Still he ran. Still the whispers bounced and echoed:
“See… hear… nothing… othing… othing… othing…”
He heard breathing, louder, with a strangely high-pitched tinge to it, as though the things in the mist were tired as well.
He heard something under the sound, too. He couldn’t place it at first, but then his foot splashed down into water and he realized that he and Trish had found the stream that cut through the forest.
He was going so fast that the transition from brush and dirt to mud and moss-slicked rock took him utterly off guard. He tumbled forward, his ankle rolling under him, the smallest shout escaping before he was underwater.
Alex realized he was holding something. He tried to let go, but too late: he had dragged Trish into the water, too.
There couldn’t be much of a current, but he still felt like he was being dragged by a giant hand. He felt himself tossed up and dragged down, then tossed up again. He reached out blindly, hoping to catch hold of something that would save him. His hands beat down on water, the liquid offering no hope. Then his knuckles slapped painfully against a hard, rough, cold surface. He kicked hard, looking for purchase, for some way to drive himself back to what he had felt.
There!
He felt it again, this time under his palm, grabbed at what he felt with the other hand as well. Both his hands reached around the rock and linked together on the backside of it.
He pulled himself up, taking a breath, gagging as he got a mouthful of water for his trouble. He almost went under again as something grabbed his belt and yanked. He reacted automatically, one hand unlinking for a moment, his body wanting to slap away the thing holding him. Pulling him. Trying to drown him.
He knew it was one of the things. One of the whisperers that taunted him, telling him he would hear nothing, see nothing, as though telling him he had no escape but the oblivion of death.
That thought drove him to full panic, but as soon as his grip loosened, he immediately dropped back under water and had to scrabble madly to get himself above the level of the rushing stream.
Something reached out of the water. The thing holding him down reached up, clawing at his face. He screamed – gagging again, more water trying to force its way in and kill him – and then realized what was pulling him down.
Trish.
She must have fallen on him when he tumbled into the current. Then she either got hooked on his belt, or had grabbed it and held on for dear life just the way he now was hanging onto the rock.
For a moment everything but his wife faded from his consciousness. He wanted so badly to reach for her, to help her climb up to safety. But if he did that, he knew he would relinquish his tenuous hold on the rock and would tumble back into the impossible current – and then where would they be?
He held tight, even though inside he was screaming in pain and terror, the image of his dead wife surfacing in the dark waters of his mind.
He heard breathing in his ears again, raw and ragged. This time the sound filled him with delight rather than dread, because it meant Trish was there, holding his belt with one hand, his arm with another. The breathing was hers, great gasps that turned into hitching grunts as she yanked herself out of the water, using Alex’s body as support.
Her weight left him, so suddenly he was sure that she must have fallen back in. He looked behind him, braced to see her disappearing from sight below the water. It was only when he heard her scream, “Come on!” that he saw through what he feared to what actually was: Trish was laying on a long, flat stone nearby. It was large enough and gave enough purchase that she had stretched out on her stomach and now reached for him.
He let go and lunged in the same motion. The current tried to grab him, but Trish had a firmer grip on his arm than the water did. She pulled, a sound caught somewhere between exhaustion and pain tumbling from her lips.
Alex pulled, too. He clasped arms with his wife, then she pulled and got him moving – not much, an inch or two. But it was enough for him to finally get purchase with his feet on the rock that had saved him. He kicked off it and the force sent him flying. He hit the rock that Trish was on and almost slid right past her and into the water again.
Then he was laying on the rock beside his wife, both of them panting, both of them trying desperately not to let go of their purchase on the rock.
Alex rolled a bit, nudging closer to Trish. The water roared nearby, far faster and louder than it should have been.
Was it this loud before?
Was I here before?
He had been. He knew it in his guts, brain to balls, the same way he had always loved his wife.
But what happened here? That was the ten-billion-dollar question, wasn’t it?
Another small roll/wiggle brought him close enough to Trish that he could shout at her, “Can you see a way out of this?”
In answer she shimmied a bit. Enough that she was able to get better purchase and lift her head a bit. “We’re in the middle!” she shouted. “It’s too fast! I can’t – oh!”
Her sentence turned to a surprised shout, which Alex heard clearly as the sound of the rushing water – the impossible torrent that had done its best to drown their words as well as their bodies – suddenly disappeared. The wall of white noise was gone, replaced by a silence so absolute that even without looking Alex knew they must still be in the middle of the flashing mist.
“It’s gone,” Trish said.
“The fog?”
“No.”
She didn’t elaborate, but she was sitting upright now, so Alex figured that, whatever was going on, at least it didn’t involve the danger of being swept away and drowned.
He sat up as well, and saw what she was talking about. His mouth worked up and down, trying to say something that would make sense of the situation. Nothing came.
