Page 51 of The Woods

At twenty paces into the woods, Alice ties her first ribbon. It feels like a silly, pointless task. She carries on, though, deciding that she might not go as far afield as she’d originally thought.

After about ten minutes of walking and ribbon tying, Alice notes that the path curves and slopes downward. A wall of earth and tree roots rises over Alice’s head on one side of the path while the other side drops down into a ravine of tall ferns. From above it looks like an ocean of green, the leaves undulating in the breeze like waves. She can’t believe how vibrant they are, even in October.

Alice steps to the very edge of the path on the ravine side. She wants to capture the sea of ferns with her phone, already knowing the photo won’t do it justice. Leaning forward over the edge and holding her phone out as far as she can to get a full aerial view, she feels the dirt under her front foot begin to shift. She tries to push back on it, but that only makes things worse, tamping the dirt lower so that she begins to slide down the ravine.

She instinctively throws her arms backward, opening her hands so that her phone flies free and disappears into the thick ferns below. Unable to fight the pull of gravity, Alice’s whole body slides down through the soft, wet earth, picking up speed as she goes. She somersaults two or three times before she hits the bottom. Stunned, she lies there gasping for breath, waiting for the wind that was knocked clean out of her to return.

She’s afraid to move. Afraid she’s broken something. When her breath finally returns, she very slowly wiggles her toes and her fingers. Nothing hurts, so she lifts one leg and then the other. No pain there either. Finally, she tries both arms and is flooded with relief to feel only stiffness. It’s thanks to that yoga class she’d been at earlier. If she’d fallen down that ravine in her usual tensed-up state, she would have shattered into a million little pieces.

Alice lies there looking up at the patches of light coming through the trees, the swaying of leaves in the breeze hypnotizing her. The smell of damp earth, new growth, and some kind of rot overwhelms her. It’s not unlike Geoff’s smell, she realizes. Finally pushing herself up to sitting, she feels achy but pretty good, considering. Glancing around, she notices it’s darker down here, and cold. It’s feeling much less like enchanted forest and much more like haunted woods with every passing minute.

“Fuck,” she says loudly, looking at the hundreds of ferns that surround her, realizing that she has no idea where her phone landed. How will she find it? It’s her work phone, and only three weeks old, which means if she doesn’t find it, she’ll have to pay for it. Moving on all fours, she pulls back the thick ferns to search the ground. Her hands and knees are quickly soaked and blackened from the damp in the soil.

She moves in a grid pattern so that she doesn’t go over the same area twice, but she’s starting to worry that the phone could be anywhere. Losing patience, she stands up, brushes her hands on her filthy leggings, and starts kicking her way through the ferns with her eyes trained on the ground.

A large crow lands in the tree above her, cawing loudly, filling the air with its harried sound. As she looks up at it, a soft breeze moves past her, lifting the stray hairs that have come out of her ponytail, sounding like whispers, telling her to run. The sound of a branch cracking nearby rings out like a shot.

Alice freezes.

“Hello?” she calls out, hoping it’s someone checking on her, someone who’ll help her find her phone so she can get out of there. No sound comes in response, but she feels a presence nonetheless, like someone is holding their breath nearby, obscured by one of the trees.

“Hello?”

Nothing. Then, a rustle.

She waits. She fights the strong urge to abandon her phone altogether and run up the side of the hill. A moment passes. She starts to calm. Taking a few deep breaths, Alice decides on a new tactic. Instead of following her grid through the ferns, she looks up to the height she fell from. From the trail of dirt that she created when her foot slid forward, she’s able to make out the exact location of her descent and realizes she’s probably searching too far to the right and too close to the base of the hill. Her phone had gone flying straight out of her hand and then down. She starts backing up, keeping her eyes on the place she fell from, imagining the arc of the phone.

