“I hate you infinity plus one,” she whispered. It sounded like a prayer on her lips, albeit one she didn’t understand, to a deity she couldn’t begin to fathom.
The forest. That’s the only god here. Just the forest.
Then she stepped down – she had moved mechanically, without realizing it, her body continuing even though her mind had all but given up hope – and her teeth clacked together as she came down painfully a good six inches before she expected to. Not on a metal rung, but on dirt.
She looked around and saw Alex. “Thank you, God,” he said.
“I didn’t think you believed in – oof!” she said as he engulfed her in an embrace that, though one-handed, managed to push the breath out of her lungs.
“I’ll believe in anything if it means I can have you,” he whispered into her ear. “Anything at all.”
A voice floated down through the mist.
“I… seeeeee youuuuu…”
The words, elongated to the point they were nearly howls, morphed to shrieking laughter. The killer. She couldn’t see him through the fog, but she could tell he was too close for comfort.
The fog brightened. It was, for the first time, right on top of them. The flashes came centered on a point about twenty feet up. She saw the light, and the perfectly dark shadow-lines of the ladder, a hunched shape rapidly moving down the structure toward them.
The lights flashed again. Again she saw the ladder, the dark spine of the watchtower. Again she saw the backlit shadow of the madman, a parasite wriggling down the spine.
One rung closer.
Two.
He faded into the silvery light of the fog.
The mist flashed again.
The skeletal ladder.
And nothing else. The madman was gone.
“Where did he go?” asked Alex.
“The forest has him,” whispered the teenager beside them. Her voice sounded dreamy – or maybe just haunted. “But it has us, too. Both of us, and it never ends in here, because it never really begins.” She laughed, a sound disturbingly like that of the killer’s deranged cackling.
“Let’s go,” said Alex.
“Where?” said Tricia. She looked up the ladder. “He’s not up there, so we’re safe for a second, aren’t we?”
“No,” said Alex. “I don’t know if anywhere is safe, but I do know I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to be anywhere that lunatic knows we’ve been.”
Tricia nodded. She took Alex’s hand, and with the other she grasped Mandy’s. The girl’s hand was limp, unresponsive, but when Tricia pulled her she came along willingly enough.
They ran into the fog. As they did, Tricia felt something tickle the edges of her conscious thought. A string. A bit of information that, if she could just catch hold of it, would unravel all that had gone on here. That would let her remember all that had gone before –
(“Doodles.”
“You came for me!”
“Just die. Just die and let everything never begin again.”)
– and so also understand all that was happening now.
She was running away. Running from the watchtower and… and…
It was gone. The thread pulled out of her fingers before she could grasp it, tug it, pull apart the veil over her memory.
The lights flashed.
Alex slowed. “What is it?” said Tricia.
“It’s… something.”
She felt it in that instant as well. Something.
Something was going to happen.
Something was going to come for them.
Something was going to kill them all.
And, because it was the forest, and none of the rules applied… maybe whoever it was would keep on killing them forever.
That was when the worst thought invaded her mind. The thing that shook her, and made her want to start screaming, and even – for just an instant – made her understand why she had forgotten what happened all those years ago.
What if it’s already happened? What if the wraiths aren’t the ghosts? What if we are?
35
Revelation
(When All Has Become)
I have been thinking a lot about revelation. About what happens when the curtain is torn aside and we see what really is. No biases, no ideologies. No false notions, no beliefs that color the facts. Just a pure definition of reality.
Definition: from the late fourteenth century word diffinicioun (or definicion, depending on who you ask; I always ask myself, for obvious reasons). Either way, it means a setting of boundaries. A determination of limits.
But what if reality is a thing eternal? That would mean it has no limits, cannot be defined. It is circles and spirals, turning into themselves over and over and never ending. You follow one revolution to its terminus and discover only one more circle beyond – or, worse, you find yourself back where you began. In that case, truly, J.M. Barrie was right: all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
So… reality. Eternal. Without boundary. Without definition.
But human beings require definitions. We need them to create a kind of power: knowing where something ends means knowing where its limits are; knowing, specifically, how badly it can hurt us before it ends. Whatever it is.
That is why, I think, so many of the prophets worked out their salvation in fear and trembling and all that. Assuming that they really saw Eternity (capital E-eternity!), they saw… everything. Which means they saw a thing of no definition. Ultimate power. Alpha and Omega – not meaning “the beginning and the end” in the sense of “once upon a time” leading to “and they all lived happily ever after” and then closing the book. No, Alpha and Omega meaning that if you reach Omega you find yourself at Alpha again. If you stand at point Alpha and turn around, you do not see Alpha-minus-one. Or rather, you do, and it is Omega.
Circles, circles, circles. I see them everywhere.
I have received revelation.
The curtain has been torn away, the veil lifted. I have seen the beginning from the end, and the end from the beginning. It has made me insane, it has made me sane. It has energized me, it has enervated me. It kills me and then makes me live again. It has given me all knowledge and none at all.
