MONSTERS In The Woods

/in /by

An EXCERPT from my DELAYED 2015 Manuscript – Monsters In The Woods

THE AMBULANCE MAN

CLIFFORD WEBB loathed the dead.
Especially… if they died on his watch.
Whether a shooting, car accident or heart attack, it was his job… his oath,   really… to do no harm, to try his best to save the wounded and dying. It was a promise he’d made long ago.
And maybe… he failed that task tonight.
Did I do everything I could? He wondered.
The E.M.T. was the only person on Earth who had a chance to resuscitate Jen out on Blooming Grove Turnpike tonight.
But when he arrived on scene, she was a goner.
She didn’t have a chance.
Clifford felt guilty.
By her dying, he felt like he failed the mission.
Now, standing in Harry Mortinson’s basement morgue, he pushed aside those thoughts and studied the old coroner busily unzipping the black vinyl body bag.
“Jen Marks,” Cliff stated, “just seventeen.”
Harry was surprised. “Doctor Phillip Marks’ daughter?” he queried while inspecting the body.
“Yep, Phil hasn’t been notified yet.”
“This is going to kill him.”
Harry and Phillip were best friends. The two met twenty years prior while climbing the ranks at Saint Luke’s Cornwall Hospital. Now, Harry was the county Medical Examiner and Philip the Chief of Emergency Medicine at the hospital.
Both were also premier members of The Powelton Club, the oldest full service private country club nestled in the heart of the Hudson River Valley. In Fall, they swung through eighteen holes on the Devereux Emmet designed 18-hole course, in spring the doctors volleyed balls on the red clay tennis courts, and in summer they brought their families to relax around the pools.
The members will all be at the wake.
Harry felt a pang of sorrow for this realization.
“Who is notifying him?”
Cliff wasn’t sure. “Might be the chief, but he’s out in the woods, and I don’t think Delores has called or been notified of who the DOA is.”
Picking up a red phone, the coroner called Phil and quickly broke the news. Doctors liked hearing things straight, no cherry on top; the quicker the bad news came, the better. Of course, his friend cried in agony for a while and kept repeating that it couldn’t be true… because the family just shared dinner hours before.
But news like this was always true.
Deep down, Phil said he knew something wasn’t right. He told Harry his wife, Suzanne, had suddenly come to him about an hour ago with feelings of dread.
Parents always knew, Harry thought.
“How’d it happen?” Phillip cried.
After twenty minutes explaining what he knew over the phone, the coroner replaced the receiver and walked back to the body to continue his examination.
“There is blunt force trauma to the skull and the eyes are open in the stare of sudden death.”
Clifford nodded. “When arriving on scene, we observed the car had plowed into pine trees.”
“No passengers?”

  “Peter Massey.”

  Harry raised one long, grey, creepy eyebrow. He knew Cliff had a personal interest.

  “He’s missing in the woods.”
“In the woods? During a storm like this?”
Harry had a good idea of what might’ve chased the boy into the woodlands. He’d been living in New Windsor for more than forty years and recognized the legends just as well as everyone else.
The tales hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, running through those same timbers with his own high school friends.
But, he’d never seen things escalate this bad.
“Does the chief think THEY have returned–?”
“Come on, Harry,” Cliff interjected, not wanting to acknowledge what everyone else in town had started assuming since the cadet went missing.       “Nobody believes the monstrosity stories; they are ridiculous.”
Shaking his head and glaring at Jen’s body, Scary Harry shrugged in disappointment.
“This is preposterous.”
Inspecting the body, the coroner noted Jen’s weighted, lifeless body on the monitor. Measuring the corpse, he reached above the table and flipped on a microphone suspended from a popcorn drop ceiling. “The date is December twenty fourth, nineteen seventy seven. The deceased is a white, seventeen-year-old female, five foot seven inches, one hundred twenty pounds with brown eyes and shoulder length black hair. The body has already been identified by law enforcement as Jennifer Marks and consent was obtained for an immediate autopsy.”
Removing her clothes, Harry discovered a peculiar symbol sliced into her pale chest.

  What the hell is that?” Cliff asked.

  Harry took a step back. “I’m not sure.”

  However, the old coroner knew exactly what it was… the imprint had been the cause of many nightmares over the years.

A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE

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Sometimes we live our own miracles, and sometimes we don’t. There is a passage in the bible, Ecclesiastes I think, somewhere around the third verse, I’ve read it many times, and it goes something like this:

A  Time  for  Everything

“THERE IS a time for everything, and a SEASON for every activity under the heavens. There is a time to be born and a time to die,  a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal.”

I have been living that verse for along time. Born so long ago the sun is burning my back, I know how that scorch feels. I feel it because the metal meets the bone within me.

“God will bring into judgment
    both the righteous and the wicked,
for there will be a time for every activity,
    a time to judge every deed.”

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RJ in the ICU post surgery

There was a time I considered Everything as meaningless. That we all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

It’s getting on into the new year and I know most of you have been worried. There have been whispers and nudges… many of them on the money, but much of it second or third hand and passed down the line. So here you have it from me, I’ve been out of the loop for most of the last year, getting on day to week to arrive at another medical procedure. Having my last Christmas at the Medical Center, I suppose I felt like I was fighting to survive.

Indeed, I fought every day just to breathe and swallow.

MRI

RJs neck now

I wont go into the particulars, but its been tough GETTING THROUGH the last eighteen months. I am back now, and in much better shape than before. With a new piece of hardware holding my neck in place, much of that pain has subsided and I’m feeling like  that “Christmas Miracle” the nurses spoke of when I came through the other end.

Life and death… I write about it, I suppose the horrific glare of the monsters and demons that live in these shadows.

Yet never have I come before their countenances like I did this last month.

I’ve seen the orbs of life in the E.R. and the Darkness of the Intensive Carehallway Unit… I felt the spirits moving along the long corridor that rested just outside my hospital room door.

Sometimes, I’d catch a glance at the bag and stretcher which carried away the remains of what we are.

And if I stretched your ear to the corridor, I heard a soft cry, imagined a tear that streaked a cheek of a loved one.

It was scary stuff.

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I saw a lot of this

Writing contemporary Horror and Suspense, well.. it brings things into perspective a bit. It makes the edges a bit less blurry.

For the entire month of December I saw and heard many things, sometimes it would be a muffled cry and a glimpse of families struggling to understand.

I was terrified I found myself slipping into that groove.

It’s a scary place to be, late into the night, when the lights go down and its just you on the bed, lines running through your veins and the outcome uncertain. I’ve been there, it will remain with me forever, and now that I have come out the other side, I wonder… who will be there in the end?

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RJ after 20 days in and surgery

There will always be fine nurses by your side, maybe a doctor or two… I’ve met them by the dozens, they tend to your every need and try their best. But what can they do when the boogie monsters come out of the shadows?

So where does this leave me, late into the wee hours when I sit here and stare out my window for a miracle? With collapsed veins, bags hanging, and a cell phone at the end of my fingers, who should I call when the end come knocking like it did for me?

I lost 25 pounds in December and gave up my soul.

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A few days into the scare.

In the end, the heavens spat me back to Earth to tell the tale.

Maybe one day I will, perhaps, if the edges ever become clear.

Right now I’m just grateful to be here with a few new fans and the knowledge it wasn’t my time.