The dubious shelter of native prairie grasses let Dandy believe—momentarily—that she was being ridiculous.
“Dandelion!” His voice held a condescending calm as measured and heavy as his footsteps.
She’d never told him her name. No one called her Dandelion but her mother. Some quick, invasive googling would explain it, though. And would turn up the car she drove and her trail volunteer schedule.
He? Was no one in particular, notable for neither age nor height nor build. A perfect, beige average. The first time they’d met, he’d trapped her to explain how The New Deal made the Depression worse because Socialism. Every time since, she’d sheltered like a schooling fish in the maelstrom of its fellows, hiding among passing acquaintances.
He was nobody, and he was following her, and, oh, she knew this story.
The sun was down but not faded. She’d known the forest preserve since before she could pronounce its name. She could lose him, double back to the parking lot, get the hell out of here.
Contorting with the deepening shadows, Dandy hid her bag in the grass and pocketed her car key. Too bad it was a plastic rectangle and not pointy metal.
Too bad her phone lay shattered on the asphalt, slapped when she tried to walk away from him. Too bad she’d stayed a little late to get ready for the Girl Scouts tomorrow. Too bad she’d existed in his presence.
Her best bet was the strip of wood chips that constituted the Oriole Trail, easy to miss and dark with cottonwoods. She’d pass the Nature Center on her way. The rangers were gone, but might have left an unlocked door between her and the office phone. For a heartbeat or two she imagined safety among the terraria of native snakes. Wishful thinking, but hope slowed her racing pulse.
She took a careful step past the shadow of the grass.
Fingers closed on her wrist.
She hated the pathetic sound she made.
“Dandelion, come on. Don’t act crazy.”
“Let go of me!” Why hadn’t she heard him? The summer buzz of cicadas and tree frogs wasn’t enough to hide footsteps.
“I just want to talk. I think you owe me that.”
“I don’t fucking know you!” Dandy threw her weight against his grip and felt his fingers give.
He had the vibe of a Regional Ordering Manager and wore a polo shirt on purpose. The dusk was too heavy, too close, too August for prolonged athletics, but she was sure she could outrun him.
She’d been sure she was better at navigating the twilight forest, too. Dandy could believe he’d spotted her through the grass, but why hadn’t she heard him coming?
Unwilling to sacrifice momentum to overthinking, Dandy kept going the way she’d thrown herself. He was between her and the center now, anyway. No sanctuary for her beneath the ribcage of the headless mastodon skeleton that was the district’s crown jewel.
He called again. She focused on running without face-planting in the disorienting dark.
A late firefly gleamed lazily ahead, hovering over a dragonfly made of scrap iron. Perched alongside an informative plaque about the importance of mosquito predators, it marked the Night Heron Trail. The route climbed a modest glacial moraine toward the McMansions that spread like slime mold along the borders of the preserve.
Grateful, Dandy jogged past the dragonfly.
The dragonfly, she suddenly realized, that sat half a mile from where she’d thought she was.
She should have had to either take the Riverbend or cross a bridge to get to the Night Heron from where she’d started.
So she was moving faster than she’d thought, got turned around in the dark. Who could blame her? She was somewhere safer now, and he was—
He was shouting. And close.
She shrank back from the trail, struggling to gauge the distance as the dregs of a vernal pool seeped through her sneakers. He’d run right by and she’d be safe.
Safe at the cost of a lifetime of good trail etiquette. She stood still as she could, but she’d already trampled over native plants and salamander habitat in the dark. Dandy hoped the forest would forgive her.
A dammit and a thud cut through the heavy air, as if someone had tripped over a big iron dragonfly. She smirked to herself in petty triumph, though she questioned the logistics. That statue was two feet tall, the moon high and waxing. He might be able to pop up behind her in uncanny silence, but he was lousy at watching his step.
The fall must have pissed him off. Growled cursing accompanied the sudden beam of a flashlight. She considered heading deeper into the trees, but she’d be on the ground if she tried to run in the thick of roots and rabbit holes.
