In The Forest Of Harm (22 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Mary and Joan had followed Alex's trail all day, easily threading through the tall trees above the roadbed. They had just come to a clearing edged by dark green hemlocks when suddenly Mary stopped.

“Something's happened,” she said softly.

“What?” Joan was concentrating so hard on trying to walk as silently as Mary that she almost stumbled into her.

Mary pointed down to the roadbed. “Alex has quit marking her trail.”

Joan's old terror instantly reawakened. “But why?”

Mary rubbed her eyes, as if that might make Alex's bent thistles and stalks reappear. “I can't tell. It looks like she walked to the edge of those hemlocks, then stopped.”

“What should we do?”

“I don't know.” Drumming her fingers softly against her paint box, Mary studied the clearing. Finally, she spoke.

“I'll go down and look around. Maybe the trail picks up past those trees.”

“But what if it's a trap?” Joan plucked at the sleeve of Mary's sweatshirt. “What if Barefoot knows we're following him, and now he's down there, waiting?”

“We can't help that. Wait for me right here. I'll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“But . . .”

Mary turned and glared at her. “Joan, I've got to go down there. We've got to find out what happened to Alex's trail.”

Joan opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. She had learned, during the past three days, that arguing with Mary Crow was pointless. “Just please be careful,” she said meekly as Mary slipped like a shadow through the trees.

When Mary had gone, Joan sat down beside a fallen pine and stretched out her legs. Once delicate and high-arched, her feet were now swollen and blistered. They protruded from Mary's jeans, looking as if they belonged to someone else. She wondered what Natalie, her favorite shoe clerk at Saks, would say if she could see them.
I'm so
sorry, Ms. Marchetti. No more Ferragamos for you. You'll have to
try the orthopedic store on Thirty-ninth.
Joan's lips trembled as she bit back a sob. Alex had always laughed at her passion for shoes. What a kick she would get out of this.
Brooklyn's answer to Imelda Marcos
, she would hoot,
condemned to beige oxfords!

Joan turned her gaze away from her feet and stared through the leaves.
Alex
, she thought, trying to sharpen the now hazy memory of her teasing friend.
Where are
you? Has Barefoot done the same thing to you as he did to me,
or has he done worse?
All at once his stink filled her nostrils as she recalled his rough fingers on her flesh.
Raped
.

Violare
. Her parents would call down the worst of curses on a man who would do such a thing. Her Uncle Nick would gleefully hack off that man's balls.
And so
would I.
The realization sizzled through her like a jolt of electricity.
I, too, could kill him.

The shrill chirp of a wren jarred her back to reality. She frowned. Where was Mary? Wasn't she supposed to come back soon?

She stood up and nervously scanned the clearing. “Shit!” she cried, wringing her hands. Mary had been gone far too long. Had she gotten lost? Had she fallen and hurt herself? Had Barefoot sprung some sick trap? What was she supposed to do now? And what would happen to her if Mary never came back?

“Think,” she told herself. “Think like Mary would think.” She forced herself to stand still and try to come up with a plan. If Mary had walked into a trap, then Barefoot would either wait for her to fall into the same trap, or he might get impatient and come looking for her. Mary had taken the palette knife and the paint box; all she had was the nearly empty tube of yellow paint. Though the idea of creeping through the forest alone made her queasy, sitting here waiting to be violated again made her want to throw up.

“Move,” she finally decided. “Mary would move.”

Stashing the paint tube in the pocket of Mary's jeans, she crept down to the clearing. The trail led to a wider patch of trampled grass, then there was nothing. It looked like Alex and Barefoot had come to this spot and simply vanished.

Okay
, Joan thought.
Where would Mary have gone from
here?

She turned in a slow circle, her heart thumping. No one direction seemed any more promising than any other, so she moved forward, hesitantly keeping close to the trees.

The afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground while the forest lay eerily still. She'd felt the same anticipatory hush when she'd sung on stage, as the curtain rose and the audience waited, silent, for the notes to start soaring from her throat.

