The Forest

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  But it isn’t. It’s the forest.

  She took his arm. The play was better than the reality. That was what play was. An escape.

  So she would escape, even as she went farther into the reality.

  Together, they stepped forward. The stream burbled beside them, winding them deeper into the mist and farther into the trees.

  The shadows kept shifting, though it was growing harder to see them. “Is it getting darker?” she said.

  “I imagine so. That’s what happens when the day goes on.”

  “How long have we been walking? It doesn’t seem like we’ve been going long enough for it to get dark.”

  He snorted. “It’s been forever, don’t you know?”

  “Seems like it, I guess. Still…” She looked up. No sky. Just a gray nothing. “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep,” she intoned.

  “And fartness was on the doodles of the trees,” Alex said. Making light of the dark words, forcing them away with the potty humor he retreated to sometimes: another thoroughly manly thing to do.

  She usually called him on it. Not this time.

  “And blartness was on the mace of the meep,” she said.

  He made a face. “Shmand shmartness shmuz shmon shmuh shmace –”

  “Okay, you win the dumb contest.”

  “I always do,” he said smugly.

  And the play continues. The Forest: Act One. In which our heroes travel into places they shouldn’t.

  For the first time it occurred to her that, though there was a cabin in the forest, she had never heard of a road leading to it. Sam had never mentioned one, either. His mother had driven up to the school in a car, but other than that she had only seen him walking into the school alone.

  Tricia suspected that there was no road to the cabin. With that suspicion came the image of Sam’s mother stopping outside the forest, then dragging him bodily through the trees. Perhaps worse.

  The image heightened the oppressive feeling that this had all been written out; that she was doing something someone else wanted her to do, and that her free will had less substance and less reality than the mist around her. She looked around, half expecting to see an audience watching them sullenly: the worst opening night crowd in history.

  She saw no audience; but something was watching.

  She screamed and threw herself sideways. Her foot came down on a patch of loose soil and went out from under her. She screamed as she plunged toward the mumbling stream, and it was only the fact that she still held to Alex’s arm that kept her from tumbling into the water.

  Alex gave a strange grunt/cough as he went from being held by her to holding her up. He planted his feet, clapped his free hand over hers, which had clenched against his bicep as she –

  (Saw the thing. The ghost.)

  – fell. He pulled, leaning away from her to stop her from falling. She wished he hadn’t. The stream wasn’t that big here. It would have wet her up to the knees, maybe less. But in “saving” her from that, he was pulling her back in the direction she didn’t want to go.

  She had looked away. Just for a moment, when falling, her gaze had left the place she saw… it. Now, looking back, she saw that the thing was gone.

  “What?” Alex was shouting. “What is it? What did you –”

  “Shhh!” She hissed him to silence, so hard that spittle flew from her mouth. It disappeared in the mist, like the fog wanted to eat every single part of her.

  “What did you –” Alex began, whispering the words.

  She put a finger to her lips, shaking her head, and his mouth slammed shut. His eyes were moving, though, wildly bucking from side to side – from her to the forest and back again. She looked only at the forest, trying to peel through the fog, trying to find what she had seen.

  She shook her head. Nothing.

  “What was it?” Alex tried again.

  “Someone’s out there,” she whispered.

  Now Alex went stiff. “Sam? His mom?” he whispered back.

  She thought about it. She had no desire to meet a crazy woman under these circumstances. So it could have been wishful thinking, but… “I don’t think so. I think it was a man.”

  Alex’s face curled into itself. Worry, fear, confusion. He shook his head, and she knew that the combined weight of what he was feeling would soon drive him to do something without thinking.

  “Alex, don’t –”

  “HEY!” he shouted. “Who’s out there? You hear me? Who the hell is out there?”

  They waited. No answer came from the forest, but something about the lack of response bothered her just as much. Something –

  Her hand, which still held to Alex’s arm, spasmed. His gaze flew to hers. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

  He squinted and cocked his head. “Hear what?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  He smiled. “That’s a good thing, ri –” His face, already pale, now blanched of all color. He had understood what she meant. “Where are the birds? The sounds?”

  Any forest was alive. Birds sang, small animals walked over branches, wind soughed and stirred up the dead leaves and detritus that fed the earth.

  But here… none of that. Not even –

  She looked sharply at the stream. It had burbled and bubbled beside them, but now even it was soundless. All noise had fallen away from the world, and the void had drawn a bit closer.

  She peered at the stream, leaning toward it. She couldn’t even see it moving. She was sure it was, if only a little, but the streambed here must be so flat that it made the flow from one side to another nearly invisible. A current, yes, but a weak one.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Alex.

  “No,” she agreed. “Nothing. Just like we’re hearing nothing.”

  They stood like that a long time, and she knew they were both considering, again, whether to turn back or keep going.

  The forest waited, silent.

  A sound began. Finally, a sound.

  Tricia felt herself relax a bit. The weird moment was passing. Sound was coming back. Soon the fog would blow away or turn to dew or whatever fog did when it was done being fog in this place.

