Captain Mallon nodded. “That’s okay. It’s possible it’ll find us soon enough. I think the key now is to stay together. We can backtrack the way I just came. If the research is wrong and luck holds, we can get you safely out of these woods and take care of the chasm ourselves. But if what I think is going to happen actually does, we’ll end up yellow-brick-roading it right to the chasm itself. Either way, we will be moving toward some satisfying conclusion. We will get out of here, okay? One way or another, we will.”
Julia nodded. She could see why Pete looked up to this man. He looked a person right in the eye as if nothing else mattered but the two of them and that moment, and he spoke with such conviction and authority that she couldn’t help but believe him. If he said it would be okay, it would.
Captain Mallon hitched the backpack strap over one shoulder and looped his free arm around Julia’s back to help hoist her up. Pete resumed his support on her other side. With the officers flanking her, she found she was able to take more weight off her bad ankle, and the throbbing eased up a little. It was the first time since getting lost in Nilhollow that Julia actually felt safe. It’s fine, it’s fine, everything is just fine.
She thought it really might be okay, this time.
The fog around them was swirling faster now. The trees in front of them were almost obscured completely, and the path was a smear of gray beneath their feet, but still she felt they were making progress in some direction. Julia couldn’t tell which direction, but like Captain Mallon had said, it probably didn’t matter. She felt better just knowing there was a plan, however loosely formed and indefinite, to take care of the situation one way or another.
Some of her confidence flagged a little, though, as the minutes passed. It felt like they walked a long time without actually getting anywhere new. The scenery around them didn’t change, and for all she knew, the forest could have had them treading the same ten feet over and over again. That, to her, was worse than the miles of ground she had covered only to end up either an impossible proximity to or distance from where she’d started. The idea of being unable to make any headway at all, like in one of those nightmares where a person’s feet were stuck in quicksand, made her feel a little sick.
“How much farther, do you think?” she asked.
Captain Mallon grunted. “Should have been out already,” he said.
“Story of my life, at least for the last two days or so,” Julia said with a small laugh.
The older cop gave her an odd look. “Four days.”
“Excuse me?”
“You mean four days, don’t you?”
“I—I don’t . . . I’m not . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The officers exchanged glances. “According to our police records, Ms. Russo,” Captain Mallon said gently, “your car was logged in as having gone missing four days ago. Pete only found out about it last night. Our best guess is that you’ve been missing at least four days. Maybe five.”
The world swam in front of her. She’d been out there four days, on only a PowerBar and a bottle of water? How was that possible? How could she have spent four days alone in the woods already? She wilted a little where she stood, her legs suddenly too heavy to keep moving.
“Whoa. Whoa there, ma’am. Everything’s okay,” Captain Mallon said. “Everything’s okay now. We’ve got you. We’ll get you out of here, okay? Just stay with us. Hang in there.”
But it wasn’t okay. She’d somehow blundered through two completely unremembered days. She’d felt that time had moved differently in Nilhollow, sure, but two days? What had happened to her? How could she have lost two days? It made her feel a little sick.
She was still processing the information when they heard the roars.
THIRTEEN
By the time units three and five reached the spot where Ranger Volkova said that Brent Carver, Helen Cadmonson, and Carl Witherspoon were killed, little was left to see except some dragged-through areas of mud where the grass looked like it had been kicked up in clumps. There were no blood splatters or body parts, no dead officers, no weapons or badges. There were no signs that unit six had been there at all.
And there were no tree-creatures, either, Alvarez noted. Who knew where that had come from? Maybe the rangers smoked up before heading into Nilhollow. Or maybe it was some weird ranger version of hazing newbies in the forest; maybe they got off on the idea of pulling one over on the cops who were stuck out there in the big scary woods. Ha ha, very funny, now everyone back to the ranger shack to smoke a bowl. Alvarez shook his head. It was in poor taste, he thought, to work dead cops into their joke. Carver, Cadmonson, and Witherspoon had probably just left her behind and she wanted to get back at them. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Cohen had jumped so quickly to Volkova’s defense. Maybe the rangers had some kind of jealousy/disdain thing for police officers. It struck Alvarez as really unprofessional, whatever their motives.
