Dark Hollow (6 page)

“Well.” Merle sighed. “For one thing, if you go in far enough, they hook up with LeHorn’s Hollow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but those woods are over twenty miles wide, and the hollow sits in the center. We’re not anywhere near it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Merle said. “That forest, and the cornfields and everything else surrounding it, takes up five different townships. The land is owned by a lot of different people—farmers, the paper mill over in Spring Grove, the local governments, even the state. But it’s all connected, Adam. LeHorn’s Hollow is kind of like the heart, and it’s got veins running all through those woods.”

The writer inside of me was impressed by his analogy, and I told him so. “You should try your hand at writing, Merle.”

“And give up my failing antique business? I don’t think so. But you’re right about one thing: It would make a great book.”

“A horror novel,” Dale muttered.

I drained my beer. “I don’t know about a horror novel, but it would make a good mystery or true-crime book. LeHorn murdering his wife and then disappearing—people would eat that shit up.”

Dale stared at his beer, and Merle found something interesting to look at in the yard.

Their silence confused me, and I wondered what I’d said wrong. “What? It was your idea.”

“There’s a lot more to it than just the murder,” Dale said quietly. “No offense, Adam, but you’re a lot younger than us. Most of this stuff happened when you were still playing with your GI Joes.”

“Most of
what
stuff happened? What are you talking about?”

“The stories about the woods,” Dale replied. “People say they’re haunted.”

I wasn’t sure if they were kidding with me or not, so I played along. “Haunted? You mean ghosts?”

Dale nodded. “For starters. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of weird things happen in there.”

“Like what?” Now I was genuinely curious. I’d heard the occasional folktale, how Patricia LeHorn’s ghost wandered the farmhouse at night, and there was my own experience from high school, but that was all.

“Remember earlier, when we were talking about powwow?” Merle asked.

“Yeah.”

“Nelson LeHorn was a warlock. Practiced black powwow. Powerful stuff, they say.”

Dale’s expression was grave. “That forest always had an evil reputation. The Indians thought it was cursed. Called it ‘bad ground,’ and refused to live anywhere near the hollow. There are accounts of them not pursuing wounded game beyond the borders of the forest, because they believed it was infested with demons. They thought there was a portal to another place inside. I’ve read that they’d banish their criminals and insane to the forest. And apparently it worked, ’cause none of themwere ever seen again.”

Merle stirred restlessly. “I always thought none of that stuff happened until after LeHorn murdered his wife.”

“Well,” Dale said, “the stuff I read about all happened long before Nelson LeHorn’s ancestors came to America. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. That’s the thing with legends. The truth and the bullshit mix over the years, and you can’t tell the two apart.”

“Whatever happened to him?” I asked.

Dale whispered, “They say Nelson LeHorn is still in the woods somewhere, hiding and doing his spells.”

I toyed with my lighter, spinning it on the tabletop. “Come on. Do you really think he’s still there?”

“Not personally.” Dale shook his head. “I figure he’s either dead or living in Mexico. You’d have to be pretty stupid to still live near the scene of the crime. But there’s other stuff. People see lights in the woods at night. Will-o’-the-wisps, they call them. Strange noises—growling, whispers, and things like that. Crop circles.”

“Crop circles?” I tried not to snicker. “You mean like flying saucers?”

“I mean crop circles,” Dale said. “I don’t care to guess what makes them. There’s other stuff, too. Back in the nineties some researchers from Penn State discovered strange pockets of magnetic ground scattered throughout the forest. They never did figure out what caused it. Some New Age nut said it was an intersection of ley lines, whatever those are. And folks tell of a big black dog with fiery red eyes that roams around the forest at night. They call it a hell hound.”

“And the trees move,” Merle added. “People go in, following a trail, and when they turn around the trail is gone and there are trees where there weren’t any before.”

I remembered having the same impression that morning, the feeling that the trees were sentient—and that they meant Big Steve and me harm.

“Do you guys really believe that stuff?” I asked, trying to sound skeptical. My voice quavered.

Both men shrugged.

Dale got up from his chair. “I’ll go get us more beers.”

