The Forest Read online

  The interview went on for a long time, but it still felt odd to Tricia. She was in shock, she was tired, she was emotionally overwrought. She knew all that, but even through those filters she thought something about all this was just… off.

  What could possibly be off about it? Just an attack, a homicide, a doctor I remember from the day I lost my boy, and the weirdest interview experience of my life.

  Doc Brown had finally gone an hour or so earlier, dropping a few pages on the sheriff’s desk, then nodding at Tricia and Alex and saying, “Sorry about all this,” which struck her as odd, before leaving.

  More odd: he didn’t take the body, or even indicate when he would do so.

  It was just her and Alex. The sheriff. And – not to be forgotten – the dead body in the back room.

  Sheriff Azakh inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly. She read over the “writing” on the last page of her pad, then said, “I think that’s about it.” She glanced at a wall clock. “It’s time I let you go.”

  “What now?” asked Alex. “Isn’t there going to be, I don’t know, someone from the medical examiner’s office or your boss or something?”

  Sheriff Azakh smiled tightly. “Probably the latter. I had Doc Brown phone the state police, and I’ll call myself as soon as I get done with you two, so we can coordinate in figuring out who that nutjob was and what happened. As for the medical examiner, Doc Brown is the closest we’ve ever needed in Sundown, or Sunrise, for that matter.” She frowned. “People mostly get along here.”

  “‘Where you find yourself at home,’” said Alex, quoting the sign at the city limits.

  Sheriff Azakh smiled tightly. “More or less. Hard to fight with yourself, right?”

  “People do it every day,” said Alex. He wasn’t challenging her, Tricia could tell. He was just tired and, like her, trying to make sense of everything that was happening.

  “Well, we try not to do it here. Leads to too much stress down the road, as it were.” The sheriff sighed, then rubbed her eyes as she said, “You two can go. I’ll need to see you tomorrow, though, so do you have someplace to stay in town?” Without waiting for an answer Sheriff Azakh looked at Tricia. “How’s the head?”

  “I’ll live,” said Tricia.

  The sheriff nodded. “Well, I certainly am glad to hear it.” She looked at the clock again. “Best get a move on,” she said. She moved back to her desk, sat down, and started writing on another pad without another look at them.

  Tricia looked at Alex, who shrugged. Apparently that was what passed for a goodbye in Sundown.

  Alex stood first, a hand held out toward Tricia in case she needed it. “I’m okay,” she said. His hand stayed out, though. She wondered if he was doing that in case he needed to steady her, or just waiting for her to hold his hand.

  She had held his hand earlier, and it had felt good. More color came into the world when she did it, banishing a few more of those shadows and grays that had taken over in her mind. But the interviews with the sheriff had stripped that good feeling away, leaving her once more in a world painted in shades of gray, a universe of shadows and bleached bones.

  Mist. Fog.

  She shook her head and stood on her own. They left the sheriff’s station. The tone the door made as they exited grated on Tricia’s ears, and she wondered if there was permanent damage due to the explosive boom of the gunfire earlier. Probably.

  It was dark outside. Only one lamp stood on the main street of Sundown. It glowed a weak yellow that created nothing but a pale halo around the bulb.

  “What time is it?” asked Tricia.

  Alex pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Seven.”

  “Seems like ten or eleven.”

  “Yeah.”

  They walked together in the quasi-darkness. With every step they took, the feeling that they were alone grew in Tricia. The store fronts were all closed. No lights in any of them. When they arrived at Tina Louise’s Diner…

  “Well, that’s weird.”

  “I think I’d like to get out of here,” said Tricia.

  Tina Louise’s Diner was closed. The neon sign was dark. All Tricia could see through the diner’s plate glass windows were dark shapes she knew were just the outlines of chairs, stools, the bar; but which her heart started screaming were monsters, ghosts, ghouls. They were just waiting for her to look away, then they would slink and slide toward her.

  She felt Alex looking at the same thing, with the same dread visible on his features. “I think I’d like to get out of here, too,” he said.

