopped a few paces away from him. Her hair framed her pale face in frizzy puffs, moving in the wind. The town surrounded them, closed in on them. Watched them, unsure of its next move.
“Is it . . . is it you? Is it—” She stood close enough that I could hear her breath catch. She covered her mouth with one hand. “What . . . where did you go?”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Kay. I—” His words were stilted, unfamiliar to his own mouth. He whipped around to face the rest of the Woodkin, but they weren’t looking at him.
“Where did you go? Where—it was just a fight, Rich.“ Tears were taking over her words, now, stealing them from her lips. “Just a fight, and you went out for a walk.”
He simply stood there. He didn’t take a step back or go with the rest of them. He stayed, as if rooted to something in town. An anchor. He shook his head like a fighter in the ring.
“I was angry. I was . . . I don’t remember. But in the woods, I heard your voice. Whispering to me from between the trees. I wasn’t right in the head, Kay. You know I wasn’t right.”
Something stood between them; something invisible separated them by two feet, but it might as well have been a football field. He sounded almost like he was pleading—desperate for her to understand, to forgive. He stared at her, eyes huge and shining. “I’m sorry, Kay.”
“It’s been months. Months. You’ve been alive all this time? Why didn’t you come back?”
The child fussed, whining and struggling in the mother’s arms to turn around. The woman juggled the toddler without looking.
“I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t me.” He wanted to leave it there, hunted her face for understanding, but there wasn’t any to find. The hand still pressed to his face shook. “It was like I was in the backseat of my own brain. Not in control. I was so angry. All the time, angry.”
“But . . . did you try to make it back to us?”
He opened his mouth, but before he spoke the child managed to twist around for the first time. They stared at each other, father and child. One in mild bewilderment and the other in awe. The woman stopped talking. The man’s words died on his lips. Two seconds passed. The toddler scanned the man’s face, calmly weighing, sorting through a mental catalog of faces he might or might not remember. And then, with the silent trust only a baby has, he just leaned forward. Rich didn’t have a choice; it was either catch the kid or let him fall out of his mother’s hands.
She covered her lips, but not in time to catch the breathless shriek. In the harsh light of the early morning, the scar on his face stood out in stark relief.
“Oh my God, Rich, what did they do?”
She reached up to touch his face, but he shied away, slow enough so as not to disturb the baby happily gurgling in his arms. He was lost in the child’s face—either from love and adoration, or to avoid meeting the mother’s eyes. The baby didn’t care. He was already slapping spit-covered fingers along the man’s jawline, babbling a story no one could understand.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s . . . it’s how they seal the bargain.”
“The bargain? I don’t understand . . .”
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t tell if he spoke to the child or the mother, but there were tears in his eyes, running down his face. “There’s . . . there’s going to be so much you don’t understand, Kay. We can talk about it—I’ll tell you everything, I swear to God—but it’ll take time.”
The scene repeated itself along the street. One of the women, in a tattered smock, held hands with a man, whispering what I imagined were similar words. A man clutched a dog to his chest, laughing as the pup did its best to lick his scarred, split face.
But only a few of the Woodkin had someone, had a tie to the real world. The ones without an anchor drifted together, compacted by confusion. They were the ones the scant handful watched, faces tight.
How long had they been watching hikers drift through town, never to be seen again? How long had they been hanging up Missing Person posters? I’d be pretty fucking suspicious too.
“Is that okay? Can it take time?” Rich asked.
“Yes. That’s okay,” the woman said. A weak smile pushed through, and she wiped her face with the heels of her palms. “It’s okay. You’re back now.”
“I am.” With every word, he came closer to sounding like he believed the voice coming out of his own mouth. “I’m here. I’m back.”
Rich’s eyes darted to the old man, still lying in a twisted heap on the asphalt.
