The Witch of the Wood Read online

  Ironically (considering all the new information Rudy had about the world and its underground inhabitants), they’d initially bought the place for the foliage. The collection of regal elms that stood sentry along the west side of the place and two humongous weeping willows at the other edge of the sloping back yard had given them a perfect sort of privacy.

  Rudy guessed she was back there now doting over her little “inventions.” Or maybe she was inside making that foofoo specialty coffee he’d always secretly despised along with one of those “healthy” fruit salads she fooled herself with, soon followed by eggs, and toast, and the Special K she refilled the bowl with at least three or four times. When he’d married her, Patricia was barely one hundred and seventeen pounds, hourglass waist, round breasts, and those cute two front teeth turn-buckled together. But then she’d let herself go through the years, fattening up to a whopping two hundred and twenty-five pounds impossible to cloak. She’d gone red in the face and fat in the ankles.

  Physically at least, she was the most masculine female he knew.

  Wolfie got out of the car and walked up to the door. It was ungodly warm, but there was a breeze, making the porch swing sway just a bit. There were tubular wind chimes hanging from the eaves, softly bonging together; that was new. Wolfie rang the bell. He pushed his hair across his forehead, waited, turned, shrugged. Rudy lowered the window.

  “Get her on the cell,” he called innocently. “She’s here somewhere.”

  Wolfie smiled, evidently tickled that his father would think of using technology even a little bit. He dialed and put the phone to his ear, one arm folded across his stomach. Then he was turned slightly away, talking, schmoozing. He held the phone away from his head and said, “She’s out back. She wants to show me something. I’ll be back in a second!”

  Rudy waved casually, dismissively. Wolfie stayed on the line with Patricia so he could talk to her on his approach, soaking up every possible moment they could connect before the planned departure he thought she was unaware of.

  The second Wolfie rounded the corner of the house, Rudy got out of the car and followed, trying not to run and make noise, struggling out his own cell phone, half looking at it to find the recording button on the side.

  At the border of the back yard, Wolfie pushed through two butterfly bushes that had grown across the pathway, shedding a litter of yellow petals to the ground in his wake, and Rudy prayed his own feet would take him the rest of the way on their own without obstruction. He’d been back here thousands of times, the landscape memorized like an old song. He palmed the cell phone in his left hand, leaving the thumb out as if he were hitchhiking. With his right hand he grabbed the digit.

  Now he was twenty feet ahead of where he’d just been, inside Wolfie’s head, Pat’s voice in his ear.

  “Keep coming, Wolfie,” she was saying. “I have a new project that I simply must show you . . . something I’ve been working on for months, something special, something so . . . me!”

  “And Mum, you are beautiful!” Wolfie said back. “I cannot wait to share this with you!”

  There was a garden of what looked like particularly thorny roses poking through a tangle of chicken wire, and Wolfie turned the corner. Down a short hill, maybe sixty feet away, was an old gray tool shed, a wheelbarrow filled with old mulch, a rain barrel, and a scatter of wood scraps. Kneeling with her back turned was Patricia. Next to her was a sawhorse set up with a piece of plywood on top, slightly bowed in the middle. And behind her was a scattered array of dollhouses on stands, some with flat roofs, some with pitched roofs, some with fake windows, others with shutters. There must have been thirty of them, all so pretty, some darkened with woodstain, others painted up in basic block colors, some no more than a foot long and a foot high and others as large as bathtubs or bureaus.

  Rudy was at the crest of the rise and almost took a header as the ground sloped. He stopped where he was and figured he had enough of a view for what was necessary. From beneath the vision he shared with his boy, Wolfie’s voice said, “Mum! These are awesome! You made these yourself?”

  She started to turn, and Rudy almost betrayed himself, calling out a last warning to the only son he’d ever known.

  For the number three was a universal trinity, in this case adding up to the Father, the Son, and the Stepmother. And “The Riddle of the Wood” was no more than a sentence with a homophone, and it was fortunate that Wolfie hadn’t picked up the possibility of this in Rudy’s biography. For the same rudimentary word-twist had been used in one of Rudy’s favorite old Star Trek episodes, titled “Bread and Circuses.”

