The Forest Read online

  “… die here…”

  “The whisperers,” murmured Trish, and it was only then that Alex realized she had stopped walking, too. A minute part of him had held out a hope that he was only imagining the words; that they were the echo of his own thoughts and not an actual, audible experience.

  But Trish had heard it, too. The whisperers had found them again.

  “… diiiiieeeeee heeeeeeeeeeeeere…”

  Alex forced himself to turn toward the sound. He didn’t shift the orientation of his body – he didn’t want to lose his way again; no way was he going to allow Trish to climb a tree to figure out where they were going. Not after what happened before.

  So he kept his body fixed on the way Trish had indicated they go. Only his head turned. Looking for the shadowed things that dogged them.

  What are they?

  He saw something. Not the whisperers – not yet, at least – but something on one of the trees. A shape, carved into the wood at about eye level. Interlocking circles that wove into themselves – the same shape they had seen on another tree. And just as before, the cuts – or burns, or whatever had made the shapes – looked perfectly smooth, though he had no doubt they would be rough as the last one had been. The smooth look of finely crafted woodworking, with the feel and texture of unblemished bark.

  The circles pulled him. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to go closer to the tree and its symbol. He shook with the effort of keeping his body oriented on the cabin somewhere ahead, and on Sam.

  Trish groaned and he knew she felt it, too. A singularity had opened in their minds, the gravity pulling, pulling, pulling them into the dark hole at its center.

  The symbol seemed to grow, to take over more and more of the tree trunk. Then, impossibly, it changed. Like an old movie, poorly cut together and flickering as mis-matched images superimposed, one instant the symbol showed against the tree as a rough old scar, barely visible through overgrown bark. The next, it was lighter, with dark liquid streaming from the edges of the symbol, dripping slowly down the bark of the tree.

  The tree was bleeding, and Alex – who loved fantasy and sci-fi but didn’t really believe it and knew the difference between real and make-believe as well as anyone – saw in it an omen. He saw the image of his own face in his mind, blood streaming from a dozen wounds and still more of his life pumping from ears, nose, and even eyes. He saw Trish, her own fate the same as his.

  Flicker: dark, smooth-looking circles in the wood.

  Flash: bright slashes, dark fluid leaking like blood in the glowing mist. The images of himself and Trish dead and dying in the forest.

  Flicker: smooth circles.

  Flash: gleaming gashes.

  He felt like something snapped in his brain. A psychic break, and then the circles were gone. The trunk of the tree was suddenly unblemished.

  “Are you seeing this?” asked Trish. From her tone, Alex knew she wasn’t sure which answer would be worse.

  “Yeah, I’m seeing –”

  He froze. The tree had snapped back to itself, the vision dissipating from Alex’s sight – or mind, or whatever had just caused him to see what he had seen. But that wasn’t all that had changed.

  “The whisperers,” murmured Trish.

  The shapes, as always, stood in the mist. Close enough to be seen as to general shape, general size, but too far for any details. Just dark, hunched things.

  The mist flashed, and the things started to move. Slowly at first, then a bit quicker, and then closing in fast. Alex was quick, but could tell at a glance he wasn’t nearly as fast as the shadows were.

  Worse than that, though, for the first time something accompanied the wraiths. The shadows had never brought sound with them, other than their words. They slid silently through the mist, as though they were part of the fog.

  Now, as Alex faced ahead and, with Trish, began to run, he heard cracks, crashes.

  For the first time, the shadows were more than ghosts. They were real, and present. They were crashing through brush, snapping twigs and branches. They could touch and be touched – if only in this strange place where things that shouldn’t exist came into being.

  The crashes grew louder, closer. Now they weren’t just behind, but above. Branches splintered above his head. Something was falling, but he didn’t look. What if it was another man, falling from nowhere, plummeting to his death as the tree branches punched holes in his chest and arms and face and popped his eyes right out of their sockets?

