The Forest Read online

  “I…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t want to believe it’s real.”

  She looked at him searchingly. “The tent. Sammy’s toy. Sam’s backpack. Even Tina Louise’s hair.”

  Alex knew she was talking about the coloration they all shared. She was also talking about what she – they – might have seen among sentinel trees.

  He pocketed the card, as though to turn away from the entire subject. But even as he did, Alex noted that he hadn’t tossed the card in the small recess in the dash made to hold pennies or trash or things of little value. He hadn’t put it in the compartment under the armrests of the center console. He hadn’t just discarded it.

  He had put it in his pocket.

  He wanted to keep it close.

  And he was, he knew, going to get out of the car and follow what memories he could.

  Before Alex really processed that, he pulled his own door handle. He opened the door. He slid out of the car and closed the door behind him. He heard the sound of Trish’s door opening and closing.

  Trish began walking toward the thing they had both seen. The flash of color in a mist-silvered night.

  Ten steps off the shoulder and trees began to obscure the road from view. He could still see the car, but only in slices between the lone guards at the edges of the forest’s domain.

  A few more steps and the car was just a hint of color if he squinted and moved from left to right and back again.

  The fog was pouring around them. The trees loomed, and bled silver mist.

  The car was gone.

  Alex reached for Trish’s hand and clung to it.

  “This is where it happened,” she whispered.

  At first he thought she was saying, this is where I saw the red.

  Then Alex saw something that brought back a thousand moments from the lost day. The memories were still faraway, hinted at more than seen, but they were real – and clamoring to be let out of the dark recesses of his mind to which he had confined them.

  This was where they entered the forest when they came the first time. The very place where they had come to find and then lose a friend.

  “It’s where we came looking for Sam,” he said. At the same time, Trish murmured, “It’s where Sammy… where it happened.”

  That was too much. When Trish said that, Alex backed away, shaking his head. “No. It’s not. It can’t be. And you were out when it happened. You couldn’t know and couldn –”

  “I was unconscious, but I came out of it a bit a few times. Just once or twice, for quick seconds. I felt heat, I felt myself get dragged out of the car and I saw a bit of the forest. Not much, but I don’t forget things. I could never forget that place.”

  “You couldn’t see enough to know,” he insisted, his voice growing frantic. This couldn’t be both places. Lightning didn’t strike twice in the same spot like that.

  Only that was a myth. Lightning struck twice in the same spot all the time. In fact, it was inevitable. Given enough time it would happen again and again, and some places had lightning rods that made it strike over and over again by design.

  Trish pointed to the left and slightly behind him.

  Alex turned, and felt like shrieking. He hadn’t seen it before – the trees were so thick they blocked much of his view, even without the further-blinding effect of the fog – but at this angle he did.

  A dead tree stump lay up on the ground. A single branch jabbed out of its side, into the air. It extended about six or eight inches, ending in a sharp point.

  But it wasn’t like that before. It was upright before. It was straight and tall and that branch stuck out and she bled so much and…

  No. It didn’t happen here. It couldn’t have.

  “I remember falling,” whispered Trish. “I remember losing him.” Alex didn’t know whether the “him” was Sam or Sammy, whether it was friend or child. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to go to Neverland, and hoped Oz would never find him.

  Trish muttered something under her breath. Alex wasn’t sure exactly what she said, but he thought it mirrored what he was himself thinking:

  We’re in the forest now.

  What will we find this time?

  19

  Revelation

  (When All Has Become)

  Some of you reading this may be wondering at this point, “Who is this person? Who is telling this story?”

  The answer is simple: I am.

  Of course, that just begs another question: who am I?

  Some days I know. Others, not so much.

  We’re all in the forest, you know. All of us. I certainly am, you may even have been without knowing it. The forest reaches farther than its boundaries. It has long shadows, you see. And in those shadows hide all manner of ghosts, who tell us all manner of lies.

  Because sometimes lies are the shortest path from truth to truth.

  THREE:

  AND INTO THE FOREST WE GO

  20

  (When Tricia Was Young)

  “How long have we been walking?”

  “How long haven’t we?”

  Tricia would have laughed, normally. But “normally” had packed its bags and bid farewell all of ten minutes after she and Alex entered the shade below the trees. So she had no laughter for Alex, no laughter for herself.

  And, most especially, no laughter for the forest.

  “Maybe we should have brought a tent,” said Alex. “We could make camp and have s’mores and tell ghost stories.”

  He was trying to lighten the mood, she knew. But it wasn’t working. She didn’t think anything could have.

  Soon after they passed through the line of trees that demarked the boundary between forest and road, a mist rolled in from nowhere. It seemed like it came from the trees themselves, like they had switched from exhaling oxygen to sighing great clouds.

  Poison.

  She didn’t want to think that way, but she couldn’t help it. The fog certainly seemed to have a noxious quality. She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly, but every time she felt the cool mist on her face or her skin she held her breath for a moment.

