The Forest Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1 Revelation (When All Has Become)

  2 When Tricia Was Young

  3 (When Alex Was Young)

  4 (When Alex Had Grown)

  5 Interlude (When Sammy Was Young)

  6 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  7 Revelation (When All Has Become)

  8 (When Tricia Was Young)

  9 (When Alex Had Grown)

  10 (When Alex Was Young)

  11 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  12 (When Alex Had Grown)

  13 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  14 Interlude (When Sammy Was Young)

  15 (When Alex Was Young)

  16 (When Tricia Was Young)

  17 (When Alex Was Young)

  18 (When Alex Had Grown)

  19 Revelation (When All Has Become)

  20 (When Tricia Was Young)

  21 (When Alex Had Grown)

  22 (When Alex Had Grown)

  23 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  24 (When Alex Was Young)

  25 Interlude (When Sammy Was Young)

  26 (When Tricia Was Young)

  27 (When Alex Was Young)

  28 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  29 (When Alex Had Grown)

  30 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  31 (When Tricia Was Young)

  32 (When Alex Was Young)

  33 (When Alex Had Grown)

  34 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  35 Revelation (When All Has Become)

  36 (When Tricia Was Young)

  37 (When Alex Had Grown)

  38 (When Tricia Had Grown)

  39 Interlude (When Sammy Was Young)

  40 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  41 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  42 Revelation (When All Has Become)

  43 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  44 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  45 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  46 (When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)

  47 (And Once Become, Become Undone)

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Forest

  By

  Michaelbrent Collings

  Written Insomnia Press

  WrittenInsomnia.com

  “Stories That Keep You Up All Night”

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  DEDICATION

  To...

  Chad Henkel, who is a good friend and always knows it’s me on the phone because I tell him it is,

  And Robert Mortenson, who keeps buying my stuff even though I tell him he doesn’t have to,

  And to Laura, FTAAE.

  “The dead don’t stay dead in the forest.

  Remember that.”

  1

  Revelation

  (When All Has Become)

  It is said by “those who know” that telepathy does not exist. That it belongs in the same category as spoon-bending on old late night television shows, faith healers, and real romance in Las Vegas chapels.

  Of course, a great many things once thought by the knowledgeable to be impossible have always existed, and are being discovered anew every day.

  Failure to see a thing isn’t proof of the absence of that thing.

  Regardless, what is certain is that the two young people – barely more than children, really, though both mature and much brighter than their years should have permitted – were thinking the same thoughts as they ran through a place full of ghosts and fog and blood and pain: “I can’t die here. Not today. Not here, in this forest.”

  But of course, that was because they couldn’t see their own deaths. So they didn’t believe, on some level, that their deaths were real, or even a possibility.

  The forest through which they ran, however, had seen many deaths, and would see many more.

  That is fact.

  That is the forest.

  ONE:

  GHOSTS

  2

  When Tricia Was Young

  The branches of the forest jutted upward through the mist, and Tricia wondered – fleetingly, flittingly – if they looked like fingers from above. Like hands jabbing wildly through the surface of some green ocean: the last sign of someone drowning, dying… then nothing at all. Just darkness.

  Or, worse, the silvery light of the mist.

  Tricia was drowning right now. So was Alex. Drowning in terror, in fear. Drowning in whatever strangeness had exploded around them soon after they came looking for Sam.

  Tricia looked around, realizing suddenly that the person they had come here for was nowhere to be seen.

  But he was here. Just a minute ago. Where did Sam –

  (You know where he went.)

  She pushed away that thought; that reality. “Where’s Sam?” she shouted.

  “I don’t know!” shouted Alex behind her, gasping for breath as he ran. “I don’t –”

  The rest of his answer was lost in his labored breathing. Just like they were both lost in the forest, and would likely remain lost for the rest of their lives.

  However… long… that is…

  Even in her mind, she was gasping. Even in her mind, Tricia was almost out of strength.

  How long could someone run before she had a heart attack and died? she thought.

  She didn’t know. So many things she didn’t know. Like where Sam had disappeared to. Like where the ghosts had come from, or…

  The man in the tree.

  None of it made sense. At least she knew there was someone actually following them – not the whispering ghosts, but a real person. Even that was no comfort, because there is no comfort in knowing you’re being chased by a maniac.

  Tricia dared a look over her shoulder. The forest was silent, save Alex’s panting. She suspected he could have kept up with her, pace for pace. They were so alike in so many ways it would have been no surprise. But there was no room to run side by side here. He had fallen back, that much closer to the person –

  (And the things.)

  – that followed them.

  Tricia only glanced back for a moment – she had no desire to be one of those idiot “heroines” in a horror movie, who stumbled over a root at just the right time to get massacred. But a moment was enough – enough to see. Even through the mist that had swallowed her and Alex along with most of the forest, she could still see and hear the shadows all around them.

