He turned on his phone. It was now 12:03 A.M. There were a few family photos and videos on the phone. Not many: It didn’t have enough space for him to keep the old ones for very long (he would download them onto his computer back home for safekeeping). But some were better than none. He wanted to conserve battery power, but he had to see Teresa and the children one more time, in case something came for him in the middle of the night and never let him see them again.
He opened the photo gallery and saw a picture of the kids dressed up for Halloween: nine-year-old Flora in a vampire costume; six-year-old Rudy in a puppy outfit; and three-year-old Peter, holding a trick-or-treat bag but not wearing a costume, because you can only keep a costume on a three-year-old for so long. And then he saw his wife, crouching down beside the children, the only one disciplined enough to smile for the camera. There were a few more pictures in the album, but that was all he had now. Just thumbnails.
He opened up the Videos app and, with the volume at its lowest setting, watched Rudy swinging from a tree while wearing only one shoe, screaming his head off. “I’M SWINGING WITHOUT A SHOE!” The boy said it over and over and laughed every time. Ben wasn’t much of a videographer. Before smartphones, he never bothered to buy a video camera, because he didn’t want to be one of those dads, always trailing behind his kids with a camcorder like a complete dipshit. But now all phones came with a camera built in and, man, did those kids like to watch videos of themselves. So he took a few videos and kept them in his archive. It was such a weird thing: all those hours and weeks and years he spent with them . . . Now he could boil down their lives to these random little capsules of their existence. He missed them all so terribly. It was like he had been gone for months.
When he stopped the video because he couldn’t take missing them any longer, he saw one bar in the top left corner of the screen.
A signal.
He called his wife right away and she picked up.
“Ben?”
“Teresa!” he whispered. “Teresa, I’m lost! I love you! Please send . . .”
The call cut out. Worse yet, the single bar disappeared and the “Searching . . .” returned.
“No. Nononononono. NO!”
He leapt up from behind the log and held the phone aloft, scouring for the signal. If it was there before, it would be there again. Where is it? Where is the fucking signal? He wished he could see all the radio waves and gamma waves and X-rays wafting around in the air so he could hunt the signal down and scream every last profanity at it. Fuck you, you fucking piss shit stupid cunt signal. He circled the extinguished fire pit and waved the phone around, making sure it covered every patch of air around him, but it was no use. After five minutes of twenty-first-century desperation, the phone gave out. The screen went black and the wheel began to spin.
“No! Fuck you, NO!”
He booted it back up a few more times as he paced, only to watch it die again and again. Eventually, all he got was a graphic of an empty battery and a little plug icon. It was dead. He was dead. He went back behind the log and pounded at the ground until exhaustion bested him and he passed out.
It wasn’t long before he woke up again. Still night. Without the phone, he had no clue what time it was, but he could feel a fire blazing nearby. Someone had built it. Lit it. And then . . .
Someone was playing a guitar. Next to the fire. They were right there. He could hear the strumming. What if it’s the dogfaces? What if they’ve found me and are just toying with me now? They would cut his face off. They would cut off his feet and drag him to their little spot in the woods and do whatever it was they did with footless corpses. He would be ground up, defiled, maybe eaten. There was no way of escaping them this time. Not in the shape he was in.
Then he heard a woman giggling. A woman. It was a woman playing the music.
He popped up from behind the log and saw a blond girl sitting cross-legged on a blanket by the fire with an old acoustic guitar on her lap. She wore a blue fleece and black workout pants and snug hiking boots, and around her were a bunch of empty beer cans and wine bottles. Her face was red with cheerful drunkenness.
Ben ran to her. “You have to help me!”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No! No, someone has . . .” but he forgot what to say. He remembered this girl now. This was Annie Derrickson. From college. She hadn’t aged a day. Literally. She was still twenty-two years old. She still had the faded blond hair and the pointy nose, and the smooth, mottled, creamy white skin that Ben wanted to glide across.
“Annie?”
“Ben? Why are you here?”
I was here for a business dinner and then I got lost in the woods and two men chased after me with knives and I really want to go home and see my family please help. That was what he was prepared to say, but his mind was being wiped clean. He tried to snatch hold of the memories before they were gone, but it was no use. Business dinner? There’s no business dinner. Lost? You’re not lost. Your wife and kids? You don’t have a wife and kids. Job? You don’t have a job. Men with knives chasing you? No one’s chasing you. Don’t be silly.
Ben looked down at his knee. The scars from his ACL surgeries? Gone. His skin felt softer and smoother. There was no longer a wedding ring on his hand. But why would you have a wedding ring on your hand? You’re twenty-one years old. You’re not tired. You’re not lost. This isn’t a crisis. This is exactly where you want to be, Ben. Isn’t it? Alone, with her?
“Do you want a beer?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”
She stopped playing the guitar and reached over for a lukewarm can of cheap beer. Ben drank it all in one gulp. Any beer was good beer.
“Why are you here?” he asked her, stifling a burp.
“For the party.”
“What party?”
“The party!”
“Where are we?”
She gestured to the trees. “In the woods, dummy!”
“But . . .”
