Page 22 of The Woman in the Hollow
This wasn’t one of my employees.
This wasn’t some silly, harmless workplace prank.
Someone else was in the woods long after the crowds had left, after my coworkers had gone home for the night.
And he didn’t seem to be breathing.
“Hey,” I called, trying not to focus on his clothes. Maybe he was just dressed for the occasion with stage blood spread across his white tee.
I mean, that was weird. But not outside the realm of possibilities.
As were the knife cuts in his shirt.
“Hey, you have to get going… the tours are over.” My breath was caught somewhere under my ribcage as I took the last step. “Are you okay?” I asked.
There was no sound, no movement.
“Hey,” I called, voice choked as I stuck out a leg and gently poked his hip. “Hey, are you o—” I poked him again, harder this time.
His body wobbled, then fell face-forward into the ground.
“Shit,” I hissed, reaching down to grab his belt loop and pull him onto his back.
Only to wish I hadn’t done so.
His dirty face was staring up at me, open-eyed, slack-jawed, face caught in pain and terror for eternity.
Because he was dead.
And that ‘stage blood’ all over him? Those fake stab marks through his shirt? That was all real.
Because there were more wounds to his front. And one hideous gash across his throat.
A gasp caught in my own throat as I staggered back. My pulse stumbled, then started up again, my heartbeat tripping over itself.
Stabbed.
Someone had been stabbed in the woods just a couple dozen yards away from the path where a hundred people or more passed by, completely unaware. The crime was covered up by creepy sounds on speakers and genuine screams from people who paid to be terrified.
Crime.
The word became a chorus in my mind as I whipped around, sure the perpetrator might be right behind me, ready to ratchet up the body count.
My hand tightened around the handle of the shovel, the wood biting into my palms as I turned around and around until I wasdizzy, my gaze scanning the tree line, looking for eyes, for the puff of breath, some sign that I wasn’t alone.
Belatedly, I reached up, flicking off my headlamp, not wanting to draw attention to myself if there was someone nearby.
If nothing else, I had the home-field advantage. No one knew the paths and woods better than I did at this point.
I couldn’t say how long I stood there, just pulse and panic, a strangling sensation closing around my throat, squeezing the air from my lungs.
At some point, though, my legs carried me back over toward the body, some part of me wanting to deny it, to look again and see that I was mistaken, that it was just a super-realistic horror decoration.
I wanted more than anything to be overreacting, to have been tricked by clever artistry and my own eyes.
The body was still lying there, staring unseeing up at the half-bare tree limbs above.
This time, the only light on him was cast down from a mostly full moon, casting him in more eerie shadows. It should have made him seem more fake, more plastic, less believable.
