Two days into Fosters’ Woods they found the skeleton. Ralph, Aaron’s pit bull, pulled it out of a tangled deadfall and rhododendron hell. The poor dog struggled, making groaning and scuffing noises, dragging his damaged hind legs through layers of leaf rot and dead tree debris. It was the densest stretch of vegetation they’d encountered so far: vine-bound oak and hickory, massive bushes in between, stands of rotting trees snagged in the thick branches of their healthier brethren.
Chet had been leery of his son’s scarily muscular dog at first, but he’d grown to love this impressive creature even more than Aaron did.
“That’s not . . . Gramby . . . Grang . . . d-d-da. Is it?” Chet strained to understand his son’s new garbled way of speaking. Aaron’s articulations sounded as if something was broken in his mouth.
“Your grandad died in a nursing home. It wasn’t his choice, but your grandmother wanted him to have good care.”
“So’s . . . guh . . . ood care?”
“I don’t know. I hardly knew the man. He abandoned Mom and me when I was ten years old, left us to build his own place in these woods where he could live by himself. He never cared much for people, not even his own kin.”
Chet used a long stick to pull the vines away for a better look at the bones. He was no expert, but something was wrong here. The skull looked too long and wide, the area above the large eye holes coarse and rough as a mountain ridge, and the rib cage was enormous.
“Ya . . . you neber . . . NEVER . . . live wi . . . im?”
“For a year and a half right after high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after graduation. So, I thought I’d try life with him for a while. It was a terrible mistake. We fought from day one.”
Aaron didn’t want to look at the skeleton. He kept averting his eyes. He was already moving forward, slashing a path with that machete he was so proud of, Ralph straining to keep up, snorting and digging at the underbrush, looking for more bones. Chet followed, no longer in charge.
“It’s all just rehearsals for the end.”
That’s what Chet’s dad used to say on too many occasions, and as the man grew older and frailer repetition increased the bitterness in the remark. By the time of his father’s final illness Chet and his mother were sick of hearing it, but never let on, not wanting to disrespect a dying man’s last complaints. His was a long illness and a painful one, and twenty-two-year-old Chet hardly recognized the man by the end. Chet knew then that living to a ripe old age was not for him.
Now a year older than his father at the time of his death, he better understood the futility of plans. Chet never planned to outlive his wife, yet here he was ten years after her passing. He also never imagined losing his home, but financial setbacks coupled with his own bad decisions had brought him to that sad juncture with shocking rapidity. The day came when he was wandering around an empty house, the furniture having been sold, packing up his patched together pickup truck for the trip south to his father’s old farm. By some miracle he now owned it, after it passed through the hands of his father’s younger sister. But it hadn’t been lived in for years. He had no idea what was waiting for him in those ancient, Southwest Virginia woods.
That’s when his adult son came back into his life. Aaron was on foot, carrying nothing but a small backpack, Ralph pulling on his leash, barely contained. With his jet-black hair Aaron was the perfect likeness to his grandfather, based on those high school pictures in Chet’s mother’s scrapbook. He himself had been just a pale imitation of his dad.
Chet stepped back into the house, fearful of this canine monster. Weren’t they illegal? He’d never seen this much muscle on a dog. Before Aaron could say anything Ralph had already pulled him into the house.
“Whoa, Dad. What happened to your furniture?”
“I sold it. I’ve lost the house.”
Aaron turned pale. “How did that happen? I thought you— “
“Were rich? Long story short, I cut things too close, missed some mortgage payments. It doesn’t take much these days.”
“I’m sorry. I . . . I was hoping I could stay with you a while. I’ve got no place to go.”
Chet didn’t bother to ask what happened. Aaron had been in this same spot more than a few times, and the chances of getting a straight story out of him were slim. “So, son, how do you feel about farm work?”
