Read The Girl in the Woods Online
Authors: David Jack Bell
The Girl in the Woods (11 page)
He wiped the blood away from his eyes. The plunger from the bathroom lay in the hallway, and Roger understood. She had used the rounded end of the wooden handle like a spear and jammed it into his face. She must have wanted to get him in the eye, to put his eye out and really hurt him, and Roger felt fortunate that she had missed.
He regained his balance and went into the hallway, looking for her.
But she wasn't there.
The girl was gone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Roger ran downstairs.
He didn't see her in the living room or the dining room, but the front door was still closed. He looked through the big picture window that gave a view of the small front yard and the long driveway that cut through the trees and out to the highway. He didn't see her out there either. He moved toward the back of the house and the kitchen, but stopped before going in. His eye had started bleeding again, and he had to wipe more blood away.
She might be in there, Roger thought, with a knife or a pan or who knows what else. He needed to be cautious.
He peered around the doorframe. He saw the cluttered counters, the big table. And the back door standing wide open.
"Oh, no. Oh, God."
Roger lumbered through the kitchen, his footsteps shaking the floors and rattling the dirty pots on the stovetop. He went outside and into the yard. The side doors of the van were open, but when he went over and looked inside, it was empty. She probably thought she could find the bike there, find the bike and ride away. But Roger had disposed of the bike already. It was part of the plan. He looked around the yard and off to the trees and woods. There was nowhere else she could have gone. She had to have run into the trees. And toward the clearing.
By the time Roger made it across the back yard and to the path into the woods, he was huffing and puffing. Sweat formed on his forehead, mingling with the blood and causing his cut to sting. He wiped the blood away and pushed on.
The tree cover had thinned with the progression of fall. As he moved down the path, the occasional branch took a swipe at his arms and legs. Roger looked ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl. A couple of times he thought he saw her, the red shirt catching his eye somewhere in the distance then, just as quickly, fading from sight. He knew that eventually, if she continued on long enough, she would reach a county road or one of the new subdivisions that had recently been built, but those were several miles away, and the paths weren't straight or predictable. He didn't want her getting away and causing trouble for him, but he didn't want her ending up lost or hurt either. He cared about her. He wanted her back.
Roger came to a spot where the path forked. To the left, the more well-worn path, was the area he hunted, the places he would go with his father. The safe places, as he liked to think of them. And to the right, down the slightly overgrown and less frequently used path, lay the clearing. Roger stood at the fork, considering his options. He thought that it made sense, and seemed more likely, for the girl to take the easier path. Wouldn't she think that she would be more likely to find help down there, in the direction that it appeared more people had traveled? Roger took two steps that way and then stopped.
But...
If someone wanted to throw someone off their trail, wouldn't they take the unexpected path, the one that led to the right? Roger reversed his course and returned to the fork.
It was getting on toward evening. The tall trees blocked most of the declining sun, letting only filtered and indirect light reach the floor of the woods where Roger stood. He had been out there enough to know that the clearing didn't do much to him during the day, that only at night did he feel its full power. But standing there at the fork, and knowing that the new girl might be down there as well, caused the sweetly painful stirring between his legs, a more intense cousin to the feeling he had experienced standing outside the bathroom door just a few minutes earlier. The feeling spread through his blood, a cold current that made his skin prickle, and if it had been dark, as it usually was when Roger came out here, he wouldn't have been surprised to see sparks leaping off of his skin like Fourth of July fireworks.
A low, animalistic grunting slipped through his teeth.
He started down the path toward the clearing, his body moving faster than it normally did, faster than a body that big and clumsy had any right to move. His dad had warned him about rocks and holes, telling him that the last thing Roger wanted to do was turn an ankle or snap a bone out in the woods.
"You'd be laying there 'til you croaked," his dad had said. "You're all alone out here."
But Roger had other things on his mind. He didn't want to be alone, so he had to find the girl and bring her back to the house. Nothing else mattered. He just kept moving forward until he saw the clearing up ahead, its surrounding ring of trees open to him and even inviting. He moved even faster with the goal in sight and soon found himself in that familiar and comfortable space.
He stood at the outer edge, breathing hard. The energy that had been flowing through his body intensified, rising to the surface of his skin like boiling lava, hardening the member between his legs until it hurt. His hands and feet felt like they were twice their normal size. He stood near the grave of the last girl, but he didn't even think about her.
He looked around, but he didn't see the new girl. So he listened, just as he did when he hunted deer.
At first, Roger only heard the blood thumping in his ears, a steady beating that moved in time to the pounding of his heart. But the more he listened, the more he heard his surroundings. The chirping cries of birds, the chittering song of a cicada. Beneath that, he heard a rustling, like a sheet of paper being slowly rolled into a ball. It came from his left, from the edge of the clearing, and at first he thought it was simply the stirring of the wind or even the scuttling movements of a squirrel or chipmunk. But the noise continued, and it sounded too large for one of those tiny ground animals. And then Roger heard something human, a soft whimper of fear or sadness, and he knew the girl was near.
He moved toward the sound, slowly but purposefully. He didn't want to startle her or send her away, but he imagined that if she wasn't jumping to her feet, something might be preventing her, and Roger hoped that she hadn't fallen or hurt herself as she ran through the woods. And if she did, if she was hurt, wasn't that his fault as well? Wasn't he the reason she ran in the first place?
