Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (11 page)

“Hunter,” Julia replies. “He says he lives there.”

She doesn’t like the sound of this. “How old is he?” she asks.

Julia shrugs. “Your age, I think.”

Fear, cold and icy, slides down through her heart. “And...when did you meet him?”

“After you left.”

She doesn’t like the sound of this
at all.
“And?”

Julia frowns. “And what?”

“And what do you two do?”

Julia smiles again. “We just talk. He showed me how to find north and to follow stars and stuff like that.”

Briefly, Ayla closes her eyes. There could very well be a boy in the woods, or her sister could be making him up. She wants to believe it is the latter, because the thought of a boy living in the woods, hovering near her little sister, her innocent, untouched sister...

Or is she?
She looks at Julia again, hard, trying to read her life in her eyes, but Julia is as lovely and sweet and happy as ever. The sort of girl who shines out in color against the drab background of her life. Even if something had happened, would she be able to detect it? A different darkness in her sister’s eyes? A skittish start at loud noises? A sadness that can never be lifted?

Has he touched you yet?
she wants to ask, but she doesn’t. There is a silence inside her and its deafening din drowns out her words.

“He sounds nice,” she says instead.

Julia smiles again. “He is,” she replies. “You should go meet him.”

Maybe she will. Maybe she will give him a piece of her mind. Tell him that she won’t let Julia fall into his hands. Tell him that he is not welcome. Tell him to go away. “Where does he live?”

But Julia just laughs. “Everywhere,” she says. “You don’t find him. He finds
you
.”

*

S
he does not want to be found. She wants to run until she reaches an uncharted land, a place where she can fold the world around her and disappear into its hidden spaces.

Julia has left for school, and she wants to leave, too, but she is too tired and there is no money for gas and there is nowhere to go anyway. Her old friends from high school either escaped or are working, and she is sitting here all alone. It is bright outside, the harshness of the watery winter sun falling on the dead and dying earth, giving light but not warmth.

Huddled under an ugly old afghan, she sits on the couch and flips the channels on the TV. Ten days until Christmas, and every commercial is decked out in cheerful holiday fare. Little kids running toward beautifully festooned trees. Mothers and fathers embracing after unilateral car purchases. Polar bears toasting their inevitable extinction with Coca-Cola. Santa drinking beer and getting fatter and fatter and fatter.

These things must happen somewhere, she thinks, because she remembers when she was little, before her mother died. Christmas was cookies and warm slippers and cheerful decorations and presents and soft songs playing on the radio.

Now the house is falling apart. Now the silence has settled into the walls, and she feels the shortness of the days inside her.

I should leave.
She should stop watching the television and get out of the house. Flee until Julia returns. Their father has not yet crawled out of bed, though when he does he will stink of last night’s alcohol, and she will have to talk to him, or worse—

Maybe she should go out into the woods and meet Julia’s friend. Even if he is imaginary, he would be better company than her own tired thoughts.

I should go,
she thinks.
Go, and go, and go...

*

T
he next thing she knows she is lying down on the couch, waking up from a too-short slumber, and he is hovering over her, the stench of whisky rolling off him in waves.

His knee is wedged between her thighs, one hand bracing himself against the cushions, the other in her hair.

I should shave my head,
she thinks. A small pleasure denied.

“Good to have you back,” her father says. “You grew up while you were away.”

I should have stayed away,
she thinks. Should have fled. Should have been strong enough to sleep in her car, to eat food from dumpsters, to sell what he takes for free.

But she couldn’t have left Julia. She had to make sure she was okay.

Now you have. You can leave now.

Then her father leans down and kisses her. The kiss is like venom, paralyzing her, and she realizes she cannot leave. He has missed her too much, and who knows when he will turn his eyes to the one who remains?

So she says nothing. Does nothing. Is nothing.

He pulls back, but not far enough. He watches her face, but she is quiet. Over the past eight years, she’s learned how to be quiet.

After a moment he nods, satisfied, and his eyes are dark. Fingers stroke her cheek.

