Something popped, something inside the overturned car crackled, and flame flickered to life.
Alex and Tricia could not believe what they were seeing. They stood still as Julie ran into the road and yanked the door open. She reached into the car and dragged out a form, then another.
Alex. Tricia.
She reached in again, and this time pulled Sammy out.
Alex and Tricia – now-Alex, now-Tricia – watched it happen. They couldn’t move. Not even when they heard screams, not even when one of the then-people rushed at Julie. Not even when the car exploded and, as it did, the car and the fire and everything else disappeared.
Only not quite everything.
Julie was still here with them.
She was whispering to the little boy she held in her arms. He was asleep or unconscious. But even insensate, he still clung tightly to his red unicorn.
“Meet the other member of your team,” said Julie, and held out Sammy to his mother and his father.
46
(When Alex and Tricia Begin to Become)
It was a dream, far sweeter and more lovely than any dream had ever been. Alex and Tricia kissed their child, smothered him with love even as he slept. “Will he be okay?” Tricia asked Julie, somehow knowing the answer even before Julie nodded and said, “He’s just asleep. And it’s best he stay that way right now.”
“Why?” asked Alex. “We should wake him and –”
“No,” said Julie. “Let him sleep. Let him dream good dreams even though the nightmare is beginning around him.”
“Nightmare?” said Alex.
Julie closed her eyes as she spoke. “I’m going to tell you a story. Then I’ll tell you why it has to happen, why it has to come true.” She looked from Tricia to Alex. Neither of them spoke.
Julie nodded. “You’ll take Mandy into your home. You’ll never mention any of this again. She won’t remember much, either. The forest…”
“… can make you forget things,” said Tricia.
“Yes,” said Julie. “She’ll forget most of what’s gone before, and she’ll love you as her parents. You won’t be her parents in actuality, though – which you will make clear to her. That’s why she’ll end up falling in love with Sammy, and he’ll fall in love with her.”
Alex frowned. “They’re too far apart in age.”
Julie shook her head. “Sammy’s a genius. So, as you’ll discover, is Mandy. The age difference will matter less and less.”
“Okay,” said Tricia. “So they fall in love. That’s not a nightmare, though, right? Sounds like a good thing.”
Julie gazed at her like you might look at a precocious, but naïve, child.
“Mandy and Sammy will study physics. Time. They’ll ask you to join them. You’ll found Fractal Circles, and build the gate. You’ll go through. Sammy and Mandy will come out. You two –”
“Won’t,” finished Alex. “You already told us that. But if our children are fine, then…” He looked at Tricia who nodded. “Then we don’t care what happens to us.”
“You should,” said Julie. She smiled tightly. “They try to find you. They try and try, and sometimes things change. On one of the tries, they bounce back farther than they intended, farther than anyone has yet gone, and for some reason they can’t come back. They’re stuck. Marooned in a version of the world where they can’t seem to find any more of the selves they have created with their endless jaunts through time.”
“How far back?” asked Tricia. “What would –”
“Marooned,” said Julie. “But that’s all right. They are in love. They have each other. They move to Sunrise – it’s the place they know best. They struggle for a few years, but eventually they’re happy. They hack into government computers – easy for super-geniuses from the future – and give themselves new names and identities. They have children, whom they name after their parents. Tricia and Alex.”
As their names were said, Tricia and Alex felt a chill sweep them. Tricia held Sammy so tightly he groaned.
“Don’t hurt him,” said Julie quietly. She reached out and, with infinite tenderness, stroked Sammy’s cheek, though she didn’t look away from Tricia and Alex as she did so. Continuing, she said, “Eventually, Sammy and Mandy realize that their children aren’t just named after their parents…”
The chill Alex and Tricia had been feeling intensified.
“… not just named after them,” said Julie. “Their children, little Alexander, little Patricia… they are their parents.”
47
(And Once Become, Become Undone)
“No,” said Alex hoarsely. “We won’t. We –”
“Why would we do any of that?” said Trish. “We won’t let it happen, we –”
“You will let it happen!” Julie thundered.
“Why?” asked Alex and Tricia at the same time.
“Because of that first jump,” said Julie. “That first trip where you two go in but don’t come out.”
(Alex and Tricia remember the monster. The broken ribs that curve around the outside of the thing’s body, grasping both the male and the female of it, binding them together as it staggers and falls and turns to ooze and then to dust and sparkling embers, then to nothing as the fog takes it away.)
“Ashes. Dust,” said Alex. He looked at Tricia. Sam was asleep still, clinging tightly to his mother. There was blood on his shoulder. Because in the forest, some things are destined to happen over and over.
Tricia said, “Dust,” and looked at her son as well. She looked at Julie. “His shoulder is hurt,” she said, and touched her own shoulder. Her own scar.
Alex touched his scar, too.
