After Perry was killed, he’d guessed the crazy-sickness could have been like poison ivy—some people were more allergic than others, and the more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that was the case. Maybe some people could stave off the insanity better or longer than others. Maybe some folks were easier targets.
He chuckled bitterly to himself at that last idea. His old man had told him all his life that he was an easy target. Too quiet, too meek, too easy to fluster. He used to wish he could be more like his old man, with a strong handshake, an alpha-wolf presence, and a voice no one ever ignored. However, in the end, it hadn’t gotten Richard Grainger much in life besides Margie Grainger, Pete’s mother, and that hadn’t evidently been enough for him, so he’d up and left when Pete was eight. Eventually, at some point thereafter, Pete had ceased to find anything to admire about his old man.
Pete shook his head. Thinking about his parents was not only disheartening, but it wouldn’t explain what he was up against and it certainly wouldn’t provide any clues as to where Julia might be.
No one left.
Those were the words painted on the tree. He chose to interpret that as meaning Julia and Darren, and maybe others, were still there, that no one had yet left the woods. It was more hopeful than the alternative, that there was no point in looking for anyone anymore.
Nilhollow wasn’t that big—no more than, what? A mile square? He’d find her. He couldn’t not find her.
He hoped she was okay, wherever she was. She had to be terrified. Julia had many strengths, but she would have been the first to admit that self-sufficiency was not high on that list. One of the things he found so attractive about her, though, was the fact that she actually was very capable, even though she didn’t always see that. She had amazing reserves of strength. She was smarter than people thought, more resourceful than people noticed, and a hell of a lot braver than anyone ever gave her credit for. She was so beautiful on the outside, but she glowed on the inside; she was vulnerably, endearingly honest with her heart, a heart so full of love and understanding and appreciation, even if those things were wasted on assholes like Darren. She was complex and fascinating and fun and spontaneous and in some ways, utterly fearless.
And because of all that, Pete knew she was still alive. She had to be. He hated to think of her being scared, because he had no doubt she was, but he knew that she could make it through anyway.
If she didn’t run into those tree-creatures, that is. Or worse. He thought again about Perry and shivered. Pete was starting to believe that those tree things might actually be the least of his problems in these woods. The idea of a driving force behind the crazy-sickness, something that had even corrupted those tree-creatures, made sense when he thought about what happened to Perry. He didn’t think the tree-creatures had driven his partner to attack them just so they could kill him. They had seemed as surprised by his behavior as Pete had. And what had they told him?
All is unwell. Much is and will be forgotten here. Swallowed up. Time is short.
Maybe they hadn’t only been talking about him and Julia forgetting things, or being forgotten or swallowed up. It had sounded to him like maybe they knew they were susceptible to the craziness in Nilhollow, too. That could be what their warning meant, that next time he encountered them, they might not remember why they had let him go—or remember him at all. They might not remember that there was a good reason not to tear him apart, too.
Further, the tree-creatures had indicated something worse, something even they seemed afraid of. He couldn’t remember the word they had used, but they thought of it as something Pete would want to protect Julia from. The sense he got from them was of something big either in size or importance or both. How did that thing fit in with Todd Mackey’s story, or what happened to Perry? How did it fit in with what might be happening to Julia? Was it the cause of people going crazy or going missing in the woods? He didn’t get that vibe from the tree-creatures; rather, he felt they thought of it as a worst-case example of what happened when that crazy-sickness ran rampant inside. Maybe it was the thing that thought of the tree-creatures as the “little ones.” Geez, what in God’s name would he do if he came across that? As Perry would have said, he’d be fucked a hundred ways to Sunday.
The tree-creatures had said something else of interest, too: The Turning grows stronger. He couldn’t have said why just then, but he thought the Turning, whatever it was, might be how the tree-creatures thought of the origin of the crazy-sickness. If it was growing stronger, his time was running out.
As he trudged along, he happened to glance up and notice that the trees in front of him rippled a little, as if he was viewing them through a wave of heat.
