'Into The Woods?'

“The last time I saw him he was wearing a blue hoodie and he had a pack slung across his back.”  

The inquisitor stared long and hard at me with a glare that said he didn’t believe I word I was saying. “So, lets take it from the top. What was he carrying?”  

“I told you before, I don’t remember him carrying anything. Jim just walked past me heading down the corridor.” Sitting in the ridged chair that looked like an ergonomic computer desk chair, but felt more like a medieval torture seat, I argued, “Look, he seemed jumpy, I mean, he just walked past me heading down the corridor.  I think he was alone when he went out through the hatch.”

“You think? You don’t know? Did you see him leave or not?” 

“I told you all I know.”  

That’s when the door burst open. The footfalls echoing through the corridor got louder and louder until the door was flung open and the messenger came in. She leaned in toward the two inquisitors. She didn’t wear the traditional uniform. Her cap was dipped strategically below one eye as she studied me sitting in the corner of the room. They glanced back at me in-between their whispers.  

The room felt colder. It could have been because we were thirty feet below the surface. It could have been because the door opened suddenly to create a draft. But I knew it was because of the woman. Her icy stare actually brought the room’s temperature down.  

“Five others are missing,” she said. Her voice was harsh and graveled. With her arms crossed she screeched, “six of your classmates are gone! Missing!” She stood in front of me, ”And you know nothing!” Her words were like acid. The accusatory words burned right though me. She saw me either as a poor protector of my old classmates or as a total fool for not knowing what was going on.  

“I thought I was just minding my own business,” I mumbled to myself as I sat there alone surrounded by these three people.  I shook my head. It was all too confusing. 

She announced, “No one goes outside!”  With a smug smile that resembled a lion about to devour it’s prey she leaned in on me and shrieked, “Not you and certainly not your friends. So where are they?”

Her breath was as sour as her teeth were yellow.  

“I don’t know where they are.” I was tired. We had been talking about this for hours. I just wanted to go back to my room.   

The woods, thirty feet above, were a different world. Monstrous pine trees covered the landscape. Gray fog swirled around the trees and eventually drifted through them before descending down the ridges and into the valleys. Through the woods the fog moved like a snake winding itself around the trunks and limbs. Even without a breeze the tree limbs twitched and jerked as if being tortured by the fog. 

One autumn day the fog had drifted ashore.  The breeze was gentle. The ocean calm. Standing on the shoreline there wasn’t even a whitecap visible when the open water began to shimmer with a green glow. Then the fog drifted ashore, smothering the beach, before hovering around the pine forest. The stench of death drifted in with the fog.  The trees squirmed as the fog moved among them. There in the woods the fog grew in intensity.  

The woods became the breeding ground for the fog which began to suffocate the birds hiding among the trees. By the dozens the birds began to drop from the branches like dead, dried up autumn leaves, onto the rocky soil. Auks, black-and-white sea birds with small wings that propel them under water to catch fish, began to drift dead on the crest of the waves. Sandpipers and terns fell lifeless as the fog rolled ashore past the breakers and over them. Seagulls and pelicans flying away trying to escape the fog, began to fall from the sky. Small animals were strangled and suffocated in the fog.  

The fog took up residence in the woods on the edge of town.  To escape the fog, the residents of the small town huddled behind locked doors in their homes. That first night was long and dark and desolate as the fog drifted around their community, covering it like a heavy woolen blanket.  By morning the woods on the edge of town saw the gray fog snaking its way among the trees.  It moved around the trunks then it worked its way to the top of the branches where it hovered before descending again to the ground.  The residents who ventured out during the evening to investigate the fog were found dead on the sidewalk, or on their porches, or on the street.  

The fog kept the residents prisoner in their own homes. To venture out towards the woods meant death. The fog, strengthened by the woods, drifted to the town by night and seeped into the homes through the tinniest cracks.  By the second night the people moved into their basements. From their basements, narrow tunnels began to connect one house to the next. Within a few weeks, most of the town was living below ground away from the woods and fog.   

Released from her interrogation I was free to leave. It didn’t take me long to walk to my room. The metal corridors, which resembled the large pipes used at power plants, were noisy and gray and dark.  Florescent lights suspended from the ceiling cast a jaundiced glow on the people passing through. In my room I grabbed a book without paying attention to the title just to have the comfort of an old friend in my hand as I sat on the bed. Here in isolation, the books have always been a source of comfort and even hope.  Propped against the head board, I rubbed the cover and slipped opened Katie Kitamura’s book, Gone to the Forest.   “Gone to the forest,” I murmured over and over again.  Her novel is set on a farm in some far off colonial country that is on the brink of a revolution. Her book seems to call for change and for people to make a decision. 

Reading in between the white spaces and the black words, I wondered, “Is it better to live in this controlled environment with artificial lights and or slip away to a new world?  Gone to the forest - go to the woods, stay in here?”   

Looking around my room I suddenly realized it all seemed so familiar. Standing up I stretched my arms out from my side.  And from the center of the room I could touch each wall. The room, my room was the same size as a prison cell.  I have been living in a prison. Safe from death on the surface, maybe.  But living? Had fear trapped me in my cell keeping me prisoner only to exist but not to live.  

As I sank down once again onto my bed I wished I had gone with Jim. I wished it had been seven instead of six that went into the woods.