by Travis Smith
“I had no choice …” Patrick murmured at last.
Brandon looked at him and nodded in silent response to the explanation he hadn’t demanded.
“I had to leave her … but I came back.” His voice was hoarse, barely audible. He struggled to hold back a flow of hot tears that stung his eyes. “And I have to go in for her.”
Ian nodded. His dark eyes flickered up to his brother. “I understand all too well.”
“We are here with you,” Maria assured Patrick.
“Aye,” Robert agreed.
“Aye,” John said.
The Stranger stood in silent, resigned agreement.
At last Ian hitched a shaky breath and looked down, his hand no longer able to resist carving circles in the dried grass where he sat. Wiry black hair hanging down above his thin spectacles, he shook his head minutely. “Greggy and I cannot.”
Patrick accepted this and lay a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Of course. We will return for you here.”
Ian shook his head again. “You’ll never return,” he whispered. “And if you do … you’ll be beyond recognition.”
4
The group spent a restless night at the edge of the Hoxar Woods with Ian and Gregoire. When the sun rose the following morning, they bid their farewells to the men.
“You’re sure ye can’t wait for us?” Maria asked, her arms around Ian in a tight embrace. Gregoire stood off to the side, gazing blankly at the horizon. He’d been silent through the night.
“We must distance ourselves from this place,” Ian said. “Our paths may cross again yet if fate wills it so.” He spoke without conviction.
Robert shook Ian’s hand before John Tompkins took him in another embrace. “Have care out there,” he said.
The Stranger stood nearby. He nodded to Ian as the man turned to face him. “I once reproached you for healing me in that cell,” he began. “Today I rebuke myself, for I may never repay your generosity and selfless attention.”
Ian nodded back, his eyes not quite meeting The Stranger’s.
“What will you do?”
Ian shrugged and cast his sad gaze upon Greggy. “We’ve spent a lifetime looking for our father. I am certain we may clear our minds and begin again.”
“I wish you endless fortune,” The Stranger said, “and fare thee well, Greggy,” he called.
The back of Gregoire’s bald head wavered in a nearly imperceptible nod of acknowledgement.
The three boys stood at the edge of the forest. Patrick broke away from the others to approach Ian. He took the man’s hand in both of his own and squeezed it. “Your kindness is infectious, and I lament that you were forced to fight,” he said, “but I would not be here today if not for your courage in the face of certain death.”
Ian forced a smile and nodded at the boy. I hope that you find what you seek, he thought, but the empty sentiment would not pass his lips. He could no more simply give false hope to the boy than he could talk him out of his fool’s errand.
5
After sharing valediction with Ian and Gregoire, the group entered the line of trees together. The bright and cloudless winter’s morning sky darkened at once beneath the dense canopy of trees. The quality of the air itself changed as if they’d walked through an invisible wall. The foreign atmosphere was stale and static. For a moment, The Stranger expected to open his mouth to take a breath and find nothing there to inhale.
“Wow,” John mused.
Even the conduction of his voice sounded dampened beneath the intangible weight of the air. The light that shone down was adequate to illuminate a narrow path before them, but gauging the spectrum of light was impossible. The Stranger blinked and lifted his own hands to look at them. They moved slowly, as if underwater or in a dream. Behind them trailed a blurred after-image of their own motion.
“The trail goes only one direction,” Patrick said. His voice sounded far away and half-asleep, drained of all vitality and passion. He set off along the path without glancing back at his companions.
They walked in a silent daze for a time. The path wound through the dense woods without any forks or diversions. The passage of time grew imperceptible, and the sounds of their own footsteps in the dead leaves littering the earth soon took on an unreal, muffled quality. Despite the motionless air, the bare skeleton branches of the trees swayed discordantly as though alive with the world around them. One tree in particular bore two large burr holes that peered down upon the group like black, baleful eyes. Its branches coiled in a long, foreboding arch over the pathway, promising to reach down and ensnare any who passed beneath.
It was not the first time Brandon noted that particular tree on this venture. He blinked sleepily and drew his knife to carve a symbol in its dry bark. After, he put the knife back into his pocket and rushed to catch up to the group who had drifted ahead.
He yawned loudly as he approached. “Perhaps we should rest for the eve’ here.”
“The eve’?” Maria asked. “We’ve only just begun walking.”
The others glanced around at one another before collectively looking up toward the sky. No light shone through the treetops. Their way seemed to be lit by an artificial ambiance that hung in the air.
“When did night fall?” The Stranger asked, confused.
“It’s been night since we entered these woods,” John mused.
The others pondered this before Patrick spoke. “But we left Ian and Greggy at the first light of day …”
“Who?” John asked.
“Ian?” Patrick repeated. “Don’t you remember Ian?”
John shook his head, uncomprehending.
“I fear we may be lost,” Brandon said at last. On the path ahead of them stood the tree with large black eyes, entwined branches arcing over the trail. He turned back to look along the way they had come, but everything was different from before. “I’ve seen that tree before!” he said, rushing to its trunk. “Look! I’ve carved …”
The others approached behind him as his voice trailed off.