The crow starts cawing again, as though they’re playing a game of hot or cold and she’s getting closer. She takes one more step back, thinking she’s almost at the place to start searching again, when her heel comes up against something hard, toppling her backward. Her bum lands on ferns and soft dirt, but whatever she tripped over is under her legs. She thinks it must be a log but when she reaches out to touch it, she feels a thin layer of fur. She yanks her hand back and swings her legs off, scrambling up onto her knees. Don’t look, the voice in her head commands, even though she’s already reaching forward to part the ferns.

At first glance, it looks like the bare thigh of a human. A man’s thigh, because of the hair. The skin looks almost translucent, as though the blood has been drained. It can’t be, she reasons, parting more ferns to find a knee, then a shin and finally, a foot. Alice gasps and falls back in shock, her own foot sliding forward, connecting. The impact shifts the leg to the side just enough for her to see a tattoo on the ankle. Not just any tattoo. A small, faded dragon.

The one Geoff got when he went backpacking through Thailand after university.

Alice tastes bile, swallows it down, and frantically claws at the ferns to uncover more of the leg. Ripping the ferns from the ground, she uncovers a limp penis surrounded with graying pubic hair. It’s the one she had in her hand only the night before; the one Geoff put inside her. Parting more ferns, she exposes an upper torso that has been split open from top to bottom, the flaps of skin revealing a rib cage missing all the vital organs. She doesn’t pause to examine the horror of this gaping cavity. She keeps going.

She has to see the face.

Her heart is racing, and she can hear the blood pumping through her skull, feel her skin pulsing with its force. She’s afraid she may pass out before identifying this disemboweled corpse bearing her husband’s tattoo.

A moan escapes her when she sees the first patch of salt-and-pepper gray beard, but by the time she’s uncovered the entire face, terror has gripped her vocal cords, and she cannot make a sound. It is the face of her husband. Mouth open in a scream, eyes wide and staring straight up at the undulating trees above.

Alice bends forward and tries to pull the cold, stiff body of her husband up into her arms but she cannot move him. It’s as though his body has fused to the earth, as though roots have grown up into his back and are holding him in place. She scrambles across him to the other side and tries at a new angle. Losing her grip, she falls backward when his body will not budge.

When she lifts her hand from the ground something has tangled in her fingers. Hair—long and white. She makes a fist around it and pulls. It gives slightly but then resists, attached to something. Swallowing hard, Alice rolls over onto her knees and follows the hair with her hands, searching for the source. Tears stream down her cheeks without a sound. Her heart knows whom the hair belongs to, but her mind will not yet admit it.

It insists she pull back the ferns until she finds herself staring down at the face she already knew she would find—her mother’s. The mouth gapes, too, and her eyes are open wide, staring up at the sky. Her skin is as white as the hair that sprouts from it. Alice pushes more ferns away to uncover her mother’s naked body. Her torso has also been split open from top to bottom, flaps of skin concealing a hollowed cavity. Her mother’s breasts are empty pockets of skin sliding away from the incision.

Alice pulls at her mother’s shoulders to lift her out of the dirt, but she, too, is fused to the ground, immovable. She yanks at the cold, stiff body, sobbing uncontrollably, her breath coming in short gasps. Terror has turned her manic, fixated on freeing her mother from the forest floor as though she can still save her. Using all of her strength and will, Alice wrenches on her mother’s shoulder. At the sound of bone cracking, Alice shudders, lets go, and tumbles away from the body onto her back.

Adrift in the sea of ferns, Alice’s horror overwhelms her. Her earsplitting scream bounces off the trees.

The crow screams back with fury.

Quinn

His stupid dog is doing that thing again. Standing at the opening to the woods, growling. He just got home from Jason’s, a little bit high and very hungry, to find her pacing by the back door. Since no one in this family pays any attention to her anymore, he figures she’s not been out since he left.

“Panda,” he calls, but she ignores him, getting even lower to the ground. He wants to go inside and make himself some food. He considers leaving her out there to growl at the wind when she suddenly starts barking and then races away from the trees toward him. Seconds later his mom appears, running full-speed out of the woods.