As Roger came closer, he saw her red shirt through the undergrowth and grass that grew on the edge of the clearing. The girl was lying on the ground and crying. Her mouth was open, and tears were running down her cheeks, making lines through the dirt that smeared her face. She looked so young, so like a small child who needed help.
"Are you hurt?" Roger said.
The girl kept crying. "I fell," she said.
Roger didn't know what to do. Even though he and the other girl had a routine, he never really knew what to do when she cried, and she did cry from time to time, even after she had been living with him for many, many years. She usually cried at night, when she thought Roger was asleep, and he'd lay there on his side of the bed, listening but not acting like he had heard, while the girl muttered and sniffed, sometimes saying something over and over again, something that sounded like the word "Mommy."
Roger held out his hand. "Here," he said.
But the girl didn't take it. She pointed at the ground, near her feet, and Roger thought he knew what was wrong.
"Is it your ankle?" he said. "Let me help you up."
She shook her head. She kept shaking it and pointing at the ground.
The light was fading, but Roger leaned forward and looked where the girl was pointing. It took a moment to see, but eventually he saw something nestled in the grass and weeds, something a dirty gray-white color. Roger knew right away what it was and why it made the girl cry.
It was a human skull and bones.
Roger held his hand out again.
"Come on," he said. "Let's get you out of here."
This time, the girl reached out and took his hand, allowing him to pull her to her feet. She started muttering.
"I fell, so I tried to hide, to get down in the weeds there, and I found those bones. I laid right on top of them. Why are they there? What happened?"
Roger didn't respond. He started guiding the girl back toward the path and the house. She went along for a moment, her body limp and fluid, but then Roger felt a stiffness coming into her form, a resistance to his efforts to move her along.
"My God," she said. "You're going to kill me."
"No."
"You killed all of these people, and you're going to kill me. My God, my God, my God."
She started pulling away, trying to release herself from Roger's grip. Roger tightened his hold, but one of the girl's arms slipped out and began flailing. She went for Roger's face, swinging and scratching, jabbing at his eyes. He leaned away, letting her go wild for a moment, then he stepped in and tried to pin her arms to her sides. The girl turned away from him, so that he ended up grabbing her from behind, but he managed to pin her arms by holding her tight across the middle. He increased the pressure and heard the air go out of her mouth with a soft whoosh. The girl made a small grunting noise, then was silent. He remembered the bedroom and how he almost choked off all of her air. He eased up a little and heard the girl gasp again. She was okay.
They stood like that for a moment, Roger holding her up while she caught her breath. She still felt limp and weak in his arms. He hadn't been this close to a girl, hadn't touched one in this way in so long. The stirring, the aching pleasure between his legs, had never gone away, and with the girl so close, her backside rubbing up against his front, it grew even more intense, more sickly pleasurable until Roger thought he was going to explode.
And he was in the clearing with her. And something in his head told him, over and over, that now was the time, now was the time to make her his wife.
Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.
Roger took her and lowered her to the ground.
The girl gasped again, this time with the knowledge of what Roger was about to do. He worked at her clothes quickly, his big hands suddenly more nimble than they had ever been before. The girl offered little in the way of resistance to him. It seemed as though she had already given up and accepted her fate, and Roger took this as a good sign. He had a wife. The plan had worked. He had chosen the right one.
When he had her clothes off, throwing the bike shorts aside like they were garbage, he worked on his, opening his zipper with one hand, slipping his member out, the thing feeling huge as a log in his hand. He remembered how to do it.
The girl lay still beneath him while he did it. His face was close to the dirt, smelling the rich soil, the musty odor of the ground, while the girl's hair tickled his nose. Somewhere beneath them, worms crawled through the earth, feeding off the bones of the last girl, but Roger didn't care. He was here now, alive, with his new wife, and when the moment came his body grew rigid, almost frozen, then shuddered repeatedly as he shot off into the girl, the flooding release feeling like it came from the very ground itself and out into her. He was taking her, making her his own, just like his dad had told him.
Take a wife
, the old man said, and that's what he meant.
Take a wife in the clearing.
, the old man said, and that's what he meant.
Take a wife in the clearing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was after seven, the sun slipping away into a blaze of red and orange, when Diana began her drive to Kay Todd's house. She found her listed in the county phone directory, a trailer court fifteen miles away in Grainger, a one-stoplight-and-post-office town west of New Cambridge. Diana had spent the day trying not to think about Kay Todd, her cigarettes, her leathery face. She went for a much-needed run. She scanned the want ads, circling three waitressing jobs and one position as a security guard. She cleaned the bathroom and kitchen in her apartment. But in the back of her head—and sometimes in the front—she heard Dan's voice.
It's impossible for this woman to know anything about your sister.
But what if she did?
Diana quickly found herself in the countryside. Her headlights illuminated the trees along the side of the road, and once she saw three deer in the tall grass, their eyes appearing in the headlights like glowing, yellow marbles. The approach of the car didn't bother them, and as Diana passed they bent their heads back to the ground, largely indifferent to the human life buzzing past them on the highway.
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