  They turned to the car. It sat where they had left it before being attacked a million lifetimes ago. Alex took the key fob out of his pocket and clicked it. Tricia heard the blissful sound of the car unlocking – she wanted in the car, and fast – and she pulled the door open.

  Even though she wanted to get in and get away, though, she paused. Something…

  Alex muttered a curse at the same moment she realized what was bothering her.

  The back passenger side tire was flat. Not just flat, but flat. The thing had so little air that there was only an inch of rubber between the rim and the ground. “I’ll get the spare,” Alex said. His voice quavered a bit.

  “Should we call a tow truck?” Tricia asked.

  Alex looked around. The town had grown darker, and as Tricia watched, the single lamp that had lit their way this far flickered and went out.

  She looked back at Tina Louise’s Diner. The shadowed stools and tables that had become monsters in her heart had not moved.

  Then one of them did.

  She gasped. Alex didn’t hear her, though. He was bent over the popped trunk, grunting and muttering under his breath as he pulled out the spare. He didn’t see the shadow detach itself from the others and move slowly closer.

  Tricia wanted to shout. But inexplicable, irrational, unrelenting terror had wrapped cold fingers around her throat and squeezed the breath from her. She managed only a high-pitched whistling sound that barely carried to her own ears.

  The shadow came closer. Closer. Resolving itself into a shape, though a shape without detail.

  It was a person. Someone watching from inside the diner. Staring into the darkness, looking at the small circle of light cast around Tricia and Alex’s car when she opened the door and the dome light triggered. And somehow she knew that if the lights went on in the diner she would see weirdly-colored red hair she knew on top of a face she didn’t.

  “He’s new here,” she heard someone say, and didn’t realize she had said the words herself until Alex said, “What?”

  She looked at him. “Someone’s watch –”

  She broke off. She had turned back to the diner when she spoke, only to find the shape was gone… if it had ever been there to start with.

  An unseen man in the diner. An unremembered man seen in a tree.

  Ghosts.

  It was the first time the word had ever really entered her head as a descriptor of personal experience. It was also the only one that fit.

  Alex leaned the spare tire he had pulled from the trunk against the back bumper of the car and joined her, squinting as he peered into the diner. He reached behind them and shut the door she had just opened. She yelped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “All I saw in the window was a reflection of the dome light, and I wanted to see what was in the diner.” He squinted at the dark window. The shapes beyond.

  Monsters in the darkness.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Tricia didn’t know how to respond to that. She could have yelled, “Don’t you believe me?” But she didn’t.

  Alex opened the car door again. He opened the back door as well, as though having more doors open might coax the dome light into greater illumination.

  He went back to changing the tire. It didn’t take too long – he hated changing tires, so had bought a two-ton capacity car jack that popped their small car into the air in moments. She turned away from the diner with an effort, but still felt eyes
on her back as she helped Alex, dragging the flat tire off the rotor so that he just had to turn and grab the spare while she put the flat in the trunk.

  They worked well together. That hadn’t changed. They were still on similar wavelengths, and she suspected that on some level that would never change. Even if the worst happened…

  But that was foolish, wasn’t it? Because the worst had already happened. Nothing worse than losing a child.

  She had to move something out of the way to make enough room in the trunk for the tire to slide in. She wasn’t sure what it was at first, then realized it was the bright red pack holding the tent Tina Louise had given them. When the woman handed them the package, Tricia thought it was the weirdest thing that could happen today.

  Got that one wrong.

  She moved the pack to the side, hoisted the tire into the trunk, then rejoined Alex. He was already finishing with the spare. He tightened a final lug nut, then lowered the car, tightened the lugs again to make sure they were secure, and picked up the heavy-duty jack. He tossed it on the spare, beside the red tent, and Tricia slammed the trunk shut.

  She glanced at the diner. The monsters were silent and still. The ghosts were nowhere to be seen.

