The Forest

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Echoing Tricia’s words, the sheriff said, “It’s okay. All okay.” Tricia jerked her head toward Julie, wondering for a split second if the forest not only brought nightmares came to life, but also laid bare anyone’s thoughts to those around them – a nightmare of another kind. She didn’t know if Alex would love her, or if anyone would love anyone if all thought was laid bare.

  But the words weren’t directed at her. Julie had shimmied out over the edge of the still-open trapdoor, one hand reaching down.

  “Grab on!” she said. “It’s tricky. Even if you’ve done it before.”

  “Is it Alex?” said Tricia.

  Julie nodded tightly. She waved her hand, and even as relief lightened Tricia’s heart she wondered why Alex wasn’t letting the sheriff help him up.

  Whatever the reason, Julie shimmied backward and one of Alex’s hands appeared through the trapdoor. It slapped the floor of the room, and Tricia waited for the other hand to come through, then the rest of him.

  The girl, still in Tricia’s arms, shivered hard. Tricia looked at her. She sensed Julie moving suddenly, but didn’t look away from the girl, who was shaking so fast and hard it seemed like she was having a seizure.

  Something flashed in the fog, and the girl in Tricia’s arms screamed. Tricia had been cradling her close, rocking her a bit without noticing, so she got the full force of the shrieking, so loud she wouldn’t have believed that it came from such a young, small girl.

  Tricia screamed, too. She couldn’t hear her own voice. The girl was wailing now, the voice so high Tricia expected the windows all around to crack and rain glass down on them.

  Tricia turned her head away from the sound. She didn’t let go of the girl, but she couldn’t help leaning away. Then her eyes widened as she realized that Alex’s hands – visible only a moment before as he pulled himself up – were no longer in view.

  He fell!

  Julie lunged forward in an obvious attempt to help Alex, leaning out over the hole in the floor too far to be safe.

  Tricia ached to do the same. But for some reason she couldn’t let go of the girl she held. Tricia’s muscles had locked in tandem with the girl’s own tormented spasms. She couldn’t let go. She couldn’t let go of what she held, she couldn’t let go of the past… and suddenly she understood that holding so tight to this one thing that represented every sorrow she had ever felt would lead to her losing the one thing she still possessed.

  She started to let go. To go to her husband. Then Julie wiggled back, and Tricia could tell the sheriff had her husband. He was safe.

  She held the girl closer to her. Alex didn’t need her as much, did he? Not in this moment. Not now.

  A moment later Alex’s hand reappeared, holding tight to the sheriff’s own. His other hand appeared a moment later, then his head and shoulders.

  The girl in Tricia’s arms kept screaming for what felt like forever even though it was probably only a few seconds before the scream became a hoarse, throaty whisper.

  Alex got to his knees, then held out his hand, palm up. It looked like he was giving something to her, but Tricia saw nothing in his hand.

  Alex looked at the open hand in horror. He started to slide backward, almost plummeting right back through the trapdoor he had just managed to get through. Only Julie’s quick thinking stopped him. She planted her feet wide, grabbed Alex’s still-outstretched arm with both hands, then pulled, pulled, pulled.

  Tricia finally let go of the girl. She let go of Sam, she let go of Sammy, and she went to Alex.

  She grabbed his forearm as well. Alex barely seemed to notice her or the sheriff or the girl or even the fact that he was on the verge of falling a hundred feet or more.

  “It was here,” he murmured. He kept staring at his open hand as they pulled him up. His feet kicked a bit, whatever block his body and mind suffered unable to completely rid him of his need to survive.

  But he didn’t look away. Not as Tricia and Julie pulled him through the hole in the floor, not as they tugged him away from the danger it represented, not even as they finally had him far enough away that they flopped, exhausted, backward themselves and all three of them lay panting on the floor.

  “It was here,” Alex said again. He sounded shell-shocked, and that strange emptiness beat back Tricia’s weariness.

