The Forest Read online

  He screamed again. Louder. Longer. A wail of anguish and pain so great that it tore her own heart in two. She wanted to call out, to ask what was happening. But what if it wasn’t one of the whisperers? Maybe it was Sam’s crazy mother. Wouldn’t it be better to stay quiet; maybe take her (or it) by surprise?

  She clambered, climbed, fell… and finally realized what it was that had passed by her like a dark rocket or a meteor falling to earth.

  It wasn’t a shadow, wasn’t a whisperer, wasn’t a thing. But she wished in that instant that it was such a mystery. The horror in the shadows couldn’t be worse than the person who was pinned in the tree, skewered by a half dozen branches, one of them jutting right through the corpse’s head.

  Then she heard Alex sobbing. It jarred her enough to get her moving again. He was still alive. He needed help. Needed her.

  She dropped past the corpse, doing her best not to look in its direction. That was almost as bad as looking at it. Even in the short time it took her to climb below it, she felt like it was moving, reaching for her. She imagined it yanking itself off the branches, a perfect circle missing from its head, blood and brain dripping into the tunnel that remained –

  She dropped the last few feet. Just to the right of Alex, who was kneeling, almost bent double, on the forest floor. He was crying, sobbing in a way she had never heard before. Jagged, agonized wails that sounded like each one came up violently, painfully.

  She ran to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Alex.”

  He screamed in terror, throwing himself to the side and landing hard on his bottom, his arms and legs already yanking him along the forest floor, crabwalking away from her. She took a step toward him, her hand still reaching out. “Alex?” she said again.

  He stopped his mad dash away. He froze and stared, the look of someone who has seen a wish come suddenly true.

  Tricia blinked, and sometime in the nothing-time of her eyes closing then opening again, Alex was upon her. Not just hugging her, not embracing, but engulfing her in himself. In the midst of fear and confusion, he was holding Tricia so completely, so without reservation – to an extent and with a closeness that she would never have dared even dream of feeling.

  “You’re alive,” he whispered in her ear. She felt tears wash over her cheek, and wasn’t sure if they were his or hers. “You’re alive.”

  “You, too,” she said. “I was so afraid that you’d –”

  She couldn’t bear even to finish the thought. She could only hold him, alone in the forest, awash in silvered mist.

  Neither said more. They held each other for a time that felt to Tricia like a delicious eternity, yet ended painfully soon at the same time. Alex drew back. “I thought you were dead,” he said.

  It was only then that she realized that blood streaked his face and clothing; that some of the warmth on her cheek probably wasn’t tears, but the blood that painted his flesh.

  “Who was it?” Alex asked. His eyes darted over her shoulder, angled up. Looking at the corpse.

  It suddenly hit her: what she had seen; what she had had to climb past. The horror of the maimed thing hit her all at once, and she turned to the side and vomited. She felt like she would puke herself into oblivion, and then Alex was there. One hand went to her forehead, holding her up, his hand pleasantly cool against the fevered nausea that squeezed her stomach. The other hand was on her back, rubbing it softly as he whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” over and over even though they both knew it was a lie.

  When she had managed to spew her guts out all over the ground – hopefully she didn’t get any on Alex – she took a shuddering breath. Waited. She thought of the man in the tree and hiccupped and thought she might vomit again.

  “Easy,” said Alex, his voice soft and calming. “I’ve got you, Trish. I’ve got you.”

  His words and touch gave her the strength to bite back the waves of nausea and stand. “Sorry,” she said. She looked at the sodden mass in front of her. “Super attractive.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “All the cool kids are doing it.”

  She laughed, then thought better of it. “Don’t be funny,” she said. “I’ll start again.”

  “No funny here,” Alex said quietly.

  He was still rubbing her back, still had his hand on her forehead. She straightened a bit more. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded. She jerked a chin at the tree, indicating the dark shape that still hung in the branches, but careful not to look at the thing. “What was that?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Alex. “I figured you would, since you had to be right by whoever it was when they fell or jumped or… or whatever.”

  She shook her head. “He fell from above me.”

  Alex frowned at that. He started to look in the direction of the body, but jerked his gaze back to hers without quite glancing at it. Surprise tugged his eyebrows together. “I thought you had to be near the top by the time it – he – fell. That’s why I was so scared. I thought you fell all the way from the top.”

  “I…” Now she was the one confused. “I was.”

  Alex shook his head and let out a low whistle. “Someone took a dive from a different tree?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. There… there weren’t any trees taller than the one I was climbing. Not for a couple hundred feet, at least.”

  Alex’s confused look deepened. “You must be wrong.”

  Irritation took the place of nausea. “I know what I saw. Something big fell right in front of my nose. It came from somewhere above me, then bounced its way down and I freaked out because I thought it was coming after you. I thought it was one of the things,” she said.

  “The whisperers,” said Alex quietly.

  Tricia started at Alex’s use of the same term she had coined in her mind. Whisperers.

