Chapter Eighteen

The man from the woods was outside the window again last night. Jacob had watched him walking stiff-legged along the edge of their backyard in the darkness, stopping and staring at the window where Jacob sat on his bed and watched. Then he would turn and continue his strange walk and disappear back into the darkness, just like the past few nights. Jacob was never able to truly see his face. Somehow it looked familiar, and Jacob combed through his memory of adults – neighbors, friends of Mommy’s and Daddy’s, parents of other kids at school, teachers – but he couldn’t find that face anywhere. It looked different, almost broken, like when he had knocked over a ceramic stein on the bookshelf and he and his mother tried to piece it back together with glue before Daddy returned home and became angry.

Maybe it was some kind of monster. Normally he would be scared, but monsters didn’t walk like people. Monsters were large, fanged, multi-legged things that stalked in the darkness, in closets and under beds. This was just a man – one he thought he recognized – walking along the woods.

When he first began to see the man several days ago, he told his mother. “Did you have another bad dream, honey?” she said and kneeled down so that she was eye level with him.

Jacob was told he had bad dreams at night, but he couldn’t remember them. He would just suddenly wake, sometimes in another room, usually with his mother and father standing over him with tired eyes, looking worried or possibly annoyed. Sometimes, he would wake to his father yelling at him, telling him to snap out of it, but Jacob wasn’t sure what he was supposed to snap out of. It was like being transported by magic to another room in the middle of the night. His face would be wet with tears, his body would be shaking, and he would be terrified, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t remember anything after lying down in his bed and falling asleep. But then he would be awake, and all the night was disturbed and it was his fault. His body and his brain were doing things he couldn’t control and didn’t remember. But he knew they were scary things. He woke with the terror inside him. He woke knowing something had happened; he just didn’t know what. He supposed if you couldn’t remember them, then maybe it didn’t matter.

“No. I don’t think it was a dream. I don’t usually remember scary dreams.”

“Some you remember and some you don’t.” She looked tired, and Jacob wondered about those nights when he woke in fright and saw his parents standing over him. She looked tired but also sad, and sometimes he would catch her just staring out the window into the trees for long periods of time – the same trees the strange man disappeared into each night. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered if maybe she had seen the man, too. Or maybe she knew him and that was why he seemed familiar.

“I’ll keep an eye out for anything, okay?” she said. “But if you see him again, you come and tell me and show me, okay? It might just be one of the neighbors.”

The police had been here yesterday because some animal put scratches in the door. The police were big, strong in their stiff uniforms, and Jacob, like most boys, focused almost exclusively on their guns, the shape of them in those holsters, wanting to one day be able to proudly walk around with that kind of power at his fingertips. He didn’t know why; he just did. Daddy had guns, but they were locked up in the basement and he hardly ever took them out, except for this week when he went on a trip.

Jacob had watched his father clean those guns one time. He took them out of the safe and methodically, silently went over them bit by bit, taking them apart and wiping the metal with a rag and spraying its precise parts with a can of special oil that gave off a smell and left Jacob with a headache. He wanted to hold them, to feel the metal and pretend to shoot bad guys.

“Some other time,” Daddy said. “When you’re older.” Jacob wondered if that would ever happen. Daddy would always say ‘later’ when Jacob wanted to do something with him, and later never seemed to come. His father would just sit on the couch, drinking from one of his ‘Daddy drinks’ until after Jacob went to bed. It was like lying, but not quite. That was the strange thing about his father – he always seemed to be lying, to be hiding something. It was nothing that Jacob could actually point to and say ‘liar’ but just a feeling that there was some great big secret and everyone knew it but him.

But his father was gone now on his hunting trip, and for some reason Jacob felt a sense of relief, as if he could breathe easier without this large, lumbering man who seemed to be angry all the time, stalking around inside the house. At least the man from the woods was outside, beyond locked doors and windows.

It was Friday morning, and Jacob ate a bowl of cereal grown soggy with milk. His mother was drinking coffee and tapping on her phone with her thumb. It was almost seven thirty in the morning, and she finally told him to get ready for school. Jacob tried in vain every morning to pretend school wasn’t coming, but his mother always remembered, always told him it was time to get ready and go, and then he would wander out into the cold, walk to the corner with the stop sign and wait with the other kids for the big, yellow bus. His mother would watch him some mornings from the driveway. Other mornings when it was too cold, she would sit with him in the car at the corner. Jacob didn’t like school. It was a lot of sitting, being forced to do work, being made to pay attention to things that didn’t interest him. He liked his imagination. He liked to spend all day in his room, imagining adventures, playing with Legos, creating worlds in which he was a powerful hero bent on overcoming an enemy and saving the day.

