Lost in the Never Woods

by Aiden Thomas

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “Ha ha.”

  Jordan suddenly leaned into the truck and hooked her arm around Wendy in a tight hug. Before she could do more than tense in response, Jordan released her and stepped back. Wendy wasn’t much of a hugger. They always felt awkward and forced. Sometime over the last five years, she’d forgotten how to do it. She got teased for it a lot. It was painfully obvious how uncomfortable physical touch made her, but Jordan never made fun of her. And if anyone was going to give her a hug, Wendy preferred it be her best friend.

  Jordan thumped her hand on the roof of Wendy’s truck. “Happy birthday, Legal Eagle!” she called before heading to her own car across the lot.

  Wendy waited until Jordan drove away, giving her friend one last wave as she disappeared around the corner.

  Slumping in her seat, Wendy let out a long breath. With the coast clear, she leaned over and placed the sketchbook on the passenger seat. Under it, the floor was littered with pieces of paper. Some folded, some crumpled up, some even torn into shreds. Yes, Wendy had started drawing pictures, but it was more than that.

  She couldn’t get herself to stop.

  It had all started innocently enough. She would be spacing out at the hospital and look down to see a pair of eyes drawn on the corner of a file. Sometimes she and Jordan would be at lunch and when she’d get distracted talking about the latest gossip from their friends, suddenly Wendy would find she had drawn a tree on the receipt she was supposed to be signing. It was happening more often, and Wendy never knew she was doing it until she looked down and there was the boy’s face looking up at her.

  Peter’s face. Or something close to it. She knew it was supposed to be him, but there was always something off. Something about the eyes that wasn’t coming out right.

  And they weren’t just trees. It was a tree. A specific tree.

  Wendy didn’t know what it was. She didn’t remember ever seeing anything like it before, and it almost looked otherworldly. While the sketches of Peter Pan were pretty realistic—much more so than Wendy had even known she was capable of doing—there was something off about the tree. Something wrong with how twisted and sharp it was. For some reason, it gave her goosebumps, but she didn’t know why.

  And she couldn’t explain why she kept doing it, or how she never knew she was doing it until it was already done. And now there were heaps of drawings on napkins, receipts, and even junk mail. She didn’t want anyone finding them, so she’d tossed them into her truck, but apparently Jordan had seen them.

  Wendy’s stomach twisted. She didn’t like that her brain and hands were capable of conjuring things up without her noticing. Wendy grabbed her hoodie and threw it over the drawings so she didn’t have to see them out of the corner of her eye. When she got home, she’d throw them into the trash can. The last thing she needed was another reason for people to think she was strange. That she was a bad omen, if not cursed.

  Wendy was starting to think they might be right.

  * * *

  Astoria was just a small outcropping of land surrounded by water, and the woods were a large inkblot of green spilled on a map, cutting them off from neighboring towns. Williamsport Road—or Dump Road, as the locals called it—twisted right through the woods to the far edge of town, where Wendy lived. Nestled against the hills, it was a road that only locals took. Several tire-worn logging roads splintered off from the asphalt street. They crisscrossed through the trees and looped back on themselves, and some just ended in the middle of the woods. Tourists constantly got lost on them and parents were always warning their kids to stay away, but they never listened. While she hated driving through the woods, especially at night, it got her home faster than the main streets.

  For as long as Wendy could remember, all the kids in Astoria had been warned to never go down those paths. They were told the woods were dangerous, and to stay out of them. Wendy’s parents had forbidden her and her brothers to explore the logging roads even though they ran right through the woods behind their house.

  After what happened, Wendy became a cautionary tale.

  The truck’s engine roared as Wendy pushed it as fast as she dared. The faster she went, the sooner she’d be out of the woods. The branches of overgrown trees and shrubs reached out, occasionally swiping the passenger window even though she hugged the yellow centerline. Her gray eyes, wide and alert, directed furtive glances at the trees. Her fingers, dry and cracked, flexed on the steering wheel with blanched knuckles. The keychain hanging from the ignition thumped rhythmically against the dashboard.

  She just wanted to get home, maybe read a book for a while, and then go to bed so her birthday would be over. Wendy glanced over at her bag on the passenger seat as it bounced with the movement of the truck. It had a blue ink stain on the bottom corner from a pen that had leaked and the adjustable buckle had turned from its once-shiny brass to a dull gray. But she loved the thing because her brothers had hand-picked it for her and had used their own money. It was the first and last birthday present they had ever gotten her.

  Stuffed inside the bag were more drawings of Peter Pan and the mysterious tree.

  It was a hot night and the cab was stuffy, but the air conditioner in her beat-up truck hadn’t worked since probably before she was born and Wendy didn’t want to roll down the windows. A trickle of sweat ran down her back as she leaned forward. Music would be a nice distraction. She would even take the whiny drone of one of the several country stations if it meant keeping her mind from wandering. She turned on the radio and a voice cut through the crackling speakers.

  “An AMBER Alert has been issued in Clatsop County for eight-year-old Ashley Ford, who went missing from her home at twelve forty-five p.m. today—”

  Wendy fumbled with the radio to change the station. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—she cared a lot—but she just didn’t think she could handle all of this. Not today, not now. Wendy could already feel the quaking in her chest and it was taking all of her concentration to keep it at bay.