  She took a breath as a fresh wave of nausea washed over her. Alex moved as though to hold her. She waved him off. “I’m okay.” She shook her head, telling herself she would not puke again. Once was embarrassing enough. “But Alex, I know what I saw. The bod –” Her mouth went suddenly dry. She swallowed, trying to work up enough spit to continue, “It fell from above me.”

  Alex shuddered. “That means he was trying to get you. Specifically. We have to –”

  She held his arm. “No. No one was trying to get me – at least not that way.”

  “But they jumped right at you.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.” Alex’s eyes were pleading. Begging her to make sense of what he was hearing.

  She couldn’t. All she could do was take a deep breath and say, “They couldn’t have jumped from another tree. The closest other one is a good thirty or forty feet away. And even if someone could jump that far – they couldn’t jump up that far.”

  It took a moment for Alex to get what she was saying. “That has to be wrong.”

  “I was up there, Alex. There were no taller trees close enough to jump from there to where I was. That was why I went up there in the first place: it was higher than the trees around it, so I could hopefully see where we need to go.”

  That reminded her of what she had seen while in the tree, and she would have told Alex, but he said, “Then what? He jumped from a plane?”

  Tricia looked up automatically, as though she might spot such a plane above them. But she had descended to the forest’s domain again. She saw no sky. Nothing but branches and glowing fog.

  “I don’t know.”

  That was the refrain. Verse and chorus of the strange song that pervaded all in the forest: I don’t know. I don’t know, I. Don’t. KNOW.

  She was sick of it. There had to be answers. Answers fueled life. Made it safe and comfortable – or at least better than it had been. Understanding meant power. Once you understood a virus, you were on the way to a vaccine. Once you understood why a plane crashed, that became the beginning
of the end for that problem. Once she understood the forest, they could escape.

  That was why she began walking toward the tree again: to find an answer, and with it to move closer to the end of this journey.

  “What are you doing?” Alex all but shouted.

  “Seeing,” she said.

  “No!” he shouted behind her. She felt his hand on her arm, pawing at her, pulling at her. “Don’t look, Trish, it’s too –”

  She yanked her arm away. “We have to.”

  He was silent. He followed her.

  Together, they looked up and saw the man in the tree.

  Tricia steeled herself, knowing she would see horror. It surprised her, though, how bad it was. Terrible when she had climbed past the thing, close enough to touch it. But here, looking up, it was somehow worse. The thing that hung above them loomed larger for the distance between them, like some dark god from myth.

  It hung with one arm oustretched, pinned into that position by the branch that had gone through its shoulder. The other hung loosely, but without ease. Its face was still gone. And now, replaying the scene when she dropped out of the tree, she realized that Alex had been holding something when she came upon him. Something soft and round, cupped in his hand as he wept.

  She turned away from the thought. She wanted answers, but were the details really important?

  Just as she thought that, she heard Alex gag and choke back retching. That almost sent her to vomiting again herself, and only the thought of barfing in front of the person she had loved her whole life and now was starting to love in different, deeper ways kept her from losing it again.

  Alex’s hand fell on her shoulder. “He’s got a coat on,” he said hoarsely.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Dark green? Heavy.”

  “Like he expected to be out here.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that cold.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “So why wear a coat?”

  A foolish question, given the circumstances. But a loose string could unravel an entire cloth, so maybe this one could unravel a mystery.

  “There’s something on the pocket,” said Alex.

  She squinted. He was right. Something was on the breast pocket of the coat. But the darkness and fog were too thick for her to make out details. “I can’t see what it’s – what he’s – wearing.”

  “I can’t make it out, either.”

  She spotted another detail: thick-soled shoes on the body’s feet. Like the arms, one leg hung propped at an angle – caught against the lowest bough of the tree before halting on the broken branches that pinned it. The other hung lower, looser. She could have reached out and touched its foot.

  Again, she was reminded of stories of deity. Washing the feet of gods with tears, touching their wounds with hands that ached for evidence of pain.

  Not me.

  She forced herself to focus on the body’s footwear. This wasn’t a god. Gods didn’t wear heavy, dark boots with thick tread. Work boots, or hiking boots. Again, this was someone who expected rough terrain. It was a heckuva lot better than the mud-riddled sneakers she and Alex were wearing.

  That was all she could stand to look at. Alex pointed, but she cut him off. “We have to go,” she said.

  He didn’t question it. Just nodded and asked, “Did you find a way out?”

  She nodded, then shook her head, then shrugged. “Maybe out by through.” At his quizzical expression, she explained, “I saw the cabin.”

  “Sam,” breathed Alex in a tone that mirrored the way she felt herself: relief that they had a bearing. Worry that it reminded them both they could not leave this place. Not without what they came in here for.

  “Sam,” she agreed.

  Panic rippled Alex’s features. “I hugged you,” he said. He spun in place, panic driving him to near-madness. “We turned. We lost our bearings. You have to climb – you can’t climb again. Not again, not after –”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I can figure out the direction we need to go.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We have a marker. We go straight out from the body.”

