Adam's Woods Read online

  He focused on Mary, took in her slightly bemused, slightly concerned expression, and said, “I’m sorry, Mary. Being back in here, it’s like one of those old sitcoms, where all the stuff is piled up inside a closet. When I walked through the door, I opened up that closet and got caught in the avalanche. It’s just taking me some time to dig my way out while looking at all the cool stuff I forgot I had.”

  “What a neat description. So vivid. I have to admit I like that better than the one you wrote where the guy gets his head ripped off in all its gory detail.”

  “So you really did read my books, although you’d have to be more specific about which head you’re talking about.”

  “Ugh. I think I’m done with that subject,” she said with a grimace, but winked to indicate she wasn’t as put off as she pretended. “But sitcoms. Now that you brought those up, I can’t help but remember what we used to watch, before some crazy lady with eight kids going shopping and getting a haircut qualified as entertainment. How about Family Ties and Growing Pains?”

  “Diff’rent Strokes...Happy Days,” he countered.

  They launched into a discussion of television’s glory days, which segued into a full-blown review of the eighties in general, and somewhere between leg warmers and White Lion he told her that he would be buying the house.

  Entranced with Mary and looking forward to more of her company, he followed the truck with the magnets out of Lincoln Corners en route to Drake City for lunch. She planned to get the ball rolling on the paperwork that afternoon. Eric would write a check for the whole amount, which would speed up the process.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever sold a house that was paid in full,” she had said, maybe with a little awe in her voice, and Eric savored the little thrill that came with impressing the girl he grew up with. Tiny village boy makes good...or something like that.

  The scant fifteen-minute drive to their destination surprised Eric. But then, when not waiting on a stopped school bus for every farm kid living on every back road along the way, it made perfect sense.

  The old man parted the curtain and strained to see who stood in the driveway of the Kane place, so-called despite lacking Kanes for over twenty years. But what else could it be called? He knew Mary’s truck but not the car parked behind it. Curious as to whether she’d finally found a buyer, he went to his study to retrieve the binoculars he used to identify birds out on his walks. Positioned by the window again, he put them to his eyes to find that they’d gone inside. He licked his dry lips and thought about a glass of water, but feared if he did the vehicles would be gone when he got back.

  He sat and waited, sweating in the heat and trying not to think of the drink, the desire for which had increased ten-fold once denied. The window air-conditioning unit rattled in place, doing its best but no match for this day. He felt nervous and irritable, telling himself that his failing eyes had played a trick on him, that when they came back out he’d see that the man with Mary was a perfect stranger. His legs began to feel stiff, so he risked pulling up a chair to the window and sitting down. Soon he was dozing, his head dropping down to his chest only to jerk back up, then repeating the process. Of all the negative consequences of original sin, he thought, getting old and feeble had to top the list. But no. He knew of worse things, over-familiar companions that would never leave him.

  He finally saw motion in the porch and put the binoculars to his eyes again. His heartbeat accelerated sharply and he felt faint. Standing next to Mary, very close he couldn’t help but notice, was George Kane, but George Kane of twenty years ago when... as he willed his hands still and looked more closely, he could make out differences in his build. Fit but not as thickly muscled as George, and taller. The light brown hair was the same, and his wide smile and slightly flattened nose similar, but the mouth was Maggie’s, unfortunately feminine for a child but an asset on a man that put stock in those things. So it had to be Eric, his son.

  His surviving son.

  He had always liked Eric, had even read some of his stories, shocked by the violence but impressed with the same sharp mind he recalled, still evident in the depth of the characters and their moral and philosophical quandaries. Just that a lot of gore had to be hosed off to see it clearly. And he also saw a man struggling desperately within those pages.

  He watched them get into their vehicles and drive away, and told himself that Eric had been in the area and wanted to see the old place. With that particular itch scratched, he would already be heading back home. Pittsburgh, he thought it was. He refused to consider that he’d actually been looking to buy. It wouldn’t change anything, but would make it all so much harder to have to see and talk to him. He felt wetness on his cheeks and wiped it away brusquely with his sleeve.

  Stop it. You made your bed, now lie in it.

  He did go to his bed and lay down, exhausted, and troubled at the presence of Eric in Lincoln Corners, whether he planned to stay or not. A mind could grow used to about anything, given enough time to adjust. As long as nothing entered from the outside that challenged its right to be. Eric introduced that variable, and despite feeling the weariness in his marrow, he lay awake under a rattling ceiling fan for a long time, staring at the past.

  Chapter 6

  The boy woke up, the sun streaming through his window, and spent a few minutes lying there and thinking. Last night had been the worst he’d ever experienced. If not for the sun and the fact that he was alive and breathing, he would have sworn that the man had actually appeared. Not to kill him, but his parents. Suddenly fearful, he nearly jumped out of his bed to check on them, but then the fact that he was in his bed registered and he relaxed. In the dream, or vision, or whatever it had been - it felt so real - he recalled blacking out in the hallway. Maybe his father had gotten up and found him there, and tucked him back in. Or more likely he’d never left it in the first place, the whole thing only in his head like before. But it had never been like that before. He wondered if he was going crazy like Kenny’s sister from school that had to go away, and decided to tell his dad about last night. Mom would just be angry, he knew.

