What Waits in the Woods Read online

  “Oh my God!” Penelope shouted, covering her pretty, heart-shaped face with her hands. “You are so evil!”

  Jeremy laughed, standing up straight. Penelope gave his bare calf a whack as he strode by. “Hey! Ow! Nice claws.”

  Penelope glanced at her fingernails, which were ragged and bitten to the quick, then curled her hands into fists like she was trying to hide them. In Callie’s opinion, Pen’s nails were about the only imperfect part of her. By the flickering of the firelight, the girl looked like a delicate doll, her latte-colored skin flawless, her high cheekbones regal, her lips plump. Her light brown hair was woven into a side braid that looked like something out of Teen Vogue and made Callie almost green with envy. Pen was, hands down, the prettiest girl at Mission Hills High, but she acted as if she didn’t know it. She was the dainty to Lissa’s coarseness, the saccharine to Lissa’s snark, the meek to Lissa’s powerful. Every guy wanted to date her and every girl wanted to be her. When they weren’t busy wanting to date or be Lissa Barton. It really just depended which type one preferred—the alpha girl, or the sweet sophisticate.

  “We never should have let you come on this trip,” Penelope said to Jeremy, shaking her head. The tiny diamond studs she always wore sparkled against her earlobes. She bent her skinny legs and hugged them to her, the dozens of colorful handwoven bracelets on her right wrist bunching up around the cuff of her sweatshirt sleeve.

  Callie’s heart skipped a nervous beat as she remembered what Lissa had said on the phone. Did Pen feel the same? But then Penelope smiled at her across the fire and she knew that Pen was just messing with him. Penelope and Jeremy had known each other for years—their families were old friends who belonged to the same country club and sometimes vacationed together—so she knew that Pen thought of Jeremy as a pseudo brother.

  “Way to go, dude,” Lissa said to Jeremy, reaching for the bag of marshmallows. “You scarred them for life.”

  “You weren’t scared?” Callie gasped.

  “No. Please. That’s a classic. I’ve heard it, like, a dozen times.” Lissa pierced a marshmallow with a stick. “But I give Science Boy points for entertainment value, because the look on your face right now is hilarious.”

  Callie gave Lissa a tiny shove, which made Lissa laugh. She lifted her thick blond hair over her shoulder as she leaned in to hold the marshmallow to the flames, looking completely comfortable. Her tanned skin shone in the firelight, her muscular calves tapering into thick, marled socks and perfectly broken-in hiking boots. Girl could have been starring in her own ad for granola bars. Or vitamin drinks. Or maybe recycling. Anything healthy and American.

  Lissa’s marshmallow caught and she retracted the skewer, blowing out the flame in one burst of air. Every movement Lissa made was confident and sure. No fidgeting, no blushing, no second-guessing. This, the outdoors, was Lissa’s world. Everyone else was just visiting.

  Lissa handed the skewer to Callie, then made another one for herself.

  “Thanks,” Callie said, rejoining Jeremy on the blanket they’d been sharing before he’d gotten up to terrify them. Her pulse was just now beginning to slow to a normal rate. Jeremy had pulled on a gray Mission Hills High track sweatshirt, so well-worn there were holes frayed into the seams along the collar and cuffs. He reached out to pull her to him, his adorable grin practically glowing by the light of the fire.

  “Okay, never do that again,” Callie said, leaning into his side.

  “Do what?” he asked, kissing her temple.

  “Scare me half to death,” Callie said. “Promise?”

  He smiled and put his arm around her. “I promise.”

  Penelope sighed and ran her slim hands over her braid.

  “Your hair looks so nice like that, Pen,” Callie said. “You should braid it more often.”

  Penelope’s tanned skin darkened. “Please. Lissa says it makes my head look too small for my body.”

  “What?” Callie snorted in disbelief. “No way. You look like a ballerina or a model.”

  “You think?” Penelope’s green eyes darted to Lissa, who tilted her head, considering.

  “Yeah, it’s actually not bad,” she told Penelope. “Maybe you’ve grown into your head.”