  Alex was screaming now. Or maybe it was Trish. Either way, the shadows took up a similar wail, as though to mock their prey by imitation.

  Then the cries shifted. Changed. Became one – a single, shrieking tone that was so different from the whispers that Alex’s run faltered. His steps stuttered, then he nearly tripped and fell as he turned his head to see.

  Nearly in step with him, there was Trish. She had all but stopped as well. He caught her gaze for a split-second. Then they both turned their heads further – he noted that she, too, was still being careful to maintain her orientation toward the cabin – and saw the fog plume and twist. The shapes that had followed them this far twisted in on themselves. For a moment he only saw one of them, then the fog split apart. Alex saw a flash of bright metal.

  A knife.

  The blade shone brightly in the fog’s inner light, but it was a dark and fearsome brightness, subsumed by the red fluid that dripped off the blade.

  The knife cut through the fog, held by Sam’s mother. She looked even crazier than she had that morning. Her eyes darted in wide circles, the panicked, fevered glances of a creature cornered by a predator. She looked right, left, right, terror on her features.

  When her gaze lit upon Alex and Trish, those features hardened. The fear disappeared from her eyes. No, worse. The fear was still there, but a terrible determination overlaid it. She was acting in a strange, purposeful state of panic that Alex had no experience with, no real understanding of.

  He knew only that he and Trish were in worse danger than ever. Even before she screamed, “You! You caused it! It’s your fault! Your fault!” She sobbed, and choked out, “I thought we’d be safe. I thought we got here early enough, but it all changed. Everything changed again!” Then, without missing a beat, she aimed the blade straight at Trish and ran toward her.

  Trish turned. Nearly fell. Alex caught her, yanked her upright, and they ran.

  He was still trying to keep in a line, trying to maintain a heading that would bring them both to the cabin.

  Just survive. Just get away from the crazy –

  A bough exploded from the fog ahead of them, a tree that they had not seen in the roiling depths. Alex ducked, and pulled Trish downward a few inches, even as she tried to do the same for him. She missed the branch – barely – but Alex’s thoughts dissolved for a moment as his forehead found the limb. Stars appeared in the fog, bright flashes in the stranger illumination of the mist.

  Alex reeled. Trish pulled him. He would have fallen but for her. She had saved him. She pulled him forward, and he thought for a moment he was screaming. Then he realized it wasn’t him, it wasn’t Trish. It was… it was…

  What?

  His thoughts rattled about his skull, ricocheting through his brain, bumping into themselves and cutting apart all pretense at understanding. The screaming, whining wail all around him dissolved into a series of jagged cries that cut his ears, cut his mind.

  Not me. Not me. It’s… it’s her. It’s Sam’s mom.

  Trish was still pulling, yanking him along as she ran. Behind them, Sam’s mother wailed and shrieked wordlessly. Occasionally she would scream, “YOU!” Every time she did, the word unreeled at the final sound, the word turning to a wolf-wail in this moonless place where the entire world consisted only of tree, fog, shadow.

  Alex looked back. She was close. So close that when she slashed the knife at him and Trish, it missed them by only inches. They both put on speed, and began zigging and zagging between trees. Alex tho
ught for sure they must be turned around again. They would never find the cabin; would never find Sam.

  If he’s even alive. If she hasn’t killed him already.

  There could be no doubt that that was the woman’s endgame, either. She had gone insane – completely, utterly, simply. Her gaze, when Alex risked another look, contained only rage and fear in a mix that had overcome the woman’s soul.

  She slashed again. This time the blade bit into his back. The cut was shallow, no deeper-feeling than some of the cuts already opened by branches and brush during one of this night’s –

  (Day’s? What time is it? What day, what month, what year is it? We’ve been here forever.)

  – mad rushes from terror to terror. But the cut bled more than his other scratches, and he felt warmth trickling down, gluing his shirt to his back. He cried out, and Trish screamed at the same time. Not hurt herself, he saw. She was crying for him, for his pain. The knife had cut him, but it had hurt them both.