Despite the reasons he could come up with for finding the rangers’ story ridiculous, he couldn’t quite dismiss the intensity in their voices. There were no tells to indicate they were lying, either, in their expressions or their body language. But so what? Even if they believed what they were saying, it didn’t make it real. People could be mistaken, deluded, or nuts. Frankly, the scene didn’t bear out their story. How could it? There were no monsters here. There was nothing here at all.
What was there in that clearing was a dirt path leading away from the scene of the struggle, if that was what it was, and into the darkness beyond their flashlights’ glare.
“Maybe all that voodoo shit Volkova and Cohen were talking about is farther up ahead,” Gibbons suggested.
“Maybe,” Alvarez replied. The evidence certainly seemed to suggest it, if the path was any indication. There were odd furrows and gouges along its length, like something had trampled through.
The seven of them stuck close together, safeties off on their weapons, senses on high alert. Only Jack Hoss seemed unfazed by the forest. From the muted snippets of the others’ conversation, Alvarez got the impression that they were all in agreement about the rangers’ story; the idea of gun-hating tree-spirits was too ridiculous to take seriously, at least out loud. It was more of the same kind of superstitious claptrap that nearly all cops had heard regarding Nilhollow at one time or another. Still, the feeling behind the rangers’ words and the look of horror on Volkova’s face had gotten to them, just a little. Alvarez could feel their anxious energy, how they recoiled from the various snapping and popping sounds around them as though they were being slapped. He just hoped none of them was trigger-happy, or a possible bad situation was going to get a whole lot worse.
As they walked, a soft and silent fog rolled across their path. It did nothing to soothe the nerves of the officers behind Alvarez. Their mumbling to each other had taken on a thin, hushed quality, but Alvarez couldn’t make out the specifics of the conversation. Were he more paranoid and less confident, like he thought Carver was beneath the bravado, he might have thought they were grumbling about him or possibly believed that he was leading them deeper into danger. Alvarez refused to entertain such thoughts, though. He was doing his job. They were tasked with finding two state troopers and two civilians, and that was what they were going to do.
Alvarez focused on the navigational task at hand. The way the fog moved, it distorted the oaks and cedars, casting them as predatory shapes with the suggestion of faces and fingers. The pines were even worse; the fog formed gums around their needle-teeth that growled with malice. He didn’t like the way the tall grasses and ferns seemed to ebb and flow through the forest, either. At times, they were closer than he thought they should be, ready to tangle around his feet and trip him up, and at other times, he made ready to duck beneath some slanting vine that turned out to be several feet farther away.
And he could hear the trees talking. His abuela, his grandmother on his mother’s side, had often told him when he was a child that if one listened, one could hear the trees speak through the wind. He hadn’t t
hought of it as any more than fantastic whimsy for most of his adult life, but he could remember spending the occasional summer afternoon at seven or eight years old, listening for what the trees might be telling him. Now, in the wind he thought he could hear whispered words. He couldn’t quite make them out, but the tone suggested cruel and degrading things. They induced pictures in his head that made him intensely uncomfortable and triggered the onset of a migraine, but also fanned the beginnings of an erection. He felt outside of himself, like his mind was a balloon on a string and his body was just a walking shell stuffed with fog and cotton. It made him feel stoned and a little panicky, like his self-control was slipping away. He also couldn’t shake the feeling that something important was passing him by, something he couldn’t quite access. He thought that maybe if he could just see the owners of the voices, it might somehow wash away the film of confusion that seemed to be accumulating in his skull. Was it really the trees that were talking to him? If so, which ones and why? Why were they telling him things? What did they want from him?
