“It's her,” he blurted, throwing open his door and stepping out.
“Hold on!” I tried, but couldn't keep his dumb ass from bounding out of the car. I unbuckled myself and followed him, making sure to pluck my flashlight from the center console. I held it up near my head like a cop about to watch someone fail a sobriety test, and walked past the hood of the car.
Elizabeth Morrissey—squinting eyes appearing quite normal—shied away from my light. “Guys,” she said, her voice low and breathy. “You came.”
Jake approached her without hesitation, and it was only my firm hand on his shoulder that drew him back. “Elizabeth?” I asked. She was standing within feet of me, looked very much like herself, and yet I wasn't fully convinced.
The girl took a step back, and then another. “This way. Hurry.”
Jake followed like an obedient dog, but I lagged behind. “Jake, hold on,” I said under my breath. He did no such thing, however. Instead, he kept calling out to her. “Babe, what's up?”
I took a few steps forward, following Jake into the maze of trees. The light in my hands did us little good, serving mostly to elucidate the trunks and low-hanging branches that popped up wherever I turned. It was only by keeping track of Jake's movements some ten feet ahead of me that I knew myself to be on the right track, and yet the way in which we now passed, tripping over knotted roots and dense bushes, couldn't pass for even a rustic footpath.
We were walking—running—into the woods.
“Stop!” I shouted. Leaping forward, I gained just enough ground to snag the back of Jake's shirt and pull him to the ground. He yelped as he lost his balance, quickly regaining his feet and brushing himself off.
“What'd you do that for?” he demanded. Then, losing interest in me, he looked back into the night-painted woods and called out to Elizabeth. “Babe, we're coming. Hold on.” He was set to keep going when I yanked him back a second time.
“You wait just a goddamn second or I'm going to take this Maglite and knock your teeth out, understand?” I barked. “We need to head back to the car. This stinks. Doesn't sit right. Got it? She's leading us away from our car, from our things, from the main road. We go too far into this mess and we could end up lost for days.”
He was about to protest, but I shook him forcefully.
“We didn't follow Elizabeth Morrissey all the way to Michigan, kid. We followed the Occupant.”
“But...” Jake looked over his shoulder. “But she looks—”
“I don't care how she looks,” I interjected. “That doesn't matter. That thing gets into your head, make you see what it wants you to see. Understand me? No good will come of following it into the woods. We've gone far enough. If we're going to engage it, we're going to do so on our terms.”
A firm stillness set in as the wind died out. Neither of us spoke for a moment, merely standing in the sparse light issuing from the Maglite. The sounds of Elizabeth's advance through the woods ceased with unexpected suddenness several feet ahead of us. My words, or perhaps the sudden shift in atmosphere, had made him pliable. “OK, fine... Maybe you're right.” This change in demeanor didn't stop him from canvassing the wilderness and doling out one last, “Babe?”
The eyes were on us again. I'd felt it in the car, had felt it a hundred or more times in the past several days. The eyes of a now-familiar predator. It was as though every tree in the forest had sprouted a pair of sharp eyes and was dissecting us with an icy gaze. Jake's voice shriveled in his throat, telling me that he felt it too.
“You feel that?” I asked. “Those eyes on us?”
He nodded, his Adam's apple quivering and a bead of sweat rolling down his red cheek.
The malign gaze that now tracked us from the darkness wasn't anything like Elizabeth's and we both knew it.
“We need to get back to the car,” I said, panning slowly. I went in a complete circle, studying the night.
I turned around with the intention of heading back, only to find the way blocked by trees I hadn't known were there. As if the forest itself had silently shifted over the past few moments, we were now walled in and this new scenery proved incredibly disorienting. We hadn't gone far into the woods, and yet I could no longer be sure of where I stood. I studied my right, my left, but under the circumstances those terms lost all meaning.
There were only two ways one could go—out of the woods or deeper into them.
I could not, with any certainty, determine which was which, but the odds were stacked overwhelmingly on my choosing the latter option.
“Damn it...” I looked past the trunk to my back, took a slow step and tried to poke holes in the darkness between the trees. If I went in a straight line, exactly in the direction I'd entered, then perhaps I could lead us out. And yet... in avoiding certain trees and their roots, I'd hooked to the right or the left any number of times while following Jake.
The way back was more like a squiggle than a straight line, and I was damned if I could follow it.
“Which way do we go?” asked Jake, peering past me.
“You should have worried about that before charging into the woods like a jackass,” I replied. I stepped over a gnarled, grassy growth and held the Maglite out before me. “Let's try and gain our bearings. The worst thing we can do in this situation is to panic. We didn't go very deeply into the woods. If we walk just a minute or so in the right direction, we should see the treeline, and through it, the car. Let's stop and think.”
But there wasn't any time for stopping or thinking.
From somewhere in the sea of trees there arose a burst of rustling. Then came the telltale snapping of a twig underfoot.
Our path was decided for us. We had to move, then and there, else we were going to end up facing the maker of those sounds. I looked back to Jake, nodded to him and urged him to stay close. In doing so, the light passed over what looked to be a pale, white hand resting upon a tree trunk.
“Shit.” My legs sprang to action and I started barreling through the woods, the light bouncing unsteadily. Jake kept pace, glancing over his shoulder now and then as if wondering what it was I'd seen. “Don't slow down!” I warned.