“What is that?” Patrick demanded. “Why did you carve that?”
Brandon looked at the circular symbols on the tree’s trunk and found himself at a loss for words.
“It was—” he stammered. “It was before … The last time we passed here …”
“What?” Jake said. “Mate, ye’ve only just done that.”
Reality slipped as Brandon looked back down at his hands. He was holding his knife in his right hand, tip of the blade pressed against the tree’s bark. He dropped the weapon in surprise and stepped back. “No …” he murmured. “What’s happening?”
The group’s collective gaze followed the knife to the ground. When they looked back up at the tree, its trunk was covered in the sinister symbol. It was carved in various sizes and rotations no fewer than thirty times.
“How many times have we been here?” John asked, looking around the dark forest.
In the silent night air, a shuffling in the dried leaves erupted to the group’s right. Patrick reached for his weapon, but there was nothing hung on his hip.
“My gun …”
He looked at Brandon, who also had no weapon slung over his shoulder. He pawed at his own back, but the guns were gone. No one in the group was holding anything.
Another sound came from the woods behind the group now. Something heavy stirring in the dead leaves. They turned and raised their hands before them in helpless defense, but nothing was there save for the unnatural silence.
As they stood in wait, an aberrant sound grew out of the quiet. Like a distant shriek carried atop a howling tempest, the sound approached both from nowhere and everywhere. The panicked, inhuman utterances were menacing and incomprehensible. They could have been words in some foreign tongue, but their quality defied nature, as if the words, the sounds, and the very breaths themselves were coming in reverse—entering an infernal muzzle, rather than exiting one.
The noise encroached and inhabited the minds of all. They plac
ed their hands on their ears, but it did nothing to dampen the rising pitch of the hellish monologue. It grew in intensity as the leaves around the group began to skitter and jump in circles within non-existent gusts of wind.
Patrick screamed, but no sound would escape his chest. He closed his eyes as the leaves rose from the earth to over his head. The sounds rose to egregious howls that threatened to crush his mind from within. He screamed his silent scream until his empty lungs hitched in his chest, and he remembered no more.
6
When Patrick awoke, the unidirectional path on which they’d travelled was different. He now lay amongst the dead leaves and cold dirt in the middle of a complex network of trails branching in every direction. Standing with their backs to him, gazing in silence along the various paths were The Stranger, Brandon, Jake, Maria, Robert, and John.
“What happened?” Patrick asked, standing and brushing himself off. The sky was still black as death, though his body’s internal sense told him that he must have slept for a day or more. “How long was I asleep?”
“All night,” Maria said, her tone level and numb. She turned and approached the boy.
“But it’s still night,” Patrick said. His inflection indicated more of a question than a statement. He remembered the tunnels and felt the crushing weight of endless unnatural darkness atop him.
Maria looked to the sky and nodded in agreement. “So it is …”
“How long has it been night?”
The Stranger, John, and Robert approached now. “Night has only just fallen,” The Stranger said. “Lie down and rest.”
“What?” Patrick asked. “No, I just woke …” He snatched his arm away as The Stranger reached out to take it in an unsettling gesture of comfort. “What were those sounds?” he demanded.
Maria approached a nearby tree and sat down at its base. “I think we shall all think more clearly after a good night’s rest.” She lay her head back and closed her eyes.
“No!” Patrick barked. “Where is the trail? How did we get here?” He looked frantically at the numerous branching paths.
Brandon was still standing in silence, staring down one of the dark trails. He turned to face Patrick at last, a silent tear rolling down his dirty cheek. “Where is she?” he asked.
Patrick shook his head and looked at the others, who were nestling down to sleep and seemed not to take notice of the boys.
“You left her here!” Brandon screamed. “Where?”
Patrick sank to his knees. He looked along the many paths again before speaking. “I can’t recall,” he choked.
Brandon rushed him and tackled him onto his back. Now his face was contorted with furious sorrow. Tears spilled from his eyes freely. “Why would you leave her alone in this place!”
“I had no choice!” Patrick sobbed. “I knew not … I knew not what this place was …”
Brandon raised a shuddering fist as if to strike Patrick, but Jake snatched the boy backward and onto his feet. “Enough!” he bellowed.
The adults around the small clearing appeared to already be asleep and took no notice. Brandon collapsed onto his hands and knees and wept. “I’m sorry,” he cried before rolling onto his side and closing his eyes.
“I don’t think we should sleep …” Patrick murmured. A shudder flowed through him as he gazed around the silent woods. The darkness encompassed everything surrounding his immediate perimeter, which he could see clearly, as though an artificial light shone down upon him from overhead. He peered upward and was unsurprised to find that no such light existed. His eyelids drooped heavily, and he settled back down off his elbows onto his back. “Perhaps … perhaps just a brief slumber.”
7
An unsettling sound snapped Patrick out of his doze. His eyes opened to unfamiliar surroundings. He lay at the edge of a motionless lake. A thin layer of fog was suspended over its glassy black surface.
