The Witch of the Wood (28 page)

Or not.

Either way, they both were getting what they wanted. She was going to be awarded her confrontation and he was going to enter the arena in his own way. And even if she “saw” him doing it, the very audacity of it had a chance of enraging her, making her more prone to folly.

Rudy made his way down and around the bend in the road and had to slow a bit, shimmying between vehicles that had finally cluttered the shoulder as well. They all had gone nowhere fast. Even though this particular stretch of highway was void of the treeline, down in the grove where the industrial green road signs had been catty-cornered, massive trees had toppled down making the forks and arteries for merging a clogged, scrambled mess. Rudy strode straight down for the signage area, worked his way through it, and vaulted a concrete culvert at the rear. The mountainous terrain ascending before him was quite steep, possibly forty-five degrees, but the timber lying across it made for a crude sort of graded stepladder, at least for most of the journey.

There was a bad moment when two trunks that seemed fairly stable shifted beneath him. They held for a moment, then gave. Rudy slid down for a few rough feet after them, rough dirt and embedded stone bunching his shirt up and scratching him pretty good up the belly and chest before his feet met any sort of support. He cursed lustily, holding there for a second plastered to the rise, arms spread, heart pounding. Wind blew hard across him, causing one of those breathless moments, and he looked up to measure his recent loss of progress.

There was only a matter of about fifteen feet separating him from the crest.

Slowly, he shucked over four steps to the right. It seemed to take weeks, but once there he came upon a combination of hand-holds and foot-stops above that made scaling the rest of the incline fairly elementary. No more slips down the cliff, but when he finally pulled himself over the top edge he was spent. He rolled away from the precipice to his back and lay still for a moment. The wide sky was poor company, black and heartless, and he turned a shoulder to get to his hands and knees amidst the clutter of downed border foliage.

Things rustled in the grass as he rose, a scattering nest of newts or salamanders or whatever you called those little flat-headed wood lizards. Ha. He didn’t think anything creeping in the undergrowth would ever skeeve him again after what he had just seen out on the highway. He brushed off, started moving.

It was silvery and strange up here, the landscape washed pale in the residue of a cold moon. There at the base of a crude path cutting between clusters of fallen birches was a tangle of leafy brush, and Rudy prayed it wasn’t poison ivy. He was limping and his chest was bleeding a little. Just ahead, there was a short dirt path to cut across, and beyond it a baseball field with splintered wooden benches and a wrestling mat tacked to the backstop so onlookers couldn’t argue balls and strikes. Rudy shuffled across the batter’s box area and made sure to step on home plate, an old habit like knocking wood or crossing fingers. “Ha,” he said again, this time out loud. There was no such thing as luck or superstition, if there ever was to begin with. There was no fate or chaos either, no social sciences or psychology. Everything was just scatter-pattern now, land masses in the static that no one had quite figured out. He moved up the third base line and through a fenceless outfield that bled into a parking area. Beyond that to the left was the football field.

Rudy made his way toward it, straight for the goal posts. On the far side of the end zone behind the visitor’s bench was the short walk through a long rectangular space they used for teeing up practice kicks and warming up the quarterbacks, and behind that was the fallen wooded area to navigate through. Then was the downhill run void of timber, leading to the campsite and the crosses. When Rudy was a kid, he and his friends used to sled down it after a good snow. They called it “Suicide Hill” of course, and one of the cancer patients had mentioned a similar memory. It had caused a moment of somber silence before the charge, and Rudy had wondered if they’d all be able to switch the light bulb back on, working up enough fire to execute an effective attack.

Oh, the light bulb had come back on, all right.

When the fireworks torched the sky and he’d cried, “Charge!” they’d gone mad with it, bodies taught with adrenaline, eyes rolling with bloodlust, all of them galloping down the bluff with their guns out and their hospital gowns furling up from behind as if they were warrior ghosts come straight from the depths of some Gothic nightmare. That Lifeblood was no joke, indeed.

Rudy passed across the gridiron, straddled the visitors’ bench, and almost tripped over an old Coleman water cooler left lying on its side in the frozen grass. For the hundredth time that evening he was about to unload a string of curse words up at the sky, but he heard something.

