The Forest

by Collings, Michaelbrent

He shook his head. “No. It has to come from somewhere. Light follows a path, we know –”

  He froze. Trish clenched her chest when she saw his face, as though trying to keep her heart from exploding. “What is it?”

  “The path. The stream.” Alex turned in a circle. “I don’t know where it is from here.”

  “We just put the tree at our back and…”

  “… and walk a straight line through the trees, through the mist,” Alex finished, trying to keep his expression from revealing what he thought their chances were of doing that: somewhere between “not good at all” and “zilch.”

  Tricia forced a smile. “The stream is pretty long, and I know it meanders around a bit. We should bump into it if we even walk in a sort of straight line.”

  Alex shook his head. “And what if we end up back where we were a second ago?” he said.

  There was one thing in the river. Then two. And what if they turned to four and then eight? What if we go back and see a thousand of the things, all whispering, “Die… die…”?

  “We can’t just go back,” Alex said.

  “And we can’t just leave,” Trish answered.

  “No,” said Alex. He thought. “Maybe we can go around in a circle. Maybe we can hit the stream closer to Sam’s place and miss…”

  Whatever is in the stream nearby.

  He didn’t say the words, but knew Trish was probably hearing them just the same. She shook her head. “Same problem as before,” she said. “We don’t know where we are, exactly, so how do we walk to a spot – any spot – with any kind of precision?”

  Alex had no answer, so he went back to Trish and turned her around once more and felt at her head. She winced but didn’t cry out, which he took as a good sign. “I can’t see the cut,” he finally said, “but from what I can feel it’s pretty small.”

  Trish looked at the painted palm of her hand. “Lot of blood.”

  “Head wounds do that,” said Alex. “I fell out of a tree once and whacked my head in about the same spot. Bled like crazy.”

  Trish looked like she might laugh. “I remember. I was there.”

  “Oh yeah. And weren’t you the one who insisted that I climb higher and higher? And weren’t you the one whose shoe fell on my face?”

  Trish put on a look of fake innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You just weren’t good at climbing trees.”

  “Certainly not as good as you were at footwear-related arboreal attacks.”

  “I still think it’s just because you weren’t good at climbing.”

  He snorted. “Probably. But a size five Nike in my mouth didn’t help much.”

  They were both talking, which they probably shouldn’t have been doing, but Alex felt like the quiet would have been too much to bear, and could tell Trish agreed with the sentiment.

  They hadn’t been able to run from the whispers, or from the things that made them. But at least they had a tree at their back, and that was something.

  Plus, the talk had given him an idea. He looked at the tree, then peered at the others nearby. The one that had attacked Trish in the darkness was substantially thicker – and so likely taller – than the others in the immediate vicinity. Perfect.

  “I can climb it,” he said.

  “What?” said Trish. “What are you – oh. No.”

  “It’s the best way. I climb to the top, look at where we have to go. Maybe I can even get above the fog and –”

  “And fall right out of the tree,” she said. “Or don’t you remember the moral of the story you just shared?”

  ”Don’t get shoes thrown at my face?”

  She snorted and, without another word, grabbed hold of the tree branch that had just brained her. “Help me up.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to –”

  “I need help on the first branch because it’s high up. But I can do it myself if you’re worried about poor little me.”

  She pronounced the last, poe widdow me, which was what decided Alex. It was a trace of the old Trish, who was more than willing to give him grief when she thought he was being a pain. They were in the forest, and things were terrifying, but if she could be this strong, so could he.

  It was a lie. He was not strong. He was terrified. He kept jerking his eyes around as though to catch something creeping up on him from the edges of his vision. And sometimes, he thought he did.

  But Trish was grabbing the branch, hooking her hands around either side and not waiting for him. Her feet lifted off the ground and she did an awkward swim through the air with them until the soles planted against the trunk of the tree.

  “Wait. I’ve got you.”

  Alex made a stirrup with his hands, right below her. She grunted gratefully and stepped into his grip, then he pushed up as she stepped higher and together they wrestled her into the tree.

  He had helped her, but even at this height – so low a fall could not possibly hurt her – his fear hummed into overdrive. “Careful,” he said. “Just go high enough to see where –”

  She snorted. “Really?” she said, already pulling herself up to the next level of branches. “I was going to get to the tippy-toppiest and then pitch myself down. Do you think I could get to terminal velocity before I exploded all over the place?”

  “Not funny,” he said.

  Trish stayed there a moment. He dared to hope she would chicken out and let him be the one to take the risk.

  She hoisted herself up. Up again.

  He tried not to stare at her butt. Apparently even in the face of death and ghosts and the madness that was worse than either of those things, the male teenager was just as worried about procreation as anything. Fight or flight? No, it was fight or flight – and how to stare at girls during both.

  Alex loved Trish’s smile and her eyes the very best. One was kind, the other intelligent, which he viewed as her two best qualities. But he had to admit the rest of her wasn’t hard on the soul, either.

  Just as with a moment ago, he knew he was hiding from terror in a sense of silliness. Terror could not exist in the same moment as laughter. Fear fled in the face of mirth.

