Savage Woods Read online

  Books by Mary SanGiovanni

  Chills

  Savage Woods

  Savage Woods

  Mary SanGiovanni

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Books by Mary SanGiovanni

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  Teaser chapter

  About the Author

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary SanGiovanni

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Lyrical Underground and Lyrical Underground logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: September 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-6018-3750-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-751-6

  ISBN-10: 1-60183-751-8

  This book is dedicated to my Sprout and my Seedling—my love for you is taller than the trees, longer than time, and fiercer than the elements.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my parents and sisters, my brother in-law, my Sprout and my Seedling for their support and understanding; Brian Keene, Matt Hayward, and Anna for their technical (and general) awesomeness; and Martin Biro and the folks at Kensington for their hard work.

  PROLOGUE

  In the part of the Pine Barrens that the locals called Nilhollow, the canopy of elder trees kept out all but the smallest patches of sunlight. Though late summer still dawdled, dragging hot, dry feet across the highway, roads, and suburban yards beyond the woods, it was cool in Nilhollow, almost cold beneath those trees. The branches waved unevenly in the odd breeze, whispering messages of rustling leaves among each other. The ferns below tittered as well, a faint gray-green undulation traveling from one frond to another. The wind itself shifted sullenly through the forest, atavistic in its sounds, its dull roar rising to a thin whistle and falling back again as it carried the messages of those it moved through.

  The lesser, the elemental spirits of the trees, were restless because even in sleep, Kèkpëchehëlat, the ancient one who had gone insane, was restless. That this greater elemental might dream in its imprisonment would not have surprised them. Its thrashing did not alarm them only because it was still asleep, for now. However, they rustled and whistled and swayed among themselves about what would happen should it wake up. Once revered as a forest god, it was very strong, like the trees and rocks they protected, more so than all the other manëtuwàk in those woods, and if its dream-sounds were any indication, it would wake up with rage guiding and driving it.

  They supposed that the Kèkpëchehëlat eventually would do just that.

  Time, they had come to know over the centuries, meant that circumstances changed. Things fell apart. Plants in the tèkëne sprouted, grew, died, rotted away. Animals were born, grew, died, rotted away. The far-moving ones had come, had honored the manëtuwàk and tried to live alongside them with respect, and they, too, grew, died, and rotted away. Falling apart was the nature of things. So were all changes . . . even strange ones like the Turning of the Earth.

  The Turning had come up from a crack in the ground, and it spread like a smoke, an illness, a superstition, all-pervasive and all-powerful. That which was not driven away was swathed in it, swallowed by it, and changed by it.

  All of Nilhollow had Turned before the shamans of the far-moving ones had intervened. They couldn’t reverse the effects, but with powerful binding-magic, they had stopped the Turning from expanding and engulfing the whole Pine Barrens.

  The ax-wielding ones who had come next did not know or care about the Turning of the Earth. They gave little credence to the warnings of those they perceived as savages, feral as the lands around them, or their stories of the nihillowewi tèkëne, the murderous woods, whose preternatural origin and effects had been the source of so much terror. They learned quickly enough to stay away, though. The loss of their animals and their children, the soul-sickness, and the wide-scale spilling of blood taught them to stay away.

  For a long time, only those who wanted to be lost—or those whom others wanted to lose—came to Nilhollow. Often the madness in the earth and air and water got into them, and they did terrible things to themselves. Sometimes, even in sleep, the Kèkpëchehëlat still wielded shadows of its rage.

  The lesser manëtuwàk had not been put to sleep with magic, like the Kèkpëchehëlat, but they did often sleep, sometimes for days, sometimes for centuries. They slept until a dull roaring of beasts in the distance woke them for good. With the passing of even more time, their bindings grew looser, allowing them more movement. From the edge of the tèkëne, they could now see as well as hear those roaring beasts, hard-shelled and very, very fast on their round, blurred wheel-feet, which swallowed the ax-wielding ones whole, carried them away, and spit them out again.

  Time had changed the earth all around them, as it did so often.

  Few who passed through now seemed to remember the old ways of the far-moving ones. Long forgotten were many of the words and gestures that kept the Turning of the Earth from spreading and the elemental creatures bound there in check. There were weak attempts from time to time, solitary movers who stole into the groves at night to try, but too much had been forgotten, too much lost. So the old bindings had begun to fall apart, too. In time, the manëtuwàk of Nilhollow were freer and freer to move through the rest of the woods again, and able to exert more influence, by degrees, over those who invaded their home.

  Of course, if they could be completely freed, the ancient manëtu who had gone insane, the Kèkpëchehëlat, could be freed as well. It had grown twisted, as gnarled as the roots and branches of the surrounding trees, and in its state, it would not remember the old ways, either. All would be swept up in its madness. Its rage-sickness.

  Things would change, die, rot away.

  The manëtuwàk wondered if they should be afraid.

