If Absence Took a Spiral Shape
by John D. Gorman
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Once the youngest brother’s truck had rumbled away, the widower lay down on the couch and closed his eyes. There was no such thing as monsters in the city. People worried about walking down dark alleys or getting mugged on the subway. Those threats were real. Devils and demons did not inhabit office spaces or lurk on street corners.
He opened his eyes and saw the sun beginning to set over the horizon. The machines were halted for the day, and all the lemons had gone home. He walked down through the fields, to the edge of the woods. He took pictures of the trees, trying to see through their dense trunks and into the branches, but all was obscured. The shadows looked frigid, even in the warm glow of the sunset.
Once golden hour had passed, he started back up to the house. He saw nothing but the pines and their needles that evening. So, when he went through his photographs the next morning, and he saw the outline of what looked like a deer standing on its hind legs, he felt bile rise to the back of his throat as gooseflesh erupted on his arms. Once he saw it, he realized it was in every one of his shots, cloaked in the pine’s shadows.
He could see very little but the outline of the head and its horns, like it was only peering around the trunks. It could have been a deer, had the head not been ten feet off of the ground. After deliberating for an hour, he sent the pictures to the editor in an email with the heading: Do you see anything wrong with these?
A reply came after a small breakfast. The editor wrote, “They look great. Get some of the tractors with the pines in the background.”
He wondered if he was slowly going insane as he took the pictures the editor had asked for. After he had a few dozen, he sat on the porch, clicking through them on his laptop. They weren’t very good, as the tractors weren’t very interesting. The pines held more mystery than the machines of steel, tubes, and wires.
He sat on the porch as morning turned to noon, pondering the history and disappearances described by the youngest brother. A different person might have felt the urge to bring the mystery to light, even more so with the photographs of what could be the monster. However, he was not that sort of person. He wanted to take his photos, get his interviews, and go back to the city.
He thought about the return for a moment before shutting his laptop and marching inside. After checking the time, he telephoned the former classmate. She picked up on the last ring. He introduced himself and told her where he had received her number. She did not seem to remember the youngest brother but took his word for it.
She huffed when he asked to interview her. “I suppose you want to make me out as some backwoods freak spouting off ghost stories like all the rest.”
“Not at all. Legends often obscure history. It would be good for the readers to know that what you saw is an aspect of the latter, and not the former.”
She huffed again and told him a time when he could come by. He stopped for gas at the corner store on his way over and bought some things for dinner. He spent an hour taking pictures to kill time. The town sported an ice cream parlor off of the railroad tracks. Houses were built around the town square, where the courthouse reigned over the boarded-up shops and restaurants. The post office, built during the time of the Pony Express, was bigger than any he had ever expected to see. He did not see another soul in town until he parked outside of the former classmate’s house.
She was waiting for him behind a screened porch of a blue house with dirty windows and ivy growing along a brick foundation. He asked if he could record the conversation. Lighting a Camel, she gave him permission.
It had been sophomore year of high school. She had been dating a senior who had just moved into town. Eventually, this young man’s father would be one of the owners of the youngest brother’s land. This senior, although not entirely ignorant of the stories surrounding the woods, had grown to assume that at the root of the legends were superstitious, hyper-religious beliefs. No matter what she tried to tell him, he would always look at the woods and talk about going in there one day.
That day came after a win over a rival high school. High off of one victory and drunk off of corn whiskey, the senior drove to the edge of the woods and walked in. She followed him, begging him to turn back.
“He wouldn’t. He kept saying that it was all nothing but fairies and ogres.” She lit another cigarette off of the end of the first. “Then it got dark.”
It had been night, and they were making their way by a flashlight and the moon overhead. Then, clouds rolled in and covered the moon. A few moments later, the flashlight went dead. It was dark enough to think you were asleep. The senior panicked and started calling out. The former classmate got quiet. She heard something moving around them and tried to tell the senior.
“He hit me,” she said, her voice even. “He tried to keep hitting, yelling that it was my fault, the town’s fault, God’s fault. There was no talking to him. He was lost then.”
She backed away from him, not knowing in which direction she was heading. There was safety in the darkness, even if she knew they were not alone. Something was very much circling them, keeping its distance as she was from the wildly swinging fists.
When the senior paused for breath, collapsing to his knees, the thing moved out from behind her. The clouds parted, and she saw the monster standing over the senior. In one motion, it swept the young man off his feet and carried him into the depths of the forest. She ran, found the truck, and drove off.
