Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2)

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Meanwhile, Jake had switched on his own phone, and was messing around once more with the GPS app we'd used in tracking down Elizabeth. He refreshed it a few times but it seemed to malfunction, not giving him any new data to work with. Either she'd ditched the phone or she'd gotten wise and shut it off.

  We were coming up on the Mackinac Bridge. To either side of it the Straits of Mackinac glistened in the feeble moonlight. There was still rain in the air; I could smell it as I cracked my window to light up, but things had largely dried out for the time being. The bridge was empty, save for a couple of cars a mile or two ahead. In one of the pamphlets I'd read on my first trip up, I'd learned that the bridge was nearly five miles long—“The nineteenth largest bridge in the world!” the pamphlet had declared with a bit more enthusiasm than was appropriate for the nineteenth place in anything—but as we started onto it, it seemed more like a hundred.

  I was thinking about the drive ahead, whether we'd encounter the Occupant again in the almost four hours of travel time yet ahead of us, when I ashed my cigarette and chanced a look upward, at the bluish lights that were fixed to the bridge's cables. Atop one of the towers, I spied something—someone—standing in stark contrast to the black sky.

  Jake saw it too, and the sight damn near knocked the sense from him. “Is that—?”

  I punched it, averting my gaze and simply focusing on the road. “Don't look. Don't let it mess with you.”

  My headlights brought up some strange shadows as I began speeding well over the bridge's posted 45 MPH, almost as though the figure standing atop the bridge's tower was casting a long shade across its length. I looked to the nicotine to steady me, but there was no escaping the jitteriness and unease that coursed through me at the sight of her. We whipped past what I took to be the half-way point in no time at all, and in the opposite lane I thought I glimpsed a lone pedestrian shambling towards us.

  I looked away, kept moving.

  You're hallucinating this. It's gotten into your head, man. That's all. It wants to frighten you, to trip you up. Don't give it that power.

  But I couldn't help it. I recalled what the damned thing had said to me, its odious, muffled voice coming through my windshield. “I'm already inside you, aren't I? I'm right here. Right. Here.” My temples began to ache. It was the crappy food I'd been eating and the crappier sleep regimen I was on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was moving in there, throwing its weight around against my brain, cozying up against my optic nerves.

  I was losing it. My hands were shaking atop the wheel, my legs fidgeting uncontrollably. I turned to Jake with the intention of cracking some half-assed joke and nearly swallowed my cigarette when the shadows passing over his wide-eyed visage lent him something of the Occupant's ghoulishness.

  “What's the matter?” he asked, hands pressed to the dash as I let the car swerve.

  “N-Nothing,” I muttered. I tossed the Viceroy out the window half-smoked and put the end of the bridge behind us. “Just tired, I think.”

  Jake returned to combing the bridge, glancing through the rear window for signs of Elizabeth. “Could that really have been her?”

  I shook my head firmly. “No. No, it was just some trick of the light. She's long gone. Probably far ahead of us now.” I said it more for my benefit than for his. I'd have said anything to get my head straight. We had a destination, a person to rescue and a calamity to prevent. Now was no time to indulge paranoia. That was exactly what the Occupant wanted. It was an abhorrent creature that feasted on human fear.

  I switched on the radio. The station I'd been tuned to the last time wasn't so clear now, resulting in a loud, garbled outburst that rattled me. I scanned the airwaves until I came upon a station playing music—I couldn't have told you who was singing or what the number was called—and combed the sweat-slick hair from my eyes.

  “We're past the bridge,” I said, glancing at the map on my screen. “It's just another few hours. We'll be there well before dawn. We might even consider stopping off somewhere for the rest of the night—the journey to our true destination will be easier by day. The woods we're heading into are insanely dense and it's easier to get lost in them than it is to get where you're going, even with directions.”

  “Do you know the way?” asked Jake.