  Trish slid sideways, skittering like water dancing on a hot iron. She pulled him with her, and the move probably saved his life, if not both of their lives. The knife Sam’s mother held slashed through the air where their necks had been a fraction of a second before. The madwoman growled – an animal sound. No comprehension, no understanding. Only need. Need to run, to flee, to fight, to kill.

  Alex risked one more look back. Sam’s mother actually looked worse than she had that morning. She looked like she had been dragged through the forest by a team of wild horses. She was filthy, her clothing torn, her hair a jumble of snarls and knots, her body streaked with dirt and sweat.

  Oddly, that made Alex feel a bit better, even as he pushed himself to run harder. If she’d been out in the forest, running around and howling at the moon or whatever she did when she went full-crazy, that meant she probably hadn’t had time to kill Sam. Maybe he was fine – other than the fact that he sprang from such an obviously cursed genetic line.

  The fog thickened around them once more. Alex’s hairs stood on end as he heard Sam’s mother shriek, and also heard the whisperers. No words, just hurried tones that echoed his own fear. Turned it back on itself and made it hideous.

  They had to slow down. They couldn’t afford to, but they could afford a fall even less. A fall would bring them into range of the knife that he sensed still slashing and flashing behind him.

  “Alex,” Trish panted. A word of warning – she felt it, too. Something was changing.

  “I… know…”

  He couldn’t say any more. He had to run, he had to push himself through the pain in his legs, the stitch in his side, and the terror that made every motion seem far too slow. Trish was doing the same, too. They had to slow for the fog, and still more from exhaustion.

  The only consolation was the heavy breathing and sharp shouts that arced into the air as Sam’s mother tripped over roots and brush. She never fell completely, though. Alex could tell from the sounds she made – and from the fact that, though he could hear her crashing into things, her screams were always so close, too close.

  Another tree loomed. Another low-hanging bough that Trish ducked under and which almost caught him in the head just like the last one had. He jerked back at the last second. He almost fell, but turned the fall into a semi-controlled slide that brought him sideways and down, barely avoiding the tree and its sweeping limb.

  He ran again. Listening, hoping.

  What he hoped for happened. He heard Sam’s mother’s scream cut off suddenly, jerked to a halt by the same branch Alex almost hit.

  He risked another look over his shoulder. There she was: on the ground, moaning in pain, blood sluicing in a thick sheet down her head from the gash the tree branch had inflicted.

  The fog billowed. It swallowed her, and as it did her cries rose in pitch and in volume. They moved from a mix of madness and fear to tones of pure panic. “No, no, noooooooo!” she screeched, and the last word dissolved to a siren-whine of terror and pain.

  It cut off as the fog flashed around them, a quick brightness that was like the mist had opened its eyes for just a moment, seen what was happening, and then fallen asleep once more.

  The silence was now broken only by the crash of his and Trish’s steps. Dead brush snapped, dry leaves crackled and spit.

  He looked back. There was nothing but fog. A few upright shadows – the trees big enough to be seen through the mist. But even they looked insubstantial. They waved and bent in the gloaming, as unreal and untouchable as the fog itself.

  There was no other shadow. He could still see the tree with its branch that had tried to trip them up. Sam’s mother should have been visible, if only as a dark shape huddled on the ground.

  Nothing.

  Just brush. Just the dead things that made up the forest floor. The crushed, crackling things that had made their home under the trees.

  Baby bones, tiny and fragile. The bones of the forest, and we’re breaking them.

  How will the forest respond?

  It was only in that moment that he realized that the forest had transformed in his mind. It was no longer a simple collection of trees and mud and dirt and growing things. It was a single entity, a hostile force that drove him and Trish to the center of itself.

  The cabin. That’s where it will eat us.

  Where it has led us.