“No one believed my story. No one believes it still. The family tried to press charges. Anywhere else, I might be in prison. Here, not a soul was going to go into the woods. No one could prove I killed him.” She finished the second cigarette and looked at him.
She had a young face, and might have been considered pretty even, but her eyes were half-glazed over. The fire that had burned there had since been reduced to embers. He did not know whether it was because of the monster, or because of the black eye and split lip covered by a thick layer of make-up.
“What did the monster look like?”
“A deer-headed ape.”
He cleared his throat. “Do you think it let you go?”
She considered this for a long while, her finger tracing a circle on the stone table. “It could have come back for me, but it didn’t. Can’t help but think about it. It’s no different than a hurricane or an earthquake, I don’t think. A divine punishment, or a natural occurrence. What makes the two so different? Something is in there that even God fears. It got spat out of Hell, if you ask me, but it’s there.”
A rusted Ram rattled down the street and parked in the driveway. A shadow passed over the former classmate’s face. “It was nice of you to come by,” she said.
He thanked her for her time and met her husband in the driveway. Dressed in a mechanic’s button-down, the large-handed husband was a kettle over a low fire. Steam and heat billowed off of him, but the boil did not roar or spill over. The husband’s eyes looked up and down. He held the husband’s gaze in a disinterested manner.
“She lie to you like she did the others?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Best not believe a word of it. Snake’s hiss is all I hear from her now.”
Or maybe it was a kettle starting to boil, he thought. He did not voice this aloud, but instead wished the husband a good day.
He cooked lunch when he got back to the house, then went over the photos from the previous day. He squinted carefully and made out the former classmate’s monster in each shot. Her deer-headed ape.
He went to the fields to try and talk to the lemons again, but they were as responsive as the first day and half as friendly. They told him he could not take pictures without approval. He doubted this but took their hint. He would be upset too; they were only working to get paid.
Then, he saw it looking at him from between two trees. Its antlers touched the pine boughs. Its claws scraped away bark when it slipped back into the heart of the woods, swallowed by its shadows.
He ran across the fields. He would have chased it, if a pair of yellow plastic hands had not dragged him away from the woods. Now the machines were stopped as the lemons tromped him back to the perimeter. They were speaking to him, but he was not listening. He was watching the woods. All other sounds slowly gave way to the creaking pines and rustling needles.
The editor and his co-workers sent him several inks regarding the monster and its legend. Most were speculation. A few cited the same incidents as the youngest brother. One referred to the classmate he had seen that day. The only article that concentrated on the monster’s origin was surrounded by click-bait ads in the “strip mall” section of the internet. It was written by a user named Gower_88_7.
It described a monster named carpelles. Gower claimed the carpelles was once a person. Fleeing a terrible crime, the person takes shelter in the wilderness. They hunt and eat wild game raw. They do not light a fire for fear of being discovered. To stave off the chill, they dress in butchered pelts and bones. The carpelles fear conflict and will revert to subterfuge and fear tactics to drive invaders from its territory. Given the foul reek of butchered skins, the towering physique, and glowering red eyes, these tactics are usually successful.
That night, he dreamed he was about to leave the farmhouse. He had taken no more photographs and did not intend to go back to the city when the phone rang. She had called at the end of the week. She said she missed him. He said he missed her, too. She asked how work was going. He lied and said it was going well, that the story was all but laid out for him to take. When silence stretched between them, she told him her belly was growing. She was craving mayo so often that she had bought a jar of it. She’d almost eaten through it with a spoon. He forced a laugh, said that it was normal and to be careful going outside. She said she would and that she loved him. She hung up before he could respond.
When he woke up, tears stained his cheeks and he wished he could hear her talk to him once more. But as in every dream, the more he grasped at it, the more it turned to smoke.
The monster was now a part of him, as it was the youngest brother and the former classmate. He had seen it at the edge of the wood, and it would stay with him as it did them. He feared this would be the first dream of many in which his wife’s voice was resurrected to haunt him. Regret would fill him as it filled the youngest brother whenever he looked out over his grandparents’ fields, as it filled the former classmate whenever she spoke up to her husband.
What were they twisted into in order to bear the weight of their missed mark each day? What could each of them, living their whole lives half-connected to the rest of the world in this microscopic town, have failed to do each day of their lives? They did not seek out the monster, not as he would.
If he did not face the monster, then he would forever live in its shadow. It was early in the morning when he walked into the woods with his camera and a headlamp to light his way.
Copyright © 2022 by John D. Gorman