  Alex was staring into the sky, as though trying to gauge what time it was by what he saw there.

  She knew what he would see: fog. Silver mist above, and around, and soon it would be through them and would be them.

  “No sun,” Alex murmured.

  Because it’s gone. The fog, the mist, whatever this strange thing is, has eaten it. Sun and moon and stars, like Genesis in reverse.

  Alex looked at her. “Do you think that’s weird?”

  “What isn’t weird in here?”

  Like her, she saw that Alex had no desire to laugh at the pitiful sally. Humor seemed like something they had left behind.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Alex.

  She shook her head and frowned. “What is that?” she said. She took a few steps forward. The mist shifted, and for a moment she could barely see Alex behind her. He whispered something she didn’t hear. “What’d you say?” she asked.

  She turned, and a shape loomed behind her. She almost screamed, but the mist shifted again and she saw it was just a tree…

  Tree…

  Tree…

  Not a tree. I know that. I saw –

  “What?” said Alex, stepping into full view. He shrugged. “I didn’t say anything.” He frowned at her. “You okay?”

  She gave a small laugh at that. “Are you?”

  He didn’t answer, other than to look beyond her. He had a quizzical look on his face: What did you see?

  At least that’s still normal, she thought. At least I still know Alex as well as I know myself.

  That was what she held onto. That was what gave her the strength to point at one of the –

  (Shadows. Ghosts.)

  – trees that kept turning insubstantial in the fog.

  “What is that?” she said.

  Alex stepped ahead of her, looking at the tree she indicated. He frowned
and took another step. She matched it, because she didn’t want to drift away from him. She didn’t want to become a ghost in the mist.

  She looked away, glancing behind them. The trees shuddered and shimmered, now close, now far. The shifting mist imparted an odd sense of movement to the trees, making them disappear, reappear; making them slink from side to side at the edges of her sight.

  “I don’t know what it is. You think Sam did it?”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like his style, does it?"

  One of the trees had a carving – the kind of thing you would expect to be formed into a heart, with two letters and a plus inside. Maybe a crude arrow.

  A + T. That’s what you wish was there. Alex plus Tricia. Alex and Tricia, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

  And if not that… anything would be better than what’s actually there.

  Not a heart, not a crude arrow. The carving was a series of circles that blended into themselves, each one hard to see at the edges. Tricia had the sudden feeling that if she could look at them, smaller and smaller, they would continue on forever, down to microscopic and beyond. It chilled her, and made her think of movies with Satan worshippers, where they drew mysterious symbols and tried to bring about the End of Days.

  Alex whispered, “Not carved.”

  She moved closer to the tree. Her skin crawled as she did so. She forced herself forward, though. Alex had moved closer to the tree, so that meant she could as well. She looked harder at the strange symbol.

  He was right. It wasn’t carved. The edges were too perfect, the curves far too smooth. Nothing had hacked this design into the tree. “Was it burned in?” she asked.

  Alex shrugged, then shook his head, then shrugged again as he reached forward. He meant to touch it, she could tell, and it was all she could do not to grab him and yank him away from the thing, screaming her head off all the while.

  He touched it.

  There was no flash of light, no moment of pain like the dark outlines on the walls around Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have felt. Alex touched the circles. Nothing happened. He ran his fingers along the circles.

  Nothing happened. Just mist and the shadows of trees.

  “It feels like…” Alex exhaled in frustration, searching for what he wanted to say.

  Tricia reached forward as well, touching the lines he had touched. She half expected them to be warm, as though he would have left behind a bit of his heat. Or maybe a bit of hellfire warmed the symbols from within.

  Stop it. There’s no such thing as demons or monsters or ghosts or –

  (Whisperers?)

  She hissed as she touched the symbol. The circles weren’t warm. In fact, they were cold.

  “They feel like ice.”

  Alex nodded. “Weird.”

  “Weird,” she agreed, if only because she couldn’t think of a word that went past “weird.” Alex had showed her a book once, one of the fantasies he liked so much. There had been a word in there that she didn’t like: eldritch.

  That was what this moment felt like. An eldritch thing. She frowned, and leaned in closer to the tree. “It looks like it grew that way.”

  Alex nodded. “That’s it. I couldn’t figure out why the circles felt so weird. But the way they are, you’d expect them to be smooth. Perfectly carved or burned or whatever, but instead –”

  “– they feel rough –” she continued.

  “– like it’s just part of the tree. The bark is there, same as everywhere else. And the carvings are cold.”

  They had finished each other’s thoughts, as happened so often, and Tricia was glad of that. She clung to it. Some things remained constant, and that made her suddenly long to go back to a time before Sam, and live again in a place that was only she and Alex and nothing more.

  “Should we turn back?”

  The words burst from her without thinking, and she immediately felt ashamed. They had come in here terrified for their friend, for what might be happening to Sam even now. And she was thinking of ditching him – for what? Because of some fog and a weird carving in a tree?