It was a slow trip to Virginia. Chet was afraid of running his old rattling truck too hard. They spent their nights on gravel side roads sleeping with the dog in the cab. To his surprise Chet was growing fond of the animal, playing with him whenever they stopped to stretch their legs. Chet was more anxious about Aaron than the dog. Asking his son about what he’d been doing the past few years netted sullen monotones and the occasional angry outburst. After a while Chet stopped asking questions. The dog felt safer and more predictable.
“Your grandad had a huge garden on three sides of the house, an apple orchard, and berry trees. Maybe they were mulberries. I don’t remember. Of course, a lot of that will be overgrown, and I don’t know what happens to fruit trees if they haven’t been tended. But I brought a bunch of seeds, and there should still be tools on the farm. With a little hard work, we’ll be growing stuff. We have plenty of canned goods until then.”
Chet tried to paint a hopeful picture. He’d once been good at hopeful pictures, when Aaron was small, but now his son seemed immune. “You’re too old for this, Dad, and neither of us knows a damn thing about farming. You call this a plan?”
“It’s the only plan I got. I’m more than a year away from social security.”
That was the end of the planning conversation. Chet knew it wasn’t a great plan. If he had a great plan he wouldn’t have lost his home in the first place.
Chet didn’t have an exact address for the property. He wasn’t sure if there had ever been one. Fosters had been in the county since its beginnings, following Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road up through Cumberland Gap.
He remembered it was on a sliver of land adjacent to the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, near the town of Tazewell. He lived in that town with his mother for several years. He was tempted to drive by their old house to show Aaron but knew he would not.
He remembered the name of the narrow access road, Willow Road, although he’d never seen any willows. These woods were white oak and pine, chestnut, sassafras, and mountain laurel, with stands of yellow birch on the mountain’s higher elevations.
This section of the forest was old growth, part of America’s original primeval woods, undisturbed until his dad decided to build his house. Centuries-old trees towered over a tangled floor layered in decaying logs, thick underbrush, lichen, and moss, with abundant wildlife. Finding a clear trail through all that scrub and brushwood, unmaintained for all these years, would be difficult.
Chet recalled something from his teen years which added to the challenge: this region had a karst topography. Beneath the matted vegetation and dead matter lay multiple layers of percolating limestone. “You can’t trust the ground beneath your feet,” was the way his dad put it. “You fall in, I won’t be able to save you.” This landscape was riddled with subterranean drainage systems, sinking springs and sinkholes, countless caverns, many of them undiscovered, unexplored, fragile. His dad used one of the deepest sinkholes to dispose of his garbage, broken machinery, and dead livestock.
After several useless trips up and down Willow’s muddy and rutted track—no doubt creating a suspicious display for any neighbors—Chet noticed an old signpost buried in the rhododendron. It was missing its sign, but Chet’s memory filled it in: “Fosters.” Just the one word. The road it was supposed to mark was overgrown with ferns and small hazel trees. They poked around and Aaron found a fragment of the sign, an “FOS” half buried in the dirt. Further probing uncovered old wheel ruts and a bit of gravel, fragments of red stone. Chet recalled the small red stones. Dad had been inordinately proud of them.
They had no choice but to pull the truck into the bushes and disguise it the best they could, although the odds of someone else wandering down Willow Road seemed dim. They filled their backpacks with food and started following whatever was left of the abandoned trail, Ralph leading the way. Aaron brought a machete. Chet didn’t like it, but he supposed it would be useful. They would have to make multiple trips to unload the truck, but Chet’s memory told him the house wasn’t that far into the woods. He was sure of it. They counted on it.
After two hours of struggling through the thick woodland Chet’s confidence ebbed to almost nothing. He was sure they’d uncovered the right entry point. They’d found no other trails, and there had been that fragment of a sign. Was it possible the sign had been moved? But Chet was relying on fifty-year-old memories. These woods hadn’t been maintained. Had his aunt ever lived here? It seemed doubtful.
