Into the Woods (Anomaly Hunters, Book One) Read online

  He got out of the car and made his way to the clearing. No one was there. The world was silent. Stars glimmered in the circle of sky visible overhead.

  Roger positioned himself at the southern edge of the clearing and waited. Time crawled. He kept checking his watch, sure it must be well after midnight by now, but he always found that barely thirty seconds had passed since the last time he checked his watch.

  Finally midnight arrived. Then it passed. 12:01 came and went. Then 12:02. 12:03. Where was she? Had she forgotten? Had she changed her mind? Had she fallen asleep?

  Then he heard footsteps rustling through the fallen autumn leaves. He peered into the darkness amid the trees, suddenly afraid it was a cop, some mouth-breathing triple-chinned patrolman who had spotted Roger’s car parked where it shouldn’t be and decided to investigate. But then a small figure materialized out of the darkness. The shoes appeared first, two white ovoid shapes decorated on the sides with bright yellow lightning bolts, then the pale face lit with eager eyes, then the blue jeans and the green jacket, and finally the long hair, which seemed somehow more purely black than the shadows around it. Emily. She had come.

  “Here I am!” she said, loud enough to make Roger’s heart leap in alarm.

  “Not so loud,” he hissed. “The fairies might hear and stay away.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered. She looked around. “Where are they?”

  He squatted beside her and pointed at the north edge of the clearing. For some reason the faint grapey smell that enveloped her—probably from shampoo or bubble bath—made him dizzy with arousal.

  “A few minutes ago I saw some lights in the darkness over there,” he said. “I think it was them. If they stay true to form, they’ll probably be back any minute now. Just keep watching.”

  She did. As he had hoped, she took a few quiet, cautious steps forward, allowing him to move behind her and draw the knife from its sheath.

  Perhaps he made a sound. Or perhaps she only wanted to ask him a question. Whatever the case, she turned around just as he pulled the knife out from under his jacket.

  She froze, her eyes fixed on the knife. He froze too, startled by this sudden, unexpected exposure. His secret desires were no longer secret. Someone else finally knew. She knew. But not in the way he had meant for her to know. He felt small and diminished in some way.

  Her eyes shifted from the knife to his face, and what he saw in them was a far cry from anything he had expected. She was regarding him not with fear or anger or confusion or any of the other emotions he had envisioned in his countless mental rehearsals for this moment. Instead she was looking at him with a sort of weary contempt, as if she were disgusted beyond all measure by this crowning betrayal and its obviously sordid motivations.

  For a moment Roger felt smaller than ever. He felt an irrational urge to apologize, or justify himself. But then his sense of self-preservation came to his rescue. It was past the point of no return. He had to act now. He thrust his feelings aside and raised the knife.

  Her eyes went wide with fear. She took a step backward, and her chest swelled with an indrawn breath, prelude to a scream.

  Roger launched himself forward. He slammed into her and crashed to the ground atop her. The indrawn breath whooshed out of her. Before she could draw another one, he clapped his left hand over her face, his fingers veiling her eyes, his palm blocking her mouth.

  “Quiet,” he snarled. “I’m not going to hurt you. I—”

  Her teeth grazed his palm. She was trying to bite him. He didn’t dare move his hand away—the instant he did she would scream—so instead he pressed harder, mashing the back of her head into the ground like a gardener shoving a seed into the dirt with his thumb.

  She thrashed violently about. She grabbed his arm and tried to pull his hand off her face. Her legs kicked and scissored.

  “Stop it, God damn it,” he hissed. “Stop it or I’ll—”

  One of her sneakered feet slammed into his balls. He yelped in pain and instinctively raised his hand from her face to cradle his crotch.

  She lost no time in taking advantage of the opportunity. She turned her head to one side so he couldn’t easily clap a hand over her face again, then opened her mouth as wide as she could and drew in another deep breath to unleash a Heaven-shattering scream. Rattled with pain and panic and unable to think of anything else to do, Roger drove the knife as hard as he could into her chest.

