A Forest, or a Tree

by Tegan Moore

  “It’s been following me,” Elizabeth said quietly. “It’s been following me since last night.”

  May didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to. They would get out of here, and Elizabeth would stop freaking out. “We have to keep going,” she said.

  They stopped in a little clearing at the edge of a ridge where trees were uprooted, knocked flat by some winter cataclysm. The bleached skeletons of the trunks staggered drunkenly off the edge of the slope. “Check the GPS,” May suggested. “I think I remember this part. Down along this ridge, right?”

  Elizabeth’s mouth was a hard, pale line. She fished the orange knob of plastic from her pack. “This way,” she confirmed.

  “See?” May said. “Almost there.”

  Elizabeth looked over her shoulder, downhill. “Ailey said the road we came up on runs along the other side of that hill.” Elizabeth nodded toward the bank rising at the far side of the slope they stood above, split at the bottom by a hissing creek. “We could cut across.”

  May snorted. “Uh, she also said it’s crazy steep, which is why we started where we did. You remember how it was driving here? The road ran at the bottom of a damn cliff most of the way up. Let’s go the way we came. It’s only another hour or something.” She tucked her thumbs under her backpack straps and turned away.

  Elizabeth started more slowly, watching down the incline toward the creek.

  The clouds heaped over each other until they lost their lustrous silver and turned pewter and then coal. May tried not to imagine what it would be like to be stranded and sick in a tent in driving rain. It was early enough in the day; all four of them would be off the mountain before the next morning. Ailey had said someone would come for them right away, on horses or ATVs as far as they could, with a litter for Piper and a whole team of people to carry it.

  “Do you hear that?” Elizabeth asked.

  May stopped, turned back halfway. “Hear what?”

  “The humming.” Elizabeth scanned the rubbly slope below them, expression blank as she strained her hearing. “Or maybe whistling. Like an engine.” Her gaze snapped to May. “There’s someone on the road.”

  They had to keep going. “We have our own car,” May said. The keys were zipped into her pocket. “We aren’t trapped. We just have to get to the car and drive for help.”

  “Maybe it’s a ranger,” Elizabeth said.

  “Even if it is, we couldn’t to do anything until we get down to the road. They wouldn’t even see us.”

  “There! Hear it?”

  May listened, eyes upturned. “I don’t know,” she said, “it sounds like some weird echo. The wind. Seriously, we’re almost back, we just have to keep walking.”

  “We could be out of here in minutes if we went over that hill. It’s right there.”

  May sighed. “We would be at the top of a steep-ass cliff with a road at the bottom of it and no way to get down. And we’d still have to walk to the car. And I don’t even hear anything. You’re making this way more complicated than it needs to be.”

  Elizabeth said nothing. She turned in a slow circle, looking up into the dark pillars of the forest rising above them. The wind pushed the treetops in lazy, bobbing circles.

  This time Elizabeth followed immediately when May set off, and stayed close. May could see the way the other girl twitched at birdcalls, the wide-open flashing of her eyes. Fear did wild things to people. And exhaustion. She shouldn’t hold Elizabeth’s panic against her.

  Something crashed nearby. Both girls startled, and May yelped. The bushes uphill shuddered. May saw long, slim legs, long, gaunt lines of a body, a rising crown of branching antler.

  “No!” Elizabeth yelled. “No!” Then she bolted over the edge of the ridge.

  May heard scree tumbling, rocks crack-clattering, and the rumble of cascading gravel. “Elizabeth!” she yelled. “It’s a deer!” The thing in the underbrush, the deer, leapt off in the opposite direction, rustle and crackle and thud.

  Elizabeth was running, arms up to keep her balance, stones dancing and leaping around her feet. It took less than a minute for her to reach the creek at the bottom.

  “Elizabeth!” May shouted. “Wait!” She checked over her shoulder. “Elizabeth, it’s a fucking deer. Come back!”

  The distance made Elizabeth the size of May’s finger, small enough to squash. Tiny Elizabeth picked across the stream at the bottom of the ravine. May saw her stumble in the water, then crawl out on the far bank.

