I was ten years old–in fifth grade–and the bus had dropped me off after school. They let us out early that Friday on account of the blizzard, the first flakes of which fell during mid-day. The prospect of a blizzard excited my imagination. Not only did I get to miss some school, but we would likely lose power, live off of oil lamps, and experience something different from the mundane monotony of normal life.
I burst into the house, dropped my backpack, and told my mother I was going to play in the snow. An inch of snow had already fallen, and I didn’t want to waste a moment. I heard her yell to be back inside before dusk, then rushed from the house and ran down the street to Mason’s house.
By the time I reached the end of the street, the flakes of snow had swollen to the size of grapes. The wind rushed through the tree branches, which swayed back and forth. I ran to Mason’s front door, ripped my glove off, and rapped on the wood. A moment later Mason’s mother opened the door, blinked, then saw me standing below her.
“Charlie, you’re looking for Mason, I assume,” she said. Her hair was tied back in a bun, and she was wearing a woolen sweater that made me think of Christmas.
I nodded. She told me to hold on for a moment, vanished into the house, and a moment later Mason barreled for the door, one sleeve of his iridescently green winter jacket dangling loose behind him.
“Mason, finish putting on your jacket,” his mother yelled from the next room, but Mason pulled the door shut behind him, cutting her off.
“A real snowstorm,” he said, grinning like he walked into a room full of birthday gifts. He struggled for a moment with his sleeve, got it right, and continued, “I heard we’re getting more than a foot. Let’s go to the orchard.” He didn’t wait for my response before bolting around back of the house.
Mason’s backyard stretched for a dozen yards or so before sloping gently down for another thirty. Rocks and tree stumps littered the hill, so sledding there was dangerous, but we often tobogganed there anyway. On this day, however, Mason charged down the hill, heading for the low stone wall at the far end of the yard, beyond which the scraggly branches and brush of a young forest grew. Just beyond that forest, across a brief stretch of town land, grew an old apple orchard. We didn’t know who owned it, but since the trees had long since become overgrown and the bushes allowed to overtake the paths, and since nobody ever told us to leave, we played there all the time anyway. I started down the hill in pursuit of my friend.
“Mason, stop!” someone cried from the back deck. I half-expected Mason to ignore the shouting and continue for the wall, but he slowed and turned his head back. Mason’s brother, Aaron, stood on the back deck in sweatpants and a long-sleeve New England Patriots shirt. His arms were crossed in front of him and his fingertips shoved in his armpits. Several years older than us, he had started high school that year, but most of the time he avoided the two of us like we carried a disease.
“What, Aaron?” Mason asked back, irritation tingeing his voice.
“The Quincy-Jones Woman.”
“What?”
Louder, Aaron repeated himself. “The Quincy-Jones Woman. You’re really going to charge into the forest after what happened to Gus last time?”
Mason rolled his eyes. “Come on, Charlie. He’s just trying to scare us.”
“What’s the Quincy-Jones Woman?” I asked.
Aaron looked at me, for the first time acknowledging my presence. “A few Summers back, Gus and I were charging around back there. We were deep in the woods–beyond the orchard–when this strange figure approached us from the depths of the forest. At first we thought we had stumbled onto someone’s property, so we apologized and started to turn around, then the person moaned.” Aaron shuddered. “That sound chilled me to my soul. It was like she was trying to say something but the power of speech had left her. When she emerged from the trees and stood only a few feet from us, a sense of dread froze me in place. Thank God I had Gus. He snapped me out of it and we ran back to the house. I don’t know what she would have done, the monster in Quincy-Jones Forest, but I don’t want you two to find out.”
“Ignore him, Charlie. He’s making it up to scare you,” Mason said, but I was too deeply invested in the story to leave now.
“I’ll catch up,” I replied. Then, turning back to Aaron, “what did she look like?”
“Long black hair that hung in tattered clumps.” He gestured to the sides of his head. “Skin sunken and blotched yellow and green, bloated like she had been submerged for days. Her eyes, completely black, bulged from her head. She walked with a limp. Rags hung from her body. Bits of foam and spit puffed at the corners of her mouth. And her hands…her hands.” Aaron paused, closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “Her hands were gnarled and knobby. She reached out for us, as if to grasp us and drag us back to the depths with her. Her nails were yellow and untrimmed, and those fingers looked like the roots of a tree, supple and strong, yet thin. I knew if she caught hold of me I wouldn’t be able to break her grip.”
I wanted to stay longer, to hear more of Aaron’s story, but just as I was about to ask another question, Mason tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, Charlie.”
I met Aaron’s gaze one last time. He shook his head as Mason pulled me toward the wall and Quincy-Jones forest beyond.
__________
Finger-like twigs scratched at our faces, stinging in the freezing air. The thin layer of snow on the ground crunched underfoot. Looking up, the pale sky masked the snowflakes, and they became visible only moments before landing on my face.
“He’s just trying to sound cool,” Mason insisted as we charged through the trees. “He thinks if he scares us it makes him an adult.”
“He seemed pretty freaked out,” I said.
“He’s a good actor.”
Mason’s utter indifference to his brother’s story reassured me some, but anxiety lurked in the back of my mind nevertheless. It threatened to burst forth at the smallest provocation. The image Aaron had painted, so visceral, had withdrawn into the recesses of my mind and become little more than a formless impression, but like a memory it could, at any moment, reform in all detail.
“Let’s go to the Sky Rock,” Mason said. He stopped suddenly and spun around. “Race you!”
“Mason, wait, I don’t–” But he vanished down a side path before I could finish. I don’t know the way. Mason had spent a whole childhood playing back here, and I only ventured over the wall on occasion, and never without Mason.
“Mason!” I cried, but I knew he wouldn’t hear me. He knew only that he wanted to reach the clearing with the Sky Rock; it never crossed his mind that I couldn’t follow.
For a moment I stood still, watching the path ahead. Flakes of snow, the only movement, twirled to the ground. Now that no other noise interrupted, they hissed as they landed.
A deep breath to compose myself. I could head back to the house by turning around and taking the most direct route, but even then I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the route Mason had taken. I knew the first turn of the path he had taken, so I could follow him at least for a bit. Plus he had left footprints. So long as I kept to those, I couldn’t lose him.
I started along the trail, grumbling under my breath about Mason’s shortsightedness.
Following Mason’s footsteps proved harder than I anticipated, but for a time I managed. Eventually, however, the path forked, and enough time had passed that the falling snow had filled the footprints, making them all but indistinguishable from the undisturbed route. Here I faced my first true test: did I wait here until Mason returned, or did I take the plunge and pick a direction? The safer option, waiting, didn’t appeal to me at all. But the prospect of becoming lost in the forest weighed heavily on me.
I stared down the left fork for a time, and though I had no specific reason, I ruled against it. Then I looked down the right fork. At first it resembled the left in every respect, but something in the distance struck me as different, though from this far away, I couldn’t determine what. A mix of curiosity and caution battled within, and the curiosity won out. After all, couldn’t I return to this place if nothing noteworthy lay at the trail’s end?
The trail opened not into more forest but into a relatively open space. The occasional tree, spaced from its brethren and growing much shorter than the oaks, maples, and locusts of the forest burst from the ground. Their long, scraggly limbs dangled overhead, but some of the lower branches were within my reach. I had been here before. This place was the orchard, and you had to cross the orchard to reach the Sky Rock. Mason had passed through here.
I started through the orchard, under trees and through the bushes that over time had taken hold of the unkempt paths. My imagination conjured images of this place in springtime, when apples sprouted from the trees, squirrels scampered back and forth, and if you remained still and vigilant enough, deer wandered past. For now, though, only I broke the stillness. The orchard stretched forever before me, and no matter how long I walked, more seemed to emerge. The orchard, a never-ending Sisyphean land, refused to release me. Eventually my legs grew tired, and I had to stop for a rest.
I plunked down at the base of a tree, feeling the snow give under my rear. It felt like falling into a cheap pillow. I took this time to watch the world around me, the cardinals and blue jays landing on branches, staying for a moment, then flapping to their next stop. Against this world of increasingly intense white snow, they stood out like colorized details of a black and white photograph.
Something larger moved in the distant trees.
Suddenly I sat erect. Was it perhaps a deer, or had a coyote wandered into the orchard. Neither was a threat, but if it was a coyote, I didn’t want to remain sitting. I struggled to my feet and scanned the clearing again, but whatever it was had vanished. Still alert, I started to sit again, but just as I bent my knees, two birds about a hundred feet away squabbled and took to the air. Back to my feet.
“Hello?” I called.
No reply.
