The phantom whipped its head around, its humble sloth-like movements abandoned.
Ashline took off. She jettisoned her previous attempts to be stealthy and instead focused on speed, ignoring the volume of her footfalls. Her previous love for the redwoods abandoned, she cursed them for their lack of lower-level branches. With no hope of going vertical, she would have to outrun it.
Just when Ash was running out of steam and the moisture in her lungs was pushing her toward an asthma attack, she saw her savior.
The project adventure course.
An enterprising Blackwood student—a vandal—had smuggled nails, lumber, and ropes into the forest and set up his own private project adventure course. With zero respect for the ecosystem or the well-being of the gentle giants, he’d nailed a series of wooden rungs into the trunk of one tree to form a makeshift ladder. Nor had the health of the bark concerned him when he’d tied two ropes between the redwoods, forming a footbridge with handrails twenty feet above the forest floor.
When Ashline reached the base of the ladder, she took the grip of the electric lantern and placed it in her mouth, fastening her teeth down on it like it was a horse’s bit so she could have her hands free. She ascended the 119
wooden rungs quickly and ignored the splinters in her fingers as she climbed. Adrenaline had kicked into overdrive at this point, urging her onto the rope bridge. The fear capacitors in her brain were already overloaded by whatever the hell that thing was on her trail. Any fear she may have had of heights was quickly replaced with the instinct to survive.
The rope bridge had more slack in it than she’d anticipated as she walked carefully across. The other side had a wooden platform where she could hide, but for now she was out in the air and vulnerable. With each step the rope swayed out perilously, threatening to pitch her to the ground.
She had just made it halfway across the rope bridge when her jaw gave out and released its grip on the electric lantern. The lantern quickly dropped toward the earth below, and Ash instinctively reached out to grab for it.
But the shift in her weight set her off balance, and her other hand, which had been steadying her on the handrail, lost its hold. Ash plunged toward the ground.
The world opened up beneath her. Her hands groped through the air and miraculously found the foot rail. Her arms were pulled taut, her elbows locked, and for an agonizing moment it felt as though her shoulders were going to dislocate right out of their sockets. The lantern mean-while thudded heavily to the earth, bouncing once before landing at an angle against an exposed root.
Ash had just pulled herself up so that the rope was 120
tucked beneath her armpits, relieving some of the weight from her rope-burned palms, when the creature’s deliberate approach became audible again.
Ash tried to remain still, although with so much give in the rope, she listed helplessly back and forth. By the time the phantom had drawn near, however, she had coaxed the rope to remain at least still enough not to bray. Now all she could do was pray that her shiny white tennis shoes were high enough to escape the creature’s line of vision.
The phantom paused beneath her. It was toeing at the electric lantern curiously. A dark arm materialized from its inky body. Three spindly liquid fingers wrapped themselves around the handle and held it gingerly in front of its blue flame of an eye. It didn’t seem too keen on touching it, as if the lantern were radioactive. A fourth finger blossomed from its hand and snaked around the lantern, caressing the glass orb until the tip of the finger settled onto the plastic power button.
It flipped the switch.
With a hum the battery engaged and the light flickered on. Ash retracted her knees up closer to her body, trying to pull her feet out of the lantern’s radius of light, lest the metallic strips on her sneakers reflect into the beast’s curious eye.
It shrank back from the light at first, startled by what to it must have seemed like a portable sun.
Its teeth parted. With a furious sound that was 121
somewhere between a squawk and a roar, it hurled the lantern at the base of the redwood with the ladder built into it. The glass orb shattered and the filament burst.
The tungsten embers faded and immersed the forest once more in darkness.
The phantom lingered beneath the rope, and Ash thought for sure it must have known she was there. But the truth was far more horrifying than that, as from behind a nearby tree a second blue flame appeared, attached to the body of yet another creature.