Mary
, she thought, longing to sing out her name, longing even more to hear her friend's voice answering in return. But the only sound she heard was the hiss of golden maple leaves, shuddering on a breath of wind.

On the left the roadbed veered slightly uphill. On the right sprawled a massive thicket of twisting bushes. Laurel, Mary had called it. Appalachian kudzu. Suddenly, Joan stopped. Had she heard something in the dense foliage?

“Mary?” she called softly, peering into the tangled green darkness.

Nobody answered. Still, Joan knew Mary was in there, somewhere, searching for Alex.
Trust your instincts
, she thought as she ducked and stepped into the tangle of high bushes.
That's what Mary would do.

She picked her way easily through the first spindly plants, then the leaves grew thicker, the branches more confining. Beneath them, the air smelled pungent, choked with rotting vegetation. She started having to shoulder her way between the reluctant bushes, then she had to turn sideways to penetrate them at all. The plants granted no admittance; the further in she pushed, the denser they grew. Suddenly she realized that this was crazy—Mary would never have traipsed through a tangle like this.

“I'd better get back,” she said aloud. “Mary's probably waiting back at that log, pissed.”

Shoving the scratchy branches away from her face, she turned. All at once her legs went limp. The coiling foliage had swallowed the path she'd just made: the laurel itself seemed to have closed behind her like a wall. Every plant loomed above her, blocking out all light and air.

“Mary?” she called, bewildered, a sudden cold sweat bathing her body.

There was no answer.

“Mary?” she called louder. Her voice edged toward panic. What an idiot she'd been. What had ever made her think she could navigate these woods like Mary Crow?

She turned quickly, then felt something slash against the top of her hair. She remembered the hawk, plummeting down from the sky, its talons like knives, and she started to whimper. Instinctively, she ran, tearing headlong through the unyielding bushes. Leaves clawed at her eyes, branches snatched at her legs as she fought her way through the malignant green maze.

“No!” she cried, thrashing through the twisted bushes that held her prisoner. She wanted to go back the way she'd come, but the leaves crowded around her, cutting her off from any place that looked familiar. Was she going forward? Or running in endless circles? Panic gripped her. She ran faster, growing dizzy, all the plants now tilting, thrusting maliciously toward the sky. Suddenly she stepped on something sharp. She cried out as a white-hot pain sizzled up her foot and into her thigh. She toppled forward. Lurching to her feet, she kept moving, charging recklessly through the thick plants. As she shoved between two towering bushes, her foot snagged on a root. This time, she fell sprawling, biting her tongue as her left cheek hit the earth. With the warm, metallic taste of blood filling her mouth, she crawled beneath a bush, seeking shelter like some stricken animal. Gasping, she sat up and examined her foot. A huge thorn lay imbedded just below her big toe. Already the fleshy part of her sole was hot and throbbing in time to the frantic rhythm of her heart.

“Shit!” she cried. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Without thinking, she grabbed the thorn and yanked hard. The sharp point broke off, but most of the thorn remained buried deep in her flesh.

All at once she felt sweaty and nauseous, just as she had when she was five and her brother Frank had locked her in their hall closet. Then, hot woolen coats had pressed against her, robbing her of the air she needed to breathe. Now coiling bushes kept her captive, their branches trapping her in an emerald darkness where the air smelled like the moldy insides of an old refrigerator. How she would love to breathe fresh air again! How she would love to see the sky!

Suddenly she could bear it no longer. She grabbed the laurel leaves above her with both fists and tore them from their branches.

“Shit!” she cried, cackling like a madwoman. “Shit! Shit! Shit! I'm going to be strangled by a bunch of fucking bushes!”

All at once, the shredded leaves that flew around her turned into women. Every Mary she'd ever known floated to the ground smiling, radiant as pictures in a missal. Mary Crow. Sister Mary Ignatius. Sister Mary Magdalen. The Virgin Mary. “Help me,” Joan pleaded, now sobbing uncontrollably. “I'm trying so hard. Please don't let me die here. Please tell me what to do. . . .”

“Joan?”

The sound startled her so that she was sitting up before she was even awake.

