Sam’s mother must have heard it, too. She screamed even louder as she rocked forward so far her head touched the floor.
“Go. Go, go, go gogogogo,” whispered Sam, repeating the words in a panicked litany that dissolved into wordless sound.
Alex nodded, and so did Tricia. Still supporting Sam, the three of them hobble-walked toward the front door, while Sam’s mother continued wailing.
Tricia was glad. Not just because the woman seemed to have forgotten them for the moment, but because she wanted out of this place, this madhouse where the whispers were so close.
“The center,” said Sam, sounding suddenly as though he had been drugged. “We’re at the center of it all. The center, the heart, the middle-the-beginning-the-end.” His jaw sagged, his mouth flopping open. Alex shook him. “Wha…?” said Sam, blinking and looking around like he wasn’t sure if he had just woken from a dream or was still locked inside that sleeping place.
“Come on, Sam,” said Alex. “We gotta get moving.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. Then he shook himself and said, “Hell yeah.” He looked around again, one last time, and Tricia saw him taking in the images on the walls. “Doodles,” he whispered.
He started moving, half limping, half being supported by Tricia and Alex as the three of them moved in an awkward knot toward the front door.
Tricia kept looking back. Sam’s mother was still on the floor, and one of the times Tricia looked, she saw the woman fall to the side, still bent double. Tricia felt a moment of hope as Alex reached for the front door. She wasn’t at all surprised in that moment to realize that the knob itself was ornate, a gold shank topped by some kind of crystal that created a timeless look that would be at home in an old, old mansion, or an ultra-modern home in Beverly Hills. She was equally unsurprised to see that the plate into which the shank was embedded did not match the knob. The plate was a yellowed, cracked thing that could be plastic or maybe ivory. Years had turned the thing from a simple mismatch into a thing almost beautiful in its grotesquerie.
Alex’s hand covered the crystal. He turned the knob.
Tricia looked at the still-screaming form of Sam’s mother. She expected the woman to leap up, to grab them all. To pull out her knife and rush them.
She didn’t.
Alex swung the door open. They hobbled out into the fog.
“Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning,” Alex whispered, though Tricia could barely hear him over the still-wailing woman they were leaving behind.
“What was that?” said Sam.
“Peter Pan,” said Alex.
Tricia thought the moment was bizarre. They were lost in a forest, a madwoman after them, supernatural forces spinning them around and taunting them – and, she finally admitted, they were supernatural; that was the only thing that made, not sense, but the best kind of unsense.
And yet, we’re holding a book club meeting. Right here in the fog. Right here, listening to the screams of the woman trying to kill us.
But she said nothing. Something inside her screamed louder than Sam’s mother. Something inside her shrieked that this moment must happen.
“I loved that story when I was little.” said Sam. He smiled dreamily. “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.”
It didn’t surprise Tricia that Sam knew the subtitle. He knew everything. He was smart. They all were.
So we’ll get through this. We’ll figure out a way to get home.
Sam’s eyes shifted, from whatever memory had warmed him back to the moment in which they lived. As they did the sense of foreordination and predestination passed away. Tricia felt free to move again.
So did Sam, apparently, because he pushed himself forward, moving his arms from Tricia’s and Alex’s shoulders. He wobbled, and Alex’s arms went out as though to catch his friend.
Sam held up a hand, warding him off. “I can do it.”
Alex nodded. “Good. We –” His expression changed suddenly, contorting to terror so complete it made even his beautiful face into a nightmare. His words turned to a cough, and as Tricia realized he was looking over his shoulder when it happened, she knew what he was seeing. She looked, too.
Sam’s mother had stopped screaming. While they talked of fairie tales and mischievous children who flew away to Neverland when they should have been sleeping, Sam’s mother had torn herself from the panic that incapacitated her. She stood.
She was walking toward them and as she passed the knife Alex had put down to work on Sam’s bindings with his fingers, she scooped the blade into her hand. She was grinning as she moved. Not running, but moving with the lithe, easy, deadly grace of a cheetah that knows it has run its prey to exhaustion.
“I know how to end it,” Sam’s mother said. “I know it has to end here, now. It ends, and then it never happens, and never will happen, and never happened at all.”
She slashed at the air with the knife.
Tricia turned to Alex. They both turned to Sam.
All three ran into the fog, into whatever waited in the forest.
Behind them, they heard the cracks and crackles and snaps of a woman rushing through that same forest, tracking them, thirsting for their blood.
And beside them, the whisperers. Tricia kept seeing them in the fog, shadows flitting through the trees, always keeping pace, but always just out of sight.
They whispered the same word over and over, sounding nearly out of breath, as though they were things of flesh and bone and breath and blood instead of nightmare shadows in a misty world. They whispered into the eternal gloaming of the forest, and into Tricia’s soul.
“Run…”
“Run…”
“RUN…”
32
(When Alex Was Young)
“Run…”
“Run…”
“RUN…”
Alex heard the whispers all around, but worse than that he heard them inside himself. He, Trish, and Sam ran through the mist, and he felt more and more like that went both ways. He was dissolving into fear, terror, pain – not just for himself, which was bad, but for Sam, which was worse, and for Trish, which was unbearable. He was turning to a mist made of silvered pains and regrets – a featureless vapor destined to blow away.
