She kissed him.
It was a fast kiss, just a brush across his lips. But his eyes lit up even in the midst of the madness and – true to form – the forest took the small moment, the mist twisted it into an eternity. A sweet island in the middle of the stream of pain and loss.
They parted. She smiled. “I’m okay,” she said.
Alex looked a bit confused – befuddled, maybe. She almost laughed at the expression. So cute, so endearing. She would remember this moment, she knew. She was hurt and afraid, and didn’t know what was going to happen next. But for some reason those pains and flaws only heightened the perfection of this fleeting, forever moment.
Alex grinned. He turned forward again, then took a step. He had Tricia’s good arm over his shoulder, bearing a lot of her weight – maybe most of it. What happened next shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did: he tripped over a root.
They had tripped so many times in this long day/night/twilight, but for some reason this one felt like a particularly malicious move by the forest. Like it should have seen them, clutching each other, using one another for support, and should have respected that unity.
A small shout of surprise came from Alex as he fell. The world seemed once more to slow down – another warping of reality courtesy of the forest – and Tricia saw that Alex’s trajectory would take him right into a fallen log. A branch poked out of the side of it, one that ended in a sharp point, and though she didn’t think he noticed it in the instant of falling, she saw it clearly.
Images flashed through her sped-up mind: Alex impaling himself on the branch, piercing his shoulder just like she had; of Alex falling against it throat-first and tearing out his jugular and carotid; worst of all, an image of Alex twisting as he fell, tumbling into it and the sharp point spearing through the back of his skull, going through his brain, and then emerging through his face, pulverizing it.
Alex can be me, or Alex can be the new man in the tree.
NO!
Alex had been holding Tricia’s good arm over his shoulder as they walked, but let go automatically when he started to fall, trying to stop her from tumbling down with him.
Her body didn’t care what he was trying to do, though. Her body wanted to save him, so even as he loosened his grasp, she tightened hers in an attempt to stop him from falling – or at least guide the fall away from the tree.
Pain exploded in her shoulder. She moaned, but didn’t let go. Alex tried to shake himself free – he didn’t care about falling, he just didn’t want to drag her down – but she clenched her teeth and pulled harder as her own wounds tore anew.
She had a moment to think, I don’t think my lung’s punctured after all. Lucky!
Then the pain in her shoulder increased by an order of magnitude as she hit the ground, followed swiftly by Alex’s entire bodyweight falling on top of her.
She screamed now, finally. And just as before the forest had stretched time like taffy, taking a fraction of a second and pulling it into what seemed like hours, now it compressed the moment. Gray blobs exploded at the edges of her sight, then turned into black balls that danced across her vision and then melded into darkness that covered her eyes. An instant, a forever. She didn’t know.
She felt Alex roll off her.
Darkness. She heard him saying something. Or did she?
A flash of light. Silvered fog. Shapes in the mist.
Whispers. Whisperers.
She was hallucinating. She had to be, because Sam was dead, but she heard his voice nonetheless. “Alex?” said the dead boy.
Light flashed, darkness came, light returned. She felt/saw/heard Alex turn in place. Still nearby, but now looking away from her.
“How?” Alex managed, and then Sam’s voice said, “Alex, I think I –” before a snapping noise interrupted him and Alex screamed, “Sam!” and then darkness fell one more time, and no light shone beyond it.
37
(When Alex Had Grown)
Alex ran forever. That was what it felt like. The mist-light had robbed him of any sense of time or place, so whether he passed through a millisecond or a millennium he couldn’t say. Sometimes he ran in front, holding Mandy, dragging her along as she held onto Trish’s hand and dragged her. Other times Trish ran in front, the order reversed. Sometimes he wasn’t sure who ran in front – or if they were even there at all.
He felt that sensation of dissolving into the fog.
Becoming.
What did that mean? He thought Trish was talking about the whisperers when she said it, but now… he wasn’t sure. What could the things out there become? Was there something worse they could be?
The light flashed. He sensed movement, turned, and heard Trish scream.
The killer was running toward them, the fog parting to allow a quick glimpse before cascading over him again. But Alex could still hear him shouting: “Maaaannnnndddddyyyyyy!”
The fog parted, and Alex blinked. The killer was still hurtling toward them, but now he was… different. He seemed smaller, farther away. And he wasn’t holding an axe now, he was holding something else. Small, but –
The fog whispered over the madman.
Mandy screamed and tore away from Alex’s grasp, wheeling around in fright. He tried to tighten his grip, but when she yanked at him the vibration of it ran through the long gash that ran over his shoulder from his back to his chest and his fingers loosened automatically.
“Wait!” Trish screamed.
Mandy didn’t wait. She ran.
Alex and Trish started after her. They were both in pretty bad shape, he knew, but hopefully they could get to her; could help her the way they hadn’t helped their friend or their son.