  And with that, as though he had been hearing not his own thoughts but those of the dark entity within this place, Alex saw it. The forest thinned, and a moment later he and Trish stood at the edge of a clearing.

  And in the center of that clearing: the cabin.

  28

  (When Tricia Had Grown)

  Tricia remembered going to the store once, and seeing a child shrieking, “I want my mommy!” as a chagrined looking middle-aged man dragged the kid through the frozen food section. She remembered thinking, “Why bother wanting that, kid? Mommy is probably no better than daddy.”

  She was smart enough to know that a lot of the sentiment was bitterness. She barely had a father, so what was she going to create in her head as the ideal of a “good” mother? Certainly not Alex’s mom – she had been every bit as bad as Tricia’s own parent.

  But now, walking through the forest as an adult, she understood what the child had said. Because there was a part of her that wanted to scream it. Even as a grown woman, she was hard-pressed not to stamp her foot and shout, “I want my mommy!” in the hope that someone would appear and rescue her from this place.

  She hadn’t remembered that moment until coming here. The forest was bringing the past to life. The memories had started to return, though they were mostly quick glimpses, instants as blurry and half-hidden as trees in the fog.

  She kept remembering a word: whisperers. It sounded in her mind, echoed and repeated. Sometimes it distorted, sometimes she heard it turn into a wordless scream that was somehow both familiar and alien.

  Beside her, Alex slowed. Stopped. “Do you hear that?” he said.

  She stopped walking as well. All she heard was the stream beside them, sliding along in its impossible currents. This way, that way, no way at all. Then she heard what Alex was talking about – or thought she did. She cocked her head, turning slightly in an instinctive motion to bring the sound closer, make it clearer.

  “There!” Alex shouted.

  Tricia craned her neck. Stupid, she knew – the change in her stance was unlikely to change what she heard. Only… it did change. Here in this place where the rules did not apply, that minute shift made the sound leap into the top tiers of her consciousness.

  “Is that… laughing?”

  Alex nodded. “Yeah.” His voice was strained, and she understood why, because she was feeling the same thing. The laughter brought no joy, no mirth. First of all, it was the wrong kind. Instead of a joyous sound it was hollow. It was the laugh of someone readying to do something terrifying.

  Worse, though, was the way it came to them, wafting through the mist on a current that made it seem too far awa
y. Not just distant, but impossibly distant.

  The fog, she suddenly thought, is all that keeps that sound alive.

  “We should keep going, keep walking,” Tricia said.

  “Yeah, we should. But where?”

  They still walked beside the stream, but that only meant at best a fifty-fifty proposition. They could be headed closer to the road where –

  (We lost Sammy.)

  – they could find help. Some passing motorist willing to assist them. Though on second thought, she couldn’t ever remember seeing other cars on the small highway between Sunrise and Sundown. So maybe they wouldn’t find help even if they made it out.

  But the other possibility was that they were headed deeper into the forest. She could tell from Alex’s glum manner that he thought that the most likely scenario. She didn’t want to, but there were the sticks. Floating back and forth, then stopping completely as the current of the stream shifted.

  We’re just sticks in the stream.

  The laughter came again. Distant, hollow, but invasive nonetheless. She was breathing the fog that kept the sound alive, so did that mean the sound could go inside her?

  Alex had moved ahead slightly as she lost herself in the gloomy thoughts. Now he slowed. Halted.

  “Something’s out there,” he said.

  The laughter came again. Floating through the fog. Breathing it in.

  “Something’s there,” Alex said again.

  The laughter trailed off. Not like the sound was losing steam, entering that spot all laughs do where the body is tired of laughing and quiets. This was the trailing tail of an echo. The laugh might still be continuing somewhere, but the echo of it faded and disappeared, the sound no longer reaching Tricia or Alex.

  They waited a moment. A crackling came from nearby. They both swiveled toward it, putting the river at their backs, waiting expectantly as the sound was repeated.