Road Beneath the Wood (The Temple of the Blind #4)

by Brian Harmon

  Beyond the final seal, the Wood stared back at him. For as far as he could see, nothing was moving. Even though there was a slight breeze on the air, the trees did not sway. Even the smallest branches seemed to defy the wind, so that he wondered if these trees hadn’t turned to stone in the endless darkness.

  He stepped out into the black forest, marveling at how eerily quiet it was, with only the soft whisper of the passing breeze upon his ears to mask the deathly silence.

  With his back to the shattered seal, he turned his head and looked to his left as far as he could without moving his back or waist.

  That was the way he was supposed to go. The fourteenth seal—or was it really the first?—was set into the side of a hill, and he would have to climb that hill and proceed over the next gully. The old man had told him that this was the way and why should he not believe him? After all, he had no better idea of where to go. There sure as hell weren’t going to be any road signs along the way.

  He looked out into the forest ahead of him again and spied something moving, a tall, thin figure, staggering among the trees. It was moving away from him.

  The old man said that the cloak would make them think he was something else, something they were afraid of. At first, that had sounded like a wonderful solution, like defending yourself from wolves by pretending to be a lion, but suddenly he felt very unsettled. If it was true that this cloak frightened them away, then that meant that somewhere out there was a fate much worse than the terrible cost of their unfathomable yearning for life. He remembered the littered body parts around the twelfth seal. What kind of terrors could possibly be worse than that kind of insanity?

  He took a deep breath and pulled the hood of the cloak down farther over his head. He turned in the direction he was supposed to go and began to climb the hill.

  “I’m coming, Olivia,” he said into the darkness, his voice hushed. “Just hold on.”

  Chapter 14

  Wayne wished he had his shoes. The ground here was coarse and rocky. Stones jabbed painfully at his feet, stabbing and clawing at his bare flesh as he stumbled across the uneven terrain. There was no grass, no vegetation at all except for the large, black trees that towered over him. There were not even any fallen leaves strewn about the forest floor. It was nothing but dirt and stone.

  He made it over the first hill, down into the gully and over the next, only to see another hill ahead. He did not know how far he would have to travel. The old man had told him nothing except the direction he should go. Olivia could be miles away, across rivers and mountains for all he knew. But he could not give up. He made a promise to her a long time ago, years ago, it seemed, and he intended to do everything in his power to keep that promise.

  God, had that really been so few hours ago? It seemed utterly impossible.

  He studied the trees as he walked. The old man had called them “night trees.” It seemed a more than fitting name. They were like no trees he’d ever seen before, and he knew a good deal about trees. He’d grown up in Dunnen, after all, surrounded by rolling Missouri forestland. These were bare, with wide, sprawling branches not unlike the old oaks by the lake in Gulfer Park, but they were certainly not oak. The bark reminded him somewhat of an ash, with a sort of crisscrossing latticework of ridges running up the trunk, but it was a shiny, inky black, and he could have fit both fists into most of the grooves. They seemed almost to capture the shadows and hold them, making the tree even blacker in the darkness. In the dim glow of his flashlight they looked like queer, black sponges and made him think of some vast deep-sea forest, something from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, perhaps.

  The entire forest, or at least as much of it as he’d seen thus far, was entirely comprised of this one kind of tree. Was this all that had ever grown in the Wood, he wondered, or were these the only ones that had survived the eons of darkness the old man had described?

  He looked up into the still tangle of branches above him. They managed to look both jagged and soft at the same time, jutting sharply out in tiny dagger points while also twisting and coiling through the air like snakes. Some of the branches actually appeared to be trying to strangle others.

  Gazing up at them, he wondered what the leaves of these trees might look like. In the forest that surrounded the house he grew up in, one could find at least the brown and fallen leaves blanketing the ground beneath the oaks and pines and walnuts, but there were none here. Any such remnants had no doubt been reclaimed by the soil ages ago.

  He also noticed that there seemed to be no saplings in this forest. The smallest of the trees he’d seen so far were two feet in diameter and those had been few and far between. Had the younger trees been incapable of surviving this darkness?

  He hurried down the hill and across a dry streambed to the base of the next and had begun to climb again when a thought struck him. The old man had said that the night trees were not dead, that they were alive and merely sleeping, eternally waiting for a sunrise that may never come. If that was true, and if it was true that the not-dead-yet-not-alive inhabitants of the Wood were drawn to any trace of life, then why didn’t the two conflict? Shouldn’t those creatures have torn these trees to splinters over the centuries? After all, the life force of a tree couldn’t be so much different from that of an insect. He supposed there must be some reason. Perhaps in their eternal slumber, in whatever form of suspended animation this was that allowed them to stand here for millennia in a sunless world without rotting into the dirt, they feigned death so convincingly that they went completely unnoticed.

  This was an interesting concept, and one that he would have considered longer if some unexpected movement on his right hadn’t startled him out of his thoughts.

  He swung his flashlight toward it, his heart thudding suddenly in his chest. What he saw made no sense at first. Something that resembled a knotted chunk of wood was sliding across the ground.

