The Woods Are Dark Read online

  The Woods Are Dark

  Laymon Laymon

  In the woods are six dead trees. The killing trees. That’s where they take them. People like Neala and her friend Sherri, and the Dills family. Innocent travellers on vacation, seized and bound, stripped of their valuables and shackled to the trees to wait. In the woods. In the dark.

  Richard Laymon

  THE WOODS ARE DARK

  Praise for Richard Laymon

  “I’ve always been a Laymon fan. He manages to raise serious gooseflesh.”

  —Bentley Little

  “Laymon is incapable of writing a disappointing book.”

  —New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Laymon always takes it to the max. No one writes like him and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes.”

  —Dean Koontz

  “If you’ve missed Laymon, you’ve missed a treat.”

  —Stephen King

  “A brilliant writer.”

  —Sunday Express

  “I’ve read every book of Laymon’s I could get my hands on. I’m absolutely a longtime fan.”

  —Jack Ketchum, Author of Old Flames

  “One of horror’s rarest talents.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Laymon is, was, and always will be king of the hill.”

  —Horror World

  “Laymon is an American writer of the highest caliber.”

  —Time Out

  “Laymon is unique. A phenomenon. A genius of the grisly and the grotesque.”

  —Joe Citro, The Blood Review

  “Laymon doesn’t pull any punches. Everything he writes keeps you on the edge of your seat.”

  —Painted Rock Reviews

  HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED…

  by Kelly Laymon

  …my original version of The Woods Are Dark can never be pieced back together after the massive rewrite required by my Warner Books editor…

  —Richard Laymon

  Well, the book you’re holding in your hands is that original version. Before I talk about how exactly I did it, let me recap the history of this book.

  My father often referred to The Woods Are Dark as the book that ruined his career. The funny explanation was that Warner Books changed the proposed cover artwork and added the most fabulously hideous green foil stamping to the design. The more complicated, ugly, and painful explanation, while equally true, was that Warner required a ton of rewrites and then performed their own hack surgery to boot.

  The good people at Warner Books didn’t like what was submitted and had several suggestions as to how to improve it. They wanted the Lander Dills chapters gone and other plotlines expanded. Though the original draft was praised by friends Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner, who blurbed that original my father went along with the revisions.

  was young and scared and I caved in. Man did I cave! Pathetic. All I really cared about at the time, was getting those people at Warner Books to accept the novel. I had almost no self-confidence at all.

  —Richard Laymon

  He was pleased enough with his new version. He was sad to see large chunks of the novel go, but getting Warner to play along was all that mattered. Then he received the proofs and saw that “some illiterate excuse for a line editor really revised it.” That was when it became every writer’s nightmare.

  Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer made sense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequences were distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammatical errors. I can’t begin to describe how badly the novel had been decimated. I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.

  —Richard Laymon

  He corrected every single mistake and returned the pages. He was then notified that fixing the mistakes would cost Warner a fortune and it was a no-go. The train wreck was published that way and it didn’t do well. He always said it probably didn’t do poorly because of those rewrites. The cover was enough to keep people from even opening the book in the first place. The tiny ray of sunshine was that the mistakes were cleaned up for later British editions. And published with much better cover artwork.

  This tale is my father’s explanation as to why, for almost twenty years, he was successful in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US outside anthologies and the small press. His track record of sales was shot and that history will follow an author for years.

  That’s pretty much the end of that story.

  Until now.

  The version you’re about to read was the one that was first submitted to Warner Books and blurbed by Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner. (And, to keep that righting of wrongs going, those blurbs can be found on this very edition!)

  Those of you who have read the Warner edition will notice that the two books are very different after, say, chapter eight or so.

  How did I do it? Especially since my father said it couldn’t be done?

  I’m not sure. It was all there. But the pieces weren’t in the same place.

  There were boxes of thirty-year-old manuscripts and I had played with the various drafts many times over the last six or seven years. I always believed it could be done. I sure had false starts though. I had to get to know each draft of the manuscript. Not by the content of the pages, but by the pages themselves. I evaluated them based on page numbering styles and other forms of continuity. I didn’t want to read any draft until I had settled on what I believed was the true manuscript.

  And, of course, all the drafts of The Woods Are Dark were complete and in order except for what turned out to be the true version, which was split up in three different places.

  I ended up with two piles of pages. One was the original Lander Dills chapters. (Those were once collected in a small-press chapbook.) The other was the original manuscript, which was missing a lot of pages. Those gaps perfectly matched the deleted Lander Dills pages. The chapters and page numbers all lined up. It was like shuffling two halves of a deck of cards. It all came together. I declared it done, read it, and began typing the book for this Leisure release. As I suspected, it held up. No gaps in story, continuity, or logic

  I had one little problem though. I couldn’t find pages 264 or 265. I had the whole novel and the final page, but the third- and second-to-last pages were missing.

