The Forest Read online

  The forest had played many tricks on them, but this was the worst. So close to their friend, to the person he and Trish had come to the forest to save.

  The mist that had fallen all around them – that strange, glowing fog that had appeared slowly and silently and gone unnoticed until it was their entire world – surged forward as Sam’s mother sliced at her son’s back, angling her blade to bury it up to the hilt.

  She swung the knife. Mist surged, and swallowed both her and Sam the instant before the knife made contact.

  But even though he didn’t see it, Alex knew she had done it. She had killed her boy. There was a single scream from that part of the fog. A ghost-shriek of pain and terror. Then nothing but the strange, glowing mist that flashed and flashed in faster and faster surges of light-dark-light-dark-light.

  Alex realized suddenly that his friend’s dying scream had momentarily drowned out the other scream that was still going on: Trish. She was in agony, mind, heart, and body.

  Alex had to get her out of this place. Sam was gone, but his mother was not. The insane, murderous woman was waiting in the mist. Maybe even circling around to get behind Alex and Trish – though Alex sincerely doubted she had the presence of mind to do anything so coherent. No. She would come from the front. A straight assault. A rush with the knife still covered in the warm blood of her own son.

  “I have to get you out of here,” he told Trish, his arms starting to pull her up, though he knew it would be agony. “Can you run? She’s out there, she’s coming, I know it, but I don’t know where or what she’ll do.” He felt like he was babbling, losing direction mentally like –

  (Like a stream that goes all the wrong ways.)

  – he was about to lose it. And he couldn’t do that. He had to get Trish out of here. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, lose her. Not to the whisperers, or to the madwoman who had just killed his friend.

  And where is that delightful lady, Alex? You think she might be around, hmmmm?

  The lights –mist-lights, fog-lights, ghost-lights – had stopped as he lifted Trish. Now they flashed again, brightening the already-glowing mist, illuminating the shapes and shadows within the fog.

  Some of the shadows, he knew, were trees.

  Others, he knew, were not.

  He suddenly felt like Sam’s mother was right behind him, about to pounce. She would cut Alex’s throat, then kill Trish. His world would end here.

  He spun around. Nothing. He looked toward the place where he had seen the madwoman; the place where he had lost his friend.

  And the mist parted. For the first time, it allowed Alex to see they were in a spot where the trees of the forest were taller than anywhere else they had been. The trunks continued in unblemished lines for thirty feet or more before the first branches appeared, bony fingers clawing their way out through the bark and into the forest’s gloom.

  The heart of the forest?

  He thought so, just as the mist fled for a moment, and he saw what it had hidden as they ran – perhaps the one thing that had waited for them all this time. Not the shadows, not the whisperers, not even Sam’s mom, but the monster at the center of it all.

  Alex felt sanity falling away, felt madness take its place.

  He screamed.

  Sam was nowhere to be seen. Neither was his mother, and as soon as Alex saw what was in the fog he would have given anything to have nothing worse to worry about than a knife-wielding madwoman and a forest full of ghosts.

  The thinning fog revealed a thing, about as tall as a person, but with far too many legs, too many arms. A head – misshapen and dented – jutted out of one scarred “shoulder.” The thing’s torso twisted strangely, its ribs and spine a fused mass of bones that pressed so hard at its mottled skin that Alex could see their outlines in painful detail. Several of the ribs appeared to be outside the thing’s trunk, gray-white-red arcs, some of them broken into two or three sections, protruding from the thing’s flesh. Parts of the bones shone in the mist, too, reflecting the light with the glint of polished metal.

  Cloth draped the thing in a mockery of clothing – a hodgepodge of fabrics and weaves that looked like the final work of a deranged garment maker.

  The creature keened an almost woeful scream. Two of its hands reached forward, and the receding part of Alex’s mind still capable of rational thought realized that the hands each had part of a face embedded in their palms: an eye on one, spinning wildly about as though trying to take in the whole world at once; a partial jaw in the other, complete with teeth and a tongue that lolled forward out of the strange hole that went right through the creature’s hand to reveal what was behind.

  Alex screamed again, and realized that he had clapped his hand over Trish’s eyes at some point. He had to spare Trish this sight. If she ever saw what he was seeing, she would lose herself to the madness that now swept Alex along on a current of darkness. It was too much to bear, and he could not let her share this sight.

  He couldn’t save her. They were going to die, he knew that now.

  But Trish could at least die without knowing the true face of the nightmare. He could give her that, at least.

  The mouth on the thing’s hand was moving – it was the source of the sound, it was screaming from its hand – but then an even greater horror came. The thing stopped screaming, and a whispering, reedy voice started issuing from both its “mouths.” The word-sounds were garbled to the point of incomprehensibility, but Alex knew they were words. Or at least, as close to words as a thing of pure madness could hope to make.

  Alex was still screaming. Trish was still screaming, one hand trying to grab her shoulder where the stick still protruded, the other scratching at Alex’s hand and arm, trying to get him to uncover her eyes.

