by Brian Harmon
And the ground… The terrain was rockier, more naked, with fewer weeds and brush.
Cordelia told him that he’d passed the third veil, suggesting that he’d already begun his descent into the real triangle. Was he still in that place? Or worse, had he descended even deeper into the anomaly?
His heart beginning to thump in his chest, Eric turned around and saw her. She was sitting on the bare ground, her knees drawn up to her chin. She hadn’t been there a moment ago, he was certain of that, but here she was, a young woman with auburn-colored hair, sobbing quietly in the middle of a haunted forest.
He stared at her for a moment. He was more than smart enough to realize that something wasn’t right, and yet he found himself moving toward this person, his heart aching for her, even as it continued to pound with perfectly justified fright.
Get out of there! the sensible part of his mind screamed.
It didn’t make any sense that this person should be here. He was way out in the woods, deep in the triangle, where the trees had begun to turn the color of blood. This was a wrong sort of place.
And she was naked.
Was she naked when he first saw her? He didn’t think she was.
Her bare back was turned to him. She was frightfully thin. He could see the bones of her spine and ribs and shoulder blades. He could see where her pelvis pushed out from her hips.
He was standing right behind her, with no recollection of how he came to be so close. He was reaching out to her, about to place his hand on her shoulder, when it occurred to him that she was covered in blood.
She didn’t turn around. Not exactly. Instead, it was as if she turned herself inside-out. Her face, a shrieking, skeletal thing with a jagged beak where its mouth should have been and bristling clusters of horns or teeth or claws where its eyes should have been, erupted from between the woman’s shoulder blades and flew at him. In the split second it took for him to snatch his hand back and run, the woman snapped herself completely around and was transformed into a terrible monstrosity of pale flesh wrapped around a vaguely human-shaped pile of bones.
Or that was about as close as Eric could come to describing the thing that now chased him through this red forest. That split-second was all he’d given himself to observe it. And seeing as how he was now far too busy dodging trees at top speed and screaming like a naked coed in an eighties horror movie to turn around and take another look, this description was going to have to suffice. In fact, it wasn’t until later that he would even piece together what little he’d seen of the monster into this imprecise definition of the latest entry into his ever-growing collection of things that had scared the crap out of him.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t have to. The thing’s shrieks were almost deafening. It sounded like it was right at the back of his neck no matter how many trees he darted around in his desperate flight.
If he survived this, he had no intention of ever entering any woods, anywhere, ever again. If he never saw another tree, he was fairly sure he’d be perfectly happy for the remainder of his life.
Of course, it hadn’t exactly been his choice to come here. And a freaky, beaked skeleton-lady could probably just as easily chase him through city alleyways, across deserts or anywhere else he might find to peacefully live his life with his newfound phobia of flora. But he couldn’t think about that right now. Right now, all he could do was run.
He wove through the trees, struggling to go faster, praying he wouldn’t trip and fall as the thing shrieked at his back, close enough for him to feel its foul breath blowing across his neck.
Ahead of him, the trees thinned a little and the ground grew rockier, making it harder to run without turning an ankle and falling. Convinced that he couldn’t slow down without giving himself to the monster at his heels, he pushed forward.
He stumbled. His heart skittered in his chest. He cried out in panic. Somehow, he kept his balance. But then he tripped. He fell. He rolled across the rocky ground, the stones gouging him, bruising him.
Then the thing was on him. Its shrieks felt like needles in his ears, filling his head with pain.
Something seized his hair, yanking at it as if it meant to tear away his scalp.
Eric didn’t dare open his eyes for fear that the she-demon would pluck them out. He couldn’t have said precisely why he thought she might pluck out his eyes. It just seemed like the sort of thing a crazed, beak-faced skeleton-woman would do, he supposed. Later he’d have time to ponder the rationality of it. For now, he simply struggled to push his spectral attacker away and to keep his eyes squeezed tightly closed and his face turned away from the sound of snapping jaws and ear-splitting shrieks.
But this woman didn’t pluck out his eyes. She didn’t peel the flesh from his skull. She didn’t even bite off his nose. Her voice, like the maddening wail of a banshee, bore into his brain. He actually felt it burrowing into his mind, wriggling its way into his thoughts.
Like flashes of disjointed film flickering across a screen, random memories fired in his head. He glimpsed brief, mundane moments of his life. In rapid-fire, he recalled standing in front of his classroom, lying in bed next to Karen, playing with his toys in his room as a child and watching horror movies on the couch with Paul as a teenager. He recalled shoveling snow, driving his car, writing out a check, sitting in a teacher’s meeting, doing his homework and taking a shower, all in the same thought.
Pain ripped through his head, as if his very brain were about to explode. He cried out in agony, but it only went on, the memories blurring together like images on a high-speed newsreel.
Why wouldn’t it stop?
Then the memories took on a different form. Somewhere in the chaos of his invaded mind, something took shape. Images began to form independently of the individual memories. Shapes overlapped, colors blended, forming something new, something he couldn’t quite grasp through the maddening pain.