  Jeremy laughed and Penelope rolled her eyes but smiled. “Okay, maybe I will wear it back more often.”

  Callie nibbled on her marshmallow, trying not to feel slighted. When she’d told Pen she looked nice, Penelope had shot her down, but as soon as Lissa had chimed in, Penelope agreed. As always, Lissa’s word was gold.

  “So listen.” Lissa casually blew out another marshmallow fire. “We should probably tell Callie about the Skinner.”

  “The what now?” Callie asked.

  Penelope and Jeremy exchanged an uncomfortable look and Jeremy squirmed.

  “I don’t think that’s strictly necessary,” he said.

  “What? What’s the Skinner?” Callie asked, sucking glue-like melted marshmallow from her thumb.

  “You mean who’s the Skinner,” Penelope corrected with a shudder. She zipped her sweatshirt all the way to her angular chin. Suddenly her thin frame looked even smaller, like she could easily fold up inside her hoodie and disappear.

  “Okay, who’s the Skinner?” Callie asked, trying to sound nonchalant even though her chest felt tight.

  “Back in the early eighties, there were these three kids who came up here for a day hike,” Lissa began, leaning forward. “They were supposed to be back at the parking lot before nightfall, but they never showed up. Their parents were there waiting to meet them, but the sun went down and nothing. Then an hour passed, another hour, another hour. Finally the parents decided to call the rangers.”

  Callie swallowed hard. Her palms were starting to grow slick. “And?”

  “The rangers searched all the trails. Every last one. They found what they thought were the kids’ footprints and followed them up the mountainside, toward where we are now. Mercer Pond,” Lissa said.

  Callie’s shoulders instinctively coiled toward her ears. She glanced around at the other three fire pits dotting the dirt nearby, none of them occupied. They somehow looked ominous in the dark, the charred rocks like broken fangs jutting up from the ground.

  “And?”

  “And they just disappeared,” Lissa said.

  “The kids?” Callie asked.

  “Their footprints,” Jeremy chimed in. He pulled his fingers inside his sweatshirt sleeves. “Their trail just stopped. There was no sign they’d tried to make a camp, no trail leading off in another direction. Nothing.”

  “Not even a sign of a struggle,” Penelope said quietly, staring into the fire. Her index finger was hooked through her bracelets.

  “They were just gone? Were they ever found?” Callie asked, breathless with fear.

  Lissa’s gaze flicked to Jeremy’s face. She looked at Penelope, too, but Penelope was studying the dancing flames.

  “Three days later, one of the kids came stumbling into the backyard of one of the rangers,” Lissa said. “He was naked.”

  Callie gripped her knees with her damp palms. “What?”

  “And covered in blood,” Jeremy added. “Like smeared across his face and chest.”

  “Why was he naked? Whose blood was it?” Callie demanded, her pulse thrumming loudly in her ears.

  “No one knew. Not for a whole year,” Jeremy said, poking a twig into the crackling fire. “The kid went mute. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. Not his parents, not the cops, not his therapist. He didn’t say anything for months.”

  “So what happened when he finally talked?” Callie asked. “What did he say? Where were his friends?”

  “His friends were skinned alive,” Penelope said tonelessly.

  Callie grabbed Jeremy’s leg, her fingernails digging into his shorts. “What?”

  “This psycho, they called him ‘the Skinner,’ used this huge hunting knife to skin the other kids right in front of the guy,” Lissa said with a glint in her eye, almost as if sh
e was enjoying the story. “When the surviving hiker finally told the cops he had these details … I don’t even want to say it … but he watched his friends die some pretty gruesome deaths, and the whole time the Skinner kept telling him he was next.”

  A wave of nausea crashed over Callie and suddenly the smoke from the fire seemed to thicken. She went light-headed and pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead. The sugar from the marshmallows formed a hard rock in the middle of her gut.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  Jeremy reached over and wrapped both arms around her, drawing her close to him. She relished the clean scent of his clothes and his warmth.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “How did he get away?” Callie asked.

