The Witch of the Wood Read online

  There was a moaning that came from the earth and she materialized, walls forming around them, and a roaring fire in the hearth keeping them warm. She was beautiful and she was naked, arched the way he liked her, looking back at him over her shoulder with an expression of slight indignation.

  And right before Rudy entered her, she whispered,

  “Do you know what a male of my species would be, Rudy? A beautiful, terrifying demon. A destroyer of men, faithful only to the ones who created him. You saw his ‘preview’ last night as the boy on the stairs. Do you have the courage to make him real?”

  Rudy fit himself into her, pumped hard, and exploded. When he pulled out, the cold wind blasted all around him, and he fell backward, cutting his bare ass on the hard ice formed on the dirt beneath him. A yard or so above him, the vagina in the tree trunk then bloomed and swelled, bloody feet working their way from between the bloated folds. Rudy stood and drew up his pants. He then grabbed the small feet as gently as he could and helped ease the child out into the world, accompanied by a symphony of sucking sounds, a masterpiece of blood, bone, flesh, and gelatin.

  The boy cried out into the wind, and he had the face of the child Rudy had seen last night, crystalline eyes, like a doll or marionette ready to steal the world’s breath and blacken the remains.

  A destroyer of men.

  Faithful to his creator.

  Are you happy, Rudy?

  Are you ready to be the king of the earth?

  There was a last cry from inside the wood, and a shadow burst from the opening, rising fast, catching on the wind, flitting and filtering between the branches and flying off in the direction of the sun.

  Rudy Barnes cuddled the wailing child.

  He considered his ethics and weighed them against his relative happiness.

  Then he made his way quickly out of the forest, this new bloody treasure nestled safe in his arms.

  Chapter 2: Warlock

  Wolfie aged quickly. Even straight out of the womb, he had the strength of a toddler, lying wet and warm in the folds of the black coat zipped around him, tiny hands and arms wrapped around his father’s neck, feet digging and pushing against Rudy’s stomach if he began to lose purchase.

  Sunlight stabbed through the windshield and Rudy forced himself to drive slow as molasses, afraid of being pulled over with no car seat, no towels, no baby bag, no blankets. Looked like a kidnapping right out of the birthing room, and the fluids were smeared all over him, past the collar and neck area. When they’d first got in the car and situated, Wolfie had reached up and felt Rudy’s face, like a blind child getting to know the contours. Rudy had told him in a flat, informative tone that this was inappropriate, and the child had immediately stopped. As if he’d understood. At first, Rudy thought it was a coincidence, but when he tested the theory, gently commanding the boy to put his arms around his neck so he wouldn’t slide down into the jacket-papoose where he couldn’t see him, Wolfie did it.

  Super-being. Strong as all hell. Wired for language in a manner that clearly defied all we knew about cognitive growth or psychology. A destroyer of men.

  But really?

  Rudy look down for a moment, straining his eyes, forcing a reddish tinge at the rim of his vision. Wolfie was looking straight up at him, round face, crystalline eyes. The lids lowered in a slow blink, a doll’s trick, and then came back open. Cold gems, but there was trust in them.

  He’s beautiful, Rudy thought, immediately feeling weird about it, looking back to the road, making a turn onto Lovell Avenue. The words that had just flashed into his mind didn’t fit him, not even a little bit. Though he’d always believed in love fundamentally . . . almost like one adopting some religious faith for the sake of insurance, he’d only really felt it in flashes. In reality, he’d spent most of his adult life alone, at least metaphorically, stumbling for years through a passionless marriage, concluding that what we all shared most was the dream of some idealized concept and the denial of our collective isolation. Then, of course, what was not real, we’d invent, and that’s where Rudy checked out of this particular hotel. He’d always been uncomfortable with sentiment and sensitivity, finding them constructed and overplayed in the media not only through the more obvious, formulaic Oprah episodes and reality television shows, but in what was considered “real news,” the given reporter asking a victim how he or she “felt” at the moment (as if the one interviewed wasn’t aware of the microphone, the viewing audience, the YouTube possibilities, or potential book deal) or worse, asking another reporter what the “public perception” was concerning some hotbed issue that stirred the emotions (as if a poll were taken and they had actually come to Rudy’s house to cap off the vote). Feelings had become too easy to “study,” and Rudy despised the mass production of it all, as if the world was supposed to masturbate all together on three or something.

