The Lost

  All the while Brian sat in the armchair, shoulders hunched and glowering, as he let the full force of his emotions flow into his free-ranging and deadly imagination.

  “How about now? Is this getting real enough for you? Because if not, I got more.”

  The door to the reception area swung open. Helen clattered in on her spike heels, pulled a Glock 36 from her purse, and pumped two hollow point rounds into Brian’s chest at point blank range. And just as the shadows on the carpet began to congeal, two more in the head. The shadows collapsed before they could shape themselves into something dangerous. Brian slumped in the armchair, blood seeping through his thick hair and onto the upholstery. Thank goodness for Scotchguard.

  Brenda’s desk became again a mere desk. Her mole, just a mole. The office paraphernalia merely functional again.

  She sighed. “What would I ever do without you, Helen? You’re a gem.”

  Helen narrowed her eyes as she tucked away her pistol. “I had a bad feeling about this one. Struck me as rather squirrely. He had the dust bunnies turning in spiders in the waiting area. And you know how I feel about spiders.”

  Brenda pushed her desk back in place and straightened up the top.

  “Better call Jerome. Tell him there’s a clean-up in aisle nine.” She sighed deeply and clucked her tongue, gazing down at the slumped and bleeding corpse. “He was too far gone. Shame we couldn't help him. Oh well.” She shrugged it off. “One less threat to reality.”

  With a glance at her wrist to make sure her mole had gone back to normal, she went to the coat rack and flung on her jacket. She was more than ready for the weekend now. It was a shame to lose a potential client, but these Category V shapers, there was not much to be done to help them but ease their way out of this world.

  “See you on Monday, bright and early,” said Brenda, winking at Helen as she bustled out the door, ever so grateful that her own condition had never progressed beyond Category II.

  For now.

  *****

  Wild Fruit

  Nora and I were as compatible as oil and water in how we saw nature. Before we met, I had been an avid trekker, climber, spelunker—you name it. If it had anything to do with the outdoors and didn’t involve killing anything, I was game.

  I grokked everything and anything wild. Mud squishing between my toes. Minnows nipping at my skin. My body was fair trespass for any kind of bug or spider. Any creature with wings was welcome to my air space.

  Nora, on the other hand, had been a denizen of sidewalks and shopping malls. She most appreciated nature safely ensconced behind windows and TV screens. She required her green spaces manicured, every weed vanquished. Any creature dumb enough to buzz in her ears or traverse her bathroom was dead meat. That had been the Nora I used to know, anyhow.

  We both made concessions towards preserving our relationship. I picked hiking trails near outlet stores. She’d prowl the shops, while I went climbing. We’d meet up at some cozy bed and breakfast in the evening.

  Sad to say, I’m to blame for the berry picking excursion. I thought it would be something we both could enjoy. We’d be out in the countryside. She wouldn’t have to walk more than a dozen paces from the car.

  Twenty minutes, I had sat in that car with the engine running. Nora finally made her way out the front door only to run back in to find sunglasses that better matched her outfit.

  I knew better than to fuss. I just smiled and went with the flow. She came back out a few minutes later, wearing something completely different.

  She hopped in the car and flipped down the sun visor, touching up her make-up in the little lighted mirror.

  “Will there be bugs?”

  “Late July. Middle of the woods. You tell me.”

  “I don’t want to get all eaten up. I just shaved my legs. I don’t want them to look … lumpy.”

  “Don’t worry. I packed plenty of bug spray. The kind that smells nice.”

  Nora had been the urbane type back then, a real girlie-girl. Suburbia to her was indistinguishable from wilderness. Truly wild places like those that I enjoyed were too terrible for her to even fathom. That all changed after I took her to the berry patch.

  Tasting those blackberries was all it took. These berries weren’t like anything like the ones buy at Costco or even at a farmer’s market. They grew wild on Connecticut Hill; a conservation area of old abandoned farms just outside of Ithaca. I had stumbled onto the place after one of the rambling drives I took sometimes to clear my head.

  I had noticed something enchanting about the place even before I even found the berries. The light seemed different there, as if the air refracted differently. Everything seemed a little off-kilter – the plants, the boulders, the little red newts that wandered everywhere after a rain.

  The place had been settled by folks from Connecticut back when people spoke of the frontier and they meant western New York. Cleveland was a wilderness and Poughkeepsie the gateway to the great American northwest. It was apparently the last place in the northeast that harbored a wolf population.

  The last farmers left their farms back in the 1920s. Ninety years later, you could still see their mark. Their tumbledown walls. Sad, little cemeteries. Pits that had been root cellars. Apple trees bursting with green and warty pomes.

  As for those berries, I can’t say if they were truly wild and native or just some almost extinct cultivar left over from the early farms. Whatever they were, they were special.

  We left the main road and entered a tunnel of trees.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Too many trees for my taste.”

  “What did you expect? It’s a state forest.”

  “You said there was going to be a meadow.”

  “There is, behind the trees. Hey, mind if I roll down the windows?”

  “As a matter of fact. I do.”

  I took my hand away from the button.

  We pulled over and parked just below the place I had scouted during an earlier foray when the berries had been green.