“Who is Mandy?” Tricia said. Or maybe it was Alex. Did it matter anymore?
“Sometimes things change,” said Julie. “Sometimes they stay the same.” She began to shrug out of her coat. “Sometimes they tweak things, and instead of Sam, there’s a Samantha, though she prefers to be called Mandy.” She unbuttoned her own shirt, too, enough to bare her shoulder. “We’re all scarred,” she said. “It’s one of the things that happens every time, to every iteration. Something hurts us, pierces us in the shoulder. Red things show up a lot, too, and none of us – none of the iterations of Sammy, none of the iterations of Mandy – know why. The universe has a sense of humor, perhaps.”
“You’re…” Alex couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m Samantha, all growed up,” said Julie. “One of her, anyway. Every time one of me goes through the gate, it changes something. But the old versions of me don’t disappear. Some of us keep looking for you – not you, but the versions we lose that first time. Some of us stop, and have their own lives. One of me founded Sunrise, actually. One of Sammy founded Sundown. One of Sammy grows up to be Doc Brown, one of Samantha grows up to be an old woman who sells tools – though mostly they’re really watching, making sure that this moment can happen. That Sammy and Samantha can find each other in this place, at this time.”
“Why would anyone want this to happen?” Alex asked again.
“Some of us – some of our iterations – ask that same thing. Some of us go crazy. They might try to kill you –”
(The madman in Sundown, who bore the Fractal Circles tag. He was/is/will someday be Sammy. He was/is/will be their son, in one form or another, after one or two or three or ten thousand walks through the gate. He will change, like a copy of a copy changes. The temporal flux will alter his eyes, his hair. They will drive him mad, and he will try to kill his mother so that he will never, can never be born.)
“Even your own parents,” said Julie –
(Our own children, think Alex and Tricia.)
– and, after licking her lips, Julie continued, “will have their doubts from time to time.”
(Guppies taped to a door. A genetic experiment that forces a family tree to branch less and less, creating beautiful freaks, too much for Tricia’s father, who will someday be born as her son, who sneaks into her room and stops the experime
nt, then relents and repents the next day while the pets are still hanging from the door, because he knows that all this has happened before, and it must all happen again…)
Julie shook her head, anguish in her eyes so full and deep that Alex and Tricia realized she was feeling every bit of the pain they were.
(“Shouldn’t someone else be taking our statements?” says Tricia. “Someone not… involved?”
The sheriff tries not to laugh, because everyone is involved. Julie is Samantha, iteration number 8,162, as near as any of her other selves can figure out. Her husband is Sammy, of the same iteration. “Well, there’s my husband, who has the same job I do, but we don’t get along and generally try to avoid being in the same room with one another.” It is true, but also a lie. She and her husband get along well. They struggle with their reality. Brother-sister, husband-wife, grandmother-grandfather. The family line turns into itself, tighter and tighter. It is disgusting, an incest of the like never known. Most of the time Julie can stay away from that man who is so closely related to her.
But sometimes she can’t. Sometimes her husband comes to her in the night, and though she knows it is her grandfather, her brother, herself with but a single chromosome shifted, she takes comfort in him. She loves her husband like Alex loves Tricia. She loves him, temporal lobe to tips of toes, brain to balls.
She loves him, physically and mentally, because he is and always will be, like Alex is to Tricia, like Tricia is to Alex, the thing that is easiest to love and easiest to hate: he is herself.)
“We won’t,” whispered Tricia.
But Alex knew she would. He knew her so well. She was his sister, after all. Sister, lover, friend. She was his grandmother, and one more thing…
“The monster broke its rib,” said Alex.
“Yes,” said Julie, peering intently at him.
“And it was Sammy and Samantha. The crazy man with the axe, the insane woman with the knife.”
“Iterations,” agreed Julie. “They stole other iterations of themselves, thinking to end it all. One stole her husband away when he was five. One stole his wife away when she was five. They followed such similar paths.”
(“Some things change. Some things stay the same.”)
“And because they were lightning rods, time and space bent and brought them here, to this forest. To us.”
Tricia looked at Alex.
Brother, grandfather. Lover. Father of my child – my children.
She loved him. He loved her.
She hated him. He hated her.
“Why will we do this?” she asked.
Alex was always the one – the iteration – more prone to flights of fancy. That was why he made the connection first. But Tricia would have as well, sooner or later. They were so much the same.
“Because a rib was broken. A man was created from a woman, or a woman from a man. They were brother and sister and father to infinite iterations,” said Alex. He looked at Julie. “Right?”
She nodded. “You’ve figured it out. Your eyes are opened.”
Tricia got it. She looked at Julie. “When we go into the gate, when we’re catapulted backward and don’t come out…” she gulped. “How far back do we go?”