  The current riddle stated,

  The sun must burst forth a hundred golden rivers.

  Rudy had simply replaced “sun” with “son,” and considering the fact that Wolfie’s main source of nutrition was iodine, he was betting the farm on the possibility that Wolfie was not going to bleed red.

  The Dark Guardian turned and Wolfie gasped, realizing that yesterday he’d done nothing more than kill an innocent shop teacher. For Patricia was wearing headgear and protective goggles with a plastic nose and mouth guard. And she had on her favorite hat, a black baseball cap with a huge plastic sunflower on the forehead, one that in silhouette would look like a strange headlamp with ridges as it had in the “Coming of Dreams.”

  “These are my birdhouses,” Patricia said. “Aren’t they just lovely?” Then she pulled a cord, fishing line connected in a spider web effect to all the doors.

  They all snapped open and from the wooden compartments erupted a black swarm, all flapping madly and chirping and chittering in a collective, continuous screeching. Patricia stood, spread her arms, and smiled beneath the plastic face guard now misting a bit with her quickening breaths, the storm of birds rising behind her like a massive black cloak, the February sun stabbing through the spaces. Rudy disengaged and thumbed for the record button on his cell.

  Wolfie ran and the birds followed in waves. He tried the “blink,” but there were too many adversaries guessing right, and within a matter of seconds he was covered, a dark scarecrow utterly overcome and infested, the multiple wings snapping and beating madly like old rags in the wind.

  He hopped around as if he were on fire, swatted, swiped, rubbed, tried to stop-drop-and-roll.

  Wherever he went, they were on him, like a moving second skin, even on the ground where he tried to cross his hands before his face. They shrieked, they wriggled and burrowed, squirming forward, tail feathers up, working the creases and filling the spaces so the boy just couldn’t lay still.

  By the time he’d regained his feet an eye was gone. He gave a last brisk hard-palming to the face and they came off in a wavelet, exposing the multiple punctures and the bursting golden runners, forked and streaming down to his neckline.

  Like bees to a hive they were on him again, and his head was a black, fluttering skull; and when a particularly fat black and gray barn swallow pecked in, Wolfie’s second eye popped in a stringy burst. He cried out, but it was muffled by wing and rump and feather and mantle.

  He had stumbled to the base of the rise and stood there below his father. Rudy was murmuring “Oh my God,” over and again to himself, but still managed to hold the phone steady, getting it all in the shot. There was a mad screeching now about the swarm, and Wolfie in his shame and disgrace put forward his hands palm up as if asking, “Daddy, what should I do?”

  “Say it,” Rudy croaked. “Say it and I’ll make you immortal.”

  Wolfie swiped at his mouth area for clearance and choked out,

  “Father!”

  The birds stormed his face and he mashed them away.

  “Father, why have you forsaken me?”

  He stretched his arms out slowly to the sides then, making his body into the shape of a cross. A pair of black junco sparrows wriggled into his mouth, then another bird, and yet another. Wolfie kept his stance as his throat bulged and they forged through him, raked across him, consumed him utterly, his thin body an opened th
oroughfare.

  When they finally came off him, he fell face down on the hill, his clothes mere tatters drenched in dark gold, the back of his head a wet swirl of matted blond hair pulled up in tufts.

  The birds were above him now, suspended in layers of rolling waves. They rose, formed a massive V shape at roof level, and burst off into the February skyline.

  Pat was nowhere to be found.

  Rudy let the hand holding the cell phone rest at his side. He felt like weeping, but he was dry. From beneath his feet, he felt a vibration. Then another, and a third, like some gargantuan underground beast coming slowly awake with a guttural rumble.

  He looked around him, and the earth seemed suddenly unsteady, rocking, pitching, buckling.

  It was all the trees. At their bases.

  They were starting to move.