  And for a teenage boy, the thought of your best female friend’s – only female friend’s, he corrected – butt was more powerful even than laughter.

  Hormones: the real best medicine.

  But Trish was disappearing into the branches above. Worse, she was disappearing into the mist that shrouded the forest in general and this tree in particular.

  The fog flashed, and as it did, shadows flitted past in the periphery of his vision, and Alex thought he heard them whisper:

  “… never leave…”

  “… you die…”

  He squinted, then looked around. Tried to convince himself he hadn’t heard anything; that his imagination had run amok.

  “Find them.”

  “Find them.”

  “FIND THEM.”

  “… out of time…”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s not real,” he murmured. “Not real, it can’t be real.”

  He opened his eyes. The shadows were gone. But was the fog thickening around the tree, around where Trish had gone?

  That was what had happened when the… things had appeared in the stream. What if they were up there now? Crackling noises came from above, but what if they weren’t Trish? What if they were following her even now? Climbing a bit faster, or maybe just appearing. Maybe just below, where they could grab her and pull her down and she would slam into branch after branch and be dead before she hit the ground. Maybe just yanking her off the tree and into themselves, to become one more specter that would forever haunt the forest.

  Alex felt his pulse start thrumming again. His pulse quickened as his heart pounded inside his ribcage, a beast that wanted so desperately to be free it would kill itself – and him – in its frantic attempts to escape.

  “Tr –”

  She fell.

  Oh, dear God, no, don –

  Thought disso
lved as he heard the terrible sound of his friend, his life, slamming into a branch. She screamed a short, piercing shriek that sounded almost like the aborted wail of a loon.

  Then she was silent and there was only the meat-wood thud, thud, THUD of a body slamming downward. Noisier than he would have thought, like she was falling from a hundred or a thousand feet rather than only thirty.

  Another sound joined the cacophony of gravity at work. The thud turned to a sound that reminded him, insanely, of the last dregs of an ICEE at the gas station. Drinking with Trish, the two of them sneaking out for something that would have been, could have been, a date. A wet sucking, then more slaps of flesh against the tree, then more wet noises, then a final, horrible noise that was a mixture of both.

  Then nothing.

  Trish had not fallen. Not all the way. She was still in the tree.

  Alex didn’t want to look up. He had to look up.

  He did look up.

  Trish hung above him, her body pinned to the tree by some of the smaller boughs that jutted out of the trunk, and which now impaled her. Four branches protruded from her body at neck, shoulder, chest, and thigh.

  That wasn’t what caused Alex to start screaming, though. He barely saw that.

  Her face.

  Her beautiful face.

  Where has her face gone?

  A fifth bough looked like it had probably been snapped off by her body as it fell. The naked end of it jutted out and up at an angle, and the other part of the sheared off limb lay tangled in a knot of branches nearby. That branch was thicker around than Alex’s arm. It shouldn’t have been able to snap like that under the weight of a girl falling from maybe twenty feet who weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds when soaking wet and wearing five pounds of clothes.

  But it did snap. The ragged edge of it glistened red where it ended about a foot away from the trunk. Something dripped off it. Too thick to be blood.

  Something fell on Alex. Wet and warm – and hard.

  Her skull.

  The branch had punched right through her head. Into the back of her skull, out the ruined remnants of what had until moments ago been his ideal of beauty in the world.

  Alex screamed. He screamed, and didn’t care if the things in the forest heard. If they came for him. If they made him a thing like them – a ghost, a wraith.

  He was already dead. His life was gone, and so twisted and mangled he could barely see anything through the gore.

  Another thing fell on his face.

  He wiped it away. Something cool in his hand.

  He looked.

  His scream now was louder than any that had gone before.

  Trish’s face was gone. Exploded by the tree that went through her skull and brain and pushed her face apart to reach through.

  And Alex held part of that face in his hands. He screamed. Because he was staring at her eye, cradled miraculously, magically, obscenely in the palm of his hand.

  25

  Interlude

  (When Sammy Was Young)

  He fell asleep to heat. Now he wakes to heat even worse. The worst heat of all, the worst heat he has ever felt. He feels like he is in an oven, and Sammy worries he is in Hell. He heard Callee Prescott talk about Hell once, and asked Mommy and Daddy if it was real.

  They laughed, and said of course not, but there had been something in their eyes that said they were lying. They both believed in Hell. Maybe they had seen it, even.

  The hot is so bad, and so terrible, and worst of all it’s a dark hot. It’s a hot that makes Sammy float in and out of sleep and twisted dreams of flying glass and blood and trees reaching for him.

  Then brightness blinds him. Cool air breathes life into his lungs.

  Sammy blinks. He sees a form. He thinks it is a person, but cannot be sure, because the light behind the person – strange, bright, pulsing light and wisps of fog that trickle in and out of it all – is blinding. “Are you an angel?” he asks/whimpers.

  “No,” says the person. “I wish I was.”

