Read The Girl in the Woods Online
Authors: David Jack Bell
The Girl in the Woods (8 page)
"Exactly. A small settlement can't survive unless you keep making new people. So The Pioneer Club began to help with that."
"How did they do that?" someone said.
"Let's just say they took an active interest in procreation. In other words, if there was a suitable young woman of child-bearing years, they made certain that she was...available to a suitable man, whether she wanted to be available to him or not. Her opinion didn't matter. The good of the community did."
Ludwig heard groans, mostly from the women in the room.
"But that's not to say they valued all life equally," Ludwig said.
"Not the Indians," someone said.
"Not the Indians, no. And not those members of the community who acted inappropriately. You see, at some point, the little settlement started to grow, and they became less concerned with basic survival and more concerned with other things. Things like morality. Once their numbers were up and they knew they were going to make it, they decided they wanted to police the private lives of their citizens, to ensure that the right kind of people were in their midst. So if a young woman wanted to marry the wrong kind of man, or if, God forbid, she ended up pregnant out of wedlock, The Pioneer Club got together and made the difficult decision about dealing with the problem. And when I say they dealt with the problem, I mean they dealt with it permanently, just like they dealt with Blue Bear, the mad Indian."
Ludwig let his words sink in. He saw a few heads nodding, a few people writing in their notebooks. Someone raised a hand.
"What gave them the right to do these things, to just destroy lives that way?"
"We could ask that about any government, couldn't we?" Ludwig laughed, but none of the students did. He cleared his throat. "Actually, that's one of the more interesting aspects of this entire matter. Where did they get their power? And the answer to that question is inextricably tied up in the actual location where they held their Pioneer Club meetings. The records that survive indicate that they held their meetings in a clearing in the woods, a location some distance from the actual town or any other aspect of civilization. This makes sense if we suppose that they wanted to keep their activities secret from their fellow citizens. In a sense, they were operating as a shadow government, and it wouldn't do to hold those meetings right out in the open on the town square.
"But there's more to the story than just finding a secluded spot in the woods. It seems as though the particular place they chose, this clearing, possessed a unique power of its own. A few letters and documents survive that were written by the members of The Pioneer Club, and a strange set of facts emerges. Since the Club met in secrecy, they held most of their meetings at night. At those times, with only the most primitive roads and no cars or street lights to guide the way, and the threats from wild animals as well as Indians always a real danger, it was no small order for these individuals, approximately ten in number, to travel to this location and conduct their business.
"But they always wanted to go. Why? Because something happened to them when they gathered in that clearing at night. The existing letters describe a power that flowed through them, an energy, something that sounds to me, as a twenty-first century reader and a confirmed skeptic, rather akin to possession, as though something took hold of them in those woods and drove them to carry out their duties with a fervor and a zeal they might not have felt if they had met anywhere else. The letters and journal entries also speak of the power that the place held over them, as though something there kept drawing them back to that clearing, and at some point, they found themselves craving a return there for a fresh fix of whatever it had to offer.
"What I'm about to say shouldn't seem like a big leap. It seems likely that whatever feeling possessed those members of The Pioneer Club in the woods enabled them to carry out the decisions they reached there. How else would otherwise law-abiding citizens become willing to carry out what amounts to ritualized rape and murder? How?"
Before he had even finished speaking, he saw a hand up.
"Isn't the answer obvious?" the student asked.
"I don't know. You tell me."
"Well, isn't it possible that they were using this clearing as an excuse to do whatever they wanted to do. It's like saying, 'the devil made me do it.'"
"Interesting theory," Ludwig said. Inwardly, he was pleased. He had led them part of the way to that conclusion, but stopped just short, hoping that one of them would carry the discussion the rest of the way. "You're saying that the clearing has no real power of any kind, that these people were just looking for an excuse in the way that you all use alcohol as an excuse on the weekends. 'Oh, I never would have slept with him if I hadn't been drunk.' Right?"
He scored a lot of laughter with that comment. Sex sells, he thought. So does the truth.
"But what if I told you that The Pioneer Club felt safe when they met in that clearing at night? They felt safe there because no Indians ever came near it. Never did and never would. Grass didn't grow there and wildlife—bears and cougars and dogs—avoided it at all cost. And what if I mentioned the lights that sometimes appeared in the trees, the voices moaning in the wind, the apparitions, the figures seen in that area that never materialized, lingering somewhere between the known, material world and whatever exists on the other side? What about all of that? Mass-hysteria? Panic? Or is it something more? Is it a haunted place where our ancestors forced unfortunates to pay the ultimate price for their sins? Is it a locus of evil?"
He stopped himself. He'd been ranting, and the students were staring at him, a bit open-mouthed, unsure of what to make of him. Ludwig couldn't help it. He found the topic fascinating and easily became fired up while talking about it.
He took a deep breath and looked at his watch.
"I see we're running short of time, so maybe we need to wrap this up. Don't forget to pick up a syllabus on the way out of the room. It has your reading assignment for the next class on it."
The guy in the back, the one who had asked the first question, had his hand up again.
"Yes?"
"I want to go to this place in the woods, man," he said. "Can you tell us where it is?"
Other heads in the room nodded.
"You all want to go there, do you?" Ludwig said.
"Yeah."
Ludwig shrugged. "If you find it, let me know. I've been trying to pinpoint that clearing's location for the last fifteen years. No luck. And even if I did know, or even if I just had some theories, do you think I'd share them with you? What are you going to do with the information? Go out there on Halloween and drink beer, hoping that somebody levitates or a ghost floats by?"
