Or, better still, that they had waited until morning.
For it was night now. The sun had set quickly, brightening an already extant moon, and the woods were dark, the trees silhouettes and shadows, the hills black background. Behind them, on the other side of the high hills walling in the opposite edge of the valley, the world was yellow and orange, a prolonged sunset fading slowly into the Pacific. But here there was only gloom and the pale bluish light of the moon.
He was afraid of the woods, and it had nothing to do with Penelope or her mothers or anything that he had seen or heard or imagined. It was an instinctive reaction to the sight before him, a physical sensation in response to something within the trees that seemed to be calling to him on some subliminal level.
Something within the trees.
He did think there was something within the trees, although he was not sure where, why, or how he had come up with that idea. And it was calling to him. He was afraid of it, but at the same time he felt attracted to it, pulled toward it.
God, he wished he could have a drink right now.
"Dion?"
He looked toward Penelope. She was pale, and he knew it wasn't only the light of the moon that made her appear that way. "Yeah?" he said.
He expected her to say something serious and profound, something that would articulate and explain the complex conflicting emotions he was feeling--that they were both feeling--but when she spoke, her words were disappointingly, disconcertingly mundane: "We should have brought flashlights."
He found himself nodding. "Yeah," he said. "We should've."
They crawled under the fence without speaking--he holding up the barbed wire so she could sneak beneath it--and he grabbed her hand as they started to walk into the woods. Penelope's hand was warm to his touch, her palm sweaty, and he liked that. Her fear excited him somehow, and he felt a stirring in his crotch.
He tried not to think about his feelings, tried not to acknowledge them, but they were as frightening to him as the woods around them. He should tell Penelope, talk to her, let her know that something was wrong not just with this place but with him, but he said nothing, held her hand, continued walking.
The world was silent. Car noises, city noises, did not reach here, did not penetrate, and the woods generated no sounds of their own: no crickets, no birds, no animals. There was only their own breathing, the snap-crackle-pop of their tennis shoes on twigs and gravel. There was something familiar about this lack of sound, Dion thought, something he couldn't quite place.
Penelope's hand stiffened in his. She stopped walking, and he turned to look at her. The woods were dark, the ceiling of trees effectively blocking out the over bright moon. Here and there, individual shafts of moonlight illuminated small sections of ground, but Penelope was in shadow, her pale face barely visible in the murk. "What?" he asked.
"Maybe we should go back."
"I thought you wanted to--"
"I'm afraid."
He pulled her close, put his arms around her. He knew that she could feel his erection, and he pressed forward, pushing it against her.
"There's nothing out here," he said. He didn't believe it and didn't know why he had said it, but he repeated it again. "There's nothing here but us."
"I'm afraid," she said again.
He wished they'd brought some wine with them. A flagon of that stuff in the vat. A few swallows of that and she wouldn't be afraid anymore.
Hell, a few swallows of that and she'd be out of her panties and on her fucking hands and knees, begging for it He pushed away from her, took a deep breath. "Maybe we should go back,"
he said.
"You feel it too."
He nodded, then realized that she couldn't see his face. "Yeah," he admitted.
She reached for him, took his hand again. "Let's--" she began, then sucked in her breath, squeezed his hand. "Look," she said.
"What?"
"Over there." She pulled him to the left, and he saw for the first time what looked like a clearing between the trunks of the trees. A meadow.
He didn't want to go to that meadow, wanted instead to turn back, return the way they'd come, but he allowed himself to be pulled along, and they passed between the trees, reached the edge of the clearing, and stopped.
"Oh, my God," Penelope said. She was breathing heavily, in hiccuping spurts. "Oh, my God."
Dion felt suddenly cold.
The clearing was littered with shattered wine bottles, moonlight sparkling on the tiny pieces of broken glass. Here and there, busted kegs emerged from the sea of smashed bottles like dark whales. Scattered amongst the glass were pieces of bone. The pieces were small-- carpels, tarsels, metatarsels--but there were enough of them distributed just at their feet to let them know that this had been the sight of some major carnage, that the skeletal remains of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people could. be found here.
But it was not the bones which had chilled Dion so.
It was the blood.
Beneath the glass, beneath the bones, the grass and the dirt below the grass were stained a dark blackish red, the residual sediment of a wave or river of blood which seemed to have once flowed through the clearing. Even the trunks of the trees were darker than they should have been, and the small shrubs and wild bushes which grew around the perimeter of the meadow had a distinctly reddish brown tint, as though blood had seeped into their systems through the roots and had usurped the space of chlorophyll in the leaves.
Dion took a hesitant step forward. The soles of his tennis shoes stuck for a second to the ground, pulling out blades of grass as they moved upward, sounding and feeling stickily like the adhesion of wet paint.
"Don't," Penelope breathed, pulling him back.
But he had to move forward, he had to see. He was horrified by the sight before him, he had never seen anything like it ... but something about it seemed familiar. It was not the bottles, not the bones, not the blood. It was the clearing itself, and this layer of detritus that had been overlaid on top of it had successfully hidden what was really there, effectively blocking what he should have recognized.
But why should he have recognized it? He had never been here before.
He walked into the meadow, Penelope at his side, still holding his hand.
It was larger than it had first appeared, and that brought home to him the enormity of what must have occurred here. They tread gingerly over the littered ground, carefully avoiding the bones.
Some of these might be Penelope's father's, he thought.
He said nothing.
The silence grew heavier, the already oppressive atmosphere even more oppressive. Before them, at the opposite end of the meadow, against the trees that fronted the hillside, was a low mound. Bones and skulls, many with bits of dried flesh still clinging to them, were arranged in ancient runic form on the section of cleared ground. From the center of the space rose a stone square about the size of a bed, and atop the square were arranged crude and ancient instruments of death. Grappling hooks hung from thick chains attached to the branches above. In the trees beyond there loomed a dark carved figure, a stone idol of some sort, and as they drew closer, Dion saw that it was the likeness of a god, festooned with what looked like the results of recent kills:
scalps, ears, fingers, penises.
The god had Dion's face.
Penelope's fingernails dug into his palm. "Oh, shit."
Dion backed up. "No," he whispered, shaking his head.
"We have to call the police," Penelope said, pulling him back. 'This isn't something we can handle."
Dion nodded dumbly.
From somewhere, from the woods, from the hill, there were screams and cries, laughter and singing, coming closer, low but getting louder. He looked at Penelope, she looked at him, and though both of them knew that they had to get out of the clearing, neither of them knew where to go.