  Sammy can almost see. Almost, but not quite. He can just feel the hot and the hotter and the hottest of maybe-Hell. Only the feel of his unicorn still clutched in his little fingers gives him hope that maybe this isn’t that place. Would Hell let him have his favorite toy?

  He sobs. The brightness has come just like the dark, but it’s all the same. It all hurts and makes him afraid.

  The person – angel? Devil? – has been speaking in a whisper that does not tell Sammy whether the whisperer is man or woman, and the light around the person shines so bright he still can’t see who or what looks at him. Now the voice speaks again, still a whisper, though this time the person/thing sounds like he/she/it is talking to herself/himself/itself. “The dead don’t stay dead in the forest. Remember that.”

  26

  (When Tricia Was Young)

  In spite of her tough words and bantering tone, Tricia was terrified of going up the tree. It was the right thing to do – or at least, the only one they had thought of that sounded like it might help – but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Still, she put on a brave face and concentrated on not letting her voice quaver or her hands shake. If she showed any reticence, she knew Alex would insist on going in her stead.

  He really wasn’t as good a climber as she was, and she was grateful that he had the good sense to admit it. She knew he wanted to protect her – he was a good guy, and wouldn’t let others take risks that he could have taken in their place.

  And maybe especially you, Tricia. Maybe he feels protective. More than a friend.

  She almost tried to toss out that feeling, then realized it was better than thinking about the fog or the forest or what Sam might be going through or any of the other dangers that had become her world.

  She went with her feelings. Thinking about how kind Alex was. How he worried about her. How he had held her that morning, when she was weeping about her guppies.

  And had that been only a few hours ago? That had seemed like the worst thing that had ever happened – the worst thing that ever would happen – at the time. But now the cruel killing of her fish with the word “DON’T” hung on the door seemed almost trivial.

  She wondered if she was the guppy. A small thing, totally at the mercy of its captor. She could be nurtured and cared for as a pet. She could be bred as an experiment. She could be killed as a thing of no worth.

  Don’t think like that.

  She concentrated on climbing. She’d always enjoyed climbing trees – hence the event where Alex got a shoe in the face – but had to admit it got a bit harder each time. It was one thing to swing from branches as a third-grader, when you weighed next to nothing; another to pull yourself up an inch at a time as a high-schooler.

  The branches of the tree were rough under her palms. It was a pleasant, familiar feeling at first. But as she ascended, the ridges of bark began to pull at her skin. She felt scratches form on her hands and arms.

  She did as much with her feet as she could. Even that began to hurt, though. Ramming a tennis shoe into the point where branches met trunk was the best way to go, but the branches were at a steep angle. Her body weight pushed her feet deeper into the wedge between branch and trunk than was comfortable, and by the time she had climbed a few yards she felt like the pressure was warping the small bones in her foot.

  And what would Alex think then? Would he ever fall in love with a club-footed freak?

  No help for it. She’d rather have club feet than fall. So she wedged her feet tight, pushed up with her legs, and pulled with her scratched palms.

  After climbing for a while, she looked around. She hoped she might be able to see above the trees nearby; to spot the stream and maybe even something that would point a clear path to Sam’s place.

  She saw only trees. She’d have to go higher.

  The branches started to thin. She switched from sturdy limbs to slim ones that bent and creaked every time she put weight on one. She tried to make sure she always had at
least one hand and one foot on different branches, so if one or the other broke she wouldn’t fall. A fall from this height could kill her, and would definitely break some bones.

  A branch cracked under her. She switched her weight to the hand above her, which was holding a limb that was also far too thin for comfort.

  The branch her foot rested on crackled again, but didn’t break.

  She kept climbing.

  She looked around every few feet. Finally she was above the other trees. The fog was still everywhere, but… was that a slit in the trees? A thinning, barely seen, that would mark the stream?

  She turned a bit. Doing so made her perch shake. Not just the branches this time, but the trunk itself moved from side to side. It was the thickness of a sapling at this height, only five or six inches in diameter, if that.

  But she needed to get a better look, and that meant moving. Another crack sounded as she turned. She froze.

  The tree, it seemed, had a malicious sense of humor. Lots of crackling and crunching, but no actual breaks. Yet.

  She turned a bit more. An inch at a time. The fog was thick, but she thought she could see something. Something…

  Tricia smiled. She leaned over a bit, intending to call down to Alex. To tell him what she had seen.

  Before she could, a giant shadow obscured her view. It seemed to come from above her, then plummeted into and out of her eyesight in an instant. She gave a shriek of startlement and fear, then peered down to see what had happened.

  She saw something pounding its way downward, slamming into a branch, flipping off it, hitting another one below that, bouncing like a pinball down to the next level. Something big, though she could tell little else of it before it disappeared among the branches.

  She started down almost instantly, moving faster than she should, almost flinging herself down the branches and limbs at a dangerous pace. All she could think of was that the thing she had seen was another shadow. She didn’t know what they were, but she knew this: it was heading for Alex.

  Halfway down, she heard him scream. She moved even faster, no longer climbing but in a strange kind of controlled fall. All but plummeting toward Alex, toward whatever had fallen to him and was hurting him.