by Ledger,John
Somehow Janey’s painfully worried look summoned Adrano’s courage.
“GUYS!” he hollered as powerfully as his slim 5’7” frame would allow.
The Clays ceased their squabbling and turned to him as one.
“Marly?” he said.
They trekked back over the rise and down the steep slope.
“Where the hell is she?” Adrano said.
He was standing right where she had been – to the left of the sycamore – and from that spot she was nowhere in sight.
“MARLY!” Bryce yelled. The woods damped the echoes instantly. He yelled again. “Hey MARLY! Where are you?”
Not that adding her soft voice helped much, but Janey chipped in and yelled for her too. So did Adrano. No one was getting an answer.
“I bet she caught her breath and headed back home,” Bree said. “She’s smarter than I thought.”
“She would have had to walk,” Janey said. “I drove us here.”
They looked around.
“Shit,” Bryce said. “Well, there goes morel day. What a freakin’ waste.”
“It’s not a waste yet,” Bree shot back. “Won’t be unless you decide we have to go looking around for her.”
Bryce’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Then I guess it’s officially a waste,” he said. “Here’s the keys. Me and Adrano will catch a ride home with Janey and Marly.”
Bree guffawed. “Are you kidding?” she said, and laughed again. “There’s no way you’re all going to fit into that thing of hers!”
She wasn’t making any friends, not that she typically worried too much about her so-called rough edges.
“We’re going to look for her,” Bryce said. “You want the keys or not?”
Bree seemed disgusted at herself when she finally said, “Screw it. It’s your wasted time. My schedule’s open, bro.”
The search didn’t take all that long.
Janey heard the hollering first. Weak, distant, terribly frightened. Distress calls. Every few seconds.
“Help.” “Anyone.” “This way.” “Please.” “Janey?”
“I heard my name!”
“What?” Bryce said. The others were crunching leaves so he turned and stopped them.
“Pleeeeeeease!”
They all heard that.
“Marly?”
“Hellllllp …!”
There was renewed energy in that near-yet-somehow far voice.
“Spread out,” Bryce said to the others. “Don’t get lost.”
“This stuff is dense already,” Adrano said, looking around at the prematurely greened-out honeysuckle. “Pick one.”
“Jay-NEEEEE!”
“This way!” Janey said. “I had my hand cupped over my ear and it sounded loudest this way!”
They all followed her with varying degrees of uncertainty and/or reluctance.
They found their target quite soon.
Marly was ragged and bloody with scratches from pushing her way through the thick undergrowth, but that obvious surface damage was nothing. It was the look in her nearly blank eyes that said it all. As her four companions – now scratched up pretty well too – emerged into the odd little grotto they saw her pressed against a dark gray limestone wall at the back of a sort of half-cave hollowed out of the surrounding hillside.
“What the heck, Marly?” Janey said. “What are you doing …?”
She trailed off because Marly was slowly raising one arm. She ended up stopping with it canted downward at an angle as she pointed a trembling finger at the little pond that lay still before her, its nearest edge not four feet away from the tips of the boots that she was currently heel-grinding against the stone wall at her back.
She was on a little crescent of dark brown dirt about twice as long as it was wide, and from the look of things the only way she could have gotten there without getting wet (she didn’t appear to be wet) was to have stepped across the eight or nine rocks that projected up through the perhaps thirty foot wide pond’s surface in a staggered pattern along the edge of the natural-looking vertical limestone rise.
“What is it?” Bryce said, moving ahead of the rest and reaching the other edge of the pond. “Something in the pond?”
When she didn’t respond – and as the others were moving up beside him – he looked over at Marly again. She was shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “It IS the pond.”
There was an odd silence that lasted for a few long seconds before Bree broke it with a howl.
“Oh my god!” she said, still laughing. “Half an hour in the woods and she went nuts.”
Bryce looked down at the remarkably clear water. So did Janey.
Adrano was staring at Marly, whose arm was still rigidly pointing.
“What do you mean?” he hollered across at her. “What’s the pond?”
The question seemed to bring Marly back to at least partial awareness; she lowered her arm at last and met Adrano’s gaze.
“I saw it,” she said. “I saw it, Adrano. I saw it…eat…a dragonfly.”
Adrano didn’t appear to trust his ears. “You saw…the pond…eat a dragonfly?”
“YES!”
“Bitch, I don’t know what kind of diet pills you’re on but that’s plain old runoff,” Bree said. “Comes right down that hillside and puddles up here. Look, it’s not even four feet deep in the middle!”
“Seems like it should be…dirtier,” Adrano said, gazing down into it as the Clay sibs were doing.
“Not here,” Bryce said. “You’re thinking of mud puddles. This is as clean as it gets.”
“All right,” Bree said, turning her focus back on Marly. “Party’s over. All eyes are on you. Now get your ass – singular, I guess – over here before you totally self-up the entire day for all of us.”
“I can’t,” Marly said. “It won’t let me.”
“That’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Bree said, “and I’ve lived with Bryce for twenty plus years so just imagine how monumentally stupid it must truly be.”
