Read The Girl in the Woods Online
Authors: David Jack Bell
The Girl in the Woods (29 page)
"You can't be my wife anymore," Roger said.
She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'm not your wife. I never was. Just because you raped me doesn't make me your wife."
Roger didn't like that word.
Rape.
It wasn't true.
Rape.
It wasn't true.
The girl kicked out and scored a direct hit against Roger's shinbone, making him yelp in pain.
"Damn you," he said. He held the knife up in the space between them.
"Go ahead," the girl said. "Go ahead and cut me right here." She pointed at her neck. Her face contorted with anger, making her almost unrecognizable to Roger. "Or do you want to rape me again first. Is that it, you fat, fucking retard?"
Roger swung and the back of his hand connected with the side of the girl's head. She yelped and fell back against the soft earth. She stayed down, sniffling and sobbing.
"Don't make me do that again," Roger said.
She didn't look up but stayed facing the ground, her shoulders shaking as she cried.
"What do you want from me?" she said, her voice low. "Do you want to kill me? Is that it?"
"I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody."
"You killed that man today. He came to save me, and you killed him."
"He was a cop," Roger said. "He wanted to take you away. He ruined everything. It always gets ruined." Roger felt like crying again. He felt the hot tears welling, and his breath hiccupped. "I just want my house and my wife. That's all."
"You can have those things."
"No, I can't. Look at me," he said. "I can't."
The girl didn't respond, and he knew why. He was ugly and cursed. A fucking retard. He'd always be alone. After today, he'd always be alone.
"You should just let me go. It will be all right if you let me go."
Roger shook his head. "No. That's not what the clearing wants. It's not right."
"The clearing?"
"It wants you dead," he said. "It wants your bones in the ground with the other girl. That's what it wants me to do, and so I do it. I feed the clearing bones. That's who I am."
"Then stop it. You don't have to be that way. Let me go."
"No, they'll put me away, in the jail."
"They'll help you." The girl reached out. She touched Roger's leg. He let her hand stay there. "It will be okay. You're sick."
"Sick?"
"Yes, you need help."
Roger knew what kind of help she meant. She meant the kind that happened in a hospital, a loony hospital, which might be worse than jail. Roger jerked his leg away from the girl. He wasn't going to go there no matter what the girl said.
"No."
The girl started to scramble backward, moving like a crab on her hands and knees. She flipped over and started to stand up, but Roger grabbed her from behind. He pinned her to the ground.
"No. No. No. No."
She kept repeating the word, her voice a hoarse whisper, as Roger turned her over so they were face to face. Her neck was exposed. Roger moved up, using his knees to pin the girl's shoulders, leaving his hands free.
"I'm not sick," he said.
He took the girl by the hair with his left hand and, with his right, brought the knife across her neck with a swift, clean motion. The girl gasped. Bright, red blood pumped out of the wound, spilling down her neck and over Roger's pants leg into the ground where the clearing soaked it up like a thirsty beast.
* * *
When the girl stopped breathing and after she'd stopped bleeding, Roger wiped the knife on his pants' leg. He knew the blood wasn't enough, the clearing wanted all of her. The clearing wanted everything.
He had no choice. He had to bury her and hide her from the world. Even if the cops knew about him and the clearing and the girl, he still had to try to hide her. He had to at least try.
He dug the hole, slowly and carefully. He should have been more tired after all of the work the day had brought, but the clearing kept him going. He knew that. He felt the burst it provided, surging through his body like adrenaline. When the hole was dug, right next to the spot where the last girl lay, he dragged the new girl over and prepared to push her in. But before he did, he stopped.
The painful pressure grew at the center of his body. He remembered burying the last girl, and taking her one last time before he placed her body in the grave. The clearing was telling him this was all right, this was the thing he was meant to do—take one last thing before he said goodbye.
Roger gritted his teeth with anger. He bit down so hard he thought his teeth might chip. He didn't want to do it. He didn't want to do the things the clearing told him to do. But the urge was so strong, so consuming. He felt like he was going to explode. His breath came in heaving convulsions.
"No," he said. "No."
He fell to his knees, crippled by desire.
He placed his hands on the girl. He felt her soft flesh beneath his fingers. He grabbed a handful of her clothes.
"No."
He pushed and rolled her into the freshly dug grave. He grabbed the shovel and began throwing the dirt on top of her, covering her face first and then the rest of her. He didn't do a neat job. He just wanted to not see her anymore, to take away the temptation that burned through his body like hot iron.
When he was finished, he dropped the shovel. He wiped the dirt off his hands, hoping to leave the clearing behind forever. He felt a dizziness come over him, and as he walked out of the clearing, he stumbled. The place wanted to hold him, to keep him there just as he had kept the girl in the house. But Roger wouldn't let it. He'd break its hold.
He pushed himself to his feet and ran from the clearing without looking back.
CHAPTER THIRTY
In the weeks since the vision outside Dan's house, Diana felt as though her nerves were becoming metal springs. They were coiled and taut and ready to bounce at the slightest provocation. She jumped when a door slammed somewhere in the building, and when she entered the apartment, she took extra care turning the two locks and fastening the chain on her front door. Only after completing those gestures, only after barricading herself in her own apartment, did she realize how pointless they were, and that was the most frightening fact of all.