School was strange. The teachers, the other kids, all seemed to be in on some big secret, too. They all seemed to know so much more than him, even the kids in his same grade. They gathered in circles and talked and laughed, and Jacob generally had no idea what they were talking about and why it was funny. He tried to laugh along, to pretend that he was part of it, that he knew about a particular television show or video game, but he didn’t, and it usually showed fairly quickly; the other kids would look at him as if he were an alien and move on. He was invariably left out. Jacob asked his parents for a phone like his mother and father had, but they refused. He asked for a video game system, but they said they didn’t have the money. He asked to watch particular movies, but was only shown movies for little kids. He was left out of the know; everyone else had a head start and Jacob couldn’t catch up.

The teachers were nice enough, but they insisted he do work and learn things that all seemed foreign. Perhaps he was an alien, accidentally left here for some reason, or transported from some other time and place, the same way he would close his eyes and wake in fright in some other part of the house.

Jacob wasn’t sure where he was from, what he was doing in this world. He didn’t feel a part of it. He didn’t really feel a part of his family. His father seemed angry about something, his mother tired and sad and he, above all else, felt alone with the feeling that something wasn’t right.

Jacob dropped his shoulders, cleared his bowl and spoon, and shuffled off to his room to put on the clothes his mother had laid out for him the night before. His room was bright with sunlight now. He looked through the windows to the trees beyond the small space of yard in the back. The leaves were all different colors, and every day there were less of them and he could see deeper and deeper into the woods. In the spring and summer, he played out there. There were large rocks to climb, bushy enclaves he used as forts in his imaginary games and battles, but he hadn’t been out there much since it turned colder. After the police came, his mother told him he couldn’t play outside alone anymore. There was some animal or something out there – perhaps a hungry bear. There were lots of bears out there, supposedly, but he had yet to see one.

He was more concerned about the man who came from the woods at night and walked along the perimeter of the yard in that strange way, like one of those puppets held up by strings; the parts move and you have to pretend it’s alive. He had seen a puppet show like that at school once. There was a tiny stage and curtain in the front of the classroom and this weird, funny, fat man was there making the puppets dance and move on stage. Jacob watched the puppets but he also watched the man whose face hovered just over the curtains as he told a story and the puppets acted it out. The man smiled in a strange way and the puppets moved by his unseen hands. Maybe that was who was outside the window at night, Jacob thought. Maybe it was the puppet man.

His mother kissed him goodbye and watched him from the driveway as he stood with three other children at the stop sign, waiting for his bus. Jacob said hello to them but didn’t speak much after that. He kept his hands busy by adjusting his backpack. It was cold out today. Not cold enough to see his breath, but cold enough to make the wait seem eternal. The bus could be heard across the whole neighborhood. The rolling hills and trees didn’t block its big diesel engine and squealing brakes. When it pulled up he was the last to climb the steps into that big tube on wheels that smelled like vinyl and rubber. His mother stood at the top of the driveway, arms crossed to keep her hands warm, and watched him as he passed by encased in glass and steel.

Jacob had yet to fully understand the large building that was the Region 12 Consolidated Elementary School. Their town was small and shared the school with neighboring Burlington. It was his first year at this place, which still seemed huge and strange despite his having come here nearly every day for the past two and a half months. The first few days left him in tears, trying to find his way to his classroom, trying to understand the rules, trying to decipher the orders from his teacher and the directions his classmates constantly spilled out at him as if they had been attending classes for years. Now, at least, he knew the routine. But still, the school branched off into long, dark hallways, doors appeared out of nowhere, and in the bathrooms older kids would mingle and laugh and stare as he stood before the urinal. When he had to pee, he waited until the midpoint of class so that he could be relatively sure he’d be alone. Without the throngs of other kids stumbling through the hallways, bumping, talking over one another, pushing him this way and that with their over-large bodies, the cheaply tiled hallways seemed to yawn like the open mouth of a cave, hiding doors to other worlds. His first week at this school, Jacob accidentally went to the wrong class and sat down at a desk. He still couldn’t understand why they had to go to different classrooms to learn different things; why didn’t the teachers just walk to the classroom he was in so he didn’t have to navigate the maze of doors and classroom numbers? But he sat down with a sick, uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. Somehow, he already knew he was in the wrong place. Things just didn’t look right. The kids looked slightly bigger than him, slightly more knowledgeable. They looked at him and then seemed to purposely ignore his presence, but he was lost at this point and didn’t know what else to do, so he waited.

As soon as the teacher began her lesson, he knew he was in the wrong place. But now, with an entire classroom of older boys and girls, all with two eyes with which to stare at him, he kept his silence. Finally, the teacher’s eyes found him sitting in the second-to-last row.

