The Pines

She jerked a thumb toward the back of the rig. “I thought she wanted to ride with us.”

“I wasn’t going to let her in here. You kidding? The way he looks? I don’t know where she is though. Jack?”

“Neighbors had her when we pulled out.”

He switched on the siren, and it drowned his words, washing them away from Athena. Headlights gleamed off orange reflective disks by the roadside, and she watched as—faintly lit—they sank, dissolved in darkness one by one.

“No, they don’t bother me,” she began. “As a kid, I used to have nightmares about being lost in the woods. When you consider it, that shows rather a lot of imagination for a child in Queens.” She tried to laugh. “Don’t you think?”

“That all there was to the dream? Just the woods? Go on.”

But the younger woman stayed silent, lost in memories of lying awake, of the crutches by the bed, of her dream closing on her. Knowing that she couldn’t run had always made it worse. She’d always known that her grandmother would come if she cried out. But she hadn’t cried. Not ever. Too proud, even then. And throughout her childhood, through her adolescent spells of sleepwalking, every night the dark had swallowed her.

The mouth of a side road rushed past, opening deep into the woods.

“Yeah, honey, dreams can sure be rough on a little kid.” Even as she spoke, Doris felt the inadequacy of her words, and when Jack snorted in derision, she turned on him gratefully. “So what’s your problem? I suppose you never had a bad dream?”

“Who me? I never had no kind of dream in my whole life.”

“That’s not the way your mother tells it.”

“Shut up, Doris. What happened to that coffee anyways? Don’t I get any?”

“Not from what I hear. Watch your driving. Besides, it’s against the rules to have coffee in here anyways.”

“You’re drinking it!”

“I’m the squad captain.”

Athena only half-listened to them. The night overwhelmed her. Swelling like a huge black wave, it could flood across the highway, crush their tiny particle of light and movement, drown them all in darkness. She forced herself to look away, then leaned over to check Jack’s watch. “Did Barry say anything else?”

The thing in the back had stopped dripping, and as the ambulance barreled through the night, streetlights began to emerge, beacons of order in the chaos of the dark.

A thought stirred. ohgodohgod it hurts The amphetamines coursing through what remained of Mary Bradley’s blood system inexorably forced her toward something near consciousness.

She had no body, no localized perceptions. Enclosed by silence, she knew only the shape and size of absolute blackness, hot and suffocating.

Memory leaked—a nightmare of herself whirled and slashed through bleeding skeletons of trees. Awareness seeped back. She lay inside…a cave? A pit? A grave? And she seemed to be soaking in a puddle, could feel it on her shoulders and buttocks, thick and sticky like paint, crusty around the edges.

where It seemed she should have arms, and she recalled things done in the mind to move an arm. ohgod what She wondered if her eyes were open. dead

A hand fell upon herself, and memory flooded. swamp and Her fingers slipped along her gouged and oozing stomach, slid to wet and softly mangled places. She shook with nausea, and the movement created searing pain.

An oval area of lighter darkness was eclipsed, then reappeared, like an entrance momentarily blocked. She realized her eyes were open, and through the dampening field of pain, she heard sounds: straining breath, slavering growl.

It scrambled closer. She barely felt its damp breath on her thigh, barely felt the teeth.

The old Plymouth rushed along the paved road, headlights lancing the haze. Telephone poles loomed past repetitiously. Even dead tired, Athena Lee Monroe drove extremely well. But then this girl is good at everything. She grinned humorlessly at the thought. She’d been stood up again.

The Chamong Diner was shabby and none too clean. This evening, Doris and Jack and some buddy of Jack’s named Larry had all stopped in, and the talk had been loud and cheery, what with the guys bullshitting about scuba diving and backpacking and all the women they were screwing, and Doris regaling them with hair-raising anecdotes from her days as coroner. Drinking coffee and watching the door, Athena had sat at the booth for hours, barely joining in the conversation, just toying restlessly with little packets of sugar and choking on the smoke from Doris’s cigarettes.

When she’d finally given up hope of seeing Barry, the others had tried to keep her with them, but she’d resisted, knowing they’d be there till dawn or until old man Sims chased them out. Passing the phone booth in the parking lot, she’d longed to call Barry…but Cathy would have gotten suspicious.

She smiled sourly. Now why should calling at two A.M. make his wife suspicious? Shaking her head, she recalled the contempt she’d always felt for her aunt’s sordid little intrigues. How Aunt Jeanie would crow to see her now. Not that she would see me. She understood too well how completely her family had disowned her after her marriage.

The car lost speed, drifting to a stop at the mouth of a sand road. The way home. Just beyond the bright haze of her headlights, the side road plunged deep into the forest.

Dashboard dials gleamed a pale, plastic green, and her hands looked ghostly in the glow as she touched the radio scanner beside her on the seat, drew her fingertips across its tiny red light. Bracing herself, she fought down the familiar moment of panic. The way home. Mindful of the bogs on either side of the road, she drove carefully, fervently wishing she had somewhere else to go.

Home. She thought of her grandmother’s house and smiled. On Athena’s ninth birthday, Granny Lee had given her a collection of children’s stories and poems. Vaguely, she wondered what had become of that book. Did she still have it somewhere, packed away with the rest of her past? She could still recall one of those stories, about a hag who lived along a dismal swamp. She tried to convince herself that it amused her to have become that woman.

Jagged darkness pressed around as the old automobile jounced over the uneven road. Downshifting, she slowed the Plymouth to a crawl…and the headlights found strange patches in the sand.

It could almost be blood. “Only children are afraid of the dark,” she said aloud. After that, she drove with deliberate slowness, fighting the urge to floor the gas pedal. Nothing is watching me. Mosquitoes roiled in her headlight beams. They swarmed along the road, teemed in and out of the windows in this muggy heat. A road sign, riddled with bullets, crawled past, warning motorists about the proximity of the state hospital. The insane asylum. She brushed away thoughts of her mother and resolutely searched for something on which to fix her mind.

Once, she’d seen an aerial photo of the barrens, the highways like razor-thin incisions. The photograph had trembled in her hands. She thought of pictures she’d seen of Canada’s Great North Woods—giant and majestic—but here, in the forests that stretched through most of southern central New Jersey, the barren sands could produce no such growth.

No. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. The sands were not truly barren. They produced the stunted, twisted pines…as her body had produced her son.

Furious with herself for the thought, she jerked the wheel, and a dwarf pine rasped against the car. Cursing, she concentrated on driving. There w ere so many things to avoid.

She switched on the radio—a garbled voice. She twisted the dial but could find nothing clear, the distant signals a cacophony of chopped and liquid sound. She turned it off, and the car crept along. Nailed to a tree, a weathered plank indicated the fork to Munro’s Furnace.

The road narrowed until it became a sandy rut walled by brush, and now pine boughs crushed against both sides of the car. Around a turn, the brush thinned, and another winding branch diverted from the main trunk of the road. Dark shells of ruined houses passed.

Soon, her own home loomed, dark and ugly in the windshield. It was her late husband’s house really, the