Uh-oh. That couldn’t be good. He slowed his pace. Trying to focus on the trees hurt his eyes and head. He turned away until the feeling eased up a little. That brain-fog was coming back, though, and Pete didn’t know how to stop it. He had to get out of there. He shifted his attention back on the trees.
There stood Perry.
Pete blinked. The breath in his chest tightened. He could feel a pulse of pain in his head with each beat of his heart. What he was seeing, that couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be Perry . . . could it?
“Vince?” Pete’s voice was small. The word hung between them.
To say Perry looked off would have been an understatement. He looked like he’d been buried, dug up, and slapped back to life, as Pete’s grandmother used to say. Perry smiled as if his face was a little rusty just beneath the pale skin. There was something wrong with his eyes, too. They looked . . . flat, somehow, the way a painted doll’s eyes looked flat, and they didn’t seem to fit quite right in his head. Also, there was a faint, coppery light behind them that seeped out around them from the sockets. When he waved, his movements seemed stiff and uneasy, like he wasn’t used to using his body. Some part of Pete knew it couldn’t be Perry. It was a marionette version, a Perry-puppet, that stood there grinning at him. Part of the Nilhollow crazy-sickness. But which had been the hallucination—Perry’s death, or Perry’s apparent resurrection? It was hard for Pete to make that determination with his head pounding like it was.
“Perry? Perry, man, are . . . are you okay?” The question sounded lame even to Pete. Of course Perry wasn’t okay. He’d been ripped limb from limb by tree monsters and tossed like confetti. How could he possibly be okay?
He looked in one piece now, though, not that it was a particularly comforting improvement. His hair was sticking up in little cowlicks, and there was a crust of dried blood following his hairline from his temple to just above his right eye. His uniform was a mess, too, torn in places and smeared with mud—or dried blood; it was hard to tell against the dark material—and kind of cardboard-looking, molded along his body like a shell rather than fabric. His pockets were torn open, and he was missing a shoe. Overall, he looked faded, the way some of the plants growing around the trees looked faded, as if whatever tied them—and Perry—to this world was being drained away.
Pete’s eyes narrowed. He watched Perry cautiously, although Perry’s slow advancement toward him wasn’t overtly threatening.
“Hey, buddy,” Pete said, holding up a placating hand. “Maybe, uh, maybe you should just stay there. Just hold on a minute.”
Perry shook his head. He was close enough now that Pete could see that a faint blue pattern beneath his skin, not like veins but more like wood-grain, had given him that unwholesome grayish appearance. The trees around him rippled, and Pete felt suddenly light-headed. He thought he heard faint singing again, coming from somewhere far behind Perry. Every part of him screamed in silence that something was wrong, that Perry was dead and that he would be, too, if he let that abomination come any closer to him, but he couldn’t quite figure out how to run.
Pete went to grab for his gun instead, then remembered he didn’t have it anymore. In front of him, Perry laughed, made a shooting gesture against his own head with two fingers and a thumb, then laughed again. It was a very h
ollow sound, not like Perry’s laugh at all. The light behind his eyes glowed a little brighter, and for one awful moment, Pete thought the brightness might have just enough power behind it to pop those eyes right out of their sockets.
Of course, it wasn’t Perry. Not Perry at all. He’d known that deep down, but . . . he had to admit, he was having some trouble that day with what was real and what wasn’t. If it wasn’t Perry moving toward him, what was it?
Pete backed up. A weapon . . . he needed a weapon. He searched the ground for something he could use.
The Perry-thing stopped a few feet in front of him and its parched, rough lips pulled back. Pete felt sick. All of the Perry-thing’s teeth were tiny, sharp shards of bone and wood—rows of them, packed tightly together in a dirty, predatory grin.
“Gonna kill ya, Grainge,” it said. The voice echoed with the same hollow timbre as its laugh. “Gonna feed ya to the Chasm.”
“I don’t think you want to do that,” Pete said, buying time. His glance fell on a large stick at the base of a nearby tree. He thought he might be able to snatch it up before the Perry-thing was on him.
