Or maybe the forest just wants her away from him, too. Maybe it’s playing its games with us all.
Whether that was happening or not, Sam’s mother was definitely closing in. She slashed again, shrieking, “Just die. Just die and let everything never begin again.”
The mist roiled, parting like the Red Sea before Moses, and the fog flashed. The light fell on Sam’s mother, and her knife seemed to cut it apart, turning it to diamonds that Alex knew would soon become rubies as Sam’s blood was spilled.
“You have to die!” Sam’s mother shouted, and Alex felt something strange from her. She was running toward Sam, Trish was running toward Sam. The whisperers flitted all around. The fog flashed, again and again until it was a near-constant strobe that rendered everyone’s movements jittery. It was too much to comprehend, the ultimate in sensory overload. Yet Alex did comprehend it. He saw everything, and felt everything, as though the understanding he had always shared with Trish had expanded to include Sam and even Sam’s mother.
Sam’s mother… who was crying. Screaming, yes. Enraged and insane, yes. But crying as well, real grief sounding in her sobs.
And then Alex saw one more thing: he saw Trish fall. A possibility at the best of times, in a place so overgrown with brush and roots – a near-certainty at a time like this.
Alex was already running for her, the paralysis that had stolen his strength pushed aside by his terror for his friend. She screamed, and he put on a burst of speed as she twisted, falling not forward but to the side. She hit a tree, and Alex thought for an instant that it was lucky she hadn’t fallen to the ground. The mist billowed, and he worried that she would have been buried in that glowing, pulsing, strobing thing and then the thing that held them captive. The mist. The forest.
Whatever minor relief he felt disappeared, though, when she hit the tree. She screamed, and pain cleaved him as he heard her agony. He shouted her name, and for once the forest played no tricks, because he was able to reach her in only a few steps.
He saw what had caused her screams, a moment before he reached her. She had spun as she fell, her back slamming into the trunk of the tree – and the force of her running, spinning fall had ricocheted her onto a small, broken limb that jutted out of the tree at just the right height. She had impaled herself on the branch that now protruded from her shoulder, dripping with her blood.
Alex ran for her, screaming her name. For a moment she was all he saw. Then the pulsing fog drew his sight; forced his eyes away from her, and toward Sam.
Sam was reaching for them. Reaching for Trish, and Alex felt his care and appreciation for the guy blossom into full-blown love as he realized Sam had forgotten about his mother and the danger she posed when he saw Trish hurt. Alex loved Sam, in that moment, like he loved Trish, and like he loved himself.
And so, in a strange way, he was about to watch himself die. Because Sam’s mother had caught up to him.
“It can’t start!” she shouted, and slashed down again.
Sam twisted, a bizarre hybrid of panic and grace that Alex knew he would remember forever. He dodged, and his mother’s swing – that would have slashed him to the bone, or maybe decapitated him completely – missed by millimeters.
Sam twisted as he dodged, coming around to face Alex and Trish. He ran toward them.
“Alex! Tricia!”
Alex didn’t know what to do. He wanted to help Sam, but what would he do? Trish couldn’t run if something happened to him – she couldn’t run whether he won or not.
She can’t run.
She has to run.
“Hold on,” Alex whispered. He encircled her body with his arms. He had dreamed of hugging her, of embracing, of holding her. But he had never dreamed that it would be to yank her off a branch that had torn its way through her body.
Trish screamed in agony, and Alex did, too. His own shoulder pulsed sympathetically, and if he could have taken the actual wound, the actual pain in that moment, he would have.
Alex felt the forest watching her pain. Felt Sam, running toward him. Felt Sam’s mother, wanting to kill them all.
Focus. Help Trish. Get her moving. Get her away.
Alex pulled, and Trish’s body came free of the branch with a wet, sucking noise.
It punctured her lung. It must have. How will she run?
How can we get away now?
The light pulsed. The whispers surged.
“… Alex…”
“… get out of here…”
“… Tricia…”
“… get out…”
“… Sam…”
“… in this Hell…”
“… people don’t stay dead…”
It is Hell, Alex thought. Because Hell is the place where we lose our minds, lose our lives, lose ourselves.
He was wrong, though. Hell had not yet arrived. But it was coming. Soon.
33
(When Alex Had Grown)
Alex had seen it all happen. He screamed, “Don’t!” Then the madman who had just buried his axe in Julie’s skull pulled himself into the ranger’s tower with them and the girl Trish held was screaming, “Don’t take me, don’t take me, don’t –”
The madman yanked his axe loose, and Julie fell through the hole in the floor and thumped and thudded her way to earth. Gone.
“You’ll understand why this has to happen,” said the madman –
(and for a moment Alex remembered for a moment he remembered another killer, a woman who held not an axe but a knife but so much of it was like this moment so much and then the moment was gone)
– and then he added, “Or maybe not,” and laughed, and flicked the axe in the air. The dead sheriff’s still-warm blood splashed across Alex, and he heard Trish scream and knew the fluid had spattered her and the girl who cowered with her as well.
“I have to kill her,” said the madman.“She’s where the ghosts come from. She’s where the nightmare begins.” He stepped forward, and Alex knew this was it, Trish was going to die.
