Deadwood

Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.

We weren’t looking for anything really. Back in those days it was about pride. How fast you could travel down Sycamore Avenue on your six-speed while the world whistled around you. The flapping of an old Randy Johnson rookie card pinned to your spokes as the last rays of sunlight dripped away. It was capturing fireflies, chasing bullfrogs, and who could stay up the longest. There was no purpose past burning the hours of boredom away. And that’s what made the whole situation that much stranger, the fact that we were the ones to find it. 

It sounds cringe now to admit it, but our “crew” had coined ourselves a name. It was essential, as per Jenny. Maybe she had copped it from a movie or something, but it served to define us, to seal us together as friends. We were the Mayfield Marauders–after the old neighbourhood we grew up in.

We were out pedalling that day because Bobby was livid about something. It was always something with him back then. He woke up one morning at his grandparent’s place and never left. A sleepover turned into a lifetime. His mom had always been flaky to the point of utter negligence, and then at some point I guess she had had enough. After that, and understandably so, the kid had developed a paper-thin trigger. That day was just one of those days…and Jenny and I were there to try to help him along. 

We took to the pathways by sun-up, only stopping for the occasional pit stop. Bobby had to brandish his old pocket knife and leave his mark on the neighbourhood like some wild dog. Jenny collected rocks like trophies in her satchel. I forced a stop or two at Speedy’s to reload on sweets. It had been the perfect summer day by our standards, apart from Bobby’s mood. Jenny filled the hours of travel from pathway to trail to gravel road with some piece of gossip or random fact from school. She was good for that, filling the air. I was half listening at best, though. Bobby’s face was beet-red, sweat dripping from his matted curls of hair. He hadn’t said much and I was concerned.

“Hey, Bobby,” I finally spoke up, once the bike path began to snake into the woods. “You about to tell us what’s wrong?” 

“Nuthin’,” he replied. “Let’s just ride.” 

“Well…I have to head home soon. It’s getting late.”

He huffed, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. You always got some kinda excuse, don’t you Allen?” He let out a heavy sigh. “We gotta at least skip a couple in the ravine before we can call it quits. Come on, man. You know we’ve been wanting to do this for so long.” When no one jumped at a response, his tone softened. “Please, guys. Let’s cap this day off right.” 

Jenny shot me a helpless glance and shrugged. “A couple of good ones then, okay? I’ve got to head back too.”

The asphalt fell away to a rugged extension of gravel and dirt as the last hints of suburbia disappeared with it. The light slowly dimmed between the pockets of trees. We weaved along as best we could, avoiding the sunken chunks of earth the size of potholes and slopes entangled with exposed roots. Jenny’s chain bolted off its sprocket and forced a fit of expletives. We helped pop the chain back onto its track, our hands coated in a layer of grime and grease. 

“This ain’t worth it guys,” she grumbled.

But Bobby’s expression only hardened. There was a determined gnashing of teeth and only once we reached the turn off did the tension in his shoulders seem to ease. We skidded our bikes to the dirt and proceeded into the trees.

The ravine was located up a narrow strip of trail, a conglomerate of large, jagged rocks and roots that made it impossible to ride up on. As we trekked up the incline my lungs began to burn. My legs lurched along in agony. Too many Happy Meals and TV dinner trays had piled up atop each other. Mom was never much for cooking.

Finally the ground levelled. We marched until we crossed paths with the bowed poplar, just as my brother had always talked about. A big rotting log would be next and then we would be where we needed to be. But as we strolled a little further I noticed that Bobby had been left behind. Jenny noticed it as well, and she set off running to make sure he was okay. 

“Argghhh,” the boy groaned, his knees to the dirt. His hand was clutching his bad ear, and his face was bunched in knots.

Panic jolted through my system. “Tell us, Bobbby! What’s wrong?” I placed a weak hand on his shoulder, unsure of what to do next. 

With gritted teeth, he forced himself to his feet. He began with slow steps, in the opposite direction. 

Jenny paused, confused, before opting to catch up with him. “We should turn back, Bobby. Find a grown up and figure out what’s wrong.”

He didn’t respond. His face was locked in a grimace. We continued to follow as he staggered along aimlessly. Suddenly we landed upon a small clearing. Bobby circled the spot, brow furrowed, hand still cupped to his ear. It was just big enough to fit a large tent and maybe a pile of firewood, although there was no evidence of any of that. Just an abrupt absence of trees. 

Jenny placed her hand on one of the neighbouring pines, and my eyes caught the strange pattern on the bark. They were singed in a uniform manner, a black ruffled wave traced along the perimeter of their trunks. A rush of nerves overtook me as Bobby continued to examine the area, a feeling that just wouldn’t settle. 

From my peripherals, I caught him falling to the dirt. He planted the side of his face to the ground. An ant or two crawled up his cheek.

“Bobby, come on!” Jenny hollered. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

We had to yank him to his feet, and even then he put up a fight. He yelled for us to stop. Wait. But daylight was fading fast and we risked losing our way home.

We forced him along, back to the trail and then the bikes. He glanced behind us, sporadically, a hungry gaze that was strangely confused. 