  Nora retrieved the two small baskets I had packed. I had been hoping to interest her in picking enough to bake a pie, but she just wanted to pick enough to humor me until I took her to the lunch I promised on the lake front.

  She acted like some astronaut who had just crash-landed on an alien planet with a toxic atmosphere. She was in no hurry to leave the car. So I made the one small step for mankind and waited for her to follow my lead. She clambered out and immediately scurried around to my side.

  She clung to my arm, scared. One nice thing about taking Nora to the woods was that here, she needed me. It was a nice feeling.

  “Hey. Don’t worry. It’s just a short ways up this side road.”

  Bushes rustled. I caught a glimpse of an antler and brown fur.

  Nora gasped. “What was that?”

  “Just a deer.”

  “That was no deer.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “John. It had two legs.”

  “No way! C’mon. Let’s pick some berries.”

  We had grown apart of late, two years since we met. Friends said we acted like an old couple, staying together more from inertia or spite than any burning fires of love. In public, sometimes, I got the feeling she was distancing herself, pretending we weren’t an item. That was worrisome. It was one of the reasons why I arranged this excursion. A salvage attempt.

  We reached the patch and found the berries in their prime. Big, plump and juicy globules of fruit unlike any blackberries I had ever eaten. They tasted both musky and sweet with a complexity worthy of an upscale Pinot Noir.

  The canes had wicked thorns. Blood beaded on our knuckles and fingers. We couldn’t stop stuffing our mouths. Few berries made it into our baskets until our stomachs began to ache. Those things were intoxicating.

  She kissed me out of the blue, long and sweet, this girlfriend who had been ignoring me, drifting away. At that moment I thought I was a genius, that taking her berry picking was the
best thing I had ever done for our relationship. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  ***

  That night we made love with more passion than we had in months. We were unchained beasts, me and her. There was nothing passive or perfunctory about us. She wanted me as much as I wanted her.

  For breakfast, we had some of those berries in our pancakes and before lunch we were at it again on the sofa. I stuck a few of those berries in the freezer to make sure we had some around for emergencies.

  Things slid back to normal as the week progressed. I had half a mind to drive out to Connecticut Hill mid-week and refill those baskets on my own. Hell, I would have picked those canes clean made them all into jam if I could be sure they would retain their effect.

  I even Googled blackberry and aphrodisiac but got no hits. I presumed it all a coincidence that our relationship took a turn for the better after we went berry picking.

  The next weekend, I didn’t even have to say anything to her. She brought it up herself.

  “So, you think there are any berries left to pick?”

  “You betcha.”

  And so we went back and the same thing happened, only wilder. The berries were past their prime but they had an even stronger effect on us. Nora basically attacked and mounted me right there in the woods. Mosquitoes fed on her bare breasts as she rode me.

  The only bad thing was all the rustling in the birches. An animal circled us, but we were too engulfed in the throes of passion to care.

  She wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. A couple days later, she was back to her old self, fretting about the grass stains on her skirt and her torn leggings.

  Another weekend came. She went and fetched the berry baskets from the garage without me asking. We drove to Connecticut Hill right after breakfast.

  The berries were on their last legs. Only a few canes on the shadier backside of the patch had anything left to pick. I brought a blanket this time, but Nora didn’t even bother with it. She shoved me down, insane with lust. We weren’t even a match anymore. I mean, I felt a slight buzz from eating these things, but those things seemed to detonate in her brain and body.

  After rutting for an hour in the overgrown meadow, she got up and went strolling into the forest, bare butt and all. Nora, the mall girl, was no more.

  That thing we saw showed itself again. Again, I was pretty certain it was a deer, though it did seem to move a bit oddly. But what else could it be?

  That week, Nora stopped wearing make-up. She no longer shaved her legs. She wore her hair down, avoided her Ann Taylor wardrobe and went to work in this loose-fitting peasant dress she had gotten as a gift and openly mocked. She was turning into a hippie chick, though all she wanted to eat was meat. And berries.

  Her friends started to call me, all concerned.

  “Is Nora like … doing meth … or something?”

  I pleaded ignorance. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them about the enchanted berry patch. That was mine and Nora’s little secret. There weren’t enough of these berries to go around.

  On Thursday, a cold front came through and gave us our first taste of autumn. She slept in the raw that night, on top of the sheets, with every window open, while I shivered in my pajamas beneath a down comforter.

  Weekend came. I was sure there could be no berries left to pick. But Nora wanted to go back to the hill. Not only that, she wanted to camp out. I tried to discourage her. As much as I enjoyed the attention, this was getting a little too weird.

  “The berries … they’re gone. They’re out of season.”

  “What about those green apples we saw? They should be ripe by now. No?”

  Probably not, but I wasn’t about to argue with her. I was glad to take her back to the woods. I packed the two-man tent, my sleeping bag and a quilt. She didn’t own a sleeping bag of her own. A month ago she would have laughed in my face if I tried to buy her any camping equipment.

  So we went out there, set up the tent in the middle of that overgrown meadow and picked some apples. There was nothing left in the berry patch but a few withered husks. But those apples, as green and knobby as they were, tasted better than anything you could get at the orchard stands. They had the same musky after-taste as the berries.