  She went rigid for an instant, then began to buck like a landed fish. Blood welled up around the hilt of the knife and soaked through her shirt and jacket. Roger let go of the knife and scrambled to his feet. He backed away a few paces and watched with mingled horror and fascination as she flailed about. Her hands clawed up fistfuls of grass. Her heels kicked divots into the dirt. Her blood glistened in the starlight.

  Her wild convulsions abruptly ceased. Her body gave a few brief shudders and then stopped moving altogether.

  Was she dead? Roger stepped forward again and bent over her for a better look.

  No, not dead yet. Not quite. Her eyelids fluttered over her blackly gleaming eyes. Her fingers were twitching like a person tapping out Morse code in their sleep. He could just hear her faint, rasping breath.

  Then her eyelids stopped moving. Her fingers went still. She let out one last, barely audible exhalation…

  And she died.

  There was a bang of imploding air, and a ball of bright white light engulfed her head. At the same time a warm wind blew outward from the center of the clearing, rocking Roger back on his heels and making the grass ripple as if a helicopter were landing. Red and yellow leaves tumbled end over end out of the clearing and disappeared into the woods. The bushes and branches on the edge of the clearing bowed and swayed.

  Roger squinted into the light. It shimmered and pulsed like starlight. Except it was far, far brighter than any star except the sun. The shadow of each grass blade stood out long and stark upon the ground.

  “What is this?” he said, backing away from the light. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “What—”

  The light exploded outward like a supernova, filling the clearing, engulfing Roger. Everything went white and

  6

  His next conscious awareness was a burning smell, a sharp ozonic stench that filled his nostrils and dragged him up from the inky depths he was ensconced within.

  He opened his eyes and saw the stars in the night sky above the clearing. What had happened?

  He sat up with a groan. His head pounded. His mouth was dry. He felt groggy, disoriented.

  He looked around. Emily lay where he had left her, the knife hilt jutting from her chest. He got up and took a few shaky steps toward her on weak, rubbery legs.

  She was dead. The dark eyes visible through the cracked lids were fixed unseeingly on the stars above. Her mouth was open but no breath passed through it. Her shirt and jacket were wet with blood.

  Then Roger noticed the grass. The grass in a circle around her head was scorched black. A few blades still smoldered, their ends glowing like sticks of incense.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered.

  He didn’t understand what had happened (though there was no doubt a perfectly natural explanation; everything had a perfectly natural explanation), but he didn’t have time to try to figure it out right now. His only concern was to cover his tracks and get the hell out of here. He staggered back to his car, got the blanket from the trunk, then returned to the clearing. He spread the blanket on the grass and started to roll her body onto it. Then he noticed that one of her shoes was missing.

  “Son of a bitch,” he hissed, looking around the clearing. There was no sign of the shoe anywhere. It must have flown off while she was thrashing about.

  He hunted through the brush on the edge of the clearing for a while, but quit when he checked his watch to see what time it was and found that the watch had stopped, the hands frozen at 12:12 a.m. Shit. He had no idea how long he had been here. He should just go.

  He r
eturned to the center of the clearing and rolled up the body in the blanket. Carrying the blanket-wrapped bundle over his shoulder like a mover moving a carpet, he returned to the car and shut the body in the trunk. When he started the car the dashboard clock told him it was 1:14 a.m. Later than he thought. He had been right to quit looking when he did. After all, the longer the car sat here the more likely it would get noticed.

  He was so shaky and exhausted that he was half afraid he would wind up smashing the car into a telephone pole, but he made it home safely. He pulled the car into the garage and shut the garage door, then went inside and moved what little there was in the basement chest freezer to the freezer in the kitchen. He had been thinking about selling the chest freezer, one of the many things he had inherited upon his mother’s death last year. But now he was relieved he had held onto it. You never knew when you might need something.