  She looked behind her. The town was dark. Even the sheriff’s office was dark. The shops that lined the street stared into the center of town, shadowed windows like eyes of lonely skulls turning gray and then black in the night.

  “We need to go,” she said. “Now.”

  She realized Alex was doing the same thing she was. Looking around, left to right, at a town that no matter how small should have showed some sign of life.

  Where you find yourself at home.

  You won’t find anyone else, though. Just yourself.

  “I think you’re right,” said Alex quietly.

  They both fairly ran to their sides of the car. Tricia was closest to the driver side, so she threw herself behind the wheel as Alex slammed the back passenger side door shut then rushed to get in the front. At the last second, he bent quickly and picked something up from the ground beside the car and shoved it in his pocket, drawing out the car keys at the same time and almost tossing them at her.

  “Go, go!” he almost shouted.

  Tricia was already turning the key in the ignition. The car was in good shape – no horror movie stalls, no banging on the wheel and screaming, “Not now, not now!” It just slipped from silence to its usual well-maintained purr, and Tricia put the car in gear and drove away. She passed the sign that welcomed them to Sundown. The sign to Sunrise was down the road.

  They’d have to stay there. The sheriff had told them to stick around, but Tina Louise had said the motel in Sundown was closed. So Sunrise, with all its memories and all its emptiness, would have to be their destination.

  And that meant they would have to pass by the forest. Tricia didn’t want to drive past it right now, but going the other way would mean a much longer drive to the next town – a drive on a three-quarters-scale spare tire, hoping that it didn’t pop or that some other emergency didn’t happen. They had their phones, sure, but she didn’t relish the idea of using them to call a tow truck out here. It’d be ridiculously expensive and, more importantly, it would take time to get a tow truck to visit them.

  Tricia just wanted away from Sundown. She wanted to get into a bed and close her eyes and pretend nothing that had happened was real.

  Even if it meant driving through the place where they lost Sammy.

  14

  Interlude

  (When Sammy Was Young)

  It’s hot. It’s dark.

  Sammy hasn’t been afraid of the dark in forever – that’s baby stuff, and he’s not a baby.

  Well, mostly he’s not. There are nights where it doesn’t matter that he knows what causes lightning and he understands that the earth’s rotation will bring the sun into view again. There are nights when he gets Daddy or Mommy, and they come and search his room for monsters.

  He knows there are no monsters. But knowing a thing is sometimes different than believing it. Belief is a thing outside knowledge, and at times exists beyond its power.

  So Mommy and Daddy come, and hunt monsters. Usually there are none. Sometimes Daddy finds a pillow under the bed. He holds it to his face and screams and spins around like he is in a life-or-death struggle against the pillow, then “pushes” it away and drop kicks it into the closet.

  “Dead,” says Daddy. And he is right. He killed the monster, because monsters can’t exist when the lights are on and laughter is in the air.

  But no lights are on now, no laughter sounds around him. There is only darkness, and heat. Sammy tries to scream. He inhales, but it feels like an oven rushes into his mouth and the hot of it kills the scream.

  Darker and darker. He feels hands on him, jerking him left and right and back and forth.

  Daddy? Mommy?

  They don’t answer, because he didn’t speak. He hears screaming, though. Not his… he thinks. But he hurts enough to scream, yessiree. Everything is on fire, and he can feel a different kind of heat on his shoulder and neck and knows it is blood. That makes him want to scream even more.

  Still, if you want to scream it doesn’t mean you can. Sometimes you can’t even breathe.

  But he wants to breathe.

  He has to breathe.

  So Sammy does, no matter how it hurts. Sammy takes a single, quick gasp of air. Too hot, too painful.

  He is still holding Silly Corny, his unicorn, and even as out of it as he is he cuddles it to his cheek.

  Now hands are jerking him back and forth. Someone screams.

  The hot of it all gets hotter, the screaming grows louder, and the darkness eats it all up and all gone.

  15

  (When Alex Was Young)

  Friday.