  “He managed to get hold of another knife when the guy’s back was turned and stabbed him right in the spine,” Lissa said, jabbing the air with her fist. “He said the guy was still alive and screaming when he ran off.”

  “Sometimes when we’re out here, people swear you can still hear the Skinner howling,” Penelope said, glancing across the stagnant pond. Another breeze rustled the leaves. Branches creaked. Callie looked from Penelope to Lissa to Jeremy. A smile twitched the corners of Lissa’s lips, but otherwise no one moved. Suddenly Callie’s chest inflated with relief.

  “Very funny, you guys. You had me until the howling part.” Callie laughed. “How long did you rehearse that one?”

  “What?” Jeremy asked, his eyes wide and innocent.

  “The Skinner? Really? Did you really think I was going to fall for that?” Callie casually reached past Lissa for the bag of marshmallows, but Lissa caught her wrist tight in her grip. Callie’s heart slammed inside her chest.

  “It’s not a joke. It was a real thing,” Lissa said, looking her directly in the eye. She released Callie’s hand and sat back. “They never found the guy. I just thought you should know.”

  Callie felt a flash of anger and vaulted to her feet.

  “What is the matter with you people?” she shouted, backing away from the fire.

  “Callie, it’s okay,” Penelope said.

  “Okay? Are you kidding me? Why did you bring me up here? You couldn’t have told me this story before we hiked a whole day away from town? I don’t want to be out here with some psycho murderer!”

  “God, Callie, chill,” Lissa said, piercing another marshmallow with her stick. “Even if the Skinner could survive a knife wound like that, it’s not like he’s still out here somewhere. He’d be, like, our grandparents’ age.”

  Callie hugged herself. Somehow that assertion didn’t make her feel any better. She glanced around. Suddenly the landscape seemed to close in on her, every shadow concealing an awful threat.

  Someone could be out there right now, watching them. She felt as if she could hear them breathing. At any moment the person, the thing, whatever it was, could pounce. And just like that, they’d all be gone. Vanished.

  Callie couldn’t sleep.

  It was no surprise, really, considering the Skinner story. Plus, by the time Callie had gotten around to laying out her sleeping bag earlier that evening, Lissa and Penelope had already claimed their spots against opposite walls of the tent, which left Callie in the middle. At first, she had thought this might be a good thing—that she’d feel safer when warmly ensconced between her two friends. But three sleepless hours into the night, she understood why the more experienced campers had chosen the ends.

  Penelope was a restless sleeper. Every five seconds she took a new position, which meant that every five seconds a new part of Callie’s body was jabbed. A foot to the ankle, a knee to the side, an elbow to the neck. Meanwhile, Lissa had passed out on her side facing Callie, and whenever Callie rolled over to try to get comfortable, she was greeted with Lissa’s wide-open mouth. It was so wide open, in fact, that for the last ten minutes Callie had been counting her friend’s teeth by the dim light of the headlamp she’d turned on after the others had fallen asleep.

  Suddenly, Lissa snorted and rolled onto her back. With a sigh, Callie did the same, readjusting the balled-up sweatshirt she was using as a pillow. Unfortunately, she found herself half lying atop Penelope’s crooked knee. Callie shimmied around on her back until she found a semi-comfortable position, and closed her eyes.

  “You can sleep,” she whispered to herself. “People do this all the time. Just … sleep.”

  A twig cracked outside the tent. Callie sat up straight, gasping for breath. She looked at Penelope, then at Lissa, but both lay still. How was that possible? How could they be sleeping so deeply in the middle of the wilderness? It wasn’t natural. For a few long seconds Callie sat and listened, but there were no other strange noises. Her heart was still pounding so hard she couldn’t imagine ever relaxing, let alone dozing off.

  She thought for a moment about digging out her journal, but the last thing she wanted was for Lissa or Pen to wake up and catch her writing. They’d probably think it was dorky—or worse, demand to see what she’d written. That would be a nightmare, especially considering all she had was the first two pages of ten different stories.