He crossed the yard slowly. He seemed exhausted, as if talking about the woods had drained him. I chalked it up to arthritis and the unseasonable heat.

When he was gone Merle said, “It’s no bullshit, Adam. People have vanished inside those woods.”

“When? How many?”

“Oh, couple of dozen that I know of, over the years. Deer hunters. Hikers. Kids out to get laid. Even a logger for the pulp wood company. Some were found, and some…well, some weren’t. They pulled one guy out about two years ago, fella by the name of Chalmers. You remember him?”

I searched my memory, and after a moment it clicked.

“Craig Chalmers? The child molester? The one who kidnapped that little girl in Seven Valleys three days after he’d made parole from Camp Hill?”

Merle nodded. “That’s him. They should have never let that son of a bitch out of prison in the first place. Remember how, after he’d kidnapped her, he took the girl into the woods, and the state police tracked him down? Well, when they found him he was babbling about demons. Said the forest was full of monsters and they were trying to kill him.”

As I considered this, something occurred to me. “When they caught him, hadn’t he been holding the girl at a campsite in a hollow?”

“Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. It wasn’t LeHorn’s Hollow. Same forest, but a different place. Those woods are full of hollows, and if you ask me every one of them is a bad spot. I said before, LeHorn’s Hollow has got roots through that whole place. Maybe it infects the rest of the forest.”

I thought about the hollow I’d been in today. How many otherswere there, I wondered, and did each of them have a satyr statue or a weird stone marker of some kind?

Merle grew silent, and I marveled again how fear could move my rustic, blue-collar neighbor to speak so eloquently.

I asked the next logical question. “Other than Patricia LeHorn, has anybody ever died in there?”

“Like I said, folks have disappeared. You mean have they ever found a body?”

I nodded.

Merle whispered, “I had a good friend, Frank Lehman, die in there a few years ago, actually. As for his body…”

He cleared his throat, spit onto the ground, and leaned back in his chair. I got the impression Merle was gathering his thoughts. He asked me for a cigarette and I gave him one. I hadn’t seen Merle smoke since his last heart attack. He lit it up with the flair and familiarity of an ex-smoker who still misses the habit. Finally he continued. His voice was rough and thick with emotion.

“Frank and I went to high school together. Played football our junior and senior years. We were pretty good buds. Used to drink together down at the Maryland Line on Friday nights. A few years back he went deer hunting with his sons, Mark and Glen, and their friends, Smitty and Luke. Frank got hosed down with Agent Orange over in Vietnam. It left him alone all those years, but then all of the sudden he got cancer. He was dying. Doctors couldn’t do shit about it. So they went deer hunting. It was supposed to be their last, great trip together. Frank had a hunting cabin about a mile from the LeHorn place. They drove up there on a Friday night, and that was the last time anybody saw them alive.”

He took a drag off the cigarette. “Damn, I miss these things. Fucking doctors…”

“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I told him. “If it’s too hard—”

“It’s okay.” He waved his hand, cutting me off. “They got to the cabin on Friday night. We know that because one of the boys, Mark, used his cell phone to call his wife and tell her they’d got there safely. That was the last anybody heard from them. By Saturday night fire companies from six different towns were called to the cabin to fight a forest fire. Took out about thirty acres before they got it under control. They figure it started inside the cabin, but nobody is sure
how
it started. Ronny Sneddon was there with the New Salem ladder crew. He told me it looked like a nuke had gone off. The cabin wasn’t just burned. It was flattened. All the trees around it were nothing but ashes. No forensic evidence, and no bodies to identify, because the bodies were incinerated. There was just nothing left, not even their skeletons. A careless cigarette butt or a knocked-over kerosene lantern wouldn’t have caused a fire like that.”

“So what did cause it?”

Merle shrugged. “Nobody knows. We’ll probably never know. But it’s just another bad thing to come out of that forest. And five more people that
didn’t
come out.”

A cloud passed over the sun, and the yard grew dark and chilly.