He did remember the route had been tricky. There was a great deal of solid rock they had to go around. The region was built on the remnants of a massive prehistoric landslide, with individual slabs of stone measuring over one and a half square miles. All that and the interleaving strata of slate and porous limestone, and that final layer of dirt and ancient forest on top. It was difficult country for experienced hikers to cross, much less two amateurs.
He didn’t remember the route being this bad when he was young, but now he was an elderly man and not that fit. The trees had probably always been this close together. He just hadn’t noticed at the time. He did remember this huge blade of rock rising out of the forest floor like the spine of some prehistoric dinosaur, but he couldn’t remember if it had been close to his dad’s farm or if he’d run across it while hiking.
Ralph was still ahead of them, untroubled by the difficult terrain. Aaron had fallen to the rear, cursing over every stumble and scrape. He’d always been an angry young man, and now he’d brought that anger into the woods where it didn’t belong. He kept swinging that big machete around, not hitting much. Chet hoped at least it was therapeutic. Chet himself wasn’t in the best of spirits. Afterall, he’d lost everything he owned.
When a giant millepede fell on Aaron from the rock above he screamed. Chet tried not to laugh. He was having his own difficulties. There was so much scattered debris he couldn’t see the actual ground, and he was afraid of taking a wrong step. If he fell into a sinkhole that would be it for him.
Periodically Ralph raised his brawny head because of a stray sound. This didn’t require a dog’s finer senses. Chet could hear them too. Soft whining noises or cries and something which might have been a chuckle. Chet tried to remember—was there a bird that made a chuckling noise? Whatever it was, it was making him paranoid. He kept glancing around at the small gaps between bushes and trees. Was that skin? A face?
An hour or so later he thought he heard a wheezing noise as if from an injured animal followed by what might have been weeping. The voice of a child. There had always been stories about children in these woods. Local children lost and never seen again. Strange children found who could speak little English, children no one claimed to know anything about. They were adopted into local families, although few of them stayed, determined to become missing again.
Chet had never witnessed anything like that when he lived here with his dad. He just heard the stories. His dad kept telling him it was nonsense. “Kids lie. You know that don’t you? They run away then they lie about it.”
Still, years later, the noises spooked him. Bare tree limbs extended out of the canopy overhead, appearing to reach for each other. He let Aaron go ahead of him. Chet stayed back so he could get a good look at their surroundings without Aaron noticing. Chet didn’t want his son to catch his suspicious attitude.
That was when he saw the figure wedged into the crevice between two boulders, made of sticks and stones, some old rope, a bit of chain, staring at him with deep shadows for eyes. He only saw it for a moment. He kept walking because he didn’t want to draw Aaron’s attention.
Up ahead Aaron was crouched next to Ralph, who was snorting loudly. Something scattered across the path. As Chet drew closer he saw the torn apart remains of an animal. More than one. There were bobcats in the area, and coyotes, but whatever this had been was shredded so thoroughly, so viciously. Of course, with felines, sometimes the border between play and slaughter could be quite fine.
As sunlight began to fade they were no closer to finding traces of his dad’s old place or those of any other dwelling. For a moment Chet grew hopeful when they came across a small stretch of flat stones turned on edge and planted upright in the ground. There had been something like this near Dad’s farm—his dad said the stones indicated a pioneer graveyard, and they shouldn’t be disturbed. Chet hurried ahead thinking the house would be around the next turn, when he found another of those graveyards, and further on, another still. Obviously, the crude cemetery he remembered hadn’t been the only one.
The further they traveled toward nightfall the denser and more difficult the way forward. The depth of vegetation was beyond anything Chet had ever seen: layer upon layer of woodland, the black streaks of trunks and limbs appearing in the narrow gaps between multiple shades of green. In some areas the trunks were twisted, warped, and corkscrewed as if from hurricane force winds. In other spots they were confronted with an impenetrable darkness between the huge thick trees. Wild animals were abundant. They’d seen white-tailed deer, foxes, two bobcats (it took both of them to stop Ralph from chasing after), black rat snakes (Chet was on the alert for copperheads but wasn’t sure he’d be able to identify one), and one black bear, thankfully at a distance.
