The Backwoods

the poor guy something to think about.

Alone now, she switched off the bedside lamp, undressed, and shouldered into her typical nightwear, a soft spearmint-colored lounger, which she quickly zipped up the front. Without thinking, next she took Ernie’s advice: she opened the window. Warm air and cicada sounds instantly flooded the room; she felt tranquilized. And Ernie was right—soon the moonlit room began to flux between sultry summer heat and a fresh, pine-scented coolness from the bay breeze filtering in through the woods.

As if they were a lover’s hands, the dark air and pulsing sounds pushed her down to the mattress. Her fatigue left her dopily giddy as she stretched out, flexing her toes, arching her back. An impulse from out of the dark brought her hands to her thighs, slipped them up under the lounger. When she closed her eyes, she imagined that it was the darkness feeling her up, exciting her nerves. Her hips squirmed around in unbidden horniness, and when her fingers walked up her belly and threatened to slip beneath her panties, her conscience dragged them away. What are you doing? she scolded herself. You’re exhausted. Go to sleep. What am I all hot and bothered about? I’m going to a funeral tomorrow. . . .

The dark thickened around her, broken only by the wedge of moonlight that lay right beside her, a pearlescent bedmate. The cicadas thrummed and thrummed, rocking her in a strange and primitive lullaby. Then she faded off, but—

Oh, my God . . .

—at once, her sleep dropped her into a dream gushing with sex. She lay cringing, raw, and naked on her living room floor, her ankles locked desperately around the back of a faceless man. Patricia knew it was her living room back in D.C. because she saw her business dress, high heels, and blouse flung over her litigation bag, which she always set down right next to their coffee table. The Rothko print that she’d bought for Byron for a past birthday hung just above the faux fire-place, and on the mantel sat the crystal carriage clock he’d bought her years ago for an early anniversary. These were familiar things, things that rooted her to her life with Byron, and she loved these things. But through her cringing sexual angst—as she was being fastidiously penetrated on the floor—she noticed the clock’s glass dome bore a crack, and the Rothko hung upside down.

A climax clenched her up—she couldn’t breathe for a moment—and then she looked up at her aggressive lover’s face. She fully expected it to be Byron’s, but she could see no face, and it wasn’t his rotund body atop her but a lean, muscle-rippled physique. Oh, my God, do it harder, harder, she thought, teething her lower lip, and then the desires of her mind were answered. The rigid penis boring in and out of her stepped up its delicious tempo, pile driving her loins into the bed. Another orgasm rippled through her as her lover withdrew and released himself across her belly and breasts. He knelt between her legs now, looking down at her; then he grabbed her hand and glided it over the lines of warm sperm—an earthy love lotion.

Patricia lay quivering, heaving in breath. Who is he? Who is he? The question reeled around and around in her head. She could see every detail of his chiseled body shellacked in sweat, but his face still remained shrouded, as if by smoke.

The smoke moved downward; he was lying beside her, his mouth sucking pink marks on her neck, and his fingers playing lower. Just the touch of his hand riled her up; she was just about to come again, but then her eyes darted off a moment and she saw Byron sitting fat and naked on the couch, his face forlorn as he watched this other man electrify her.

Patricia didn’t even care.

She lay back, tensing more, begging for this strange mystery lover to take her again right there in front of her husband, the rough hand expertly gentle with her most private parts, and then her legs shot upward, toes straining toward her living room ceiling when she recognized Ernie Gooder’s face on the man who was burying her in the most wanton ecstasy—

Patricia shrieked in the throes of another climax . . . and—

—then awoke naked and clenching in her sister’s guest room.

Oh, jeez . . .

There was no one beside her, of course, no Ernie finishing up, and the only hand between her legs was her own.

What’s gotten into me? she thought. Her confusion melted into a drowsy disorientation. It frustrated her, even half-asleep as she was, because it made her feel unaware of herself. The cicada sounds seemed twice as loud now, the moonlight dimmer yet somehow edgier. During the fitful dream she’d kicked the covers off the bed and cast her cotton lounger to the floor, and now she didn’t even bother putting it back on. The moonlight made the sweat on her breasts, belly, and thighs appear frostlike.

She let her confusion fade away behind her fatigue, then curled up into a nude ball. Her sex still tingled as she drifted back to sleep, completely incognizant of the face peering in at her naked body through the window.

(II)

Wilfrud and Ethel Hild were the clan’s dowsers. But it wasn’t water they sought; nor did they hold any forked branches for divining rods.

They’d shed their handmade clothes—for nakedness better solicited the spirits of the Earth—and stood now as pale stick figures painted ghostly white by the moon. Wilfrud’s gut looked sucked-in beneath the ribs, Ethel’s breasts losing some plumpness. Divining required a three-day fast, and they’d been divining a lot lately—hence the emaciation. Their eyes looked huge in thin faces—huge in the trance they put upon themselves.

“A minute or two more,” Everd Stanherd intoned from the side. “It takes time for the ashes to reach their blood.”

Wilfrud and Ethel had been dowsers since early childhood, and now, fifty years later, they’d honed their skills—which some would call sorceries—to expertise.

No, no forked branches. Instead they’d slit the belly of a newborn snake, eviscerated it, and then burned its threadlike innards in a brass censer, along with dried coneflower petals, sweetbriar oil, and some fabric from one of the girls’ tops—something well-worn and close to the heart.

The others watched from moonlit trees as Wilfrud and Ethel then ate the ashes out of the censer to begin the trance. Some wore stone pendants about their necks, while others wore lao pouches, and still more wore crude crosses fashioned from animal bones or dried vine cuttings. They all looked on silently in their inexplicable faith.

They walked nude through the woods. The others followed. No one spoke.

A while later, they stopped in a small clearing near , the river and pointed down.

Everd was the sawon, the keeper of the clan’s heritage—and its magic. His voice croaked in the dark, his wife, Marthe, beside him. “Dig here, men. You can see the upturned earth.”

It was obviously a makeshift grave they all surrounded now. The younger men quickly wielded their shovels, routed and emptied the sad mound. Their women watched from the trees, some sobbing. It didn’t take long before the pallid body was hauled out.

Marthe clutched her husband’s arm and burst into tears. The monster didn’t even kill her first, Everd thought, shielding his wife’s eyes. The young girl’s fingers were locked in an upward clench. She’d been trying to unearth herself when she’d finally smothered. A monster, yes, a monster. The wheat bands around both death-white thighs confirmed what she’d been doing. Another one had gone astray, prostituting herself for extra money instead of living by the clean, honest way of the clan. And Cynabelle’s dead. Another one dead. Murdered by that monster.

“At least it’ll stop now.” Wilfrud’s sorrowful words crept through the dark. “Now that you’ve taken care of the soulless bastard.”

“I pray so, my friend.”

They hadn’t found all of the others who’d gone missing over the past few months, and perhaps Chief Sutter was right in his suggestion that they’d simply left town for a chance at a better life. But not all of them. The dowsers had found four others buried like this. The men murdered, and women raped and murdered. Everd would not leave them to graves like this. They’d rebury them