“Come here,” David whispered, tugging on Allison’s sleeve. “Follow me.” He led her off the trail and into some thick brush. The branches snapped and clawed at them, leaving stinging cuts on their faces and hands. As the light drew closer to them, they hunkered down in the brush, hoping the beam of light wouldn’t find them. Footsteps, squishing deeply in the soggy ground, drew closer to them and, as the light played back and forth along the path, David and Allison could see that it was just one person, carefully picking his way along the trail. David heard Allison whimper softly, and he put his hand on her shoulder to steady her.
The light drew closer and closer, swaying back and forth, touching the woods on both sides of the trail. Confident that the sound of the spring peepers would hide any sounds they made, David and Allison snuggled closer to the earth. The moisture of the ground began to seep through their clothes but they hardly noticed.
Suddenly, the light swung directly over the bush that concealed them. Allison sucked in her breath and David felt her shaking. The light swung back, lower this time, and the beam hit David right in the eyes. He froze, expecting discovery, but the beam and the person aiming it went slowly past their hiding place.
When the figure was a farther down the trail, David and Allison slowly came out from hiding. They studied the receding light until it was lost behind a curve in the trail. They sighed relief.
“Jesus, that was a close one,” David said softly. He still had his arm on Allison, and he could still feel her shaking.
She looked at his dark, vague form and said, “That looked a little like your old friend there, Les, didn’t it?” Her voice was tight and controlled.
David shrugged. “How the hell could I tell? Could have been anyone for all I could see.”
“It’s just that when he stepped into the path, I thought I caught a glimpse of his face in the light.”
“Do you want to stay here gabbing all night, or do you want to get out of here?” David asked harshly. He started down the trail in the same direction the person with the flashlight had gone.”
Allison followed closely behind, reaching out in the dark to keep her balance and bearings. “Why are you going this way?” she said, pleadingly. “This is the way he came.”
“This is the way out,” David snapped. He was still feeling the tension of the encounter with . . . whomever. “It was probably one of the people in the search party. They’ve been out in the woods all day.”
“He looked like he was in a hurry,” Allison replied. “If he was a searcher, wouldn’t he have taken more time looking?”
David grunted and didn’t break his pace.
“When the light hit us, don’t you think he saw us?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Well,” Allison went on, “a person in a search party would take more time to look, wouldn’t he? I mean, the light—”
“Look,” David snapped. He pulled up short and turned, grabbing Allison by the arms. “You want to get out of here, right?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. She found herself remembering some of the stories David had told her about the Bog and, although she would never have admitted it, she was at the point of crying.
“Well,” David hissed, close to her ear, “if you want to get the Christ outta’ here, just shut up and keep walking!”
“But—” Allison started to say but her voice broke.
“Quiet! Walk!”
“But what if that was the guy who killed that kid?” she said brokenly. “We don’t want to walk right along where he went.”
“Look,” David said, pointing into the darkness, “this is the path that leads almost directly to my uncle’s house. We can get onto the road and walk to the car from there. Or,” and now he leaned toward her menacingly, “would you rather we turn back and go back the way we came?”
Allison glanced nervously over her shoulder. The path was visible for only a few feet, then it was swallowed by darkness—darkness that pressed close, suffocating. The sound of the spring peepers swelled until Allison thought it would drive her crazy. She peered closely at David’s face, trying to read his expression: she didn’t know if it was mere agitation at being lost in the Bog or something else: fear.
“So even if whoever that was took this same path, it’s the fastest way out of here that I know.”
“But wha—”
“Just shut up and follow me!”
They moved ahead through the thick darkness, each silent and thinking their own thoughts. Allison, frightened and feeling bitter that she had let it show, was gnawing at her lower lip with restrained frustration. She hadn’t wanted to come on this walk around the property in the first place and had come only because she didn’t want to spend the afternoon waiting in the motel; she was getting damn sick of that motel and its bar with the watered-down drinks.
Once Allison had stopped blabbing, David walked silently, trying to let the early evening sounds and smells of the Bog relax and unwind him. In fact, they did just the opposite. . . .
—Don’t you ever go into that there Bog!
Allison was right, in a way; he admitted that. If the person they had seen was part of the search party for the missing boy, they had nothing to be nervous about; but if that had been the killer. . . . He remembered that night, so long ago—
—a massive, black shape loomed up out of the darkness!
Tension coiled in the pit of David’s stomach like a snake. With the memory came the clenching, terror-stricken feeling he had had as he looked up and saw the man standing over him. To his child’s eye, he had looked like a twenty-foot tall giant, towering over him like a tree threatening to fall and crush him. His breath ached in his lungs as he moved ahead, hoping the winding fright he felt wouldn’t spring before he and Allison broke out of the Bog.
—the clean, sharp sound of a bone breaking!
David stopped short in the path and tensed. Allison bumped into him and swore slightly under her breath.
“What is it!” she asked as David stood, muscles ready to spring.
After a moment, he shook his head. “Nothing. I stepped on a branch, and the sound just startled me.”
“Fearless leader,” Allison mumbled, and David chuckled to himself. He pushed ahead through the darkness. He knew that the fear he felt was mostly self-generated—mostly. There seemed to be something, either behind or around him, that clung close to him; something darker than the night that wanted to wrap itself around him and choke him.
—You’ll disappear with nary a trace!
“Hey!” he said suddenly, “we’re almost out. I can see a break up ahead. We’re not far from the road.”
“It’s a goddamn good thing,” Allison muttered, but David couldn’t make out what she said over the sound of the spring peepers.
They moved along the path for another hundred feet and broke out into a clearing. David tilted his head back and sucked in a lungful of air. He wanted to wash away the tension and fear that the Bog had generated, but he knew that it wouldn’t completely leave him until he was far away from it. Maybe, he realized for the first time, just maybe that’s why he was so anxious to leave Holland after high school graduation—to leave behind the night-filled Bog and everything it had come to mean for him.
