The Forest Read online

  On impulse, she sidestepped. She was standing directly in Alex’s “lane” now, though still facing away from him. A moment later, she heard similar motion and knew he was doing the same as she had: sidestepping to get into her “lane.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Alex was looking over his.

  “Which way?” she said.

  He pointed at her. “Toward you.”

  She pointed at him, echoing his words. “Toward you.”

  Alex frowned. His finger, extended toward her, now bobbled. “What is it?” Tricia said.

  “I don’t feel anything,” he answered. “No current, it just…” Then he froze. And Tricia knew in that instant what he was feeling, because she was feeling the same thing.

  The current shifted.

  It was pushing against her shins one moment, then against her calves the next.

  “Which way now?” Alex whispered behind her.

  “Away from you,” she answered in the same whisper. “You?”

  “Away from you.”

  She sidestepped again. One foot in each lane.

  On her left side, the current pressed against her shins again.

  On her right, it pressed against her calves.

  Then it switched. Just like that, it pressed against her calves on both sides. Then against her shins. Then one of each current going against her left calf, and pushing equally hard against her right shin.

  The current divided directly below her.

  She heard a strange sound coming from Alex. She had never heard it before, a dry sob that sounded like his soul was being ripped out of him.

  She turned to face him. He did the same.

  The current swirled. Now one direction, now another.

  “It’s impossible,” he whispered.

  She agreed.

  But it seemed, at least here in the forest, that impossible was just like truth in the rest of the world: it existed regardless of whether you believed in it or not.

  As they watched, one of the twigs she had thrown earlier floated into view, running between her legs and heading toward Alex. She remembered it, because unlike most of the dead things she had been tossing in the stream, this one had a single bright green stalk growing out of the side – a small bit of life struggling to be born.

  The stick continued toward Alex. As it did, it drifted ever so slightly, moving left, moving right.

  It passed under Alex’s legs. He turned around, automatically moving to the side so Tricia could watch it with him.

  The twig hypnotized them as it slowly… slowly… slowly moved to the center of the stream. It hung in place, then began slowly spinning on a center axis.

  Tricia realized she couldn’t feel the current on either leg. Then it returned, and before the stick finished a single revolution it shifted twice more. Backward to forward, forward to back.

  The twig stopped spinning. It seemed to tremble, then started to shake as though suffering a grand mal seizure. The shaking grew more pronounced, and then an odd sound came from it. Louder than it should have been, and unmistakeable. It was the shredding, tearing sound of a green stick being twisted beyond its tolerance. The small branch separated, and now one half was on each side of the invisible place in the center of the water, torn apart by an impossible current in an impossible place.

  Alex turned toward Tricia, terror in his eyes. She knew what had driven him to that terror – were they about to be torn apart, too?

  She and Alex moved out of the water as one. They walked slowly, with odd deliberation, heading for the same side of the stream. They walked to each other on the bank and clasped hands. They looked at the silvery water sliding through the silvery mist.

  On impulse, Tricia reached down and grabbed one more handful of leaves. She threw them into the river.

  The leaves clumped together. A moment later, the mass split in two. Half went one way, the other half proceeded in the opposite direction.

  A moment after that, the leaves stopped moving. They were still floating, but statically, no movement at all.

  “Which way do we go?” she asked quietly.

  “Does it matter?” Alex answered in an emotionless monotone.

  “No. Not in this Hell.”

  And it didn’t. They both turned and started walking. Impossible stream on their left, impossible forest on the right, but Tricia knew that, no matter which direction they had chosen to go in that moment, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

  Because no matter which direction they chose to go, they would only end up walking deeper into the dark heart of the forest.

  “We’re going to die in here,” she whispered. Only to herself, so quietly it barely reached her ears. But the forest seemed to sigh around them. The forest had heard.

  And the forest, she thought, agreed.

  24

  (When Alex Was Young)

  “I have… to stop.”

  The words came out between gasps. Alex had been running so far and so hard that he worried the words themselves might push him over the edge. He and Trish had dropped their bags somewhere during the run, but instead of lightening his load it weighed him down. The bag had represented the mundane, banal world of high school – and right now “mundane” and “banal” sounded pretty good.

  He wondered, between thunder-sounds of his heart beating far too fast, if a kid his age could just keel over of a heart attack.

  “Me… too,” panted Trish. She put her hands on her knees, then apparently lost the strength to do even that and instead she half fell into a squat, her arms crossing over her knees and her head resting on her arms.

  Alex wanted to follow suit – how very much he did! – but something inside him was shrieking that one of them had to keep watch.

  Though, to be honest, he didn’t know what he was keeping watch against. Or, for that matter, what he would do if the thing out there in the mist decided to reveal itself.

  He looked around. Searching for the whispers.

  There was only the sound of the stream, which he and Trish had somehow managed to follow even in the midst of their mad flight.

