What the Woods Keep Read online

  “As of this morning, I own my family estate in Promise.” I watch Del’s lips stretch into a perfect little O. “Dad isn’t going to be happy about that. He was very thorough when he cut off all connections I had to Promise after Mom disappeared. But I guess he has no control over what Mom planned for me while she was still around. She stipulated in her will that I get the house the day I turn eighteen.”

  “So that’s what your mystery chore was.” Del overcomes her surprise enough to speak. “What are you going to do? I mean, about the house? This is huge!”

  “I-I know the logical thing would be to sell it. I don’t see myself moving to Colorado, but I want to at least have a look at the old place, maybe spend a week there before I let it go. Is that too bizarre, that I want to go back to a place where nothing good has ever happened to me?”

  My question is rhetorical, and I don’t expect Del to answer. She doesn’t. Also, I’m not being completely honest with her, and, knowing how perceptive she is, it’s likely she can hear the deception in my voice. Some good things did happen to me in Promise. Lots of good things. Take the woods, their dark calm, their unending welcome, their unwavering acceptance of me. On days when Mom wasn’t tormented by her demons, she took me deep into the woods and we’d roam for hours, petting the wet moss, collecting strange flowers that grew in the shadowed corners, and listening to the sounds of birds and animals before returning to the Manor for the simple lunch Dad would make for us.

  And then there was Shannon. The boy next door, my first friend—my only friend back then. Would he still be living in the house next to the Manor? When I left Promise as a child, I cried about losing the safe haven of my forest and Mom’s beloved Manor, but most of all I was devastated because leaving town meant leaving Shannon. We didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye. One morning I woke up to Dad telling me I had an hour to pack; the rest of our stuff would be shipped to our new home. I thought of running away, of going to the woods and staying there, eventually becoming a wild girl reared by animals and nourishing myself with berries and roots, but Dad picked me up, packed me into his car with the luggage, and just took off. And that was it.

  After we settled in New York, I wrote to Shannon regularly. At least, I did until the therapy started and I lost days, weeks, and even entire months to Dr. Erich’s treatment. Since my father was in complete control of my life back then, there’s a good chance that none of my letters actually got mailed. Or maybe Shannon moved away or simply moved on. Whatever the reason, I never heard back, and eventually I stopped writing.

  “Can I come with you?” Del asks, sounding uncharacteristically timid.

  “Don’t you have your group project to work on during the break? And what about Bolin?”

  She waves her hand in dismissal. “Bolin and I are through. Done. Never again. And I can work on my project while you do your soul-searching or whatever.”

  I consider it. I’ve never traveled by myself before. It’d be nice to have a travel buddy. And Del tagging along to my homecoming trip means I’d have a shoulder to cry on if being bombarded by sad memories gets too tough.

  “First let’s see how much plane tickets cost, and—”

  Del doesn’t let me finish. She launches out of her spot on the floor to clasp me in a breath-ending hug. “Let me worry about that! Oh, and happy birthday, Hayden!”

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  URBAN TERRORS

  The Stonebrook Incident: Unveiling the Facts

  by Ross Hidalgo

  Note: Doreen Arimoff, lawyer for the Holland family, has requested we remove this investigative report under allegations of fraud, defamation, and invasion of privacy. The Urban Terrors blogmasters are reviewing her request.

  An episode of horrific violence, which in local urban lore came to be known as the “Stonebrook Incident,” took place ten years ago on a gloomy September day in an idyllic corner of Long Island. The ghosts of what happened that day still haunt the halls of Stonebrook Academy and the minds of all involved, including the victim and the perpetrator.

  My investigation began in the living room of the Academy’s former headmistress, Ms. Belinda O’Reilly. Now retired, Ms. O’Reilly fondly remembers Jennifer Rickman, a kind and popular girl, who at the age of nine suffered severe cuts to her hands, head, and face after being thrust into a bathroom mirror by classmate Hayden Holland.