We rode back, the streetlights on and porch lights illuminated. As civilization finally returned, he told us what was wrong. 

He had heard something in the dirt.

We vowed to return the following morning to investigate, but due to the tardiness of our return, my parents had grounded me for a week. I was to be afforded few luxuries during this period– a stack of books in my bedroom, some mid-afternoon history documentaries if my father was manning the TV. There was only so much that could be done to distract me from my disappointment. I moped around the house until the evening when the phone finally rang. Jenny’s voice sounded scattered. Anxious.

“Bobby’s been acting strange.” 

They had been digging. All day. Bobby had strapped Jenny’s dad’s old spade to his backpack. They returned to the clearing and proceeded to dig until Jenny got tired and downright refused to anymore.

She said he was convinced that there was humming. Some kind of black static that he couldn’t leave alone. 

“But there was nothing, Allen,” she sighed. “I mean it…nothing. And nothing but endless dirt in that damn hole.”

I figured his hearing aid was just on the fritz, some sort of short circuit messing with its frequency or something. Bobby had always had health problems since birth; complications, my folks used to whisper under their breath at the dinner table. I always felt bad, like it was another reason his mother had left. His ears were one such issue, the left one particularly bad. His hearing aid had been donated and wasn’t exactly state of the art technology. It looked more like a faded denture than a medical device. 

She said Bobby couldn’t ignore it. The steady whir was driving him insane, and this was the source, he claimed. The stupid forest was where it had all started and it was loudest the closer he got to the spot. He wouldn’t stop until it stopped.

“I’m not going back there again,” she stated flatly. “Fat chance. Not without you.” 

I felt a warmness flush my cheeks. Then frustration bubbled up inside of me as I was reminded of my sentencing. Twenty-four-hour lockdown. Maximum security. My high-school, snot-nosed sister would be waiting for any opportunity to snitch. It was torture, not being there to help out my friend, not being able to see Jenny’s face. I wished her good night and stared off at the ceiling until drowsiness overtook me.

***

Created by: Danny Ingrassia

Darkness warped the surroundings. Our beams of light could not source out any of the chittering or rustling of leaves, and the unknown had left us skittish. Our only real landmark, the bowed tree, seemed to elude us, and the feeling that we would never make it began to taint and spoil the experience. 

Bobby led us, wandering eerily in this concentrated death march before we finally found it.

My eyes widened, nearly dropping my light. The hole Bobby had dug now resembled a small pit. It filled the entire vacant space. All I could picture was a coffin being lowered, maybe seven feet wide and deep, and the thought of it made me shiver. He had tied a rope to one of the neighbouring trees to lower himself in.

Jenny bit her lip, her voice trembling. “How…how long did this take you, Bobby?

“A long time,” he responded. His hand had cupped his bad ear again, and he was wincing. His eyes narrowed, squinting, as he surveyed the area. The beam of light cut through the trees.

The ground felt tough as cement, laced beneath a vast network of roots. To be this desperate to rid himself of this mysterious, relentless noise…I couldn’t help but feel terrible for him. 

Without another word, he grabbed ahold of the rope and began to lower himself into the hole. Once grounded, he gestured for me to toss him the shovel. It was the only one we had. The edge of the spade was bent, corners flaked with rust. The wooden handle had been worn smooth and jiggled with every thrust. He went to work, grunting as layer by layer of soil was tossed into the air. Jenny stared down with a look of concern while I beamed my flashlight into the surroundings.

Branches rustled. Twigs snapped underneath the howling of the wind. A coyote yowled somewhere amidst the shadows of the trees, much too close for comfort. 

When Bobby finally needed a breather, he traipsed his way up the rope to safety. His hair was caked in clumps of mud, his face ashy like a coal miner who just came up for air. I patted his back as we swapped spots, the pile of dirt no bigger than before. He walked over to Jenny and plopped down beside her.  

We took turns into the night until our shoulders burned and back ached. We coughed and heaved and yawned as the futility of the exercise began to wear on us. What were we even looking for? When would we know when to stop?

Soil rained down in waves. And my heart began to race when I finally began to pick up on the noise.

whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp.

The low whir was like a drum, rhythmic pounding from the inside of a womb. It started faint, but as the night wore on, it began to steadily build. I questioned whether exhaustion had distorted my sense of reality. The sounds of the forest had heightened everyone’s sense of dread, and maybe I had just imagined it. But Jenny’s face had now run pale and it couldn’t be ignored.

Our reactions seemed to bolster Bobby’s efforts. He crashed the shovel into the dirt. Clinks echoed into the night. Those who waited nervously patrolled the perimeter, one shining a light down into the pit at all times. The black stains across the base of the neighbouring pines, the deadwood, made something in my stomach churn.

We stopped when sparks began to fly. At first Bobby thought he had hit a large rock. The sound travelled differently. He worked his leverage to try to shift the object out of place. Then as he crashed the shovel into the surrounding earth, rubble began to clear, and what looked like a grooved metal plate began to emerge. 

“Bobby?” I yelled down. “You alright? You need some help?”