  Chapter 3: Wolf

  First was the great rumbling, vibrations that sent numbing shooters through Rudy’s feet, pebbles and dirt seemingly from nowhere rolling and threading down the hill toward the shed, Patricia’s plywood work board trembling and shivering on its supports, then falling off at an odd angle. Next was the rocking, the skyline come alive, trees all around pitching to and fro as if engulfed in some strange hurricane that painted arcs on the horizon.

  From beneath, there were great pulling sounds, stretching, yawning, a muffled army of high-tension bows being drawn as the massive network of intertwined root systems strained to the absolute breaking point.

  Then the earth erupted, a million buried circus whips cracking all at once as the embedded roots ripped up from underfoot in a damp throaty roar, soil coming up in bursts and cascades, peppering the house, showering all around Rudy Barnes who covered his face with his forearm.

  He thought he heard screams: a neighbor walking a dog maybe, a jogger, who knew? It got drowned out quickly by the fantastic collapse, the purging of the skyline as every tree came crashing down to the earth.

  Rudy was lucky he was not killed. The border elms like the slats of some massive gate-barrier thundered down in a diagonal pattern, first smashing through the roof atop the detached garage, then the kitchen and laundry room, the rose garden, and all along the hill Rudy was sidestepping down, the ground feeling like shuffling floorboards in a funhouse. Rudy turned and tried to run. A gargantuan trunk pounded the ground, missing him by inches, and he dove off to the right. The weeping willow on the far side of the back yard smashed down into the shed, turning it to splinters, and three trees plunged across Rudy’s path a few feet ahead of where he had fallen to his stomach. He covered his head with his hands for a moment, the scratches and abrasions up his forearms wet and stinging.

  The thunderous booming of it was overwhelming, rolling shockwaves pounding the ground, a riotous tumult that felt like the end of the world. It reached a tremendous peak, then slowed, thinned out, and scattered to isolated shivers, the final showers of soil and rock pelting down, then drizzling off like an engine ticking down as it cooled.

  There were dull echoes. There was aftermath silence, but then came a mad skittering in the grass. Rudy raised his head and there, coming on at ground-level from the felled ruin of the wood beyond the iron fence, was a mad rush of wildlife flooding over and between the crooked nest of trunks and branches: white and gray fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, gophers, small foxes, deer, all jumping and crawling over each other in a mass exodus from a world that had been turned inside out.

  There were more screams now from over the hill, honking horns, cars crashing into things with gritty finality, hoarse shouts.

  “Good acoustics all of a sudden,” Rudy thought wildly, as he pushed to his feet and made for the tool shed, its opened back corner still standing on its own like some ancient monolith. He moved, climbed, stepped across the jigsaw of foliation, lost his footing and raked his shin, then doggie-paddled over to the “monument.” The catty-cornered shelves had held, and Rudy swiped the remains of a collection of gardening trowels to the ground along with a stack of clay flowerpots. He climbed two shelves high and wrapped his arms around the corner post for dear life.

  The evacuation swarmed underneath him, yipping and rustling, and what looked like a bear cub loped right past his ankle nipping and snapping at the air. The mass covered the hill, a rippling hoard of clawing, retreating hindquarters that scurried off to the jungle that had become Hampstead and Elm Avenues and beyond.

  The dust and dirt that had risen in the air was now settling to a resinous haze. There was almost a dramatic pause then, like the time for a deep breath where one could take inventory, cut his losses, and measure his options.

  But along the slope of the near hill there was new movement. A sneaky sort of creeping.

  It was a spread of strange coloring, an outpouring, and Rudy’s breath caught in his throat. Bone-white hands and arms were creeping out of the holes in the ground, skeletal fingers feeling about the perimeters, palms settling, then pressing, and then was the emergence.

  Rudy focused on the closest cavity across the yard, where an elm had toppled down across the forest gate, bending the corner into a twisted black dog-ear. Back at its dark uncorked root-cellar, a form pushed out of the hole, black beetles and other vermin swimming off her in a sort of unveiling, white skin stretched bone-tight and spotted with filth, tangle of black hair peppered with dirt. Her bulbous black eyes shuttered open and closed in reaction to the glare of the sun, and she pushed up to a standing position, bony knees almost buckling.