Her enemies didn't exist outside. The real enemy lived inside, somewhere in her own brain, an organ which was once again turning against its owner, like a well-trained attack dog that decides to savage its master. Except, Diana believed, her brain had never been well trained. It had been turning against her for a number of years, and after a long dormant period, was now back with a vengeance, ready to finish the job. How that job would be finished and what the ultimate measure of victory or defeat would be, she couldn't guess. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
The problems were the worst at night.
At night, she feared closing her eyes. She didn't know what would happen when her conscious defenses were down, leaving her subconscious—or whatever was responsible for the visions that plagued her—to take over like an unruly child left without supervision. So she spent a number of nights lying in bed, all the lights in the apartment on, trying to will herself to stay awake. For a short time, it worked. She sat up through the night, her eyes growing increasingly bleary and strained, and come morning she'd doze off, only to snap awake convinced that she was on the brink of slipping into a vision. Eventually, exhaustion won out, and she had no choice but to sleep at night or even during the day, and when she did, she dreamed, and the dreams were almost worse than the visions.
She remembered a particularly vivid one that occurred shortly after the vision in Dan's yard. In the dream, she encountered a middle-aged woman, someone she had never seen before. The woman approached Diana in the parking lot outside her apartment just as Kay Todd had. And just like Kay, this woman approached Diana confidently, with assurance, as though she knew things about Diana that Diana didn't think this strange woman could know.
The woman placed her hand on Diana's arm. Her touch was cold, like something that had been refrigerated for weeks. Ice cold.
Diana tried to withdraw from the grip, but the woman wouldn't let go.
Diana looked into the woman's eyes and recognized her sister.
With the twisted logic of dreams, Diana knew that the woman didn't really look anything like Rachel, either as a young woman or as a projection of what Rachel might look like as an adult, but still, Diana knew it was her sister. And still, she wanted out of the grip, perhaps all the more because it was Rachel, and Diana knew Rachel shouldn't be there, and she shouldn't be that age.
"What do you want?" Diana said to her sister.
"It's okay," the Rachel said.
"What's okay?"
"It's okay that you stopped looking and caring."
A stronger sense of panic gripped Diana. She didn't want to be misunderstood.
"I didn't. I swear I didn't."
"You did, and it's okay."
"I..." Diana started to repeat the lie but she couldn't. She knew in the dream that Rachel could see through her and knew her. She couldn't hide.
"You lost me. You let me go. It's okay."
"I'm back now. I'm looking. I'm back for you."
The Rachel woman let go.
Diana's arm burned from the cold, and the woman's touch had left a red mark behind. Diana stared at the mark, and when she looked up again, the woman was changing.
The sun grew brighter and hotter. The wind picked up. The edges of the woman's body became indistinct and blurry, as though she were fading away before Diana's eyes. But she wasn't disappearing, Diana realized. She was decaying. Her skin shriveled, pulling in tighter against the skull. Her eyes disappeared and shrunk back into her head. Her hair coarsened and turned brittle, some of it snapping off and flying away in the increasing wind. Diana watched as maggots squirmed and crawled just beneath the surface of the woman's skin, and then her horror increased as the maggots slipped and slithered through her nostrils and into her now vacant eye sockets. Diana couldn't look away. It was as though her neck were locked into place, forcing her to witness the spectacle of her sister's decaying and disintegrating body.
Like watching a time-lapse movie, it took a matter of seconds for the woman to be stripped of her flesh and clothes and be reduced to a crumbling pile of bones. Soon the bones became dust, scattering in the wind, but even then Diana heard the voice of her sister, only now it delivered a different message.
"You let me down," it said. "You should have kept coming for me."
* * *
Diana knew she was spending too much time alone, so despite her frayed nerves and difficulty sleeping—or, more accurately, because of them—she vowed to get out of the house more and mingle with the world. She hoped that doing so would make a change in her life, the kind of change she had been waiting years for. Like a fever breaking or the tide receding, she wished for something new to come along and replace what already existed.
She tried her best to turn the page.
She found a job as a hostess at a restaurant on the town square. It was an Italian place that catered to lawyers and business people during the day, then fed the well-to-do of New Cambridge at night, especially on weekends as they all went out to attend movies or concerts or plays. It didn't pay enough, but it was mindless, and she could stand at the door and offer people some version of a fake smile and take them to a table and hand them a menu and then not worry about anything else that happened to them. Let it be somebody else's problem. The managers normally hired college students, so when Diana was able to show up for all of her shifts and perform competently, they treated her as though she were the second coming of Einstein. She knew someday she needed to find another job, one that would lead to a career, but this one gave her some breathing room for the time being.
She still checked in on the Foley case, but news came out in a trickle that eventually slowed to nothing. And when she noticed the news reports rarely mentioning her, as though she had never existed at all, some part of her wanted to call the Foley family and tell them that it would get better someday, that their pain would ease and the disappearance of their daughter would begin to make some kind of sense. But she knew if she made such a call and said such words, she'd be lying. What she really needed to tell them was if they thought the first few weeks were difficult, wait until they experienced the first few months and then the first few years. If they thought the first days were dark, then they hadn't seen anything yet.
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