“You look so much like your mother,” he breathes, and then his tongue is in her mouth, the sour taste of whisky curdling her screams, and she is quiet and cold, quiet and cold, no longer herself, if herself ever existed.

She is nothing. A doll, a dead thing, a dark hole ripped in the world.

But he doesn’t mind. He never has.

*

I
n the bleak midwinter, she goes down without a fight.

*

W
hen he is done, she goes to her room. Her legs are heavy but her chest is hollow. She is twelve again somehow but trapped in a woman’s body, struggling to find her way out. She lies down on her bed and stares at the wall for hours, waiting for the feeling to pass, but it only grows stronger, and she is struck with the thought that if she sliced open her skin, from head to foot, that she could step out of it and start all over.

She listens as he ambles around downstairs. She knows he’s getting his afternoon whisky bottle ready, and then he’ll be sitting in front of the television for the rest of the day. When she lived here, she always made the meals so that Julia wouldn’t go hungry, but now she is afraid to even take stock of the pantry. It will be full of liquor bottles, and Julia, too young to know any better, will have been eating macaroni and cheese every night.

Should have stayed,
she thinks again.
Should have stayed. Selfish, selfish.

But the soreness between her legs tells her there was nothing selfish about it. The hollowness in her heart tells her it had been brave to come back, because now she is just a shell again. Whatever progress she made has been brushed away by the touch of his hand.

It’s time to give up,
she thinks, but then who will protect Julia?

Well. No one protects her
now.
And so.

There are no answers, and there never have been.

The light of the sun moves across her wall, the slow dance of the earth pushing her from the past into the future.

Time sticks to her like glue.

*

W
hen the sun fades at last behind late-afternoon clouds, she finally sits up and puts her feet on the floor. They are heavy, like anchors. As though she is in the ocean, her feet are concrete shoes that hold her down beneath the waves when otherwise she would be weightless in a dark and watery world.

She stands and moves across the floor, hearing it creak beneath her steps. Perhaps she should go shopping. Find something to eat, even though her stomach is full of stones.

She makes her way downstairs, not knowing where she is going or why. Julia isn’t home yet, and that is fine. The longer she stays away, the better. She is probably eating at a friend’s house.

With nothing to do, she takes her keys from the kitchen counter where she left them and opens the front door.

Immediately she regrets it: icy wind cuts straight through her frumpy hoodie, seeps into her jeans, freezes her toes. But she doesn’t want to go back. She’s opened the door and now she can go through it and step into another place entirely. All it takes is one step. One simple step.

She steps through the door. She feels the same as ever.

Wrapping her arms around her body, she stumbles toward her car, but when she reaches it she remembers that she doesn’t live in North Carolina any more. She doesn’t live somewhere beautiful, somewhere where she has friends, somewhere with dark coffee houses and bars riddled with frat boys and old men who feed her drinks and try to fuck her but never quite manage to do so.

It’s so easy to run from them. Why, then, can’t she escape from
him?

There is nowhere to go, so she turns to the forest that surrounds the house. The old pasture at the back of the property is growing over, weeds high as her heart, trees creeping in, reaching for the house with twisted branches as though to tear it to shreds, this abomination of arboreal flesh.

She fords through the tall grasses, like a woman walking through the sea. The wind sends undulating waves across the old pasture, and when she reaches the first of the saplings a gust so fierce pushes against her back that she stumbles into the welcoming shelter of the trees.

The wind covers the sound of any animals slipping through the woods around her. Flipping her hood up over her head she holds herself tighter.

There are deer out here, coyotes and feral pigs. Armadillos, snakes, possums, tiny little mice, rats, owls, hawks hunkering down for the winter, vultures huddled together in trees waiting for everything else to die.

All sorts of things are in the woods.

She hasn’t been here since she was in junior high, before she managed to get her hands on a car and a way off the property and to civilization. She would come out here and gather leaves, stones, bones and berries. Anything that struck her fancy. Anything that seemed like it might be magic.