  Her hand was at her forehead then, in a protective salute to shield her sensitive eyes, and Rudy noticed something. He still had a clear view of her face in an odd sort of bare perspective.

  “No shadow,” he thought.

  She let her hands fall to her sides and took a step forward, careful not to touch branch, leaf, or stalk of the prison column that had held her underground for so long. She gave a slight curtsey and then spoke in a voice rough with dirt, “Rudy. Rudy . . . Barnes.”

  She began to change, and there must have been a seam around the back of her, because the pale epidermis dragged from the rear to the front, coming around the arm, the thigh, the shin, the waist, then down over the face hugging the contours, a sheet slowly drawn from a petrified statue. There was a brief moment when she was a skeleton, heart beating in the cage of bone, veins pulsing, muscles quivering as the receding cover of skin met in folds and creases going into her open mouth. Simultaneously was the regrowth, a burst of supple skin spreading from the vagina out, and before Rudy could make the rather juvenile symbolic connection between the consumption of the real and the birth of the façade, he came to recognize the masterpiece coming to form.

  She was April Orr, bob hairdo hanging in limp strings and clots, soil-spots on her forearms, dirt caked on her pretty bare knees. But even covered by the filth of the hole, she was gorgeous. Rudy had never seen the woman naked, only bent at the banister with her dress up over her hips, and here, bared to the world, she was without a doubt the most potent sexual presence he’d ever known. The long fingers, sharp face, and sparkling eyes reflected an elegant humor that was absolutely magnetic. Then as if in sweet contradiction to the air of sophistication she downplayed was that body, lithe and engineered for passion and sweat. Those small, firm breasts had their nipples up. Those long dancer’s legs stood firm now beneath slender hips defined by squint-eyed dimples slanted on either side. There were two freckles to the right of her belly button, and a daring rose tattoo to the left, long stem snaking down to frame one side of her neatly shaved pussy-stripe.

  Rudy wanted her. Now. He pictured it in his head, making his way through the clutter of branch work and kissing her, cradling and melting to the ground with her.

  He climbed down from his mount and closed the distance between them. It was awkward. He almost tripped and took a header but recovered abruptly, and as she reached out her hands to him he had a sudden and awful vision of his son in the same positioning, absolutely covered with birds.

  “No,” Rudy whisper
ed instinctively.

  Her head exploded then with a wet burst. Rudy squeezed shut his eyes and gave a half-turn, raising up both arms as bone shards and hot pith splattered over him. He was soaked and cut on his hands, his forehead, the right cheek, and he heard pieces landing in the grass. He opened his eyes just in time to see the headless body before him careen, walk in a drunken step forward and back, then fall in the hole it had crawled from.

  There was a murmuring now, a gritty hum coming from along the hill, the Gregorios’ back yard, the space on the other side of the property now exposed where there was a vacant area overgrown with clover and ragweeds, and of course the broken heap of a forest spreading out past the black iron gate.

  It was a massive, rising congregation, a sweeping haunt of skeletal forms with red lips and black eyes, thousands of them pushing up to standing positions beside their prison holes, focusing hard on the man at the foot of the hill and droning,

  “Rudy . . .”

  Then came the gory fireworks echoing across the landscape, wet ruptures of blood, bone, and brain torching upward like exploding party favors at Temple University’s Cherry and White Day, then raining down on the headless bodies collapsing upon the wood and grass in an awful sort of haphazard symmetry. Rising behind the carnage were more witches, a blurred mass closing steadily.

  “Rudy!” someone said from behind.

  It startled him, but the voice was clear, no drone, no grit.

  He turned, and it took everything in his willpower to do it gracefully, without putting his arms and elbows in front of his face, cowering.

  It was Caroline Schultz from up the block. She was a thirty-something blonde who worked for the water company, or the gas works, one of the utilities, he couldn’t remember. She’d traded recipes with Patricia a couple of times, and they shared the same lawn service company; that’s all he knew about her. That, and the fact that she liked wearing hats. Today she had one with army fatigue colors. No coat, white T-shirt, black yoga pants that flared at the bottom, and pink Converse All Stars.