"That would be cool."
"It would, wouldn't it? But I'm not kidding when I say that nobody really knows. And unless you want to go out there and wander through every inch of forest in Union Township until you come across it, the location may remain a secret for a long, long time. At some point, probably during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, The Pioneer Club simply ceased to exist. At least, there are no records that I've been able to find to prove they were still around. Maybe they thought they'd outlived their effectiveness. Maybe the membership grew old and died out. Maybe the modern world made it more and more difficult for them to hide their activities." Ludwig shrugged again. "Who knows?"
He paused, and the students started to stir. They sensed class was ending, and the minds that hadn't already shifted to whatever they wanted to do next did so. But Ludwig wasn't finished with them. He liked to send them away with something meaty to chew on.
"Of course," he said, "it's possible that The Pioneer Club never really disbanded. It's possible some form of that club exists in New Cambridge today. So whenever you pass an old man on the street or in the store, and he gives you more than a passing glance, ask yourself if he might not be thinking of taking you out to that clearing in the woods to answer to a higher power. You just never know, do you?"
CHAPTER NINE
Roger waited for the girl.
He had pulled his van off to the side of County Road 600 and turned the flashers on, making it look like he was just a regular guy having car trouble. The van was so old—he had it when the first girl came to live with him—that it wouldn't be hard for anyone to believe that it had broken down.
But he also knew that a girl wouldn't always stop to help a guy with car trouble. A guy would. A guy would stop and maybe get out his tools or at least offer to give a jump or a push or a lift. But Roger knew a girl might not. She might be scared or nervous. That's why he had another story to tell her when she stopped, one that would put the girl at ease. He had a plan.
He stood at the front of the van and leaned against it, even shaking his head a couple of times to add to the illusion that he was a guy having the worst sort of luck in the world. He smelled gasoline and oil, the industrial rubber they used for the hoses. But he kept his eyes up the road. He knew she'd be coming soon. She always came at the same time, the same place. Roger liked that. He liked routine.
The other girl's death had disrupted his routine. He used to be able to count on his days having a pattern, a comfortable sameness from one to the next that he could rely on, but that wasn't the case any more. It started going away when the girl got sick, but her sickness had brought routines of its own. Bring her chicken broth and toast in the morning. Carry her to the bathroom after that. Change the sheets if she soiled them. Repeat the whole thing at lunch and dinner. But once she died, Roger was alone, and he didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to find his way back into a routine.
Even before the girl died, Roger found himself spending more and more time in the clearing.
While the girl slept, achieving temporary relief from her pain and sickness, Roger went hunting, just like he had when he was a kid and his dad was still around. He didn't find much game in the woods. A lot of the deer were gone, the numbers reduced by the surrounding development and an outbreak of wasting disease. But Roger could still find squirrels and birds to shoot, anything to distract him from the dying girl he had to return to in the house. He would occasionally make his way to the clearing on these hunting excursions, but it didn't speak to him during daylight. He'd go there and just sit on a rock. He'd look down at the ground and he'd wonder why someone like the girl, someone who had never hurt anyone in her whole life, had to get sick and die. It happened to his parents, too. Nice people. Good people. And then the girl. Soon they would all be gone.
He supposed that someday he too would die and get put in the ground. But who would do it? Who would even know he was there, dying and then rotting in the old house, his body turning into a skeleton on the bed? Who would miss him? Who would cry for him?
Roger couldn't bear to think that way for very long. He'd get up and leave the clearing and go back to hunting, or just wander around the woods.
But at night, everything was different. At night, the clearing did speak to him. Not like human voices, not anything he could hear, but something he could feel. The clearing vibrated in his bones and jangled his nerves. It made his skin break out in goose pimples and sweat drip from his every pore. It felt like some power, something he couldn't see, whispered among the tall trees and the undergrowth, rustling the leaves and shivering the grasses, and then passed through his skin and into his body, filling him. Possessing him.
He became something else when he was in the clearing at night. Something stronger, something hungrier.
And the hardness always returned between his legs, swelling up until it hurt.
He knew there were ways for men to relieve that swelling, painful urgency on their own. His dad had talked to him about it once. But Roger didn't like to do it that way. He tried to from time to time—even tried it in the clearing—but it always left him feeling more hungry afterwards, like he'd just had a taste but the real meal still hadn't been served.
He had even brought the shovel with him to the clearing that very morning and began digging into the rich earth, working down to the place where the dead girl lay. He thought if he could just bring her back out again, just one time, he might be able to find some temporary relief. Roger even went so far as to shovel a couple of spadefuls of dirt out of her grave, his hands shaking and his mouth watering like a dog's while he did it. But he stopped himself and threw the shovel aside. It wasn't right. It just wasn't decent to disturb the dead that way. He knew she was already rotting, her skin falling away and getting eaten by worms. Her eyes sinking back into her skull.
Other books
Boundary Waters by William Kent Krueger
The Qualities of Wood by Mary Vensel White
Dark Studies (Arcaneology) by Foster, C. P.
Best Lesbian Romance 2014 by Radclyffe
The Border Lord and the Lady by Bertrice Small
Night Hoops by Carl Deuker
Surrender by Marina Anderson
Arizona Allspice by Lewin, Renee
Minerva's Ghost by Danielle Elise Girard
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman