-–
Amy and I walked back to the bullpen minus Tommy. Thor was making some kind of notations to the whiteboard map of the area.
“I take it Tommy’s finished with his story?” He sat down at his desk. “Don’t worry about him, he’ll probably smoke a whole pack today but he’ll be fine. It’s been 40 years, after all. I hope his story hasn’t given you any second thoughts, Amy?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not going to touch anything I find in the woods but I’m fine. ‘Guess those rules are there for a reason, right?”
Rules?
“Ah…not something a non-ranger would know about,” Thor fished around in his desk drawer, “we printed up a bunch of these in the 70s and still haven’t run out. Here, have one.”
He handed me a folded brochure-type pamphlet entitled ‘Safety in the Woods – Practical Rules for Rangers’.
“I’ll save you the trouble, though, and show you some of the more…esoteric rules we have in Precipice Bay.”
They basically boiled down to the following:
Wow…there were a lot of rules here and so many questions! Some of the things here were self-explanatory but others opened up brand new inquiries; what was going on with Hope Island? And where was forest section 84?
“So I’m sure you’ve got plenty of questions but let me tell you about my own experience in these woods first…if you’re still in the mood for a scary campfire story?”
I nodded and sat down beside his desk.
“This happened about ten-odd years ago, now, before I was First Ranger. I was doing some routine work one day when time got away from me and the sun started going down. Luckily, I was well within walking distance of a hunting blind and went straight there before all the light faded.
“Now you might’ve noticed the rules around bein’ in the forest overnight. That was on the books for rangers since before Tommy’s fright night and is still there today. We have well over a hundred raised hunting blinds spread out across the forest from the Javelin, North to Cold Spring, West to Morgan Hollows, and South to New Stickney.
“Have you ever been in a hunting blind?”
Once, with my Uncle Pat when I was ten. I told Thor as much.
“Well try to get that image of soft plywood floors and wet canvas walls outta your head. These are permanent insulated structures with solid floors and thick plexiglass windows. They’re all about 6-10 feet off the ground, accessible by a pull-up ladder or stairs, and have sleeping bags, food, and water for a few days.
“I got there before dark and used the radio to contact Clyde Foran back here and tell him I couldn’t make it back before dark. After that I disconnected the radio, secured the window tarps closed, and settled in for the night. All standard procedures.
“I was reading a pulp novel, some rip-off of the Shadow one of the guys had left in the blind, when around 10 PM there comes a knocking on the door. And not some branches scraping or wind or anything natural you could mistake as tapping – I’m talking 3 good hard raps on the door.
“I shut off the lantern and waited. My skin seemed painfully tight against my body. Every hair was painfully standing on end. The woods play tricks on you at night, you see, so I wanted to be sure I’d heard what I thought I’d heard. After a few minutes it came again; 3 hard raps on the door.
“I didn’t answer or make a sound, partly because it was procedure not to answer any knocks on the door at night and partly because I was shitting my pants in fear.”
Ralph Tillerson snorted at his desk before slurping at his mug of coffee. Thor turned a tired eye to his fellow ranger.
“As hard as it is to believe, I’m not ashamed to admit I was scared that night. But whatever or whoever it was seemed to take my silence as some kind of answer and didn’t knock again. I was eating a candy bar from the mess kit awhile later when my walkie-talkie chirped.
“’Thor? This is Clyde. I’m at your location, can you let me in?’ Is what it said and I cursed myself for not turning off the walkie as soon as I locked the door – it was standard procedure, after all – leave no line of communication open after getting to shelter. But I was an idiot and had left it on!
“I didn’t respond to the voice. That’s another of the unspoken rules in the forest: trust no noises in the forest at night, they’re just audio hallucinations or, if you want to be really macabre, the Witch seeking to ensnare witless humans.
“’C’mon, man, can you let me in already? It’s freezing out here’, the voice continued, probably knowing that if there was a hot mic in the blind there was a warm body. I switched the walkie off and double-checked the windows were snapped shut and the door was locked. ‘Thor? I know you can hear me. Let me in.’
“It was maddening, let me tell you. Now I could have taken a peek out the window to see who or what was at the door but after years of hearing Tommy’s story I wasn’t going to invite that level of trauma on myself. Hearing it was enough…I didn’t need to look into Erica Martel’s maggot-ridden eye sockets to know something dangerous was at the door.
“And I knew it wasn’t Clyde Foran at the door.
“So kind of like Ralphie, here, huh?” Amy threw a wad of crumpled paper at the thick man’s broad back. I noted that he had already sweat through the back of his shirt and he hadn’t been doing anything except sitting and eating since I arrived.
“So whatever I was hearing wasn’t a real person, hell, I couldn’t even tell you if there was anything physically there or if I was just hearing things.” Thor took a swig from his Postum.
“Have any other rangers experienced this,” I asked, “aside from you and Tommy?”
“There isn’t a ranger alive in this area that hasn’t experienced something at some time. Sometimes it’s something like The Twins, or voices, you know, small things, but Harry Miller – the head ranger when I first started here – swore he’d once seen hundreds of spectral children staring at him out the back door of this very station when he’d gone out for a smoke. Gave him his first heart attack, too.
“But I didn’t see anything that night in the blind. Oh it talked something fierce, taking on different voices every other time, but I didn’t respond to it and I didn’t open the door.
“It started as Clyde, then switched to Cedric, then Tommy, and ended up a sultry-voiced woman enticing me to open the door. Maybe Erica Martel herself…
“I was delirious when Cedric and Tommy broke down the door the next morning, mad from anxiety, fear, and exhaustion. According to both of them the ladder was still propped up against the wall beside the door and there were no marks on the door itself. They got worried when I didn’t respond to the safe word.
“I was on involuntary sick leave for the next month.”
I just sat there watching Thor sip his drink for a while, trying to parse everything he’d just said.
“I’m sure you have questions. I’ve got about 15 minutes until I have other duties to attend to so shoot and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.”
“Where is ‘Forest section 84’? And why do rangers need to enter it in force?”
“That section of the area is home to both a wide-open field area and a dense copse of old growth trees-“
Wait a minute, that sounded like-
“-the locals call it ‘The Break’
-and there it was…the site of my only true solitary experience with any of the myriad creepy-crawlies in the area. I knew Bigelow was no doubt napping in the sunshine with Alex and Kitty outside but I kind of wished he were on my lap at that moment. That same ripple of vertigo rose from my feet – that subtle but disorienting feeling of becoming unmoored – that I felt in the field when the gracklins attacked.
“Section 84 is about 30% field, 20% normal forest, and 50% old growth. It’s the result of a logging permit being revoked way back in the 1920s. Over the years the edges of the old growth have started seeping out into the fields but it’s still a weird location.
“And I have it on good account that there’s a massive infestation of sprites in the woods.”
“You mean gracklins? There’s a den there?”
“I’ve heard ‘em called ‘gracklins’ before, the native people call ‘em pukwudgies, but I’ve always thought of ‘em as sprites – forest spirits. Never seen anything of ‘em but I’ve seen the results of their work…we don’t go in there unless we absolutely have to…” Thor reached down to the floor and clicked his fingers.
A truly enormous, fat, fluffy cat plodded out from under Ralph’s desk.
“…and we always take old man Winter here if we go. Whatever lives in those woods seems to really hate him. 15 years, old Winter’s been with us, and its been 15 years since we last had an injury in Section 84.”
Winter was a dusky gray shorthair cat with white socks and mittens. The gray at his oddly shrunken muzzle – he must’ve had some Persian in him – was starting to turn white with age and he had a snaggletooth. His green eyes were splotched with brown smears, and he had the tip of his left ear clipped.
I stuck my hand out, palm down, and Winter’s eyes narrowed before he brushed his jowl against my fingers.
“Now that’s a stupid goddamn cat,” Ralph opined with his face stuffed with cruller, “just lies underneath my desk all day and bites me when I try to put my feet on ‘im!”
Pot meet kettle…
“I can probably answer 1 last question.”
I really wanted to know about Harper’s Field but it was probably a matter of public record, and Hope Island was probably much the same…
“This note here about unresponsive hikers, what’s the story behind that?”
“Ah,” Thor leaned back in his chair and sipped his mug, “that’s something that’s been on there since the 30s and not something I personally have any experience with but I can tell you what I’ve heard.
“Here’s the thing, our records go way back, even before the National Parks inception, with volunteer rangers and warders going almost to the incorporation of Precipice Bay. One of the things those records indicate is the danger of isolated, deranged hikers.
“Something about these woods…not even what’s in the woods but the trees themselves…makes some people funny in the head. Or so I’d like to believe. There are at least 3 official accounts of deranged people in the forest from 1853-1937.
“The earliest account – and most likely the one that prompted a rule among the rangers – was from spring in 1853. I don’t remember the exact date but I’m sure it’s there if you care to search, and it only states that a woodsman named Peter Haviland was hunting with a friend, Bertrand Cottet, when they came upon a solitary man facing the Tall Men in these woods.
“Haviland and Cottet first caught sight of his back and what they described as an ‘inhumane howl’ coming from his throat. They called out, asking what was wrong, but the man didn’t move. He did stop screaming, though, but that was small comfort. He continued standing there, as Haviland described ‘as still as a corpse’, until the pair came within arm’s length.
“Faster than either could react, the ‘man’ grabbed Cottet without turning around and whisked him off towards the mountains ‘wailing like a banshee’.”
“So, wait a minute, does that mean the man’s arms bent backwards to grab Cottet or did he turn around?”
“Story didn’t specify, just said the pair met a strange man screaming, Cottet got yanked, and he was never seen again. There were notes that a search was conducted but I don’t know how extensive or thorough it was…
“The latest record from 1937, that one has a bit more meat to it since it was an official ranger’s report. It was Jerry Mercer who wrote up the report and it was signed by Head Ranger Tim Mosley.
“On August 12, 1937, at 11:06 AM, Mercer took a call that some hikers heard human screaming and, upon further investigation, found a man standing at the edge of Hanging Hill with his back to them facing the Tall Men. Mercer arrived at approximately 12 PM but despite repeated inquiries received no response. Per protocol he did not approach closer than 20 feet.
“Unfortunately, one of the hikers that reported the situation grew impatient and moved within 10 feet. As soon as that distance was breached, Mercer said that it was like a switch went off and the ‘man’ started twitching and making a noise like a busted fan.”
“What does that mean, ‘a busted fan’?” It could be any number of noises, none of which put my mind at ease. Thor smirked and touched an old paper ledger on his desk.
“Mercer wrote that it was like when a desk fan is just starting to turn, a kind of ‘whump, whump, whump’ along with the squeal of un-oiled metal, like honing a knife with one of those sharpener jobs that come with expensive butcher blocks. But apparently it didn’t speed up or anything, just kept repeating at the same clip.
“Suddenly, the ‘man’ turned around and grabbed the hiker by the throat with both hands, lifting him off the ground over its head, and the using the hiker’s weight to carry them both forward over the edge.”
Jesus…what the hell was going on in these woods? Gracklins, ghosts, the Witch; what fresh hell was Thor describing?
“Did Mercer see what grabbed the hiker?”
“The report states that when the ‘man’ turned around there wasn’t anything human about the features. ‘An upright mound of ground beef and worms’ was how he wrote it up and Mosley signed off on it…not that that makes it true but ol’ Timmy wasn’t a man prone to delusions if the stories were anything to go by…”
That was an image I could have done without…
“What happened to the attacker and the hiker? After they went over the edge?”
Thor finished off his drink and leaned back in his chair with a squeal of old metal.
“Well…that’s the part where things go off the rails. The ravine below wasn’t that deep but it was thick with overgrowth and dead leaves. A couple of deputies helped Mercer search the area but there weren’t any bodies.
“Sheriff’s department wrote it off as a murder-suicide despite not having any killer or motive while Jimmy never let it go even after he became head ranger. He took to walking the forest with a shillelagh – one of those Irish walking sticks – except his had a heavy steel knob at the top.
“He also developed a habit…one odd enough they were still talking about it when I joined up and that was over a decade after he retired…see, he would tap the ground with his stick incessantly. Walking about the woods, walking the halls of the station, keeping watch at the fire tower, you could apparently tell he was there by the tapping.
“Rangers who are more sensitive to paranormal goings-on sometimes say they can hear his tapping in the station late at night…
“Anyway, Harry Miller, the one who had a heart attack out the back door’ve this place, worked under Mercer for years and told me he got first-hand information on how Mercer picked up that habit.”
A noisy slurp heralded the entrance of Tommy Parisen back to the bullpen. He reeked of cigarettes with a light dusting of some horrendous aftershave – Aqua Velva? – gently laid over the top like snow dust on top of a compost heap. He drank noisily from a cup of coffee in the doorway.
“’Beer-y’ Miller, eh? Lazy SOB but a hard-ass on everyone else, so high-strung ‘s no wonder he had…what, six heart attacks?”
“Nine, actually; though the last 2 were almost concurrent,” Thor popped a handful of orange Tic-Tacs into his mouth, “nothin’ quite like Death givin’ you those final couple of knocks on your door.”
Tommy waved it off.
“Why’re we talkin’ about Miller? The ghost kids?”
“No, no…well, actually, yes we were talking about that before – we’re talking about Jerry Mercer’s tapping.”
“Ah…Beery’d trot that ol’ chestnut out all the time.” Tommy sat down by Thor’s desk. “So Beery used to say that when he and Jerry were out on patrol in the Hanging Hill area, Jerry would tell ‘im about the hiker attack and about how they never found any bodies.
“According to legend – and Beery was an infamous liar – Jerry Mercer said that when they searched the bottom of the ravine they couldn’t find any trace of the bodies but they did find a large patch of dug-up dirt on the side of the hill near the bottom. Just churned up dirt like from a drill or something, soft enough for something…oh, roughly human-sized, to leave if they dug like a mole.”
Or maybe something that held itself in a human shape…the thought made butterflies erupt in my stomach. I could feel my lower half go cold and the hairs on my neck and arms stood on end.
“Jerry shoved his arm into it, supposedly up to the shoulder, and felt nothing but soft loamy dirt until his fingertips hit something hot and wet. Somethin’ that squirmed away as soon as he touched it.”
“On that pleasant note,” Thor interrupted, “why don’t we take a gander out in the hall, hmm?”
He walked out of the bullpen into the long main corridor while Tommy and I followed.
Right across from the information desk, Thor stopped and regarded the wall. Suspended in an ornate mahogany case with a glass door was a 4 and a half or 5 foot long stick. A brass plaque affixed under the display read:
“In memory of First Ranger Jeremiah Wolcott Mercer (1918-2006)
Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far – Theodore Roosevelt”
Tommy snorted and tossed his empty cup.
“Jerry was only head for what…16 years? An’ he gets a plaque an’ shit? Hell, Beery Miller was head longer and we ain’t got nothing from him…’cept the smell in the men’s room!” The old man started a laugh that quickly turned to hacking coughs. “But yeah, that’s Jerry’s shillelagh all right.”
“Mercer took to testing the ground everywhere he went,” Thor smoothly continued, “and I guess that just became a compunction and finally a reflex as simple as breathing. If Miller’s account was true, can you blame him for being terrified something like that hiker could pop up out of nowhere?”
I left shortly after that since Thor had a meeting to run and I figured Alex and Kitty had waited long enough but I had to take a minute to myself outside the station. Maybe Tommy had the right idea…
Taking a single cigarette from my emergency stash made me feel bad but after a couple of drags the fight-or-flight jitters stopped and I just kind of sank against the wood bench.
There was just so much new information packed into that afternoon and so many questions. What made Precipice Bay the epicenter of so many odd occurrences? I’d learned so much since I started working up here and virtually none of it was good. It was hard to remember the days when I’d go for a hike near my house back in Lyndon or around the Castleton campus area with Jamie and Alice or visited The Ledges in Wilmington with Uncle Pat…
Those places, areas I used to think were breathtakingly beautiful, were now darkened by all the things I could now imagine in or around the forests. Not to mention all the walks I’d taken in the woods since I arrived in Precipice Bay! How many times had something been watching me? Or been right under my feet?
Then I saw the shoes.
They were brand new black Doc Martens, polished to a mirror sheen, and looking like they hadn’t even been worn. They were innocuously sitting beside the bench across the sidewalk from me. The laces were even still looped together from the factory.
Time seemed to stop and my vision inexorably tightened until all I could see was the boots. The adrenaline that had leeched out of my body during my smoke break instantly and catastrophically surged back. The nape of my neck tingled and the skin of my arms was almost painfully taut with every hair on end.
My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. I was hyperventilating but I couldn’t hear my own breathing, I couldn’t feel anything other than the bones at the tips of my fingers trying to tear through the skin.
Suddenly a fire bloomed between my fingertips and I realized the cigarette had burned to the filter. I bolted upright and blew on my fingers just as a man stepped out of the bushes.
He was probably mid-20s and was zipping up his pants – leaving no question what he’d just been doing despite the camp bathrooms being less than 20 feet away. He looked at me oddly - I must have been a sight – before plucking up the new boots and trotting down the walk. I watched him pass the showers and head down the path to the lake.
“You okay?” I screamed and jumped away as Alex grabbed my shoulder. She and Kitty were carrying the picnic hamper. “Jesus! What happened to you?”
I sat back down on the bench bonelessly and let Bigelow lie down on my thighs. They had 3 wine coolers left. I drank 2 and told them to call Steve while I called Ken. I had to tell them what I’d discovered.