Savage Woods Read online

  Apparently, to Darren, she was no exception, though she tried so hard to be. She just kept screwing up. It took time and patience he didn’t have with her to learn all his rules, and when she did, those rules seemed to arbitrarily change. She just couldn’t quite get the hang of preventing his anger and disapproval, and that seemed to prove to him what an immoral, broken, conniving, weak, flawed creature she must be—despite the little voice in her head telling her that he was the one who had changed.

  Sometimes he could be outright cruel, displaying an unpredictable and upsetting streak of heartlessness that the little voice desperately pleaded with her to see as more than just a quirk. However, he hadn’t been outright abusive—at least, she had not truly recognized the behavior as such. He just lost his temper sometimes. He yelled in her face, pushed her around a little, shoved her into walls and furniture, grabbed her arm too tight—but he didn’t hit her.

  Until the day he did. She didn’t like to think about it. The day it happened, she knew that she had to get out of that relationship. She might have been accommodating to a fault, but that had been too much to accept. She mustered up all the pride she had left and told him it was over. In only two days, she had deleted his number from her phone, mailed back whatever stuff he’d left at her apartment, and threw away anything she could find that reminded her of him. She felt nothing during the process except the sting of self-reproach and the echo of pain from his fist against her face.

  That was how she was, how she’d always been: Julia wasn’t oblivious to other people’s flaws, only too tolerant of them, and for too long. She accepted quirks until they weren’t quirks but acts of betrayal. Once that line was crossed, enough was enough and then she accepted nothing about the person anymore. That decision was usually final. It certainly was with Darren; she didn’t need anyone, least of all the little voice in her head, to tell her that a punch in the mouth was a slingshot from the land of quirks to outright abuse. She was done with Darren for good, and she told him so, then made it clear there was not and would not be anything else to say on the matter.

  That was when he went from unpleasant to scary.

  There were the phone calls, which she let her voice mail pick up. Sometimes the messages would be sweet and loving, achingly so. In those messages, he reminded her so much of the man she had started dating, the man who always told her how pretty she was, how smart and talented she was. He told her he missed her and loved her, that he thought about her all the time, that he’d made a mistake, many of them. But there were other messages, sometimes during the same week or even on the same day, that were left in a different tone entirely. In those messages, she was a worthless bitch, useless for everything but the hole between her legs. She was a heartbreaking, soul-crushing cunt, and he should have known better than to trust anything that can bleed for a week every month and not die. In those messages, he swore he’d hurt everyone who ever was or got close to her—family, friends, coworkers, and especially anyone she slept with . . .

  After she changed her number, the emails got worse. In between ranting screeds about her, he signed her up for spam, porn, even dating sites. She didn’t understand his reasoning regarding the dating sites at first, but when she started getting strange visits from men, claiming they’d found her profile on a rape-simulations fetish site, she started to get it. That genuinely scared her. It had been hell trying to convince the site to take down her profile, but threats of lawyers finally put an end to the sluttyslave69 account, and the passage of a few weeks ended the visits from strange men.

  Still, the damage was done. She began checking obsessively four or five times a night before bed to make sure that the doors and windows were locked. She pulled the curtains shut during the day as well as at night. She seldom went out after dark, and when she did, she made a security guard or a coworker walk her to her car. She slept with a letter opener under her pillow and a small kitchen knife just beneath her bed.

  The police told her they couldn’t do much except to take down her statement and file a report. Stalking laws were nebulous at best, and the local police were ill equipped and minimally trained to handle those sorts of things. There were no threats, after all—no damage to property, no physical violence. She hadn’t kept the voice mails— just seeing his name listed in her Missed Calls made her feel a little queasy. And they told her it would take some time just to prove the emails were actually coming from Darren.

  When the phone calls and emails had begun to die off, next came the gifts. “Gifts” was the word the police used, but to Julia, they were anything but. The flowers maybe were, the living ones, with the note which read, “I’m sorry” in his tight, sharp little script. The dead flowers came with notes, too—little things like “I’m watching,” “He won’t protect you, bitch,” and finally, “They’re as dead as you are.” After that last note, the police finally started taking her seriously. They went out to visit him and tell him to knock it off.

  And then Darren became really dangerous.

  Julia couldn’t quite say she felt better as she drove home from the police station that afternoon. She wanted to; she wanted to believe that the cops would go out to his house or his job at the investment firm and arrest him this time instead of just scold him at the door. She had often lain in bed fantasizing about the police cuffing him in front of that insufferably protective mother of his, or his coworkers, some big show where people would finally be forced to see the monster beneath his polished veneer. She wanted to believe Detective Colby’s reassurances that Darren would be in custody by the end of the day.

  However, there had been too many times where Darren had slipped like a thief through some loophole or other, had paid a fee she couldn’t dream of affording, and been let go with a warning. Detective Colby said none of that was a waste, that it was all a cumulative means to an end, and Julia did believe the detective honestly felt sympathy toward her and wanted to help. However, it often seemed that all Julia’s efforts to protect herself from Darren’s growing anger and frustration were met with an uptick in those violent emotions that meant harassment, nightmares, sleepless nights . . . and more gifts.