  “I know it well enough,” I lied. The truth was that I was going to retrace my previous route into the forest and then continue north. Hopefully the cell signal would hold up long enough for us to get close to Milsbourne. In the event that it didn't, I'd packed a back-up in the form of a cheap map, procured at a mini mart during a coffee run, which I'd painstakingly compared to my digital map. I'd penciled in the supposed location of Milsbourne based on the coordinates John Prince had given us and hoped it would get us to our destination if all else failed.

  Jake leaned his seat back. “You should keep driving,” he suggested. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can...” He hesitated. “Wake me when we get there, will you? I want to get this over with.”

  I agreed and was not a little envious when he drifted off to sleep a few minutes later. The silence now, except for the sounds of the road, was total. I rummaged around in the back seat for one of the bags in which I'd packed canned drinks and cracked open a Monster. It went down easy despite its being warm and after half a can I felt a burst of alertness.

  You've driven down this path before. You know the way. You know the way.

  I repeated that last bit again and again, drying off my sweaty palms on my pant legs, as more and more trees—taller, older specimens—began turning up. They were popping up with frequency now in dense patches, and I knew very soon I'd be walled in by them on both sides.

  You survived the forest once already, I told myself.

  This fact didn't do much to bolster my sagging confidence, though. As I drove, I was caught up in wondering whether I could possibly survive it a second time.

  It was a good thing that I was awful at math, because had I stopped to calculate the odds with any great accuracy I probably wouldn't have liked them too well.

  27

  I don't know how that kid managed to sleep deeply enough to snore, but somehow, he did.

  Jake caught some much needed Z's from the passenger seat, oblivious to the changes in scenery. We were into the woods now, had pierced the outer boundaries of the Hiawatha wilderness, and right on cue, my phone began to wig out as a result. The reception went downhill fast, causing the digital map to lag behind. It was all I could do to slow down in the less dense areas and wait for the pixellated spots on the map to populate before charging on into the verdant dead zone.

  The caffeine had perked me up, and although I knew I'd have to deal with a crash soon enough, I'd sufficiently regained my wits and was feeling, dare I say, rational again. I wasn't full-on Neil Degrasse Tyson rational, but compared to the fear-stricken professor Barlow I'd been back in Mackinaw City, I was thinking with a much clearer head.

  In that time, I tried to piece things together, tried to guess what was waiting for us at the end of this long journey.

  Everything started with the death of Corvine's wife and daughter.

  No, wait. If I wanted to know the start of this—of all of it—then I'd have to figure out what importance Milsbourne held. So far, every major player in this story, Jake and I included, had been drawn towards the abandoned mining town like moths to a flame.

  I wasn't sure that W. R. Corvine had ever been there, but it stood to reason that he had. He'd kept a cabin in the Hiawatha region until his death in '89, and had stolen a book from the university library in the 70's—the only one in their extensive collections that even mentioned Milsbourne.

  And then there was this Jamieson Monroe fellow. No one knew what'd happened to him in the end—odds were good that, like most players in this tangled web who'd overreached and gotten in too deep, he was long dead—but he'd ventured to Milsbourne and discovered something in the hills, near the copper mines, that'd cost him his sanity.
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  Enid Lancaster had, while under the Occupant's sway on the night of the Third Ward Incident, tried to escape the asylum. To my knowledge, no record existed anywhere that named her plans upon escape, but sheer, gut feeling—something I'd learned recently to trust implicitly—told me she'd been gunning for Milsbourne herself.

  This was reinforced by the fact that, three decades later, I was tracking a girl possessed by that same entity into northern Michigan. A girl whose mother's surname matched that of Chaythe Asylum's infamous killer.

  All roads led to Milsbourne.

  My thoughts returned to Jake's earlier question, that of how we might deal with Elizabeth once we had her cornered.

  I scoffed at the very idea—could two mortal men, one of them an out of shape English teacher and pack-a-day smoker, really hope to corner this beastly thing?

  No.