  It angered Rudy, actually, and he turned left on King Avenue, screeching the tires a bit. It wasn’t just the fabrication of the melodramatic that bothered him so, but more the misplacement of it. We paid attention in class because the teacher was hot, we liked someone’s music because of the tattoo, we voted for a candidate because of his honey voice. And the words that had floated through his mind, He’s beautiful, were not his words but those of his mother, he suddenly realized. They had invited her over for one of the championship games between the Sixers and Lakers back in 2001, and she had busied herself sewing a hem throughout the affair, blue lips pursed as if they’d been tightened by drawstrings, sitting on the most comfortable chair they’d angled for her so she’d get the best view of the TV she wasn’t watching. There had been a steal and a run the wrong way down the hardwood, and Rudy had wanted the room to join him in his bitter Philadelphian’s disappointment as another one went down the toilet. Mother had looked up, fixed her watery gaze on the curly-haired Laker who’d just burned us (Rick Fox it was), and said, “My . . . he’s beautiful.”

  Rudy had just turned thirty-seven, but it somehow triggered a teenager’s rage he’d bit back down and promptly and conveniently forgotten.

  Until now. And the question was, why had his mother’s words suddenly resurfaced, laying themselves delicately over his own, like a soft molestation?

  He looked down at Wolfie, he who was staring back with those shock-blue eyes. Rudy laughed, and it sounded creepy and awkward. An “ah-ha” moment. A cold one.

  Of course. Wolfie could manipulate your sentiment or lack of it, pick your poison.

  The world didn’t have a chance.

  Rudy backed into his parking space and sat there for a moment, slightly hunched down. He had to be careful, especially on the short trip across the lot to stairway. It should have been isolated back here, like a ghost town mid-morning on a Friday, everyone at work where they belonged, but Rudy had picked this rental for the view beyond the cross street like everyone else in the building; walking trail, peaceful reservoir, rising stand of dark pines in the background. And the parking lot was a sudden flurry of activity, almost like one of those bad thrillers where all the clichés passed by all at once, minding their business while the serial killer watched them through his tinted windows and the eyeholes cut from the burlap he’d stretched over his head and tied around his neck with a cord. Every time Rudy thought the coast might be clear, there was another pop-in from the side or across the way—three ladies power-walking by with their ear buds, visors, and designer shades, a stocky college kid in a blue Alaskan parka heading to the bus stop with his backpack and laptop, an elderly couple shuffling past with sneakers big as clown shoes, the perky stay-at-home dad with the balloon-tire baby carriage he jogged behind, the black body spandex making him look like a faggot no matter how liberal you thought you’d become.

  Someone knocked on the passenger side window, hard.

  Rudy jumped and banged his knees on the bottom of the steering wheel.

  “Jesus!” he said out loud.

  It was a head on an angle, Sam Finkelstein, his neighbor from 2B. Sam was a
strange guy, sort of gently intrusive: when it snowed he walked the parking lot putting everyone’s windshield wipers up. He had an oblong “Munster” head and eyes that sagged at the edges, giving the impression that he was a bit slow, but Rudy knew that he wasn’t. Just odd, different standards, like one of those ladies with a hundred cats, or the kind of guy who thought it was a big score when the elementary school threw out their old computers and he got to scour the dumpster.

  “What you got there?” Sam said, all muffled and displaced outside the closed window. He tilted his head the other way and squinted. “That a baby there?” He was pointing now, tapping the pad of his index finger on the glass.

  Rudy felt Wolfie twist a bit, turning his head so he could look at the man in the window. When their eyes met there was a jolt, and the three of them were suddenly connected in some odd psychic triangle that only Sam was utterly unaware of. And for a moment Rudy knew things, private things about his neighbor he never would have guessed in a million years.