Sam ran between him and Trish, and though he wobbled he never fell. A few times Alex reached for his friend, but Sam always righted himself first. The three of them ran, but even in the headlong flight Alex tried to keep himself oriented. He wanted out of here, and he wanted Trish out of here. Sam, too, but not nearly so much. He felt almost cruel admitting it, even to himself, but if it came down to it he knew he would leave Sam to save Trish.
He would do anything – live or die – to save Trish.
A branch rushed toward his face, slicing out of the fog. He ducked, rolled, came up running again. He had drawn slightly ahead of Trish and Sam, so they were able to take advantage of the warning his maneuver supplied and avoid getting clotheslined by the limb.
Behind them all, the crashes came hard and fast. Sam’s mother was howling, the sound more like that of a beast than a woman. They were all changing in the mist, in the forest. Alex was becoming nothing, fading away into a thing of pure fear. Sam’s mother was becoming an animal, rabid and unthinking.
What of Trish and Sam?
He didn’t know. He could only run.
“How… far… to the… stream…?” panted Sam.
“Not… far,” Alex panted in return.
He had no doubt that was the case, normally. But how could he tell Sam about what the forest did? About the way distances shifted and places seemed jumbled and nothing could be counted on.
Except Trish. I can count on her. I can count on Sam.
“Run…”
The whispers were still there, though they sounded farther away than they had a moment ago. The fog flashed.
“Are they gone?” asked Trish. She didn’t stop running. None of them did.
“No,” said Alex. “They’
re not.”
He heard Sam’s mother, her words echoing in his mind: “No matter where I go, no matter how far or how long I run, they follow me. They’re always there. Around me, inside me. All of them, all of me.”
The fog flashed. Alex looked toward the light. It always had a place, he realized. It wasn’t like the fog was brightening uniformly – the light had a source.
He looked back toward Sam and Trish as he said, “What’s nex –”
He looked at Trish.
She looked at him.
Neither looked at Sam, though. Because Sam was gone.
“Where is he?” Trish shouted.
“I don’t know!”
They both spun in circles.
“Trish! Alex!”
Both of them turned toward the sound as the fog flashed. Sam’s voice, Alex knew. But it was too far away. There was no way he could have run away without Alex or Trish seeing. No way, but it had happened.
“Do you hear that?” said Trish quietly.
“Of course I do,” snapped Alex. “But how did he get so far –”
“Not that.” She held up a hand. Cocked her head. “Where’d she go? Sam’s mom?”
Alex mimicked her motion, tilting his head to the side. “I don’t hear her.”
The fog flashed. And then Alex did hear her. He heard Sam’s mother shrieking, but again he heard it far away. The shrieks were just as insane as they had been before, but distance gave him a measure of comfort.
“Run…”
“Hear…”
Something flitted past him. Alex spun, trying to see it, but all he saw was another shadow in the fog. It was about his height, whatever it was; beyond that he couldn’t tell a bit about it. Even the height might be wrong, too, given how the mist curled and curdled everything. The fog transformed trees to hunchbacked skeletons, the sky to a distant memory. It warped everything, so he knew any impression he got of what he saw could be wrong.
Something ran past again. Again Alex turned, sensing Trish mimic the movement. The shadow – or perhaps another shadow – ran past. Again, just out of sight. A dark blur, the crackle of branches: these signaled its presence more than anything Alex actually saw.
His eyes opened wide. “I’m hearing them,” he said.
“We’re both hearing them,” Trish said, before calling out, “Saaaaam!”
“Here!”
Sam’s voice sounded farther away than ever.
Alex shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m hearing them. The whisperers.”
Crack-crack-crack-crack.
Alex tensed, and felt Trish do the same beside him. “They’re coming,” she whispered. “They’re becoming.”
Alex understood, because it was the same thing he was feeling. The whisperers had been wraiths, the quick glimpses of them that Alex and Trish had caught accompanied by no noise other than the words the things spoke.
But now –
(crackle-crack-crack)
– he and Trish were hearing them. Not just the words they spoke, but the movements they made. They were becoming, yes, that was the right word. They were becoming flesh – or something like it. They were becoming real. Stepping out of shadow and into the mist-lights, to be seen, and to be feared.
“RUN!”
One of the shadows flitted by, so close that Alex suspected that if he had turned a bit faster he would have seen the thing – and would have been driven mad by that sight.
Even so, and even with the sound of leaves and twigs breaking under the thing’s feet, the voice of it still sounded strained, hollow, distant. It was the echo of words the owner had spoken, then had walked away from before they fully ended.
Alex ran. He saw his life pass before his eyes: not just the life he had led, but the life he had hoped to lead.
He saw himself, a child growing up in a cold house. No home, just a place to shelter and sustain basic survival. There was no life in the place. Certainly his mother was never kind to him, never held or cuddled or whispered the sweet lies and sweeter truths that Alex knew should be every child’s birthright, but which had passed him by.
