JULY 16, 1925
There was a noise. I will call it a noise. And then pressure, unbearable pressure that made me think I would faint or die. When it finally released, my ears were bleeding.
I can attribute the noise and the pressure and my ears to memories, to an incoming storm, to anything, really. I will not let their damned nonsense and superstition infect me. I am angry with Tommy. And Mary. She should have more sense than this. The rest of them I barely know, but I am angry with the lot of them.
JULY 17, 1925
The gate is bothering me. It’s just a gate. It’s surrounded by trees. There’s no fence it connects to. Just a gate, standing alone in the forest.
Why can I not bring myself to touch it?
I moved my campsite further down the dirt path. I can still see the gate. The whiskey is nearly gone, and I want to go into town for more, but I promised Tommy I would stay. After this, I think I will take my own holiday, far away from Tommy and this gate.
JULY 18, 1925
This morning as the sun crested the horizon I heard screaming. I was about to run into the trees at the screams, but then the laughing started.
I have killed men with my hands. I have taken shelter behind corpses to shield myself from bullets and shrapnel. I have seen all the horrors that war has to offer, and I have never been more frightened than I was of that laughter.
I am a coward. I do not care. If it had only been the screaming, I would have gone in. But I did not want to see what could make someone laugh like that.
I did not go in I will not go in I am staying on this side of the gate. If something terrible has happened, well, it has already happened and I have not interfered I have done what Tommy asked me to. I will stay out the full week here.
Then I will punch Tommy right in the face and leave.
JULY 22, 1925
If I had known what they were really asking me to do the burden they were putting on me the ghosts they were shackling me with the horror they were leaving me to wade through I would have told them no. I would have known they were asking me to sacrifice right alongside them.
God damn you, Tommy. God damn you all.
But I suppose he already has.
I am tired. I will finish my account tomorrow.
JULY 25, 1925
I have had all the whiskey in my house, and all the whiskey in Tommy’s house for good measure. It is not enough.
I waited until the eighth morning, because I am a coward. I could have gone in the seventh night, but my soul recoiled at the very idea of crossing the threshold of that gate under cover of darkness. The gate had become an unpassable barrier in my mind, the only thing between me and whatever was happening in those trees.
Screaming. Weeping.
Laughing.
On the eighth morning, I unlocked the gate and stepped over the line into Tommy’s new no-man’s-land. I expected it to feel different—for my ears to pop and bleed once more, for my skin to crawl, for something to tell me what had happened here before I had to see it for myself—really, for an excuse to turn and flee.
But it was just trees like any other trees, slowly humming to life with birds and bugs and the creeping natural things of the world that either did not know or did not care about whatever was awaiting me.
I think of him, that person, that Hobart, walking slowly toward his goal, unaware of what he would find. Maybe if I had turned around, maybe if I had let myself keep the gate closed, maybe then I could have
* * *
—
But no. Tommy was my brother. I had to know. I owed it to him. Or I thought I did. Now I know the burden they placed on me absolved me of all debts, and put them in a debt they could never repay to me, a debt they never intended to repay because I was not included in their blasphemous accursed god damned shit shit shit god damn you Tommy god damn you
* * *
—
I went into the woods. I walked softly as though hunting or being hunted. I made my way to the center, where they had cleared a circle of trees around Tommy’s temple, where a great bonfire had burned that first night.
I found the cow, or what was left of her, rotting and putrid, the whole stomach of her blasted outward through some means I could not understand. It was worse than anything I had imagined the poor cow being used for, and I vomited and braced myself to see the fates of the fourteen people if this was the fate of the cow.
There was evidence of the bonfire. A ring of rocks, ashes, the lingering scent of smoke.
And there was some evidence that people had been here. Footprints, some gouges in the dirt. A neat row of fourteen pairs of shoes. Some of their clothes, folded next to the shoes, others torn and discarded. The camp told a tale of order descending into chaos, and it was a tale I did not want to read.
But the part of the story I most wanted to see was nowhere to be found. There was no evidence of Tommy, no evidence of Mary, no evidence of the Pulsiphers or the Nicelys or the Strattons or that moon-faced idiot Robert who had no right to be married to lovely Rose, or any of them. Any of the fourteen people who had entered these woods. They were gone. There was a folded bunch of papers on top of Tommy’s book and I took them and tucked them into my pocket. I didn’t want to open them there. I still do not.
There was a smell. And it was not the cow; the wind was wrong for that. I have been in trenches. I have crawled through mud churned with the gore of the living turned dead. I know the smell of death. It was everywhere.
Part of me wanted to believe this was a grand jape, a joke to end all jokes, myself the butt. That Tommy and the others were hiding in the temple, or had slipped out and around me and were safe and warm in their houses, waiting to laugh at me upon my return.
But I could not deny the smell of death, and the knowledge that Tommy and the other thirteen fools were never coming back.
The temple waited. I trembled, I shook, I am not ashamed to say I wept. But at last I set foot inside and found nothing—or so I thought. It was empty, the floor bare save the patterns Tommy meticulously laid into the black-and-white stonework. Even though it was empty, I felt no relief. No release. Because of that smell.
And then I noticed it. The gentle inhale and exhale, the steady pace of sleeping breath.
Something was there, and I could not see it. Something slept, breathing deeply, soft wet exhalations. My eyes insisted nothing was there, but I could hear it, I could smell it. I ran then, from the temple and the woods, then shut and locked the gate behind myself, haunted and hunted.
Tommy and Mary and the rest are gone. Whatever they did, they left something behind.
JULY 30, 1925
I hate them. I hate them all.