“My favorite part of the party is when the party is over. When I don’t feel obligated to have a good time, and I can just sit and chill with whoever’s left to chill with, you know?”
He nodded like a simpleton. “Totally.”
The last time you saw her, she was a senior, wasn’t she? One class ahead of you. Remember how nice she was to you? Nicer than girls usually were. She had that boyfriend, remember? Dave. Dave was all right, except for the fact that he had her and you didn’t. And then, her final week at school, she ditched that boyfriend. Remember that one night? She was out at a party, now single and available. You stood near her that night as the stereo blared out through the frat house living room, and she scooped your hand up in hers. You never expected her to make a move. You never expected something that good to ever happen, did you, Ben? And you never expected to be so shitfaced at that exact moment. You could barely stand. So nothing happened. When you woke up the next morning, you had to go back home while she stayed on campus for graduation. That wasn’t long ago. You remember her hand, don’t you? Why don’t you take her hand now? Why don’t you get a taste of what a second chance feels like, kid?
He took her hand. She gave him a playful squeeze to let him know she liked it. She was wearing a friendship bracelet and the frayed ends tickled his wrist.
“Did I fuck up with you?” he asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“You took my hand that one night, and I didn’t do anything with it. I think I fucked that up.”
“Oh, I’ve fucked up worse. I was in a bar once, and I saw this cute guy, so I went to drag him out to the dance floor without realizing that his leg was in a cast. I dragged him ten feet before letting him go.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Honest to God.”
“Where are you living now? Do you have a job or something?”
&nbs
p; “No, I’m just hanging out.”
“That’s cool.” “That’s cool”? That’s all you can think to say, you idiot? Stop talking before you fuck up again.
Ben felt so hot next to her and the fire, but it was that wonderful, toasty kind of body heat that never gets uncomfortable. It was like sinking into a feather bed that only gets softer and warmer and more pleasurable to lie on.
“How did we get here?” he asked her.
“The path.”
A brief silence. All he could think to say was, “I wish I hadn’t fucked up with you.” So typical. Guys always get too serious too quickly, and they never realize it until it’s too late.
But it was all right tonight. Annie wasn’t scared off. “You didn’t fuck up anything,” she told him. “Sometimes the moment gets away from you, and that’s it. Doesn’t mean I ran away from you. Doesn’t mean I don’t like you, Ben.”
She laid the guitar on the ground next to her and smiled at him. She looked stunning in the firelight. He leaned in and kissed her and holy shit, was she a good kisser. Soft and warm as sex. He never wanted to stop. She threw her fleecy arms around his neck and they reclined to the forest floor, his hands feeling everywhere around her. He wanted every inch of his skin to touch every inch of her skin.
“Let’s go in the tent,” she whispered. And she got up and led him to the flap. The best part of having sex with a girl was when they led you to the sex. Ben wanted to be led forever, to some bedroom a million miles away. It was all young joy.
• • •
He woke up a few hours later in the tent. Annie was gone. It was only him, barely covered by the pathetic square red blanket he had found. He looked quickly at his knee and saw the scars. Thirty-eight years old. Teresa. The kids. The dogfaces. They were all there. They were back. It was a dream, and yet it didn’t feel that way at all. He very much remembered Annie leading him into that tent and doing everything to him he ever wanted her to do. He remembered his hands were gripping her soft hips and she was rocking back and forth on top of him, naked and sunny and giggling. He was there for that. It made him want to throw up.
He got dressed and opened the flap. The fire had died. Beyond the pit he saw the guitar and the empty beer cans and wine bottles. Those were all still there.
What the fuck?
He was still lost, and now maybe a philanderer on top of it. Bile gurgled in his stomach. He put the jerky and hot dogs and the water bottles and the blanket into the backpack, which still seemed quite light, and he ran out of the tent to pick up the beer cans and feel them, to make sure they were real, tangible objects. On top of the guitar was a little envelope with his name written in polite script across the front. He quickly opened it and found a small stationery card inside, with the same script handwriting:
Stay on the path, or you will die.
Off to the side, he saw two black lumps resting under the trees. There were flies buzzing around them. He only needed to take a couple of steps before realizing what he was looking at: two dead, black Rottweilers, their faces skinned clean off.
CHAPTER FIVE
COURTSHIRE
The flies had eaten out the dogs’ eyes and all Ben could see was a layer of white subcutaneous fat slicking their skulls. He was definitely gonna throw up now. Yep, time to barf. He turned away from the dogs and let out all of the previous night’s potato roll supper.
Maybe if I smash a rock against my head . . . if I just bash the crazy out of my skull, I’ll wake up somewhere, strapped to a gurney, and everything will be terrible but at least it will make sense. Instead, he wrapped himself in the blanket, put his filthy socks and shoes back on, threw the backpack over his shoulder, and ran away from the campground as fast as he could.
And he screamed. Or tried to. His voice had dried to a croak.