  But even so, I was hard pressed to find a solution to all of this that didn't involve us killing the girl. For all his years of research, Dr. Corvine had done just that. The only solution that brilliant man had come up with had been to bludgeon Enid. What hope did Jake and I have of defeating this thing otherwise? It wasn't like I could smooth-talk the Occupant into leaving her alone. When we encountered the thing again—and it was going to happen whether I liked it or not—violence was inevitable.

  When the time came, who was going to be the one doing the hurting?

  I looked to Jake. He was sleeping with his mouth wide open, a bit of drool trailing down his chin. Lucky bastard, I thought. When the fatigue got to be too much for me I'd pull off somewhere and join him.

  Suddenly, from his lap, there came a bright light. His phone flashed on, and its screen was filled with the same map as before. Though it spent a good deal of time loading, the app made a shrill noise as it received some new data. Carefully, I picked up the phone and compared it to the map on my own. The signal was very weak, but it was there—and it was faring a bit better than mine.

  We had Elizabeth's trail again and, perhaps unsurprisingly, she was still heading in roughly the same direction as we were. She was close—further ahead, somehow—but in the same general vicinity. My first reaction was to cheer the new data, to celebrate. But my excitement died away quickly as I realized what that meant. She's still close by. That means you have to stay vigilant. She could be lurking behind the next corner for all you know...

  I placed Jake's phone in the cup holder and glanced down at it occasionally as I drove, tracking Elizabeth's movements against our own for an hour. Then two. By the end of the third hour, when we found ourselves deep into woodland territory and my eyes were getting heavy, I'd managed to get periodic updates on Elizabeth's whereabouts while struggling to maintain my cell's crummy signal. At this junction, it seemed like she was right on top of us, like she was walking alongside the road and she'd turn up at any moment in the headlights.

  I needed a place to rest. We were close to Elizabeth, closing in on Milsbourne, but my body didn't give a damn. I'd gone on too long without sleep and couldn't avoid it any longer. If I didn't pull over, and soon, I was going to nod off and wake up in traction. In the past hour, I'd seen two—yes, two—cars pass. They'd both been going the opposite direction, as though fleeing this wilderness. I was the only one stupid enough to be plunging into it at this hour, I supposed. I considered just pulling off to the side of the road and taking a short nap, but kept on a little ways ahead in the hopes that I might find something a little more discrete.

  Two or three miles down the line, I found it.

  There was a large swath of grass alongside the road, something of a clearing, which stretched into the forest. If I pulled into this clearing and then backed up between certain of the trees, leaving my lights off, I'd virtually disappear. It looked like the kind of place a cop might sit to catch speeders, except there was no one around here to dole tickets out to.

  There was nothing glamorous about sleeping in the car, but I seized upon that recessed hiding spot at once and parked. Making sure to lock the doors, I shut off the headlights and had a look at our dark surroundings. The trees had grown into a thick weave, their roots and canopies intermingling with one another, and the shade they afforded was incredible. Even during the day this spot would have been mighty dark.

  We were close to Milsbourne—as close as we were going to get without doing some bushwhacking, probably. I studied the map on my phone, which had glitched out, and tried to pinpoint the best way into the abandoned town. There were no roads leading into it, of course. Jake and I would likely have to hike some miles into the forest to find it. Just how far remained to be seen.

  If there were still people living deep within that wilderness, as Prince had claimed, then perhaps we'd run into them. I could only hope that they'd be friendlier than the thing we were hunting.

  28

  It wasn't a sound that woke me.

  A powerful gust of wind sent the car rocking, and I opened my eyes to a scene of sheer black.

  Or, nearly black.

  It'd been the feeling of being watched, something which must have been accosting me for quite some time and mounting with each passing minute, that had drawn me out of sleep. I shifted in my seat, nearly ignored it. My eyes were burning. Sunrise was at least an hour or two away and I wanted to get some actual rest. I would have gone back to sleep if I hadn't glimpsed Jake's face just then.

  He was sitting upright in his seat, no longer snoring, and his eyes were open. He was looking out through the windshield narrowly, and his jaw could be seen to tense in the feeble moonlight.

  “What's up?” I whispered. “See something?”

