Sacrifice (7 page)

“Because these two wholesome boys would never lie?” Dave said.

“No,” Marc said. “Because I saw him, too.”

All eyes turned to Marc. He gave each one a look like a novice cliff diver gives the water before his plunge. Then he stared out over their heads.

“It was about a week ago,” Marc began. “A few days after the Water Tower Incident. I was home that afternoon…”

And Marc told the story of his own encounter with the Woodsman.

Chapter Sixteen

1980

A week earlier at Marc’s house.

“Marcus, we gotta go,” Marc’s mother called down the hallway.

Danny already stood at the door. He wore the tan golf hat he always wore when he went outdoors. Danny loved to ride in the car. Albert was at daycare.

Marc carried his violin case down the hall. With Marc’s slight build and short height, the instrument looked nowhere near as diminutive as it did with most people.

Marc played the violin. He also played piano and enough guitar to impress his friends who didn’t know a B flat from a flat tire. Don’t misunderstand—he was the first in line for tickets when the hot rock bands like Boston and Styx came to the Nassau Coliseum. But of the six, he knew there was more to music, dimensions the others did not grasp. The violin was his instrument of choice.

At seventeen, he hated having his mother drive him to violin lessons. Every part of the idea screamed “loser”. But he did not have the luxury of a hand-me-down vehicle from his less affluent parents. He sure wasn’t going to ask one of the Half Dozen for a lift. His violin lessons weren’t a secret, but calling attention to them would open up a floodgate of abuse. He liked it better when his teacher had come to his house for the lessons, but he’d screwed himself there by getting too good. His tutor had recommended a more skilled instructor, one whose reputation had transcended the need to make house calls.

“Do you have everything?” his mother asked. She stared at his shoulders. “You should bring a jacket. The afternoon might be cooler.”

It was June. People were in shorts.

“Ma, I’m fine,” Marc answered. “I’m capable of dressing myself. I’m seventeen.”

“So, my eldest son, you are so old, you drive us to the lesson.” She held out the keys to the car.

Marc hesitated. A teen mulling whether to drive was even odder than one playing the violin. But his mother had mastered the art of passenger seat driving and could inject advice on any aspect of his technique. Since he’d graduated from his learner’s permit, he rarely drove with her in the car. He took the keys.

“I can go by myself, Ma,” he said. Danny’s omnipresent smile drooped. “I’ll be back in ninety minutes.”

“No, I’ll run errands and pick up Albert,” she said. “This will be better.”

Danny beamed, his trip assured.

Marc knew it wouldn’t be better. And it wasn’t. His mother’s traffic paranoia meant they left too early and he arrived twenty minutes before his lesson started. He cheered himself up with the knowledge that, after haggling with the butcher over the price and quality of today’s meat, she would probably also be twenty minutes late picking him up.

His instructor had a room in a narrow music shop at the end of a strip mall. Deciding not to subject himself to the screeching practice of the current student, Marc took a seat outside against the side wall of the building. The sun was warm and the oppressive summer humidity was still weeks away. In his head, he went over the piece he’d been practicing all week, fingering the neck of an invisible violin in his left hand.

Next door was the fenced playground of a daycare center. A swarm of kids under four years old raced around a collection of half-scale slides and swings. A woman leaned against the inside of the fence. She puffed on a cigarette and checked her watch at intervals of less than a minute. The shrill din of toddlers at play rolled across the parking lot. It still beat listening to first-year violin.

That was when Marc first noticed him. The preternaturally thin man in the homemade leather outfit. The man with the pointed hat and pointed nose. He was on the outside of the fence, looking in at the kids. His face was shredded almost beyond recognition, like something from a B-grade horror movie. Marc felt his stomach roil. This disfigured man was in the caregiver’s line of sight, but she paid him no mind.

Marc couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he could tell the man was calling to one of the kids, a boy in the sandbox with a bowl haircut and red coveralls. The boy played with a small, diecast pickup truck and made roads in the sand.

