The Forest Read online

  “We’re not staying there,” said Tricia. The words came out sharper than intended, and Tina Louise shied away as though worried she was going to be hit.

  “We… we were just visiting,” said Alex. “Just planning on driving around for a bit. Just passing through.”

  Tina Louise nodded, “Oh, I know that. But in case you decided to stay –”

  “Then we’d stay in a motel,” Tricia cut in. She did her best not to speak angrily, but wanted to sound firm. She wanted this conversation to end. It was too strange – and not just the oddness of getting a tent from a woman they barely knew. It was the little things. The way she said her brother was new in Sundown. The way she kept saying, “Oh, I know that,” as though she was best friends with Tricia and Alex, or at least a nosy neighbor who watched them through a crack in the curtains around her kitchen window.

  The way Tricia for some reason wanted the tent. Almost needed it.

  Tina Louise shook her head sadly. “No motel in Sundown,” she said. “And the one in Sunrise is closed. Remodeling.” She laughed a bit and said, “Putting in wifi, too, I hear.” Another strange, strangled laugh. “Technology, ain’t it a hoot?”

  “We’re not planning on staying,” said Tricia, one more time, hoping that this time –

  “Oh, I know that,” said Tina Louise. “Still, the tent’s yours.”

  She walked away. Tricia watched her walk away. The old woman’s shoulders slumped a bit as she walked, and by the time she reached the kitchen she looked like she had just finished a marathon.

  She turned around at the last moment, and said, “Just in case.” She shrugged, looking like the movement cost the last of her strength. “You never know.”

  She turned and pushed open the swinging door that led to the kitchen. The door, like kitchen doors in restaurants everywhere, sported double action hinges, so when Tina Louise passed through and then let go, the door followed her into the kitchen, then swung into the dining area, then back into the kitchen.

  The first swing into the kitchen revealed Tina Louise, leaning against a counter, wiping her forehead.

  Then a swing into the diner.

  Then another slice of the kitchen: no Tina Louise this time. She had moved out of view.

  Another swing.

  A final pass into the kitchen, though this time the swing was so small that Tricia just barely glimpsed the man who was looking back at her. Just enough to see the same hair that Tina Louise sported. Her brother. The one who was “new,” whatever that meant.

  Then the door between the two worlds settled into place, making no noise at all, not even a whisper to mark the finality of the split.

  Alex stood abruptly. “Nice of her to comp the meal,” he said in a strange, gray voice.

  “Nice,” agreed Tricia.

  He looked at the red pack on the table. “It reminds me…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.

  Alex grabbed the handles. Lifted the pack. “We’re not –” began Tricia.

  “Oh, I know that,” he said. Tricia wondered if he was aware that he had just mirrored Tina Louise’s repeated statement.

  Whether he did or not, he took the pack just the same. They left the diner, and he tossed the tent into the trunk of their car, then stood still. “Where to?” he asked.

  Before Tricia could answer, she heard a shout: “YOU!”

  She turned toward the voice and saw a man erupt from the shadows of an alley across the street. He looked like any other homeless person who would stay in an alley, though Tricia had to wonder how a “Pop. 1985” kind of place could spare even a single person for the role of Homeless Guy No. 1 in their day-to-day operations.

  It struck her, then, that she had never seen anyone in Sundown. Just Tina Louise, a few people in the diner the times they came. No one else.

  She had stayed within a few miles of this town for most of her life. She had passed through some of her most important experiences here; had the deepest roots here, in a way. But the place was deserted-seeming, and she was just now realizing that fact.

  All this passed through her mind as the homeless person ran toward her and Alex. The shocked, sideways spin of thoughts was her only defense against the oddness of the experience at Tina Louise’s place, and now the sight of an indigent rushing at her in a town that seemed empty, maybe dead.

  Then she had no time to think of anything else. The man who screamed had run across Sundown’s two-lane Main Street, into the tiny parking lot of Tina Louise’s Diner.

