Deep in the Darkness Read online

  I said, "Let me put her to bed, and then we can discuss it." Me, procrastinating again.

  I scooped Jessica up and carried her upstairs, walking through the moonshadows that painted the open staircase with gray slants. I made it to the top and thought of Rosy Deighton...well not Rosy, but the woman in the room I met that day, how she rose from bed and spoke inscrutably of them, how they'll get me like they did everyone else in this God-forsaken town. I'd kept this odd little tidbit of information to myself, did my best, really, to try to shove it from my mind. But it kept coming back, the image of Rosy and her gnarled face, her disfigurements, the yellow nails tapping their signal upon the windowpane as she forewarned me of some obscure and hidden threat.

  It terrified me.

  I stood on the landing for a minute, maybe more, holding Jessica, embracing her as though a clear and present danger positively existed in the cool unstirring darkness of my home. She fidgeted slightly in my arms; a wave of sick fear burned a hole in my stomach. Confusion beset me, strengthening the bloom of fear within me.

  Something bad happened here, my conscience told me. There was a sudden surge of anxiety torturing me. My breathing was quick and labored, matching the urgent pace of my heart; my legs felt like sodden tea bags; my feet and hands tingled, as though all the blood had rushed away from them towards my head, causing my lightheadedness. The human body responds dramatically to the perceived threat of danger, the symptoms as real as if an actual intruder emerged from the darkness with a weapon aimed in one's direction. But there was no intruder, no immediate peril. So then why am I so damn terrified? Is my subconscious trying to tell me something? Or am I in need of medication like so many of the patients that leave my office with an RX for Xanax clutched tightly in their sweaty palms?

  Something crashed in Jessica's room.

  I started—exaggerated response I told myself—then tried to soothe it away, taking long slow deep breaths through my nostrils, blowing it out across my coated tongue. My body ran with gooseflesh, and again I had to remind myself that there was nothing to be afraid of—spontaneous crashes were nothing out of the ordinary when you had a playful Cocker Spaniel sniffing about the house. No what ifs here, nothing to ask the anxious mind that never offered a practical answer.

  I took Jessica into her room and placed her gently on the bed. A cool breeze raced in through the screen, tossing the lace curtain toward the ceiling; the billowing fabric looked like a ghost caught in the clutches of the window frame as if it attempted to sneak its way in from the cold night. On the floor alongside the dresser lay one of Jessica's many plastic dolls, its fall coming from a toss of wind, not one of Page's nosy pokes. Its head had come loose and rolled halfway across the room. I could see the glassy eyes staring up at me, unblinking, seeming to forcefully demand, Michael, give your wife another child. I need another playmate. I retrieved the head and tried to reattach it, but failed in my attempt to do so, the plastic eyelids blinking as it shifted in my grip. On the dresser Jessica had all her dolls lined up. There was a gap in the queue. Oddly, it reminded me of a missing tooth. I walked over and fitted the doll back in its spot, alongside her teddy bear with the one button eye that dangled from loose threads, and nestled the head in its lap. I then shed the curtain aside and peered out the open window. The woods were as dark as the ocean at night. Huge. Threatening. A monster. Psychologically, I could have been standing at the edge of the universe, or in the wake of a giant tidal wave.

  That's your anxious mind speaking out again, Michael. Time to let it go.

  I closed the window, swallowed a dry lump in my throat, and tucked Jessica in, snug as a bug. Gently, I ran a finger across her cool brow, moving aside a blonde curl, then kissed her goodnight. Standing in the doorway I couldn't help but stare at my sleeping beauty before heading back downstairs to discuss adding another child to the Cayle family household.

  9

  The fourth Sunday we were in the house, I decided it was time to strap on the work boots and take a nice long hike through the woods. Christine had brought Jessica into town for lunch, a haircut, and perhaps some shopping (as per Jessica, there was a toy store in town, a bit of information she must have gained through osmosis), and I took in the warm June sunshine with some iced tea (Rosy Deighton's recipe), snuggled in a folding chair in the front yard. As soon as I finished the tea and stood to make my way around back, Phillip Deighton came walking across the front lawn. Page, who'd been sleeping in the shade of the chair, yipped a few times then licked himself and went back to dreaming about filet mignon, or t-bones.