  Was this just a case of faulty page numbering? Everything came together perfectly. Maybe those two pages were meant to be blank? However, it was obvious that those pages had to contain the conclusion of the Lander Dills tale. It was the only unresolved issue. I checked the chapbook of deleted The Woods Are Dark scenes. No dice. There was no conclusion to that plotline in there either.

  Were they lost forever? Is that why my father said it could never be done?

  I sat down with the boxes of manuscripts one last time. I had no idea what I was going to do if I came up with nothing. And I really didn’t care to think about having to burn that bridge. Then, at the bottom of the box containing the handwritten draft I found a typewritten page. It was page 264 and it said “Epilogue” at the top. The first line had Lander singing a carefree little song. The page behind it was 265 and wrapped up Lander’s story.

  I was so relieved that I laughed and then cried a little. It was done. A wrong had been left to sit for just under thirty years. It was written before I was born and submitted less than six months after my birth. I was just a baby when the whole thing blew up, but heard the story told many times during his life.

  I certainly hope this wasn’t a giant exercise in failure. I hope the longtime fans enjoy this original version as much as (or more than!) the one they’ve previously been exposed to. And I hope that the newer fans enjoy this so much that they’re never curious enough to seek out the Warner edition on eBay. Bu
t if I failed miserably at this, if it was never meant to be done, that sure would be the next logical step in the saga of this book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Neala O’Hare slowed her MG as the narrow road curved. The evening sun was no longer behind her. Shadows of the high trees threw their dark capes across the road, hiding it. She pulled off her sunglasses.

  Sherri, beside her, suddenly gasped.

  Neala saw it, too. She hit the brakes.

  Her friend thrust a hand against the windshield as the car jerked to a stop.

  In front of them, the legless thing dragged itself over the road with powerful, hairy arms.

  “What the fuck is it?” Sherri muttered.

  Neala shook her head.

  Then it faced them.

  Nealas hands clenched the steering wheel. Stunned, she tried to figure out what she was seeing. It hardly looked like the face of a man.

  The thing turned. It started to drag itself toward the car.

  “Get out of here!” Sherri cried. “Quick! Back up!”

  “What is it?” Neala asked.

  “Let’s go!”

  Neala backed up, but slowly, just enough to keep away from the approaching creature. She couldn’t take her eyes off its bloated face.

  “Run it over!” Sherri snapped.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. It’s a man. I think it’s a man.”

  “Who cares? For Godsake, run it over and let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  It sat up, balancing on its torso, freeing its arms. It leered at Neala.

  “Oh God,” Sherri muttered.

  It fumbled at an opening in its furry vest. A pocket? It pulled out a severed human hand, kissed its palm, and tossed it. The hand flipped toward Neala. She ducked her head, felt it in her hair, and knocked it aside. It fell into the gap between the bucket seats.

  The legless thing scuttled off the road and disappeared into the forest.

  Neala looked down at the hand, at its crooked fingers, its coral-painted nails, the white band of skin where a wedding ring used to be. Lunging sideways, she threw herself over her door and vomited onto the pavement. When she was done, she turned to her friend.

  “We’ve gotta get rid of it,” Sherri said.

  “I…”

  Snarling as if enraged, Sherri clutched the hand by its fingers and flung it from the car. “God!” She rubbed her hand furiously on her shorts.

  Neala sped away.

  As she drove, her mind repeated the incident again and again. She needed to make sense of it, but no matter how she concentrated, it wouldn’t fall into a pattern she could accept. The scene belonged in a nightmare, not on a peaceful road on the way to Yosemite.

  She was glad to see a town ahead—not much of a town, to be sure. Up in these areas, though, they never were.

  “Maybe they’ve got a police department,” she said.

  “You’re not planning to stop!”

  “We ought to tell someone.”

  “Tell Father Higgins, for Godsake. Save it for confession. Jesus, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “We can’t just forget about it.”

  “Forget about it? Every time I shut my eyes, I’m going to be looking into that repulsive, gloating…” Sherri jerked her head sharply as if to shake the picture apart. “God, I’m never gonna forget about it. But we don’t have to go around making a big deal of it, okay? Let’s just keep it to ourselves. It’s water over the dam, you know?”

  They had already left half the town behind. Ahead of them, Neala saw a bait shop, Terk’s Diner, and the Sunshine Motor Inn.

  “Why don’t we stop at the diner?” Neala suggested.

  “Why don’t we not?”

  “Come on. It’s almost seven. We could both use some supper.”

  “You mean you can eat after that?”

  “I can try. I’d sure like to get out of the car and relax, at least. Try to think it out. Talk it over. Besides, there’s no telling when we’ll hit another restaurant.”

  “You call this a restaurant?”

  “Hey, this is your kind of joint. Probably filthy with greasy spoons and ’characters’.”