  As was his habit, the boy lay and listened. He liked the sounds of the night, or had before all of this, and he also liked to absorb the sounds of morning: his mother opening and closing cupboards as she prepared breakfast, some cartoon on TV where he’d find his brother laying on the couch wrapped in a blanket watching Bugs Bunny beat up Elmer Fudd or the Road Runner beat up the Coyote, his father still snoring if it were Saturday.

  He listened, but no sounds at all came from anywhere in the house. He felt a little apprehensive again, but the reason for the quiet was probably silly and he would look stupid if he ran out of the room screaming.

  “Mom?” he called.

  Nothing.

  “Dad? Jake?”

  No answer.

  He slowly slid his legs over the side of the bed, and standing up looked out the window, thinking maybe they’d all gone outside to get an early start on the leaves. No one in the backyard. No one in the field beyond that. As his eyes drifted to the woods - the final thing he could see on his limited horizon - he thought he caught the shape of a man standing in the shadows of the clearing that led to the paths. When he blinked and refocused, he saw only the shadows.

  The boy turned around, trembling, and moved towards the door. He leaned backwards slightly as if against compelling hands, and took short jerky steps with feet that barely left the floor.

  He peeked out into the hall and through the open door of his parents' bedroom. He saw the shapes of them under the sheets, and wanted to believe that they had slept in like him. But he could see one arm, his father’s, hanging over the side, limp and covered with something dark, a deep dull red, almost black, in the sunlight. The sheets were the same red color, and he knew they had been white.

  The boy slumped against the wall, the blood rushing through his veins now a palpable sound, and the dread and terror that had lived only in the night washed over him like rising wate
r finally breaching the dam it had railed against. He didn’t want to go in and see. He didn’t want to go to Jake’s room either. He felt a scream building inside, building to a terrible force that would tear him apart if not released. He opened his mouth, began to take quick sharp breaths, each quick exhalation a wave stronger than the last, his despair and terror waiting to catch just the right one to ride and crest on his vocal chords.

  The screen door to the porch banged, and the pending scream downsized to a whimper, his body rigid, his instinct of self-preservation kicking in. He waited for more noise. Nothing indicated a presence in the house, but he did hear the sound of a vehicle start up from what sounded like the street out front. A vision of a police car or a neighbor flashed through his mind and he turned and ran down the stairs. Maybe they had knocked, but he just hadn’t heard. He needed to see and talk to and be held by someone alive.

  He reached the first floor and opened the door to step onto the porch. At the corner, a large white van idled with its turn signal on, though no other cars could be seen coming in any other direction. It remained stopped for a few moments more, and then the driver began a slow left turn. The boy didn’t know the van, and it looked to him like the kind that child molesters used to abscond with their unlucky victims. The windows were tinted black and hid anyone inside. It disappeared behind a house, and the boy felt a chill, felt that the driver had waited for him to see and only then left.

  He looked over at the neighbors' house, the Robinsons', hoping in vain to find someone outside. He scanned the town, what could be seen from the porch, and found no one. No cars, no lawn mowers, no one walking, nothing.

  And then he smelled bacon, realized the odor had been there since he opened the door, felt his stomach rumble and saliva flow into his mouth despite the fear, and thought with joy that he’d been mistaken, that his mother was in the kitchen cooking and that somehow he’d gotten on the porch before he’d really woken up. All of this wasn’t real. Not a dream, exactly, but like that show about people that walked in their sleep.

  He became aware of something on the floor of the porch right inside the door, a lump under a paper towel with a stain of grease breaking up the floral pattern. The smell came from there. He looked around again, didn’t see the van or anyone else, and advanced slowly towards it. When he crouched down next to it, he could make out the rim of a plate under the cover. He reached out his hand as if it were the snapping turtle he and Jake had found out by the swamp, that had appeared to be dead, but proved itself quite alive and intent on removing his fingers.

  The boy poked at the paper towel until it slid off of the plate, revealing bacon, scrambled eggs and two pieces of toast neatly arranged as if ordered at Denny’s. Also on the plate was a small piece of paper. Written in block letters in a large, childish hand was one word. EAT.

  Eric heard a knock on the door and saved his work, then shut down the laptop. He had a vague idea of the story’s path, but at a certain point it became murky. This was unlike the way he usually worked, normally mapping out the story from beginning to end using notecards for scene summaries, then testing the plot for holes and inconsistencies and impact. He would then run it by his circle of writer friends to see if they saw anything he’d missed, or to tell him the whole thing stunk. The actual writing was like putting flesh on the skeleton. He couldn’t do that this time, because it was his story, and he didn’t know the end. And he had begun to fear that by facing his childhood demons, it might impair his ability to continue on in the horror genre.