Even back then she knew that only magic could help her.

But no matter how many cairns she built, no matter how many brilliantly red oak leaves she placed in the trickle of a stream at the north end of the woods, nothing ever happened except that she had to return home, and make dinner, and wait in the dark every night.

She puts her head down and follows the trails in through the trees, looking for nothing, wanting nothing, being nothing. The wind blows her where it will. She spots a few coyote turds, and a few paces further down the trail she nearly treads upon a burst of fur and two sad little forelegs, shattered bone and blood protruding from the still-intact skin. All that is left of a careless hare.

Stupid rabbit,
she thinks.
Serves you right.

Shouldn’t be easy prey. Should be cautious. Should look where you are going.

Tears prick her eyes as she squats down beside the blast of fur. She watches the wind ruffle it, pick up stray strands and carry them away, and the little unlucky rabbit’s feet lie there, cursing the ground.

Unlucky feet,
she thinks. She should pick them up and take them with her. Maybe put them beneath his bed, let the rabbit’s last laments soak into the floorboards. It’s as good a way as any to curse someone, to magically enact the revenge she is too cowardly to take on her own—

“I thought you would be taller.”

The voice comes from nowhere. Deep. Baritone. Almost bass. Her breath catches and she whirls around to see a young man standing just a few feet behind her.

She hadn’t heard his feet in the dead leaves. Hadn’t heard his breath. Hadn’t felt his approach.

“Who are you?” she snaps.

He stands there, hip cocked, as though he were posing for a magazine. His smile is almost devious, his skin pale but his eyes a brilliant green. His hair is sandy brown with a sheen of red to it, wind-tossed and careless. He is dressed like a model, in fashionable jeans and a thin t-shirt, his olive-green windbreaker loose and open. He wears red-brown leather boots, half buried in the fallen leaves.

There are no tracks in the leaves behind him. He stands there as though he sprang from the ground.

She stands up. “Who are you?” she asks again. “What’s your name?”

He tilts his head. “Hunter,” he says. “And you are Ayla.”

She doesn’t like that he knows her name. “You must be the guy who’s been hanging around my sister,” she says.

“My little friend Julia?” He smiles wider. “Yes.”

She doesn’t like the way he smiles, doesn’t like the way it makes her feel. He’s too handsome, too slick, too good to be true, here in the middle of the woods. What sort of creep makes friends with an eight year old? “Stay away from her,” she tells him.

He laughs and shrugs. “She comes to me. It’s boring in that house, with just that old man for company.”

Guilt wells up inside her, like blood from a wound. “If you touch her, I’ll kill you.”

His smile turns into a grin. “Perhaps,” he replies. “But she is just lonely. She is not like you.”

A scowl creases her face. “What do you mean, like me?”

He turns, and to her eyes he moves strangely, a little lumbering, a little light on his feet. “She doesn’t need me,” he says. “You do.”

She watches him, speechless, as he walks to one of the trees, staring up into its bare branches.

“What do you mean, need you? Who the hell do you think you are?” she finally manages to say.

But he doesn’t answer her. He turns and pins her with his bright green eyes. “You should come out tonight,” he says instead. “Come out and dance with me in the starlight.”

She backs away. “You’re crazy,” she tells him. “You’re a crazy person.”

“I think it would be crazier not to come,” he says. “After all, I’ve been waiting for you.”

Her blood is cold. “What do you mean, waiting for me?”

He doesn’t answer right away. Instead he reaches up to the tree next to him, an old pecan tree, twisted and huge, its first branches so high off the ground he couldn’t touch them if he jumped—

—and then he
changes.
Grows bigger, or longer, or the tree bends down to him, and with one graceful kick of his feet he leaps into the tree, as light as a cat.

Her mouth drops open, and he smiles at her expression as he stands up, balancing on a branch too slender to hold his weight, his stance as casual as a man at a cocktail party. “You like that trick?” he asks. “I learned it from the bobcats.”