  But Alex looked like he was considering it. More than that, like he was glad she had said it. Only macho pride had made him hold out this long, she realized. One of their few differences: the cultural stupidity that he, as a man-in-training, had to be braver than anyone else.

  Bravery, she had realized long ago, was overrated. Fear was a biological reality, and if you felt it there was probably a good reason for that fear. Men couldn’t figure out the reasons, because they were so busy thinking of ways to prove they weren’t afraid that they had time for nothing else.

  Like figuring out where the danger actually was.

  But now that Tricia had said something, Alex’s masculine pride would allow him to consider what lay beneath their fear. The thing hiding in the mist of their hearts.

  Tree…

  Tree…

  Tr –

  Tricia flinched as she saw something move. She peered into the mist. In that moment, she thought she heard something. Thought there was something…

  Whispering.

  She couldn’t make it out. And as she strained, she realized something else was drowning out whatever she heard in the forest. “Shut up,” she hissed.

  Beside her, Alex – who had been saying something, though she had no idea what – fell silent. “What?” he whispered.

  She searched for the movement she had sensed. The flash of –

  (Red.)

  – color she thought she had seen.

  Nothing. Just trees, unmoving; and mist, gray and unending.

  “What were you saying?” she finally said.

  “I was saying we could stay or leave.” Alex swallowed loudly. “Up to you.”

  More macho stupidity. He wanted to leave, but was letting her make the decision – which, if you really thought of it, was a kind of cowardice.

  She hated him. For the first time ever, she felt something other than friendship or affection or anything else that was good or bright. The feeling passed in an instant, but it shook her as much as anything. That was probably why she said what she said. Not what she wanted, which was, “Let’s get out of here,” but what she sensed he didn’t want: “Let’s keep going.”

  She coughed, cleared her throat. She looked away from the terrible flash of anger she saw on Alex’s face. She wondered if he hated her in that moment, as well.

  She pointed at the stream. They had found it easily, a few minutes before the fog came. It was, she knew, the only thing they really needed to guide them to the cabin where Sam was. They could find the cabin, find their friend, and then follow it right back out of the forest. “We follow this, we find Sam, and we leave.”

  He nodded and stepped forward, turning slowly and deliberately away from the tree and the strange design it held. He walked toward the stream, finding the point where the dirt softened and then became mud.

  Alex turned to look at her. She joined him. As she did, his eyes flicked over her shoulder, looking again at the tree. He murmured something.

  “What was that?” she said, lifting her foot high to avoid tripping over one of the serpentine roots that crawled everywhere in this place.

  “Just something Sam said,” responded Alex.

  “What?”

  “Not just a doodle.”

  Tricia froze, her foot still in the air.

  (Sam: “I wasn’t even sure what it was, really. I was only four or five, I think. I already was reading, of course, but wasn’t old enough to figure out a lot of things, just the same.”

  Tricia: “Can you remember what it looked like? Maybe if you –”

  Sam: “I can’t remember it very well at all. I remember thinking it looked odd, and that there was this weird symbol all over it – like she’d been doodling, only it gave me the wigger-jiggers big time. Not just a doodle, it felt, like, ominous somehow.”)

  Out loud, Alex spoke Sam’s next words: the words his friend had ended that conversation
with: “I know I sound loony.”

  He seemed to flicker in her eyes, and for a moment Tricia wasn’t sure if she was talking to Sam or to Alex.

  What’s happening?

  She looked at Alex, and the sense of talking to two people disappeared. It was just Alex; had always been Alex.

  Alex shook his head as though shaking off sleep, then reached out his hand.

  She stepped toward him. She didn’t take his hand, though. Yesterday she would have, and probably would have squealed internally in girlish excitement. But not here.

  “The forest is waiting,” she said.

  Alex jerked, just like she had a moment ago. “What did you say?”

  “I said Sam is waiting.”

  He shook his head, the color draining from his face. “You didn’t, though. You said the forest is waiting.”

  She replayed the memory. He was right. She shrugged and a whistling, strained laugh lurched from her. “Isn’t that funny?” she said.

  Alex looked at her for a long moment. Then he stepped forward. Following the stream that cut through the forest. Toward Sam.

  We hope.

  She followed him for a few steps, then hurried her pace until she had drawn abreast of Alex.

  “Don’t get too close,” he said.

  “Nice,” she snorted.

  “Not to me,” he said, embarrassed. “I meant, the stream. I mean –”

  He reddened, and she thought that was beyond cute. Maybe when he reached out his hand, he wasn’t just trying to help her over the root.

  Maybe it had been more.

  Maybe maybe maybe.

  Tree tree tree.

  “This forest is a confusing place,” she said.

  “Definitely confusing,” Alex agreed, then took a half step back and swept his hand in front of him in a ridiculous parody of a chivalrous bow. “After you, milady.”

  Again, at any other time she would have laughed. Now she shrank back. “No, after you, m’lord.”

  He held out his arm. “Together, then?”

  She curtsied. They were play-acting, trying to pretend this was a normal place where they could joke and clown and be together and be happy.