  With the actual mourning of Adam, he didn’t feel the same urgency and connection. It wasn’t so much this loss that concerned him. Sure, he had a career going, and since he possessed no other real marketable skills than writing, he would continue on wherever it went. Maybe he could switch to mysteries, or actually do the historical work minus the ghouls. Other authors had pulled it off, but their names were bigger than his and he knew he might not survive the transition.

  But he was still relatively young, and at thirty-two, he could learn another trade if necessary, even go back to school and get his Masters Degree, possibly teach. He would always write, if only for himself.

  The most troubling aspect of this was what would fill the vacuum in his life. Writing "intellectual" horror had driven him this far, given him a sense of purpose. Would anything he did after burn within him, force him out of bed at three in the morning to work while the city slept? Or would the fire go out for good, leave him hollow and soulless, a wraith himself and as good as dead. No matter what the popular culture portrayed - and Eric had avoided adding to that canon - he believed real zombies walked among us in just this manner, living for nothing and dying only a formality. It all led back to the God question. If He did not exist, these zombies might actually be the agents of the truth, the ones with symptoms too far along to hide and the rest of the world deluded by ultimately meaningless hopes and dreams.

  He could feel this story bringing things to a head, and he would have to stop making his characters do the hard work and face it himself; decide whether God could exist and be the source of light and truth even though he allowed monstrous things to happen even to his subjects, or whether he was a fiction beyond any novelists’ ability to create and so much more grievous for the scale of the lie. And if the latter, would Eric choose the path of a brave fool laughing at the edge of the abyss or a realist mired in despair. Or the third possibility. That God existed, was all powerful, but cared as much about the human race as the human race cared about a colony of ants and kept a magnifying glass handy to fry them for kicks.

  People had always told him he thought too much. He felt that most people thought too little. And he wondered now if they were the blessed ones instead of the fools.

  Eric pushed away his musing, trusting that his existential dilemma would wait for his return, and walked from his study in the back of the first floor through the kitchen and into the living room to open the front door. Mary was coming over to celebrate his first night here, and he relished seeing her again.

  A lake a few miles from Lincoln Corners had once been a popular escape for city people, with summer cottages crowded around its shores and slow moving pontoon boats plying its surface with indifference to deadlines and time itself. Many of the cottages were vacant now - and attractions such as a go-kart track and a water slide that had plunged into the lake gone - but an ice cream and hot food shop still flourished, much to Eric’s surprise. Going there as a kid had been a treat, and Mary had promised to pick up some dinner on her way. He had asked her to get his favorite, a pizza sub, if they still made them. He could remember the mozzarella stretching out from his mouth nearly as far as an arm-length before snapping and he savoring every gooey bite.

  He opened the door with a smile, but instead of Mary an older man wearing a Massey-Ferguson ball cap, flannel shirt, jeans and work boots stood with his fist raised for another knock. His eyes widened in surprise, and then he scowled and thrust the hand out in a gesture so brusque that for a moment Eric thought he meant to strike him.

  The hand stayed, and Eric realized he was to shake it and did, his fingers briefly caught in a vice and then released.

  “Eric Kane. I heard you bought the house. Quite a shock. Do you have a moment?”

  “Hello, Mr. Fisk. Good to see you. I’m expecting someone, so maybe we could talk tomorrow?” The years hadn’t changed the father of his friends Jeff and Tony much, except for the gray hair revealed when he absently removed his hat and looked at Eric with gray eyes that didn’t blink. He had always been a blunt man and apparently the years hadn’t altered this either, if anything had amplified the trait.

  “Will only take a minute. Can I come in?” he asked as he stepped across the threshold. If he’s a vampire, at least I didn’t invite him, Eric thought wryly. He looked around outside, and with no sign of Mary, sighed and figured it was better to let Mr. Fisk have his say and get him out of the house. He knew his first name was Arnie, but couldn’t bring himself t
o call him that.

  His visitor swept the living room with a glance, taking in the sparse furniture, the absence of anything on the walls and the small television sitting on the floor. Whatever he thought stayed hidden behind his stern demeanor. Eric waited for him to speak but he seemed for a moment somewhere else, staring at the hat in one hand and rubbing the calluses on the other across the back of his leathery neck. A smell of sawdust emanated from him, reminding Eric of his father.

  “Still running the lumber yard, I take it? Saw it open when I came in,” Eric said, to break his reverie and hasten Fisk to the point of the visit.

  “What? Yes. Have been trying to get one of the boys to take over, but neither one is interested. Don’t want to come back here. Me, I’ll be buried up on the hill regardless.”

  His head suddenly swung up and he pinned Eric with his eyes. Eric remembered the look, the suspicion, often warranted, when he and JT had come to collect Jeff and Tony for their exploits, and felt all of ten.