  Wayne quickly shined his light around, searching the trees around him for anything that might attack him, but there was nothing to be seen. When he aimed the light at the thing on the ground again, he saw that there was more to it than he’d originally noticed. After a moment, the bizarre shape caught up with his eyes and he felt an overwhelming revulsion rush through him at the sight. He took several steps back, barely resisting the urge to turn and flee the area.

  The knotted thing was not a piece of wood, but a pelvis and part of a thigh. And it was still attached to the mummified torso of a ghastly, scurrying corpse.

  The sight was horrifying. This thing resembled a human being, with arms and hands and shoulders and a head, but it was the color of lumber left out in the rain for too long. It was missing all of one leg and most of the other and very little remained between its hips and its ribcage. It appeared to have been half-devoured. And yet it still lived. It clawed at the cold ground with a weary, yet ferocious desperation.

  It was not coming at him, but running away from him, as if terrified for its nonexistent life, and he was surprised to find that it was as much a sad sight as it was dreadful. He stood there, watching the abomination crawl away into the darkness, filled with a strange and unexpected pity for these things.

  Could they still feel pain, he wondered. Was there any kind of humanity left within them? It never turned to face him, so he was spared whatever expression it wore. He had a feeling that these things were mostly animal instinct, but it was far too easy to imagine human terror on this one’s moldy face.

  He turned away from the fleeing creature and continued up the hill, still contemplating the tragic existence that he’d witnessed. To him, it was the ultimate crime against nature and God, a perversion of life. He wondered as he approached the crest of the hill how such a place could exist. If there was a God—and he’d always firmly believed that there was, even if he wasn’t a diligent churchgoer—then how could He allow something like the Wood to be?

  He realized that something was moving far to his left and turned his light to it. Something he couldn’t quite see was movi
ng through the trees, something much quicker than the corpse he’d just seen. He realized with some dread that this thing, whatever it was, was not moving away from him. Apparently as intrigued as it was frightened, it was keeping pace with him, flanking him.

  Apparently, not all the things that lurked out here were so easy to scare.

  The terrain grew steep as he approached the crest of the hill, and the sharp rocks felt like glass against his toes. He kept telling himself that he should be grateful to be out of that tunnel, to be away from those hateful voices, but he could not lie to himself. At least in there he was safe as long as he ignored the things around him. Now he was afraid that the thing in the trees would stop stalking and simply charge him.

  When he reached the top of the hill, he saw that the terrain leveled out again at the bottom. He didn’t know what kinds of obstacles he would have to overcome, but at least for a little while the terrain would be easier to navigate.

  A sound from behind him announced that he had more company. He turned to see another creature creeping closer to him. It was pale and gray, like the fingers that reached around the twelfth seal when he opened it, but this one had more than two fingers. This one looked nearly intact, except that it seemed to be missing its left foot. It walked with a profound limp, directly on the stump of its left ankle. Its belly was split open and a grotesque tangle of dried innards protruded like the contents of an overstuffed suitcase. Its eyes were black, sightless tumors. Yet it still seemed to look at him, to see him even without its eyes. It had once been a man, but that was all that he could tell.

  When he turned, the thing stopped, unsure. Behind it, a third was barely visible in the darkness where his light ended. It, too, had stopped and was regarding him silently. They wanted him, he saw, wanted him with all their being, but they were afraid of him. More precisely, they were afraid of the cloak he wore.

  He took a step toward the nearest one and threw his arms up. “Get out of here!” he shouted, and the things scattered like mice. Even the one that he’d seen creeping alongside him, far off to one side, bolted and fled into the darkness.

  Wayne grinned. He knew they would not fall for that many more times, but for now it would buy him some time.

  He turned and hurried down the hill to the flatter ground below. He had to hurry. His aching feet did not matter. He could take care of his feet later, but if he waited around, callused heels and blistered toes would be the least of his problems.

  Chapter 15

  He could not be sure without a watch, but Wayne guessed that it was at least twenty minutes before the forest’s ghastly inhabitants began to close in on him again. When he tried to frighten them off this time, he saw that some only retreated a few yards into the trees.

  They were beginning to grow in numbers. There were at least fifteen of them now, some merely the size of children, but others as large as grizzly bears.

  These were not human beings, he saw. Not all of them. A few of them appeared to be mostly human, but many of them, even in an advanced stage of decay or mummification or even mutilation, could not possibly have looked this way if they had been human to begin with. One had ears that dangled to its chest. Two others had horns protruding from their skulls. Another had no face at all, but rather a huge, tumor-like opening that looked like the mouth of a giant leech. And one of them might even have been a dog once.

  He yelled again, and again the creatures retreated. Some vanished into the darkness, but too many withdrew only a few steps. They were unsure of him, but they were quickly becoming unafraid of him.

  Gambling, he turned toward the nearest one and sprinted at it, as if he intended to attack it head-on. The creature was sufficiently frightened this time. It turned and scrambled back into the darkness from which it came. The rest of them followed its lead, bolting away like startled deer.