The fog still surrounded them; he had been right about that, at least. But the stream had changed. Or rather, it hadn’t. The stream was no longer a wall of current, but a thin, shallow line of water that glinted like a mercury thread in the mist, stitching its way through the green coat of the forest. A moment ago it had felt like category-five rapids. Now it was only shin-deep.
“What happened?” said Trish.
Alex had no answer. He was bedraggled and exhausted. He felt like he had been fighting heavy rapids.
I was fighting heavy rapids. There was no way anything else could have happened.
But then where had all the water gone? A glance at his wife told him that she had just gone through the same thing he had: she was utterly soaked, and still coughing quietly as her lungs emptied of water.
He looked up and down the stream. There was no sign of rapids. He saw small eddies as the shallow waters rolled over stones buried in the stream’s bed, but that was all.
Just a stream, no matter what I felt.
He frowned.
A stream, and also rapids, and…
… rocks.
He and Trish were laying on the rock she had found, and had pulled herself onto. There were other rocks that he saw and remembered at least a bit from the moment he had tumbled into the river or stream or whatever it was.
But the rock he had caught at the last moment of his strength – the one that had saved them – was gone. The spot where Alex remembered the stone being was empty. Just slowly-moving water, less than two feet deep.
Am I remembering wrong? Did I just grab this rock we’re on? Or did I grab Trish?
No. He distinctly remembered getting his shoes positioned against that other rock, the water still rushing over his knees and his side as he stretched between it and the rock where he now found himself.
Small. But big enough to anchor and help save them.
“What’s happening?” he said, not really expecting an answer.
Trish coughed again, then said, “I don’t think this was what Dr. Coleman had in mind when he told us to come here.”
Alex almost laughed. He probably would have, but the f
og was still all around them, smothering any levity. Instead of laughing, he said, “We have to get back to the road.”
Trish nodded. She stood, wobbling a bit, almost slipping on the rock where they had taken sanctuary from water that apparently did not even exist. Alex leaped to his feet as she did, his mind shrieking that if she fell in the rapids would reappear as fast as they had gone. She would fall and be lost to him.
But she righted herself, then stepped purposefully into the water. In only a few short steps she was on the bank, then turning and gesturing for him to follow, to hurry.
She needn’t have bothered. Alex was already moving, sloshing across the water and then slogging onto the mud that marked the line between wet and dry. He looked at the forest, or tried to. The fog was still thick, and blanketed everything with an impenetrable gray.
“I don’t want to go in there again,” he said.
“Me either.” Trish pointed at the stream behind them. “I vote we stick by the stream. Follow it until it dumps out at the road.”
“That’s miles past where we stopped the car.”
She shrugged, though she didn’t look at him. Like Alex, Trish had her gaze glued to the fog that hid the trees – and anything else that might be there. “I’d rather hit the road and backtrack along asphalt for a few miles than go in there again.”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant by there. And he agreed completely. He turned to follow the stream. Took a step. Stopped.
Trish must have seen his frown, because she asked, “What is it?”
“I don’t know what side of the stream we’re on.”
“What?”
“I got all turned around in the…” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “The stream” didn’t seem to cover it, but “the rapids” was just as jarring, given that they were not there at all. Finally he shrugged and finished, lamely, “The water.”
Trish nodded. She looked around and he could see that she had gotten thoroughly spun around as well. The fog blanketed everything, and between that and the permanent, starless night created by the canopy of tree branches, there was no way of knowing north from south, east from west. Then she chuckled. “We’re so smart, you and I.”
“What is it?”
“Both of us have PhDs and have been doing advanced physics in our sleep since we were kids.”
“So?”
“So we apparently forgot that water flows downhill.”
He understood what she meant now. The stream was fed at one end by a spring in some of the mountains far past the forest, and ended at a reservoir southwest of where they had stopped the car.
They just had to follow the current until it got them out of here.
“My brilliant wife,” he said.
She flashed him a grin, and even wet and bedraggled he was struck by how beautiful she was when she smiled. It felt like he was looking at the best version of his own potential. Like the world might turn out all right if he just kept staring at that smile.
He held out his hand. She took it. He looked at the stream. There wasn’t much water, and there wasn’t much light, either. But he could make out a few branches sliding in one direction as the current carried them toward the reservoir, toward the place where the forest ended and real life could begin again.
Alex meant to start walking, but his feet remained rooted for some reason. He finally realized that he was listening for the whispers. Looking for the shapes that had accompanied them in the mist. So, for that matter, was Trish, turning slowly in a complete circle that ended with her facing the same way he was: downstream.
“Hear anything?” she said.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“See anything?”
“No. You?”