She was fast, though. She ran like she knew the forest, dodging around trees and under branches with an agility that Alex envied. Before, she had been as clumsy as either he or Trish, obviously as much a stranger to this place as they were. Now, though, she ran like a deer through its woods, like a person who knew every inch of this forest that had no end.
Alex realized then that he was running the same way. Leaping over branches and brushes that could have would-have-could-have-should-have tripped him up. So was Trish. She didn’t run, she danced. She flitted over the bushes and roots, dodged around trees as though she were a creature of fae, a thing born to the mists and the nightmares.
The end was coming. The end of… whatever this was. He was being led to something, drawn by some force he couldn’t see and catapulting him from his world of science and facts and truth into a world where all was mutable.
Nothing was real here.
Which meant everything had the potential to exist.
The flashes came faster, faster. Shadows flitted everywhere, so thick that at times he could see nothing but darkness, covered only by a thin scrim of silvered light.
He lost sight of Trish. He found her again.
She was dancing, leaping over branches like someone who has spent her existence doing that –
(the darkness closed around her…
… opened again…)
– she was tripping now, the darkness had caught her and she was falling, beautiful, graceful, terrible –
(the darkness closed…
… opened …)
– now it wasn’t Trish he followed but Mandy, looking back at him and screaming like he was trying to kill her but he wasn’t he was trying to save her save them all and –
(darkness…
… light…)
– the light flared, so bright it became his world. The darkness was gone but he was blind, all the same. Pure darkness was the complete absence of light, the photons bouncing in and not bouncing out. Nothing to reflect to the eye and give it something to interpret.
But there was too much light, now. Too much light, too much to see and nothing to understand and –
(darkness…)
– something hit him. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, or even what he was. He was not Alex, he was only the light and
the mist and the eternity they contained.
Then he hit the ground. Rolled. Something gripped him as he tried to rise. Threw him down. He tried to get up again, but felt a knee slam down on top of his chest. Still he writhed and twisted, but a fist slammed down on the wound that wrapped around him, front to back. He felt a finger or thumb press the wound, then press into it.
He screamed. The scream finally drew back the brightness, and let him look away from the undefinable, unending lunacy of the forest. He saw a face.
“Trish?” he said. It was her. Why was she –
The face flickered. Madness withdrew a bit more. He saw who was really over him.
The killer. He had lost his axe, but now he held a knife, held in one hand high over his head while the other burrowed into Alex’s flesh and kept him paralyzed with pain.
“I have to do it. Have to kill you all, then I die, too. It’s fair. I’ll kill myself, it’s fair.”
Alex struggled. He twisted in spite of the inferno that raged in his chest and back. Or maybe it was because of that fire. He bucked in rage and pain and the killer’s fingers popped out of his wound as the killer fell forward.
The madman posted, his bloody hand driven to the ground beside Alex’s head. The knife came down, too, driving into the earth beside him. It was bloody, and seeing it, the fight went out of Alex. Because the blood was either Trish’s, in which case she was dead, or it was Mandy’s; and Trisha was still dead, because there was no way she would have let the killer get to the teen without dying first.
“I’ll make it quick,” said the killer. “I deserve that much, at least, don’t you think?”
And Alex saw, as his brain began to misfire with grief and terror, that there was something tucked into the waistband of the killer’s pants.
A red, tufted thing.
An ape, staring with one eye. The other was gone, the place where the button had been a ragged mass. Dirt matted the little toy.
Trish is gone.
Mandy is gone.
The forest took them all.
The knife fell toward him and…
38
(When Tricia Had Grown)
… Tricia, who was so like Alex in so many ways, had been running away from him. Away, because she was chasing Mandy, who ran away from her as though she was the thing that wanted to hurt her.
She’s going to lose me.
Tricia couldn’t let that happen. The mist-flares and the darkness that ruled between them had become a constant. A blinding flash, a blinding darkness, and she could see only bits and snatches of the world around her in the picosecond of twilight between those extremes.
Yet she continued to run. To chase Mandy as though, if she caught the girl, she might also be able to catch the others who had left her.
Her friend.
Her child.
Her husband?
She stopped, suddenly and completely.
Mandy was gone. Whether to the darkness or to the light, Tricia could not say. But there was no following her. And why had she tried? Really? There was a girl out here, but her husband was here, too.
The light flashed, darkened. Blinding brightness, impenetrable darkness. The beginning and the end, with her caught in the middle.
But isn’t that where I’m supposed to be? Isn’t that what life is? We’re all caught in an instant between before and after, and so all we have is now.
With that realization, she understood. The forest might take all from her, might steal it away and make her lose her life and –
(Become.)
– maybe worse. But it had given her this at least, this moment where she saw what she had lost, and what she might still lose before it all came together and night fell in the forest. Or maybe before dawn began.
She had to find Alex. She had left him alone long before she left him to run after Mandy. Because she’d been running after Sammy before that; and, to a lesser extent, she’d been running after Sammy’s namesake. She’d run after Sammy, she’d run after Sam, and she’d lost her husband as she did.