  The dead rats laid out in the shape of a heart on her driveway.

  The slashes in her tires, filled with bent nails.

  The pig blood splashed all over the windshield of her car. Where did a guy like Darren even find so much pig blood?

  When she bought the security camera, he moved out of view, leaving her a hole dug in the vacant lot across the street, shallow but wide enough for a body, with a crude wooden cross jabbed into the ground at the head of it. In permanent marker, he’d scrawled her name, her birth date, and that day’s date.

  All were violations of the restraining order. All of them he’d done just outside the range of the security camera.

  But then he’d buried the ax in her front door . . . and she caught him on the security video doing it.

  Each prior time, the police came out to look at what he’d done, took pictures and samples for evidence, carefully marked and packaged and removed everything, then hauled her in to file another report. They needed hard evidence, they told her, which could take time. Fingerprints, a hair, a fiber—anything. Julia honestly believed that at that point, they wanted a reason to put Darren away as much as she did. And when Julia called to tell them she’d finally caught Darren in the act, her triumph overshadowed by fear and frustration, Detective Colby was probably more excited than she was. She’d come in with the tape, as he asked, and he’d looked fit to do a jig right there in the office. They’d get him this time, and she would be safe. Free.

  God, she hoped so.

  As she turned onto Mt. Misery Pasadena Road, she wondered what, exactly, she could have done differently to make Darren leave her alone. She was pretty sure that despite his voice messages to the contrary, it wasn’t she who was sending mixed signals. She didn’t quite understand why he so fiercely wanted to hold on to her. Why couldn’t he just let her go? It seemed that he had
bled his obsession into every facet of her life. Everywhere she was, everything she did, his presence overshadowed it all.

  She was still navigating the fog of these thoughts when a car pulled out behind her. She noticed that he was tailgating her, but it was immediately relegated to the same secondary sub-compartment of her mind that other road conditions were. She didn’t recognize the car, a bronze-colored Honda CR-V, and so didn’t pay all that much attention to the driver—not until he backed off, slowed down, then sped up enough to hit her car hard, jarring her bones and sending her drifting off onto the shoulder of the road. She tugged on the wheel to right herself, and pulled over, shaken. She was about to get out of the car and confer with the driver on the damage when a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror froze her.

  The man who sat behind the wheel of the Honda looked a hell of a lot like Darren. It was hard to be sure beneath the tinted band along the top of the windshield and the dark sunglasses he wore, but Julia recognized that grim, joyless smile, that hostile drumming on the steering wheel by hands that wanted to hurt something, that lock of black hair and the way he tossed it off his face.

  It was Darren; she was sure of it in her soul. She started the car again. Before she could pull out onto the road again, though, he floored the gas and rear-ended her, then backed up slightly and slammed into her car again. She heard the ugly whine of metal bending and denting, and the crunch of broken glass as Darren backed up, preparing to hit her again.

  The impact in her bones right down to her teeth was nothing compared to the cold sweat on her skin and the sick ball of fear in her stomach. What the hell was he up to?

  She jerked the wheel and stepped on the gas pedal, and the car lurched back onto the road. He wanted her to panic and get out of the car, but she wouldn’t do it. He could run her over, leave her broken and bleeding on the side of the road, just a mangled piece of debris. Or maybe he had a gun and was planning on shooting her the moment she was free of the car and in range . . .

  His rage was different this time; she knew it—could feel it as surely and jarringly in her bones as when he’d hit her car. He wasn’t just planning to punch her this time. He was going to obliterate her. She forced herself to take deep breaths until the need to vomit slowly passed.

  Julia pumped the gas again, and the car made a rattling noise like something was loose somewhere, but it kept moving forward. A hard thud jerked her head and neck forward painfully, and her car skidded across the oncoming traffic lane onto the far shoulder. For a moment, she felt helpless, picked up and carried by a wave of grinding metal. Then the car rolled over something and huffed as if exasperated by all this trouble. Julia wasn’t great with cars, but she was pretty sure that sound of displeasure meant that something had punctured her tire. She was tempted to power down the window and peer out, but the thought of Darren taking aim at her and her head exploding like a melon all over the side of her car kept her from doing so.

  Julia realized then that she should have called the police the moment she thought she recognized Darren behind her, or from the very first ramming of his car into hers at least, but frankly, she had been too surprised to think straight. Sure, Darren had a bad temper, and he was clearly not above crude and threatening little acts of vandalism to scare her into coming back to him. But this was much more intimate, more hands-on, and it had all just seemed so surreal. The idea that someone she had been so vulnerable and intimate with could be capable of such violent anger toward her made that sickness in her core spread to her head and limbs. What had gone so terribly wrong?

  She pulled her purse onto her lap and rifled through the small pocket in the front. She had her cell phone out and had dialed nine and one when the shattering of glass made her scream. She flinched away from the shards as they rained in on her. When she finally dared to look up, Darren stood by the jagged remnants of the driver’s-side window. With one hand, he reached through the broken window and grabbed her cell phone, which he dropped to the ground and stepped on as she watched. In the other hand, he had an ax.