“Get someone!” Marly insisted. “Scientists. Police. The Army!”
Torn equally between extremes of amusement and frustration, Bree gave in momentarily to the absurdity of the moment. She eyed the pond.
“Dear god,” she said. “You’re absolutely one of a kind.”
She kicked off her shoes and set to stripping off her clothes. Her bodybuilder physique was halfway between appealing and intimidating, depending on the observer.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bryce asked.
“Going for a swim,” Bree said. “Looks great.”
“Are you kidding me?” Adrano said.
“Polar Bear Club,” Bryce said, shaking his head. “Both of us, but I draw the line at dirty ponds in the woods that are no deeper than wading pools.”
“My brother the wimp,” Bree said, grinning fiercely as she unsnapped her bra. “No REAL sense of adventure. Scared of a little swimmin’ hole. Besides, it’s as clear as spring water.”
“Hey!” her brother said. “How about stopping at the underwear this time?”
She smiled wickedly. “Whatever you say, Johnny Puritan,” she said, re-snapping. “You’re no fun.”
She glanced down at Adrano’s pants and couldn’t miss the bulge.
“I’d break you in half kid,” she said. “Work out a little, huh?”
She backed up and set herself.
“PLEASE DON’T!”
Marly was crying.
“You’ve got to get help,” she hollered. “Trust me. It’s alive. Don’t touch it!”
Janey and Adrano both looked up to Bryce.
“We ought to go get her,” Janey said.
“You’re not up to the manpower requirements,” Bryce said. “Come on, Adrano.”
Bree had gone from cranked-up crouch to pissed-off slouch. “Fine,” she said, “but don’t blame me if you guys get splashed.”
Adrano was just about to hop over to the firs
t foot-sized stone when he paused and turned to face Bree. Bryce turned that way too.
“You splash these clothes and you and dear mother will be paying to dry clean or replace them,” Bryce told her. “And if you think I’m kidding I suggest you think about it a minute.”
She appeared to do just that…and reluctantly concede. Adrano, meanwhile, hopped over to the first stone and – the second being fairly near it – was now perched on them and preparing to make a jump to the third.
“You win,” Bree said. “I’ll give you three minutes.” She looked at her watch. “Good thing this little baby is waterproof,” she muttered softly to herself.
She didn’t give three minutes. She gave about fifteen more seconds, or until about the point where her brother and his precious work clothes were more or less straddling stones way out in the middle of the pond. Adrano was about to leap off onto the little dirt beach upon which Marly had so oddly stranded herself.
Perfect.
A well-aimed shot would drench her brother but leave Adrano – who was cute and likeable, if a lot shorter and wirier than Bree tended to fancy – more or less out of splash range.
She set herself again.
“One precision splash coming right up,” she said in very low voice.
She hurtled forward and dove, aiming her rock-hard form as accurately as she could.
Right on target.
She disappeared beneath the surface.
But there was no splash.
And she never came back up.
The sound had been odd: Not like water, more like…jelly?
Janey and Marly both saw her hit the strange surface, saw it part and ripple like crystal clear gelatin moving in slow motion, saw Bree vanish into the undulating mass.
But only poor Janey had been near enough to clearly witness – in abject horror –Bree’s body completely dissolving in a manner of about three seconds. Not even Bree’s bones survived the scourging acid-like effect of the presumed water.
Janey shrieked, fell back, tripped, and hit the back of her head against a protruding root. She twitched sharply and then fell motionless as Adrano finished his landing on the little brown island-back of the cave hollow and spun around to see what was happening. Bryce pivoted right where he was, but in doing so he lost his footing and his right “morel hunting high top” plunged into the pond.
What happened next was so repulsively shocking that it sent Adrano slamming back into the wall – and Marly – with such force that he knocked the wind out of himself. Attempting to gasp in air with momentarily paralyzed lungs, he watched helplessly as his friend began to tip oddly and awkwardly even farther over to the right.
Bryce’s eyes were growing wide. His lips parted and he let out a slow-starting but quickly building scream as the tilt pulled his other foot off the rocky perch.
Bryce was melting down into the pond like a candle.
He was screaming the whole way down, at least until the instant dissolution of his body reached his mid-torso and his lungs opened at their bottoms. Then the rest of him whistled and gurgled away until only the curly blond hair covered dome of his upper skull, complete with still-wide eyes, bobbed on the surface. Then that too was pulled down and vanished.
Adrano was beyond fear. Marly too. Janey still lay motionless some twenty feet from the far shore of the monstrous pond.
It was quite a while before either Adrano or Marly managed to get a word out, let alone a coherent sentence. Twenty minutes, probably considerably more. The watch gleaming at the bottom of the pond could probably have given them the correct time if either had been foolish enough to risk getting in the position required to get a good look at its face.
“Her watch,” Adrano said dully at last.
“What?” Marly had nearly fallen asleep standing up with Adrano’s body pressed against hers.
“It didn’t dissolve her watch.” He gave it a moment’s thought. “Maybe it couldn’t.”