“Joan? Is that you?”

Joan struggled to focus in the dark, bracing herself to run. Hours must have passed since she'd collapsed beneath this bush. A figure crouched in front of her, someone dirty, hunkering down like an animal. The smell of fear hung rank in the air. Joan bit down a scream. Was this a dream, or had Barefoot found her? Would she die here without anyone ever knowing what had happened to her?

“Good God, Joan! Where in the hell have you been?” Mary grabbed her so hard Joan felt the breath leave her lungs. “I didn't know what had happened to you!”

Joan felt Mary's arms around her, felt her sweatshirt soaked with perspiration. She was trembling so hard she could barely speak. She was not dreaming! Mary had returned!

“Why on earth did you come in here?” Mary cried. “Why didn't you stay where I told you to?”

“I was looking for you,” whimpered Joan. “Please don't yell at me . . .”

Mary let Joan go and stared into her eyes. In the dark her dirt-streaked face gave her the look of some aboriginal mud-woman. “You don't know what this is, do you?”

The warm comfort Joan had felt just seconds before evaporated. Trembling, she shook her head.

Mary looked at her fiercely. “This is a Hell, Joan. A dog-hobble. A huge sprawl of bushes that could go on for miles. Hillbillies write songs about people who wander into these things and never find their way out. I've been crawling through these bushes for hours. If I hadn't heard you snoring, I'd never have found you.”

“Well, you don't need to be so nasty about it,” Joan retorted, close to tears. “After all, I was the one who was lost—”

Mary gave a weary sigh. She released Joan and brushed a tangled snarl of hair from her eyes. “You're right,” she said. “You didn't know, I should have warned you.”

For a while neither of them spoke; then, with another sigh, Mary curled up beneath the laurel like a bone-tired child. She lay with her back toward Joan, and in the green darkness she looked no more animate than a lump of earth.

Joan watched her until the silence between them seemed to stretch for miles, and she felt as if the two of them suddenly inhabited separate islands in a distant archipelago. When she could bear it no longer, she whispered, “Are you mad at me?” Her voice cracked in the darkness like a child's.

“No,” Mary answered flatly. “Just tired.”

The thorn in Joan's foot was throbbing like a hot coal. “We're in trouble, aren't we?”

“Yes.”

“Bad trouble?”

Mary turned over. Her expression was lost in the shadows. “I don't know, Joan. We're hurt. We're hungry. We lost Alex's trail, and now we've lost ourselves in this Hell. Does that sound like trouble to you?”

Again, Joan started to tremble. Mary made everything sound so hopeless. “Maybe when the sun comes up . . .” she began.

“The sun can't penetrate this laurel, Joan. It's never more than twilight in a Hell. There aren't any streams to drink from, and nothing edible to forage. It could take us days to crawl out of here.”

Joan began to cry. How she had wanted to please Mary—to prove just one time that she wasn't the wuss Alex had called her. But she'd failed utterly. She'd gotten them both impossibly lost in this stupid tangle of bushes. She wished Barefoot had just killed her back at that spring. It would have made it easier for everybody. Then Mary might have had a chance.

“I'm sorry,” she sobbed, her breath coming in gulps. “I'm so very sorry . . .”

She hunched over in a small knot as she wept, filthy, hungry, and more miserable than she'd ever dreamed possible. They were hopelessly lost and it was all her fault. And now Alex would surely die, if she wasn't dead already. Then suddenly she felt Mary's bracing arms around her, her breath whispering into her hair.

“Save your tears, honey. I learned years ago they never change a thing.”

“But what are we going to do?”

Mary squeezed her. “We're going to rest a little while, then we're going to move on.”

Joan blinked. “In the dark?”

“Dark, light, it doesn't make much difference in here.”

“So we're not giving up? We're still going to look for Alex?”

Mary didn't answer at first, then she spoke, sounding as if she were a thousand years old. “No, Joan. Alex is gone. We lost her when we got tangled up in this Hell. From here on the only thing we'll be looking for is a way out of here. And we'll be very lucky if we find that.”