The new arrival came toe to toe with his identical companion. The first squawked to the second, who promptly rotated its blue eye toward the debris of the pulverized lantern. The second cyclops barked something back to the first. This prompted the first to edge closer to the other until their “skin” touched.
The two phantoms melted into one.
The amoeba-like mass of the first creature gelled together with the other, with no resistance or fight. Their gasoline flesh bubbled as one, a living oil spill. When the reverse mitosis had concluded, a single phantom twice the original size stood in the place where the two had been, with legs now thicker than telephone poles. And it had two glowing blue flames for eyes instead of one.
With a last passing glance at the trees around it, the new phantom lumbered off in a completely new direction, quick enough for Ash to know that if it ever returned and intended to catch her, it most certainly would.
122
Ash didn’t need any persuasion. She swung hand over hand on the rope until she could grab hold of the wooden rungs. She scampered halfway down the ladder before she let go, dropping heavily to the ground. The broken glass of the lantern crackled under her feet.
She had been running for only a minute before she saw a low light emanating from the other side of the trees.
Like a moth she flocked to it and prayed it wasn’t the deadly whisper of another blue flame. Ash lowered her head and barreled around the other side of the trees.
She ran right into a clearing full of people.
Perched on the head of Turtle Rock and circled around a glowing hot plate were Jackie, Darren, and a small pride of senior boys, all of whom looked equally as stunned and bewildered as Ashline.
Ash ran a hand through her disheveled hair and waited for her panting breaths to slow before she waved casually at the group. “Um . . . hi.”
Jackie’s unblinking eyes peered at her before she finally adjusted her glasses and held out a wooden rod with a marshmallow simmering on the end of it. “S’more?”
123
THE BEACH SCROLLS
Satur
da
y
Ashline woke the next morning and immediately hit her head.
She had somehow managed to not only roll off her mattress and onto the floor once again, but from there, still asleep, she’d wiggled beneath the bed frame.
The result was shooting pain in her forehead and an explosion of light in her eyes. She had vague memories of dreams involving the blue flame people. In the one that surfaced first, she had again been dangling from a rope over the forest floor, only this time there’d been a whole pack of the phantoms waiting hungrily below, like a school of blood-frenzied sharks. Finally she’d let go, and the phantoms had congealed into one enormous creature. She’d had just enough time to see its bear-trap jaws part before she slipped into its open mouth, down its moistened gullet, and into the hot furnace of a belly waiting below.
124
After she wormed her way out from the clutter beneath her bed, she touched her sheets. They were still slick with night sweats. Looked like part of her Saturday would now be devoted to laundry. Joy.
She had, for obvious reasons, not shared with Darren or Jackie her late-night rendezvous with the phantoms.
As far as she was concerned, the marshmallow she had eaten off the floor had been laced with hallucinogens, and until another crypto-zoological creature appeared on her doorstep, she was sticking to her theory.
She rescued her r
acket from her closet and headed for the courts. The pitching machine already held a full reservoir of tennis balls; she had only to wheel it onto the court and into place before she flicked the on switch. Fiercely competitive at heart, Ash lived to compete against other players and, moreover, to pummel them without mercy.
But there was just something about playing against the machine that got her blood going, the way it fired relentlessly over the net with cold malice. The machine wasn’t a “better” or “worse” player. It was an indifferent judge of intuition and guts, of what Ash had underneath the hood, and of how far she had come.
She eventually synchronized to the rhythm of the game, the hollow thuck! sound of the machine providing the bass to her morning symphony of tennis.
By the time the machine launched the last ball from its reservoir, Ash rushed the net and, with a resounding scream, struck the ball with an overhand blow. It overshot the boundary line at the back of the 125
court and hit the machine itself. The pitcher tottered on its feet.
Her aggression in check, Ash slung her tennis bag over her shoulder and hustled back to the dormitory. She had just tossed her bag into the corner and was entertaining the idea of a shower when Jackie materialized in her doorway. Her bespectacled, ravenously hungry friend dragged Ash off to the dining hall for Saturday brunch.