  She just wanted to get out of the woods and into her house. Wendy punched another preset on her radio but the same voice came through the speakers again.

  “Ashley has blond hair and brown eyes. She was last seen in the front yard of her house wearing a white-and-yellow checkered shirt and blue pants. This comes in the wake of local boy Benjamin Lane being reported missing yesterday afternoon. Authorities haven’t commented on whether the disappearances are related to—”

  She spun the tuner dial again. The sound petered out before breaking into loud static. Wendy took a deep breath in an effort to steady herself and peered at the flickering backlight of the stereo.

  She knew every twist and turn of the road and could drive it with her eyes shut, so she gripped the wheel tightly with her left hand. She banged her right fist against the radio. This usually fixed most of the truck’s problems, but loud static continued to fill the cab.

  Wendy clenched her jaw and glanced up. She knew the wide bend was coming, but the loud crackling was putting her teeth on edge. She looked back at the radio, fingers spinning the dial, but not a single station would come in. She was about to press the AM button when all noise coming from the radio cut off, leaving her with just the steady rumbling of the truck’s engine.

  A branch slapped the passenger window.

  Wendy jolted so violently it hurt.

  A shadow dropped onto the hood of her truck, blocking her view. It was inky black and solid. Dark, crooked things like fingers dragged across the windshield. A terrible screech cut through her ears.

  Wendy screamed and the shadowy thing slipped off the hood just in time for her to see a mass in the middle of the road illuminated by her headlights. A shout ripped through Wendy’s throat as she slammed on the brakes. She gripped the steering wheel and her body tensed as she swerved to the right.

  The tires spun over loose dirt and the truck jerked to a stop between the road and the woods. Wendy stared out the front window into a tangle of branches. Her
sharp breaths robbed the cab of fresh air. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Her neck and temples pounded.

  Wendy cursed under her breath.

  She pulled her stiff fingers from where they’d cramped around the steering wheel. With trembling hands, she patted down her chest and thighs, making sure she was in one piece. Then she buried her face in them.

  How could she be so stupid? She’d let her nerves get the better of her. She knew never to look away from the road while driving, especially at night. Her dad was going to lose it! And what if she’d totaled her truck? Wendy could’ve gotten herself killed—or worse, someone else.

  Then she remembered the mass in the road.

  Wendy’s breath caught in her throat. It could be a dead animal, but she knew in her gut it wasn’t. She twisted in her seat and tried to see out the back window, but the red glow of her taillights hardly lit up the outline of whatever she had almost run over.

  Please don’t be a dead body.

  Wendy struggled to untangle herself from the seat belt. She tumbled out of her truck and immediately looked to the woods. She took a few steps back, watching them cautiously. But they were silent and unmoving in the heavy summer air. The only sounds were the faint breeze through the leaves and her own labored breaths.

  Tentatively, she peered at the front of her truck. It was pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of the road, the front bumper dangerously close to a thick tree, but still running. There was a dent in the hood from whatever had landed on it. The windshield was cracked—or, no, not cracked.

  Were those scratches?

  Wendy brushed her fingers over the lines. There were four of them parallel to one another in a long swipe. What could’ve done that? It hadn’t been a deer or a branch.

  And what had she almost hit in the road? Her head snapped to look back over her shoulder to the mass in the middle of the road. It still hadn’t moved.

  Wendy jogged toward the figure, trying to balance on the balls of her feet, so as to make as little sound as possible as she crept closer. She took each step slowly, willing her eyes to open wider, to adjust so she could see in the dark. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck to get a better look just as a cloud above shifted and a silvery glow was cast over the boy lying on his side.

  A shudder racked Wendy’s body and she ran forward, falling to her knees beside him. Sharp gravel pressed through her jeans.

  “Hello?” Her voice shook and her hands trembled, hovering over the boy, not knowing what to do. “Are you okay?”

  Are you alive?

  He let out a pained groan.

  She snatched her hands back. “Oh my God.” Wendy scrambled around to his other side to get a look at his face. She’d learned from her mom never to move someone you’d found unconscious.

  He was lying on his side with his arms curled into his chest, as if he were sleeping. He was clothed in some sort of material that wrapped around his shoulders and torso, hanging down to his knees. She couldn’t tell what it was in the dark, but it had rough, jagged edges and it smelled like the leaves she dug out of the gutters in spring.

  Bracing one hand on the ground, Wendy leaned in closer. Slowly and carefully, she reached out and pushed his wet hair back from his face, brushing her thumb over his forehead. There was something about the way his freckles ran across his nose and under his closed eyes that was familiar …

  Before she could work it out, a groan sounded deep in the boy’s chest. He rolled onto his back as his eyes opened and focused on hers.

  Wendy’s natural inclination was to shrink back, but she couldn’t move.

  His eyes were astonishing. A deep shade of cobalt with crystalline blue starbursts exploding around his pupils.