“Oh, but I think I do. The best part of living things is their dying.”
“What are you?” Pete didn’t really expect an answer, but he felt compelled to ask, anyway.
The Perry-thing laughed. “Don’t you know?”
“I know you’re not Perry.”
It shook its head. “No, I certainly am not.”
“Are you one of those tree-things?”
The Perry-thing looked impatiently to the sky, then back to Pete. “Oh, Grainge. I’m not one of the little ones. I am the Turning! I am the Willfulness Beneath the Woods—much older than the trees, older than your little tree spirits, the manëtuwàk, older even than their mad forest king, the Kèkpëchehëlat. I am the clay of destruction, the echo of all things buried and waiting. Come to the grove and see. See the Chasm.”
Pete nodded slowly as he took a step toward the stick. “So . . . you’re the madness in this forest. You’re the one who’s making everyone sick. Crazy.”
The Perry-thing clapped its hands in delight. “I am the madness and the clarity, the lies and the truth. The voice that issues from the throat of the Chasm. I’m not a someone, but an everything.”
Pete took another step toward the stick. “You’re batshit insane, is what you are.”
“These little names and titles are fun. Your kind puts so much stock in words and titles. And I enjoy them. I do. But in the end, what to call me really shouldn’t matter to you. You’re going to die regardless, to feed the Chasm. Your bones will be ground to dust.”
Pete dove for the stick. His hands closed around it and he swung it up and toward the Perry-thing. It grinned at him briefly and then the stick connected with its face . . . and passed through a haze of spores. Pete coughed and quickly turned away from them.
When he turned back, an arm thrown up over his nose and throat to keep the spores out, he saw that all traces of the Perry-thing were gone.
He stood panting a moment, his body sore, his lungs feeling as if he’d inhaled the unsatisfying cold air of deep winter, and he knew that he’d been close—too close—to the heart of what had destroyed Mackey and Perry. Why it hadn’t destroyed him yet, too, was still a mystery, but he suspected it might have had something to do with a unique goal in mind that kept at least some of his thoughts clear.
“Julia!” he called out, desperate in that moment to hear her voice, to know she was okay. “Julia!”
All thoughts of staying quiet and under the radar of whatever ruled the woods had left him. The craziness, the Turning, knew he was here, just as the tree-creatures knew he was here. There was no sense hiding.
“Julia!”
He listened for several long seconds, but there was no answer. He did his best to suppress that panic in his chest. She was okay. She had to be. And he would find her. He started walking again, his body tensely on guard. Maybe she was hiding somewhere. He hoped she was.
There was an awful lot to hide from, though.
The little ones, the tree-creatures, the manëtuwàk—they were some kind of elemental spirits, it seemed, at least according to the Perry-thing. Pete wasn’t sure it was such a reliable source, but the idea of elemental tree spirits made a lot of sense. Pete could vaguely remember from grammar school a history chapter on the Lenape tribes that had settled the Nilhollow area ten thousand years ago, and manëtuwàk sounded like it could be a Lenape word. In fact, the concept of tree-spirits sounded very much like a belief ancient tribes would have had. The other word, the Kèkpëchehëlat . . . that was the powerful thing the tree-creatures had referred to; Pete was sure of it. The Perry-thing had intimated that it was some kind of bigger, badder version of the manëtuwàk, their forest king, which was in keeping with the mental impressions the tree-creatures had given him. It was perhaps why they were afraid of it, and afraid of how much of a hold the Turning had over it.
What worried him most, though, was the Perry-thing itself. It had rambled and pontificated a lot, but what, exactly, was it? Pete suspected it wasn’t so much an entity as simply a force gone insane itself, a manifestation of the powerful insanity that infested Nilhollow. Pete thought maybe the Perry-form was meant specifically for him, a means of this sentient craziness beneath the earth to communicate with its victims. It appeared as Perry to him because guilt could be a significant driving force in the direction of madness, and maybe madness and death, the deterioration of body and mind, were what sustained it. It didn’t matter if it was human or inhuman deterioration; apparently it affected both equally.