With small steps I started forward. If it was a deer, it would sense me and run away. If it was a coyote, I could jump and make noise, and it would run away. After walking fifty feet or so, a stench overwhelmed me, however, and I had to stop. The crisp winter air had smelled blank for so long that the slightest scent stood out, and this odor reeked stronger than low tide. Rancid and tangy, it reminded me of death and decay. Images of corpses and medieval battlefields littered with bodies in the silent aftermath of war flooded my head.
Then I saw her.
I have no doubt of what I saw. Sunken cheeks, yellow-green skin, like that of a half-spoiled lime. Strands of black hair that, frozen stiff, swished back and forth with her steps. Nearly naked and barefooted, she walked with a hunch and a limp. Her tongue, purple from the cold, poked from the corner of her mouth. Worse than all these details though were her eyes. Like those of a frog, they seemed to bulge from her skull. Her pupils swelled to such a size that you couldn’t tell where she was looking, except for that she lurched in my direction. I didn’t move at first. She was still far enough away that I didn’t fear her yet. When she was twenty feet away, she raised her right arm, its skin seeming to drip from her bones, and opened her hand. Those bony, knobby fingers looked like clamps of death. The intuition that if they tightened around my arm or neck, they would act on me as ivy on a tree, choke me and sap the life from me bit by bit, parasitic and unrelenting. The situation’s urgency triggered my instincts, and before I knew what I was doing, I turned and ran for the trail.
For each step I took, each time my feet crunched in the snow, the sound repeated behind me. I dared not look back, fearing that if I saw her running in pursuit, I would freeze like frightened prey. Strangely, terror didn’t grip me. That anxiety one feels when his life is threatened, like the heart and gut are squirming to move, didn’t arise. My fear seemed academic yet entirely honest. That clarity of mind guided me along the trails which had before seemed so foreign. Now details that had before meant nothing looked familiar, and so long as I didn’t think, my feet carried me along the right path.
The wall loomed ahead of me. My legs now searing front the effort of running through the snow, I leapt. Over the wall, into Mason’s yard, losing balance and plunging into the snow. I spun onto my back and stuck my hands up to fend off the Quincy-Jones Woman as she dove for my prone body…
She wasn’t there.
I was alone in Mason’s back yard. I sat up, turned my head back, and giggled. She hadn’t run after me at all. The sounds behind me had been the echoes of my own footfalls. I was safe, out of the forest, and had nothing to worry about.
But what about Mason?
The question struck me with the force of a cannonball. It punched the air from my lungs and the glee from my thoughts. He was alone in the forest with the Quincy-Jones Woman. If she smelled him and followed his path, snuck up behind him, and grabbed him unawares, neither he nor I could do anything. I had to go back. Prepared and alert, I could warn Mason and guide him back from the forest. Even if he didn’t believe me and decided I was crazy, for him to think that struck me as preferable to losing him forever.
Without further hesitation I plunged once again into the trees, unsure where to go or how to find him. I shouted his name several times to no avail. Wherever he was in here, I wasn’t going to find him without becoming lost myself. I systematically explored each side path, checking them for any signs of Mason, tensed and ready to flee at the first sign of the hag, but throughout the next hour I found neither of them, and I realized I could do nothing but return to the house and hope that Mason emerged from the woods soon. I’d have to explain to his mom that he wandered too deeply into the forest and now was lost during a blizzard. She’d have to call the police, and soon enough the situation would become an event, an ordeal. So badly did I want to avoid such an outcome that I considered continuing my search despite its futility. Instead I turned around. The wind picked up to a howl, and the tree branches clacked against each other. The snow drove down at an angle now. Soon the storm would grow too intense to stay outside. I took one last look at the wall and the trees beyond, then crossed the yard and knocked on the back door.
“There you are. We were getting worried,” Mason’s mom said the moment she opened the door. As she pulled me inside I tried to say everything on my mind, that Mason was missing, that the storm was growing too intense and if we didn’t do something, he was in serious trouble, but only now that I stood in the warm living room did I realize how the cold had interrupted the muscles of my face. They were so frozen I could hardly talk, and before I knew what was happening, she had me seated at the kitchen table with a mug of hot cocoa.
“Your mom called, Charlie, and she and I agree that you should spend the night here. The storm is getting too bad for you to walk home.”