He saw himself at school, realizing quickly that he would be isolated by most of the students – and a good share of the teachers – for his brilliance.
He saw himself graduate. He saw himself working, devoting himself to the search for knowledge, to discovering more about the way things really were, every day.
He saw children. His children. A boy, a girl. He saw them grow up and find their own happiness, have their own children, and the cycle would repeat.
And, of course, Alex saw Trish. She was his world. She had been for longer than he could remember, and he knew she would always be the north star upon which he fixed his course. She was the only thing that had kept him from growing up completely dysfunctional, the love she shared and the ability she had to understand him on the deepest levels making up for the absence of parental kindness or concern.
He also realized that he did not see one thing: Sam. It was as though when the fog – or whatever hid within the fog – stole their friend away, it had stolen even the memory of his existence.
No. I remember. And I will find him.
The light flashed. He and Trish stopped running, because the light had flashed in front of them… and it had never heralded any comfort. Just death. Just shadows, and wraiths, and the man in the tree, and –
Sam’s mother exploded out of the fog in front of them.
She looked somehow more alive out here, like the fog had strengthened her. Or perhaps it was the opportunity for violence that did it. Either way, she looked different, stronger, more ready and willing to do anything and everything.
The fog curled around her; ate her. She was there one moment, gone the next.
“Where’s Sam?” shouted Trish.
“I don’t know. I don’t –”
Alex couldn’t finish. He was exhausted, and his mind finally realized how out of breath he was. He looked at Trish. She was gasping, too. She seemed diminished. The time in here – the endless, impossible time in this endless, impossible forest – had taken its toll. Two thoughts struck Alex. The first was the idea that Trish’s strength and soul were being stolen by Sam’s mother. She was a vampire of the soul, and that was why she seemed so much more alive, almost younger in the moment he had glimpsed her. The second, worse by far, was the idea that if the fog had swallowed Sam’s mother, and Sam… what if it did the same to Trish?
Something flashed through his mind. Like when he had seen his life flash before him. A glimpse of something important, something that would make him understand.
“We have to find him,” Trish said.
Alex gritted his teeth as her words chased away the moment. He dug deep, trying to find the strength to run again, to find Sam and get out of here. He suddenly felt like he didn’t have the strength to move at all –
(She’s feeding off me, too.)
– but knew he would find the strength to get Trish out of here.
Trish turned, looking around. She stumbled as she twisted, as though the tree roots around them were coming alive and trying to trip her. She righted herself, then shouted, “Sam!” She turned toward Alex. “Alex, I see him!”
Alex nodded as he, too, saw Sam.
Their friend stood not twenty feet away, looking as he always had. Same pants, same shirt, same red backpack they had seen so many times. But he seemed smaller than he had. He was being sucked dry, too.
“Sam!” Trish shrieked. She started running toward their friend.
Sam’s face twisted in relief. “You came for me,” he said, his voice breaking as tears threatened, then came in full, running down his cheeks and neck and into the collar of his shirt.
Crackle-crack.
Alex twisted, looking at the shadows that were flitting around. Some seemed to run right at them, disappearing from view before anything could really be seen of them. And the whispers came with them.
One of the shado
ws stood in the mist right behind Sam.
“Sam, run!” Alex shouted.
Even as he shouted, the mist boiled around them, obscuring Sam for a moment. When it broke apart, Sam seemed to have gone from twenty feet away to twenty yards.
The forest wanted them.
And what the forest wanted, the forest kept.
Trish had turned to look at him, just a quick glance, but the pale, pinched look on her face told him that she was seeing things behind him.
Sam stood too far away from them. Too close to the shadow that wasn’t a shadow at all, Alex now saw, but his mother, the madwoman with the knife so thirsty for her son’s blood.
Even as Alex focused on Sam – and on the woman he saw behind his friend – he heard the whisperers, louder and clearer than ever. They sounded almost alive, almost real, and that frightened him so badly that it eclipsed everything else.
They were becoming.
“… get out of this place…”
“… hear anything…”
“… see anything…”
“… just fog…”
“… turn around…”
“… this rotting place…”
Sam reached out as he cried, “Where’s my mom? WHERE’S MY MOTHER?” He sounded far too young, fear transforming him from a fifteen-year-old to a five-year-old. But not screaming for his mother; he wanted to know where she was so he could run from her.
Which meant he hadn’t seen what was behind him.
She was there, still rushing at him, her bright blade flashing and slashing through the air.
“Where is she?” Sam shouted, and Alex felt like screaming himself, because every time he blinked it seemed like Sam was farther away. “Where isaaaaugh!”
His scream fell apart, turning to wordless, mindless panic. Then he shouted again: “Don’t!”
Sam shouted it. Alex shouted it. Trish shouted it. All of them joined in that moment, the forest melding them into one creature, one mind that felt only terror as Sam’s mother gritted her white teeth and slashed at her son. She was too far, though, and even though Sam hadn’t moved, she missed.
The Forest Page 26