  “Hey!” shouted Alex. The guy glanced in Alex’s direction, then turned his gaze back on Tricia.

  It was a terrifying gaze. His eyes moved spastically, jerking in every direction but straight ahead. He was seeing many things, but Tricia suspected that reality wasn’t one of them.

  Before her body figured out what to do about this newest oddity, the guy was on her. He slammed into her, driving her to the ground. Alex was running as it happened, but couldn’t reach her before she was falling, her head bouncing painfully off the pavement as the bum started screaming, “How many times? When has it happened and when will it happen?”

  The bum grabbed her head, hands clamped tightly on either side. He lifted her head up, and she had a moment where she saw – with strange clarity – his beard. It was scraggly, but not long. A beard badly started, and what little there was of it was matted with dirt and food and perhaps a bit of blood.

  The man pulled her head up higher. She saw his clothes. Less ratty than she would expect; indeed, they looked like they might have been very nice in the not-too-distant past. A button-up shirt, filthy and stained but with an expensive-looking cut. A suit jacket, the filth and the tear that spread along one side of the front panel doing its best to hide the original tailoring.

  Something glinted on the pocket of his jacket. She didn’t see what, though, because the bum/not-bum slammed her down on the pavement. Her head thudded against it, and everything went dark, though not before she heard the bum scream it again: “How many TIMES?”

  12

  (When Alex Had Grown)

  It unfolded strangely for Alex:

  The man, across the street. Shouting something that Alex barely heard because he was still trying to wrap his head around the weird turn things had taken in the diner.

  The man, now on this side of the street. Now screaming incomprehensibly.

  The man, heading toward Trish.

  The man, tackling her.

  Alex, who stood stunned for the first seconds of it, finally moved. He ran around the front of the car, screaming, “Get off her!” and then, “Help!” and then, “Trish!” as he saw the guy slamming her head against the pavement and screaming, “How many TIMES?”

  Trish’s eyes rolled back. A gauzy curtain of bright red – as red as the tent pack, as red as Sam’s bag or Sammy’s unicorn – dropped over Alex’s vision. He screamed again, wordlessly this time, then tackled Trish’s attacker. He drove his shoulder into the man’s side and shoulder, pitching the stranger away from his wife, then riding the man down to the pavement beside her, ending up half-straddled over him, not sure whether he should try and pin the guy or start hitting him.

  The guy squirmed, writhing like a fish, flopping around and trying to get free of Alex. He couldn’t, though he did manage to roll over onto his back. He looked up at Alex as though seeing him for the first time, then said, “You, too?”

  Then he did what somehow struck Alex as the strangest thing of all: he started to cry.

  All the fight had dropped out of him as soon as he saw Alex. Now he was as limp as Trish, the only movement that of his body as it shook with shuddering sobs.

  “Help!” Alex shouted. “Help me!” He hoped he was shouting loudly enough for someone to hear – maybe Tina Louise or her brother. He didn’t know what to do until someone else came – he wanted to check on Trish, but didn’t want to let the guy up.

  “Help!”

  A third time, and now Alex loo
ked around. A quick glance to see if anyone was coming. There were several businesses nearby. A mom-and-pop corner store. A Postal Annex. A storefront with a window that proclaimed its willingness to handle taxes, “Se habla español.”

  A man who looked to be in his fifties or sixties was peeking out of this last. Alex, not wanting to take his hands away from the shoulders of the crazy man weeping below him, moved his head in tight circles that he hoped conveyed his need for the man to come out.

  The man didn’t. He frowned, then shook his head in an almost weary way, then leaned away and disappeared from view.

  Alex looked back down at the man who was no longer struggling below him. He glanced at Trish, who was moaning softly and blinking. She rolled her head to the side, and mouthed something. At the same time, the guy beneath Alex jerked his hips up, suddenly trying to buck him off. Alex flew forward, posting his hands on the pavement by the crazy guy’s ears to keep from eating asphalt.

  The man was rolling toward Trish now.

  He had a knife.