Muted laughter.

Muffled, lunatic sniggering. Down twenty feet or so, coming from behind the Porta-Potty.

Rudy advanced cautiously, head cocked at a slight angle. This was advanced for Patricia. There was no audience present for her little revenge scenario here, just empty bleachers. What did it mean? Did each vacant space along the benches represent a day gone by that Rudy had been an empty participant in their marriage? Was the unlit scoreboard a reflection of their many disagreements, so worn and battered with the tally that the only markers remaining were the faded baseboard zeroes in the darkened arrangement of bulb lights?

Rudy moved closer, the portable bathroom unit before him now, leaning a bit to the right, black spray-painted letters slanted across the vent holes at the top in some tag of indiscernible graffiti. From behind it, the snickering had gained intensity—a wet, lunatic chuckling, stifled as if the individual having the fit were pressing both palms to the mouth area.

Rudy paused there by the unit’s access door. The real question here wasn’t “why” in terms of symbolism. That would come later if Rudy lived through it. The question was “what,” actually. What was waiting for him on the other side of the Porta-Potty; what had Patricia turned herself into? She could shape-shift, but did that mean she had to have a live model to form herself after? Or could she invent things? What if the giggling thing behind this obstruction came from, say, some six-foot circus clown with razor teeth and alligator claws, a man-sized hyena walking on its hind legs holding a machete, a spider-giant with the painted face of a jester? Rudy wasn’t armed.

Had she heard him coming?

Of course she had.

Enough. Rudy came around the corner of the unit, face steeled, fists clenched at his sides.

***

She was there facing away, shoulders shaking, and her body language gave every indication that she was fully prepared to turn and pounce. Rudy was going to reach for her shoulder, but didn’t. For what it was worth, he put his hands in a defensive position in front of his face.

“Patricia,” he said.

“No!” she exploded, turning suddenly.

Rudy fell back a pace. It was Caroline, dressed in the clothes she had evidently changed into before setting off the fireworks from the edge of the battlefield: pinstriped train engineer’s hat, a three-quarter sleeve Tribal Love shirt with a wide neck and eagle insignia, and black stretch jeans. Even with her face soiled from crawling around and setting off the explosives, wet and smudged with grief, she looked good to him, stunning in fact. Rudy met her stare, but it wasn’t easy. He had deluded her, cheated her in a manner that was irreconcilable.

“You son of a bitch,” she spat. “My mother could have had fifteen more years, twenty even. She was a good woman, awaiting your arrival all her life and helping me prepare for it. And I just borrowed the shovels of monsters to bury her in a shallow grave.”

Rudy’s mouth opened, then slowly closed, a soft breath of forfeit coming through his nose.

She didn’t wait long for the explanation that wasn’t coming anyway. Rudy had used her and it was over. Period. She moved past him and walked off, making her way across the twenty-yard line, shoulders shaking with grief again, one arm swinging as she picked up speed in a manner so ultimately girlish that Rudy’s heart broke.

He had sacrificed her mother and the other cancer patients for a greater good, true enough. But it was her mother and the standards of ethics didn’t apply, not when it hit home like this. Rudy thought about going after her to apologize, to try to rationalize his actions, explain his logic, attempt to meet on some sort of common ground, but he didn’t. It would have been pointless. He pretty much knew Caroline Schultz didn’t care about the witches anymore, and both of them were totally alone now.

Something came from behind and whisked past Rudy, brushing his ankle. He almost shrieked in surprise, yet bit it down, shaking his head, smiling wryly. It was Killian, that goofy little spaniel, running for Caroline and then jumping at her heels, trying to get her attention. There on the far side of the field she made a halfhearted attempt at picking him up in stride, but he was playing hard to get now, darting away and then coming back, leading her slowly toward the alleyway between the two sets of home bleachers. Finally he broke away into a playful run.

“Killian . . .” Rudy heard her say faintly, making the grudging chase, following him into the darkness. Gone.