Besides. Think of the salamanders.
If she stayed ahead of his light, it would work to her advantage as much as his. Eerie sneaking wouldn’t work while he lit up the forest. The trail twisted obligingly, and the beam missed her every time, skittering as he stumbled and bobbing as he ran, cutting shivering streaks of shock and shadow across a landscape even darkness couldn’t make alien to her.
She couldn’t be afraid of the woods. Him, yes. Fear of predators was utilitarian. Basal vertebrate stuff. But not the woods where her feet knew every step, knew them from owl spotting hikes and predawn meditation classes as surely as by daylight.
The flashlight threatened her night vision, though. Cold light slid over the matte surface of a plastic sign about bluegill and sunfish, glittered dully off the muddy creek, shone stark against the white stone of an affectedly rustic shelter.
She cut through the trees, silently apologizing again to the plants. He’d see the shelter, too. The limestone practically glowed in the dark. But there was a clearing of picnic tables beyond. She could tiptoe through that without tripping and get around him. This wasn’t far from the parking lot.
Dandy stopped short at the thought. She was far from the parking lot. But she also wasn’t wrong. This was the biggest of the shelters scattered around the preserve. Most were weathered wood and half the size, makework for the Civilian Conservation Corps once upon a time. None of those had a fireplace, its grate cold and stately in waiting for the season of bonfires and scary stories. She had a scar on her elbow from when she was twelve, startled by another Girl Scout’s grab-and-scream at the end of The Golden Arm.
No, she knew this spot, and it was close to the entrance, on the Riverbend trail. The Night Heron ran along the opposite shore of the creek.
She squinted back at the informative sign about fish and couldn’t remember whether that one or the native pollinators belonged on the Riverbend. A plump, fluffy bird alighted on one corner and turned its brilliantly red eye on her.
Monochrome moonlight should have snatched the red away into shades of gray.
The undignified squawk of a black-crowned night heron overpowered the sound of her full name when it came again, but he was close. She’d figure out geography when she was in a bright, populated area again. Behind the shelter now.
She took one step and fell hard.
Dandy couldn’t feel anything she could have tripped on. A lesson in running around the woods at night that she hoped she’d live to appreciate, since she was now on the floor of the most obvious structure for a mile around.
He was near enough that she could hear him panting. She crawled between two of the benches rather than stand up straight into his flashlight beam.
He ran past the shelter. Didn’t even stop to look. She stayed frozen, aware of a syrupy weight in her lungs and the lactic acid burn in every muscle. His footsteps faded, and, finally, so did the light.
Dandy planted her hands against benches on either side and heaved herself up, drawing strength from the memories of a hundred bonfires and ecology lectures and snowshoe hikes and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. She had to stifle a laugh that was only a little hysterical.
These woods were hers. The shelter smelled of burning English buckthorn (invasive) and scorched marshmallows. The scar on her elbow throbbed.
Another of those lingering August fireflies drew her eye, and her triumph withered. She wasn’t alone in the shelter.
The district office was lined with faded sepia photos of Civilian Conservation Corps and ice cutters, farmers and geologists, all the odd ends of humanity that added up to a forest preserve over a century and change. Her favorite was a strolling Edwardian lady, her campaign for wholesomely natural recreation undaunted by long skirts and a really big hat.
The woman from the photo stood a few feet from Dandy, pointing silently back down the trail. The eyes under the brim of her hat shone night heron red.
The bench toppled with an echoing thud as Dandy flew to her feet and out the side of the shelter, jumping the ledge and running straight into the trees behind.
She was seeing things. Stress could do that, probably. Stress hallucinations. A real thing she hadn’t just made up.
Every other step was under a woody vine or into a mud puddle. Her feet were soaked. The squelching might be louder than her stumbling and rough breathing combined.
She clambered over a log and found a bigger drop than anticipated on the other side. Dandy tipped straight into a tree, stopping short of smashing her nose but wincing at the bruising knock to her shoulder and the unique discomfort of violently squashed boob. Righting herself, she stepped again onto uneven forest floor.