  “What was there?” asked Tricia.

  “Mine,” whispered the girl. “Mine all mine all mine.”

  Tricia looked at her. She was still in another place, her legs now bent up so that her knees were under her chin, hugging herself tightly.

  “What is, honey?” Tricia said gently.

  The girl shuddered, but gave no other answer.

  Julie just shook her head, then stood and looked around. She made a sound, so full of despair that Tricia knew what she was looking at, even if she hadn’t already seen it herself.

  “It’s out there, isn’t it?” said Alex. He still sounded odd, drained, but at least he was here. “We haven’t gotten above the fog.”

  The sheriff shook her head. “No. It’s…” She shook her head again, then went to the generator that Tricia saw was hooked to the ancient radio by a jury-rigged set of alligator clips and frayed cords. She tried flipping a few switches, then pulled a ripcord. The generator didn’t make a sound. Not even the slightest cough in response to her efforts.

  Tricia knew it wouldn’t. And she could tell the sheriff hadn’t expected it to, either. The fog was all around. It wasn’t ready to let them go, so stay they would.

  “Why are you here?” asked Alex.

  “I fell into the stream,” said the sheriff, her voice strangely wistful. “I thought I was far enough away, and that it was too weak to do anything, but…”

  “It changed on us, too,” said Alex.

  The sheriff studied him. “How so?”

  “It was this little thing, and then it was fast, and then –”

  “It catches you,” said the girl who sat in the corner. “It drags you away from the world. From everything.”

  Tricia looked at her. “What happened to you?” she said. “Why were you out there?”

  The girl shook her head. “I was out there forever.” She laughed, an ugly, pained sound. “Just running and running, but I never got anywhere.” She let go of her knees and passed a shaky hand over her face, hiding from the people in the room and the world outside.

  “She must have been swept away, too,” said the sheriff. Her expression, wistful a moment ago, darkened to something like sorrow.

  “What is this place?” asked Alex. “What’s happening to us?”

  The sheriff smiled sadly. “The same thing that always happens. The forest…”

  Alex held something out. For a moment, Tricia thought he was expecting them to see something he no longer held, like he had a moment ago. But something glinted in the fog-light, and she saw it was the card from the man who had attacked her.

  “You didn’t spot this before,” Alex said to Julie. “It was on the man who tried to kill Tricia earlier today.”

  Tricia shook her head, wondering what Alex was doing. Lost evidence wasn’t the point of the moment, was it?

  But Julie nodded, and Tricia realized that Alex must have put something together that she hadn’t. The sheriff stared at the card in Alex’s hand. “You got that today,” she murmured, speaking to herself as much as to the people in the room. “Today.” She sighed.

  The fog flashed. It didn’t seem as bright in here, high up and far from the forest floor, but that could have been wishful thinking.

  Tricia stood. She took a step toward the girl who now rocked back and forth against the wall. The girl’s gaze jumped to Tricia. “We’re lost,” said the girl.

  “I know, honey –” Tricia took another step toward her, but the girl leaned away and a pitiful mewling spilled out of her.

  Tricia froze, then leaned away. The girl’s keening slid into silence.

  Tricia felt Alex’s hand in hers. She squeezed it. It gave her stren
gth enough to look out the window.

  The fog was thick out there – thicker than before. But there were no movements at least. No roiling vapor, no dark shapes. They were above the trees, if nothing else. Even though everything out here was wrong, even though reality itself appeared bent, at least they were farther away from the ground. Distance meant something here. Maybe only the up-and-down kind, but that was a rational thing, and she could work with rational things.

  Alex destroyed that moment of illusion. “We’re never leaving, are we?” he asked Julie.

  “Not all of us,” said the sheriff. “The forest has us.”

  “What is the forest?” asked Alex. He motioned at the card, with its arcane symbol, its eldritch circles. “What is that?”