  He gave a quick nod before uttering, “Do you see her?”

  I wiped at my face and grabbed the wheel to pull myself into a seated position. It took me awhile to get my eyes to cooperate, and I scanned the scene through the windshield while yawning loudly and waiting for the stars to leave my vision. The scene had not changed since we'd parked. The trees were still blocking out all but the barest hints of the moon, and the weave of dark trunks seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction. It was hard to believe we were near a major road; I glanced through the thicket to my left to make sure we still were.

  “What is it?” I asked, scratching at my belly. I needed to take a leak. My shoulders were achy and tense for the brief sleep.

  Jake pointed through the glass, his voice frail. “There. Standing between the trees. Don't you see her?” He turned his stunned eyes to me. “It's her. It's Elizabeth.”

  The mention of Elizabeth's name chased the sleep from my eyes and I looked back into the woods, combing the treeline for her form. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Positive?”

  He nodded so hard I thought his head might fall off his shoulders. “Yes, I'm sure. And she... she looks fine. She looks normal.” He gulped. “Her eyes aren't like they were before. They're not big and black.”

  I wasn't seeing what he was seeing. Everything ahead of us was dark, night-impenetrable forest. I didn't see so much as a goddamn mosquito pass by the windshield as I squinted. “A-Are you sure?” I asked again. “I'm not seeing her, man. Where are you seeing this?”

  His finger jabbed the air once, twice, like he was mashing an invisible button. “She was right there, just outside the trees!”

  I flicked on the headlights, squinting as they bathed the wilderness in harsh light, and had a second look.

  My eyes picked up movement, but whatever it was fell out of frame almost instantly. It had backed into the woods so quickly I hadn't been able to see what it was.

  “She wants us to follow her,” muttered Jake, hurriedly pulling off his seatbelt. “She waved to us. She wants to show us something.” He was confident, moving to exit the car, when I reached out and pulled him back.

  “Jesus, hold on. Don't do anything reckless.” I glanced back outside, but caught only the swaying of tall grasses in the wake of something moving rapidly. Whether it was Elizabeth or something else—one of the grey wolves I knew to li
ve in this region, for instance—I couldn't say. Leaving the car half-cocked on what may have been Jake's dream-borne hunch wasn't good enough for me. “It could be a trick,” I continued. “We don't know what we're dealing with. If it had really been Elizabeth, wouldn't she have come up to the car? Don't you remember what happened last time?”

  “Yeah, but it's different now!” pleaded Jake. “I saw her, with my own two eyes. It's her! Maybe she found a way to break free of that thing.”

  “Right, but I didn't see shit, so we've got a problem.” I gave him a tug on the sleeve, urged him to sit back and wait. “I'm not cool with your running out there and getting yourself killed. We still don't know what we're dealing with. I don't suppose you've been taking secret boxing lessons since the last time she kicked your ass at the dorm, have you?” I asked, pointing to his black eye.

  He flushed with an equal mix of anger and embarrassment. “What are you? My dad?”

  “No,” I shot back, “but if I were, I'd slap you in the mouth for getting smart with me. Let's stay put and see what the hell happens, OK? If she comes out from there again we'll go out and meet her.”

  Jake was raring to go, but with a sigh he leaned back and crossed his arms. “She wants us to follow her,” he insisted.

  I cocked my head to the side, cracked my neck. “Your girlfriend's body has been worn by a monster for the past few days. I'm not really inclined to follow her anywhere—much less into a dense, dark forest. Use your head.” A few moments passed and the woods became completely still once more. “Whatever it was, I don't think you saw Elizabeth. It was something else, Jake. It could have been a deer. You know, the last time I was up here, I was driving down one of these dirt roads and—”

  Jake gasped.

  There was someone standing outside his window. Though I couldn't make out much, the light coming from my headlights carved a definite human shape out of the shadow and filled out a few basic characteristics besides. It was a woman. Hair was long. She was a little tall from where I sat. She fit Elizabeth's profile in the most basic ways, but I still hadn't seen enough to be sure.