  Sam shaved his legs because he had itch compulsion, and the hair against the inside of his trousers could literally incapacitate him for hours. He’d had bloody noses since he was in junior high school, and the Vaseline’d Q-tips and Swiss humidifiers only helped marginally. He’d never been married, but he’d been engaged, he’d tried for a doctorate in psychology but couldn’t finish the dissertation, he was presently unemployed but remained hopeful.

  He was also addicted to Internet pornography, and every day that he swore he would stop became another instance where he rationalized that his hard drive was so loaded with smut that one more surf wasn’t going to make too much difference.

  He liked costumes: French maids, Indian squaws, cowgirls in jean shorts, schoolgirls in plaid skirts.

  And nurses.

  Old school nurses. He was in love with the image emotionally and sexually, hopelessly drawn to the mother-sister type seemingly unaware of her own severe beauty and playing you with the contradiction. There was another jolt, this one zinging Rudy right through the bottom of the scrotum, and the image delivered here was an older one, black-and-white film run too fast all jumpy with age lines and little burn bubbles running through it: Sam’s deep, dark past, visiting his Cleveland cousins as a boy of twelve and meeting his second Aunt Esther who told them stories about Israel, all of them sitting cross-legged on the floor before the sofa, the one with the odd flower patterns and ancient vinyl slipcovers, and she sat there above them—an exotic jangle of earrings and bracelets and dark glass-bead necklaces, with her tight black skirt riding up over those pretty bare knees, and when she re-crossed her legs there was that sweet red mark left on one of them, and she’d seen Sammy looking and straightened uncomfortably. She’d tucked her hair behind her ear, pinched her long nose between her thumb and index finger for a moment, and then gone upstairs, returning soon with a bit of an alteration in her attire, her legs now covered in white panty hose. And even though the supple skin was no longer catching the glow of the overhead light, the sculpted form of those calves was undeniable, and she was his relative, far from perfect with her hawklike features and the mole under her left eye, her skinny smile and nervous laugh, but those legs . . . and he knew he was naughty, and little Sammy wanted to rub his penis so badly that he thought he was going to die.

  It wasn’t difficult math. The Aunt was the forbidden mother-figure Sam had reconfigured into the safer fantasy. He even got to transpose the white stockings, for God’s sake.

  Sam wasn’t looking in the car window anymore. He was looking away toward the reservoir, and when Rudy followed his sightline he didn’t see any bus stop or walking trail. It was a long hallway, and at the end of it was a sofa with flower patterns and vinyl slipcovers, and sitting on it was Aunt Esther. She had her Seventies perm, but it was bobby-pinned back behind her ears and topped off by a starched white cap. She was wearing a belted white pinafore over a short-sleeved blue blouse with a white collar, and she’d just kicked off her padded white shoes.

  She pivoted a bit to the side and drew her knees in, one leg arching up and out, toe pointing, and she slowly began to remove those white panty hose.

  Sam started walking toward her, head cocked a bit in dumb disbelief. By the time the panty hose lay in a feathery pile on the floor, Sam was halfway to her, walking faster now, and by the time he reached her, she was rubbing the back of her ankle as if she required as potent a physical soothing as the mental comforts she’d just supplied to her patients.

  Sam reached to touch those legs, and she let him.

  Rudy felt them too; she had goosebumps.

  As if back to the grainy black-and-white film stock, she jumped camera frames then, making Sam move ten feet laterally to get to her, lying on her back on the kitchen table, knees up, ankles together. He approached and palmed those knees, spreading them slowly, her heels making rubbing sounds on the tablecloth, letting the shadows disappear up her thighs, and Sam saw her dark pussy, one of the lips sticking just for a moment, then coming off the other in a sweet unfolding, and Sam bent in to tongue it, his back cracking softly, and he and Rudy smelled her deep musk.

  But right at the very moment he made to slide his tongue into her, she jumped frames again, now twelve feet deeper into the house in the baby’s playroom, naked on all fours and sunken down in front with her elbows and forearms flat to the carpet, ass pointed ceiling-high in a lovely heart shape, waiting there, just for him.