“Hello?” Patrick called, the sleepy slur vacating his speech before the second syllable was uttered. He scrambled to his feet and looked around. There was no one. “Where did you go?” he called as loudly as he could, but the words came out dull and muffled.
The distorted sound of a baby’s cries echoed across the still lake. Patrick turned to see a woman-like figure appearing to stand in the middle of the water. Long, straight, grey hair dangled below her waist. As he watched, her limbs writhed in unnatural rhythms like snakes attached to her torso. Her head seemed to swivel, disconnected from her shimmying neck. When her black eyes fell upon Patrick’s own, he struggled to breathe. The woman was tall, nude, and nearly all bone. Thin, grey skin was stretched across the rolling landscape of her ribcage, and Patrick could have convinced himself he could make out the beating of her heart beneath the flesh, even across the dark lake.
His eyes flicked upward to the night sky just long enough to note that there was no moon illuminating the abomination, that no stars shimmered overhead. She took a lurching step toward Patrick, and his hand went instinctively for his gun. Still gone. Her limbs continued to writhe and twirl in a slow fashion as she took painstaking, spasmodic steps through the water. The surface of the lake did not ripple with her footsteps, but the fog around her ankles swirled with each movement. Her limbs bore grotesquely abnormal proportionality, with hands nearly as long and thin as her forearms. Her joints were accentuated and bowed at irregular angles. As she turned and lurched toward him, he made out an infant tucked into the crook of one of her writhing elbows. It hung limply on its back, arms and legs dangling down. Its ashen face peered sightlessly at the black sky. Mouth agape, it sang a dismal tune. Like the hellish wails from before, the sound seemed to be in reverse, with impossible inhalations of air and utterances throughout, cadences falling then rising in uncanny asynchronous inflections, rather than rising and falling in ordinary intonation.
Patrick stumbled backward as the atrocity approached. When he stood and turned away from the lake, he saw a cabin standing in the nearby trees. It was the cabin! He looked around once more for his companions, but they were nowhere to be seen. The baby’s warped cries grew nearer. He rushed the front door and pounded on it in a frenzy.
“Let me in!” he cried. “I’ve come to get my friend! Let me in! There’s—”
The door creaked open at once, but no one stood on the other side. The potioner’s den was illuminated by flickering candles, as before, but the pots and mixing vials that had scattered the floors before were gone. Now only a table stood on the far edge of the room. Atop the table lay a body. Patrick could make out the torso and legs, but the upper chest and face were concealed by the cabin’s large support beam. His breath hitched in his chest, and the malformed fetus’s cries from outside either ceased or his brain refused to continue processing them.
Those legs atop the table … the familiar legs … exactly where he’d left Olivia so long ago. Even as he peered from across the den, he knew the body was lifeless. His heart sank into his gut, and his knees quivered, threatening to give out beneath him. He staggered forward minutely, breath still bated, exposing more and more of the body to his sight with each step. He saw the familiar small breasts—those breasts atop which he’d lain and embraced the simplistic bliss of manhood after making love to her beneath the stars—and they were still and lifeless. An involuntary groan escaped his open mouth as he side-stepped to reveal her neck. The groan grew into a choked wail as he sank to his knees. The sound was wrought with a mixture despair, disgust, and fury, and it was interrupted by a single dry-heave. Her chest tapered up and ended in a short stump where her long and alluring neck once stood. Her unblemished skin ended in tatters that suggested a frantic and tearing removal, rather than a precise excision of the head.
Patrick hitched a sputtering breath and released another sob that was cut short when something brushed across his ankle. He turned and scrambled backward into the cabin’s den as an enormous arachnid recoiled and hissed at his sudden movement. The spider drew back on its hind legs and waved at him. Its vertical maw open
ed and spewed forth a spray of toxic-smelling poison. Its limbs and torso were not hairy but seemed to be covered in a humanoid skin.
Patrick screamed and reached behind him for anything with which to protect himself, but, as he did, another beast descended from the rafters and seized his arm in six of its legs. It hoisted the boy off the ground and coiled its bottom toward him. Patrick braced himself for a stinger the size of his leg to pierce his gut, but the creature instead spurt a strand of thick, sticky webbing at the cabin’s floor. Its front two legs effortlessly dragged its body and its prey back toward the cabin’s ceiling, elongating its web as it crawled. Patrick writhed in its wretched grasp, but the spider was too powerful. It hissed at him as they reached the rafters and sprayed another jet of web at the far wall. Patrick kicked with his free legs at the beast’s belly, and it shrieked and turned its head toward the boy. When it did, Olivia’s face dropped down before Patrick’s own. Her sightless eyes peered through him. The fair skin of her neck blended into the creature’s bastardized pelt as though her head had been pasted on haphazardly.
Patrick recoiled violently and fell from the spider’s grasp. He fell halfway to the cabin’s floor before another beast snatched him out of the air. It turned the boy toward it, and Patrick was now staring into the dead eyes of his mother, her head appended to the creature just as Olivia’s was. Patrick’s consciousness wavered as his mind struggled to process the horror unfolding. His body went limp, and the spider dropped him into a spray of sticky webbing while its companions began to roll him into a tight coil.