Jenny called out to him, but he ignored her too. He pummelled the ground with heavy strikes, fixated and exhaling with exasperated cries. There were streaks of tears running down his face, and that’s when I really began to panic. I had never seen him cry. 

As the dirt began to clear around it, a trigger set off inside me. Under the glaring beam of the flashlight, I realized what it was from all of those old war documentaries.

“Bobby! Stop, man! Come back up!” 

The rest happened too fast to register. The humming began to radiate through the earth. I could feel every thrum travel through my bones, feel it in my teeth. Jenny screamed his name and scampered towards the rope. I followed, keeping my beam of light on Bobby. 

He dropped the shovel. He hunched down. 

The humming continued to roar. The ground began to shake. Jenny bellowed from the top, her hands on the dangling rope, but it was all too late. I instinctively held her back. She wriggled and snarled and tried to push me off her, but I couldn’t let her go. Not like this. The wrestling caused her to lose control, and she tumbled into the pit.

I desperately pawed around for my light. 

His hand danced around the center of the plate. 

whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp

Where was she? Where was Jenny?

whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp .

The beam trembled across the pool of unforgiving black. My ears rattled and swelled under the merciless drum, my head about to burst. 

Flashes of Bobby and his scurrying hands burrowing into the dirt. 

Finally, there was Jenny, curled up on the ground. Motionless.

And then, Bobby, as he appeared to pull.

An indescribable pillar of light emerged. Sunlight on polished chrome. But there was no warmth or joy behind it. The beam began to engulf him, and all I could make out was his back to us now, his outstretched palm out in a stop motion. It was quicksand, sweeping and relentless, and like the grip of a hand or some underground force, it pulled the boy in.

He cried out just before, something burned forever in my memory. 

An explosion followed within seconds, this terrible swirling cannon-blast of wind and flames. The shockwave gusted through the forest and rattled the nearby trees. Sound collapsed into a tunnel-like void that swallowed everything around it. All light disappeared. I was thrown backwards, and that’s the last of what I can remember. 

***

I woke up, surrounded by curtains, bleary-eyed under fluorescent lights. Every muscle ached. But most of all was the pounding in my head and the ringing in my ears. The doctors believed I had a concussion, accompanied by first and second degree burns throughout my body. They told me I was lucky to be alive.

You can imagine how it looked to be discovered next to a makeshift grave in the middle of the woods. This was further compounded by the absurdity of our story and the fact that Bobby was missing.

He was never seen again. 

The base of the hole had been torched by the blast. Tiny bits of metal clung to the edge of branches. Most of the area had been incinerated, impossible to clearly identify the source. It was the kind of heat that took everything with it in flames. 

It left a lot of questions unanswered…like how we were somehow spared. 

The pragmatic working theory was that someone had planted the bomb, a suspected old land mine or tank mine or something. But they could never explain why it had survived dormant, why it had been “planted” or buried so deep, or why in the middle of the woods. They couldn’t track any of the source material, and they sure as hell could never explain our depiction of events.

Jenny wasn’t so lucky. In a way she truly was, but her survival was more of an ill-faded twist of fate rather than some sort of miracle. Most of her face had to be reconstructed with skin grafts. It was a long, arduous process. I visited her once or twice once she regained consciousness. It was too tragic to see her in that state, too much had changed. I’d heard she bounced around schools for a while after that. In the end, we just lost touch. All I had was our childhood memories and this deep seeded need for her to have been alright. 

It was hard to navigate being under that kind of spotlight, especially at our age. All of the articles, news stories, and when elements of our story seemed out of place compared to the findings, it added more mystery to a town which had nothing better to talk about.

Our lives shifted fundamentally that night. I could tell Jenny never forgave me for holding her back from Bobby. Hell, I never forgave myself. 

I still thought about him. Some nights, the dreams, I could damn well hear his voice. They never found any trace of his body. Maybe it really was too hot to uncover any remains, but that still struck me as odd, that Jenny could somehow survive, but Bobby couldn’t. It never left me. It never left the others in town either, as we were the last ones to see him alive.

Nearly three decades had passed. I was forced back home for my mother’s funeral. I managed to stay away as long as I could, but nostalgia drew me in.  

The spot didn’t look the same. All of the charred trees had been chopped down, inspected and collected as evidence, I presumed. The hole had been filled in and new undergrowth had overtaken the space. But still I knew. This was the spot.

Deadwood. 

As I approached, the ringing in my ears intensified with a deathly rhythm. It was the same ringing I had been hearing for years after the incident, along certain street corners, playgrounds, alleyways, beaches. The sensation always gripped me with terror. 

What was calling up at me? 

Were there more places like Deadwood?

The burns on my body began to flare up with an intense itch. The charred black scars seethed. 

My fingers ran along the bumps of bark, sap clinging to my fingertips, as I caught the mark carved crudely into one of the pines.

M.M 

Forever.

My eyes dropped to the dirt. I cried. 

With his final words, Bobby had called out for his mother. She had died a few years prior to the incident, unbeknownst to any of us at the time.

And it made me wonder what my final words would be.

Or what had been calling him…