  Fingers wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee, Ms. O’Reilly recalls a school assembly that day. The assembly was called to calm the student body after a young pupil’s gruesome discovery: Eight birds had crashed to the ground for no apparent reason, inexplicably dead. The boy who found the dead birds had smeared their blood all over his face and would not stop screaming. He had to be sedated and kept on school premises as unusually stormy weather prevented his parents from picking him up promptly. To make matters worse, the Academy’s grounds had been partially flooded by the storm, and an old oak tree that served as the Academy’s symbol, its image decorating the school’s emblem, was struck by lightning and split in half. All these creepy events added to the foreboding background for an incident that shook the Academy to its core.

  “I still get shivers when I think about it,” Ms. O’Reilly says, recalling how the atmosphere in the darkening halls of the Academy was growing tense with anxiety. “Those bulging black clouds hanging over our school … like a curse in the making. And all those dead birds. Hayden’s stone-cold face! And blood flowing from the wounds on Jen’s forehead and cheeks, her nose smashed in, her lips a gory mess…”

  Ms. O’Reilly was called to the scene—a girls’ bathroom—after a student named Hayden Holland attacked Rickman. Like most students and staff that day, Ms. O’Reilly only saw the aftermath of the attack. The sole eyewitness to the event was Ms. Aileen Lancaster, a geography teacher. My attempts at locating Ms. Lancaster for an interview hit a dead end; she has no digital presence or accurate records that I can locate.

  On the other hand, Rickman agreed to meet with me in a café in eastern Long Island. After undergoing extensive therapy and several plastic surgery procedures to remove the worst of the scarring, Rickman’s face still bears a reminder of what Holland did to her.

  “It all happened so fast,” Rickman remembers. “She cornered me in the bathroom. One moment I was standing next to her and we were talking. Just talking. And the next, I was whooshing through the air, my back hitting the wall. And then I was pulled back by this unseen force, and I was flying, headed for the mirror. I didn’t even have a chance to raise my hands to protect my face before the impact. It all happened so fast.…”

  Whooshing? Flying? Unseen force?

  I ask Rickman if she was fully conscious during her ordeal. Yes, she was conscious, and yes, she meant what she said: Holland sent her flying into that mirror. When I ask how that could be possible, Rickman whispers that Holland is “not quite human.

  “What would a ‘monster’ have to say in her own defense?”

  “Take what you will from this,” Rickman continues, “but this is what I know happened, and I will stand by it.”

  Suspended from the Academy following the incident, Holland appears to have never returned to the formal schooling system. No details of her life post-Stonebrook can be found on public record. Holland has no social media profiles and no other digital presence.

  Rickman believes her attacker just walked away from the incident unscathed and unpunished. She blames Holland’s family lawyer for pulling strings to save Holland from a more drastic intervention. Sometimes, Rickman says, she can’t sleep at night thinking that this monster’s still out there somewhere.

  I keep thinking that there are two sides to every story. What would a “monster” have to say in her own defense? If not for a random connection, I might have never received any answer. But a friend of a friend from college mentioned in passing that he knew a girl whose roommate is named Hayden Holland. I asked to be
introduced, and soon I was making arrangements for a “blind date” with the “Stonebrook monster” herself.

  I could not believe my luck.… And then my luck ran out. An hour before I was supposed to meet Holland, I received a phone call from—you guessed it—the Holland family’s lawyer, threatening me with legal action if I didn’t drop my investigation. But this is not the end. It’ll end when the truth is out.

  6

  BIRTHDAYS ARE STRANGE:

  PART 1

  We are attracted to mysteries. Our perpetual drive to solve the unsolvable, to know the unknown, makes us human.

  The unknowing bothers us.

  To transform the unknowing into knowing, our brain turns to pattern-seeking: the newest set of images from the Mars Rover, the sketchy evidence that the elusive Loch Ness monster is alive and well. The human brain is an expert in finding meaning in these artifacts, because in our book, meaning equals truth. Even the most far-fetched of meanings are better than being left completely in the dark.