  ONE

  “You know, I read this article online the other day that said that black holes can move. They just, like, bounce around the universe, all random, ya know? And if they bounce our way and get close enough even just to wobble the revolutions of planets around the sun—BAM! We’re all hoovered into nothingness.”

  The herald of this revelation, one Todd Mackey, scratched at the day-old strawberry-blond scruff on his chin and jaw. He squinted through the early morning haze, which bent the rays of the rising sun in odd angles through the forest surrounding the campsite. He and his brother Kenny were only into the second morning of their “guys’ weekend” and already he was feeling unusually and uncomfortably enveloped by the trees, with their mantles of needle-green. Down there on the ground, with the forest growths and thicknesses far more pressing an issue than galactic vacuums eons away, Todd didn’t much believe in, un
derstand, or care either way about the movement of black holes; it was just talk. But he needed it, to forget the bad feeling he had. He wanted conversation, however inane.

  The Nilhollow area of the Pine Barrens was Kenny’s idea. He had told Todd the spot would be perfect—cool, quiet, and best of all, pretty much all to themselves. Unlike a lot of the rest of the Pine Barrens, Todd didn’t know much about the Nilhollow part of it, other than what little he and his brother had seen online on camping websites. He knew it encompassed some six-hundred-plus acres, maybe a mile square (although math was never really Todd’s bag) in a central area of Brendan T. Byrne State Forest, somewhere within the neat borders of Mt. Misery Pasadena, Glassworks, and Butler Place Roads. Like the rest of the surrounding forest, it was comprised of mostly pitch pines, bracken ferns, and just enough sand in the soil to remind him of the Atlantic Ocean not too far away. Despite the extensive hiking trails in the surrounding areas to the west and south and its location amid a prominent forest of the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve, Nilhollow was difficult to damn-near impossible to find on any of the Pine Barrens, Brendan T. Byrne, or even old Lebanon State Forest maps. There were no nearby campsites out there, and the closest place to park was still going to be quite a hike from the road. It would be an adventure, Kenny had told him, and Todd was always up for an adventure.

  The stories they heard from campers and locals in the Burlington County diner they stopped at along the way proved a little strange, but neither brother was inclined to put too much stock in them. Most of it was typical Weird NJ–style, clichéd stuff about cursed grounds, unexplained hiker deaths and disappearances, lights in the sky, that sort of thing. There were some even more bizarre stories, too—some of the missing people turning up inside-out and hanging from trees—but those were told in the same vein as the urban legends about UFOs and Lenni-Lenape spirits, and were not something the brothers were going to let stand as a deterrent. Hell, Nilhollow’s unmonitored wildness, with its almost forbidden paths and their dark history, was at least fodder for campfire conversation.

  However, for Todd, actually being there and feeling the place around him had gotten under his skin a bit more than he’d expected. Something about Nilhollow was just . . . all wrong. He could see why ghost stories might have gotten a foothold there.

  For starters, the brothers had discovered the first morning that hunting was a waste of time, because animals went to great lengths, or so Todd was convinced, to avoid the area. That might have been due to a pervasive and lasting smell, faint to the boys but maybe stronger to the wildlife, of dead things rotting in wet, dark places, underneath thin shrouds of forgotten earth.

  Shadows were too long in Nilhollow, and seemed to shift and dart with an anxious and aggressive purpose of their own. In the day, no birds chirped in the trees; no crickets chirped at night. It had taken him a while to notice, as is often the case when perceiving the absence rather than the presence of something. Once he did, though, he couldn’t un-notice it. That was not to say there were no sounds at all; that was another problem, and one that had wreaked havoc on his sleep the night before. In the silvery hours just before dawn, while he lay awake in the darkness, there certainly were sounds, and they seemed to come from all around the tent—strange, sad, high-pitched crying alternating with deep bass warbling, like nothing Todd had ever heard before.

  His brother, who slept like the dead, had heard nothing.

  The worst of it, though, was that from the moment Todd had set foot on the path that led to the clearing, he had felt the off-kilter quality of the place, as if the whole area was shifted slightly off-track from the rest of reality around it. It was a kind of natural unnaturalness that felt . . . old. Very old—older than any Lenape tribes or their burial grounds, possibly older than human souls. It gave him the sensation of being watched, too, by someone or something as distorted and changing as the leafy shapes and shadows, as looming as the trees. But more than just being watched, it made him feel touched somehow, even pressed down on, which in turn made him feel sort of violated and at the mercy of the Barrens around him. He wasn’t the superstitious or even really the imaginative type, nor did he scare very easily; Todd dealt with the world in terms of what he could see, hear, and touch, not what he felt. So the fact that he sensed those things as distinctly as the clothes on his body, a tangible thing he could not just ignore, made him all that much more uncomfortable.