  Sam was desperate now, bright purple in his passion, eyes rolling, and he stumbled to her, unbuttoning his pants, wading and waddling as they fell to his ankles, voices in his head pleading, “Oh my God,” and “No, please . . .” and that made it better somehow as he fell to his knees to ram his second aunt from behind, and he was amazed in a distracted sort of way by the roughness of the carpet.

  Then the playroom vanished, and so did his second aunt.

  “Oh,” Sam said, voice small. Initially, he hadn’t been running his fingers along goosebumped flesh, but the pitted bumper of the old Chevy illegally parked and booted with three old tickets fluttering from under the windshield wipers. He hadn’t been palming knees and spreading a pair of bare legs, but rather, he’d moved down the sidewalk to the bike rack and strategically pushed apart the tires on a couple of old ten-speeds that had been abandoned, and now he was in the street with his pants down, knees scraped, bus braking desperately because it had been doing fifty-seven with “Express” flashing across its automated route identification board.

  “Wait,” Sam said, just before the bus hit him dead on.

  The kid in the Alaskan parka, the one who had actually said, “Oh my God,” was still digging to try to get a bit of this on his cell phone. The woman next to him who had said, “No, please . . .” was looking away, face screwed in like a prune.

  The front of the bus plowed into Sam and kicked him backward, his head slapping down to the street, blood bursting behind in an egg-shaped spray. The tires screeched and smoked over him, the back end of the bus fishtailing, Sam’s body puppet-jumping as it was caught up and mangled by the under carriage.

  Rudy got out of the car and moved toward the apartment’s rear entrance.

  “Thanks for the subtle diversion,” he muttered numbly. Before taking hold of the doorknob, he looked down at his son.

  Wolfie was smiling.

  Rudy brought his child in, put him on a blanket on the living room floor, drew a bath, went through the motions. Every three seconds or so he looked back over his shoulder from the bathroom to check, and Wolfie basically stayed put like a good little baby, reaching his fingers playfully into the red ambulance lights washing across him through the picture window facing the reservoir. It gave the illusion of movement, a lunatic carousel.

  “You’ve got to kill him before it’s too late,” Rudy whispered under his breath. Then he said back to himself, “Yeah, right.”

  So did Wolfie, and he was right in the doorway, wobbly, but standing there naked and bloody. Rudy’s heels kicked out from under
him and he sat hard, right on the spot where two of the tiles had come loose, and his ass hit an edge. He winced, bit it back. Yes, he’d forgotten about this particular foreshadowing. Wolfie moved when you blinked. He’d also learned to talk through this psychic sort of connection they had going, and even though it was a mimic, Rudy was pretty sure it wouldn’t be too long before the kid was making speeches.

  “Safe,” Wolfie said, and then he waddled straight into Rudy’s lap. The professor drew him in, held him, lost himself for a moment in the warmth of it. He loved this boy suddenly, deeply; he felt it in his neck, his back, high in the temples, and this was no media-driven piece of hyperbole.

  “Of course you’re safe,” he murmured.

  “I meant you,” the boy responded.

  Rudy started a bit, and then it was all game face, lifting Wolfie into the tub, washing him, making sure to hit all the tucks and creases. Of course Rudy Barnes was safe, and the math was staggering. Wolfie could read minds, at least to some degree. He somehow knew even at this early juncture that his father was a moral figure and would struggle with the bloodshed. He also knew that at the end of the long cycle . . . with the returning arc of the pendulum . . . when the roller coaster finally slowed at the exit gate, pick your metaphor, love and loyalty would be Rudy’s landing point. Flat and fundamental. Personal, not publicized.

  And Wolfie was aware of this psychological roundabout at the age of an hour. Rudy dried him off and kissed his forehead mechanically, searching for something cushy to wrap him in. It was mind-boggling, the puzzles Wolfie would be able to solve in a matter of weeks, days, hours, that would leave his own father behind in a state of absolute ignorance.

  Rudy got the Eagles floor cushion with the couch-arms, two pillows from his bed, and a quilt from the linen closet. He arranged them in the middle of the floor the best he could with Wolfie in the crook of one arm, and then set the boy there and wrapped him. He stayed there for a second, above him on one knee.