The ground, flat in some patches, raised in others, felt like a moving, unreliable thing as I pawed past trees and sought a break in the forest. I was looking for the natural bluish hue of moonlight, but there wasn't any to be seen from where I stood; the towering growth was choking it all out, leaving our surroundings stained in pure black. The Maglite was better than nothing—I was damn glad to have it on me—but it wasn't doing much to help us find a way out of the forest. Rather than light the path, it only served to drive home the density of the woods we were now lost in.
From behind us came the footsteps, noticeable for their slow, even resonance compared to Jake's and my own. I gave my ankle a slight twist on a cluster of knotted roots and almost went down, narrowly catching myself on a tree. Jake bumped into me, still glancing fearfully to his back. “It's coming,” he said, his entire body shaking. “It's coming!”
I started hauling ass again, forgetting the pain in my ankle.
It was like being trapped in a nightmare, this chase. There was an attendant feeling of despair in every step I took, in every trunk I ran past, and equally so in my discovering a dozen more exactly like it just beyond.
Eventually, though, you wake up from a nightmare. It comes to an end.
I'd been waiting for this nightmare to come to an end since the night of March 28th.
Jake and I were running through the dark again, trying to escape the hideous, black-eyed thing that had hounded us at the asylum.
Sooner or later, it was going to catch up.
A raindrop hit my face.
Another.
I turned my gaze upward and thought I'd caught a break in the trees. From this thinning section of the canopy an ice cold rain was falling freely. I shook off the drops that clung to my hair and raced onward, batting away low branches and getting my fingers tangled in a dense spiderweb.<
br />
“This way! This way!” shouted Jake, throwing his hand out and cutting to the right. He motioned frantically at what appeared to be a bright orange light just beyond the trees—possibly a streetlamp I'd previously overlooked near the road.
I followed him, almost wiping out again on a large, fallen branch, and feeling a fresh wave of rain hit me upon the back. The light grew brighter the closer we got. And more unsteady, too. “What is that?” I asked.
Jake was the first one to make it out of the woods. He burst through the treeline and out into the tall grass of the clearing, stumbling to his knees as he did so. For whatever reason, he made no effort to stand back up, but simply gawked.
When I put the edge of the woods behind me and had a look at that orange light myself, I understood why.
It was coming from my car.
Streaming from the windows, the trunk.
A bright, flickering fire.
Standing atop the car, staring down at us, was Elizabeth. She was only there for an instant, disappearing into the woods as the smoke rose in thick, obscuring waves, but in the firelight I could make out her ink-colored eyes narrowed in a smile.
Jake and I sat in the grass alone after that, watching the car burn. The fire was short-lived, which was the only thing that'd spared the surrounding trees from catching fire and burning. That, and the rain, which started coming down in sheets.
Shivering, I approached the smoldering thing, encountering something underfoot as I trudged through the muddy grass. I bent down to pick it up, palming away a layer of thick grime.
Elizabeth's iPhone.
Jake approached, looked into the car through the busted windows, and tried to figure out whether any of our stuff had survived. Of course, nothing had.
And that included the things in the trunk—the only remaining research of W. R. Corvine. The tapes, books and notes that might have provided more insight into the thing we were chasing, or even a solution of some kind, had gone up in smoke.
I'm pretty sure I started laughing, but I can't remember. I felt like Steve Martin during that scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, when the rental car burns, and I could have socked Jake, my personal John Candy, just as hard in the gut. I rifled around in my pocket for my cigarettes, only to realize I'd left them inside the car.
That really set me off. The universe was truly under the sway of a cruel God if I couldn't even enjoy a damn cigarette after all of that.
I spent a few minutes kicking at the simmering front bumper and howling at the top of my lungs. I cast the iPhone into the wreck, shaking with anger, and paced back into the clearing, the rain crashing down and leaving me soaked to the bone. “It led us here,” I growled. “It led us all the way out here. And now that it's gotten us here, for whatever goddamn reason, it wants us to stay. It's got us right where it wants us. It left the phone behind. The fucking thing is taunting us!”
Jake was pale. Rain poured down his face in fat rivulets. “But why?” As if in answer to his question, a text message came through on his phone with a loud buzz. Clawing his cell out of a rain-slick pocket, he stepped beneath a cluster of trees to read it. His color only worsened as he stared down at the screen, and the whitish glow emanating from it made him look ghostly.
I sidled up to him. “What is it?”
The screen was dripping wet, and the whole thing shook in his grasp so that I could barely see what the fuss was about.
I could see it well enough to know that a text from Elizabeth had just come through, though. A thumbnail of her picture popped up on the screen as the message loaded. Bright eyes, lovely smile, orange headphones dangling from her neck. A very different creature from the one that'd just torched our only ride out of here.
I snatched it from him and read it closely. It was short, a single sentence. I felt my blood pressure spike as I handed the phone back and glared at the smoking remnants of my Cavalier.
“Won't you join me in Milsbourne?”
The Occupant had sent us an invitation.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you've enjoyed Forest.
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About the Author
Once upon a time, a young Ambrose Ibsen discovered a collection of ghost stories on his father's bookshelf. He was never the same again.
Apart from horror fiction, he enjoys good coffee, brewed strong.
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Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2) Page 17