  He took Emily’s body from the trunk and carried it down to the basement. He had to bend her knees a bit to fit her into the freezer. Once she was settled, he parted the blanket so he could see her face.

  She was now so pale she looked as if she had been carved from alabaster. Her black hair was tangled and wild. Her eyes were still parted a little, but they no longer gleamed; they were dull and dry. He reached into the cold interior of the freezer and closed her eyelids.

  He straightened up and stared at her. His eyes narrowed. His jaw clenched.

  “You stupid bitch,” he said. “Why did you have to fight?” His anger grew stronger with every word. “Why did you make me do that? You cunt! You stupid fucking cunt!”

  Lips twisting in fury, teeth grinding, he kicked the chest freezer hard enough to put a dent in the side. The lid crashed down with a bang that resounded through the workroom like a gunshot.

  The sound broke his rage, and he slumped forward with his forehead resting atop his crossed arms on the lid of the freezer.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be alive, gagged and scared and bound spread-eagled atop the wooden table by the south wall, her skinny body stretched out like a sacrifice to a cruel and merciless god. The god, of course, being Roger.

  But that would never happen now. She was dead. She was ruined. In a weird way, she had had the final victory. Bitch.

  He turned out the basement lights and headed upstairs. In the kitchen, he got out a black plastic trash bag, then took off all his clothes, from his jacket to his underwear, and stuffed them into the bag. All of it—not just the clothes, but the body and the blanket and the knife—would be disposed of tomorrow in the deepest reaches of Blackwater Swamp.

  Though what he really wanted to do was go to bed, he forced himself to take a long, hot shower first to thoroughly scrub away any traces of the night’s misdeeds. Only after he was certain that every last grass stain and smear of blood had vanished down the drain did he towel dry and stagger off to bed.

  He was on the brink of sleep when his eyes flew wide.

  There’s a corpse in the basement, he thought.

  His stomach tightened with atavistic dread. His fingers gripped the sheet so hard his knuckles turned white.

  A corpse, he thought. I’m alone in the house with a corpse.

  But barely had that thought sunk in when another one took its place: I made that corpse.

  A small smile took shape on his lips. His fear ebbed away, replaced by a mad, giddy glee at what he had done. He had committed a godlike act. True, it hadn’t been exactly what he had wanted to do, but it was a mighty and irrevocable deed nonetheless. And he had done it. Him. He had altered the course of many people’s lives. He had changed the world. Forever.

  He fell asleep smiling.

  7

  That was last night. Today he wasn’t smiling at all.

  He awoke with the day nearly done. He had forgotten to set his alarm, and he was so exhausted he slept till nearly four p.m. By the time he had washed, dressed, and eaten, the sun was low in the sky, and he decided to wait till tomorrow to make the trip to Blackwater Swamp.

  But then he watched the local six o’clock news. As he had expected, the lead story was the disappearance of Emily Crow. As he had also expected, the cops had found her shoe and pegged the clearing as the scene of the crime.

  What he hadn’t expected was that the cops knew that Emily had gone to the clearing to meet a man whom she had met in the park earlier that day and who had promised to show her fairies in the woods.

  Shit. That stupid little sow had broken her promise. She had blabbed to someone.

  Shit shit shit.

  While the newscast moved on to other stories, Roger got up and peeked out the living room window. There were no unfamiliar vehicles parked anywhere on the street, no strangers strolling about. It was the same boring suburban street as always.

  But it probably wouldn’t remain that way for long. Plenty of people had seen Roger in the park yesterday. And given how disoriented he had been last night, who knew what other evidence he might have left? He had to dispose of the body and the evidence now, today. If he hurried, he might be able to make it to the swamp before it got too dark for him to find his way along its mazy, unmarked dirt roads.

  And so here he was, in the basement, staring at her beautiful face one last time and psyching himself up to lift the body from the freezer and drive it away on its final journey.

  He sighed and reached into the freezer.

  A girlish giggle rang out behind him.

  Roger whirled, his heart slamming up into his throat, his eyes as big as moons.