  Your mother disappears into the small-town night, never to be seen again? Your brain immediately launches into its meaning-making mode, not stopping till it settles on the “simplest” and, therefore most probable, explanation: Mom was not mentally well, and, as a child, I was blind to it, too charmed by Mom’s eccentricities and artful detachment to notice objectively that she needed help. Maybe the night she went missing she had an episode, a bad one, and wandered off into the woods. Maybe she fell and broke her neck. Maybe she drowned and her body, trapped by the tree roots and algae, was destined to never be found by the search efforts. And here’s the logical continuation of that thought: Maybe whatever Mom had was genetic and it’s only a matter of time before I start to lose it, too.

  Or maybe Mom just left us because she was never meant for family life and after years of trying, she gave up.

  I could drive myself nuts going through possible scenarios. And now, ten years later, when I’m confronted by the truth that Mom cared just enough about me to leave me the Manor along with her cryptic conditions and some nonsensical clues, all the scenarios I mulled over seem faulty. I have to start from scratch. My father would call this experience paradigm-altering.

  So if Mom was lucid enough to organize her will with Doreen, does it mean she knew something was coming for her? Was her disappearance not a tragic accident? Did she have any enemies?

  Who was my mother, anyway? What motivated her to do the things she did? Mom was always a mystery to me. And, I suspect, to Dad, too. Maybe Dad was attracted to her in the first place because she was a riddle to be solved and he fancied himself the man for the job.

  In this vein, let me tell you a bit more about my father. Despite his very unscientific obsession with the Nibelungs, he holds a conviction that all phenomena, no matter how odd, can be scientifically explained. And what we can’t yet put into formulae or a neat graph will be a piece of cake for the next generation of savvy humans.

  As an antisocial kid educated outside of the formal schooling system, I started collecting unexplained occurrences. While my peers were into seashells and action figures and stuffed toys, I was into creepy incidents preserved in archives and later digitized by other weirdos like me. Influenced by Dad’s scientific aura and his manic journal-keeping, I started a journal of my own, where I wrote up my “findings” and “hypotheses.”

  My first entry was about the Tunguska event—a powerful blast that hit a remote, uninhabited area in Siberia in 1908. It burned nearly nine hundred square miles of the forest to the ground, turning silica-rich soil into glass. The event left no crater, but an unusual concentration of silicates and magnetites in the earth and trees suggested the blast’s extraterrestrial origin. The theories range from a giant meteorite impact to a small black hole passing through Earth to some kind of a geophysical anomaly.

  The final entry in my journal of scientific mysteries was about a certain incident that the Promise newspapers referred to as the Black Clearing Event. Even now, I remember the newspaper headlines like it happened yesterday: LOCAL WOMAN DISAPPEARS INTO WOODS … GIANT CLEARING FORMS SAME NIGHT AS PROMISE WOMAN PERISHES IN FOREST … Before I settled on my two leading hypotheses explaining Mom’s disappearance (mental-health incident and abandonment), I had this theory that Mom was abducted. But whether it was aliens or evil fairies, I couldn’t decide. In the end, I just tore out those pages from my journal and decided to forget all about it.

  They say ignorance is bliss. But so is denial.

  * * *

  We don’t do gifts in my family. Aunt Nadia doesn’t believe in birthdays (whatever that’s supposed to mean—birthdays are not like Santa or some deity whose existence is subject to faith and worship) and Dad can’t be bothered with life outside his “research.”

  Though I’ve made my peace with my aunt’s stance on birthdays, Del still expresses her disagreement with my family’s unorthodox approach to the matter via an occasional tirade on the importance of Tradition (yes, with the capital T) and via gift-giving. This time, in addition to my disastrous blind date, my birthday gift from Del is a framed photo of our apartment’s door. (Del’s got a soft spot for doorways, arches, and everything else that in her artsy mind passes for a gateway.) I run my fingers over the frame’s darkened antique silver. Cool, smooth to the touch. I instantly love it. My mind’s already spinning, thinking how I can top this amazing gift come Del’s birthday in October.