  Sherri managed a smile. “Okay. But let’s keep the freak to ourselves.”

  Neala turned onto the gravel parking area, and shut down the engine. They latched the roof into place, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. Before starting across the gravel, Neala stretched. She was stiff from the long day in the car. Standing on tiptoe, shoulders straining back, she felt the luxury of her tensing muscles. The movement pulled her shirt taut across her chest. She liked its feel against her nipples, and thought how long it had been since she’d felt the eager touch of a man’s fingers or tongue on her breasts.

  Maybe up in Yosemite, she’d get lucky.

  Meet a rugged mountain man.

  One for Sherri, too. I’m not selfish

  “I feel almost human again,” she said, meeting Sherri behind the car.

  They crossed the gravel lot to the entrance of the diner. Sherri pulled open the screen door, and they entered.

  Neala liked the warmth. The familiar aromas made her long for a cheeseburger and french fries. “Counter?” she asked, seeing a pair of empty stools at the end. The other half a dozen were occupied.

  “Let’s take a table,” Sherri said, surprising her.

  Sherri usually preferred the counter, where she struck up conversations with nearby strangers.

  Not tonight, apparently.

  They slid into a booth on the side, facing each other. Sherri’s eyes briefly met Nealas, then lowered.

  “Buck up, pardner,” Neala said.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Don’t be this way. Please.”

  “Oh, how should I be?”

  “Be the gutsy champ we all know and admire.”

  That didn’t even get a smile from Sherri.

  Neala needed that smile. She’d never felt so frightened, so alone. This was a hell of a time for Sherri to go silent and glum.

  “Would it help if I apologize?” Neala asked.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It was my idea to go backpacking.”

  “The freak wasn’t your idea.”

  “That’s for damn sure. But if we’d stayed home…”

  “It’s all right. Forget it.”

  The waitress came. “Sorry to keep you folks waiting,” she said. She set water glasses on the table, and handed out menus.

  When she left, they studied the menus. Usually, they would talk over the offerings, maybe decide to split an order of fries or onion rings, discuss whether to “blow it” and have milk shakes. Tonight, they were silent.

  The waitress returned. “Ready to order?”

  Neala nodded. “I’ll have one of your Terkburger Specials and iced tea.” She watched the gaunt, unsmiling woman write it down.

  Can’t anybody smile tonight? she wondered.

  This gal ought to be happy as a lark, with a ring like that on her pinky.

  “A patty melt,” Sherri said. “Fries, and a Pepsi.”

  The woman nodded and walked away.

  Sherri watched her, frowning.

  “Did you get a load of her ring?” Neala asked, hoping to break the somber mood.

  “How could I miss it? The thing nearly blinded me.”

  “Do you suppose it was glass?”

  “Looked real enough to me. I’m no expert, of course. Besides, I left my jeweler’s loupe at home.”

  Neala laughed, and saw the hint of a smile on Sherri’s face. “It looked like a wedding ring,” she said.

  “Wrong finger. Wrong hand, too. She probably outgrew it.”

  “Her? She was nothing but bones.”

  “Maybe it’s a friendship ring,” Sherri suggested. “I could use a friend like that. Money coming out his wazoo. If I were that girl, I’d blow this burg in about two seconds. Grab hold of the guy, and light out for the big city.”

  When the waitress brough
t their supper, they both watched her hand.

  “What do you think?” Neala asked when she was gone.

  “I think it’s real.”

  Neala bit into her Terkburger: a thick patty on a seed bun. Juice spilled down her chin. She backhanded it off, and reached for a napkin. “Delicious” she said.

  “Same here,” said Sherri. Strings of limp onion dangled from the sides of her sandwich.

  “Onion breath.”

  “You planning to kiss me?” Sherri asked.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Gee, and I had my heart set on it.”

  “You’re sure going to stink up the tent. Maybe we’d better sleep under the stars.”

  “What if it rains?” Sherri asked through a mouthful that muffled her words.

  “Then we get wet.”

  “I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Better wet than onion gas in the tent.”

  “Yeah?” Sherri pulled off the top slab of rye bread, pinched a matted glob of onions, and dropped it onto Neala’s plate. “You have some, too. Insurance.”

  Laughing, Neala piled the onions onto her Terkburger and ate.

  Soon, their plates were empty. Neala thought about returning to the car. She didn’t want to.

  “How about dessert?” Sherri asked, as if she were in no hurry to leave, either.

  “Good idea.”

  This was no time to worry about calories. Neala never worried much about them, regardless; she had no trouble keeping her trim figure. Still, gloppy desserts made her feel guilty. Tonight, it would be worth the guilt to postpone returning to the car.

  They both ordered hot fudge sundaes. They ate slowly, picking at the mounds of ice cream, the thick warm syrup, the whipped cream sprinkled with chopped nuts.