Tricia turned a slow, silent circle. The flashes kept coming, though it wasn’t the brightness that coaxed tears to life and make them run down her cheeks in an unbroken stream. It wasn’t the light, it wasn’t the dark – just how fast they came, one after another.
She turned, turned, turned.
And she saw Alex, running. He was passing her, unseeing as he ran. She had gotten turned around – though she couldn’t say when it happened – and was now following him. She ran after him, and saw him performing almost balletic maneuvers as he followed/fled his way through the forest.
Then he stopped, and spun in place. His mouth was wide open with surprise, delight, terror, understanding, confusion. Every expression she had ever seen on his face was there now, all at once. She wondered if he was experiencing the same realizations and sensations she had undergone. She wondered if he had been running from her as she ran from him. Maybe he had been as broken by loss as she.
The killer burst out of the forest.
One moment he was nowhere to be seen, and it was just Alex standing between the tall, unblemished trunks of what looked like the hugest trees in the forest.
The heart of the forest.
(Remember?
You were here once before.)
The killer ran for Alex, who was spinning in circles, not seeming to see through the dark-light-dark of the place. Tricia tried to shout for him, to cry out. She wasn’t fast enough. She felt that feeling usually peculiar to the ever-never-time of night terrors: her tongue bound itself, rendering her speechless; her legs pumped as hard and as fast as they could, but she was moving slowly, so slowly, too slowly.
The killer hit Alex. Drove him down to the forest floor. Alex struggled, then shrieked as the madman jammed his thumb into the gaping wound on his shoulder.
She was still running, but slower and slower. Each time the light snuffed out was like a barricade she had to blast through. Each time the darkness disappeared became a wall she had to climb.
“I have to do it,” said the madman to her husband. “Have to kill you all, then I die, too. It’s fair. I’ll kill myself, it’s fair.”
Alex bucked his hips up with a cry. The killer, atop his chest, was thrown forward. His free hands planted on either side of Alex, but not for long before he posted up and Tricia realized for the first time he was holding a knife high above his head.
He seemed even farther away. Even smaller. Alex, though, seemed bigger somehow: her terror for him pulled him close, made every detail of his face and body stand out in ultra-high def down to the very pores. He writhed, and shook, the killer atop him in a grotesque mockery of lovemaking.
She thought she saw something at the killer’s side. A tuft of red.
In the madness of it all, she thought for a moment it was Sammy’s toy. Then she saw another bit of red and realized that the knife the killer held over his head, about to slam into Alex, dripped with crimson.
Alex is here.
I’m here.
And that means he found Mandy. It’s her toy tucked into his waistband, her blood on his blade.
Tricia’s heart, already aching from the strain of her run, now seemed to stop.
The fight went out of Alex, too. Every muscle in his body seemed to slacken.
“I’ll make it quick this time,” said the madman, the killer, the murderer. “Don’t I deserve that much, at least?”
The lights made everything surreal. The forest’s strobing lights, its pulse, sped up more and more here at the heart of it all. The killer raised his knife a bit higher.
Blink – higher.
Blink – higher.
Blink – the killer stabbed down.
Blink – something hit the killer.
A body hurtled out of the forest, and just as Tricia had thought the toy the killer held was Sammy’s before realizing it was Mandy’s, so now she thought Sammy bolted out of the forest. A Sammy as he should have been: not the br
ight little boy he had been, but the teen he should have become, and just as she had imagined.
Only this person’s clothes were torn. Bloody.
His hair was matted.
He was beautiful more than handsome. His features finer than she would have thought. Because it wasn’t her son. She had lost her son – he had been stolen from her – long ago. No, this was Mandy.
And that, now, was enough.
Mandy slammed into the killer with a snarl. She was small, but young and strong and the force of the blow was more than enough to knock the killer aside.
They both rolled, bodies twisted together so closely they seemed bonded at an atomic level; it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Then the bond loosed, a strange fission producing two smaller objects where only one had existed before.
And just as with any fission, a burst of energy seemed to push back the dark-light-dark, the mist that waxed and waned. Tricia felt her body return to normal speed, her mind regained control of her tongue.
“Alex!” she shouted. “Mandy!”
The run to this point had been a flight through forever. But time contracted as well as expanded in the forest, so in only two steps Tricia was at Alex’s side, helping him up. He shouted, but pushed up with her help, the two of them hurrying because there was Mandy, struggling to her feet; and there was the killer, already on his feet, already slamming the knife in the girl’s direction.
The light flared again.
One great –
(Final?)
– beat of the forest’s heart. And with it, Tricia remembered.
This is where it happened before.
Sam’s mother.
The heart of the forest.
The monster.
She looked at Alex. Saw understanding come over him, too.
Both of them knew what had happened before, here, in this exact spot in the forest; they remembered a monster, and finally understood where it had come from.
She knew her husband stood beside her. Physically, yes, but also in a way that he hadn’t been – or that she hadn’t let him be, or some mix of the two – for a long time.
She ran.
The Forest Page 30