“I don’t recognize you,” she said. Her hair was so blonde it was practically white and there were lines in her face that deepened when she spoke to him. “What’s your name?”

“Jacob Hollis.”

“Are you sure you’re in the right class, Jacob?”

“Umm…”

“How old are you?” Now he was being grilled, and he felt his stomach tightening.

“Seven…”

“No. You’re in the wrong class. What class are you supposed to be in?”

Jacob didn’t know.

“Well, march down to the main office and talk to them. They’ll get you to the right place.” Her voice was harsh, and she watched as Jacob stood from the desk that wasn’t his own and walked back out the door. The other kids laughed quietly as he left. No one held his hand; no one told him where to go or what to do. It was just him, alone, in this monstrosity of a place.

That feeling had not yet left him and he wondered if it ever would. He wondered what this place was supposed to do for him, why there was so much emphasis on coming here, enduring here. In this place, surrounded by other kids, he felt alone.

There was something different about today, though. Although he was never happy or comfortable here, he had begun to grow accustomed to it. It had at least become a familiar, unwanted feeling, but today he felt something else, something more twisted and frightening than the usual alienation and confusion he normally felt. Maybe it was his dad being gone – the way he had packed up his things, his instruments for killing animals, and left early for some faraway place. Maybe it was the memory of the man from the woods still stalking through his mind. With his father gone, that lumbering figure in the darkness suddenly seemed more frightening. Even though Jacob always sensed something wrong about his dad, he at least knew that his father loved him and would protect him, protect the house. He was big. He was strong. He could do that. Now, with his father gone someplace far away, Jacob had an unsettled feeling that everything was wide open, like the door to the house was open and anyone could just walk inside. Perhaps it was the look on his mother’s face as the bus pulled away on the street. It was like a photograph in his mind; one thing about looking at pictures is that you look at them to remember people you haven’t seen in a long time. He missed her suddenly, overwhelmingly, and wanted to be in her arms, to have her hold him in his house where he could feel safe.

Or maybe it was something else. Perhaps, those dreams he couldn’t remember were slowly sneaking their way into his thoughts. He knew he would wake screaming; what did he see? Did he even want to know?

Jacob watched two boys giggling over a phone in a corner of the hallway, and their faces seemed suddenly sharp and devilish, their smiles too wide, their cheekbones like blades trying to cut through their skin. They looked at him for a moment like they could kill him. He looked away. No. There was something wrong today. He felt it, and he wanted more than anything to be home. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

In Ms. Cracco’s class, they learned about telling time on a clock, the small arm and long arm moving slowly across the numbers on a circle. They made their own clocks out of construction paper, wrote in the numbers with marker, cut out hour and minute hands and fastened them to the paper clock. They moved the arms into the correct position to match times Ms. Cracco announced to the class. Next it was on to shapes – squares, rectangles, stars and circles. Again, more cutting with scissors and arranging the shapes into neat patterns. Jacob enjoyed that lesson. He laid out different shapes over each other, their edges and angles intersecting, forming things that resembled objects in real life. A triangle and a rectangle to form a house; a circle with a square below it resembled a hot-air balloon. He even used the shapes to form people – a circle for the head, a triangle or rectangle for the body, two smaller rectangles for the legs – like the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ signs in the hallway beside the bathrooms.

He placed the star inside the circle and sat staring at it for a while. It reminded him of something he couldn’t quite remember but somehow seemed important. He took the clock he’d made and then laid the star over it. He traced the lines of the star to the different numbers the five points touched.

“What are you doing, Jacob?” Ms. Cracco hovered over him suddenly, stern and foreboding.

“Nothing,” Jacob said. “I just thought it looked cool.” It wasn’t necessarily that it looked cool, but it looked like something.

The teacher kneeled down next to his desk. “You see how all the points intersect? And those points go to the numbers on the clock? What do you think about that?”

“You can go from one time to another,” he said, “and skip over the other times.”

“Maybe one day we can,” Ms. Cracco said. “You’re a smart boy. Maybe you’ll figure it out.”

Jacob looked at her. She seemed older than her face would suggest, and he thought he saw disappointment in her gray eyes. Was it with him? But she had just said he was smart, so it couldn’t be disappointment with him.

She stood silently and continued walking down the row of desks, overseeing the projects of her students. Jacob wondered what it took to be a teacher. He suddenly wondered about her life. It was a momentary flash of empathy. Wondering if Ms. Cracco was married, if she had children of her own, if she really wanted to be a teacher. Like most adults, she seemed to be hiding something. There was a lie somewhere. Maybe she was sad like his mother or disappointed in something else. The world of adults was strange. They always had information, knowledge, which they held back. When they looked at him, it always seemed like they were looking at someone to pity. It made him feel like a burden, that perhaps their lives would be easier if he didn’t grow up in their presence. The way his mother hugged him, clinging to him like he could be lost at any second, made him wonder what was out there, what waited for him in this strange world.