  Callie had been trying forever to put down on paper one of the many tales that always seemed to crowd her head, but after a few hundred words she always, always got stuck. When school had ended that year she had made a vow to herself that she would complete at least one fifteen- to thirty-page story this summer. Just one. And she’d tried. She really had. But now school was starting in a week and a half and she hadn’t even managed to get halfway through any of them.

  Epic creative fail.

  So instead of reaching for her journal, Callie pulled from her backpack the book she was reading. It was a heavy, hardcover copy of The Black Inferno #3: Jensen’s Revenge, which she’d bought at the bookstore downtown earlier that week. Callie knew she’d get mocked if she was caught doing this, too, but at least the journal would remain secret.

  Tingling with anticipation, Callie opened to her marked spot, the first page of chapter two, and started to read.

  The world was dark as pitch. Jensen took a breath, then another, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Waiting for an outline to appear. A shadow. Anything that could indicate where he was, what sort of peril he was in. But waiting didn’t help. There was nothing. Nothing but a low, distant rumbling that seemed to grow more insistent with each, broken, breath …

  Yeah, this wasn’t going to make her feel any less freaked.

  A rapid scratching at the vinyl tent made Callie flinch. Someone … some thing was scraping away at the door. Was it an animal trying to claw its way in with its tiny, sharp nails? Or was it just a branch being worried by the breeze? Or was it … could it be … a knife?

  The Skinner.

  Callie craned her neck, afraid to move any other muscle, and stared, half expecting to see the outline of some Gollum-like psycho on the other side of the flimsy wall. Then, suddenly, the scratching simply stopped.

  Total silence aside from the croaking of the frogs around the pond and the strange, constant ticking of the cicadas in the trees. Callie shoved the book back into her pack.

  It’s okay. Everything’s okay. This time on Sunday you’ll be safe in your bed at home. On Monday morning, Dad will make chocolate-chip pancakes and we’ll go to pick up Mom.

  Callie imagined herself and her dad at the airport, and her mom coming down the escalator, running toward her, throwing her arms around her. She saw them gabbing into the night, sharing the stories of their trips, laughing over the Skinner and the forgotten water bottle. She imagined the shops they would visit in New York City, the food they would eat, the hotel room they’d stay in. Maybe they’d even spot a celebrity at Barneys. Walk past the perfume counter just as a supermodel was spritzed with a tester of the latest fragrance …

  “Hey, Evelina,” Callie would say to her mom. “That scent is totally you.”

  It was working. It was actually working. Callie felt herself begin to melt off
into the imaginary world she’d concocted. Slowly, her eyelids began to close …

  A thud sent her eyes open wide. Callie sat up again, gasping for breath. Right outside the tent, a shadow rose up from the ground. A distorted hump that curled and straightened and stretched before her eyes, until she was looking at the perfect outline of a man. A man with something long and ominous clutched in one hand.

  “Callie?” the man whispered.

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Jeremy?”

  The headlamp slipped down over her face, landing with a thump against her collarbone.

  “Ow.”

  She was so relieved she couldn’t move.

  “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”

  No, but you scared me half to death, Callie thought. “What’re you doing?” she whispered.

  “Come out,” Jeremy said. “Let’s go for a walk under the stars.”

  Still trembling from the scare, Callie carefully got on all fours and quietly unzipped just enough of the door so that she could peek out. There Jeremy stood in shorts, boots, and his track team sweatshirt, his flashlight trained at the ground. His plaid blanket was folded over his arm and an excited, daring sort of smile lit his handsome face. Dirt covered his knees and Callie realized he must have tripped outside her tent. That was the thud, and the reason for his shadow seeming to grow out of the ground. She felt so silly now. Clearly it was a flashlight in his hand and not a knife. Why did her friends have to tell her that stupid story?

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you in?”

  Callie hesitated. It was the middle of the night in the woods. There were living, breathing animals out there, just waiting for a couple of idiot kids to wander into their clutches.

  And the Skinner. There was also the Skinner.

  “I don’t know, Jeremy …”

  “Come on. We’ll stay out in the open by the lake, away from the woods,” he suggested, interpreting her hesitation perfectly. “You have to see these stars, Cal. It’s amazing.”