A snap underfoot had a funny quality.
She’d put her heel right through a deer skull.
Once she’d done the same to the battered remains of a frog. Then as now, she felt obscurely guilty. Animals died because animals lived. She didn’t think deer cared for the sanctity of their mortal remains, but humans did. She had no interest in defying her own biology, either.
That, and she couldn’t think of a human-wildlife relations metaphor more on the nose (well, on the orbit and zygomatic arch) than her foot punched through an elegant ungulate’s disused cranium.
Later. For now, miles to go. Dandy clenched her jaw and looked up.
And swallowed hard.
The tree she’d knocked into bordered a gap in the woods like a missing tooth. The emptiness let in a burst of moonlight too white and brilliant. Bone at her feet and bones all across the space between the trees gleamed horribly.
The oak woods had a few big clearings where they interwove with wetlands, but this didn’t deserve the name. The way the forest just stopped here, the lack of proper groundcover—was that turf grass? The botany was more wrong than the nightmarish cervid graveyard, and she wasn’t even good at botany.
She wouldn’t have thought there were this many deer in the whole preserve. There certainly wasn’t any way they’d all end up dead in one place. Adult deer predators were just people and cars.
She didn’t see any fawns, and an implausible number of the carcasses had antlers. Bigger antlers than she’d ever seen on a whitetail that depended on a two-hundred acre preserve to make a living. Most of the bones looked diseased, twisted bumps vivid in the colorless light as though they’d lived through multiple breaks and infections.
The skull she’d crushed was old and dry, but not all the deer rested in such neatly resolved states of decay. She should have smelled this coming, if nothing else. Dandy pulled her shirt over her nose, mentally tallying the vultures she’d seen lately, and ventured past the uncanny treeline to the nearest carcass that still had flesh on it. Maybe CWD virus? She’d have to tell whatever ranger was on duty in the morning.
Yes. Normal, normal deer problems here.
No reason to think that this wasn’t her forest. Not her deer, her trees, her moon. No reason but silly squeamishness to spin on her heel and flee this grotesquerie, so why did she feel her feet beginning to do just that?
He stood behind her when she turned. The shadows of antlers hung above his head, razor sharp on white bark. Dandy couldn’t place an angle of moonlight that made sense of the shadow or any native tree that looked like that.
(Some kind of birch, maybe? She really needed to brush up on trees.)
(He had something in his hand.)
(As long as she thought about birches she could believe it was the flashlight.)
“Shh, it’s alright,” he said, though she hadn’t made a sound. “Woods are like this. The trees, they’re old, they’re hungry…”
She drew herself up to her full, negligible height. “These woods are like fifty.”
He blinked at her in a way she was happy to call owlish. (Owls are not particularly bright, dedicating the bulk of brain-space to their eyes.) Dandy summoned her perkiest trail volunteer voice, the one she reserved for sulky teenagers. “Overuse and pre-EPA pollution almost knocked this place off the map in the sixties. There was a huge restoration project. Lots of these trees are younger than microwaves.”
He blinked again, a man whose plan was getting away from him, and decided to answer whatever question he’d expected her to ask instead. “That’s why all the stories happen in the woods, the songs for dead girls.”
Dandy remembered with a soft groan that she’d first met him on a lecture night, and the topic had been American murder ballads. That and the flower in her name must have been enough. “No they don’t. It’s Down in the Willow Garden.”
He ignored her very hard. “The old things in the trees like it that way. It doesn’t have to be like this, though. It’s dangerous, but I can make sure you’re alright.”
“There’s mostly songbirds in the trees, and that flashlight’s probably freaking them out. The preserve closes for a reason.” She let him grope for his soliloquy and hooked her ankle around a gnarled ribcage held together by just enough mummified flesh.
Dandy kicked half a deer at him with savage desperation. He jumped back and squawked. She raced across the clearing, wincing at every crunch.
Until her feet crushed only wood chips.
