Chapter 3 Monsters in the Woods
He gathered the courage to step out of his car soon after Dancer left and he stood in the dark trying to acclimate himself to his new surroundings.
A memory surfaced.
Years ago, while working a temp job at a call center, Green had a supervisor named Dylan who said he had been in the U.S.
Navy SEALs. Dylan was a thoughtful, quiet type.
One day, on a lunch break, Dylan broke the customary silence and told a story of his time in the Navy.
He had been called on to do dive work at night, removing communications cables.
It wasn’t far from shore, but still the kind of deep that meant you couldn’t ascend too quickly without inviting decompression sickness.
While working, slicing wiring, Dylan had cut himself badly.
“I nearly lost my thumb to that cut,” he said. “Thankfully, surgeons saved it.”
He showed off the puckered scar at the base of his thumb. It looked like a wad of chewed bubble gum.
“And that wasn’t the worst part of it,” he said.
“There I was. Deep underwater. Pitch-black. Trying to hold pressure on the cut. Shit, trying to hold my thumb on for all I knew. I was bleeding out into the open water. And I had to take my time surfacing. Wouldn’t do me much good to rush up and die of the bends.
And, all the while, I could just imagine how far my blood was traveling into the water, billowing out into the blackness.
I could imagine what might be smelling my blood, tasting it, tasting me.
How far would the blood travel before I surfaced?
It was a breadcrumb trail leading straight to me, wounded, helpless, and blind.
An easy meal. What was nearby? What was hungry?
Most of all, if something did come for me, I knew I wouldn’t even see it before I felt its teeth.
Sure, I knew there were sharks. Even a small shark can take you apart.
I also had absolute faith that there were things worse than sharks.
Things that have never been photographed, never described by science.
And I knew, just knew, that they were looking at me.
I can’t explain it, but they were there, watching me.
Things I couldn’t comprehend were deciding if I would ever make it back up to the open air.
And their decision, their risk-to-reward analysis, was gonna be based on stranger things than just hunger. ”
At the time, Green just thought Dylan was pulling his leg. He only half believed the man was in the SEALs. After that conversation, Green started taking his lunch break in his car.
Now, he wasn’t so sure.
He stood in the cold air, holding his flashlight in both hands, looking at the little footpath that led to his campsite.
Just fifty feet that way.
A puff of breeze tumbled the dry leaves at his feet.
Something that might have been an owl called in the distance.
He licked his lips and got back in the car.
Tomorrow. I’ll set up camp tomorrow.
He wasn’t going to learn the ins and outs of his new camping equipment in the middle of lightless woods surrounded by unknown creatures with unknown business. It was reasonable to sleep in his car. Perfectly reasonable.
Dylan smirked from the past and took a bite of his vending machine sandwich.
Green rested a hand on the steering wheel.
He thought about hard metal doors and nice predictable locks.
He thought about engineers and safety tests.
Stamped metal and molded plastics, all built by human tech with human purposes.
His car was a tiny embassy of the known world amid the nations of wild things.
He reclined his seat, hoping to rest his body while staying alert.
Dylan spoke as he chewed. “Keep pressure on that wound.”
Sleep crept into the car unobserved.
He sat with Mr. Reynard in his hospice room.
Jess hadn’t wanted him to go. She called his visits to the old man morbid. He went anyway.
His past was unraveling at the edges.
Green’s little card table by Mr. Reynard’s bed held a clockwork picture of a moth with a perfectly spherical head shining like a mirror, a work in progress.
His elderly neighbor looked at him through a haze of pain and medication.
“Do you think you’ll ever get back together with that fiancée of yours? Jess?”
It was a strange question. They were still together.
“No, I don’t think so.”
He was answering with the future’s voice. The speed of his answer startled him.
Mr. Reynard coughed and took five slow breaths to recover.
“Why not?”
Green thought about it.
“You know, I don’t think she actually liked me very much. She would talk about me like I was work, like a second job.”
He waited out another rasping cough and recovery.
“Honestly, I once caught myself daydreaming about her just…disappearing. Moving out while I was at the office. Even having a car accident. Just, I don’t know, going away without me having to make any hard choices or be the bad guy. Not my proudest moment.”