They didn’t have to make much of an effort to avoid these creatures. The animals appeared oblivious to their presence. Now and then a domesticated animal gone wild made its appearance—dogs mostly, but once a cat and what might have been someone’s pet monkey. It moved so quickly through the trees Chet couldn’t be sure.
At one point, though night was falling, Aaron wanted to take a break to hunt down a rabbit or a squirrel, or a pig, although Chet wasn’t sure they were pigs. Plump and ugly, but quite unlike any pigs Chet had ever seen before. It was a crazy notion—Chet figured his son was restless. He didn’t know if Aaron had ever tried hunting before. He struggled to keep Aaron focused. He himself had been taken over by doubt. What if the house wasn’t there anymore? What if they couldn’t find their way out?
Finally, too tired to continue that first day, they made camp beneath the boughs of a tulip tree. Chet hadn’t seen one since he was a teenager. He’d always loved the leaves’ unique shape.
Aaron wasn’t impressed. “You don’t have any idea where we are, do you?”
“We’re in the right area at least. I’m sure of that. But a lot can change in almost fifty years.”
Aaron pulled his coat over himself and curled up against his dog, turning his back on his father. “You’ve screwed us, haven’t you, old man?”
Early in the morning of their second day in the woods Ralph fell into a sphagnum bog. When Chet woke up Aaron and the dog were gone. He thought Aaron might have gotten restless and forged ahead alone, or he’d gone squirrel hunting as he’d threatened yesterday.
Then he heard the dog’s high-pitched whine as it transitioned into a chilling howl. He ran in that direction, pushing through the trees until he came to a large clearing. Aaron was crouched near the middle, pulling at his panic-stricken animal. Both were thrashing about. They were drowning in mud and liquid green.
It was a sphagnum bog, mats of water-infused moss over layers of decaying vegetation and saturated peat. These things were deceptive. Scattered shrubs and stunted trees grew in this one, grasses, and something studded with berries. Ralph must have thought it was solid ground.
Aaron was looking Chet’s way, his face drawn with panic. “He saw the wild cranberries! He went for them, and then—but it’s not too deep! I can feel rock beneath my boots!”
“Try to calm him down!” Chet tried to run around the edge to them, but his boots sank deep into the muck and began filling with water. He jerked his body sideways and climbed out, continued running until he was a few feet from the pair.
“It’s not that deep, Dad! I’ve got solid ground under me, I swear. Come in and help me carry him out!”
Chet had his doubts, but he jumped in anyway. The thunderous cracking came almost immediately. Then the world fell away.
When Chet opened his eyes he hadn’t a clue where he was. He was soaking wet. Stinking mud covered his face and lay caked on his chest. Smooth rock walls surrounded him, their surfaces appearing melted with streaks of pink and a bruised color. Overhead was a rough oval of sky. Great green-gray mats of moss hung from its dripping edges, torn into ragged threads. He was peppered with tiny bits of limestone, and piles of larger rocks lay around him, fallen from the collapsed ceiling above. He heard a groaning, and found Ralph lying a few yards away, his back submerged in a shallow stream of brackish water. Aaron lay beside him, still wearing his pack, face down in that same water.
Chet pushed himself up into a seated position. He was sitting in a morass of gray mud and pale, wormlike vines. He had cuts and scratches, but no broken bones as far as he could tell. He scraped a load of mud off his body and crawled over to Aaron and pulled on his shoulder, straining to turn him over.
His son’s mouth made a burbling noise, and he began to cough. Semi-conscious, he’d been drinking that awful stuff. From the angle it appeared his face had been mostly out of the water, his bloody head resting on a piece of shale. Chet tried not to touch the mud and grit matting his son’s hair. For all he knew that was staunching the flow of blood.