Don’t let it take me!
Each word was like a tiny bomb going off inside his head, filling him with unrelenting agony.
Then it was over.
Just like that, the shrieking had stopped. The pain had stopped. He lay there, his mouth still wide open even as his final scream faded in his throat.
All was quiet except for the ringing in his ears…and the weeping…
Eric sat up. Sitting beneath a tree not ten paces away was the weeping woman. She no longer looked like a bag of bones. She no longer had a massive, toothy beak, or horned eyes. She wasn’t bloody. She wasn’t even naked. She wore a dirty, white dress that was soaked and clinging to her frail body.
He scrambled to his feet and backed away from the woman before she could transform again, but she remained where she was, as if she didn’t even know he was there.
He studied her as he moved away. Although she’d been bloody for a moment, she wasn’t the bloody woman who filled his head with those disturbing visions. That woman had black hair, not auburn. And this encounter felt nothing like those other two.
This was the woman whose sobs he’d heard rising from the lake. Was she one of the drowning victims Pete mentioned? Was that why she looked drenched?
It was impossible to know for sure.
Both women seemed to be trying to tell him something. The bloody woman used terrifying, but vividly clear visions. Whatever it was he’d just experienced was completely different. He hadn’t understood any of it, except those five words that had erupted in his brain like psychic grenades. Don’t let it take me! They were the same words that he heard in his dream, but it wasn’t the same voice. He couldn’t recall exactly what either of the voices had sounded like, but he was sure they were different.
Don’t let what take them?
He stared at the woman who sat curled and weeping on the forest floor, who had turned herself inside-out and had chased him down just to reach into his brain with her freaky banshee screams to deliver a message he couldn’t decipher. She looked so pitiful there, so fragile. He could almost believe that it had all
been in his head, that she wasn’t really a shrieking monster.
Almost.
His ears were still ringing. His body still ached from tumbling down that rocky hill.
Cordelia had warned him that what came next would test him to his very limits. Was this what she’d meant? It was an awful ordeal, but he supposed it could have been much worse.
Finally, when he’d put enough distance between them that the trees began to shield her from his view, he turned and fled.
By some miracle, the weeping woman let him go.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I hate that place,” decided Isabelle.
“Not loving it myself,” agreed Eric, still glancing around at the surrounding forest, the phone gripped too-tightly in his clenched hand, his heart still thumping from the encounter with the weeping woman. “Scenery’s not bad, I guess, but the locals are all freaking nuts.”
She sighed loudly. Or maybe it was a quiet groan. He couldn’t quite tell. “It’s a total mess,” she said. “I can barely concentrate through all that mist.”
“Mist?”
She was quiet for a moment, considering what she’d said. “The energy,” she explained. “I’m not sure why I called it mist.”
Eric looked around. “Maybe they’re the same thing.”
“I never thought of it that way, but maybe.”
The mist was still there. He could see it lingering in the distance, just a light haze hanging in the air. It was all around him, permeating the entire area.
But the trees had turned gray again. That was good. He guessed.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Isabelle didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be considering it. “I’ll be fine, I’m sure. But it really sucks. I’ve never felt this miserable in all the time I’ve been trapped in this state.”
“I’ve definitely never seen you like this,” he admitted. “You’re really worrying me.”
“You’re sweet. But I’m sure it can’t hurt me. It’s just… You know. Uncomfortable.”
But Eric wasn’t ready to let it go. “Maybe we should leave for a little while. Give you a break.”
“We don’t have time for that.”
“We’ll make time.”
“Focus on what’s important,” Isabelle insisted. “Like that crazy, screaming woman.”
He supposed she was right. And he did want to know what was up with that. “What was that back there?” he asked. “Who was she?”
“Another spirit,” she replied. “Like the bloody woman.”
“A lot like the bloody woman. But it wasn’t the same bloody woman.”
“Completely different,” she agreed. “It definitely wasn’t the same ghost.”
“She wasn’t bloody the whole time,” he recalled. “Only for a second or two, I think.”
“I don’t think it’s uncommon for ghosts to be bloody. They all died, after all.”
“They did, didn’t they?”
“Holly even said there was blood in the lake.”
Eric remembered the weeping woman’s drenched and filthy white dress. Had she been killed in the lake? Had she died violently?
“I think most spirits who died traumatically are pretty messed up. It only make sense.”
It did. Especially when they seemed to be trapped at the scene of their death.
“That woman felt…I don’t know. Broken, I guess. There were so many emotions and no control.”
“You actually got all that from a whole lot of shrieking in my ears?”
“I felt her in that energy. She was all intense emotions. Desperation. Anguish. It was scary.”
“So what was the point?”
“Another message. But I couldn’t tell what it was. It was way too chaotic.”