  He reared back – not much, he was still mostly pinned under Alex – but more than enough to ram the knife right through Alex’s wife.

  Alex reacted automatically, wrestling with the guy’s knife arm, pulling him into a roll that ended with them both several feet away from Trish – good! – but now with the madman on top, pushing the knife downward toward Alex’s shoulder – not good at all.

  “It’s going to happen,” said the madman, spittle flying from his lips, spattering Alex’s cheeks. “Now or later, it’ll happen. Some things don’t but other things do. Things stay the same, even when things don’t stay the same.”

  Alex clamped his hands around the guy’s wrist, pushing up for all he was worth. The madman grunted and leaned into the knife. Alex couldn’t stop its descent. All he managed to do was keep the blade descending toward his shoulder rather than aimed directly at his throat or heart.

  Beside them, Trish rolled to hands and knees. She swayed, then steadied, and Alex could see her about to throw herself into the crazy man still trying to stab Alex.

  “Don’t do it!” Alex tried to say. But he only managed the first word before he heard a hornet buzzing.

  A hornet?

  The lunatic’s weight suddenly shifted, and Alex suddenly gained control of the knife as the attacker rolled off him. The hornet sound kept up for a moment, then a pair of workbooted feet entered his field of vision. Alex followed them up to beige pants, to a thick black utility belt with a gun on it, to a greenish-beige button-up shirt that had a star pinned to it.

  “Sorry,” said the woman who had just saved him. She was holding a Taser in her hand, twin lines trailing from it to the back of the madman who had attacked Alex and Trish. The officer – a sheriff, according to her badge – grimaced and jerked her head at the man twitching on the ground. “I tried to stop him before he got to you, but…” Another grimace.

  The madman was still twitching, but the violence of his seizures was lessening. The sheriff leaned over and, in a smooth motion, cuffed the attacker.

  Crazily, Alex wondered why he himself hadn’t been shocked when the guy got hit with the Taser. Even more crazily, the sheriff answered his unspoken question. “The design of the Taser makes current just flow between the points of contact. No danger to anyone a bad guy is holding onto.” Then, apparently correctly deciphering Alex’s look of surprise, she shrugged and said, “People are curious about that.”

  Alex almost asked what people, and how often the sheriff had to do something like this, when he remembered: “Trish!”

  He rolled toward her, scrambling to hands and knees, then just knees as he scrabbled his way to his wife. She was on her knees as well, bracing one hand against the car for support. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Let me see.” Alex felt the back of her head. A knot was forming there, but miraculously, he couldn’t feel any blood. “We should get you to a doctor,” he said.

  Trish shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not here. They can’t –”

  Alex nodded. There wasn’t a hospital nearby – they were an hour from the nearest town big enough to have so much as a multi-doctor private practice, so they would have to go to the little general practitioner’s office in Sundown if they wanted fast help. If it was even still there.

  That was where they had been taken after what happened to Sammy. And Trish was right: the doctor hadn’t been able to help a thing.

  “You sure?” said the sheriff. “We have a good GP here, he can take a look at –”

  “No,” Trish snapped. Softening her voice, she added, “No, thank you.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Alex heard the electronic tone of the door to Tina Louise’s Diner, and looked over to see her running toward them. No brother, though.

  He’s probably still in the back, being “new.”

  Alex almost started laughing at that. It would have been an ugly laugh, empty of humor and full of hysteria. He gritted his teeth and bit it back, then felt the back of Trish’s head again.

  “I’ll be okay,” she murmured.

  Tina Louise stopped a few feet away, when the sheriff said, “It’s over.”

  That, like so much of the day, struck Alex as odd. So did the fact that Tina Louise didn’t ask any questions. No, “What happened?” or “Where did that guy come from?” or even, “Did you know my brother’s new?” (and Alex had to grit his teeth again, harder this time, to keep that ugly laugh from coming).

  “Okay,” Tina Louise said. She looked at Trish. “You need an ice pack, sweetie?”