He tried to focus on the path and on the search, to really buckle down and pay attention, but each time his brain tried to hold on to a thought for too long, it felt like a pin was being shoved into his eye. Still, he knew he needed to put the brain-haze and the whispers out of his mind as best he could; he couldn’t lose himself looking for evidence of tree people. He had a job to do.
He fanned the glow of his flashlight from one side to another in a clumsy but earnest attempt to examine the area for signs of unit five, as well as clues as to the whereabouts of the missing persons. It was so hard to focus, though. That fog was getting up inside his head every time he breathed in, and it was rapidly turning bad inside him. It made him want to hurt something.
Alvarez couldn’t really estimate how far into their trek the two units had gotten before the fog both inside and outside of his head finally began to dissipate a little, at least enough so that Alvarez could see what he guessed was a clearing about twenty feet ahead. The trees looked much thinner there and less dense. Maybe that was where the officers were down. He turned his head to report it in the shoulder-mic but the mic whined back at him. He grunted as the sound sent a needle of pain right through his ear and up into his head.
It was more of an annoyance that he couldn’t reach the command post. He didn’t think they were too far away, nor did he think the equipment was on the fritz. He supposed it was possible that this place caused some kind of interference. In fact, that sounded pretty likely, given the way his head felt. It was perfectly plausible that some interference, something electric, like live wires or ley lines or something, was the reason for the monstrous and disjointed way in which the plants in the area were growing, the static on his mic, and the headache and crazy thoughts he was having.
He set his sights on the clearing. The sooner they did their jobs, the sooner the officers could get the hell out of there. Who knew what kind of cancers electrical interference like that might cause? The trees all around certainly looked tumorous to him.
“Clearing up ahead,” he said, as much to break the uncomfortable miasma of silence surrounding the units as to give the officers a heads-up. It would actually be something of a relief, Alvarez thought, to be in the clearing. The trees felt oppressively close.
It took some climbing over thick, thorny bushes and tall clumps of grasses to make it into the clearing, but one by one, the officers broke through into a small open space that even the trees seemed to hang back from. A faint smell of rotting grass carried on the breeze. There was a low, dull hum like that of incandescent lights, the presence of which fed into Alvarez’s theory about electrical interference. He couldn’t see anything, though, beyond a foot or two in front of him. Without even the trunks of pines or oaks to break the darkness, it seemed deeper somehow, like it was swallowing them.
The pure, unbroken lightlessness appeared to unnerve the other officers as well. Even Hoss seemed wary. Within seconds, the beams of their flashlights zigzagged like lightning bugs around the area, trying to get a sense of its dimensions. With the fog, though, the boundaries of the clearing constantly shifted. What little plant life they could see, growing in patches across the span of the clearing, looked even more gnarled and dead than the rest of Nilhollow’s flora, curling at unnatural angles reminiscent of the hands of desiccated corpses. In truth, it was difficult for Alvarez not to imagine those plants reaching for his ankles, pleading to be pulled out of the ground . . . or possibly looking to drag him down into it. Alvarez studied a clump of what he guessed were maybe ferns under the beam of his flashlight. They set off little alarm bells in his head, those plants. They looked too much like the spines and ribs of children, the way they bent and curved. Most of Nilhollow had a bizarre cast to it—colors and shapes just a little off from what they should be, a little too pale and thin, too much like alien, sentient things. But the plants in that clearing were even more surreal, a stylized Gothic portrait of nature instead of nature itself.
“I don’t see anybody,” Greer said, tossing up his hands. “In fact, I don’t see anything except a bunch of dead plants.”
“Me neither,” said Hoss. Alvarez had known him for years. He was a serious and levelheaded man, buzz-cut and built like a tank. He’d seen action in Afghanistan a year before, where civilians were used as human shields and young girls blew themselves to bits in public marketplaces in the hopes of taking Americans with them. He had pulled talismans, meant to protect their wearers from jinn, off the charred bodies of dead terrorists and had once faced down a so-called magician in a sun-bleached alley who had hurled down on him every ancient curse a superstitious man might die from. Jack Hoss was still standing. He did not back down and he did not run. But the way his eyes scanned the darkness suggested he felt the same unease that Alvarez did. The wrongness of the place, the unadulterated . . . well, evil—it was palpable.