Mr. Reynard watched him from the bed with wet eyes the color of old paper. His white stubble was becoming a snowy thicket in the hollows of his sunken cheeks. Green wasn’t sure if he was actually listening. He went on speaking with a future self’s voice.
“Kinda pathetic. I know. I was just so tired of selling her on the idea of me.”
Mr. Reynard looked at the ceiling and Green thought his mind had left the conversation and drifted elsewhere. That was fine. He just wanted to be near his friend.
“You’re right,” Mr. Reynard said. “Good for you. Marriage is hard, but it was never hard to love my Andi. Even when I was furious with her. A good partner makes you feel strong. Better to be alone than with someone who treats you like a chore.”
He shut his eyes. Green watched his pulse flutter beneath the thin skin at his temple.
“You deserve better,” he said in a whisper.
When he looked back at his art project, the moth was gone. The new picture had long copper minute-hand teeth.
Green woke shivering and started up the engine to run the heater, aware it wasn’t the first time he’d woken to do so.
2:55 a.m.
He looked at himself in the rearview. In the dashboard glow, he felt conspicuous and vulnerable.
Folded in the absolute dark of those woods, he was a solitary light, a beckoning glimmer in the permanent midnight of the ocean floor, bleeding out a shining summons into the dark, calling to unseen fish of unknowable size and appetites.
This time, he would keep watch until dawn. He could sleep when the sun was up. He could set up his tent and start camping the way it was meant to be.
Sleep returned.
He was back in his condo.
Jess was gone. Mr. Reynard was gone too.
The acorn sat on his kitchen counter.
The days began ticking away faster and faster. The sun leapt and fell outside his windows in time with his breathing. Day. Night. Day. Night.
The acorn grew more and more vibrant as the colors of his home dulled and faded to a photograph in an old newspaper. It was absorbing the vitality of the place, becoming more real as the life Green spent his best years building withered.
How can such a small thing take so much?
The acorn shuddered once and began beating like a heart, filling the room with a pounding rhythm.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
Day-night. Day-night. Day-night.
The condo walls flitted away like ash. Crickets chirped. Old trees stretched their branches and cracked their knuckles like fighters preparing to brawl. Mushrooms split his tiled floor with their passing, soft and unstoppable.
He started awake. This time, the car was too warm. He was sweating. He’d fallen asleep again before turning off the engine. He ran a dry tongue over chapped lips.
Sipping warm, flat soda, he cracked the window. The air was cool and smelled like autumn. It smelled utterly unlike the city.
3:32 a.m.
The night wore on in fits of sleep and fear.
Green bobbed up and down in rolling tides of contrasting sensation, exhaustion, and tense alertness, until that, too, became familiar. He slept in twenty-minute chunks chained together by moments of confusion as he struggled to remember where he was and why he was cold and uncomfortable.
He walked through a dream of grocery shopping, the store shelves packed with items he didn’t recognize, but he felt immense pressure to buy.
One of these things is the thing that’s been missing.
One of these things will fix me.
One of these things will tell me who I am in a way I can finally trust.
Something tugged him back to wakefulness.
He was shivering again.
A press of a button and the engine was warming.
4:59 a.m.
Nearly dawn.
A light moved in the trees beside the lane.
Green looked up to see a luminescent figure stitching its way through the woods forty feet from his window.
It was a deer, though it didn’t look like any deer he had ever seen.
Its skin was translucent and shone with a pale glow akin to bioluminescent fungi.
Within, its dark organs were visible as shapes pulsing with rhythmic life.
It looked like an anatomy illustration escaped from the pages of a zoology text.
The deer paused and looked at Green, stepping toward him. Its dark eyes found his. There was something inexplicable inside its head. It was too distant to see, but he could feel it. A shape.
The creature took another step closer.
Green’s breath fogged the glass and the deer became a patch of moonlight through smoke. He raised his sleeve to rub away the crystallizing condensation.
The glow sprang off into the darkness, though its legs weren’t participating in the movement.
“Heads up,” Dylan said from a memory.
He was starting to reach for the acorn when a nightmare thing the size of a pinball machine slammed onto the hood of the Prius.
The car rocked. The steering wheel sucker punched Green in the face, cracking the bridge of his nose. Phantom lights exploded into his vision with the impact. He struggled for breath as tears blurred the world.