  The thing kept making sounds from its hand-face. Then the other face – mottled, with tufts of hair sprouting not just from the top of its head, but from its cheeks and even one of the three eyeballs set in its forehead – opened its mouth and screamed as well. Two wails from one creature. A chorus that should never have been, and which rose louder and louder, until…

  … they cut off, as though they never existed in the first place.

  The mist surged again, swallowing the thing in its depths at the same moment that Trish yanked Alex’s hand away from her face.

  Alex kept screaming for a while. What had he seen? Not a nightmare, but a nightmare of a nightmare. The thing that made terror itself sit up in fright.

  Eventually, Alex’s screams waned. He looked around. The mist was still there, but the shadows were nowhere to be seen. The wraith-things that had dogged his and Trish’s steps had disappeared, as fully and completely as the thing had just done.

  “Help me,” said Trish.

  The smallness of her voice jerked him back to the moment, and back to something resembling sanity. He looked at the girl he had loved as long as he could remember, and saw that her face was as pale and translucent as the glowing mist that still enveloped them. He looked at her shoulder. The blood that had soaked her shirt appeared to have slowed from a gush to a trickle. But she still wasn’t out of the woods, figuratively or literally. He pulled her to her feet. She groaned, but didn’t scream.

  She had always been the strongest of them.

  “We have to get out of here,” said Alex.

  She actually chuckled, though the sound turned into a groan before it was fully formed. “Really?” she said. She turned her head, looking at the spot where Sam, his mother, and –

  (The thing what was it don’t think about it it wasn’t real how could a thing like that be REAL?)

  – the monster in the mist had been.

  “Where’s Sam?” she asked.

  Alex could tell from her tone she already knew the worst had happened. Though to her, the “worst” was Sam’s death and disappearance, not the real worst. The thing Alex had seen had to be the zenith of evil, the nadir of hope.

  If it even happened.

  Did it happen? Or was this all just a dr
eam?

  Is any of this real? Am I the lunatic?

  “I don’t know where Sam is,” Alex managed. Then he added the word that had to come next, the only word that fit in this insane place. “Gone.”

  Trish looked like she was going to say something. Probably protest that Sam couldn’t be gone; that he was still out there. “We have to find him,” she would say. “We have to save him.”

  But she said neither. Alex hoped she hadn’t seen what he saw – not just the monster, but the moment the fog took Sam and his mother away just as the point of her knife was finding his back – but he could tell that she felt the same thing he suddenly felt himself.

  Something was different. Something had ended, perhaps. Maybe the forest would finally let them escape.

  He hoped so.

  “How are we going to find our way out of here?” he asked. He was mostly speaking to himself, but Trish answered.

  “Pick a direction.”

  He nodded. She was right: one way was as good as any other in this place. He remembered a passage from Alice in Wonderland:

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  Alex remembered it perfectly. He remembered most things perfectly, but Alice in Wonderland was, along with Peter Pan, one of his two favorite books.

  He wondered if he would ever read it again. Even if he made it out of here, could he ever willingly visit fiction that had him traipsing through madness as though it were a thing to be enjoyed?

  (We’re all mad here.)

  He shoved the thought away and forced himself to take a step, then another, Trish’s good arm over his shoulder. They walked a few paces.

  He looked at her. “Okay?” he said. She nodded. He gave her a quick smile, then stepped forward again. Only this time Trish didn’t come with him. She pulled him back, and toward her, and he had an instant of confusion, then an instant of delight before she touched her lips to his.

  It lasted forever. It lasted no time at all.

  It was the worst time, the worst place for this to happen.

  But it was also the best time and place for this moment. It was an island of sanity in the madness, a shelter of pleasure against the pain.

  They parted. She smiled. “I’m okay,” she said, and for a moment, before he realized she was just answering his previous question, he worried he had hurt her somehow.

  He turned back to face the forest and took another step forward as a grin spread across his face.

  Maybe we’ll get out of th –

  A root reached up and grabbed him. The forest was doing it again. It extended hope, then stole it away at the worst moment, because even a thing as pure as hope could be twisted to corruption by this place.

  Trish moved as he fell, and Alex realized that she was actually trying to hold him up. But all she did was get herself pinned below him. Her eyes widened as his weight tore the wound in her shoulder. She screamed and finally, mercifully, passed out.

  Alex rolled off her as fast as he could. Had he just killed her? Killing her would be the same as killing himself. He couldn’t live without her.

  And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.

  He sat up too fast. Dizziness gripped him and he pitched to the side, barely stopping himself before falling on Trish again. His hands flattened against the thick, rich dirt on each side of Trish’s head, and his breath came in shallow gasps against her face.

  The whispering started again. The whisperers still lived in the mist, and still spoke to those who dared the forest.

  The wraith-lights came again, too. The soft glow of the mist grew bright and then snuffed out in rapid successions that turned the world into a storm of darks and lights.

  Alex looked around, panic welling up as he realized they were right back among the tall trees where Trish had been wounded and the monster appeared. He saw the smooth trunks, the finger-branches clawing out of them.

  He thought they had left the monster, but that wasn’t true. The monster was the forest.

  And the forest wasn’t ready to let them go.

  “Alex?”

