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 something else,” 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.”
“Hey, guys.”
I turned. Everly Hadleigh stood behind me, her long blonde hair forming a wispy mane around her face. She usually spent time with the art kids and was wearing a long, loose black smock with white paint flecked across the skirt. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the other conversations happening around us.
Victoria popped her lips, looking around. “Did you hear something, Juniper? Or is it just windy over here?”
I laughed, but I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t have a problem with Everly. She was weird as hell, and way too soft to ever be friends with me, but Victoria hated her. I knew why, of course. Everyone knew why.
“Can I borrow some money?” Everly said, her voice softening even further. “Meredith forgot to give me lunch money this morning.”
“Mom has a lot on her plate, you know?” Victoria said, rummaging in her purse. “Her focus tends to be on her kids, after all.”
I winced. Mrs. Hadleigh — Meredith — wasn’t Everly’s mom. When someone as illustrious as Kent had an affair with his own secretary, rumors were bound to get around. When a child resulted from that affair, it only got worse. People said Everly’s mom wasn’t stable, and that was why Everly lived with Kent and Meredith.
But her mom still worked at the Historical Society with Kent. It had never made sense to me, but I wasn’t one to judge anyone else’s weird family situations. It wasn’t as if mine was any better.
“Please?” Everly pulled her hair over her shoulder, her fingers plucking at her dress. “I’ll just get something from the vending machine.”
“Ugh, fine,” Victoria groaned, pulling a five-dollar bill from her wallet. She held it out, but just as Everly was about to take it, she snatched it back. Everly sighed, her shoulders slumping.
“I’ll do your math homework,” she said. “For a week.”
Victoria smiled, placing a hand over her heart before she finally handed over the cash. “Aww, Ev, that’s so sweet of you to offer!” Her smile vanished the moment Everly turned away. “By the way, Jerry, I’m using the car later.”
Jeremiah glared at her as I snuck chips off his plate. “Uh, no, me and Brendon are going to Hyper Bowl.”
“Then Brendon can pick you up.” Victoria shrugged.
“No way, you used the car last time! Have Mom give you a ride!”
“Jerry, I’m using the car, and I’m either going to use it with your body in the trunk, or without.”
Despite an argument that drew out over the rest of the lunch hour, we got the car that afternoon without needing to murder Jeremiah in the process.
“Where did you tell your mom you were going?” Victoria said, turning the music down just enough to speak. I’d let her pick the place where we’d drop acid tonight, and she was driving us north along the bay, where the trees were thick and houses were few and far between. I thought staying at a hotel or a friend’s house would have been better for our first trip, but she insisted being outdoors would be more “magical.”
“My mom will be hungover at least until tomorrow,” I said. “She wouldn’t notice if I was gone for a week.”
“Lucky.” Victoria pouted. “My mom micromanages everything. I told her we were spending the night at Kim’s.”
Victoria pulled the BMW X5 off the asphalt, driving along a narrow, rutted dirt road. The ground was bright green with moss, with ferns clustered around fallen logs and massive roots. She parked, rolled down the windows and opened the moonroof, turning off the engine. The sounds of the forest were all that remained: the wind in the trees, the singing birds, the groan of the boughs overhead.
“Here,” she said. “This is perfect.”
I wasn’t sure when the acid kicked in. Between the time I put the tab on my tongue and the time that the colors around me began to slide into a bizarre amalgam, time had lost its meaning. “You Are a Memory” by Message to Bears was playing from my phone, and I swore the song had gone on forever. For hours and hours.
We got out of the car, and as I stretched my arms toward the sky, I was certain I could touch the clouds. I could feel every little crackle of the dry bark beneath my fingers as I climbed up a fallen tree. The air was so crisp — crisp, like overly-carbonated soda — and the sensation made me giggle. Then I kept giggling, because I couldn’t stop, and everything I looked at just made it funnier.
“Are you feeling it?” Victoria sounded like a tape-recording playing too slow, and that made me laugh more. I nodded and laughed, laughed and nodded, and she began to laugh too.
Time kept changing. I could measure it in steps, in breaths. I could measure it in those bizarre waves that rose up in my chest, tight like a band but filling me like air under the wings of a bird. Acid could come in waves, but were those waves minutes? Hours? Eternities?
The sun had dipped low, and I was laying in the grass, watching the kaleidoscope of trees overhead against the pale pink sky. Everything was rippling, oozing, and changing.
Victoria’s face appeared above me. She looked strange, but everything looked very strange.
“Juniper, we should go for a walk.”
I shook my head. I hoped she could see it too: the colors, the swirling, how everything was breathing. She reached down her hand, and I had a funny thought that her hand and her head weren’t connected at all.
“Let’s walk. Come on. I want to show you something.”
I wanted to lie there on the grass until it grew over me, until I became like the fallen pine covered in lichens and little patches of moss. But Victoria was pulling me up, so I took her hand and trudged with her, deeper into the woods.