“Help! ANYONE! Teresa? Kids?” He took out some jerky and chewed it on the run before seeing a house on the path in the distance. It looked real. It had a stick-style exterior, with jolly puffs of white smoke piping out of the chimney. A house! He ran so fast he barely had time to chew. Outside the cottage was a little wood fence that enclosed a lush green lawn and a garden with rows of little flowers (in November?) and gooseberry bushes and vines ripe with fresh tomatoes. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe there was a witch living there. No matter. Ben made it to the thick oak front door and pounded as hard as he could, not caring if he scared off whoever was inside.
The door swung open and there stood a short old woman with bobbed hair, wearing a long, thick skirt and a white blouse with a red shawl over it. Wooden clogs peeked out from under her frock. She looked familiar to Ben, although he couldn’t put a name to the face.
“Please ma’am, I need help!” Ben pleaded.
“Who are you, my dear?” she asked. She had a British accent.
“My name’s Ben and I’m lost and two people have tried to kill me and they’re still out there. I need to use your phone.”
“Phone?”
“Yes, your cell phone. Or a landline if you have one.”
“Landline?”
Oh shit, I’ve run all the way to Amish country. “A phone! Do you have a phone? Do you know someone nearby who has a phone? Does anyone live near here? Is there a town nearby?”
“Oh, the town is miles down the path.”
“And what town is that?”
“Courtshire.”
“What is Courtshire?”
She was puzzled by the question. “It’s . . . It’s Courtshire! The town!”
“Am I still in Pennsylvania?”
“Pennsylvania?”
He may as well have been speaking Japanese. Every answer of hers seemed to make things less clear.
“Is there someone in the town who can help me? A policeman? A doctor?”
“You can find help there, yes. I don’t like the idea of murderers and thieves running loose. I can help you get to Courtshire.”
“My goodness, thank you. Thank you so much. Do you have a car?”
“A car?”
“Okay, a horse or something.”
“Oh, ho ho! No, I’m afraid I’m much too poor to afford a horse, but I can help you get to Courtshire still. But first, I’ll need you to weed my garden.”
“What.”
“I’ve grown old and weak and you look like a fine, stout young man. Pull the weeds in the front of the cottage and I’ll get you on your way to Courtshire.”
“I don’t think you understand. I am in grave danger. You are in grave danger. We have to leave for Courtshire.”
“Now? Oh, I’m not going anywhere.”
He grabbed her. “You have to come with me!”
“Take your hands off me, young man.”
He stepped back. “I’m sorry. I’m not a violent person, but these men killed a little girl. It wasn’t that far away from here. They killed two dogs as well. I can show you the bodies.”
“You can go where you like, but I feel safest here, in my home. Not out there in the forest. If you want me to help you get where you need to go, you’ll pull my weeds.”
She stuck her hand out to consummate the deal. Has the universe lost its fucking mind? But there were no other offers to consider. He shook on it.
“The weeds are small but pesky,” she warned him. “Finish by noon and I’ll be sure to feed you before you go on your way.”
She shut the door and now Ben was confronted with a morning’s worth of tedious labor. Between the rows of tomatoes were little arachnid weeds that sprouted out instead of up. He knelt down and his right knee—the bad one—flared up from the impact. After taking a moment to wince, he thrust his hand into the soil, which was surprisingly warm for this time of year. He figured the weeds would come up easily, but when he went to pull, they stayed firmly rooted. He grabbed at the base of the shoot, but all that did was rip away the shoot, leaving him wit
h a tiny stump to yank out of the ground. The only way to get the weed out was to grab the whole hunk of soil around it and pull. The first weed came loose and the thin, tensile roots stretched down one foot, then two, then five, then ten. It was like reeling in a fishing line. The roots seemed to have no end. By the time he was finished with the first weed, there was a coil of root sitting in the dirt, long as a garden hose. Down the row, there were hundreds more to pull. More punishment.
After an hour, he had cast off the blanket and sweat was running in torrents down his face. What he would have given for fresh clothes. A bright red tomato hanging down in front of him beckoned. He plucked it and ate it like a peach, the seeds and juices dribbling down his chin. Best tomato he’d ever eaten. The oak door swung open.
“NO EATING FROM THE GARDEN!”
“All right! All right!”
“Can I make you some tea, dear?”
“Can you make it iced?”
“Iced? Where would I get ice?”
“Regular tea is fine, then.”
The sun ticktocked over the forest as he toiled, nervously scanning for dogfaces every few minutes from the demon garden. They were still out there. Maybe they were still hunting him.
At last, he yanked out the final nasty little shit weed and piled all of them in a compost heap outside the fence. The garden was lovely now, and the cottage door swung open once again. The old woman stood next to Ben, her hands clasped over her tummy. She looked delighted.
“This is magnificent. It looks better than it has in years!” She took his arm. “Come inside. I have some things for you.”
She led him inside the cottage. It was just a single room, with a wood stove over in the corner and a bed of hay on the other side. In the center was a heavy wooden table laid out with fresh pies and jams and piping hot loaves of crusty bread and big hunks of hard cheese that looked like cliff faces. In the center of the table was a trivet, on top of which rested a bubbling pot of beef stew. The old woman went over to the table and poured him a cup of hot tea.
“Come eat.”