  Berries or not, things got wild in the tent that night. The action actually spilled outside for a time despite the dewy chill to the air.

  Mall girl had become nature girl, impervious to cold. We brought back a bushel of apples. She made a pie.

  The following weekend, Nora canceled out of a good friend’s wedding in which she was going to be a bridesmaid. We went camping again. And that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

  We picked more apples, which were now beginning to show a bit of blush between their warts. There was a sighting again of that shy buck that seemed to dwell in this clearing. And then Nora noticed these mushrooms with reddish caps speckled with white.

  I didn’t know much about fungi, but these looked dangerous to me.

  Nora picked one and pretended to take a bite.

  “Nora, no! Don’t fool around with those.”

  “They’re good. Smell them.” She held one out to me. They had the same musky note I had tasted in the berries.

  “Yeah, but … I’m not sure they’re edible. They might even be poisonous. We should check them out first.”

  “Let’s pick some anyway. Just in case they’re good to eat. I … have cravings.”

  I made us a campfire that night. There was the usual crashing around in the woods, just out of sight. That shy deer, no doubt. I made us some pasta and we roasted some small zucchinis on a stick. Nora was acting all strange. Aloof and silent. Her eyes wide, inflamed.

  After dinner, she slunk away into the dark. I figured she just went off to go pee or fetch a sweater. Not that she ever got cold any more. I got a little uneasy when she didn't return right away.

  “Hey Nora! Wanna make some sh’mores? The coals are perfect.”

  “Nora?”

  I got up and flicked and flicked on the flashlight. I found her crouching sans panties behind the tent, clad only in a T-shirt, crouching over the sack of mushrooms, munching them raw. Specks of dirt and fungi clung to her lips.

  “Nora! What are you doing? We don’t know if those are safe.”

  “They’re fine,” she said in low guttural voice. “In fact … they’re delicious.”

  My heart began to pound. I tried to get her to go home or at least get back to civilization. She insisted on staying.

  I kept a close watch on her as we sat by the fire. She wouldn’t talk. She kept her distance from me, sitting there cross-legged, staring up at the moon. The creature kept just beyond the firelight, moving in close, moving away, like a dance. This was not deer behavior, not at all.

  In the tent that night, she wouldn’t let me touch her. She tossed and writhed, throwing off the comforter when I tried to cover her.

  “You feeling okay?” I worried she might have poisoned herself.

  I flicked on the light. Her brow looked all damp and shiny. I touched my hand to it. She growled and tried to bite me.

  “Jeez, Nora. You shouldn’t have eaten those mushrooms. We need get you to an ER.”

  “No.” The word slid out of her throat like the moan of a cat in heat.

  She finally settled down. I conked out from exhaustion, but later, a noise outside startled me awake. I flicked on the light. Nora was gone. The tent flap was unzipped.

  I went dashing out into the darkness, crashing into trees, calling her name. I heard this grunting and snuffling behind the blackberry patch.

  A stench rose up. Urine and musk. Frenzied movements in the moon shadows. Before I could swing my flashlight, a furry limb slammed down hard on my arm and sent it flying into the ferns. Something clawed at my shirt, shredding it open, raking grooves into my chest. As I lurched back, a pair of hooves slammed into my side and sent me flying.

  Panicked, I scrambled to my feet and scurried back to the car, beani
ng myself on a low-hanging limb in the process. I drove out of those woods as fast as my wheels would take me, side aching, heart thudding all the way.

  Coward that I was, I considered driving all the way back to Ithaca and holing up in the apartment. I could come back here on my own at first light and sort things out. Instead, I did the right thing. I pulled into the first gas station I found and called the cops.

  What followed was a whirlwind nightmare of search parties, incriminations and interrogations. I was the prime suspect in Nora’s disappearance. Her friends and family went after me with venom. I was a murderer in their eyes. I had to get a new unlisted number and delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

  Weeks passed. I was never charged with anything, not that it made me feel any better about losing Nora. In discussions with the investigators I always mentioned the berries but never the sex. That would have only complicated things. And I never said a word about the gaunt and feral creature that had attacked us. That thing had been no deer.

  After the hubbub died down, I went back to Connecticut Hill every other weekend or so. It was my way of dealing with the loss. I always made sure I got there with plenty of daylight left. No way would I catch myself anywhere near that place after dark. Sometimes I would find myself tailed by a detective or two. I always welcomed their company.

  Christmas Eve, after not going out there for weeks, I made a little pilgrimage in honor of the holiday. Nora had always been big on Christmas. This was to be my last excursion for the time being. I planned to shut things down for the winter. Maybe I’d come back in the spring.

  We had our first snow the night before. It lay a couple inches deep in the clearing. Along the forest fringe the ground was carpeted with these little twiggy plants I hadn’t noticed before. They poked up all gnarled and skeletal, bearing pairs of bright red berries. It was the only color in a bleak and dormant forest made only bleaker by the overcast.

  And then I saw the prints. Fresh ones. Hooves on one side with the occasional serpentine swish of tail. Beside them, bare and delicate feminine human toes.