  But Alex was quivering. Still looking around wildly. She realized then that the sounds they heard weren’t just forest sounds. No cracks of branches, no wind rustling leaves. This was too regular, too low and consistent.

  “Something’s whispering,” said Alex.

  Tricia nodded. Not just to agree with the “whispering” part, but to show he was right: it wasn’t someone. It was something.

  “… here… children…”

  The whispers were disjointed, words elongated and then separated by odd pauses. They lengthened into a wheedling call that sounded like echoes bouncing through the world’s longest and darkest tunnel:

  “… heeeere… childrennnnnnnnnnnnnnn…”

  Then nothing, followed by a single shriek, like feedback when a microphone and speaker were placed too close together. The whine grew, and intensified, then coalesced into a single shouted word.

  “RUN!”

  Tricia ran. Alex ran.

  Neither of them noticed that, in running away from the whispers, they were running toward the center – the heart, if you will – of the forest.

  21

  (When Alex Had Grown)

  Doodle doodle.

  (“Like, ominous somehow.”)

  The words bounced around in Alex’s mind, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why, or where they had come from.

  They came from the forest. Everything comes from the forest. We came here in a car, but that car was part of the forest, too, and so was the road that led here, because the forest is the whole world.

  He looked at the tree they had found, with its jutting spike of a branch. It seemed to writhe in the mist, and for a moment he thought he saw it glistening wetly, a dark liquid dripping from it. Blood.

  His mind s
pun. Like a car flipping, the dizziness of losing a child, the way Trish spun her ring around in a circle… like a…

  (Like a doodle.

  Like, ominous somehow.)

  “I…” Trish fell silent. She was staring at the fallen tree and its spike-like limb, and he wondered if she had seen the blood. If it was memory or real.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Do I remember something about this place?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that.

  “It’s like –

  (“ominous somehow”)

  – like I’ve done this before.”

  “All this has happened before, and it will all happen again,” he said. It was a line from a story that had terrified him as a young boy: a story about another boy who flew to children’s windows looking for his lost shadow – and then stole them away to a place where they would never be found again. But he kept reading it, for some reason, and it had become something of an obsession – a story he returned to over and over again, even though he could remember and recite every word of it.

  “We’re not in a fairy tale,” said Trish.

  “Let’s hope not,” Alex replied. “Fairy tales were never really meant to have happy endings.”

  “Hansel and Gretel never should have gone into the forest in the first place,” she agreed.

  “Do you remember…” He couldn’t finish. He didn’t want to know, and in that moment would have given anything to forget what little he did know.

  Trish shook her head. “Shadows.” Her eyes focused, moving away from the trees, finding his gaze. “Do we stay?”

  He looked toward where the car still sat. Out of sight, but close enough. Even with the thickening mist around them, there was no chance they could get lost unless they ventured in much farther.

  “I think we should stay for a bit,” he finally said. He bit his lip, then added, “I think we have to.”

  Trish nodded, but she had gone white. “But not overnight.”

  “No, not overnight. We just go in and –”

  “If we’re not going in overnight, then why do you have that?”

  Alex looked down, where she was gesturing.

  The tent – the bright red tent, like a bright red bag bouncing in a panic-run through the green and the gray of the forest – was in his hands.

  “How did that –”

  “You got it. You went back to the car. I followed you, and you opened the trunk and grabbed the tent, and said, ‘Maybe we should have brought a tent,’ then came right back here.”

  He didn’t remember doing any of that, and he supposed that should scare him – should terrify him. But it didn’t. He felt like he was being led. He didn’t believe in predestination, or in fate, but the feeling was so real that he was hard-pressed to convince himself of those things in that moment. “We’re not staying overnight,” he said firmly. “Not in the forest.”

  But he was walking further into the treeline. She was following. He held the tent, and for the strange thought that they could make camp and have s’mores and tell ghost stories passed through his mind.

  Then they were inside. Finger-branches interlocked over them, tree trunks rose behind them. They had left the car, the road, the world.

  Something touched his skin, and he jumped. “Just me,” said Trish. Her hand traveled down his arm, and he felt an electric thrill, so like the time before. The time they entered the trees and held hands and kissed for the first time.

  What? We didn’t kiss here. We kissed – we had that First – at Tina Louise’s Diner.

  Didn’t we?

  Everything seemed jumbled in his mind.

  Trish squeezed his hand, just as hard as he was holding the tent.

  He looked around.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  Trish nodded. “Heading toward the stream.”

  He remembered in that instant: mist. Seeing things, hearing things.

  Whispers.

  Whisperers.

  (“They’re coming. They’re becoming.”)

  Things had been in that fog, that strange mist. Shadows had danced, and now…

  Now the fog was coming again. He realized that, even though he couldn’t see the sky above, even though it was night somewhere out there, he could still see clearly.

  “The fog is glowing,” he said.

  “I know,” answered Trish. “I just noticed it, too.”