Because I am Alpha and I am Omega.
Two bodies, two people, cannot exist in the same place at the same time, no matter how brief the overlap.
And I do not simply believe this.
I know this.
I have seen the truth of this eternal, irrevocable fact.
Yet at the same time, I am the beginning and the end, and round and round the mulberry bush (or the misted trees) we go, followed by the ghosts and wraiths that never quite step out of the mist.
Yet those ghosts and specters… they are real. They see us, just as we see them. That, too, is part of the eternal, endless madness that is the only reality.
I cannot believe what I have done. What I will do.
But no matter what, it will happen. It will happen over and over, and perhaps some of the details will change, but there will be constants. There will be scars borne by all, there will be wounds suffered at our own hands, and blood we save and blood we spill. Jesus suffered for us all, then asked us to take up his cross. Which meant he suffered for us, then asked us to suffer for him, which meant we suffered for ourselves. Round and round we go, merrily merrily merrily.
I used to laugh about the idea that Jesus was a god. But now, I’m not so sure. Maybe he was. Maybe He was. It’s entirely possible, because what if… He was Me?
I am all.
I am none.
That, you see, is why this is my story. Because all stories in this world are mine. I am endless, without defining or bounding, either on the right hand or on the left.
I will do this thing. I will touch the stars with my works, and create them in me. For I am a god, and so I have become also Death, the creator of worlds.
I know I am insane.
But I know it with the pe
rfect discernment that only a truly sane man or woman can possess.
I don’t know if I am the first, or the last. But what I do now makes it all irrelevant.
FOUR:
IN THE BEGINNING
36
(When Tricia Was Young)
Tricia felt the branch hit her; felt the pain as it pierced her shoulder and the strange numbness that came with it. She wanted to sink into that numbness. She wanted to surrender to nothing and float in the mist and become –
(“They’re coming. They’re becoming.”)
– mist herself.
She heard whispers.
“… Alex…”
“… get out of here…”
“… Tricia…”
“… get out…”
“… Sam…”
“… in this Hell…”
“… people don’t stay dead…”
They sounded so real, so close. And that meant she was dying. Because when the ghosts sounded this real, didn’t that mean you must become one of them yourself?
She heard something, a cavalcade of dry snaps, and managed to turn her head toward it.
She saw Sam. Face shining with sweat and terror, running toward her and Alex. And behind him, there was Sam’s mother, swinging the blade she held.
The light pulsed.
The whispers surged, but this time Tricia couldn’t hear anything. It was just a mass of noise, like the biggest party in the biggest city in the world. So many whispers that they seemed eternal.
Sam’s mother’s bright, terrible knife plunged toward her son’s back. She was too close. There was no way she could miss.
The mist swallowed them both. More than swallowed – consumed them. It happened in total silence, a silence so loud that she felt but did not hear Alex go crazy for a moment. She felt his strong body, his strong arms that had pulled her from the tree –
(I’m the man in the tree, Daddy!
Stop it. You’re insane.
See my guppies?
DON’T.)
– go rigid as he realized what she did: that mist or not, fog or not, Sam was dead.
And in that instant of realization, of revelation, she heard him scream. It was a shriek of terror and pain so perfect, so exquisite, that there could be no lying. Only a death-scream could be heard in the silence of the forest.
Alex turned to her, and she wondered why. Then she felt her own body straining, and realized that she was screaming, too. She couldn’t hear it through the twilight mist and the silence that blanketed her world, but Alex could. Alex could hear her shrieking in pain – pain for a punctured body, pain for a punctured heart.
He always knew what I felt better than I did.
I love him.
The last realization, firm and clear, did not make everything all better. That was the stuff of movies, of romance books. But it did make her stop screaming. She fell back into the silence of the forest. Then Alex spoke, and sound returned to the world. She heard her own labored breathing, the shifting of leaves and the soughing of the wind, the life-breath of the forest.
“I have to get you out of here,” Alex was saying, panic running his words together so they came out in a single breath. “Can you run? She’s out there, she’s coming, I know it, but I don’t know where or what she’ll do.”
He spun around, searching for the woman who had killed her son, had killed Sam.
(“Thank you,” he said when we found him. “Thank you for coming back for me.” But it wasn’t enough, was it?)
Alex went rigid. He had done that already – too many times, too many moments where shock stilled his body – but not like this. He felt like a statue to Tricia. A corpse, riddled with rigor.
We’re both dead. We’re the whisperers. We’ve… become.
Light flashed in the mist.
Then Alex did something strange. He put his hands over her eyes, like she was a child in a movie that had suddenly become a bit too scary for comfort.
And he started to scream.
He had fallen into an abyss of terror, so black and deep she didn’t know if he would ever resurface. And because of that, he didn’t cover her face completely. He wanted to shield her from what he had seen, she knew that, just as she knew that given the choice he would have protected her, fully and completely, from the monstrosity that walked from the parted mist.