  He has an ax.

  She gaped for a minute, mostly at the ax, still unable to convince herself this was really happening.

  “Why?” she asked him, though no more than the shape of the word formed on her lips. No sound came out. Then she looked him in the eyes.

  There was no real outward display of anger or hatred, but there was nothing even remotely resembling the spark of love or understanding, either, or even the simple flicker of humanity. His eyes were dead spaces, twin voids. There was no Darren in there—not the man she’d fallen in love with, certainly, but not even the man he’d become those last few weeks. That Darren was still human, however flawed and unbalanced. What drove this version of him from the seat of his mind was something else.

  His expression never changed. He looked perfectly calm. His mouth was a thin fault line in the placid geography of his face. His eyebrows were neither knitted nor arched. He was not breathing heavily. He wasn’t showing signs that any of this was affecting him at all. If he had, she might have entertained some hope of pleading with him.

  He opened the driver’s door—she hadn’t thought to lock it in all the confusion—and grabbed her arm, yanking her out of the car with her purse still clutched tightly to her. His grip was inescapable, though, the muscles straining like a bundle of steel cables in his arm. The world blurred for a moment and in the next, she was on the ground with the wind knocked out of her. He balanced the ax against his shoulder and took a few steps toward her. The thought that crossed her mind was that he was going to chop her up. He didn’t want her body identified, so he was going to dismember her. He wanted her to rot right there at the edge of the woods, with wild animals carrying away whatever pieces were left. She felt sick.

  He hadn’t spoken a word, and that scared the hell out of her—so much so that when he hoisted the ax over his head, it took her a few seconds to react. She heard the sharp voice of the wind zipping around the blade as it sliced through the air toward her, and that, more than anything, sent her rolling out of the way. She came to a stop near some bushes and felt something soft like skin against her arm. She turned and discovered her arm was still tangled in the long, thin strap of her purse. Julia considered for a moment swinging the purse at him, trying to trip him up or throw him off balance, but it wasn’t quite big enough or heavy enough for that. She pulled it to her anyway, gripping it like a medieval flail, and scrambled backwards into the brush.

  He was coming toward her. She clumsily got to her feet and took off into the woods. Then he finally spoke.

  “Julia,” he called. “I’m going to kill you. Chop you down like a tree.” And apparently, this thought struck him as incredibly funny, as he burst out laughing in a way that Julia had never heard before—mean, exaggerated laughter that sounded ugly, echoing, and hollow.

  She broke through the brush onto a dirt animal path and took off running, doing her best to dodge the occasional rock or root jutting from the ground, or branch reaching out to whack her in the face. She heard great, heaving breaths behind her, which, given Darren’s workout habits, seemed exaggerated for her benefit. She also heard the occasional thump as Darren swung the ax into a tree, followed by a grunt and a laugh as he pulled it free again. After a few minutes, he gave up the big-bad-wolf huffing and puffing and began to hum. She didn’t recognize the song, but the way his voice ricocheted between the trees made her intensely uneasy.

  Julia slowed, gasping for breath herself. She’d never been much of a runner, partly due to teenage years smoking cigarettes and partly to shin splints, and she didn’t think she was built for much more sprinting through the woods. She considered her options: He could follow her easily as long as she stayed on the path, just as she could follow well-known and well-worn hiking trails.

  Or she could take her chances in the woods. The supposedly haunted woods.

  Was he still following her? Surely even Darren had to know this was crazy. Maybe he had just meant to scare he
r. Maybe he was already back at his car and ready to drive off, and it was enough to leave her terrified and lost in the woods. Or . . . maybe he was closing the distance between them, creeping between the trees like a hunter. Or a crazed lumberjack, she thought, followed by the Monty Python lumberjack song lyrics running through her head, and she fought hysterical laughter of her own.

  “Julia! Julia, you beautiful slut. Come back.”

  So he hadn’t left, then. Her stomach turned. He began humming again. She had no idea which direction it was coming from.

  She had to pull it together, and quick. She was in the Nilhollow area; she knew that much. It was mostly unmapped wilderness, so far as she was aware. That meant potentially not great circumstances for her, but it also meant not great circumstances for Darren, either. She could disappear.

  Disappear. The word rolled around her mind. The state park’s forest area was huge. She very well could disappear.

  “Julia, you’re making me angry. Come back, now. Let’s talk, okay? Hurry up. Chop chop.” His voice exploded in another fit of laughter. “Chop chop!” She didn’t dare turn around, but he sounded closer than she had hoped.

  Taking a deep breath, she veered off the path and into the woods. She had managed to crunch and crash her way through several feet of dense ferns and other brush when a root caught her toe and she fell face-first into what she assumed was a thicket. She lay there, tears blurring her vision and blazing hot trails down her cheeks, breathing hard but as quietly as she could, and suddenly felt angry. The anger eclipsed her fear and her hurt, both physically and emotionally. It swallowed up everything. This situation was fucked a hundred ways to Sunday, as her police friend Pete’s partner, Vince Perry, always said, but she’d be damned if she was going to lie there like a wounded deer, mewling until he found her and hacked her to pieces.