Chaotic was definitely one way to put it, Eric thought. The woman didn’t physically harm him. She didn’t bite or claw. She didn’t strike him. She’d attacked him only with her voice. And yet that, alone, had been enough to invade his mind. He recalled feeling as if her agonizing shrieks were burrowing into his brain. And he recalled the way she’d riffled through his memories.
“I felt all that, too,” agreed Isabelle, reading his thoughts. “Like she was incapable of telling you what she wanted to say, so she tried to construct it inside your head, using your existing memories to build something new. But it was way too invasive. Your mind rejected her. I can’t imagine anybody not rejecting that kind of violation.”
It was invasive. The very memory was uncomfortable. “It’s over now,” he decided. “We’ll just have to hope she wasn’t trying to tell us anything important.”
“I guess so…”
Eric stopped. The forest around him had suddenly darkened again. A great shadow seemed to pass over the area, as if something enormous had just passed overhead, but the sky remained mostly clear. Only a few more clouds had crept in since he last glanced up.
A queer terror gripped him as his eyes swept the forest. He couldn’t see anything and yet he felt certain that something was there, just beyond his ability to see, something terrifying beyond imagining.
He couldn’t think. His mind was too crowded with that overwhelming fear. Deep down, a part of him wanted to run away, as fast as he could go, to seek out the deepest and darkest place he could find. But he couldn’t even make himself turn around.
Was it only his torturous imagination, or did he feel something ancient and primal upon the air?
But then it was gone again. In an instant, the woods were just as they’d been before. He turned in a slow circle, scanning his surroundings, but there was nothing there.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
“I felt you feel it. And I felt something in the energy. Like something moving inside the energy.”
“Any point in asking what it means?”
“I have no idea. But it makes me feel sick.”
“Sick?”
“It’s like being on a roller coaster. Not in any good way, either. It’s really not fun.”
Eric didn’t like it. He wished he could get her out of there. It wasn’t good for her, he was sure of it, but he was stuck there until they figured out how to stop…whatever it was they were there to stop.
A noise called out to him and he paused. “Did you hear that?”
“Was that the cat again?”
“I thought it was.”
The sound came again. An impatient mewl from somewhere in front of him and to his right. Definitely a cat, and probably the same one.
“Might as well follow it,” said Isabelle. “Maybe it’ll speed this whole thing up a little.”
“I’m not sure how much I trust the creepy little furball,” he said, but she was right, as usual. He disconnected the call and followed the sound of the cat’s voice as it led him through the trees.
It was loud enough to be coming from only a short distance away, and yet he could never seem to see it no matter where he looked. It was as if the silly creature had turned invisible. Each time it called out, it seemed to be in a different place, forcing him to zigzag through the forest in a seemingly pointless manner. He was just beginning to think the little monster was just screwing with him when the crying stopped completely. Eric halted and looked around, searching the forest floor in every direction. Then a long, mournful moan called out from just above him and he lifted his head, startled, to see the fluffy beast stretched out on a tree branch overhead, its big eyes fixed on him.
When he first encountered it, he’d called it a “spooky cat.” And the name still seemed fitting. Sitting there where it was, its huge eyes fixed on him, looking almost amused, it was eerily reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He could almost imagine it saying, “We’re all mad here, Eric,” and he barely held back a shudder at the thought.
The creature made a quick series of noises in its throat and twitched its tail at him.
“I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me,” he told it.
Eric trudged after the creature in hope that, if nothing else at all, it would at least lead him back toward civilization. And perhaps it already had. He could no longer see that curious haze in the air and the forest sounds had returned to normal, along with the natural color of the trees.
Before he could consider it further, his cell phone rang again.
“Tell me everything that’s happened,” said Paul.
Eric cocked his head, surprised. “Rehearsal finally over?”
“It is. Finally. The whole thing was a total cluster. They were having some sort of stupid argument over the songs…or the order of the songs, or…something. Idiotic. The whole thing. Just went on and on. We sat there forever. Now we’re stuck at the rehearsal dinner at the groom’s parents’ place.”
“Well that sounds like an improvement, at least.”
“Not really. I don’t think I care much for these people. They’re snobby. And we spent so long at the church that dinner was late. Chicken was cold. They already ran out of beer. Nothing left but wine. I hate weddings.”
“Your life is pure misery,” agreed Eric.
“I do suffer so,” moaned Paul.
“Constant sorrow, I know. So the rehearsal dinner’s done?”
“Yep.”
“What’re you doing now?”
“Just sitting here. Me and Kevin. Waiting to go back to the hotel.”
Eric heard Kevin in the background agreeing that the situation was indeed unentertaining and that he was ready to be done for the night. His wording, however, was considerably more to-the-point: “This sucks.”
“Almost everyone else is gone. But Monica’s just standing around over there with her mom and a bunch of other women, going on and on about whatever it is women can go on about for hours on end and never get bored. Apparently, we get to stick around as long as possible for some stupid reason. Like we’re not going to spend all day tomorrow with these people, too…”