  “It’s not supposed to be here,” said Julie. “We’ve tried to –”

  The fog flashed around them. The girl on the floor whimpered, and Julie turned to her. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re safe with us.”

  “How can you say that?” asked Tricia. “How can you say that we won’t leave this place, then say that… that…”

  She gestured at the girl on the floor. Julie glanced at Tricia for the most fleeting of moments then focused on the girl again. “Because she has to live. She’s so young, and the young have to live their lives.” She frowned. “I think. Memory is funny in the forest. It eats what’s happened, it almost seems. Which makes sense, I guess. But it’s hard to remember a lot of things here.” She stared at the girl. “But not her. I remember her.”

  Julie noted the trapdoor, which still sat open. She went to it, grabbed the handle to the door that was flush against the floor, and lifted it. She pulled, guiding the door in its arc that would close it, leaning over as she said, “We’ve got to figure out how to get out of this, and maybe even –”

  Alex’s eyes widened. “Don’t!”

  Something flashed. Not the fog. The flash was streaked with red, then sheeted with it as the axe buried itself in the sheriff’s forehead. She stiffened, and the madman – still holding the axe – climbed up the last few rungs of the ladder.

  The girl started screaming. “Don’t take me, don’t take me, don’t –”

  The madman looked at her. Julie was still on her feet, doing an insane tapdance as her cleaved brain fired random impulses in its last moments. She sagged, and as she did the murderer jerked the axe free. It made a terrible grating sound that Tricia knew she would remember forever – or at least, for the rest of her life.

  Julie slumped, her body done with its dance. The madman moved aside, an almost languid motion of surprising grace that let the sheriff slide past him and through the hole in the floor. A dull thud sounded and Tricia knew the body had bounced into the ladder. Another thud a half-second later as the body ricocheted into a strut. The impact shook the floor. So did the second and the third, the epicenter of each shock bouncing through a different part of the guard tower as Julie careened through the supports.

  Then nothing.

  The madman stared. He didn’t look at Alex or Tricia. He had eyes only for the girl on the floor.

  “You’ll understand why this has to happen,” he said. “Or maybe not.” He giggled, and whipped the axe sideways, a motion that flung blood across the room. Tricia cried out as the still-warm blood of the sheriff splashed across her face and arms, and heard Alex do the same.

  The madman turned to them. “I have to kill her,” he said, a sadness in his voice that was so genuine and so normal that it terrified Tricia more than any insane rant could have done. “She’s where the ghosts come from. She’s where the nightmare begins.”

  He swung his axe again, and the blood splashed Tricia and Alex and the girl as well as the madman stepped toward her.

  “Sorry, honey,” he whispered. “I couldn’t do it for so long. But all good things must come to an end, right? That’s what I want: for it to end.”

  He took another step. “It has to end,” he whispered as he raised the axe. “It ends here. It ends now.”

  Alex leaped across the room, and Tricia wanted to cry out, to scream: “Don’t!”

  But there wasn’t time. And he wouldn’t have listened anyway. He would die for her, she knew that. And in that instant, there was a kind of wonderment in the air. She thought that losing Sammy had broken them. But here, in this place, she remembered – not much, just a little. Just flashes. There had been blood and pain before. There had been devastation.

  And what had saved her then?

  The same thing that tried to save her now.

  Alex.

  The moment brightened her soul, brighter by far than the fog or even the glints of light that appeared within it.

  This was a blaze. The instant birth of a sun within her. The moment that was first and last and everything in between.

  It wasn’t Tina Louise’s Diner where I first kissed Alex. It was here. It was the forest. Here is where I knew he loved me.

  The birth of a universe of love had taken a forever-nothing of time. It was eternal, so it existed within all time, and within no time at all. Light flared within her, so bright and hot it should have burned, but somehow it only made her happy.

  Then eternity ended. The brightness dimmed and died. The universe ceased as the madman finished the swing he had begun a billion years and a nanosecond before… and buried the axe in Alex’s back.