  Emily sat cross-legged on the wooden table by the south wall. She was dressed in the same outfit she wore last night—green jacket, blue jeans, tennis shoes with lightning bolts on the sides. But there was no knife stuck in her chest, no blood on her clothes. She was regarding him with a playful, impish smile.

  He looked back over his shoulder. At the bottom of the freezer Emily’s dead, pale face lay amid the folds of the blue blanket. Roger turned back to the table. The other Emily’s smile widened.

  “Oh, Roger,” she said in a gently mocking tone. “You’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t you?”

  Part Two:

  Winding the Clock

  Chapter 9

  Echoes (I)

  Cynthia rang Mr. May’s doorbell, then glanced at Calvin, who stood beside her on the Welcome mat.

  “This might take a while,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “He’s kind of…slow-moving.”

  Everybody is today, she thought sourly. She wished they had gotten an earlier start, as they had originally planned. But as so often happened, aligning the lives and schedules of three people took longer than anyone expected. It was already after one p.m. She had been hoping they would have long since heard whatever Mr. May had to tell them and be halfway to finding Emily by now.

  “What did you tell your parents?” Calvin asked. “I mean, I assume you told them you were going out this time, right?”

  “Yeah. I, um…” She gave a self-conscious shrug. “I hope you don’t mind: I used you as my alibi. I told them we were meeting up to go over some schoolwork and then hang out a while.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “I don’t mind at all.” He gave her that goofy, spacey smile he had been giving her every now and then over the last few weeks, a look that he seemed totally unaware of. It was the look of someone who thinks he’s found his soul-mate.

  She cringed inwardly at the sight. She knew she should tell him the truth: that his having a Y chromosome pretty much nixed any chance of their being soul-mates. It was the right thing to do. But she didn’t know how. She couldn’t even muster up the nerve to tell her own family she was gay. She kept hoping that maybe if she did nothing and just ignored all of his conscious and unconscious signals of romantic interest, his feelings would dissipate like a fever when it breaks, and they could just be friends like she wanted.

  Somehow she didn’t think it was going to be that easy, though.

  Fo
otsteps became audible on the other side of the door. A moment later a latch clacked, and the door opened, revealing Mr. May, as impeccably dressed as yesterday.

  “Greetings,” he said, stepping back and waving them inside. “Please, come in.”

  They did, and found themselves in a long corridor that stretched away toward a wrought-iron spiral staircase in the center of the house. Oil paintings lined the hallway, most of them depicting quaint rural landscapes. A few of the paintings, however, bucked the bucolic monotony. One of these showed a pipe-playing satyr gamboling on a rocky riverbank. Another showed a naval battle, the hulking wooden ships reduced to vague and ominous shapes behind the clouds of cannon smoke. Another, which Calvin and Cynthia stopped to look at in more depth, showed a large throne room lined with white marble columns and hung with tapestries. A ribbon of purple carpet extended across the room and up five marble steps to a dais, presumably where the throne sat. But only a sliver of the dais was visible, the rest being beyond the right edge of the painting. Dozens of men and women in medieval finery stood throughout the room, all but one of them reacting with mingled shock and horror to something atop the dais. The one exception was a young woman dressed in a long blue gown and a tall conical hennin. Instead of looking horrified, she was hiding in the shadow of a pillar at the far left edge of the painting and smiling an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile.

  Mr. May watched them study the painting with a small smile of his own.

  “Do you like it?” he asked Cynthia.

  “It’s…interesting,” she said. “It’s very photorealistic. I like that.”

  “Do you know who painted it?”

  “Um…” She peered at the painting, examining the style and dredging up whatever scraps of art history she could recall from various Art classes over the years. She was forced to concede defeat. “No.”

  “It was painted by your great-great-uncle, Randolph Crow.”

  “My what?” She looked at Calvin as if she thought maybe he could explain. He just shrugged. She examined the painting again, then looked back at Mr. May. “I’ve never even heard of him!”