  Wayne quickly turned and continued on in the direction he’d been walking, careful not to lose his direction. Hopefully, he could make considerable progress before those things worked up the courage to approach him again.

  For several minutes, he remained comfortably alone as he walked along the barren forest floor, but all too soon he saw things creeping among the trees at the far edge of his light. It was a losing battle, he knew. There was simply no way to fend them off forever. He remembered the ones he’d seen swarming outside Gilbert House. There had been dozens, perhaps hundreds of them back there. He had no doubt that there could be hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of them in this forest. He didn’t even know how big the Wood might be.

  The old man had referred to it as a world unto itself, a “buffer zone,” he had called it. And the Sentinel Queen had told him that the Wood was “bigger by far” than the world he knew. She described it that way when she explained the dangers of destroying Gilbert House. It would apparently swallow their world if such a doorway were thrown open.

  She also said that it had happened before. To other worlds. He remembered the strange appearances of the stalking corpses, how they did not all appear to be completely human, and he wondered if they were some of the unfortunate denizens of some of those tragic worlds.

  He shuddered at the thought of such a fate and wondered if it was anything like the end of the world that the old man claimed would come to pass if he didn’t stop Albert and Brandy from finding the Sentinel Queen’s doorway.

  As he swept the trees ahead of him with his flashlight, concentrating on walking in as straight a line as he could, something caught his attention. There was something pale clinging to the trunk of one of the night trees.

  As he drew closer, he realized that it was some kind of mushroom. Soft and fleshy, milky white and as big as a serving platter, it resembled blistered flesh. As he walked around the tree, he saw several more on the opposite side of the trunk, these much smaller than the first.

  The old man had said nothing about fungi. Neither had the Sentinel Queen, but then again, she had not bothered to give him any advice for surviving beyond that nightmare she called “Road Beneath the Wood.” Given the awful nature of the things that stalked him even now through these black trees, it seemed as though the old man might be right about her untrustworthiness. But then again, he himself suggested that she might have anticipated his intervention, so maybe she simply knew that the old man would give him everything he needed.

  He still didn’t know who to trust, but right now that was completely irrelevant. Right now, he was standing in the middle of a vast forest infested with murderous, roaming corpses. His only concern at the moment was finding Olivia and then getting the hell out of here.

  He turned away from the mushrooms and continued on.

  There were now several of those wretched creatures lingering at the edge of his flashlight’s reach, watching him with tense anticipation, ready to bolt should he decide to charge at them again. Soon, they would venture closer. They would grow bolder. Eventually, they would lose their fear altogether and then he would be at their mercy.

  Unnerved, he began moving faster.

  Soon, he saw more of those mushrooms. Some of the night trees were speckled with them, their branches sometimes completely enveloped in a spongy coat of sickly white fungus.

  It was probably safe to assume that they were poisonous, but he wondered if they were dangerous in other ways. He remembered the Sentinel Queen’s warning about touching the roots in the tunnel. The old man had explained that the roots were still alive and that they would reach for his light if he lingered too long. As long as he passed through quickly, they would do him no harm because they were slow to awaken. But that didn’t explain why he couldn’t touch them. Would that wake them immediately? Would they spring to life and grab him? The beehive was still perfectly willing to present him endless suggestions. Similarly, he now wondered what horrors might befall him if he allowed himself to brush against one of these mushrooms that grew like tumors on the black bark of the night trees.

  There was no way to know for sure because he definitely wasn�
��t going to test the theory. He made up his mind to be careful to avoid the fungi and focused his attention forward again.

  Two creatures were staggering toward him, blocking his path. They were not whole, he saw. One had no arms. The other was dragging one of its feet like a broken sandal, limping almost comically on the exposed knob of broken bone that protruded from its torn flesh. He roared at them, like a hyperactive child playing a game, and—perhaps only because he was walking straight toward them—they fled, the one with the broken leg resorting to a desperate, three-legged crawl to escape.

  Out of the silence, from somewhere not terribly far away, he heard something that sprang new life into his tired feet. It was a voice from the darkness, an indiscernible shout. It was the shrill cry of a startled woman.

  Olivia!

  Wayne picked up his pace, ignoring the stabbing stones of the forest floor. “Olivia!” he screamed. Something that had moved with stiff-legged awkwardness from behind a tree ahead of him turned and fled, startled by his outburst. In its haste to get away, it fell to the forest floor and scurried back into the darkness on hands and knees. “Olivia! Where are you?”

  But no one replied.

  Another dismembered corpse appeared off to his right, little more than a torso and an arm. It was turning away from him when he saw it, clawing at the dirt with one mangled hand.

  He ran on, his eyes and ears wide open.

  Perhaps it wasn’t her. Perhaps he’d only heard one of these creatures somewhere, crying out through vocal cords still miraculously able to produce vaguely human sounds, a new one for all he knew, still in its early stages of decay. It was not unthinkable. Many of those stalking him now still somehow retained lifelike motor skills. They walked with him, even ran at times with the grace of the living. Many of them, in fact, were moving with a purposeful stealth, skilled predators on the prowl, cautious but fully aware.