“Well, there’s that,” Susan Brinks, the Missing Persons Unit officer, said. Her flashlight was aimed at a dark crack in the earth about fifteen feet long and maybe three or four feet wide. In the dim glow, the officers could see some large rocks along the closer edge wiggle free of the dirt and tumble in, widening the chasm by another six inches or so.
“Do you think the officers fell down that?” Gibbons sounded uneasy.
“Not likely,” Alvarez said. “I don’t think it’s wide enough.”
Sometime in the last few minutes, the electrical hum had become a low rumble, almost like thunder. It seemed to be coming from the chasm and was of just such a pitch that he could feel it in his chest and head.
“What is that? Can you guys feel that?” Brinks asked.
“Like a bass sound, right? Coming from over there.” Gibbons pointed to the chasm.
“I think we ought to radio it in,” Greer said.
“Go for it,” Alvarez replied. “I had no luck getting through, but maybe you will.”
Greer tried, and when the same static feedback whined in his ear, he shook his head. “No luck.”
The wind picked up suddenly, carrying away most of the rest of the fog. Clouds shifted somewhere above them and streaks of moonlight passed through the trees, spotlighting the twisted vegetation. The rotting smell wafted stronger in their direction.
“Something’s not right here,” Greer said. “I think we should go back.”
Alvarez turned to him. Greer was a tall, skinny, low-voiced, even-tempered kind of guy. He was never roused to anger or upset by much of anything. Alvarez hadn’t known him long, but he’d always come across as a good cop, the kind who genuinely wanted to protect and serve. Alvarez didn’t think he was any more the type to run from a situation than Hoss was. However, the look on his face now was of distinct disquiet. He was worried; he felt it, too.
If Greer and Hoss were worried, that was something to stop and consider. It suggested that it wasn’t just Alvarez who was beginning to think dismissing the rangers’ story had been a mistake.
Alvarez looked at the
others. Gibbons, God help him, looked confused and uncomfortable that everyone seemed to know something about the clearing that he didn’t. The other two officers, a state trooper named Dave Walton and a local officer named Karen Sykes, looked spooked, and Brinks was chewing on her lower lip, her flashlight jerkily skipping along the leafy canopies above them. It looked like she was searching for something with the desperation of one who had seen or thought she’d seen something she promptly lost.
“Something’s not right, Alvarez,” Greer repeated. “You know that, right?”
“What do you mean by not right?” Brinks asked him, her eyes and her beam of light still intent on the trees above.
Greer shook his head. “Can’t you feel it? In your head, like sinus pressure except all over? In your hands, like the way anger makes you clench your fists? I can feel it in my bones. Something is fucking wrong with this forest, with this spot right here, and it’s coming out of that chasm.”
The others stood in uncomfortable silence, glancing back and forth between Greer and Alvarez, presumably waiting for the unit leader to respond. From their faces, he could tell they bought into Greer’s theory wholesale. Truthfully, so did Alvarez.
He sighed. “Greer’s right,” he finally said. He had to be careful with how he handled them. Skittish, armed cops were bad news. “We have to focus on what we’re doing out here. Two cops, two civilians, and now, most of unit six are missing. Those cops and those civilians aren’t here, obviously.” He paused. “But something is. This place ain’t right, and even if it’s just in our heads, it’s not conducive to getting the job done. So we head back, meet up with the central command post, and report what we know. Which ain’t much, sadly.”
“Okay,” Gibbons said, and Alvarez could hear relief in his voice. “Okay, good. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They were just about to hike back over the tall grasses and get back on the path when a deep roar, loud enough to shake the branches of the trees, erupted from somewhere near the chasm. They ducked and covered their ears. Alvarez turned back to see what was making such a horrible noise and for several long seconds, he just gaped in awe.
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