“Sorry, sweetie,” the man 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 stepped toward them, raising the axe as he whispered, “It has to end. It ends here.”
Everything drew into sharp relief. Alex saw the madman. He saw Trish and the girl they had found. He saw the blood that spattered their lovely faces and turned them to grotesque parodies of their beautiful selves. He saw the gore that spattered the rising axe blade, the blood splashed all around the still-open trapdoor.
“It ends now,” said the madman
Like hell it does, thought Alex. And ran forward as the axe came down.
He had a moment to think what a stupid thing he’d done. Rushing a lunatic with a double-bladed axe, with only the barest of ideas what to do next.
The axe hit him. He had another instant to be thankful – he had run forward fast enough that he got fully inside the arc of the blade. Then his body realized that, though it had avoided the sharp blade, the butt of the handle and the killer’s hands clenched around it had come down hard on Alex’s back. His ribs felt like a red-hot steel belt had wrapped around them, burning everything they touched and tightening so much he couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe.
He almost fell. Almost went down and that would have been it. But Trish saved him. Even as darkness puckered the edges of his sight, even as he felt like letting the black take him and be done with it all, she saved him. Trish screamed, and the pain in her scream was so exquisite, so all-powerful, that he knew at once she had seen the axe hit him. That she thought the blade had bitten into him, rather than his back coming into contact with the handle and with the killer’s arms as the blade slapped nothing but empty air an inch beyond the curve of Alex’s buttocks.
The sound of her pain, brought on not by fear for herself but anguish at what had happened to him, energized Alex. He had no plan, just an idea. But that idea pushed him, too. He kept moving forward, th
rowing his arms wide and lowering his shoulder and hitting the guy as hard as he could.
He slammed into the killer’s midsection, and thought he heard something crack. Maybe a rib? He hoped so. Whatever it was, the killer grunted in pain, and wheeled back. Three quick steps…
… and the last step ended in nothing. His backpedaling foot found the open trapdoor. He reeled backward, and now Alex did feel the blade of the axe as the killer tipped into space. The madman slammed down with his weapon, like a mountain climber using his climbing axe to arrest a fall, and the sharp edge drove into Alex’s back just above the shoulder blade. Alex screamed in pain, and straightened automatically as his body tried to get away from the agony.
That was a mistake.
The axe, already deep in the muscle of Alex’s back, dug a furrow over his trapezius, down his collarbone, and several inches down his chest before finally pulling away.
Alex wanted to vomit with the enormity of the agony that crashed over him. But he choked down the rising gorge and, instead, smiled as the killer wheeled back, placed another foot into eternity, and then plummeted through the trapdoor.
The smile felt like it was pulled right off his face an instant later – or maybe he was pulled away from the smile – as the killer’s hand lanced forward and grabbed hold of the front of Alex’s shirt. Suddenly Alex was falling, too. He screamed as the shirt pulled taut against him. The light cotton felt like steel wool scouring the flesh from his bones where he’d been wounded.
He pulled back in spite of the pain, trying to keep from falling forward while trying to peel the killer’s fingers from his shirt. It didn’t work. He lost his footing and tripped forward and would have fallen through the trapdoor if he hadn’t managed to wedge his good hand against the far edge of the door frame. He was planking across the opening, the killer hanging off him with one hand, the other still clutching the axe.
The killer smiled. “Maybe you’ll do. Maybe I can end it with you,” he spat. He hefted the axe one-handed, but the sound of tearing rent the air, and in spite of his pain Alex enjoyed the sight of the man’s eyes widening as he realized what must come next.
The seams of Alex’s shirt ripped.
The killer, his handhold suddenly gone, fell.
But not far enough.
At the last second, he swung his legs forward, using the last traces of momentum to propel himself toward the ladder. For a moment, Alex thought he wasn’t going to make it. Then the killer’s right leg caught in the space between two rungs. His left leg jammed through the space below, and his downward fall turned into a short, fast arc that ended with his legs twisted around the ladder’s rungs, his head smacking into another rung four feet below. He let go of the axe, and it clang-clattered its way downward, disappearing in the fog.
Alex almost followed him down. His shoulder was screaming, one arm hung loosely. The other was slick with sweat or blood or both, and rapidly losing its grip on the frame of the trapdoor. He gritted his teeth, unable even to call out for help as he bent every last muscle fiber to the task of keeping himself from plummeting. Only if he did it, there would be no hangup in the rungs. Just straight down, a quick trip, a quick flash of pain as the ground liquified him, then nothing.
He was slipping. Slipping.
Then he felt hands around his stomach. More hands pulled at the ragged remains of his shirt, pulling it the same way the killer had. Only where the killer had pulled him toward doom, these hands lifted him to safety.
He tried to help, but couldn’t do much more than keep himself rigid so that he’d be easier to grab hold of.
Then he was falling again, twisting to the side this time as the hands gave one last, concerted yank. He fell back and down, landing only inches from the trapdoor, half atop Trish, his head in her lap.
She pushed the sweaty hair from his face. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said, then she was hugging and kissing him all over his face. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said, again and again.