  Kenny claimed he felt nothing. Todd wasn’t sure that was entirely true, but he didn’t push it. Kenny had an annoying habit of deflecting his own fears and insecurities on others if people called him out on them, and Todd just didn’t feel like arguing about it.

  “No fucking way. Bouncing black holes? Come on, man.” Kenny, who had given up any aspirations of bagging so much as a rabbit that weekend, stretched out on his back in his sleeping bag and lit a joint. Todd grimaced; years of athletic training, workouts, and good eating made the idea of smoking up seem like such a waste, but Kenny grinned defiantly at him. Neither said anything about it. The brothers were close; their summer’s-end camping weekend was tradition, their catch-up time before Kenny’s fall semester started, so personal quirks were put aside. Nothing got in the way of their weekend.

  “It’s true, man,” Todd said, a small grin in return finding its way to his lips. “They move around, sucking up stars and planets and rocks and shit as they go—just bouncing around the universe like giant Dustbusters.”

  “I thought like, gravity kept them in place or something.”

  “There is no gravity in space, dumb-ass. That’s why things float out there.”

  “Then how do you explain why the planets don’t just go flying off into space? What keeps them going around the sun?”

  “Centrifugal force, man.”

  “Caused by gravity,” Kenny said triumphantly.

  “Whatever. That’s only because there are things that are bigger and more powerful, like the sun, for the planets to go around. The black hole is the most powerful thing out there—and if there’s nothing bigger to keep it in place, then hell yeah, it’s gonna move.” A little impressed with his own train of logic, Todd looked at the jagged slivers of sky visible through the treetops. It was pearlescent up there, soft-looking. And it seemed very far away, like the light at the end of a long tunnel. “One could be heading right this way now.”

  Kenny scoffed and rolled over onto his side. “Doubt it. So what’s the plan for today?”

  Todd shrugged. “I dunno. Hiking? Supposed to be cool, I think. In the sixties, maybe.”

  Kenny nodded. The brothers were silent for a moment, and then Kenny’s face lit up.

  “Let’s look for the vortex. We can hike there.”

  “The what, now?”

  “The vortex. Well, paranormal researchers would probably call it a vortex, but it’s not—not in the traditional sense. It’s more of a chasm.”

  “Uh, meaning what? What’s the difference?” Todd frowned at him. Already he didn’t like where this was going.

  “Well, a vortex is usually, like, a portal to the spirit world, right? A place where the veil between life and death is thin or torn through. Could be magnetic forces, pockets of gases coming up out of the ground, or hell, just people tripping their asses off. Damned if I know. But there are usually reports of all kinds of stuff near a vortex—ghosts, UFOs and little gray men, eerie lights.”

  “That sounds like a lot of bullshit,” Todd said. It didn’t, though. Not here in these woods, with the trees leaning in to listen and the heaviness of the air breathing down his back.

  “No more than your bouncing black holes,” Kenny went on with a sideways grin. “I’m just saying this isn’t a vortex like that. None of that stuff the websites or even those old folks in the diner were talking about. It’s a different experience. It’s—Don’t look at me like that, man. I’m serious. It’s just this place in the woods where they say the land started to go bad. Makes people see things, hear things. Makes people do things, too.
Crazy shit, man.”

  “I didn’t know you were into that paranormal shit,” Todd said. He was stalling. The more his brother talked, the worse an idea hiking out there seemed.

  Kenny shrugged and looked away. “Didn’t say I was. But I’ve heard a few things. From . . . friends. Friends of friends.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “No one you’d know.” He had an odd, flustered expression on his face, a look unused to being there. “Figured it might be something to do to kill a few hours, at least.”

  Todd raised an eyebrow. There was more to that story, whatever it was, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the rest, and Kenny clearly wasn’t interested in volunteering it. It did suggest, though, that maybe Kenny knew more about the nature of this place than he had let on.

  Kenny continued. “They say it’s a hole, like this little chasm—”

  “I thought you said it was a vortex.”

  “I did. Psychic vortex. Physical chasm. Try to keep up.” Kenny knocked the glowing head off the tiny remains of the joint and poked at it until it went out. “So what do you say? The Nilhollow vortex-chasm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s just a hike.”

  “From the middle of nowhere to . . . deeper into the middle of nowhere. Why are you so dead set on going?”

  Kenny squinted at him through a ray of sun. It cast an odd expression over his features. “Why are you so dead set against it? Scared?”

  Todd scoffed. “I’m not afraid of a hole in the ground.”

  “Okay, then. So strap on your balls and let’s go.”

  A low whine echoed through the trees as the brothers squared off. Todd could tell that even though Kenny would never admit it, he felt as strongly about going as Todd felt about the wrongness of those woods, though he couldn’t imagine why Kenny cared so much. Nevertheless, the dynamic with Todd and his brother had always been that the desire to act always seemed to overrule an inaction, whether the motives were shared or explained or not, so finally, Todd agreed.