Rudy wanted to weep. Such loss on so many fronts here. He turned slowly, shoulders deflated, and walked to the edge of the slope to look down at the smoldering war zone. He had made his statement there and then promptly vanished. Time marched on, and he had that feeling of overwhelming insignificance return to him: speck on the road, dust on the hill, same difference. Even his troops were represented thinly at this point, as all the rider bearers had seemingly disappeared—no wolves, no shepherds, no Danes, no huskies. There were no living cancer patients mulling around either, and Rudy concluded that they had used their animals to gallop off to the fallen wood, far from the light of the fire so they could die with some sort of dignity in solitude. That, or they were presently heading back to the hospital. Rudy sighed. There was a medium-sized pooch, maybe a beagle, sniffing at the remains of a dead man in dress clothes face down at the front edge of the fire, and two corgis playing tug of war with one of the guy’s shoes. There were a few dogs at the perimeter of the tent area, and two out in the meadow jumping in the high grass. Only the playful ones had remained for show in the wake of this brutal demonstration of blood and justice. They were his emblems. Absolute irony.

Like that loving spaniel showing up right at the moment he and Caroline had gone their separate ways, his little ears flopping all over the place, tail wagging like mad.

Rudy’s breath caught in his throat.

Oh yes. It fit her like a glove, didn’t it . . . turning herself into an entity that would avoid all suspicion, a cute little dog he’d let close to him. She’d been watching him from that intimate perspective, waiting patiently, nuzzling in his ear the moment before he made love to another woman, lying at his feet while he planned his campaign.

And she’d used his own strategy against him, hadn’t she? While he’d occupied Caroline with setting up the fireworks, he’d been free to solicit her mother and the other patients. And while his biggest dogs had borne his soldiers, he’d left the basement unattended.

This was Patricia’s chance to get Caroline alone there and kill her, slowly by torture most probably. Rudy would go down in history as the one to liberate the witches, but Patricia was to make sure he’d do it without the one who’d meant the most to him in the end, breakup or no.

Rudy looked around his feet and got incredibly lucky. One of the sick had dropped his holsters there in the grass, Gus Glick his name was, and he had insisted on wearing his pistols at the hip like the cowboys he’d idolized so much as a boy. Rudy had been fastening the buckles for him when the fireworks went off. Clearly, he’d failed to snap home the clasps properly, and the weapons had dropped, leaving Gus an unarmed rider. It hadn’t mattered. Like Caroline’s mother had done, Rudy recalled Gus Glick jumping off his mount mid-stride to fly into one of the Hell’s Angels, rolling with him in the dirt and winding up in a top position, biting at his throat and ripping up strips of flesh.

“Thanks, Gus,” Rudy muttered, slipping both pistols from their sheaths. Caroline and the mutt had a healthy head start, but he thought it was possible to avoid this tragedy if he pushed it.

He strode back to the edge of the football field.

Then he started to run.

He just couldn’t catch up. The river behind Caroline’s house was a mere quarter-mile away from the high school, at least when you avoided the jogs, U-turns, and detours you’d need to make if using a GPS. A straight beeline across the landscape made it a hop and a skip, but that only applied if you were limber enough to hop and skip, both of which Rudy was not. Out front past the high school and into the woods beyond he found he had to stop constantly to fight his way through patches of brushwork, nests of upturned roots, shanks, and trunks crossed up and splintered.

Just when he thought he’d found a lane it got blocked, and climbing over piles of logs was risky, the bases often shifting beneath him as they had on the cleft above the signage grove, making him pause and reroute. He finally made it up what had been a long slope with a gradual incline, which crested a valley of sorts. He leaned over, guns to his knees, breath heaving. Down the slope at the base of the gulley were the remains of a wooden fence that must have bordered an area back in the nineteenth century, and up the twin rise on the other side he thought he saw movement disappearing over the bluff. He had closed some of the distance, but not nearly enough. In the back of his mind he had entertained the dark possibility that Patricia would transform herself out here in the dark amidst the fallen wood, then turn and stick a shank of splintered oak through Caroline’s chest—but that just wouldn’t be “poetic” enough for someone like her, would it? No. Straight murder didn’t have enough “craft” in it, and Patricia was not one to fall short on “message and delivery.” It was clear now. She had been a secret witness to his and Caroline’s affair, she had snuggled between them right up until the moment of consummation, and she was going to address this at the point of original sin.