“Just fog,” said Alex. “Let’s go.”
They walked along, and every so often he glanced to his right, as though they might have wandered away from the quietly burbling stream without noticing it. It stayed where it was supposed to be. The water level remained the same, too – no more phantom rapids or disappearing rocks.
He glanced over. He walked. He looked again.
He stopped walking.
“No,” he whispered.
Trish froze, too. “What?” she asked. She turned her head side to side, staring at the fog and the shadows it hid. “What do you see?”
Alex couldn’t answer her. He could barely speak at all, and the words he managed were almost a whistle through a throat clenched in fear.
“That’s not possible.”
23
(When Tricia Had Grown)
Tricia understood the world.
Oh, not in the details, not in the smallest areas – though she worked to do just that in her daily grind as a researcher – but the world in general, that was her thing. That was why she liked science. There were absolutes. There were things you could count on. Sometimes the absolutes seemed to shift or change – gravity was a different thing once you got big enough or small enough or added in different forces. But even those shifts and changes were themselves the product of absolute rules. Even when the rules had yet to be completely discovered or figured out, they were there.
Truth was truth, irrespective of whether you believed it or not. That was the point of science: to peel back what appeared to be and find out what actually was.
That was why she felt like she was being punched. Not just once, either, but over and over.
She had forgotten so much of the forest. Whether it was swallowed up by the pain of what happened here so long ago – and then what happened again, when she lost her son – or whether her mind had just hidden from things that seemed to countermand everything she thought she knew, she could not say. No matter why, the forest existed for years as a black hole in her mind. A few things, mostly seen in dream, existed in a tenuous hold between remembered and forgotten, in the event horizon of memory and whatever lay in the total darkness. Now, that event horizon was contracting.
She was starting to remember, and so also starting to realize how much danger she was in. Not just the physical kind, but the kind that threatened Self. The kind that could strip away sanity easier than she could peel an apple.
That was what she felt now, when she looked at the stream. Alex had pulled her with him as he ran away from –
(Memory. The thing in the dark. The monster. The man in the tree.
The forest.)
– the things that had hunted them from the mist. He had done the right thing, the only thing… but it was also the most dangerous thing. He had fled the shadow, and in so doing brought them deeper into the place where madness ruled not at the fringes, but at the heart. A place where science didn’t work. Where they could walk forever without getting to their destination. Where she and Alex could fall into a stream that wasn’t a stream, but a raging river.
Tricia honestly thought she was going to die twice. Once from being drowned in rapids, or dashed to pieces against the rocks that thrust out of white water to pummel and bruise them as they were buffeted to and fro.
The second time – the worst of the two by far – was the death that came when she crawled onto the rock in the middle of the rapids, and realized that there were no rapids. Just a stream, cloaked in creepers of mist that reached forth from the mist all around them.
The thing that had almost killed them wasn’t even real.
But Alex saw it, too. He felt it. He’s still dripping wet.
Alex stopped walking. “No,” he said. His hand remained curled around hers, but his flesh chilled. It was like holding the hand of a corpse.
“What?” she said. He was staring at the stream, so she looked away. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want more madness. She looked into the forest. The mist swirled, and its light brightened for an instant. The flash illuminated lazy circles of vapor that funneled in and out, allowing almost-glimpses of shapes and shadows.
“This is not possible,” Alex said.
And Tricia finally
looked. She cursed herself, but it was impossible not to look.
Alex was staring at the stream. The water flowed, nearly silent against the rocks that made up its bed, fist-sized things smoothed by eons of friction. A whisper, nothing more. No loud noises, no rapids.
But it was flowing the wrong way. They had been following it down stream, the stream at their right as they walked. But now, when she turned so it was on her right side, she was facing upstream, against the current.
A small noise escaped her. It was girlish, almost the sound of a child finding an unexpected present. Not in keeping at all with the fear she felt as she said, “Did we cross over without realizing?”
Alex shook his head. “We’ve been walking with it on our right.”
“Then we must have started off in the wrong direction.” She sounded almost petulant, and hated it. But that was the only explanation, wasn’t it? They must have been confused, and actually started going upstream in the first place. That was all. Just confusion because of panic, and they misread the subtle current.
It would be an easy fix: they just had to turn around, put the stream on their left, and do it right this time. Follow it downstream, get back to the road, then drive to Dr. Coleman’s office and beat him to death for suggesting they come here in the first place.
Apparently Alex was thinking along the same lines, because he said, “I have never wanted to murder a health professional before.”
She squeezed his hand, and felt some life come back into it. He squeezed hers back. Not too tightly, but tightly enough that she knew he was alive. That she wasn’t holding the hand of someone who had died some time ago, and was only walking around because he hadn’t quite realized it yet.
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