The sun had set. The light was gray, and clouds were filling the sky. I looked at my watch, for the first time in forever, but the numbers didn’t make sense. They were just digital marks on a screen, hazy and oddly three-dimensional, as if I could stroke my fingers along the edges of them. I put my wrist down hurriedly, and the moment I did, I saw where Victoria was leading me.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” I said as the old spires of St. Thaddeus cathedral loomed ahead, towering amongst the trees. Sober, I never would have been afraid of this place. The legends surrounding it were just that: old stories, made up. The paint had faded from its exterior long ago, leaving the wood dark and stained with the damp. Lichens and fungus grew from the old boards. Beneath the three spires that adorned its front, a massive stained-glass window depicted a woman standing beside the sea, her hand upstretched, holding a dagger.
This place had a story, like everything else in Abelaum. It was close to White Pine, the deep mine shaft where rescuers were once able to pull the only survivors of the mine’s cave-in back up into the light of day. It was said the three rescued miners stopped here, and dedicated the cathedral to the God they claimed spared their lives in the deep, dark, flooded depths.
The Deep One, they’d called it. Every now and then, you’d still hear the old folks mutter about it. But to our generation, it was just a creepy story. Like Big Foot, or the Jersey Devil.
History and myth intertwined in this town, utterly inseparable from each other.
The old church should have been dead, like bleached bones, but the air around it rippled like heat off the roof of a car in summer. I stopped abruptly, tugging back against Victoria’s hand, and she stared at me with wide eyes.
“Why not?” she said. “You’ve been in there before, Juni, we both have.” She shrugged. “It’s the same old church.”
“Not…not now,” I said, and tried to pull my hand from her grip, but either I was weaker than I thought or she was gripping hard. “Not when we’re tripping. Let’s go back. I want to go back to the trees.”
Victoria shook her head. “Just a little while. Please? I just want to walk through it.”
Something felt so unexplainably wrong. I could smell smoke, like a campfire. As the darkness around us deepened, and we got closer to the cathedral, I could see a glow within the grimy window. The crickets should have been chirping, but the woods were so silent.
But Victoria was my best friend.
The cathedral’s front doors weren’t chained shut like they usually were. When Victoria and I had been there before, to drink or smoke or do whatever our little rebel hearts desired, we’d had to break in through a back entrance. But the chain was gone, and right before Victoria pushed the doors open, I knew we weren’t alone.
Someone was inside. Someone was waiting.
For the first time in my life, from behind me, from the woods, I heard a whisper.
I heard the woods call my name.
I wish I could forget the things I remember.
I wish the nightmares would stop.
I wish I could erase that night.
That night, when something called my name, I learned why I should have run.
The church’s roof had caved in years ago, forming a gaping hole that streamed moonlight onto the pile of rubble below. But the pews still stood in their places, in nice neat rows, waiting for congregants to fill them.
As Victoria pushed open the doors, I realized the pews were filled.
Two dozen pairs of eyes turned to watch us enter. Two dozen familiar faces stood as we walked inside. I looked at them in utter confusion, wide-eyed, convinced the acid was making me see things all wrong. They were all wearing white robes, and as I walked past, row by row, they placed masks shaped like stag skulls over their heads.
Mr. Thorne was there, and so was my history teacher, Ms. Malcolm. Mike, who worked at the gas station. That weird old lady, Mrs. Kathy, who lived by the university. A massive bonfire had been built in the center of the church, and Victoria led me around it. I felt like I was stuck on a bizarre amusement park ride, watching the oddities around me with detached fascination.
Until we rounded the fire and stood in front of the pulpit.
Kent Hadleigh stood before us, dressed in white, hands clasped in front of him. Meredith stood off to the side, and Jeremiah beside her. The woman who stood next to Kent was familiar, but I couldn’t remember her name.
Until, in the shadows behind the pulpit, I spotted Everly.
The woman standing beside Kent was none other than Heidi Laverne — Kent’s receptionist, his mistress, Everly’s mother.
I frowned. Victoria let go of my hand, and went to stand beside her mother and Jeremiah. She smiled at me, but the acid in my brain warped her expression into something sinister. I could measure time now in heartbeats. Ba-dumb, ba-dumb. Every throb in my chest hurt. Every beat tried to push adrenaline into my limbs. Half my brain was convinced this was all a hallucination. This wasn’t real. This was just another wave.
But the other half of my brain was certain something was very, very wrong.
I had to leave. I had to leave now.
But I turned to find the church doors had been shut, and the congregants, in their masks and white robes, had moved closer. I faced a barrier of masked figures, the dark sockets of their eyes staring at me coldly.
Outside, the gathering clouds unleashed the first crack of thunder.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Juniper,” Kent said. I turned back to him, slowly. Victoria had been given a white robe she was slipping her arms into. I shook my head as her face disappeared behind a mask like the others.
What the fuck was this? What the hell was going on? Was I hallucinating all of this?
I began to back away, quickly, stumbling over debris on the ground. But I didn’t get far. Kent nodded his head, and suddenly both my arms were seized, gripped tight by masked figures who forced me back up toward the pulpit. I didn’t know what was happening, but I hated strangers touching me. I thrashed against them, pulling back, digging in my heels. Why was everyone just staring?
“Let go!” I jerked against them, their masks looking far too real from behind the veil of psychedelics. It was like they didn’t even hear me. They forced me up before Kent, and pushed me to my knees.