“And then,” Jackie continued excitedly, reaching for the syrup, “he said we should definitely hang out. Can you imagine? Me, dating a senior?”
“Maybe he has a thing for the mousy librarian look,”
Ash suggested between sips of her orange juice.
Jackie narrowed her eyes in a failed attempt to look threatening. “Watch it. This is my future husband we’re talking about.”
Ash pointed her fork at Jackie, as the other girl went to town drizzling the thick viscous syrup over each and every cranny of her Belgian waffle. “I really hope you weren’t drooling over Chad Matthews like that.”
In response Jackie dipped her finger into the syrup and, before Ash could shy away, drew a line of goop down Ashline’s forearm.
Ash squealed with disgust. “You little bitch!” She dabbed frantically at her arm with a napkin.
Jackie winked at her and took a bite of her waffle without even cutting it. “Next time,” she said with her mouth full, “it’ll be your face.”
126
Grateful that the one-sided tennis match had restored her appetite, Ash returned to the buffet line for seconds.
On the way she passed the table with Rolfe, Ade, and Lily. The trio and Ash exchanged nods that seemed to say, Yes, Thursday night really happened. Yes, we’re still here.
And yes, we’ll be paying for it at tomorrow’s detention.
Ash had just reached the front of the food line when she caught sight of the blue-flamed gas burners that heated the brunch trays. Her appetite atrophied.
The sun reared its head not long after brunch. Ashline donned a halter top and shorts, and along with Darren and Jackie grabbed a beach towel and joined a mass of other students on the Blackwood quad. For the major-ity of the afternoon she lazed about in soporific content-ment, alternating between lying on her back and her belly as if she were a flapjack. When it became clear that attempting her viral marketing reading for econ class was a fool’s errand, she spent the rest of her outdoor time idly scrolling through the tracks of her MP3 player and occasionally adjusting her aviator sunglasses.
But all good things had to come to an end. As Jackie, who had lathered her pasty body in self-tanner, was trying to convince Ash to parade past the senior boys’
pickup volleyball game, the clouds rolled across the sky with a cautionary grumble. Within minutes the bipolar weather had taken a turn for the worse, and the drizzle began to come down.
In unison the other sun-sleepy teenagers who were 127
scattered across the quad rose from their half-slumber and flirtations and fled to the dorms. Darren, spoiled from growing up in Santa Monica and maladjusted to NorCal’s moody climate, took off running toward the boys’ dormitory.
Jackie wrinkled her nose at the gathering storm clouds. “I knew we should have gone over to the volleyball game earlier.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t spent an hour psyching yourself out,” Ash replied.
“What can I say?” Jackie shrugged. “I’m a pussy.
Ready to go?” She offered her hand to Ashline.
But Ash, whose response to the rain had been only to roll onto her back, didn’t reach for it. She was enjoying the icy massage of the rain against her shoulders, the sharp contrast from the warming sun. “You go ahead. I’m going to get a few more minutes of sun.”
Jackie glanced up at the overcast sky. “You’re serious?”
Ash slid her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose.
“What are you going to do the moment you go inside?
Take a shower?” When Jackie nodded, Ash continued,
“Well, I’m just going to take mine out here.”
“You’re a loon,” Jackie said.
“Yes,” Ash agreed. She tossed her econ text to Jackie, who caught it. “If you wouldn’t mind rescuing this from the rain, since you’re headed for shelter anyway.”
Jackie indulged her with one final perplexed look before she turned and fled for the girls’ residence hall, 128
grumbling something about “volleyball” and “rain” until she was out of earshot.
The rain picked up, and Ashline, now alone on the quad, stuffed her earbuds and MP3 player into her pocket and reveled in the rhythm of the rain. Growing up in Westchester, she had always felt compelled to sit on their three-season porch and watch the passing storms, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat of the raindrops against the air conditioner.
