Penpal (2 page)

Here, I’ve tried to preserve both my thoughts and experiences of my early life, as well as the gradual influx of new information, so that you might learn of these events as I experienced them. Parts of this story were written before I knew what I now know, all of which you will know by the end of this story, but I’ve kept the chapters as they were originally written. To the best of my ability, I have avoided contaminating my old memories with new revelations, and I’ve tried to be as faithful to the past as was possible when extrapolating from my earliest memories. What I offer you here is a combination of what I remember, what I’ve learned about my past from my mother, and what seems most likely; though my guesswork was restricted to gaps that are ultimately unimportant. If I was successful in all of this, then you will understand now as I understood then, and the pieces of my history will fall into place for you in very much the same way that they have only recently done for me.

Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

– Harlan Ellison

Footsteps

In a quiet room, if you press your ear against a pillow, you can hear your heartbeat. As a six-year-old boy, the muffled, rhythmic beats sounded like soft footsteps on a carpeted floor, and so as a kid, almost every night – just as I was about to drift off to sleep – I would hear these footsteps, and I would be ripped back to consciousness, terrified.

For my entire childhood, I lived with my mother in a fairly nice, and extremely rural, neighborhood that was in a transitional phase; people of lower economic means were gradually moving in. My mother and I were two of these people.

Those that spend any amount of time driving on interstate highways will see half-houses traveling alongside them. It’s an odd sight if you let yourself think about it; two halves of a house built somewhere miles away from where it becomes a home. Everything about those structures has a feeling of impermanence: the wood that forms them is cut where it isn’t used and assembled where it doesn’t stay; the most permanent things about those houses are the concrete support columns that they rest on, but even those seem transitory in a way. My mother and I lived in one of these houses, but she took good care of it. As a kid, I always thought our house was quite nice.

As I sit here and think about my old home and all the things in it, an amusing and pleasant conflict builds in my mind; I know now that we were poor, but had you asked me then, I would have had no idea what could have prompted that question. My mother must have had so little money to spend, but I never remember her saying the words that tend to become the mantra of some parents when they try to subdue their children’s eager shopping: “we can’t afford it.”

I don’t remember wanting for much; I even had a bunk bed despite being an only child. I’m sure that this is the case for many children in low-income homes, but as a boy, despite the incongruity, I thought my home was as close to a palace as one could hope for. To me, the support columns under the house didn’t represent what the house actually was – an imported structure on a makeshift foundation – but what it could be. I remember asking my mother if we could make the columns taller so our house would tower over all the others.

Part of my love for the house stemmed from my general love for the area surrounding it. The neighborhood itself was relatively large in proportion to the town itself. Small towns lack many of the luxuries of larger towns or cities; what few stores there are close down early, traveling events don’t stop there because they probably missed your small dot on the map, and there aren’t many police or hospitals at your disposal. But, to a kid, these things don’t matter because small towns often provide a luxury that can’t be found in larger, more convenient or populated places: freedom.

Of course, I had rules to follow – I had a lot of them, in fact. But I didn’t notice any of them restricting me because I was allowed to do the one thing a kid in a relatively remote area likes to do – explore. Just a short walk from my back porch was a dense and untamed wilderness that I spent some part of nearly every day surveying. These woods and waterways surrounding the neighborhood were my playground during the day. But at night – as things often do in the mind of child – they would take on a more sinister feeling.

The apparent change in the very nature of the trees and the lake, I think, was mostly my fault. One of my mother’s rules was that I could explore the woods on the condition that I would be home before dark. To motivate my speedy return, I would play games in my mind when leaving the woods at dusk; my feet moved more quickly when I imagined that they were carrying me away from ghouls and beasts. When I would dream, the footsteps would belong to these pursuers.

Sometimes I’d pretend that a hideous and ravenous wolf was charging through the woods just behind me; I’d imagine what would happen if I stumbled or fell and it caught up with me, but when I concentrated too hard on keeping my balance, it would always seem to ensure that I lost it. Other times I’d convince myself that there was an enormous clutter of spiders descending from the trees above and blanketing the earth behind, and that I was always inches away from being ensnared in a collective web or simply overwhelmed by their numbers and tackled by the sheer weight of their individually
weightless bodies.

The thing I imagined the most, I think, was that if I didn’t make it home before the sun went down, my mother would be gone – that everyone would be gone, and that I’d be all alone.
I always made it back home the quickest when I played that game.

It didn’t take long for these games to become a reflex, and the fear would appear without any effort at all. Some nights I would spill into the house so frantically that it would startle my mother, but this was the winter of the first grade of elementary school, so I tried to compose myself and pretend that I was merely worried about getting home too late.

The things I imagined in the woods just before nightfall created a feeling of general uneasiness in me when the sun retired. My home offered refuge from these terrors, but the architecture of my house came to sabotage my feelings of security. The concrete stilts that raised my house above the earth left a void just below the entirety of the floor of my home. Gradually, my mind came to fill this crawlspace with imaginary monsters and inescapable scenarios, and they would consume my thoughts whenever I was awoken by the footsteps.

I told my mom about the footsteps, and she said that I was just imagining things. This seemed an appropriate accusation given my tactics for making curfew, but I persisted enough that she blasted my ears with water from a turkey baster once just to placate me, since I insisted that it would help. Of course, it didn’t. The footsteps continued that night, but I tried my best to ignore them, just like always.