  "Hello Phillip," I said. "Have a seat. Chair's a bit old, but clean. Found it in the garage."

  "Looks as though you're headin' out." Phillip had on a pair of carpenter shorts, work boots, and a golf shirt. As usual, gray chest hair exploded from the collar.

  "I was going to explore the woods a bit."

  Phillip nodded knowingly. "Hmm...you know where you're going? I'm only saying this 'cause it's easy to get lost when you don't have your direction about you." Phillip painted a straightforward grin on his face: next best thing to coming right out and asking if he could come along.

  "No, I haven't been back there yet. At least not beyond about thirty feet."

  "Well, it's a good thing I wore my boots. Gets a bit mushy back there. And there's also something back there I think you'd like to see."

  Apparently I wasn't going to be spending this time alone. Not that I minded, of course. Phillip had been pretty good company since we moved to Ashborough, and when push came to shove, he was my only friend. "I could use a tour guide, I suppose."

  "There's some beaten paths in and about the clearer areas," he said. "Best to find them and not stray too far. Three, four times a year the Sheriff and his men end up scouring the woodland beyond the town 'cause some kids end up losing their sense of direction. And don't you think it hasn't happened to any adults, either."

  "As long as it isn't any trouble..."

  "No trouble at all."

  "Well, then let's go."

  I grabbed two plastic bottles of water before heading out, and in five minutes we were well beyond the perimeter of the woods, to a point where I couldn't even see my house anymore. The land rose up over a hill and then down along one of Phillip's aforementioned beaten paths. I thought it interesting how the woods, quite thick in most places, cleared every now and then to give way to brambles and high grass. Still, the trees remained intimate, their branches reaching out and caressing like fingers, the leaves whispering songs down from the clutches of balmy winds. It was that special time of year when Spring surrendered to Summer, sending kisses of warmth across your moistening skin. It showed down my chest in a dark wet stripe, Phillip had one on his back. A product of nature's embrace. How poetic, I thought.

  Phillip walked off the path, to the left. Twigs and sticks crunched under his feet. "Come this way."

  "Don't stray too far. I don't want to get lost."

  "I know these here woods pretty well, Michael. You just stick with me and there'll be nothing to worry about." Deighton didn't catch the joke.

  The path we traveled was carpeted with slick leaves and scattered pine needles, making the going a bit slow, which didn't matter much to me, as I'd intended on a leisurely stroll with mother nature and this was as close to pure nature as you could get (putting aside the errant soda can or beer bottle whose labels were as colorless as Phillip's chest hair). My guess was that we'd traveled about a quarter-mile now, more than half of that on flat land. Eventually we stopped for a breather.

  "You mentioned that you had something to show me," I said.

  "Yep..." Phillip took a mouthful of water, smacked his lips, then changed the subject. "You've any idea where we are?"

  "Forgot my compass, Phil."

  "That way's north," he said, pointing. "About four miles from here is the town. If you walk in any westward direction you'll end up in someone's back yard. If you go south, well then you'll get nothing but forest...probably forty
miles worth."

  Something shifted in the woods about ten feet away. I felt a bit of a scare in my heart, then peered watchfully ahead. Phillip hunkered down and I followed suit. He placed an index finger across his lips (which still had the cigar between them) and pointed. I looked back and saw it. To the right, nestled amidst a patch of ferns, a spectacular doe. Its felt was smooth and nutty, eyes wet and wide and cautious, mouth gnawing fruitfully on a sapling. This was a hunter's dream come true, I thought, and I savored every moment by admiring this tiny yet exquisite slice of God's creative pie. Man, what a rush.

  And then, in a leap, it was gone.

  Phillip stood up, groaned some. "Oh...that was a treat."

  "Is that what you wanted to show me?" I asked jokingly.