If it was a thinking force, then Pete guessed it wanted to survive, to grow by spreading itself through its environment . . . and to feed. To lure prey, it got into the mind and tried to trick it, confuse it, and wear it down. That suggested to Pete that if there was a way to shield one’s mind, one might be able to avoid going insane long enough to get out of there.
Pete rubbed his head, which was not completely clear of the brain-fog seemingly caused by close contact with the madness-infected denizens of Nilhollow. All of these theories about tree spirits and thinking forces from underground sounded outlandish, but seemed to fit. Of course, he’d always known that there was an internal, personal logic in a madman’s hallucinations. How could he possibly tell if it made any true sense, or was just his own crazy-sickness taking root and already spiraling out of control? How could he be sure of anything he’d experienced since he’d set foot in the woods?
A frightening thought occurred to him. What if he was somehow responsible for killing Perry, and didn’t even know it? Could he have imagined creatures tearing him apart as he murdered his partner himself?
No. He took a deep breath and exhaled shakily. The idea was too inconceivable to entertain. Even crazy, it just wasn’t in Pete to have hurt his partner and friend. This was the insidiousness of Nilhollow, he decided—the confusion, the self-doubt. It was meant to distract him and break him down.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. He was going to find Julia and get them both out of there.
And that was when he heard the scream.
EIGHT
Julia flopped down against a tree trunk, breathing hard, aware of each and every little discomfort in her body: the roughness of the tree bark against her back through the thin material of her T-shirt, the cold dampness of the leaves she sat on, sinking into her jeans. The chilly air that brushed across her bare arms promised only to get colder. She was getting hungry. Her head hurt. Her ankle ached and her feet had blistered in at least two places. She had to go to the bathroom.
And she was helplessly, profoundly, overwhelmingly lost, in an area of the Pine Barrens with the shadowed reputation of swallowing people whole. She was alone.
She didn’t really think she was alone in Nilhollow, did she? She was pretty sure she was not. Maybe Darren was still somewhere out there tracking her, hunting her down, creeping closer through that unearthly stillness
that blanketed everything, clutching his ax.
Although it wasn’t Darren that she kept feeling was watching her. Her intuition told her that. Her dreams told her he’d never watch her again. But something was watching her. Sometimes she thought she even saw its hands in the curves of branches and its face in different clumps of leaves. It was stalking her. Maybe the figure she’d seen was a manifestation of it, possibly trying to gauge her reaction, and even as a featureless shadow, it had scared the hell out of her.
There was also that chasm, and the dreadful implications surrounding it, which she couldn’t quite convince herself were just dream-remnants. This forest was bad right down to its essence. A maliciousness permeated the air, the ground, the strange growing things. “Murderous woods,” indeed. And she couldn’t find her way out of it.
Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. They felt cold as they spilled down her cheeks, as if this place had stolen her inner warmth like it had already stolen her sense of safety and her confidence. Maybe those three things were one and the same.
Julia took a deep and shuddering breath. No. Now was not the time for helplessness or panic. She thought about Darren again, couldn’t help it—thought about how often he had called her useless, crippled, and weak. She wasn’t. She wasn’t.
She couldn’t argue the fact that people had done things for her all her life, from her parents, friends, roommates, and coworkers to a string of boys and men who had been eager to impress her. She had always been willing to believe those people’s stated or implied intentions of genuine affection or helpfulness, and to accept their gestures as the signs of caring they were presented to be. It had taken her awhile to spot the often passive-aggressive resentment beneath their words and actions; it had simply never occurred to her that any of these people might have had ulterior motives in paying for things or offering to drive her places or fixing things for her. Frustration with her or others’ successful fulfillment of those ulterior motives changed things, but Julia hadn’t realized that at first, so it had often left her dumbfounded when people around her inexplicably gave up or turned on her. In fact, it ironically had taken Darren to make it painfully clear, Darren with his distance and impatience followed by possessiveness, his hostility and his explanations, curt and cruel as they were, and finally, his threats.
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