“To the beginning,” said Julie. “You are brother and sister. You are father and mother. You have been all these things for so many iterations.”
“Are we the first ones?” said Tricia.
Julie shook her head. “When you have broken infinity, there are no firsts, no lasts. There are only points on the circle. One is here, now. Another is later, at the gate. Another is farther around the circle, so far in time that it becomes earlier again. You land at that point – later for you, but before anything any of us have seen.”
Julie touched Sammy again. Softly. Lovingly. She looked at Tricia, then at Alex. “You are the mother and father of all of us. Not just the iterations, but everyone. You slingshot back through time to a place where there is no human alive. You are the first, just as in this place, you are the last. You are Alexander and Patricia, but someday, far in your future, far in this world’s past, you will be known as Adam and Eve.”
Tricia knew what Alex was thinking. Alex knew what Tricia was thinking.
They both spoke the words. “Why?”
“Because all human life has sprung from us, in one way or another. All human life belongs to us, and so we must care for it and protect it. My lot is to protect you, over and over, as many times as I can; and one day, my lot is to die here, protecting you. Yours is to walk this path with eyes wide open, and know that one day you will be the beginning again, because you chose not to let yourselves be the end.”
No one said anything further. Tricia held Sammy as long as she could. She smelled his hair, and it was just as she remembered it being. The smell she loved hadn’t changed.
Alex reached for his child. Tricia passed him over, and Alex held his son, his grandfather, his descendent and his progenitor.
“What did you say when you saved Sam all those years ago?” said Alex, remembering his friend jerked out of harm’s way before his mother could kill him.
“Was that you who saved him?” asked Tricia.
Julie shook her head. “No, I saved Samantha. I saved myself, in iteration. Just as my husband saved your son in another iteration.” She smiled. “But we both would have said the same thing. We’re so very alike, you know.”
“I know,” said Tricia.
“I know,” said Alex. “But what…” he began.
“… did you say?” finished Tricia.
Julie smiled. “I said the words I hoped would be true. The ones that give me hope this is all worth it: it will all be all right in the end.”
Trisha nodded.
Alex nodded.
In his sleep, little Sammy nodded.
A few minutes later, Doc Brown and Tina Louise and her own brother/lover/husband/father or whatever iteration he was came from the forest. Mandy – Samantha – walked unsteadily between them.
She saw Alex and Patricia, and her gaze lit on little Sammy. “He’s hurt,” she said, her voice still slurred. “What happened?”
“Everything,” said Alex.
“Nothing,” said Tricia.
No one asked any more questions.
They stood at the edge of the forest for a long time. Which, in the forest, was a very long time indeed.
And which, in the forest, was no time at all.
A REQUEST FROM THE AUTHOR:
If you loved this book, I would really appreciate a short review on Amazon (or anywhere else you’d like to post it). Just click the book’s product page, then go to where it says, “Write a review” and let others know what you thought of the book.
Ebook retailers factor reviews into account when deciding which books to push, so a review by you will ABSOLUTELY make a difference to this book, and help other people find it.
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And thanks again!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michaelbrent is an internationally-bestselling author, produced screenwriter, and member of the Writers Guild of America, but his greatest jobs are being a husband and father. See a complete list of Michaelbrent’s books at writteninsomnia.com.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I usually do the acknowledgments with a thank you to various people. A few who are always there: the members of the Collings Cult (my street team and some of the coolest people in the universe); and my wife.
They are both named in this one, as always. But I have to especially thank my wife on this one. In many ways The Forest was my most ambitious project to date, and my sweetheart made it possible. Her suggestions on every book are welcome, helpful, and kind without sparing me honesty. On this one, they were beyond important. If it weren’t for Laura, this book would be a red-hot mess. Maybe it still is, but that one’s on me. So anyone who enjoyed the book, please give a bit of a hat tip to my wife, who kept me from looking stupid. If you hated the book and think I did look stupid, then it’s my fault. Laura did her best, but you can’t blame Michelangelo for failing to build perfect sculptures using a mix of Silly Putty and used chewing gum.
This may sound like false modesty, but, to reference something I heard once: at least I’m smart enough to know how stupid I am.
A big thanks, too (on the subject of my stupidity) to the following people, who keep me from looking dumb. Too dumb. Too much dumbly. Ack! Okay, here they are (and please note they didn’t help me on the Acknowledgments, so that’s why I look much more dumberesque here):
A special, enormous, Big Gulp-level thank you to Julie Castle-Smith, who has helped me time and again, and did a yeoman’s work in catching mistakes in The Forest, even if she can’t spell “dilate” correctly.
Another enormous thank you goes to Julie Balla, who went above and beyond the call of duty by sending a bunch of notes about things that didn’t work, and who helped polish the final product until it shone. Or is it shined? I’ll have to check with her.
The Forest Page 33