  He turned. He didn’t want to, but he had to. The voice was Sam’s.

  Only Sam’s dead. Stabbed to death by his mother, his body stolen by the mist.

  Dead.

  But the forest was lying then, or lying now, because the mist parted, and Sam was still there, still alive, standing right where he had been in the moment the blade had come down.

  “How?” Alex managed.

  Sam smiled. In that moment, bloody and torn and weary from heaven-only-knew how many years of terror, he was beautiful.

  He reached toward Alex. “I think I –”

  A twig snapped. Sam froze.

  The mist flashed and swirled. It enveloped Sam again. A twisting eddy twirled it apart long enough for Alex to see his friend one last time.

  Two hands reached out of the mist. Alex could not have said whether they belonged to a man or a woman, only that they came from the mist, from a place where nothing had been only a moment before. One hand lay on each of Sam’s shoulders.

  Alex did something he would have thought utterly impossible only minutes ago: he forgot about Trish. He stood and ran toward his friend so quickly and fluidly it was almost a single motion, shrieking, “Sam! Watch ou –”

  The hands tightened on Sam’s shoulders. Sam’s mouth curled in something strangely akin to a smile.

  The hands yanked him into the mist.

  Alex ran after Sam and whoever had done this.

  His mother. Has to be.

  But it wasn’t. The mists curled and flashed, but not enough to completely hide what had pulled Sam away. Alex saw a face that didn’t belong to anyone he had ever seen, staring quietly. Waiting.

  Man? Woman? He couldn’t tell. It all happened too fast. The eyes turned toward Alex and said nine words. The mist swirled and…

  Sam was gone.

  The face and hands that had taken him away were gone.

  The whispers with their shadow-wraiths were gone.

  Alex screamed. Not about what had just happened, but about everything: the kidnapping, the arcane symbols they had seen, the madhouse in the forest, the man in the tree, Sam’s death… and then Sam’s second death and disappearance as the mist consumed him once more.

  Everything went dark. He heard the words that had been spoken, and they were the last and only thing in his world for a long time. Just nine words that made no sense in this destructive place, and which bore him to oblivion.

  4

  (When Alex Had Grown)

  “But you don’t remember those words?”

  Alex blinked. “What?”

  Dr. Coleman sighed, shuffled some papers as though referring to his notes – though he was doing no such thing, Alex could tell – and said, “You heard words in the forest, the day you went looking for your friend?”

  Alex blanched, just as he had when speaking a moment ago. “I… yes.”

  (I heard words yes I did a hundred years ago or was it only twenty I don’t know I can’t tell I remember the face the faces covered in blood and worse, so much worse –)

  “I think so.” Alex sighed. “I don’t know. Everything’s… muddled. I dream of it sometimes, but it’s like everything’s in a fog. I can only see hints of it, and only hear these whispers that make no sense. But in the dreams I know if I can understand it, then I can have him back.”

  The psychiatrist cocked an eyebrow. “You can have Sam back? Or Sammy?”

  Beside him, Alex felt his wife move. He glanced at her. She was shifting her wedding ring, turning it around and around on her finger. An eternal circle, the same thing over and over again. It was a great symbol for marriage, if that marriage was working. But
if it wasn’t… well, eternity could be quite the horrible prospect.

  Trish shrugged, almost hunching over. She scratched at the shoulder where a star-shaped scar marred her skin. She wore turtlenecks, rain or shine, day in and day out, to keep anyone from seeing the scar there, or the matching one on her back. As though she had gotten it doing something shameful.

  He didn’t remember how she’d gotten the wound – neither of them did, which was part of the problem between them – but he knew she hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of. In spite of the trouble they’d been having in their marriage, Alex knew –

  (Temporal lobe to tips of toes, brain to balls, right?)

  – that his wife was a good person. However she got the scar, it was not something that demanded guilt or embarrassment.

  Trish stiffened, obviously aware he was looking at her. Not long past, his attention had made her happy. In that past she would have looked back, and winked, and maybe they would have cut out of work a bit early so they could go home and make love or play a game or even just sit and talk while holding hands.

  Now, she shied away from him.

  Alex looked back at Dr. Coleman. Dr. Scott Ray Coleman’s office was a uniform beige, with a few muted tones here and there to remind visitors they weren’t actually dead, just very calm. At least, Alex surmised that was the intent. In reality the color scheme just muffled everything. Everything seemed a bit out of focus, like he was looking at the world through a smudged window.

  Coleman himself was just as beige as his office, and seemed just as smudged and far away.

  Even his voice sounded distant. “Whatever happened out there, that day, we know that you lost someone important to you. No one begrudges you forgetting some no doubt painful details.” He smiled, somehow managing to convey perfectly that he did in fact fault Alex for missing those details.

  Within the first ten minutes of meeting the shrink – ten minutes which cost, by Alex’s calculation, seventy five bucks – Alex had come to the conclusion that he kind of hated the man. But Trish seemed to talk more here, so he kept coming back. The marriage was on the rocks, but Alex had no intention of letting it sink. He would do whatever it took. Anything. Even skipping work or dealing with someone who was the human equivalent of tapwater.