The signposts were gone now, but the path remained fairly consistent. Ben walked along parallel tracks of pressed-down leaves as the woods spread out behind him. The trail descended and he had to walk in a zigzag to keep his footing on the loose, unsettled rocks. Going back up the mountain would be a real pain in the ass, but again, he had time. Maybe the path went in a circle. Maybe there was a more gradual, friendly slope back up the mountain so he wouldn’t have to double back. He could keep moving forward but still end up home.
He kept expecting to see another walker come crossing by, or a jogger, or a hotel attendant on break time, but there was no one. He was alone, for the first time in a very long time. There was that little itch to check his phone, but he quashed it the best he could and tried to enjoy the moment like a responsible adult . . . to take in the majesty of the forest. Oh, the majesty! The leaves flittering and the sound of distant tractors from across the mountain and the royal blue sky above. Yes yes, this was all worth soaking in for the sake of personal betterment.
And then he came to a fork. The ATV tracks split in two here. To the right, he could see them bend down toward a main road. Through the dwindling leaves, Ben caught the occasional glint of a passing car. If he went that way, he would eventually hit that road and have to turn around because there were no sidewalks to be had. That was a country road. You were either driving on it, or you were the dead deer lying next to it.
So he followed the tracks to the left and stayed perched along a ridge, walking along as the country road option disappeared behind him. He would remember the split if he had to go back. It was unmistakable. There was no other spot where the path turned vertical like it did right there, so he walked on with a great deal of confidence. He saw the country McMansions below come back into view and now he was moving back closer toward the inn, if not exactly on the same level. He was good. This was all fine. The path split again and this time, he took out his phone and opened up the Notes app and jotted down the markings so he wouldn’t forget them: “Two trees with split trunks at junction.” He thought about calling home a second time to talk to the kids (on the phone, they were adorably unintelligible), but he saw the top left corner of the screen offer nothing but “Searching . . .” The only way to bring the phone back to life was to move on.
Soon, he could see a gate in the distance: one of those old iron-bar gates that you have to get out of your car to unchain. It was hanging open now, with a big NO TRESPASSING sign posted next to it, and past that was an old white pickup in front of a two-story aluminum shed.
Then Ben heard a whirring sound, like the motor of a leaf blower or a hedge trimmer . . . the kind of motor you can make squeal just by squeezing a trigger. It got louder and louder as he approached, but he couldn’t see any people and he couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from. Suddenly, he felt more vulnerable than he had five seconds earlier.
As he got closer to the gate, Ben slowed down, without even realizing it at first. One moment he was walking briskly, the next he was stepping around quietly, like a drunken teenager trying not to wake his parents up. Maybe I should turn back around. Seemed like a good idea. This was probably the end of the trail anyway. He could go back up the mountain and get back to the hotel and shower and get dressed and maybe lie there for a moment before his meeting. The hotel didn’t seem so bad anymore. It probably had hot water. Ben wasn’t exactly a marathoner. Every step forward was now going to be an extra step back, and it was wearing on him and his corroded knee joint. There was nothing more out here for him to see.
And then he saw the man: a big, hulking man wearing a denim shirt and cheap jeans, dragging a body out of the shed. The corpse was small and clad in a little cupcake nightgown. Her feet were gone. Her hair was bloody and tangled. Her hands were limp and Ben could see the chipped blue nail polish on her fingernails. The legs were just a couple of stumps dragging along the ground. He saw the red, like the butchered deer parts on the side of the road. Saw it. Then the man turned to him and their eyes met and fuck.
The man’s face wasn’t visible. It was covered by the skinned-off face of a black Rottweiler, ears included.
Before Ben could process anything, he was running. He couldn’t feel his body moving at all. Sight and sound took over his brain: the sight of the path cutting through the forest, the sound of the killer dropping the corpse to the ground, and his footsteps kicking into high gear: first lumbering, and then jogging, and now booming behind Ben in big thumps, like a giant stepping across acres of grassland at a time. Soon, he could hear the killer panting, and laughing in a low demonic register. He was closing in.