The boy looked over at the Woodsman, who was pantomiming holding something big in his arms. The Woodsman held it out like an offering. However the boy saw the Woodsman, and whatever the Woodsman made the boy think he had in his hands made an irresistible package. The boy smiled and dropped his tiny toy in the sand. His eyes went kind of glassy.

The Woodsman pointed at the gate in the corner of the playground. The boy stood up, transfixed.

Marc’s fingers froze mid-imaginary chord. A chill went up his spine. That creature had nothing good on his mind. And why wasn’t that woman shooing him away from those kids. What kind of idiot was she?

Mark was about to shout at her when the PA from the daycare interrupted him. “Howie, your mother is here. Howie.”

Howie didn’t race to the office. His next step to the gate was more hesitant. He looked a bit confused but his eyes kept that glazed, thousand-yard stare. The Woodsman motioned for him to hurry.

“Howie!” said the woman at the fence. She ground her cigarette into the ground with her heel and marched off in his direction. She scooped him up under the arms and dropped him back down facing the main office door. “Up front you go! No keeping your mother waiting. All the toys will be here for you tomorrow.”

That snapped Howie back to the real world. He chuckled and ran as fast as his tiny legs could carry him to the building entrance. Marc looked back outside the fence, but the Woodsman was gone, though how he got away so quickly was a mystery.

The whole event gave Marc the creeps. The hideous man in the bizarre garb, the way he transfixed the little boy, the oblivious playground attendant. The more he thought about it, the more he thought it must have been his imagination. It was just too strange.

He went in for his lesson. He played like crap.

Chapter Seventeen

So in the shadow of the Whitman bleachers, Marc told his story to his friends. When he finished, you could hear a pin drop.

“Here’s what’s really creepy,” Dave said. “You still take violin lessons.”

“Honestly,” Marc said, ignoring Dave’s jab, “until you two told about what you saw at the accident, I really doubted the whole thing myself.”

“You guys are full of it,” Paul said. “You are all putting me on, like when you sent me the fake letter telling me the football physicals were being given at the hospital emergency room.” That classic prank had Paul arguing with an ER nurse for a half hour while the rest of them rolled in the parking lot laughing. No one was laughing now.

“Do we look like we’re kidding?” Ken said. He turned to Marc. “Did you ever see him again there?”

“No,” Marc said. “I went back the next day and the day after. Nothing. I couldn’t very well ask the people working there about it. The woman obviously couldn’t see the Woodsman.”

“And neither could the other kids at the day care,” Dave added. “Just the…target.”

“And both times, the kid couldn’t have seen the Woodsman as he really looked,” Ken said. “He’s too creepy to ever have a kid trust him.”

“Assuming all this is real,” Bob said, “what do we do about it?”

“The thing seems invisible,” Ken said. “But I say we pair up and hunt this thing. Intercept it before it makes another Josie Mulfetta.”

“And another Vinnie Santini,” Jeff said. “If it looks for groups of kids, so should we. Ken and I can see it, so we make two groups with one of us in each one.”

“Well, boys,” Bob said. “Love to help, but I’ve got a shift to pull. I’ve got a break at five. Drop by and tell me how it’s going.”

As Bob turned to leave, he almost bowled over Katy coming up to the bleachers.

“Katy! Jesus! I nearly creamed you. Wear a bell or something.”

Katy stepped around Bob and tapped her watch.

“Late, Jeff?” she said. “I figured when the only the cars in the lot were from the Half Dozen, you’d all be back here.”

“Katy,” Jeff said, with a combination of embarrassment and regret. “I’m sorry.” He pulled her around the corner out of earshot. He held her hand. “I know we were going to shop for prom corsages. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Well there’s still time,” Katy said. “I don’t need to be home for an hour.”

Jeff winced and braced for impact. “I can’t make it. We’ll do it tomorrow, OK?”

Katy dropped his hand like a dead fish.

“That’s twice you’ve cancelled this,” she said. “I’m the one who wants to go to prom. If you don’t want to go, say so. Don’t play around like this.”

“That’s not it, Katy,” Jeff said. He glanced back at his friends under the bleachers. “I just can’t do it now. We’ll go tomorrow. I promise.”