But this was something entirely different. This time the forest itself was calling to her, beckoning her inward to experience the storm unsheltered, unfiltered, and au naturale.
Her senses exploded from their cage, no longer dominated by her sense of sight. Instead she found addiction in all of the little things, and was enamored of nature’s perfect attention to detail. The smell the soil released as the rain hammered down, the freshness, the aromatic ecstasy of the grass. The sound of each individual droplet making its triumphant return to the earth, no longer just the homogenous white noise of rainfall, but now rainfalls.
There was a growing curiosity about where each drop had come from, and how far it had come, and for how long it had traveled. She wished she could rewind and follow each drop back to the lake, river, ocean, or puddle where it had last basked beneath the sun.
Ignoring the first yawn of soreness in her legs from the morning’s workout, Ash abandoned her towel on the 129
grass and began to lope toward the campus gates. Mud splattered her previously immaculate tennis shoes. She didn’t care.
She swept through the stone titans guarding Blackwood’s entrance and, without looking both ways for traffic, darted across the parkway and into the redwoods beyond.
Ash wasn’t sure where exactly she was running, but it was definitely west. Had the sky been clear, she would have discovered that she was running directly toward the setting sun. Whereas the brooding forest had brought her a sense of profound dread the night before, she tasted only the sweet confection of freedom now. She ran faster.
Finally, after she had easily been jogging for four miles, the trees above began to noticeably shrink, their growth curbed by the brisk ocean air. Ash could smell it too—the subtle aroma of the soil and decaying leaves overpowered by the sharp bite of the sea.
The rain died to a whimper. It ceased altogether as the trees abruptly ended, leaving Ashline perched on the top of a tall bluff overlooking a narrow smile of beach, and beyond, the Pacific Ocean.
Ashline stumbled down the sharp slope of the bluff, finding footholds where she could in the sand, which was freckled with stones. Here and there the dirt and sand had managed to hold on to a few vestiges of beach grass, like a balding man s
avoring his remaining tufts of hair.
At the bottom she took off her tennis shoes and socks, 130
tucked them behind a rock, and trekked across the chilly dune sand, letting it ooze through the spaces between her toes.
She came to the water’s edge. The foamy fingers of the surf wrapped around her feet before continuing on their path up the beach. It was the ocean’s way of breathing, the tide—deep breath in and deep breath out.
However, Ashline’s relaxation was gradually waning, replaced by a growing confusion as to why she had ended up on this beach, and how she was going to navigate her way back to Blackwood after blazing an unmarked trail for miles.
Then the discomfort of her rain-drenched clothes, clinging to her body, washed over her.
The breeze against her damp skin wasn’t the only thing giving her chills. Ahead, fifteen meters out to sea, was a familiar blond-haired boy sitting ready on a long-board, waiting for a good wave. His body rose up and down with the swells. Rolfe was too busy scouting the horizon to notice Ashline.
Ash turned to face north, hearing the slap of approaching footsteps in the sand. Raja, who had been maintaining a brisk pace on her beach run, caught sight of Ashline’s face, and her jog died to a walk before she stopped altogether. From this close Ash could hear the tinny chirp of the music from her headphones.
Raja plucked out her earbuds and opened her mouth to say something—but whatever it was she could possibly 131
have wanted to say would have to wait. The rumble of a motor had picked up from the south, where a black SUV
was carving a path across the sand. As it approached, Ash spotted two sea green kayaks mounted on the roof. It hadn’t even rolled to a complete stop when Ade opened the passenger door and hopped out. The engine sputtered into silence, and Lily joined them on the sand.
“Well,” Ade said, “at least there were no screams this time.”
Raja folded her arms across her chest. “That really doesn’t make me feel any less creeped out.”
“I’m with Cleopatra on this one,” Ash said. “We really have to stop meeting like this.”
Speechless, they all watched Rolfe—who had finally found a wave to his liking—ride to shore. He coasted in with the surf until his momentum died in the shallows.
Wildefire Page 10