The moment my knees hit the dirty wooden boards, it was as if reality smacked me in the face. This was real. Holy shit, this was all real.
“Don’t worry, my dear. All is as it should be.” Kent’s voice was calm, almost soothing. He smiled down at me and lightly touched my cheek with his cold fingers. I jerked away, tugging against the arms still holding me in place.
“What the fuck is this?” I yelled, my voice shaking. “Let me go. Tell them to let me go.”
Kent shook his head, like I was a child making a ridiculously unreasonable request. “God has called you, my dear. It has waited for you for a very long time.”
I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. None of this was funny. My heart felt like a fist pounding against the inside of my ribs, trying to escape its prison of bones. “Stop,” I said. “Stop it. This isn’t funny. This isn’t fucking funny.”
Kent turned, lifted a mask from the pulpit behind him and placed it over his head. He became another empty-eyed skull, and the woman in black peered down at me, examining me carefully.
“What is your name?” she said.
“Juniper! Juniper Kynes!” I struggled, panting. “And I know you! You’re Heidi Laverne! I know all of you!” I shouted at them, hoping it would rattle them. I didn’t know what they were doing, but I knew their names, their faces. I could tell someone. I could name them guilty.
But guilty of what?
Heidi nodded slowly. “She is the one It seeks. It calls her name.”
“It calls her name.” The entire congregation murmured in unison behind me.
My mind was spiraling. There were bizarre patterns on the walls, infinite looping geometry in the floorboards, in the pores and freckles across Heidi’s face. She stepped back, and from within the folds of her black dress, she drew out a knife and handed it to Kent.
It was like a part of my brain turned off. Some part of me, the part that still had logic, saw what was coming and flicked a switch, shutting me down.
It shut down the part that wanted to scream.
It shut down my frantic struggling, so I wouldn’t waste my energy.
I went still, and silent, and only hot tears streaked down my face.
“Brothers and Sisters!” Kent’s voice boomed through the space, echoing amongst the rafters. “Long has God blessed us with Its mercy and patience, long has It awaited this night! Tonight, we begin to fulfill the oath of our ancestors. Tonight begins a new era upon earth. Tonight, the first sacrifice goes to the Deep One.”
“Amen,” the congregation said in unison, and a deep shudder of revulsion went straight to my core. I could only stare at the knife, its blade catching the fire’s light as Kent turned it slowly in his hands and knelt before me.
“Mr. Hadleigh.” My voice was a trembling whisper. “Please.”
“Do you know the story, Juniper?” he said, his voice as light and happy as if he were speaking to a little child. “Long ago, three men were rescued from the tragic flooding of the mines. Only three. The only survivors amongst dozens.”
“I’ve heard the story.” I was weeping, staring at the blade. Knowing something awful was going to happen, and I could do nothing to stop it, had turned my limbs numb with dread. “My grandpa used to tell me, because his great-grandpa was down there —”
“And his great-grandfather survived,” Kent said. With one smooth motion, he cut open my t-shirt.
Humiliation rushed through me, unbearably hot on my skin but sickeningly cold in my stomach. I squirmed against the hands that held me as they tugged the ruined shirt off me, begging softly, “Please, please, no, please…”
“Your ancestor was spared. God’s mercy must be repaid,” Kent said with a firm voice.
And then he began to slice into my skin.
My mind went black. Only Kent Hadleigh’s voice permeated the void I’d fallen into.
“Your soul was promised to the Deep One, my dear. Six generations have passed, and the oath must be fulfilled. Three lives spared, three souls given.”
The congregation echoed, “Three lives spared, three souls given.”
I was screaming, my voice ragged, “No, no, it’s just a story, it’s all just a story, it’s not real! It’s not real! There’s no God in the mines. It isn’t real!”
Why were they doing this? Why? Adults weren’t supposed to believe the stories; they told them to scare little kids. Teenagers told their own scary variations as they drank cheap beer in dark places. It wasn’t real.
The cuts burned, searing into my skin as if the knife was blazing hot. My own blood was smeared across my chest, and the sight made me so light-headed that I fell deeper, deeper into that protective dark void.
The next thing I was truly aware of was being carried through the rain. It was freezing cold on my skin, washing rivulets of blood from the cuts across my chest. What had they done to me? What the hell had they done?
Were they going to kill me?
I was tossed down into the mud. I tried to crawl, tried to move, but perhaps they’d drugged me again because my muscles wouldn’t budge. My hands were seized up, clenched like claws, tight and aching. There was a sound like splintering wood amidst the pouring rain. The white cloaks surrounded me, and I reached out for them, clinging my muddy fingers on the cloth, hoping, begging for help.
There was no help. I was fifteen years old, and they watched me in silence. Dozens of them.
No one would help me.
No one cared.
“Victoria!” I screamed her name into the faceless masses. “Victoria, help me!”
But she didn’t help. She didn’t care. She’d brought me here.
“Send her to God.”
Dragged through the mud, the wooden frame of a dark, open mine shaft loomed up ahead of me. I clawed at their hands; I fought them with every bit of strength I had left.
There was nothing I could do.
They shoved me down into the dark.