“Well, great,” Katy said. She gave the rest of the Half Dozen a rueful shake of her head. “And how the hell am I supposed to get home since the busses left half an hour ago?”

“Bob can take you,” Jeff said. Bob was halfway to his car. “Bob!” he shouted across the parking lot. “Give a Katy a ride home, will ya?”

“Are you nuts?” Katy whispered. Bob drove his mother’s old ’72 Duster. Bob had replaced the six-cylinder drive train with the innards of a 340 Barracuda. The exterior was an experiment in Bondo and two colors of primer. Major components tended to fail without notice.

“What am I, a fucking taxi?” Bob shouted. “C’mon, Katy. I’m already running late.”

“I’ll take you, Katy,” Dave offered. He hopped off the bleacher. “I’ve got to go anyhow.”

“Thank you,” Katy said.

“Fill me in on the ghost story later, man,” Dave said to Ken.

Katy gave Jeff a look that could freeze a roaring fire. Then she followed Dave across the parking lot.

“I’ve seen that look,” Paul said to Jeff. “She wants your nuts in a vise.”

“We’ll work it out,” Jeff said.

“Let’s get going,” Ken said. “Those who see the Woodsman with those who don’t. Paul and Jeff in one car. Marc and me in another.”

“Ken,” Marc said, “drop me at the library instead. I want to check if Josie was the first ‘accident’ a kid has met up with.”

And with an optimism fueled by youth, two-thirds of the Half Dozen went out to find a needle in a haystack.

Chapter Eighteen

Katy sat scrunched in the far corner of the Vista Cruiser’s front seat. She had a lock of her hair wound tight around two fingers. She stared out the side window. Thoughts of killing Jeff flitted through her mind. She was going to call her best friend Olivia as soon as she got home. Liv wouldn’t believe this. Or maybe she would. She wasn’t much of a Jeff fan.

“You OK?” Dave offered as he piloted the car between the strip malls on Route 25.

“Yeah. Fine.” She kept staring past the passing businesses.

A few minutes of silence.

“Jeff has a lot going on,” Dave said.

Katy cut him off with a raised hand. “I know you’ll all stick up for each other. You’re an annoyingly tight little group. Don’t defend him.”

“I wasn’t about to,” Dave said. “I was going to add 'But he doesn’t prioritize the right things.’”

Katy looked over at Dave, as if seeing him for the first time. The little time she had spent with him had been in the company of the Half Dozen. She hadn’t heard a sentence from him that hadn’t dripped with sarcasm before. “Really?”

“Yeah, I mean we’re nearly done with Whitman High,” Dave said. “There are only two things that matter between now and then. Graduation and prom.”

Katy’s jaw dropped. “Didn’t I hear you describe the prom as ‘hanging out in the gym and listening to a shitty band’?”

“Actually it was ‘hanging out in the gym
wearing rented clothes
and listening to a shitty band.’ But that’s what it is to me. I don’t have someone worth taking.”

From the profile view, Katy could see behind Dave’s glasses. His eyelashes were long, with a graceful upper arc. His face seemed softer without the omnipresent smirk that accompanied his verbal barbs. Sunlight danced off his blond hair as the car passed through the shadows of overhanging trees.

She thought this outburst of sensitivity had to be a joke, but second-guessed herself. This
was
the guy who was going to go to forestry college to protect the environment and save Bambi from wild fires. A jackass wouldn’t want to do that as a job.

Dave spun the wheel and entered the parking lot of the Venetian, the restaurant Katy’s family owned. Her family lived on the second floor. She was the third generation to do so. Katy grew up in the Venetian. One week after her birth, Mom was back at work while Katy dozed in a crib in the office. Her father ran the kitchen, and he and his wife had ensured that Katy was rarely alone. Pre-kindergarten play time was rolling silverware into cloth napkins. The customers thought it was cute when she took it upon herself to wait tables at the tender age of nine. At sixteen she had a timecard. The lot was empty though the neon sign in the window burned OPEN. He pulled up to the entrance.