  One shadow belonged to a madwoman, real and terrible. The others were unknowns. Wraiths in the mist. Unreal, impossible – but undeniable, just the same, and far more terrible for that.

  She and Alex stopped running – just for a moment. Alex bent over, air heaving in and out of him.

  “We have to find him,” Tricia said. “We have to find Sam.”

  Alex didn’t answer, but she saw him grit his teeth and dig deep for the strength to run more and run faster.

  Tricia turned around as she caught something out of the corner of her eye – almost fell, how stupid stupid stupid – and saw…

  “Sam!” She spun again. Looking for Alex, to make sure he had seen, too. She found Alex in the mist –

  (So thick I can barely see him even this close, and besides that he seems farther somehow. The forest again, always playing games with the what and when and where of it all.)

  – and then shouted, “Alex, I see him!”

  Alex nodded curtly, even as Tricia turned toward the boy they had come to find.

 
Sam was their age, about the same height as Alex and Tricia. But he was thinner, and the bright red backpack he wore seemed somehow to make him even smaller. To diminish him in a way that Tricia wouldn’t have thought possible.

  Though what of any of this was possible?

  Sam stood still. Maybe twenty feet away, barely visible through the fog all around. Tricia ran as hard as she could, trying to ignore the fact that she didn’t know if it was day or night, or how long they had been in this place. The forest, it seemed, was a place out of time. Eternal, and unforgiving.

  “Sam!” she shrieked. The mist boiled around them.

  Sam’s face twisted in relief. “You came for me,” he said, his voice breaking as tears threatened.

  Almost at the same time, Tricia heard the whispers.

  “Sam, run!” Alex shouted behind her.

  Tricia glanced at Alex: her best friend for so long she couldn’t remember a time without him. So long that “we” came easier to both their lips than “I.”

  She found Alex in the mist. He wasn’t looking at her or Sam. He was looking beyond Sam. And at the same time, the mist flashed, as it had so many times to signal that things were about to get even worse.

  Something is coming.

  Tricia looked forward again, expecting to see Sam close ahead. She had been running forever, and surely she must have reached him by now.

  But he seemed not closer, but farther away. The forest had played another trick and bent time and space and existence itself to keep Tricia and Alex from saving their friend.

  She saw something in the mist behind Sam.

  It’s her. It’s his mother!

  The whispers around them grew, even as the shapes and shadows that surrounded them darkened. The wraiths – the whisperers – closed in. The whispers became sibilant hisses, then murmured sounds not-quite-heard. Then words. Snatches.

  “… get out of this place…”

  “… hear anything…”

  “… see anything…”

  “… just fog…”

  “… turn around…”

  “… this rotting place…”

  Sam was shouting, “Where’s my mom? WHERE’S MY MOTHER?”

  From anyone else in this situation, the scream would be one of pleading. Asking the heavens to send the one person required to save a child. But Tricia knew Sam meant exactly the opposite. The whispers and shadows were bad, but in a photo finish for absolute worst was Sam’s mother. She had brought her son here to kill him, and now wanted Tricia and Alex dead as well. The woman ran at Sam from behind, the knife she held flashing brightly in the strange glow of the mist.

  “Where is she?” Sam shouted. Still far away, and seeming to draw farther from Tricia with every step she took. “Where isaaaaugh!”

  His scream turned to a wordless shriek as he looked over his shoulder and saw his mother. Saw what Tricia did: that he was far closer to the madwoman than to either of his friends, his “rescuers.”

  Some rescuers we turned out to be.

  “Don’t!” Sam shrieked, holding up his hands as though to ward off the knife, and at the same time Tricia heard the same word burst out of her own throat, and from Alex’s as well.

  In answer, Sam’s mother bared her teeth and slashed the air. She slashed again, then screamed as she ran toward her son, “Just die. Just die and let everything never begin again.”

  The glowing mist pulsed, and pulsed, and became a continuously flashing thing, the lights that had appeared at random through this nightmare now continuously surging on-off-on-off-on-off with the regularity of a metronome.

  Or a heart. A breath. The mist is alive, the forest is alive.

  The light pulsed, and each brightness felt like a cut against Tricia’s mind. She winced away from the lights and from whatever madness had caused them.

  “You have to die!” Sam’s mother shrieked, and Tricia realized the woman wasn’t just shouting, she was sobbing. Whatever had shattered her mind, some grief lay at the base of it.

  Tricia fell.

  Just like the idiots in the movies, like the ones she was so determined not to be. But could anything else have happened, here in a place so strewn with roots, and where the trees themselves seemed to be her enemies?

  She fell, and screamed, then screamed louder when she felt pain shoot a white-hot bolt through her shoulder.