It had the height of a human, but the resemblances with H. sapiens ended there. It was a jumble of jutting limbs, wobbling along on a trio of legs that protruded from its center in all the wrong angles, while another leg extended from its back like a misshapen tail that flopped about as the thing moved. Its spine twisted impossibly, and she saw ribs that extended out through the flesh of its torso, shards of bone that curved outside its skin, glinting almost metallically.
Two of its hands reached forward, and it screamed. Not from the contorted head that stuck out of a scarred shoulder joint – a head where the mouth and eyes and nose numbered too many, where the tongue waggled loosely from its perch outside the thing’s head. No, it screamed through the mouth embedded in the palm of one of its outstretched hands.
White bits fell from that mouth.
Teeth. It’s screaming out its own teeth.
The screams ceased. The monster continued vocalizing, but the noise had a cadence and rhythm that made her feel like it was talking to her. Its voice – if it could be called a voice – was as insane and sad and horrible as its screams had been, but they had an undeniable intelligence.
“Ih-hz-soond-Ih-nnnn-ear-ih-nnnn-aow…” it wailed. The tongue fell from its mouth, and the sounds dissolved into a terrible, meaty “uhng-uhgn-ughn” as it step-staggered toward her and Alex.
The mouth on the head that extended in a lopsided, ungainly sack from the creature’s shoulder opened and began to scream as well. This sound was deeper than the other, the two of them singing a song that Tricia knew she would never forget, not even if she lived to be a thousand years old.
And yet, she had to see it. She had to hear it. She had to witness this –
(becoming)
– moment. She pulled at Alex’s hand, still clapped ineffectually over her face. She yanked, pulled, but his hand stayed there, stayed there…
The forest’s lights brightened and died.
The creature was there, but disappeared along with everything else in the dark.
The whisperers came again. Not whispering this time, but screaming – a single high-pitched, almost girlish scream, as though even the specters feared the monstrosity the forest had birthed.
But when the light came again…
It was closer…
Darkness fell. Light flared…
It was closer still…
The mouths shrieked…
Alex was no longer screaming, just going, “Ah, uh, ah, uh,” in an eerie mimicry of the monster’s “words”…
Closer…
The thing’s hands reached out…
The fog billowed…
Tricia knew this was the last moment. She tore Alex’s hands away, and for a moment she felt no pain, no fear. This was the end, so what was there to fear?
Without fear, she knew, she would finally see.
The fog twisted, curled. Tendrils of mist writhed across the creature as it lurched toward them. The tendrils joined, tying themselves together, then thickening, becoming sheets of mist that fell over the creature. The thing howled, then the last tendril writhed across the gaping mouth in its still-outstretched hand. The thing became a dark blob in the fog, then a shadow, then a hint…
… and then nothing at all.
Silence again. Not the strange, loud silence of before. Just silence as she had always known it. Empty, calm.
The mist still surrounded them, but there were no more flashes of light. No more shadows darting in their periphery, following in their footsteps, hunting.
No more whispers, no more whisperers.
Alex stared into the space that had held the abominati
on, and now held only dead leaves and broken sticks and the mangy patches of shrubs that covered the ground. A long time seemed to pass.
He looked down at her.
“Help me,” she said, her voice tiny and quivering.
It was an odd thing to say, in a way. Shouldn’t she ask what they had just seen? Shouldn’t she be asking what they would do now?
But no… just a simple plea. That was enough.
Maybe it’s ending.
Alex nodded. She felt like he was answering her thoughts. She hoped so. Hoped he felt what she did: that it was over. Or at least, nearly over.
Alex looked at her shoulder, grimaced, and then pulled her to her feet. The pain that had been absent now came back to her, centered in the red-hot spot at her shoulder, but it coursed through the rest of her body as well.
“We have to get out of here,” said Alex.
A strange groan/laugh hybrid escaped her. “Really?” Then the vestige of humor withered and died. “Where’s Sam?” she asked.
“I don’t know where Sam is,” said Alex. He looked like he was searching for something to say next, for some sentence or phrase that would make all this make sense. Finally he just said, “Gone.”
For a moment, that wasn’t enough. For a moment, she wanted to scream that they had to keep going, had to keep looking.
Then she remembered the way Sam had looked as his mother plunged the knife down.
She remembered the savage look in his mother’s eyes.
She remembered the finality with which the mist closed over them.
And knew Alex was right: even if the two of them made it out of here, Sam wasn’t coming out of the forest with them.
Alex saw her face. He read her thoughts in the way only Alex and – to a shorter but not necessarily lesser extent – Sam had ever done. “How are we going to find our way out of here?” he asked.
“Pick a direction,” she said.
He nodded and took a step, her arm over his shoulder, bearing her weight. Another. Another.
He looked at her. “Okay?” he said.
She nodded. He stepped forward again, but she planted her feet. He looked at her, an eyebrow cocked, wondering why she had stopped.
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