  31

  (When Tricia Was Young)

  Tricia started forward. They were here! Somehow they had made it to the cabin, and that meant Sam was there. Because he couldn’t be anywhere else. He had to be in the cabin; had to be alive.

  Alex grabbed her hand. “Stop,” he said, and pulled her back to the trees.

  “What?” Tricia demanded.

  “We don’t know where she is.”

  Tricia didn’t ask who he meant. The woman with her knife, last seen curled around her ankle in pain, tripped up by the same forest that had trapped Tricia and Alex within it.

  “She’s behind us,” said Tricia. “We know that much.”

  “Do we?” asked Alex.

  “Of course.” Tricia nearly snarled the words, immediately surprised by the ferocity of her response.

  Alex blanched. “But everything keeps changing. It…”

  “It doesn’t change. The only thing that changes is us. We keep getting spun around, but we know where we are now. The stream is that way.” She pointed in the direction the stream had to be. “We get there, turn south, and we’re back on the highway and then home.”

  Alex hesitated. But when Tricia pulled him toward her, he didn’t resist. He kept glancing back the way they had come, even though he had to be seeing only what Tricia did: fog, thicker than ever. In front of them, she could see the cabin through the mist, but only as a blurred rectangular block with smaller rectangles that could only be windows.

  The lights aren’t on, but is anybody home?

  Was that thought about the possibility that Sam wasn’t there? Or, worse, that they would find his body in there, hacked to pieces by his insane mother?

  Tricia didn’t know, so she put the thought away. Every step they crept toward the house, she shoved it deeper and deeper. She knew it was dangerous to do that – not only because a lack of understanding might bring danger as she tripped into traps she had made herself willfully blind to, but because once started, where might it end? What else would she lock inside her, what else might she force herself to forget?

  They reached the cabin, and even without the nightmare that had preceded this moment she would have understood why the kids in town spoke of it only in whispers. Why they dared each other to go there as a rite of passage, and why the rite of passage was never accomplished. Whatever notoriety a kid could achieve coming here would not be worth the payment in nightmares that the cabin would require.

  It was ramshackle, little more than rough boards nailed to the most basic frame. Some of the framing was visible through the rotted wood of the walls, and some of it…

>   Tricia squinted. Some of the framing she saw wasn’t just visible through weather- and time-beaten wood. It had actually been built outside the wall. That was insane, because it meant that the frame had been built piece by piece, with the builder sometimes working inside the frame, other times outside it as the walls went on. A mad mismatch that would require at least ten times the work and result in a corrupt, weakened structure.

  The roof hung above it all, and looked much the same: half-rotted shingles, some of it looking like it was covered by nothing more than plastic sheeting, struts and supports running in short lengths on the outside as well as – presumably – properly in place below the roof.

  It was outside-in, inside-out. And when Tricia realized it, she felt like she was looking less at a cabin than at the living heart of the forest. The forest was body, the mist was breath, but the center, the force that pushed life through it all… that was here.

  “It’s… everything,” said Alex. He felt it, too, then.

  They were still holding hands. They didn’t let go as they approached the cabin.

  Tricia headed toward the side of the house, the angle of it allowing her to see a sliver of what she thought was the front door. The front door, it was rumored, faced the stream. She had thought to rush in, grab Sam wherever he was, and then run for dear life until they reached that stream and follow it out of here.

  Then home. Home and everything would be fine.

  But Alex was pulling her away now, drawing her off to the side. She almost resisted, then realized he was right: they shouldn’t just walk blithely in. They had to look around; had to verify it was safe and, more importantly, that they could get Sam out of there.

  If he is here.

  He is.

  She and Alex went to the first window. They bent over as they approached, both of them hunching automatically – though even with the fog Tricia knew there was no way anyone looking out a window could miss them.

  Then again, maybe no one inside would want to look out in the first place. Not if they had seen anything like what she and Alex had seen.