  Before anyone could say anymore – before she could even think about the grim reality of her last words, Tricia took Alex’s hand and they began walking. She tried not to think of the fact that she was angling away a bit. She had come down a bit to the side of where she went up, angling to avoid the body. She had come up behind Alex, so between the body’s trajectory and Alex’s position she knew they had to go at a near right angle to the body.

  One of the corpse’s arms hung slack. The other jutted out, partially crucified… and making it look like the faceless body was guiding them, pointing the direction they must take.

  She shuddered to think where a bloody, mangled deity would want them to go. And at what they might find when they arrived.

  She forced back the thoughts.

  She walked.

  Alex followed.

  Sam waited.

  The forest watched.

  27

  (When Alex Was Young)

  For Alex, walking through the forest had never been a picnic. Just getting here had been an exercise in patience, as the road stretched out before them. Or maybe time was what stretched, the seconds lengthening so that a walk out of town that should have taken an hour turned into a three-hour ordeal. Then, even before the fog arrived and with it, the whisperers, the going had been rough. He and Trish hadn’t exactly dressed for hiking.

  Then the fog did come. The whisperers arrived.

  (“… heeeere… childrennnnnnnnnnnnnnn…”

  “RUN!”)

  But this was the worst. Walking with the man in the tree at their backs, and though Trish hadn’t said anything, Alex knew she had seen what he did. The corpse had not only marked the beginning of this last path, but actively pointed the way.

  The forest had caught them in life, and now Alex wondered if, should something happen here – something worse; something deadly – it would also claim them in death. The man in the tree had fallen from a nowhere-place – the same place where all that extra time on the road between here and home had sprung from, perhaps. Then the forest reached out its branches, caught the body, and snared it in a place where it would forever molder and decay until finally the tree would grow up around it and swallow it and the man in the tree would become part of the tree. Part of this place where all time and space coexisted with endless night and a journey with no destination.

  Alex remembered a book that Sam had brought. One of his endless supplies of books, this one dealing not with science or technology, but history. Alex had wanted to read through a book on graphene – something Alex knew almost nothing about but which Sam, of course, had a wealth of information on – but Sam told him to look at certain chapters of a history book instead.

  “History is yesterday,” Alex said. “I don’t care about yesterday, I care about today and tomorrow.”

  “If I have seen further than others,” Sam intoned, thrusting the history book into Alex’s hands, “it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

  “I’m not interested in pop psychology, either,” Alex retorted. “I’m interested in math and physics.”

  “I can see that,” Sam responded seriously. Trish began to giggle in the way she did when she knew something Alex didn’t. Apparently Sam recognized the laugh’s meaning, because he winked conspiratorially at her.

  “What am I missing?” Alex demanded.

  “It wasn’t a pop psychologist who said it,” Trish managed, then burst out laughing as she said, “It was Isaac fricking Newton, you dope.”

  Alex pursed his lips, trying to decide how irritated he should be, and about what. Finally, he decided to acknowledge his error and be humble – which, he had found, was always the hardest thing to do at first, but had the quickest resolution. So he bowed low to Sam and said, in his best Samurai voice, “You have science judoed me, sensei.”

  Sam grinned as he bowed back, and said in
similar tones, “When you have understood Greek mythology, Grasshopper, only then will you be ready to leave the monastery and travel the world proclaiming peace, where you will inevitably be pushed into a corner and Kung Fu someone to death weekly on a major network channel.”

  Trish had snorted, said, “Well there was a stunning display of mixed metaphors, terrible misunderstanding of Asian cultures, and accents that bordered on outright racism,” and tried – unsuccessfully – not to laugh.

  “But we nailed network TV, right?” said Sam, and blew her a kiss.

  Alex took the book from Sam, intending to read it for a half hour or so before pestering his friend to give up the graphene text. An hour later, he had forgotten physics as he read about Styx.

  He had always thought Styx was just a river, and was fascinated to learn it was actually a goddess who had sided with Zeus during the Titan war, and upon whose name an oath was sworn to end the battles between Titans and gods. She was endless, her byways known only to Charon, who ferried souls across her to the underworld.

  We’re lost souls, lost in Styx until shown the way by Charon – no ferryman this time, but a man in a tree pointing the way to judgment.

  Certainly the forest seemed as much river as anything. There was a flow to the place, the trees stretching out, the branches touching one another and allowing a constant, unbroken stretch from organism to organism. A stream of greenery bound together by the flow of energy that never ended, but could be crossed just the same.

  So we have a ferryman. So he’s a dead guy in a tree. At least we know where we’re going.

  He tried not to think of the fact that, even when crossed, the trip was always one-way. Charon did not return people to life after their crossing. They stayed in the underworld eternally, and though the world had progressed since then, and myth either replaced or at the very least informed by science, no one had invented a way back from death.

  At least, not that he knew.

  And no matter what, we’re not dead. We’re –

  “– going to die here,”

  The fog flashed, and Alex froze. He didn’t look behind him, afraid he might see their faceless ferryman standing there, one arm pointing eternally to the center of the forest, the other slack and loose because there was no way out, so no way to point.