  “I’ve got one at the station,” said the sheriff.

  “Station?” said Alex. A strange panic had set in, like the sheriff had just told him he was being taken away to be questioned and perhaps waterboarded. “We don’t –”

  “Julie,” said Tina Louise. “There’s time to give the girl –”

  “It’s Sheriff Azakh,” said the sheriff. Alex looked at her for the first time. She was about Alex’s height, with brown eyes and light brown hair beginning to gray, cut so short it looked more like the haircut of a man than that of a woman. She had pale skin with a sprinkling of freckles visible on her nose. She looked like she was about fifty, maybe a bit younger. She didn’t look like an “Azakh.” Not that Alex knew what an Azakh should look like, but the name still struck him as strange; ill-fitting.

  Curiouser and curiouser, thought Alice as she fell down the rabbit hole.

  Tina Louise pursed her lips. “You want to fight or something?” she said to the sheriff.

  Sheriff Azakh sighed. Alex wondered if that was the sheriff’s primary expression. “No, Tina Louise. I just want to do my job and keep things moving the way they should, same as you do every day.”

  Tina Louise’s eyes flicked toward Alex. Toward Trish. She nodded, then went back inside the diner.

  The sheriff watched her go, then started pulling the crazy man who had started all this to his feet. “Up you go, sir.” The guy tried to get his feet under him, failed, and fell flat on his face, which elicited yet another sigh from the sheriff. She pulled harder, and slowly the guy got to his feet.

  Alex stood as well, then helped Trish up. She grimaced, and for a moment he thought she might fall again. “No, I’m okay,” she said.

  Sheriff Azakh jerked her chin down the road. “My office is just a block away. You can put up your feet there ‘til you get settled.” Yet one more sigh. “I have to take your statement, so you might as well relax while I process this guy.”

  The guy in question looked like he wanted to say something, but the sheriff shook him and said, “You’re in enough trouble, wouldn’t you say? Your little part in this story is over, so I’d say it’s time to shut your mouth and do right by yourself unless you want me to zap you again.” A spark of coherence entered the other man’s eyes for the first time, and he nodded. “Good man,” said Sheriff Azakh.

  She sighed again.

  “Come on,”
she said, and began to walk down the road, half-pushing, half-leading the man who had just tried to kill Trish, and then Alex as well. She didn’t wait for them, just headed down the road, pushing the guy every once in a while.

  Déjà vu suddenly gripped Alex. He was sure he had been here before; done all of it over and over again.

  Of course. You keep losing things here.

  He looked at Trish. Not her, though. Saved her, at least.

  From what?

  He knew he wasn’t asking the question about this moment only. He was asking about the day they had lost.

  The ghosts. The whispers and whisperers and the monsters behind the curtain.

  The thoughts meant nothing; nonsense words pushing unbidden into his mind. Still, they almost staggered Alex. He clung to Trish now, half supporting her, half being supported by her.

  Sheriff Azakh was halfway down the street, still shoving her prisoner along. Alex wondered why she wasn’t driving the guy to wherever she was going, then realized he hadn’t seen a police car anywhere.

  Or any car, for that matter. Other than the man in the accounting place (“Se habla español!”) and Tina Louise, there was no one.

  “It’s empty,” whispered Trish.

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked around. They hadn’t taken the car, just started along behind the sheriff, going wherever she was taking them.

  Following again. Not knowing where we’re going – again.

  Curioser and curioser.

  The sheriff turned, heading toward a small, one-story building that looked like it might have been a bank at one time but now said “SHERIFF” in big letters on the front window.

  Alex looked at Trish, though they both kept walking. She wasn’t looking forward, apparently trusting him to lead her in the right direction. Instead, she was staring at a shop window. A sign above the shop proclaimed “TOOLS!” in almost exactly the same lettering as the sheriff’s station used. Below that: “We buy lawnmowers and fix shovel handles” on a handwritten sign in the window, which struck Alex as immensely funny for some reason.