One of the Woodkin turned toward the bridge and the trees looming on the other side. Slanted beams of early-morning sunshine sifted through the canopy, turning the spaces between the trees a filmy gold. The Woodkin whispered to one another, shoulders hunched, curled inward. Some of the women were weeping. Two men held hands. No one looked another in the eye. No one waited for them at home, looking at the door, hoping. They were too far gone for forgiveness, perhaps. For them, there was nothing but the valley. I wondered about their perspective. Lost, suddenly alone. Abandoned by their . . . whatever.
I should feel sorry for them. I didn’t. We watched them cross the bridge, watched them sift into the fingers of the trees. No one followed.
The forest swallowed them.
The distance between the couple in the parking lot evaporated. I watched it happen—they weren’t together, and then they were. A measure of words between them, saying the right things, and they closed the distance. She pulled him close, buried her face in his smeared and stained shirt.
“Excuse me,” I said from my position on the street with as much politeness as I could muster. “I hate to interrupt, but . . . could I borrow your phone?”
* * *
The “what the fuck do we do now” debate was like pulling teeth. People seemed unwilling to talk, unwilling to step out of their circles of trust and open their mouths. Three or four brave souls broke the silence. I listened absently, sitting on my red vinyl stool. One wanted to go into the woods and find the rest of the Woodkin, but it seemed like everyone else wanted to bury the evidence. To forget. Move on. I watched their faces. Quick, darting glances at their neighbors, at the people speaking. The ones who spoke did so quickly, spitting their words. Their eyes shot this way and that as they talked, too nervous to hold still. Plastic, tight faces, fidgeting fingers. Did their mouths taste of ash? Did they smell sweet-rot and dead flesh with every inhale? We balanced on the edge of a knife; I saw the uncertainty in their faces. They carried it with them.
The denizens of Bedal had suspected for a while. Had seen hikers stop for supplies in town and never return. Had whispered about this or that person who, like Rich, ran out after a fight and was never seen again. In the crowd I saw a few familiar faces—the parents waiting for their kids at the bus stop after school, the pinched suspicion and narrowed eyes, for some. Still clutching their bats and golf clubs. Their gaze still sneaking to the Woodkin who’d stayed behind.
“Ain’t no one gonna believe what happened here,” an older woman grunted, hammering a cane against the diner floor for emphasis. “I don’t trust none of yous, and yous don’t hafta trust me. But this’n something we gotta deal with.”
So they agreed. Hesitantly, reluctantly. A group volunteered to take the three one-time residents to their last rest, loading Sarah, Mike, and what’s-his-face in the back of a truck as quickly as they could. After all, a broad-shouldered man with the voice of a mouse pointed out, at some point they were part of the town. They’d had lives, families. They’d paid bills. No one knew when they stopped being themselves and became members of the Woodkin, but they belonged to the town, and deserved a decent burial.
“Wait.” Rich, one of the handful who stayed, pointed out the obvious. He hadn’t let go of the baby and didn’t look like he would anytime soon. “What about . . . what about them?”
He didn’t point to the twisted and malformed corpses, but everyone knew what he was talking about.
“What about them?” The old woman’s upper lip wrinkled.
“We can’t leave them there, Salma Hodgekiss. And you all know that damn well.” His partner stepped in front of her husband, taking the brunt of the woman’s disdain with no effort. She jerked her chin at the truck of corpses. “Take ‘em with you. Bury them deep, and their secrets with them.”
“Who says you get to make the call?” A balding, thin man called from the back of the crowd. He shrank from the gazes turned his way, fingers fidgeting at his sides. “You, Kay. How do we know you’re not . . . you’re not one of . . . one of them?” More whispers, sideways glances. Kay looked at her split-faced loved one, who shrugged uneasily.
“I don’t know.” Rich muttered, just for the two of them. He shrank beneath the combined suspicion they leveled at him. Like any moment his skin would distort like putty, revealing the deception. Like smoke would pour from his eyes, from their eyes. From anyone’s. “It feels different now, but . . .”
“You can’t,” Kay said finally, looking back at the balding man. The whispers, the tension built in dissonance, splitting like the hydra’s heads. One person, then two. They’d eat each other, given half the chance. Because any one of them could be just like them.