  For most kids, that meant a relief from school, a break from grown-ups demanding they do this, then that, then this again because that wasn’t done right the first time.

  For Alex – and, he knew, for Trish – Fridays meant dread. Fridays meant going home and spending a weekend avoiding a father and a mother who were more like ghosts, emerging for work and for food, than parents. Both Alex’s mom and Trish’s dad telecommuted, working for different companies, which allowed them to withdraw a bit further each day from their children and from the wider world beyond.

  Alex’s mother rarely spoke to him. Sometimes she talked in her sleep, and occasionally she screamed. Sometimes he heard her moaning in what sounded an awful lot like pleasure.

  Both of those horrified him, though at the same time he suspected they were the best proofs he had that she was alive – because ghosts didn’t have nightmares or sex dreams.

  Trish reported similar doings: her father screamed, he moaned – though the latter didn’t happen as often as Alex said it did in his house. He wasn’t sure if that meant her father was less repressed than his mother, or if Trish was just better at hiding Severely Gross Things.

  Whichever it was, both of them would be subjected to the possibility of such in higher concentrations during the weekend.

  Though, he reflected, this weekend might be different. This weekend, there was Sam. Alex’s and Trish’s parents hated each other, but they couldn’t possibly hate Sam’s mom, right? Maybe Alex could pretend he was spending the weekend with Sam, and Trish could do the same, and the three of them could spend the whole weekend at the one-movie, always-deserted “cineplex” that Sunrise boasted, or at the library where they could spend time at the surprisingly-well-stocked science section, or even at the all-night liquor store, where the owner had decided they were “good kids who deserved better” and so never enforced the no loitering sign tacked outside his front door.

  Neither he nor Trish had broached the subject with Sam, though they both felt sure he would sign on. They hadn’t met Sam’s mom yet – a single parent, just like theirs, which pointed to their similarities just as strongly as everything else had – but from what they had garnered, he,
too, would do just about anything to avoid that nightmare known as home life.

  “She’s crazy,” he had told them the second day at school. The three of them were curled up in the shadow of one of the buildings, avoiding the sun and the other students during the forty-seven-minute “lunch hour” (which both Alex and Trish took as another revelation of the stupidity of this place). Sam was flipping through pages of some of the books he had brought – a book on string theory, one on ancient Israelite metaphysics, and another one analyzing the two of them in an attempt to validate higher revelation – and Alex and Trish were trying to keep up with the depth and breadth of their new friend’s thoughts.

  Sam sighed and said, “Get out Wells. It’s the bottom text.”

  Alex pawed through Sam’s cavernous red backpack. Again he saw the extra clothing.

  “What is all that for?” he asked. He tried to make it casual, but knew it came out forced.

  Sam put down the books. He looked at Alex, pursed his lips, and said, “For my mom. She’s crazy,”

  “They don’t look big enough for her,” said Alex. He attempted a joking tone, knowing it sounded just as forced and insecure as his previous question had.

  Sam shrugged. He wasn’t going to say anything more, Alex could tell. Then Trish put a hand on Sam’s leg and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Sam answered with another shrug. Trish waited. Alex did, too, though he wanted to ask a follow-up. But he trusted Trish’s instincts.

  It was the right thing to do. Sam looked away and said, “We’re… I guess you could say we’re on the run, Mom and I.”

  “On the run?” Alex hated when people parroted part of a sentence as a question. But he suddenly felt what other kids must: slow and stupid. What Sam had said… how did that make sense?

  “Like, from your dad?”

  Again, Trish’s woman’s intuition –

  (And she is definitely a woman, isn’t she, Alex?)

  – proved accurate. Sam nodded. “Yeah. I don’t even remember him. But Mom says he’s the most dangerous person in the world.” He grimaced. “Of course, she says that about me, too, when she drinks too much. So I don’t know how much to take it as true, but… I guess I believe her. Or at least, I believe her enough to keep a change of clothes in my bag, in case she says we have to go and we just go.”