After crossing a small field, they came out onto the road. It felt good to have solid asphalt beneath their feet, rather than sinking, gripping muck.
“Thanks for the nature hike,” Allison said as they strode down the road. She swatted at her legs in case any ticks were still clinging on. “We’ll have to do it again sometime . . . in about fifty years or so, OK?”
“I’m sorry it got so shitty,” David said, taking her hand in his. “I really thought we’d be out of there before it got this dark.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well,” he said, tugging her hand, “it’s still a ways to the car. We’d better get going.”
They walked side by side down the road. The way was still dark, but they felt relieved to have a solid surface under their feet. As they walked away from the Bog, though, David couldn’t shake the feeling that the dark, destructive, nameless
something
was still back there in the Bog and that it, like himself, had grown much larger since the last time he had been there.
IX
“W
ell, well, well,” the man said, barely disguising the glee in his voice. “I see you’ve been nice and comfortable here.”
He was shining his flashlight on a large, fallen tree trunk that had a pile of leaves swept up against one side. Through the space where he had kicked the leaves away, he could see the wide, staring eyes of Jeffy Hollis gleaming in the light. The boy’s eyes shined like the eyes of a frightened deer caught in the sudden glare of a car’s headlights.
“Now, if you promise me you’ll be a good boy and stay nice and quiet, I may even take that gag from your mouth.”
The boy nodded his head wildly, and the man bent down and started to scoop away the leaves, exposing the boy’s pale, quivering naked body. “You don’t want any trouble, now, do you?” the man asked. He took the gag off over the boy’s head and threw it into the darkness.
Jeffy’s eyes narrowed to slits and he ran his tongue over his parched lips before weakly shaking his head back and forth.
“I didn’t think you did,” the man said, as he exposed more of the boy’s body. Deft fingers reached for the ropes that tightly bound the boy. The man pulled on the ropes until they bit deeply into the boy’s arms and legs, then, with a sudden loud grunt, he pulled Jeffy out from underneath the fallen tree.
Jeffy lay on his back, staring up at the man, whose vague form stood out ink-black against the starry sky. “Ahh . . . ahh . . . I’m . . . thir . . thirsty,” he muttered brokenly.
“Just shut up,” the man said harshly, and he pressed the toe of his boot into Jeffy’s stomach. “You talk when I ask you a question, and that’s it. Understand?”
The boy nodded agreement, but still the boot pressed painfully into his belly.
“You understand?”
Jeffy gagged on his answer.
“Good,” the man said, softer. “You do what you’re told, and everything’ll be OK.” The man trained his flashlight on Jeffy’s eyes until they began to hurt, then, slowly, the circle of light left his face and began to move slowly down the length of his body. Jeffy heard the man’s breath catch in his throat.
Jeffy knew that to struggle against the rope that pinned him was useless. He had been left in this position last night, jammed under the length of tree. The cool night air and his inability to move sent screaming stabs of pain into his joints and muscles, and long before dawn he had lost consciousness because of the intense pain. Throughout the day, hidden beneath the damp, moldering leaves, wedged against the tree trunk so tightly that. he could not move, Jeffy had fluctuated between unconsciousness and a pale awareness. Looking up at his tormentor and his piercing beam of light brought Jeffy closer to consciousness than he had been in twenty-four hours, and terror filled his numbed brain.
“Are . . . are you gonna’ let me go?” he asked, wiping his tongue around his mouth to wet his lips.
The man’s low, hollow laugh was the only answer. The dark form hovered over him like a tree ready to fall.
“I . . . wanna’ . . . wanna’ . . . go home, . . .” Tears welled in his eyes, and the beam of light began to swim. “I’ll be good from now on . . . I will . . . I won’t . . . play. . . near the . . . Bog. . . .”
“What’s the matter with you, crying like a little girl?” the shadow man asked gruffly. He leaned close to the terrified boy, his breath warm on his chilled skin. “Are you a little girl?” he asked, mockingly.
“I’ll . . . be . . . good . . . I’ll . . . be . . . good,” Jeffy murmured. “Don’t hurt me. . . .”
“Oh, I can’t let you go yet.” The man patted him almost gently on the shoulder. “I can’t let you go until I have some fun. You must’ve figured
that
out.” He placed the flashlight down on the ground, directing the light so it shone on the boy’s trembling body. Roughly, he rolled the boy over and began puffing at the ropes that held him. At first, Jeffy thought the man was making sure he was still tied tightly and that he couldn’t move, but then, suddenly, he felt the twisting pressure that pinned his arms back released.
“Are . . . you . . . gonna’ let . . . let me . . . go?”
“I told you,” the man answered, “I want to have my fun first.” He was working on the knots that pinned his legs together, and once these were released, he shifted Jeffy over onto his back and stared down at him.
Jeffy looked up at the towering dark form that seemed to sway dizzily above him. Tears ran down his cheeks, streaking the dirt on his face. “Please please . . . don’t . . . hurt . . . me. . . .”
With a grunting heave, the man rolled Jeffy over onto his stomach and ground his face into the spongy earth. He reached down and quickly undid his own pants, letting them drop to his ankles. Turning back to Jeffy, he reached into his pants pocket and took out a closed knife. With a snap of his wrist, the six inch blade sprang out. The blade caught the flashlight beam and glimmered.
“Cryin’ like a little girl, huh? Well, maybe this is what you want.” With one hand, he raised Jeffy’s butt into the air and pressed him close to his stomach. The knife blade gleamed as it came around and touched Jeffy’s stomach, dimpling the smooth skin.