“No such luck,” he managed.
She laughed, a strange hiccup-chuckle that conveyed all the fear and relief and pain she had dealt with over the last few seconds. Alex wanted to laugh, too, but the motion of Trish’s laughter felt like shards of glass carving through the flesh and bone of his shoulder.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“’Sokay,” he managed. Then he braved more pain to look around. “Where’s the girl?”
Trish gestured with her chin, and Alex followed the movement. The girl sat huddled into herself again, but he knew that she hadn’t been there the whole time.
“She helped save you,” said Trish quietly.
“I know.” He turned his gaze to the girl. “Thank you,” he said.
“I want to go back,” she whispered.
“Where?” asked Trish.
“To the way it was before.”
“Before?”
“Before he came. Before he killed everything. Before he took me away.”
Trish looked like she was going to ask another question, but Alex reached up with his good hand and touched her arm. “Let her be,” he said.
Trish nodded. Her eyes took on a peculiar cast. “What were you holding?” she asked.
It took a moment for Alex to even understand what she was saying. In all the insanity, he had forgotten what he saw below the tower, what he brought with him up here, what had been gone when he held it out.
Was it real?
“I thought… I thought I found Sammy’s toy,” he said. “But I must have dreamed –”
“My toy,” whispered the girl. “Mine.”
Alex looked at her. She was still glassy-eyed, but she had come out of herself to save him, and at least she seemed to be responding to things around her. It was an improvement.
“It wasn’t, um, your toy,” he said.
“I dropped him,” she said. “I dropped my toy in the forest.” For a moment her eyes came alive and she looked right at Alex. “You found him.”
“I found…” Alex licked his lips, which were suddenly parched.
“What?” asked Trish, her voice choking with emotion, with hope. “Did you find Sammy’s toy?”
“My toy,” said the girl. “You found him. I dropped Dopey Monkey.”
For a moment, Alex wasn’t sure. He had thought he found Sammy’s unicorn. The toy that was so dear to the kid, a gift from his parents that he took everywhere with him. They had lost the toy the same day they lost Sammy. Everyone figured it had been burnt in the fire. But what if…
Alex saw himself picking up the unicorn, below, in the mist. But at the same time, he saw something else. In one flickering image in his mind it was the bright red unicorn. In another it was a bright red monkey, so detailed a picture that he couldn’t have imagined it from nothing. Some people believed that God had blinked the universe into existence, creatio ex nihilo. Alex didn’t believe that, but he knew he couldn’t conjure complete toys from his imagination.
The forest. It twists everything from what really is to… to whatever it wants you to see.
He saw it again. He wasn’t picking up a unicorn. It was an ape. Dopey Monkey.
But even then…
He looked at his good hand. Splashed with blood – some his, some the sheriff’s, some probably from other victims of the madman – but otherwise empty. “Where did it go?” he murmured. “Either way, where did it go?”
Again, the girl’s gaze became more present. “The forest took it. It takes things, and it gives them back… different.”
“What does that mean, sweetie?” asked Trish.
The girl didn’t answer. Instead, a moan issued up from below them. The sound made Alex shiver. The killer was still there. Alive.
And waking up.
“Is that…” Trish didn’t finish the question.
Alex nodded. “Yeah.” He rolled over, pressing himself up with his good hand.
“What are you doing?” Trish asked, her hands darting bac
k and forth as though determined to stop him one moment, then not wanting to touch his wounds and hurt him the next.
“I gotta get down there.”
“Down there?” she said. “Why would you –”
“Because he’s tangled in the bars, but what if he gets untangled? What if he wakes up and comes back up here?”
“We fight him. He’s got to be hurt. He –”
“What if he’s not?” said Alex. “You think you could fight him off? Or her?” he added, gesturing at the girl, who whimpered and pulled a bit tighter into herself.
“I don’t know,” said Trish. “But what are you going to do?”
Alex just looked at her. He didn’t want to say the words, but the look in his eyes must have communicated his plan. Trish put a hand to her mouth. “You can’t,” she whispered.
“I can,” he said.
“You could kill a man?”
Alex thought about it. Thought about pushing the killer off the ladder. Not in the heat of a pitched battle, but as a premeditated act. He thought about peeling the man away, and watching him drop and knowing he was dead at Alex’s own hands.
He looked at Trish. At the many small wounds she’d suffered running through the woods. At the fear in her eyes. He looked at the girl, curled up on the floor of a watchtower that only allowed a vista of mist. Her hands opened and closed, and he somehow knew that she was holding “Dopey Monkey” in her mind. Clutching a memory of comfort and love.
He looked back at Trish. “Absolutely,” he said.
Trish shook her head, and Alex opened his mouth to argue why it was the right, the only, thing to do. But she wasn’t shaking her head at that. She wasn’t fighting him on the necessity of the act. Just on how it had to be accomplished. “You can’t do it,” she said. “I will.”
“No,” he said automatically.
“You going to play gallant knight?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. Because the simple fact was he didn’t want Trish to go through it. He didn’t want her to have the burden of knowing she had killed someone that way. It would stain her.
The Forest Page 27