Don’t slow down. Don’t slow down even for a second.
Ben cried “HELP!” again and again but all he could hear was the growing laughter of the man behind him. His face grew deep red. He felt like he was about to start bleeding out of his eyes. He considered taking out his phone but that would only slow his progress, and his goal at the moment was to not get caught. The path stretched out ahead, but he could barely see it now because his mind was presenting him with a slideshow of terrors: the dog-faced murderer closing in, the future sight of his own mangled body, his wife getting the call and screaming out in horror and dropping her phone to the ground in shock. He had to look back. He couldn’t resist it any longer.
The killer was twenty yards away, a healthy distance and yet not comforting to Ben at all. The man was twice Ben’s size and had a big butcher knife in his hands. Even from this distance Ben could see that the edge of the blade looked cleaner and newer than the rest of the knife, ground down by a fresh sharpening, now gleaming and ready to hack through bone and skin and tendons and whatever else got in its way. The man would catch him, and then Ben would see the man’s sickly green eyes and feel his awful dog breath and watch the knife plunge into his body and that final moment would linger into his afterlife and well beyond.
Now Ben wasn’t bothering to form the word “HELP” when he screamed. He was screaming purely . . . all random, soft, extended vowels spewing out like vomit. He had no control over it. He could hear the maniac still laughing behind him. And then he heard him say what sounded like. . . .
“I’ve been waiting for this since the day you were born.”
He spotted bizarrely arranged piles of sticks off to the side as he blitzed down the path, structures he had never seen before. Maybe this killer, this dogface, had been waiting for Ben the whole time. Trapped him. Maybe he would be gutted and lashed to those sticks and left for a faceless dog to chew on. Ben turned to look again. The distance between them had grown to thirty yards and he was praying he would be able to get back to his signpost and turn up the mountain and leave that man in the dust for good, then make it to the hotel and call the cops and get in his car and go home and never ever ever come back here. Thanks for everything, Pennsylvania, but fuck you eternally.
Just when Ben was getting his hopes up about escaping, another man leapt into the trail ten yards in front of him. Also in a dog mask. He had a knife, too. Through the holes in the dog’s skinned-off mouth, Ben could make out the second man’s lips and teeth. He was also laughing and smiling and clearly deranged. Ben screamed again in holy fright. He was throwing his screams, as if they were a last-ditch weapon for him to hurl at the madmen.
Run right at him. That was Ben’s first thought. Ben played football when he was a kid. Fullback. Not a great player, but not an embarrassing one either. Whenever they were facing a team that had a really good defensive lineman, his coach always used the same strategy: Run right at the guy. Don’t let him chase you. Don’t try to fool him. Just bowl the fucker over and take him by surprise. There was a killer in front of and behind Ben now, with the treacherous mountain slopes on either side of the path, waiting to trip him up and render him easy prey. There was only one real option: the football option.
So he kept running. He imagined having a football in the crook of his arm and then he barreled forward, screaming for war.
The second dogface didn’t expect that. By the time he was rearing back with the knife, Ben was already knocking him down. Stiff-armed him flush on the chin and dropped him like it was nothing, like he’d been waiting all these years to play one final, perfect down. If he had diagrammed it and practiced it for a week, he couldn’t have executed it better.
He was running so fast now that his muscles felt like they were exploding, sending random bits of stray tissue to other parts of his body where those bits didn’t belong. He looked back and the first dogface was hunched over the second dogface thirty yards away, then forty, then fifty, and then out of view entirely. Soon, he didn’t hear them at all. He was extending his lead. He was gonna make it back to the hotel. He was gonna live.
But when he scoured for the two split-trunk trees marking his way up the mountain, he couldn’t find them. The trail bent to the right instead of the left, as he had originally anticipated, and now he was seeing bigger maple trees and other things he hadn’t recognized on the way in: odd rock formations, uneven slopes, patches of thick mud. A family of deer began sprinting alongside him, their bodies melting into the trees and then reappearing again. He looked down the mountain and saw no signs of a road, or of any McMansions at all. They were all gone. Everything . . . everyone . . . was gone.