We sat in silence while I thought about what I’d heard. Dale returned with a Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and beer, and we talked about less grim topics: the rising property taxes, why foot traffic was off for Merle’s store, the Orioles’ chances this year (we lived close enough to the border that we were allowed to root for Maryland’s teams), the war in Iraq, and how all the good television shows were on cable.

Eventually we heard the telltale crunch of car tires on our gravel driveways, as Claudine and Tara both came home from work, arriving within seconds of each other. (Even though Dale and Claudine were both retired, she volunteered every day at the library.) Tara gave me a look when she saw the empty beer cans on the table in front of me, but didn’t say anything. They both joined us for a few minutes, but soon the women pulled Dale and me away. Merle got up to go as well, and he looked wistful. I imagined he was wishing he still had a wife to drag him away from a bullshit session with the boys.

Tara and I went inside, and Big Steve crawled out from under my desk, stretched, and ran over to greet her. He smelled her shoes, investigating where she’d been for the day. She reached down to pet him, and he wagged his tail and let her know how happy he was to see her.

I was glad she was home as well.

“So what’s for dinner?” Tara asked with a smile.

“Um, I guess time got away from me. Sorry. I didn’t get the lawn finished either.”

Her smile grew. “I noticed. Maybe you can get Merle and Dale to help you finish it tomorrow. If you guys can stay away from the beer long enough.”

I gave her a brief hug. “How was your commute?”

“It sucked. How about yours?”

“It was a long walk from the coffeepot to the computer.” I chuckled. “How are your feet?”

“Killing me.” She sighed. “Have I ever mentioned how much I hate wearing nylons?”

“Once or twice.”

“I’d like to get my hands around the neck of the guy who invented them.”

I grinned. “How do you know it was a guy?”

“Because a woman would never inflict this on her fellow females. Same goes for high heels.” She bent over and rubbed her calf.

“Sit down,” I suggested. “I’ll massage them.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

We went into the living room and sat on the couch. Big Steve jumped up between us. Tara kicked her shoes off and then leaned back, putting her legs over Big Steve’s back. I rubbed her feet while the dog served as a footstool.

Tara closed her eyes and sighed. “God, that feels good.”

“Good,” I replied, and felt the tension draining out of her. “How was your day?”

“Nothing but headaches. How was yours? Did you start the next book yet?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I tried like hell, but I just couldn’t seem to get anything out. Writer’s block, I guess.”

Tara frowned. “You don’t get writer’s block.”

“Well, like I told Leslie today, I guess I do now.”

Her forehead creased. “So what did you and Steve do all day, then?”

I was speechless for a moment. The last thing I wanted to do was tell Tara about what I’d seen in the woods. She’d think I was losing my mind, or, at the very least, get pissed off that I’d seen Shelly Carpenter naked.

“Research,” I lied. “I went online and did research for the next book. And then I started to mow, until Merle interrupted me.”

“Mmmhmmm.” She flexed her toes as I rubbed her heel. “And I bet he and Dale twisted your arm to goof off for the rest of the afternoon, too?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it. They held me at gunpoint. We may have to move.”

She laughed, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss. “I love you, Mr. Senft.”

“I love you, too, Mrs. Senft.”

“Do you?” Her voice changed. She suddenly seemed sad.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Why would you ask me that? What’s wrong, honey?”

She shrugged and began to stroke Big Steve’s fur. “I started thinking about the baby again today. Our receptionist, Robin Harmic, is pregnant. She told us at lunch. I wanted to be happy for her, but I couldn’t. It…it should be me, you know?”

I hugged her tight and kissed her forehead. “I know. And it will be, eventually.”

“Will it?” she asked. “I don’t know, Adam. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I can’t have kids.”

I spoke softly. “We’ve been through this, Tara. The doctors found nothing medically wrong with you. Chances are your body rejected the babies because there was something wrong with them. That doesn’t mean that it will happen again.”

“But what if it does? I can’t go through this again. I just can’t.”

A lone tear slid down her face, and I held her tighter.

Big Steve shifted between us. His sad brown eyes shifted from Tara to me and then back to Tara again. He knew something was wrong. Gently he put his cold nose under Tara’s hand and snuffled.

Tara patted him absentmindedly. “What if we keep miscarrying?”