“Great,” Marly said in a voice nearly drained of hope. “If only we were made of metal too.”
“I can’t believe we all left our phones in the car so we wouldn’t lose them out here.”
“Can’t believe it?” Marly said. “Wasn’t it your idea?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, it kinda does.”
Adrano looked over at Janey, still motionless and lying at just the right angle for him to see that her soft mid-length caramel hair was uncharacteristically dark behind her elven right ear.
“Shit,” he said, “if she’s dead too we are so screwed.”
He looked up and saw the curving edge where the hollow met the hill slope over their heads. Though the peak was probably no more than twelve feet over his head, it may as well have been a mile up; they were trapped in here on all sides – by limestone, gravity, and a terribly, impossibly real carnivorous liquid menace – until poor Janey revived and got them help or they became brave and/or desperate enough to risk traversing the stones.
Speaking of the stepping stones, there were odd ripples over by them now.
One was sinking slowly beneath the flawlessly clear gel.
“Oh crap,” Adrano said softly. “It’s cutting off our way out.”
“Oh no!” Marly yelped.
“We have to go!”
“No! I can’t. We can’t.”
The waves stopped. Only one stone had sunk and it was still possible (though now significantly less likely) that the two of them might be able to retrace their paths across to safety. At least Adrano probably could. The odds were far worse for Marly.
Both of them realized this at about the same time.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I can get back across.”
“What if it reaches up and grabs you?”
“It’s given no hint that it could do that.”
“It didn’t give us hints about the other things it can do either. Maybe it’s just bluffing. Maybe it wants us to try. What if it’s clever enough to try to get us all? Catch you trying to cross back over it and strand me here until I die or feed myself to it?”
“It’s going to have a hard time getting hold of Janey unless it can climb up and crawl around,” Adrano said. “And if it could do that, then why mess around? We were all close enough to its edge at first that it could have lunged out and pulled every single one of us in if it was fast enough.”
“It’s left me alone back here.”
“Yeah,” Adrano said. “Maybe as bait to catch the rest of us.” Seeing the look of horror he was getting, he quickly changed subjects. “How did you end up here in the first place?”
Marly looked sheepish.
“Hey, unless another stone or two starts to sink I’m in no hurry,” Adrano said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I had kind of caught up with you guys, at least enough to hear Bryce and Bree arguing over the top of the hill. I felt kind of…unwanted…so I said screw it and decided to head back to the car. I guess I got turned around because it all looks the same in here. I came across this pond and thought it was really neat, and I saw something shiny over here, so I risked getting wet to come across the rocks and pick it up. I figured it was a coin because it was silvery, but …”
She held it up. Painted over by now with sticky dried blood from the grooves its jagged edges had sawed into Marly’s rigidly clamped hand, the thin piece of shell-curved material felt ridiculously light, almost weightless, as Adrano pried it loose and held it up to look at it in the already yellowing afternoon light. The convex side featured only blood but the other also had blackened streaks like tapering tiger stripes that sort of looked to have been spray-painted on.
“Do you think it has anything to do with…that?” Adrano said.
“I don’t know. I just wish I hadn’t noticed it.”
“Yeah, that makes all of us. This side looks…I don’t know…burned? Like black scorch marks. Shit, maybe it’s from space? I mean I don’t see any crater around here
…”
Marly didn’t respond, but she did speak up again a few seconds later.
“Right after I picked that up,” she said emotionlessly, “I saw the dragonfly drop down and land on the surface. It was there for a second and then…then…the surface dented downwards and just sucked it in. And as soon as it went under I saw it kind of…dissolve ...”
She looked about half-catatonic again. Adrano nudged her hard and she shook out of it.
“I…tried to keep everyone else back. I really did. I warned you what I saw. No one believed me. Nobody listened. You thought I was just desperate for attention!”
“It’s not your fault, Marly. Bree shouldn’t have been so damn eager to prove her…womanhood or whatever. Bryce and I shouldn’t have figured you’d just freaked out. We’re all to blame in one way or another.”
“Except Janey.”
“Yeah, except Janey. Who may need our help too, you know? She may be hemorrhaging to death over there while we feel sorry for ourselves here.”
They looked over at her. She was still in exactly the same spot where she’d fallen. The dark patch of hair had expanded.
“What are you saying?” Adrano said, looking her in the eyes for the first time in a long while.
“I’m saying we’ve gotta try to get across while we can. For her, if not ourselves. No one can hear us and hardly anyone ever comes through Weathers Woods. And if we don’t hurry and make a move …”
He glanced down out of sheer instinct; sure enough, the water was rippling again. And now another stone was sinking. Once it was underneath the horrible liquid there’d be a daunting five foot gap to jump.
“We’ve gotta do it,” he said. “We have to try to get across now.”
“Oh my god,” Marly said, following Adrano’s gaze down to the sinking stone. “That one’s going too!”
“Like I said, it’s now or never. Come on.”
He had to drag hard on her arms to get her to take one step, and even once that was forced she was still pulling back.