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1
Grandpa used to tell me never to answer if I heard my name called from the woods. It didn’t matter if it sounded like my mother calling, or my brother, or even my best friend. He drilled it into my head from the time I was a little girl, barely old enough to toddle around the yard, let alone the woods.
“If the woods call your name, don’t answer. Run.”
He never explained why. He didn’t need to. The rule stuck with me into my teenage years. Every time I rode my bike down the winding road, the trees whizzing by on either side, I’d listen to the boughs creaking and the pine needles rustling. Sometimes, I’d imagine my name was called and I’d peddle faster, my heart racing until I reached school and was safely behind the iron fence surrounding the campus.
Dad claimed it was all bullshit. “Ain’t a thing in these woods you can’t kill,” he said. “Don’t you forget that, Juniper. You just keep your wits about you. Don’t go wandering around after dark.”
No matter who you were, if you lived in Abelaum, you held a strong belief about the woods. About when you should go out, when you should hike, when you should lock your doors. Everyone would tell it a little differently, but the general belief was the same: the woods weren’t safe.
The threat, whatever it was, was never put into words. There was a general sense of unease about the pines; the kind of thing that made people avoid certain trails and certain roads. Older folks made little charms out of twigs, twine, and fish bones, and would hang them up outside their house or around the edges of their yard. Grandpa kept them on his fence posts, around the field where his horses grazed, right at the edge of the trees.
There still came a year when one of the mares went missing. He kept them in the stable at night after that.
By the time I was fifteen years old, I realized the superstitious stories were only good for scaring little kids. From the trailer park where we lived, it was a four-mile bike ride to school if I took the road. But it was only a mile and a half if I cut through the woods. I started taking the shortcut when I was fourteen, peddling as fast as I could through the trees.
I wasn’t afraid of the woods. But something felt wrong about lingering under the trees too long, as if the longer I stayed in their presence, the more irritated they’d get to have me there. I rode through quickly and didn’t linger. No point in pushing my luck.
Even with the shortcut to school, I was usually late, especially when Mom was fighting with her boyfriend all night, and I couldn’t drown out the yelling enough to sleep.
My breakfast was an energy drink I’d grabbed from the back of the fridge, which I chugged outside the classroom as I waited for the bell to ring for lunch. I’d missed the first three periods completely, and I wasn’t about to walk into Mr. Thorne’s class halfway through and get reprimanded with yet another lecture on tardiness.
The bell rang, and I tucked myself into the alcove near the water fountains as the crowds of students flooded the walkways. Finally, I spotted Victoria’s high brown ponytail bobbing away and I sprinted through the crowd to catch up with her.
“Girl, you’re late again?” Victoria’s eyes went wide as she looked over at me. “I swear, Mr. Thorne is going to end up calling your mom again.”
I shrugged. “As if she ever picks up the phone. I think her line got disconnected.” I poked her arm eagerly. “Soooo? Did you get it?”
“Shhh.” She quickly glanced around, then reached into her purse as we walked out to the lunch area. Keeping her hands low, she held up a plastic ziplock bag just high enough for me to see a tiny square of folded tinfoil within.
I grinned, and she smiled widely as she sing-songed, “Almost time for a little trip with Lucy!”
The benches spread over the lawn were almost entirely filled. The sun was out, a few puffy white clouds drifting lazily across the crisp blue sky, unusually pleasant weather for October. We wound our way between the tables as Victoria argued with herself about whether or not we should walk off campus to get iced coffee. But another conversation had my attention instead of her caffeine dilemma.
“There’s an entire network of mine tunnels out here, man. For all we know, they’re right beneath our feet. Nobody knows how deep they go.” Nervous laughter followed, and I spotted Victoria’s twin brother, Jeremiah, holding the rapt attention of the two new transfer students. “But that was where everything went wrong — they drilled the old silver mine too deep. They hit an underground river system, and the whole mine flooded. Cave-ins trapped most of the workers inside.”
“Holy shit,” one of the girls murmured. She had a bite of food paused halfway to her mouth, too distracted by Jeremiah’s story to keep eating. Typical Jeremiah; as if he didn’t already get enough attention on the soccer team, he also had to scare the new girls with local legends.
“So they’re all still down there?” the other girl said. “Like, they didn’t get them out?”
“Only three came out alive,” Jeremiah said darkly. “They survived for two weeks by eating their friends’ corpses.”
“Ewwww!” both girls shrieked, and I prepared to give Jeremiah a good scare of his own as I came up behind him. He leaned forward, lowering his voice for effect, and Victoria glanced over at me and rolled her eyes.
“But the miners attributed their survival to somethingelse,” he murmured, and his audience went still with nervous anticipation. “Legend says that as the mine was being dug, something very old and powerful woke up. Some say it’s a monster. But the miners said it was a God, a God that granted them mercy, in exchange for —”
“Would you stop with the scary campfire stories already?” I grabbed Jeremiah’s shoulders, nearly making him spill his soda and getting some unhappy looks from his audience. Victoria sat down on the opposite bench, gave the two girls one of her signature smiles, and they both quickly scurried away.
No one fucked with Victoria — or with Jeremiah, for that matter. Their father, Kent Hadleigh, was a major donor who’d had an entire wing of the high school dedicated to him for his generosity, so Victoria and Jeremiah could do whatever they damn well pleased.
I didn’t know why they wanted to be friends with me, especially since making friends wasn’t my strong suit. Most people considered me a bitch, either because they’d pissed me off at some point, or they’d talked to someone who’d pissed me off. Being known as a bitch and having a reputation as a partier were really the only two things me and Victoria had in common.
But she always had a hook-up with a dealer, regardless of what I was trying to get, and her family was very generous with their money. Her mom had taken me shopping for new clothes last year when she’d realized I was still wearing shoes with holes in them.
“Goddamn it, did you really have to be such a cockblock?” Jeremiah groaned heavily. “I was going to get both their numbers!”
“Oh no, Jeremiah might miss out on some pussy,” Victoria said, her voice dripping with mock sadness as she pulled out her mirror and reapplied her lip gloss. “What a tragedy.” She paused, her eyes focusing beyond me, over my shoulder. “Ugh, God. Weirdo at twelve o’clock.”