  He smiled, trudged forward. "Follow me."

  We walked perhaps another quarter mile. My legs tightened up as a few more short inclines made themselves present—the result of a lack of exercise, I thought—and I made a point to heed my own advice one of these days. I looked good, but I needed to start jogging again.

  Neil Farris took to a daily ritual of jogging. Lot of good it did him.

  The passage twisted downwards, cutting in and about some very old pines, then the trees fell away in a spot home to a mass of tangly undergrowth. Roots rose up from the ground like tentacles, reaching to trip up the path. The ground here was spongy and the mud came up to my ankles at one point. But then the path rose again, and the pines reclaimed the territory, as did firmer ground. The canopy of branches here was thin and had a difficult time blocking the sun's rays which were now lancing down from directly overhead. Sweat jeweled on my brow. My heart rate was that of a runner's.

  "So where are we going?" I asked Phillip. I realized, suddenly, that he'd taken me to the proverbial 'middle of nowhere'.

  "Almost there," he answered, wherever 'there' was. Middle of nowhere.

  We culminated another small hill, then came back down into a rather large clearing within a circle of ivy-shrouded oaks. I was taken with awe, my senses overloaded with surprise and bewilderment. The scene before me was unbelievable.

  I described it as a circle of oaks because that's exactly how this area was shaped, leading me to believe that this place had been not been some casual fluke of nature; it was too perfect to have not been influenced by the hand of man. Here was a rather large area, the diameter perhaps sixty or seventy feet across the open center, the pines standing like soldiers around the perimeter. Yet, despite the oddly cut-out area, I couldn't help but find distraction with something even more incredible here, something extremely...ominous.

  The clearing was crowded with stones, and I'm not just talking a few random rocks and pebbles. These were great slabs of non-indigenous stone, each of them rectangular in shape and fitted into some odd configuration as though the whole had been constructed as some sort of altar or temple. I thought to myself, This baby is old, and I couldn't help but think of Stonehenge, or Easter Island. Some of the stones stood on end as high as ten feet, some only went a few feet in the air but were no less menacing. Others lay flat on the forest floor seemingly situated at complementary angles. I imagined that if one viewed the entire structure from above, some brand or pattern would make itself present. Of course, to attempt such a feat would be impossible because, despite the large circular clearing in which these slabs of carved stone were erected, the trees here had still found a way to extend their branches out to close out the sky. This forced the surrounding shrubs and smaller trees to compete for precious sunlight, and kept this miraculous work of ancient art a secret. Even more amazing was how nature itself appeared to have conformed to the ancient monuments: a perfect carpet of leaves and pine needles blanketed the floor around and about the stones, and yet not one leaf or needle lay atop of them. It was as though someone had meticulously tended to the area, passing through every so often with a dustbuster or broom to take away any leaves or needles littering the smooth-weathered surfaces. But that wasn't the case, of course, and the more I gazed at the stones, the more I came to assume that there might be some incredible harmony at work here: the forces of nature toiling gracefully alongside some deeper metaphysical power. It sounded a bit kooky but I just couldn't see humans being involved here, with the evenness of this place. It was too isolated. Too spooky. Too perfect. Too...I could go on and on.

  The whole picture...it looked feigned—although this could never be the subject of some Grandma Moses piece depicting any other part of Ashborough. No. This was something for the imagination of Michael Whelan, or Frank Frazetta. Yet...still...imagined this landscape was not. This was real.

  "This is amazing," I said, sounding like I meant it. I walked across the center of the area, pacing from stone to stone, checking out their smooth surfaces and the crude enormity of them all. A quick count had me estimating the amount of stones to be about thirty. Jesus, I thought. How did they get here?

  "I knew you'd like it," Phillip said, sitting down on one of the stones and lighting his cigar.

  "This is incredible," I said, tilting my head in attempt to make out some sort of purposeful pattern in their layout. I tried not to get too crazy about it though, local town historians had probably studied this scene for years without finding any answers to their ancient function, design, or intent.