  The fog brightened. A flash that Alex realized had happened a few times. Maybe it was brighter now, or maybe his mind just hadn’t been able to process or accept it.

  Another flash.

  The fog had surrounded them, creeping in as slow and silent as a murderer in his bedroom. It clung to the trunks all around, and blanketed the world, so thick that he and Trish seemed to disappear at the waist. The world, in that moment, had no substance.

  “We should go,” he said.

  Trish nodded, let go of his hand, and turned around. She took a step, then frowned and took a step in a different direction. “Where do we go?”

  Alex turned around as well. He thought he turned a perfect one-eighty, but realized there was no way to know if he had been facing directly away from the road in the first place. People tended to drift to one side or another when they walked, he knew, so he could have been facing at a right angle to the road, or parallel, or anything in between.

  And then he had turned “around.” And after just that one half-turn – maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less – he had no idea where he was, or which way led to the road and safety and which led deeper into the forest and this strange, glowing mist.

  The trees all looked the same here.

  Tree…

  Tree…

  (“A doodle.”

  “Mom says he’s the most dangerous person in the world.”)

  “I don’t know where we are,” he whispered. He looked at Trish, and saw naked terror in her eyes.

  In his peripheral vision he saw the mist wrap creeper vines around trees. It grew outward and inward at once, and might have come from the trees themselves for all Alex knew.

  The gray was complete only a moment later. There were shapes in the mist, but they seemed to wax and wane, to draw close and then farther away.

  The fog flashed. It was hardly blinding, but it was undeniable.

  “This is impossible,” said Trish.

  “Totally,” Alex whispered.

  The fog flashed again. It felt like the mist was laughing at them.

  A sighing sounded. Trish walked back to him and held tight to his arm. “Just the wind,” said Alex.

  He was lying.

  “No. Something’s here,” Trish said.

  Another line from that book flitted through his mind:

  (“Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?"

  Nothing, precious," she said; "they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard –”)

  “– her children,” he finished.

  “What?” whispered Trish. “What are you –”

  The whispers came again. Louder. The hint of something unseen, the promise of something all too real. They grew, and solidified.

  The fog flashed. The mist-light pulsed.

  Alex began walking. He didn’t care where he was going in that moment, just that they get away from here. He pulled Trish along with him. She came haltingly, her feet dragging as panic sapped her ability to move.

  Then he heard the whispers, and as he did, he remembered hearing them years ago. The words were different, but still spoken in the same faraway voices, the whispers of the dead or dead-to-be. He felt like they were different voices, but each spoke part of a single thought:

  “… see…”

  “… hear…”

  “… nothing…”

  The mist thickened, flashed.

  Alex realized suddenly the ludicrousness of holding a tent in a place like this. He threw it away, cursing whatever part of him had wanted to stay here, and whatever part of them
both had allowed them to walk into this place at all.

  He dragged Trish a few feet. She was almost dead weight behind him, her eyes wide and tears streaming down her eyes. “Run,” he whispered. “We have to run!”

  She shook her head.

  But she ran with him all the same.

  It was a nightmare flight, down a path unseen to a destination unknown. He hoped they would find their way back to the road, but knew even as he ran that it would never happen. The trees were too thick, and seeing and hearing the things around them had resulted in both him and Trish spinning in a panic. More important than either of those factors, though, was a simple fact that kept slamming its way through Alex’s skull:

  The forest had them. It had caught them like flies in a web, and would let them go, or not, when it wished. And not a moment – or an eternity – before.

  The mist flashed.

  The forest laughed.

  22

  (When Alex Had Grown)

  The trees of this place were far enough apart that a part of Alex understood that he wasn’t likely to run into one, even hurtling forward in panic. But what if he stumbled on a root, or tripped over the bushes or slipped on the moss that coated so much of the ground?

  And besides, Trish wasn’t as fast as him. She was fast enough, but to run as hard as he could would mean leaving her behind. But they had to run, from some unseen threat, and had to run as fast as they could, so he reached back for her and found her arm and jerked her forward with him. He tried to grab her hand but couldn’t find it. He wrapped his fingers as tight as he could around her forearm, but was afraid to let go after that. What if he lost her?

  The whispers followed, keeping pace. He kept hearing breathing in his ears, like someone was panting right behind him, but he never looked back. He didn’t know if it would be worse to see some spectral creature, or something born of nightmare and now made into flesh… or nothing at all.

  Madness, either way. Madness behind, and madness all around as he and Trish ran, ran, ran through fog and flashing lights.

  The trees started closing in, and Alex had to duck constantly as thin blades of wood slashed through the thickening fog. Sometimes, if the branches were large enough to make out through the mist, he managed to duck, and he would yank Trish’s arm so she did the same. But just as often the branches were no bigger around than his finger, and the fog obscured them until the last second. They felt like whips, slapping him so hard he could feel welts rising on his face and neck and arms. Sweat got in his eyes and he wiped it away, realizing only when he saw the back of his hand that it wasn’t sweat after all; that one of the branches had opened up a gash on his forehead.