  “Trish!” Alex shouted behind her. He had spoken – or screamed – only in shades of terror for the last few hours. Even so, his voice took on a newer, more deeply felt fear. She knew it was for her, and loved him a bit more for that even as she saw why her shoulder hurt and shrieked yet again.

  She had fallen against some stick that nature had prepared for this moment.

  Not nature. The forest.

  The branch was only an inch in diameter. It should have snapped in pieces when she fell against it, instead of impaling her through the shoulder. But in this place where nothing was right…

  She gasped, then screamed again, as Alex called her name, then called out Sam’s, then shouted for her again.

  And then a final scream raked the air, so jagged with terror it momentarily overpowered even the pain in Tricia’s shoulder.

  She looked up. Looked over.

  Saw Sam.

  Sam’s mother stood only inches away from her son. Sam wasn’t running; wasn’t even moving. Horror and anguish had rooted him to the spot where he would be captured, cut, killed.

  “It can’t start!” his mother shouted, and slashed down again.

  Sam finally broke free of his terror. He dodged to the side, and even as his mother jumped to cut him off he was running the other way. He spun as he twisted away from her, a jittery dance move that somehow took him just outside the range of her knife swing.

  He dodged around her and ran toward his friends. “Alex! Tricia!” he shrieked, reaching for them.

  Tricia couldn’t answer, and couldn’t reach back. The agony in her shoulder flared into being, along with the dismal thought that the branch that had thrust through her body was still attached to a tree.

  She was pinned like a bug. Couldn’t escape. Couldn’t even try. Even if Sam and Alex got away, she was as good as dead when Sam’s mother caught her. That woman wanted to kill her son more than anything, that was sure. But Tricia knew that she would settle for eviscerating Tricia and/or Alex as a consolation prize.

  Alex had reached her, and apparently did the same math Tricia did – that she would die for sure if she stayed here – because he said, “Hold on,” and Tricia had barely enough time to wonder what she was supposed to hold onto before Alex put his strong arms around her and yanked.

  Tricia screamed as he pulled her free. Alex screamed, too, like he could feel the same pain she did. Maybe that was true – he had his own wounds. But she knew even in the depths of her agony as Alex pulled-yanked-twisted her away from the branch that he was feeling only for her in that moment.

  That was what love was, wasn’t it? Feeling another person’s pain as your own, even when you were in pain yourself?

  The branch pulled free from her flesh. It made a sucking sound that she thought must be a punctured lung, and she knew there was no way she could get away from the maniac woman in the mist… or from whatever else was there.

  The whispers surged, as though in response to her thought.

  “… Alex…”

  “… get out of here…”

  “… Tricia…”

  “… get out…”

  “… Sam…”

  “… in this Hell…”

  “… people don’t stay dead…”

  The whispers coalesced and grew. The forms in the mist grew closer… and that was when she heard Alex, his arms still around her, go insane.

  3

  (When Alex Was Young)

  Can’t lose her. I love her.

  The thoughts were a clock ticking in Alex’s mind, though whether to some far-future moment or to an impending, terrible end he couldn’t say.
/>   Only the forest knew. Only the forest would decide.

  He and Trish had come here to find their first real friend. Because the two of them had always been so close, “outside” friends had been hard to come by. Neither of them eschewed the company of others, but even if he and Trish hadn’t been smarter than everyone else at the high school, including the teachers, it would have been hard for any third party to break into the network of inside jokes and shared experiences that bonded him and Trish so tightly.

  Sam, though – he was different. For the first time Alex could remember, he and Trish clicked with someone not themselves. And so the three of them spent every waking moment together – at school, at least, when Trish and Alex weren’t in the periodic lockdowns imposed by their parents, and Sam wasn’t with his own mother.

  Then Sam disappeared. Alex and Trish went to find him, and found so many other things first. Terrible things, things Alex didn’t want to think about – and couldn’t think about, actually. Not now, with a branch shoved right through Trish’s shoulder; not now, with Sam running full-tilt through the forest toward Alex and Trish, his insane mother shrieking and spitting as she tore after him.

  Sam oozed blood from a million cuts where a million branches had whipped across his skin during the nightmare run the three of them had shared. Behind him, his mother was closing in, ready to open fresher and wider wounds that would not merely dot him with blood, but bathe him in it. Sam’s eyes got wider as he ran, and Alex knew that his friend could feel how close his mother was.

  Trish went silent. Just for an instant. Alex felt her warm blood washing over his hands and arms, and for a moment wondered if she had died – if he had killed her by pulling her away from the branch. Maybe severed an artery or something.

  Then she screamed. Alex felt relief – she was alive.

  Horror returned as he realized that Trish wasn’t screaming in pain. She was looking at Sam. Alex followed her gaze and saw Sam’s mother swing her knife at her son. There was no way Sam could make it to safety. Only a few feet away from his friends, but too far for all that.