  “For real?” she muttered. “Really.”

  Elizabeth scrabbled up the loose incline. May stayed put. The thing in the forest rattled off into silence. May watched until Elizabeth disappeared into the trees on the far bank, and then turned back down the mountain.

  Elizabeth had the GPS, along with its locating beacon. May had the car keys. And now they were alone, but probably they would both be fine.

  * * *

  She waited a long hour, and then started the car. “Sorry,” she said into the humid, oppressive air. And: “I’ll come back.” Elizabeth had the GPS. Elizabeth had it, and they both had the coordinates of where Ailey and Piper were. And Piper was sick.

  There was no cell signal, not anywhere, and the road was deserted. There weren’t even road signs. The sky was low and scowling, but holding back, holding its breath—there was no wind. Motionless, gravid, and a sense of being watched.

  May stopped at the first little grocery she saw. It was half–boarded up but it had an Open sign in the window, and maybe something moved in the dim inside, but the door was locked and there was no answer at her knock. Behind her, a crow lighted next to a puddle in the parking lot, its reflection playing against the glass door like a mirror. It dropped a twig from its beak.

  She drove endless minutes, checking her phone for bars. None of the other structures tucked into the woods seemed alive. Some of the buildings tumbled in at the roofline, others were barricaded with junk. She stopped once where an old truck sat in a driveway, and banged at the door of the trailer until her knuckles hurt.

  Back in the car. The sky was darkening, the storm shoving closer to the ground, but no rain yet. In the dark fur of pines she saw a glint of light. A big house, set back, A-frame roof glowing golden at its windows.

  Its narrow driveway wound into the woods. May felt her pulse in her skin. Maybe she’d get to take a shower today. Maybe whoever owned this house would be awesome, and the emergency personnel would come and take her information and the GPS coordinates, and then she’d be tucked into a bed with cocoa and pillows and cable TV.

  The driveway was long. Overgrown branches dragged thick fingers along the windows like nails. Despite the neglect, the house the driveway spilled out in front of was ostentatiously nice. Celebrity nice, and gloriously lit. Nobody left this many lights on if they weren’t home.

  Her boots thudded the porch boards. She pushed the doorbell. She pushed it again, and when nothing happened, she knocked. Her knuckles ached from the knocking she’d done before, so she used the side of her fist instead.

  Somewhere in the house a small dog barked. No one came to the door. May’s head began to throb. Inside, upstairs, there was a muffled bump of wood against wood.

  Frustration burned between her vertebrae. She banged harder, this time on the glass. She wanted to kick the door. “Hey!” she yelled. “Is someone home? Goddammit!”

  Overhead, on the face of the house, something slid and clicked. A woman’s voice rang out. “Go away!”

  “Hey!” May scrambled down the porch steps to find the origin of the voice. “Hello! I need help!”

  “I’m not alone in here,” the woman’s voice said. The little dog barked again, louder through the open window.

  May looked up. She felt her arms at her sides, waving, like they were flapping, like she would take off and fly up to the pretty, pale, middle-aged brunette who frowned out the open window at her. “I need help! My friend is hurt! She’s sick!”

  The woman bared her teeth. May felt the dis
tance between herself and the stranger up there. She matched the woman’s expression without thinking, a bone-smile of defeat. “My friend is dying in the woods and I need help,” she shouted. Screamed, really. She’s white, May wanted to add, she’s a little blonde and freckled white girl. But she didn’t say it. She didn’t want to have to say it in order to get into this big stupid fancy house.

  “I’m not alone,” the woman yelled again. “And I have my husband’s guns. Go away!” The window slammed shut.

  A small breeze carried a scatter of raindrops. One landed in May’s eyelashes. She blinked it away. The clouds seemed to pile on top of the incline behind the house; far up, for a moment, May thought she saw a dark human shape spidering across the scree.

  The porch light went out. In the hush May could hear a wind begin to shake the hillside. She watched it crawl down over the trees toward her. It reached the yard and its landscaped saplings; they tossed their skinny arms; they bucked their backs; they shook their heads. The wind slapped a handful of rain into her face.