  She knew those eyes. They were the same ones she’d drawn over and over again but could never get right. But that was impossible. It couldn’t be—

  “Wendy?” the boy breathed, the smell of sweet grass brushing across her face.

  Wendy scrambled back from him. At the same time, the boy’s cosmos eyes rolled back and fell closed again.

  Wendy clamped her hand over her mouth.

  He was older than the boy from her drawings. His face wasn’t as round and his cheeks weren’t as full as in the dozens of sketches that littered her car, but there was something about the slope of his nose and the curve of his chin that she recognized.

  Breaths shook her shoulders and escaped through her nose. How did he know her name? Her heart thrashed against her ribs like a wild animal. She couldn’t recognize him. There was no possible way that the boy she was looking at was the same boy from her drawings.

  Peter Pan was not real. He was just a story her mother had made up. She was just freaking out and her mind was playing tricks on her. She couldn’t possibly trust what her gut was telling her.

  Even though every fiber of her being screamed to her that it was him.

  It didn’t make any sense. Her imagination was getting the better of her. She needed to get him help.

  Wendy tried to focus and ignore her swimming head. She dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen was blurry and, in the back of her mind, she realized her eyes were watering, but she was able to call 9-1-1.

  As soon as the ringing stopped, before the dispatcher could say a word, Wendy choked out, “Help!”

  CHAPTER 2

  Peter

  “What’s your name, miss?”

  “Wendy Darling,” she said, leaning to the side, trying to see the still-unconscious boy as the other paramedics put him on a stretcher.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m a mile from my house, sitting here with you.” She jerked her hand back as he tried to feel the pulse at her wrist.

  “I’m Dallas. I’m a paramedic.”

  Wendy glanced at the shiny badge on his navy uniform, the embroidered patch on his sleeve that read ASTORIA, OREGON FIRE DEPARTMENT—PARAMEDIC. “I can see that.”

  “I’m just going to do a couple of tests to make sure you’re all right,” he continued. After she had called 9-1-1, the fire department arrived on scene, closely followed by an ambulance. They went right to the boy before taking her aside to ask questions.

  “I’m fine, Dallas the Paramedic,” she said, pushing the penlight he was holding out of her face. With all the volunteering she did at the hospital, not to mention her mom working in the ER, Wendy knew all of the emergency medical service workers in Astoria, Oregon. Dallas the Paramedic was new. Probably still doing his volunteer hours, if she had to guess, based on how textbook his questions were.

  “Does anything hurt?”

  “Just my butt from sitting on the side of the road,” she told him, again craning her neck to watch the ambulance. The gurney made loud clacking noises as the paramedics loaded the boy in. Wendy wanted to yell at them to be more careful.

  “Did you hit your head in the accident at all?”

  “It wasn’t an accident. I’m fine, my truck is fine.” She sucked in a deep breath. “There was no accident.”

  “Okay, miss,” he said, standing up and putting his stethoscope back into his bag. The doors to the ambulance slammed shut.

  They were taking him away. Wendy felt a swell of panic. She needed to see him, needed to talk to him, needed to find out who he was. She needed to prove to herself that he wasn’t Peter Pan, just a boy. A very lost boy who had somehow ended up in the middle of the road.

  “I want to go to the hospital,” Wendy blurted out.

  Dallas blinked. “What?”

  “The hospital. I want to go. Can I follow? Like I said, my truck is fine, it’s just on the side of the road.” The tugging need to follow him only grew more persistent as the ambulance started to pull away.

  Dallas frowned. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to drive if you think you need to go to the hospital to get checked out—”

  Frustration flared. “No—my mom works there. I want to see my mom; she’s a nurse,” she told him. The lights of
the ambulance disappeared around the bend.

  “Oh.” He blinked again. “All right.” He hesitated and looked back to his sergeant, who was at the fire engine, talking on the radio. “Hey, Marshall,” Dallas called. “Tell the officers to meet EMS at the hospital.”

  Officers. Great. She’d have to talk to the police. The hairs on her arms stood on end and she could feel sweat seeping through her shirt.

  Dallas looked back at Wendy, expression pinched. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

  Wendy looked him straight in the eye. “I have all of my mental faculties and am refusing care and transport,” she recited.

  His eyebrows drew together, but after a moment, he sighed and pulled out his metal clipboard. “Sign here acknowledging that you—” Wendy whipped it out of his hand and quickly scrawled her name on the line before shoving it back at him. He fumbled to grab hold of it again.

  Dallas squinted at her license before holding it out to her. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Wendy jogged back to her truck. She revved up the engine, backed out of the tangle of branches, and headed for town. The woods disappeared behind her, fading into the night.

  * * *

  Wendy punched in the code to slip into the emergency room through the side door in the waiting room. The ER was small and outdated in shades of blue and green. The plastic covers on the terrible fluorescent lights were painted blue with clouds, as if that somehow softened the harsh glow. The nurses’ station was placed in the middle, and the six emergency rooms surrounded it in a U-shaped ring. Drapes and sliding glass doors pulled closed around them. She walked straight up to one of the hand sanitizer dispensers attached to a wall, put exactly three pumps into her hands, and rubbed them together vigorously. It made the cracks in her fingers sting.