It was a day like any other. But it was Friday, and Jacob was glad that he wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow or the next day. He could stay home, play in his room with his toys and use his imagination to construct other worlds where there were no secrets because he had them all. They were boy’s games made of Legos and action figures, spaceships, trucks and cars, imagined heroic personalities and villains bent on world domination. In those worlds he had control over the action figures, what they did, what they thought, who they battled and why. He could reach into those imaginary worlds, pull characters out and put them back in, shift time and location and even planets. His was the hand that moved them into situations and either let them live and conquer or suffer under an unseen enemy. That was how he spent his time on those long days of solitude. When he would go outside, he went to the woods where he explored the rocks and trees, imagined monsters waiting in the shadows, and acted out scenes of bravery and control he wished he possessed in real life.

His father would sometimes say he should be out playing with the other boys on the block, but he never saw them. It was as if they were all locked up in their separate houses. Besides, since he was only seven years old, his mother wouldn’t allow him to just wander up the street, looking for other kids to play with. Most of them were older, anyway. Their eyes were focused on phones and screens, which did fascinate him when he had the opportunity to see them, but because he had never played with them, he was instantly lost, outside the circle of understanding, unable to be engrossed in them like other kids.

At the end of the day he was hungry and tired and wanted to be home again. The bus bounced on the old back roads of his neighborhood, a place where nearly every house was partially hidden. Jacob was momentarily lifted off the seat, bounced, and settled back into the vinyl. He could feel the cold coming off the window, touching his forehead. There were very few children on the bus, and, with each stop, there were fewer; the brakes squealed, and their little bodies with big backpacks jumped off the bus stairs and walked quickly and confidently in the direction of their homes.

Jacob’s mother sometimes waited at the top of the driveway for him to arrive, but other times she merely watched him from the windows. He liked those times. Walking from the bus stop to his house on his own made him feel more grown up. He also liked the brief moment of solitude. It was cold and bright out today. The sky was a deep blue, and the leaves were dry and brittle, falling from the trees in a dancing rain of brown and yellow. His stop was next, and he could see the intersection ahead. Jacob pulled his backpack up on his shoulder and readied himself to stand up and exit as quickly as possible. The other kids were already standing in the aisle, holding on to the back of the seats, waiting for the full stop and the doors to fold open. Jacob looked through the windows. His mother wasn’t on the driveway today.

After he got off the bus, it pulled away down the road, and Jacob watched as the two other kids walked away from him in the opposite direction. Normally there were three other children who got off at this stop, but Dori wasn’t here today, so there was only Logan and Bella walking down the street with their backpacks high on their shoulders. The road sloped gently downward toward their houses, and the two other children disappeared out of view. He could hear them talking to each other. They had said nothing at all to him, though he wished they would. He wished that maybe one day he could walk with them and they could talk like friends.

Jacob waited for a moment and watched the bus disappear around another corner. He looked to his house but couldn’t see his mother at the window. The wind pushed cold air across his face and with it a strange, pungent smell – something thick and raw.

There was a small copse of trees separating Jacob’s house from the neighboring one, which was occupied by an old woman who needed a tank to breathe. Jacob began to walk toward his home, but, in that copse of trees, he saw something. Buried in the dry fallen leaves was something bulky, with light brown fur that moved slightly in the light breeze. He stopped and stared at it for a moment and then slowly stepped off the road and walked a few feet into the brush. Overhead, the trees moved slightly with small, twisting sounds of wood. The sky was deep blue above their long, thin branches, and, even in the daylight, the moon was visible but almost see-through, like a cold, distant ghost.

Jacob saw the fur ruffle again in the leaves. He walked to it and looked down and then cautiously moved the leaves aside.

It was a rabbit, but it no longer looked like a rabbit. The insides had been torn out, and the blood and gore had crusted on the ground and stuck to the dead leaves like glue. Its head was attached by only sinews. Its doll eyes had glazed over with a bluish-white tinge.

He rolled the rabbit over completely with the toe of his shoe. The inside was hollow and black. Strands of muscle and gut were hardened and crusted and old. Jacob stared at it for a while longer, the body splayed open, the life rotted away, and wondered at it. He wondered if that was how it looked when you died. If there was really nothing left but this empty shell, crusted to the ground, hanging with partial bits of what was once stomach, lungs and heart.

Poor rabbit, he thought. Then the same thick and raw smell wafted over him again. There was a shadow on the leaves. A shadow big enough to engulf both him and the rabbit as one. He turned around to look, and the afternoon sun shone bright in his eyes.