Ralph dragged himself around, whining until he was able to get to Aaron’s face and began licking it. Something was wrong with the dog’s hind legs—he was hardly moving them.
“Blut . . . blud habben?” Aaron twisted around and tried to stand up but only got as upright as two knees in the stream, his left arm around Chet’s waist.
“The floor of the bog collapsed. It’s probably been draining into this cavity for decades. We’re in a cave, son. Can you believe it?”
“Da . . . wanna go . . . hommm.” Aaron began to cry. Chet rubbed his shoulders. He couldn’t say it, but he was thinking we don’t have a home. They might as well have been invisible.
It took over an hour to find another exit from the cavern. Luckily, they didn’t have to crawl. A long passage between high, sheer rock walls branched off from the chamber. A stream ran through it, but it was only an inch or so deep. It stank of something metallic, iron maybe. The light was dim, but at least there was light, so Chet was confident this was a way out. A steady slope of debris led to a wide crack in the stone. Chet could see a little sky beyond, and a tantalizing swatch of green.
Ralph fought against his damaged hind legs, using his muscular forelegs to power himself forward. Aaron seemed stronger the longer they walked, but was still quite fuzzy, and his mouth still wasn’t working. At least he was making little sense.
Aaron didn’t notice the petroglyphs carved into the walls, and Chet decided not to mention them. Nor did he point out the one or two large creatures perched in the shadows of the ledges above. Chet avoided looking at them, so he caught few details, but he saw the eyes, and what might have been a heavy brow, and those must have been cheekbones.
The first thing they saw coming out of the cave was a deer staring at them, moving its head back and forth, before it attacked. Ralph lunged forward and the deer turned away.
A few seconds later birds exploded from the bushes around them. They raised their arms to protect their faces—it was like an avian tornado, and then it was gone. Aaron started crying again. Chet held his hand.
They progressed slowly, but steadily through a stand of old hickory, the ground choked with rhododendron, rotted, hollow trees kept standing thanks to the embrace of woody vines. Ralph dragged that strange skeleton out of the rhododendron bushes, and Aaron changed. He became more forceful. He pulled the machete out of his pack and began swinging it again. “Hommm da! Hommm!” He kept calling for Ralph to hurry up, but the dog didn’t understand him. Ralph was busy digging for more bones. And chewing on the rhododendrons. Chet didn’t think the dog should be doing that, but he wasn’t sure.
Chet left his pack back at the campsite, so they would have to make do with whatever Aaron was carrying. To his surprise he wasn’t that hungry—maybe due to the unaccustomed excitement. Chet had figured out by now his dad’s house was gone, otherwise they would have already found it. But he didn’t know how to break the news to Aaron, especially with that machete in his son’s hand.
Even if they did find it, Chet no longer wanted to try living here. In a lifetime of bad mistakes, this trip might have been the worst. People, at least modern people, had no business in such a place, in such cursed geography. The land here had folded over into itself, the distant past trapped within the present. Such a country could nourish nothing sane.
This did not negate the fact that it was beautiful here. In an area where trees had fallen creating a hole in the canopy, where sunlight could flood in, abundant clover and ragwort grew along with clumps of the loveliest foxglove and wild hyacinth he had ever seen. Where the roots had pulled out of the ground deep pits had formed, and mounds where the rotted trunks created more soil. Atop one of the mounds an owl was perched, its head turned 90 degrees sideways as it studied these two approaching mud men and their crippled dog.
But sadness also blooms in a place like this. On the other side of the clearing they found an abandoned campsite, a flattened tent and two decaying IDs, the scattered remains of backpacks, and two of those flat stones wedged upright into the ground, the surfaces scarred with indecipherable markings. For some reason, the sight made Aaron angry, and he began hacking at the already rotted remains with his machete, continuing the attack until little was left but chewed up ground.