  Although the stones exhibited no flutterings from above—at one point I saw a leaf seesawing lazily down from the canopy and magically divert its path to avoid a stone before alighting on the ground—some had had their fare share of crude carvings, and the largest stone which lay flat and detached from its brethren in the middle of the configuration possessed a multitude of brown Rorschadt-like stains.

  Blood.

  I paced over and gathered a closer look at the stains, touched them, wanted to smell them—doctor's intuition setting in—but stopped myself from doing so. They were as dry as the rocks themselves but didn't look as old. Common sense told me that over time they would have eroded and faded away regardless of the stones' porousness. Which meant the blood stains—if that's indeed what they were—hadn't been there very long. That unnerved me.

  Looks like an ancient altar of some sort.

  I turned to face Phillip but he'd gotten up from his spot. The trail of smoke from his cigar showed that he'd moved beyond the circle of stones. I could see him trembling, restless with deep lines of tension creasing his aging face. I thought: he's tormented about his wife. Given the dire circumstances I'd be too, and again I told myself, despite Phillip's constant reminders, that Rosy Deighton had not been a victim of cancer (I still hadn't located her file and resigned myself to the fact that one didn't exist). My conscience told me that she'd been attacked by an animal, more than likely a dog or two. Or three. Like Neil Farris. So what? I thought, trying to minimize my concern. Regardless of how Rosy's afflictions were obtained, they had been endless and traumatic and gruesome and would always be till death do they part. I offered Phillip a nod of reassurance and he knew where I was coming from. He winked back, puffing on his cigar.

  "How old are these?" I asked. One of a half-million questions rolling around in my mind.

  He shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know for sure. Thousand years, I guess. Let me show you something else."

  We walked to the outermost area at the opposite end of the structure beyond the perimeter of the circle. A very large stone stood perpendicular to the others, ten feet away at the edge of clearing. Crabgrass hugged the bottom in bunches, errant ivies snaking about it like lanyards. On the face of the stone were a series of Hieroglyph-like carvings, illegible pictograms that decorated the upper half of the ten-by-six foot stone. Had anything like this ever been discovered outside Egypt? On the bottom were a succession of straight-line markers as though someone many years ago had kept a running total of something important. Sequenced by fives, I easily added up the notches. They totaled eighty-three.

  "See those notches?" Phillip asked as I ran a finger in the indentation of one. "Four hundred years ago people u
sed this place to make sacrifices. Each one of those markers represents an event."

  "An event?"

  He nodded. "Yep, a sacrifice."

  "What kind of sacrifices?"

  Phillip put his hands in his pockets. "Well, according to legend...town legend that is, and I say that because nobody knows for sure how far out beyond Ashborough our little piece of history has traveled over the years. Old Lady Zellis, she'll tell you tales that'll pull your eyes out of your head, and she knows every legend that runs from Ashborough all the way to Blacksburgh and beyond, though she might be the only one. You see, each town has their own personal legend and where they originate is usually where they stay. No one cares much for the next town's folklore, and no one likes to share their stories either. I guess you can call it hometown pride.

  "Anyway, there used to be a race of aboriginal people, not Indians, but a different kind of people who lived here in isolation long before the white man came and pilfered it all away. This land had been wholly unoccupied and unferreted by the native folk, and for years our New England forefathers heeded their warning and steered clear."

  "Their warning?"

  He hesitated, looked me in the eyes, then said, "That all those who tread this land shall fall victim to the savagery of the Isolates."

  "The Isolates..."

  "This is what the Indians called them, these supposedly underdeveloped aborigines."

  A silence grew between us. I took a sip of water and let the story sink in. The savagery of the Isolates. I moved my sights from Phillip to that large white slab in the center with the brownish stains. To me it looked like a great dead heart, the surrounding stones the fossilized remains of some long extinct dinosaur. Again it occurred to me that the whole of all these parts seemed much too tended in appearance, very un-ruin-like for something supposedly a thousand years old, and it really bothered me.