The Oriole trail where she’d first thought to hide was the only chip path, and while it did intersect the Riverbend, that was from a different direction entirely.
The huge stump of a sycamore, shining in the light of the yellow-hazy moon, stood at the trail intersection. Beside a sign about tree rings was the faint outline of one of the CCC boys who built so much of the preserve.
He had a night heron’s eyes.
The prints his feet left in the mud along the creek belonged to a dog, a horse, an overloaded stroller that dropped a trickle of trail mix and baby socks. Dandy kept pace despite the burn in her calves, trusting the forest at last as it seemed to trust her.
The stump was on the way to the parking lot, but on the way meant nothing. She was nowhere in particular, but she was nowhere in her woods. The air smelled of summer creek, not putrid bones. Lovely, dark, and deep. If she’d followed the forest’s advice the first time maybe she’d be safe by now.
She glanced over her shoulder at the wavering glint of his flashlight, and when she looked back she was alone. The footprints, now with a raccoon’s spindly fingers, continued over a bridge that had been gone since she was a teenager, eaten away by summer floods.
The trail it led to had been reclaimed by swamp and budget cuts. There couldn’t be anything on the other side but mud.
Dandy looked back once more and jumped. Not because he was there again, and that was a grace note, but because of the little tree that stood suddenly at her elbow. It glowed with that hard, ugly not-moonlight and was no species she recognized, but she still couldn’t blame the horrible influence of hungry old things in the forest for her mediocre tree ID skills. If she saw morning she was buying a new field guide.
What she’d taken for unhealthy leaves on bone-white branches were tiny bodies, songbirds and rodents, a few big cicadas for variety, all impaled and oozing on their twigs.
Good. That’s good. Shrikes are rare, and they’re an important predator. Their habits were a bit spooky, but you couldn’t blame the butcherbird for your own sense of ick.
Every little head twisted and fixed her with dead eyes. The cicadas didn’t properly have the necks for it, and managed only with a faint crunch. She started, then waited, letting a count of three go by to see if there was anything else to this performance by the dark old things.
The eyes stared. Two cicada heads fell off. “Oh, fuck you,” she hissed at the tree, then spun and bolted across the bridge that didn’t exist.
Dandy’s initials and her little sister’s lingered in smudged chalk on the handrail. When had that trip been? Some year they were in the same scout troop?
Her girls would be here at eight tomorrow for their bird walk. If the other troop leaders couldn’t reach her, they’d assume a mundane misadventure, a flat tire and a dead phone, and they’d go ahead with the trip. The idea of one of the kids finding her body bobbing in the duckweed made her angrier than the dying part.
Broken dolls with flowers for names floating in rivers, again and again forever. Not because of hungry and ancient gods, either, even if they made an enthusiastic audience.
A howl rose behind her, one and then two more, high and piercing. Wolves had been locally extinct for generations, much to the detriment of deer populations. Coyotes, though? Coyote calls had their own quality, nothing like the haunted house sound effect she was hearing.
But.
Coyotes.
Coyotes, coyotes, coyotes, she repeated to herself until the word was only sound. The moon seemed to waver above, too bright and cold one minute, its friendly, light-polluted self the next.
Something big rushed across her path. Coyote-sized, and the tapetum lucidum glow from its eyes was reasonably coyote-like. It only seemed to have two legs, but who was she to criticize? The howls behind her faded into the buzz of a summer evening, and the thing that only a little bit a coyote kept quiet pace with her from the undergrowth.
Her feet were mostly underwater as she stumbled, but she’d lost interest in problems like wet shoes. She only noticed the difference when she reached solid ground again.
This spot was concretely real. The open stretch of ecologically unsound lawn led up to a kayak launch. The dam below was popular with anglers and birders. Prime night heron territory. Nowhere near the parking lot, but a bridge over the creek brought cars close. The sight of headlights rushing by was so mundane it was jarring.
She could run to the gas station even if nobody stopped for her. People. Lights. Safety.
“Dandelion!”