It had become evident something was wrong with Ralph. He’d been drooling excessively the past hour or so, and then he began vomiting, his whole body straining to get rid of whatever was bothering him. Chet remembered the rhododendron and felt responsible. He tried comforting the dog, attempting to stroke his back, but Ralph wasn’t having it. He staggered several yards away, and with a final wheeze keeled over.
Aaron limped over and prodded the body with the side of his machete. He got no response. “Da . . . Ralb dead.”
“I know son. I’m so sorry.”
“Les . . . g-go.” He headed for the trees in front of them.
“We could bury him.”
Aaron stopped and turned around, stared at where they’d entered the clearing, then pointed with his machete. “Le . . . le dem do it. Dem . . . peep . . . uls.” Chet knew what he was talking about but refused to look in that direction.
They continued to walk after it was too dark to see. Aaron seemed to know where he was going, but Chet didn’t. Chet could barely see anything so he couldn’t understand how Aaron could be so sure where he was stepping. Chet tried to stay as close behind his son as he could, putting his feet down in the same spots.
Slivers of moon shone through the branches. It was a cloudless night so that helped. Chet saw shiny bits in the darkness. Animal eyes, or something else. Shadows moved between the haunting verticals of the dull black trees, but with no clues to identify what cast them.
The slow wind through the woods sounded like breathing. It struck him that he knew little about trees, little about anything, really. He’d read that trees communicated and shared resources, but he couldn’t recall any of the details. But it seemed to him these trees were on one side, and he and Aaron were on the other.
They came upon another patch of those flat stones wedged upright into the ground. In the dark they looked like giant teeth. “Ress . . . here. Sleep-t,” Aaron said.
“You mean with these graves?”
“Yebt. Pig uh spot.”
Chet wasn’t going to argue with him. He was scared to disagree with his son in any way. But he was exhausted. And at least the ground here was flat. Once he lay down, his arm beneath his head, he fell asleep in minutes.
That night he dreamed of roots and branches growing out of his body, anchoring him to the ground. Of bodies turning into vegetation, of bones turning into wood. He saw himself trying to rise off the ground in the morning, but his skin began flaking off, making a large pile of leaves surrounding his boots.
Chet woke up to the sun breaking through the limbs overhead. He sat up and looked around. Seeing no sign of Aaron, he stood and called his name. No answer.
He studied the ground. There was a new upright stone behind where he’d been sleeping, freshly wedged into the dirt. A dark X was painted across its surface. It might have been blood, but he didn’t want to touch it to find out.
There was something vaguely familiar about the scenery. A massive tree with three large trunks stood a few yards away. One of the trunks was much longer than the others, and almost parallel to the ground. Chet thought it defied gravity. He couldn’t understand why the imbalance didn’t make the tree fall over. He’d wondered about that all these years, ever since he was a teenager living here.
The trunk pointed in a particular direction. Chet followed it, down an incline, then up a shallow hill. He stopped then, gazing at the house below.
But calling it a house might have been an exaggeration. The square roof had collapsed at diagonal corners, and the walls leaned. The entire structure—rough slabs of wood as gray as weathered limestone—was covered in thick woody vines, and parts of the forest had encroached on one side. There were trees growing against, and into his father’s old house. He suspected it was the trees and the vines that held the whole mess together.
He walked down the hill. The door was missing. He didn’t trust the porch, but he placed his steps on the more solid-looking bits.
Aaron was inside waiting for him, sitting at a table much higher on one end than the other. He had some kind of ruined carcass in front of him. His chin was grimy with blood. “Sid . . . down,” he said, and gestured toward an old, dented bucket. Chet did as he was told, but his head barely rose above the edge of the table. He felt like a child dining with the adults.
“Sa . . . say lo . . . hell . . . lo.” Aaron turned his head.
Deep in the shadows the figure leaned forward, looking more like a crude sculpture than a man. His chest was enormous, his head roughly formed. Inside two hollows above his broad nose his dark eyes gleamed.