  Follow the stream. Follow it upstream, and get Sam, and get out.

  It wasn’t much, as far as plans went, but it was something. Enough to push the panic back to manageable levels. He no longer felt the urge to run blindly, though he knew that if the whispers came back, he likely would react just the same.

  “What were those things?” asked Trish. She was still panting, but less heavily, and some color had returned to her face.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They had to be something.”

  He knew what she was saying: it had to be something that made sense. Something that science could account for. There was no room in Trish’s life for the irrational. One plus one always equaled two.

  Of course, that meant, numerically, that the infinite existed. Alex had teased her about that once, telling her that if infinity was real, then anything could happen. Infinite time, infinite possibilities.

  Trish did not like that. And at this moment, neither did Alex.

  “Ghosts,” he whispered. He knew it was a mistake as soon as the word left him, but he couldn’t catch it, couldn’t shove it back in his mouth and bite down on it until it died.

  Trish looked up at him, something like rage lighting her cheeks with fever spots. Unlike him, though, she managed to swallow whatever she wanted to say. It would have been something devastating, though, he could tell.

  Not for the first time, Alex realized that he loved her – which meant she had the power to destroy him.

  Alex looked around, as though checking once more for danger, though this time it was more to keep from looking at her.

  “Should we keep on?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” Trish said.

  He shrugged. “We’ve been in here a long time. We ran a long time. We’re probably close.”

  Trish nodded and stood. She closed her eyes as though fighting the urge to vomit
. “Stupid to get so close and not help him.”

  “If he even needs our help,” said Alex. Again, they were words he shouldn’t have said. To his surprise, though, this time Trish didn’t get mad. She looked tired, and sad, but not angry.

  “He needs our help. I can…”

  She didn’t finish. Alex suspected that was because the words she would have had to say were “feel it.”

  He felt it, too. Something was out there. Not just the things that had whispered to them in the fog, but something worse. Something that had put Sam in danger.

  Us, too.

  There was nothing to be done about that. They could either turn back and abandon their friend, or they could continue. There were no half-measures here, not in the forest.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Trish nodded. She took point, drawing slightly ahead of him. It was weird not walking side by side, but he knew why she had done it. The forest pressed close to the stream in this place. She didn’t want to go in there – a decision he heartily supported – but that meant they could either walk abreast with one of them in the stream, or they could string out along the narrow bank.

  It also felt suddenly like a military operation. A scout in the lead, rear guard behind. Stringing themselves out so as to be less clumped; less of an easy target.

  He shivered.

  His heart had settled down a bit since their crazed run, but now it went back into overdrive. The rush-roar of his pulse returned for a moment, deafening in the hushed isolation of a mist-clad forest.

  Trish stopped walking suddenly.

  “Do you hear that?” she said, and Alex realized he wasn’t hearing his pulse alone. Under it there was a strange sound, so out of place in this moment that he couldn’t place it.

  Rapids? Where are there rapids around here?

  He and Trish turned toward the sound. As they did, the sound disappeared. Alex saw no rapids. Just the stream, whispering its way along a rock-strewn bed on its way through the trees. Beyond that, the other half of the forest. Around it all, the mist.

  Whatever had made the sound was gone.

  “Come on,” he said. “I think we should keep going.”

  They started walking again, and this time he took the lead. No sense of chivalry or feeling that Trish needed looking after – she was tough and strong and could handle just as much as he could. But even though she didn’t need looking after, any more than he did, he wanted to look after her. And he did need to follow that desire.

  I’d die for her.

  But I’d rather not do it just yet.

  Maybe I should get her out of here.

  That wouldn’t happen, he knew. Tricia would never have allowed the one friend they made in their lives – other than each other – to face the danger of an unstable parent, or the danger of being in the forest itself. And, Alex knew, neither would he. They were in it together, and both of them would see this through to the end.

  He could see Sam’s face. Even in the one week that had passed since he showed up, he had grown noticeably more drawn. Not any thinner, really, but as though his skin had been stretched a bit tighter over a bit less. He was disappearing in stages, though he refused to address it.

  Alex felt wetness on his feet. He’d been so involved in his thoughts that he had wandered into the stream. He felt the current pushing him back, trying to stop him from finding his friend. He imagined it as a living thing.

  Go back, it whispered. Go back, and never come here again. Go back… or die and fall into me and I will sweep you away and you will be lost forever – not just your life, but the very memory of your existence will be wiped clean by my current.

  It was such a deep, dark thought that he jumped right out of the water and onto land when he felt something touch his arm.

  It was just Trish. “You okay?” she asked.

  His only answer was a sickly laugh. “Sure. Aces. Great.”

  “You were talking,” she said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were,” she insisted. “You were whispering.”

  He felt cold. “I wasn’t. I know I wasn’t.”

  Both of them looked into the fog.

  Nothing. Then a flicker, far away. Another pulse of brightness, closer this time.