And there he was again. Not nearly as smug and collected as he’d been in the deer graveyard. The sodium orange glow of distant streetlights showed the color in his cheeks, the sweat and mud, where the moon alone wouldn’t have. Not the cold moon of his old, hungry woods or the crookedly plump one above.
The light stole her last hope that it wasn’t a knife in his hand.
She hoped he’d want to talk at her some more (and was probably the only soul who’d ever had that thought about him). He’d learned, though.
He chased.
The street was just ahead. Out of the corner of her eye and in quite a different direction, an unreasonably bright firefly flared. She bolted toward it.
For a moment she thought she’d made an awful mistake. Whatever combination of fear and exhaustion had left her imagining the forest preserve leading her to safety was over, and she’d just run not only away from people but toward the creek. The water wasn’t high, but the dam made everything dangerous, as she’d been told a hundred times and told a hundred visitors in her turn.
She was going to die, and she’d just have to hope that it wouldn’t be the scouts who found her.
Dandy vaulted over the safety railing, and her feet landed not in the water but on a plastic sign about turtles and their various habits. It belonged near the big bridge where you took outdoorsy selfies and could watch flocks of cedar waxwings hunt insects for hours. Her next hop brought her to a rubber model of an invasive zebra mussel. A scrap iron praying mantis, twin to the dragonfly. A bench donated in honor of Martha Hodgkins, 1935-2013, who loved to walk in the woods with her granddaughters. Each appeared as she jumped and disappeared as she sped onward.
Halfway across, Dandy looked back to see him behind her still. He struggled against the water, soaked to the chest and fuming. Pathetic, but he still had the knife. And raw hate in his eyes. He must be starting to suspect he wouldn’t see a woman with flowers in her hair floating in the creek by the night’s end, and he couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.
The forest was hungry, the songs all said. He’d never thought he might be the meal.
She raced across a bronze plaque detailing a historical coal mining disaster and an upturned kayak to reach the far shore.
An antlered shadow rose behind her. A hand dragged at her braid.
She kicked backward and barely connected, but he still let go. Dandy should have kept running. No firefly caught her eye this time. She just needed to see the end of it.
He was out of the creek. A hand with a dozen fingers clamped around each ankle. Fishing line and candy wrappers and the spiny dorsal fins of invasive carp wrapped round bones of sycamore twig and broken popsicle sticks. The claws at the end of those many-knuckled, multiplicitous fingers belonged to owls, broken bottles, ice boots. They pulled and so did he, an impasse that frightened her for a moment.
Then the moon blinked benevolently, a slow sideways slide of nicitating membrane over its red, red iris, and an S-curve neck blotted out the scanty suburban stars. The beak that snapped down on him was there and gone in an eyeblink.
Nothing frightening for the kids to see tomorrow.
What stepped out of the water was a woman in a long skirt and a giant hat. It was a skeleton of trash wrapped in creek detritus. A young man in Conservation Corps uniform, a beast with coyote’s paws on woodcock’s legs. It was Rosemary, the head ranger, and Changying, the aquatic biologist in residence, and that quiet guy who ran the Halloween Haunted Hike every year whose name was either Tim or Tom. The mastodon’s missing skull sat atop its neck. The hand it extended was nothing but a pink WETLAND DELINEATION flag, and there sat her daisy barrette, smeared with mud.
She returned it to her braid.
Raccoon fingers brushed the scar on her arm, smelling of spring floods and cinnamon cider in the snow. The wind rose all at once, a relief to air that hadn’t shed much of the day’s heat, and in the rustle of the leaves, she heard, “Mine.”
Dandy watched as a black-crowned night heron shook out its feathers and alighted at the bottom of the dam. She returned to the trail where she belonged, watching her step as she went.
Malda Marlys teaches science outside Chicago and writes the sort of speculative fiction that requires too many qualifiers for the normal flow of conversation. An out-of-practice black belt, mediocre birdwatcher, and terrible knitter, ey spends most of eir time being bullied by housepets and adding to a monumental TBR pile.
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