Despite the general eeriness that the games and footsteps would cast over the nighttime neighborhood, my life was a quiet one. I had adventures by myself, or, more often, with my best friend Josh, but I suppose every kid has their adventures. The only odd or noteworthy events that I can remember happening were the occasions when I would wake up on the bottom bunk despite having gone to sleep on the top. This would only happen every now and again, but it wasn’t really that strange since I’d sometimes get up to use the bathroom or get something to drink and could remember just going back to sleep on the bottom bunk. This would happen frequently enough to remember but infrequently enough to dismiss. In itself, waking up on the bottom bunk never really bothered me.

But one night, toward the end of winter in first grade, I didn’t wake up on the bottom bunk.

I had heard the footsteps, but was too far gone to be woken up by them. When I awoke, it wasn’t from the sound of footsteps, but the feeling of biting cold and violent shivering. As I opened my eyes, the clashing of what I expected to see – what I had nearly always seen when I woke up in a place other than the top bunk – and what I actually saw, frustrated my senses as my mind tried to reconcile my expectations with actuality.

I saw, or rather my mind showed me, the red, cylindrical bars that supported the mattress of the top bunk, but beyond those, I saw stars. Gradually, the bars melted away and faded from my vision, and I was left with only those floating points of light and the jagged, crossing limbs of the tall trees that arched across them high up in the sky.

I was in the woods.

I shouldn’t be here
, I thought. The coupling of the woods with darkness was something I had trained myself to avoid.

I sat up immediately and tried to make sense of where I was. I thought I was dreaming, but that didn’t seem right, though neither did me being in the woods. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the limited light, and gradually the trunks of trees and the shapes of overgrown bushes began to take form. I scanned over the foliage without really focusing on any of it as I searched for something I might recognize – something that might give me some indication of where I was.

An unnatural shape caught my eyes, and I looked at it for what felt like a very long time until I could finally discern what it was. About ten feet in front of me, resting among a mass of tangled sticks and loose leaves, there was a deflated pool float that was shaped like a shark. Even after I understood what it was, I continued looking at it, trying to figure out
why
it was there. This only added to the surreal feeling, to the point that I was sure that I must be experiencing a dream rather than the world itself. After a while, though, it seemed like I just wasn’t going to wake up, because I wasn’t asleep.

I stood up to orient myself, and I caught a flash of some trampled shrubs that looked like a path, but the woods were thick behind it, so I turned to look elsewhere. I didn’t recognize this place. I played in the woods by my house all the time, and so I knew them really well, but I had only been in them when it was dark once before. I had run through my woods straight to my house at the last edge of dusk countless times without even having to think about how to get there. But there’s a big difference between dusk and dark, and as I stood there taking in all that there was to see in the dim light, it started creep into my mind much more forcefully that these might not be my woods after all.

A shiver that I think was only partially due to the chilled air ran through me as I wondered how someone was supposed to find his way to a place when he didn’t know where he was starting. I took a deep breath and a single step and felt a shooting pain in my foot. I lifted my leg quickly and reeled off balance, falling back to where I had woken up only moments ago.

I moved my eyes from the terrain to my throbbing foot and saw what had felled me. I had stepped on a thorn. It stuck about an inch out of the middle of my foot, but it only bled when I quickly tore it out of my skin. I wound my arm back to throw it someplace where it wouldn’t pose a danger to me any
longer, but as I searched for a safe spot, I realized that there wasn’t one.

By the light of the moon, I could see that the thorns were
everywhere
. The whole ground was laced with this natural barbed wire. I had been lucky to only step on a single thorn just then, but as this occurred to me, I became conscious of the rest of my body. I looked at my other foot, but it was fine. As a matter of fact, so was the rest of me. I searched over my legs and feet with my eyes and hands. No cuts. No scrapes. I didn’t have another scratch on me. I wasn’t even that dirty. I cried for a little bit and then stood back up.

I opened my mouth and filled my six-year-old lungs to capacity, and just as I was about to scream for help, my breath hitched in my throat as a thought lodged itself powerfully in my mind:
what if someone heard me?
I held the air tightly in my chest and stood puzzled by my own question. I needed help; shouldn’t I hope that someone would hear me? All at once, I began to think of the fiends and monsters that I had imagined stalking and chasing me through and out of what might be these woods. I found myself wishing I had never played those games. I let the air escape slowly to give myself a last chance to use it in case I changed my mind and wanted to yell. I didn’t. I would have to find my own way. I didn’t know which way to go, so I just picked a direction and began walking.

I walked for what felt like hours.

I tried to walk in a straight line, but there was no path to follow. I made sure to course-correct when I had to take detours around tree limbs that were too entwined to move through or patches of thorns that were too broad to step over. Every time I would make my way past one of these natural obstacles, I would be confronted with a seemingly identical tapestry of foliage, and the feeling of hopelessness would begin to assert itself a little more. I just wanted to see something familiar, and each time the woods appeared particularly thick, I thought I had found my landmark.

Marking the outer edge of my usual explorations, there was an enormous pile of discarded and decaying Christmas trees that my best friend Josh had found once during a game of hide-and-seek. Although he had been driven out of its concealing shelter fairly quickly by fire ants, we would return to it many times to trample on the stray and spherical colored ornaments that had been left behind.

We had many stories about where the trees had all come from, but I assume now that the genesis of the pile was much more ordinary than what we had hypothesized. Whatever the origins, what was left was a tangled mass of still decorated, however sparsely, holiday trees that looked, from a distance, to be a single colossal Christmas tree. This would be the easiest thing to spot in my woods, and if I found it, I would know where I was. But that was only if these
were
my woods.