No one seemed to be able to look in the bed of the truck. It was like . . . like looking in a mirror and seeing a plastic version of your almost-self. So close, it could almost be you, if you looked at it just right . . . or it looked at you. The facsimile hit closer to home than any of us wanted to admit. Like wax dolls, frozen for now. But when the sun went away and the shadows crept back, would their skin melt and twist into something new?
The group agreed eventually. They dumped the three in the bed of a truck like sacks of flour and drove across the bridge. By some miracle, no cars came through the town, no early-bird hikers or logging truckers. No witnesses. Their secrets buried deep.
A few people, including myself, stayed in the diner. Some seemed at a loss about where else to go. Some melted back into their houses, clutching loved ones or kids. Others still stood in their tight pods around the streets and sidewalks, staring at the drying blood stains on the asphalt. Muttering. Watching, waiting. Their uncertainty and suspicion carried like a knife pointed outward.
A woman—Maria? Mary?—got behind the counter at the diner and started handing out coffee, murmuring quietly to people. The coffee was bitter and weak . . . I’d never tasted anything better. People talked quietly. The same questions.
What now?
Who do you think?
It‘s like a dream.
The bell over the door tinkled and a bear of a man walked in at the head of a group. The chatter died down for a second. More than one person craned their head to get a good eyeful.
“How’d it go?” Maria/Mary asked from the counter.
He ran a hand across his scalp. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “It went. Brian Mayhew said some words over the graves.”
“Where are they . . . you know?”
“Down the PCT trail along the river, before it splits and starts goin’ uphill. There’s a spot along the banks, in the sun. They loved that river, all three of ’em.”
“What about the . . . the others?” Her disgust was palpable.
“Buried deep, in one of the ravines. Covered the graves in rocks. The wolves might get ’em, but ain’t nobody gonna stumble over ’em by accident.”
The quiet whispers offered approval, if only for a heartbeat. I said nothing.
Did they drive up to the valley, where that granite slab reigned? Bury them too shallow, where the others could dig them up, find them? Pull them apart with their bare hands, consume them? In the darkness behind my eyelids I could see their teeth, wet and red with blood and stringy muscle. Grinning.
Switchback would never leave that valley. He died there, between those teeth, pulled apart and left to rot. I was no longer Switchback but somehow not yet Josh. I stood in the limbo between my names, nothing and no one. I was alive—and for now, that was all that mattered.
“Someone’s coming up the road,” a girl in her teens by the window said, sitting up straight.
“Police?” someone asked, hustling to the window to peer outside.
“No, it’s just a person.”
Everyone moved to the window, staring.
I turned to see a beat-up red Subaru pull onto the hardpan of the diner’s parking lot, a familiar pair of hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. I drained the cool dregs of my coffee and stood up. Time to step out of the valley.
I was nervous. A chill hovered in the pit of my gut, and my fingers weren’t as steady as I wanted them to be.
Showtime.
I walked out of the diner unmolested. They’d already forgotten me, another blank face in the crowd. No one even asked my name.
No one looked up.
She waited for me outside, leaning against the car door. She wore sweatpants and a bleach-stained black hoodie, sleeves pushed up around the elbows, hair thrown up in a messy bun. My heart sledged against my ribs. A familiar high-pitched voice whispered in my ear. I could feel their gazes against my neck like iron bars.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
I waited. I had the right to wait, even after everything. Because we were standing next to each other, but the distance between us was still measured in miles. It wasn’t like I thought it would be, in the woods, in the fire and fear. Forgiveness wasn’t immediate. Seeing her . . . all our problems were still very much there, still very real. Everything wasn’t magically solved because we were together. I think down deep I’d hoped that would be the case, because it meant I wouldn’t have to do the work. But that’s not how life works, is it?
“Where’s your stuff?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Are you . . . what happened to your wrist? Blech, and your ear? Are you okay?” She was a crap liar, her faux calm thin enough to be transparent.