  After we have a cozy lunch at Five Leaves, Del takes me to the New York Aquarium. She knows I love all things sea and water, but I adore fish most of all, because they are quiet and aloof and rarely look me in the eye. But today, something about the Aquarium feels off.

  As I approach the reinforced glass—a window into an underwater fairy world—the schools of fish race away, into darker realms. I’m about to comment on this weird behavior to Del when I notice a girl in the thinning crowd. She’s about my age, though it’s hard to tell for sure, since half her face is hidden underneath a low-sitting baseball cap. But it’s the glimmering mass of white scars on the girl’s exposed neck that makes me do a double take.

  Scars. Uneven. Loud.

  Not unlike those caused by shards of broken glass.

  Jen’s bloodied hands covering her face.

  The girl isn’t Jen—logically, I know that—but still, I’m drawn to her. My heartbeat speeding up, I take a step toward the girl, but a deafening bang hijacks my attention. The crowd around me begins to move, its erratic motion making me seasick. Del grabs my hand, drags me away from the glass. I look over my shoulder and see it—what everyone’s running away from: a large seal torpedoing in my direction, going full speed.

  It hits the glass.

  The water in the tank turns pink.

  The kids are wailing as they are picked up, carried, dragged away by their parents while the seal’s thrashing and twitching. It goes still.

  Somewhere close I hear Del cursing in French. My legs have a mind of their own, so she has to half drag, half push me out of the room.

  Once outside, we don’t stop moving until we get on our train. “Well, that was something. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before,” Del says. I mumble a meaningless response.

  I have seen this kind of stuff before. More than once actually, and the only constant in the equation, every single time, was one and the same: me.

  7

  BIRTHDAYS ARE STRANGE:

  PART 2

  We don’t talk as we ride the packed train back to Fort Greene. The electrified air tickles the hair at the nape of my neck. The storm’s gathering, and I feel it with every inch of my skin, with my every blood cell—something’s coming, and it’s looking for me. It’s as if the simple act of hearing my mother’s name spoken out loud in Doreen’s office has set off some ancient chain mechanism, its endgame not clear but likely sinister.

  In a daze, I follow Del up the stairwell into our lair. The apartment’s too silent, too dark for me not to suspect what’s about to happen. I imagine I can hear
their whisper-thoughts coming from the kitchen: I wonder if she knows we’re here.… I haven’t seen her for almost a month.…

  So when my kid cousin Riley (wearing jeans, a red cape over a Spider-Man hoodie, and a hat made of kitchen foil) jumps out of the kitchen, yelling “Happy birthday,” my surprise has to be faked. Riley is followed by Dad and Aunt Nadia. I take a breath, bracing for impact; a comet off its orbit, Riley collides with me, squeezing me in a fierce hug. Thanks to his most recent growth spurt, he’s taller than most boys his age, reaching just below my shoulders.

  “Love the hat, little man,” I say as Riley’s hands around my waist loosen enough for me to take a breath. “Did you make it yourself?”

  “Riley, release Hayden.” Dad attempts to separate Riley from me, but my cousin sticks to me like an exotic vine to its host tree. I free up one hand from Riley’s grip and manage to hug Dad while Nadia greets Del.

  Dad responds to my embrace in his usual detached way. Ever since I moved out of Nadia’s house and came to live with Del in Fort Greene, I see Dad roughly once a month. Usually, I’m the one expected to make a trip to Long Island, where Dad resides in Aunt Nadia’s spare bedroom. Our meetings are brief and awkward: We exchange some noncommittal sentences—avoiding the topics of Promise, Mom, Stonebrook Academy, or Dad’s career suicide—and then we eat a mostly silent meal together and maybe watch some TV. That’s about it. Aunt Nadia calls me every other day to check in and to assure me that my father is so very busy with work that he simply has no time to call me himself. Considering he’s been on one long work trip after another ever since we moved to New York, I believe Nadia’s assessment, though where Dad is traveling to is a mystery to me, since he’s technically unemployed.