  They looked to the other side of the stream.

  A few sticks slipped idly by, twirling in the stream’s unseen eddies.

  And with them came the whispers.

  “Turn around…”

  Alex reached for Trish. Their fingers found each other.

  “Turn around… Turn around… Turn around…”

  The whispers echoed toward them. They started out in what Alex would have guessed was the other side of the stream, but with each repetition they sounded louder, closer. They were in the stream.

  A thick patch of fog wriggled its way out of the mist, floating forward with the echo and obscuring the other side of the stream. It floated forward as a patch of white in the pervasive silver of the air. The fog had been mysterious and frightening before. Now it seemed alive, and full of malice.

  The fog stopped. It roiled in the middle of the stream and as it did Alex saw something dark within it. A hunched form, unclear in the haze but undeniably there where nothing had existed only a moment before.

  Just a trick of the light – or of the dark.

  For a long moment, the shape didn’t move. Then it shifted slightly, and there was no way that Alex could pretend it was a just a thicker patch of fog or a shadow cast by branches overhead. It was a thing, a nightmare that should not be.

  Another shadow came into view. Dual wraiths that slid slowly forward, toward the stream’s edge, where Alex waited with Trish.

  “Die…”

  The whisper was lower than the others had been, but the small sound still pierced Alex’s heart.

  “Die…”

  “Come on,” whispered Trish. Her voice didn’t tremble; she might as well have been waiting for him to go with her to class after lunch ended. But he felt the slickness of her palm, the clamminess of the flesh beneath the sweat.

  She pulled, and he came with her. They moved slowly, backing away carefully because to run, it seemed to Alex, would invite the things in the mist to consume them.

  The trees and the mist closed ahead of them. For the first time, Alex was glad that the forest cloaked so much all around them.

  They continued backing away until Trish stopped with a murmur of pain. He risked a glance back and saw that she had backed into a tree.

  The lowest branch, a thing as thick as Alex’s leg, jutted out of the trunk at just Trish’s height, and from there grasped at the sky along a knobby, knuckly path that made Alex think of arms and legs that had been badly broken and had healed crooked.

  “You okay?” he asked Trish. She was rubbing the back of her head, and when she pulled her hand away he saw darkness on her palm. Blood. He leaped forward, turning her around so he could look at the wound.

  “Ow!” she shouted, albeit in a whisper. “How bad is it?”

  Alex shook his head. “I can’t see. Too dark.”

  “Dark?” she laughed. “Hardly.”

  “What do you mean?” Alex asked. He looked back into the trees, wondering if they should keep moving. But he heard no whispers, saw no dark patches.

  “Haven’t you noticed how light it is?”

  Alex hadn’t. It seemed pretty dark, in fact. There wasn’t even a moon above them. The trees were everywhere, the canopy a continuous ceiling of darkness, and –

  He froze, his fingers still in her hair where he had been feeling for her wound.

  Trish was right, and Alex felt like a fool. The highest branches of the trees covered them completely, and the fog hid any glimpses of stars or sky that might have slashed through the canopy.

  But they had been able to see. Not much, but far more than they should have.

  He looked around. He was a product of modern civilization, which meant everywhere he typically found him
self at night had lights. Main Street, stores, restaurant, his home. Even the gas station was lit brightly on the rare occasion when he and his mother were out and about past sundown.

  But he didn’t notice the lights. They were just there. One time he and Mom had even driven from the store to their place with the headlights off the whole way. Neither noticed until they pulled into the garage and realized they couldn’t see the back of the garage, so were likely about to plow right through into their living room.

  She had laughed. It was a faint, not-very-funny laugh, but even a thin laugh was more than she usually allowed herself. She had said something, as though to excuse the lapse, and Alex said the same words he remembered: “You hardly notice the light until it’s completely gone.”

  Trish nodded. “But it never was gone, so we never noticed. I just barely did a second ago, when I turned around and saw the tree and got mad at myself for not seeing it. In the dark. With no moon, no stars.”

  “Where’s the light coming from then?” he asked.

  She waited. She knew the answer, but wanted him to figure it out for himself. Or just didn’t want to speak the words.

  “The fog,” Alex said

  She nodded. “It’s glowing. Just a little, but…”

  They peered into the woods. They turned around, trying to find the spot where the light was coming from. It had to have a source, didn’t it? Fog didn’t glow.

  Alex remembered reading a story where there had been a glowing fog. The idea had made him laugh at the time, even though the book purported to be scary. He wasn’t as bound to rationality and logic as Trish was, but for some reason that glowing fog seemed utterly ludicrous at the time.

  Not now, though. Not inside such a thing.

  “Where’s the light coming from?” he asked. He hoped Trish would have an answer. Some scientific fact she had paid attention to while he was engaging in his flights of fancy, and which would explain the luminous mist.

  “It’s not coming from anything.” she answered.