“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not, but it’s fine for now.” It was too easy to fall into the patter, into the easy rhythm we’d had for years. I braced against it; we had to do the hard stuff first. If we stood in the parking lot of the Bedal diner and fought it out until the sun went down, fine. But we had to do the work. The lingering lessons from Dr. K, reaching over the years. You had to do the work. It doesn’t just go away on its own. I had to leave everything here. The only question was, who would start? Except it wasn’t a real question. She would—I’d already decided. Because I still wanted to punish her. She’d made my life seem foolish, and me in the process.
“So.” She fiddled with her keys, running a finger over the jagged teeth.
“So.” I waited.
“I’m sorry, Puggs,” she whispered. She looked up from her car keys; her eyes were pale blue, shining. “I’m—I’m sorry. It was a stupid, stupid mistake, and I . . . it was nothing, no one, just some guy—a vendor for some vacuum company, he came to meet with me to get onto the site and—”
I held up a hand. The images crashed into my brain, unbeckoned and unwelcome. “I don’t want to know.”
“Are—are you sure? Because I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.”
“Nope. Don’t want details. Never want details.”
“What do you want? What can I do? Because I’m sorry, Puggs, I’m so sorry, I never should have done it, but I was angry at you for something and he’d been charming and nice, and—”
“Deb, God damn it, I don’t want details!”
She shut her mouth with a pop, her upper lip trembling. I hadn’t meant to shout, but the voice was louder now, taking up all the space in my head. I pressed my good hand against my temple.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” she said. She inched closer, her fingers running over and over the teeth to her keys.
“Puggs? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right!”
She recoiled like I’d hit her, pressing up against the car door. Like a splinter pulled from an infected wound, the ichor rose to the top of my throat, bubbling over. “I’m not all right, Deb! How could you do this to me? I—what did I do? What did I do to deserve this?”
“You didn’t—it was . . . it was complicated. No one did anything wrong. Or . . . I guess, I did. I’m sorry.” One hand reached out, reached across the distance. I felt like a stoked fire, burning too high. My skin flushed, too hot; sweat poured down my face. I was yelling; why was I yelling? She wanted to apologize. All those hours on the trail, spent fantasizing about this, about this exact moment. And I still wanted to punish her. She’d made my life seem foolish. She’d made me seem foolish.
After everything I’d been through, was that really the only thing I wanted to keep with me?
The quarterback yells hike, and you have to do something. Fix it, or walk away. I had to do the work.
A matter of perspective. I wasn’t mad at her—not even a little—anymore. Maybe it was Switchback who had been mad at her. Switchback, who had wanted to punish her, to see her beg for forgiveness over and over again until the words turned into mush. Switchback, who had craved the mean little details curling through the hurt in her expression.
I wasn’t Switchback. Not anymore. I could leave him behind, crumpled and useless. Buried too shallow beneath the rocks in the valley.
My name was Josh Mallory. And I was alive.
I took a breath, grabbed her hand. I reached across the emptiness between us.
“Oh my God, Puggs, you’re burning up. Do you have a fever?” She stepped in, brow wrinkling in instant concern. She put a hand on my forehead.
“Almost certainly.” I huffed a weak laugh. Her hand on my forehead felt good, felt cool. A bridge across the divide. I took a breath . . . and crossed it. I left that cold, angry voice on the other side. It wasn’t over, big things like this were never over right away, but we each took a step, which is all that mattered. A step toward the middle, to close the distance.
“Thanks for coming,” I whispered.
She wrapped her arms around me, hugged me tight. When she pulled away, she gave me an up and down, a sly smile fighting against the last tears rolling down her cheeks.
“You look like shit.”
I laughed, stronger this time. “You should see the other guy.”
She smiled. I smiled.
“I really am sorry, Josh.”
In one brilliant, effervescent moment, everything faded away. The Woodkin, the valley, everything. One sentence, and it became a bad dream, a wound that would eventually heal. I was alive; the rest would sort itself out. I became Josh Mallory once again, and left Switchback behind me.
The cold, high voice in my head, all those miles away, stopped screaming.
I kissed her on the forehead and wrapped her in my arms. She smelled like coffee and bedhead.
“Let’s go home.”