  No, she thought. This is ridiculous.

  She turned her back into the growing wind. The great house before her showed no evidence of its inhabitant. May wondered how the lady had turned the porch light off from upstairs.

  Beyond the door was a warm-lit, high-ceilinged living room, all hewn wood. Everything in there looked expensive. In the nearby open kitchen May could see a landline phone in its charging station on the granite counter.

  Another gust chugged down the hill, this one bringing the resolute thrum of hard rain.

  The phone was close enough that May could see the numbers on it. She reached for the door, tried the knob without really thinking. Her breath caught when the latch turned and the door swung inward.

  Why would it be locked? It was midday, despite the dark skies, and there was nobody around to lock out.

  At the back of the living room there was a set of stairs, opposite the kitchen, where she could keep her eye on them. The phone was cordless. She could take it to the porch.

  She breathed through her mouth, rocked her boots silently heel-to-toe as she pushed into the cozy light of the house. A gust of wind rattled the kitchen’s big picture windows and the French doors, which led to a paved patio. It was dim and green outside, a deep-water aquarium. She checked the silent stairs. No dog, no crazy lady. The windows pulsed again, clattered with rain.

  Her heart was somewhere between her stomach and her ribcage, a fat soft throbbing bullfrog. The granite countertop had a few pieces of mail, a catalog, a dish with crumbs on it. May wrapped her hand around the phone handset. It made a quiet bip as she lifted it from its station.

  A whump of wind again on the side of the house made her jump as she turned to creep back to the porch.

  She felt the crash instead of heard it, the pitch of shattering glass. And then a great dark figure, a gaunt and branch-crowned bestial silhouette the details of which her eyes could not negotiate, stepped through the broken French doors and into the kitchen. It made the house seem suddenly crowded, as though a landslide had carried a grove of black trees into the living room.

  Her forearms stung, and May registered with wonder the fine red lines that appeared there. Flying glass, it must have been.

  Feet banged on the stairs, and there was screaming but not from May’s throat, May was too stunned to scream, too caught out with the phone in her hand and the darkness that had demolished the French doors and slipped into the cozy living room. The room thrummed with wind. From the corner of her vision May saw the woman on the stairs, and yes, she did have a gun, the kind you’d take hunting for deer, and she held it stiffly and wild-eyed as it swung its aim across the downstairs. May was backing away, the lady’s screaming pushing her toward the open front door, which the wind was slowly arcing closed.

  The great shape, the long-legged blackness and its great reverent leafless crown, stepped, set its hooves, stole forward. Its legs like boughs, its silhouette a thatch of dark fingers of void woven together. The room smelled of ozone, of crushed leaves. The storm swept through the living room, a physical punch of wind resounding against the kitchen cupboards, sweeping May’s hair off her neck.

  The backyard trees bowed, thrashed, banged their elbows together.

  The woman was screaming down the stairs, the gun sweeping over May and the rest of the room, and May couldn’t imagine she could possibly be a target with that magnificent, awful thing drowning the light out of the room between them. She stepped back again, felt the phone in her hand, wondered what 9-1-1 would do about … this. What kind of help to ask for. And what use was a gun? The lady was looking at her and shouting incoherent threats and terror, the long cold nose of her gun pointed high.

  It—the thing, the creature, if it was even truly there—lifted its dreadful, awful crest and looked at May with no eyes.

  Her back was against the front door. It must have swung closed. It must have shut in the wind as she backed toward it. She felt the knob, felt the catch of its lock.

  The gun sounded, a powerful blast muffled by the house and the storm pummeling everything, and with the violence of the sound everything fell instantly still. Everything vibrated at the same imperceptibly high frequency. Everything felt the storm holding its breath.

  Whose story would this be, May thought: hers, or Piper’s, or Ailey’s, or Elizabeth’s?

  The thing, the creature, the blackness, shivered with the wind. It turned itself toward her slowly, like a question.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Tegan Moore

  Art copyright © 2019 by Samuel Araya