If it was too bad for me to walk home, it was too bad for Mason to wander the woods. With the cocoa, decadently sweet and with a layer of whipped cream atop it, my face was thawing. I managed to say, “Mason was–” before the stomping of footsteps cut me off. Mason stuck his head in the room, saw me, and his eyes lit up.
“Where have you been, dude?” he asked. He took the seat opposite me.
“I was looking for you. You took off and I didn’t know where to go. When the storm picked up I thought you were lost.”
Mason shook his head. “Nah. When I got to Sky Rock and realized you weren’t with me, I realized you were lost, so I headed for the house knowing you’d eventually make your way back there.”
The phone rang in the next room, and Mason’s mom excused herself. The moment she left, I leaned in and said in a hushed tone, “I saw her Mason.”
“Her?”
“The Quincy-Jones Woman.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“I’m serious. You can’t have seen her. She’s not real. Aaron’s been talking about her for years; he was trying to scare you.”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I’m serious. In the orchard, when I was looking for you, I saw something big moving around, so I took a closer look. It was her. Exactly like Aaron described.”
Mason must have seen the sincerity in my eyes because he didn’t respond for a moment. Finally, “you really did see something.”
“Really really.”
After finishing my cocoa I wanted to ask Aaron about the woman, but he had apparently gone to his girlfriend’s for the evening. Instead Mason and I took to the den, fired up the Xbox, and spent hours playing Left 4 Dead. As we killed zombies and hurled insults back and forth, the snow piled ever higher outside. Wind rattled the windows, and occasionally a tree branch cracked with the volume of a gunshot. We were enjoying ourselves until ten in the evening or so, when suddenly the power went out. Mason decided to go to bed, but since the day’s events had left me too anxious to sleep, I went to the window and stared across the back yard, watching the stone wall. I could hardly see it through the snow and ice accumulating on the glass, and the occasional glimpse I caught revealed nothing. I couldn’t tell in the slightest whether the Quincy Jones Woman had made it into the yard, or if she still wandered the forest, looking for the boy she had come so close to catching. Eventually I passed out. That night I dreamed of seaweed’s slimy tendrils wrapping around my ankles and pulling me to the bottom of the sea.
__________
Fresh snow never fails to transform the world. From richness of color to monochrome splendor, it creates a new world out of the old, at least for a time. Without knowledge and experience, a place after a snowstorm is unrecognizable for its usual self, and that metamorphosis inspires the imagination and a sense of childlike wonder. A snowy world is beautiful, and it takes the mind of a cynic not to appreciate it.
Mason’s mom made us waffles and bacon that morning. While we ate, she sat by the sliding glass door with her coffee and watched the birds flit from branch to branch. A rabbit sometimes hopped across the yard, leaving behind it its distinctive tracks that trailed in lazy curves before vanishing under a bush. The clouds of the storm now gone, the sun shined down, reflected off the snow, and sparkled with crystalline brightness. The thermometer read twenty-eight degrees.
Mason and I threw on our snow clothes and charged outside the moment we had digested enough to move. “Back to the Sky Rock,” Mason shouted, and I followed, intending not to lose him this time. All thoughts of the Quincy-Jones Woman had left my mind, as the splendor of the snow encompassed all my mind and spirit.
About half-way down the hill, Mason suddenly pitched forward and fell face down in the snow. He must have tripped over one of the many rocks that littered the yard. With over a foot of snow, we couldn’t see the smaller ones.
“You okay, Mason?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, rolling onto his side. “Just give me a second to get this snow out of my clothes.
While Mason emptied his hat, gloves, socks, and coat of snow, I approached the bulge in the snow that must have been the rock. It was longer than it was wide, and judging by the gentle imprint it left on the snow’s surface, it couldn’t be more than six or eight inches tall. I felt it with my boot. It was hard as ice.
“Is there a rock here, Mason?”
“I don’t know. You think I memorize the rock patterns?”
The answer was yes, but I said nothing. Instead I leaned down and scooped snow away. It was wet and heavy, so digging took several minutes, but when I had finished, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from what lay before me.
“Mason, come take a look at this.”
“It’s just a rock, man.”
“Seriously, just look.”
Mason came around to stand next to me, looked down, and said, “oh.” He managed nothing more.
Frozen in the snow lay the body of a woman, her skin now pale and icy, strands of black hair frozen against her forehead. She was young, not the crone I had seen in the woods, and her face read of desperation. Her fingertips curled, frozen in the motion of reaching forward. She had been desperate, and now she was dead.