by E. M. Fitch
They’d come at her in a circle, she was sure of it. So she hurried along, knowing a place just up ahead that she could use to her advantage.
The rock face was steep and covered in moss, a fuzzy green wall that rose perpendicular behind her. If she reached one hand back, she could feel the cool softness that stretched in a long line in both directions. The trail turned right into the forest, but still, Cassie could see a long way down. There were no hikers today, no witnesses.
The creatures would still encircle her, she had no doubt, but now it’d have to be a semi-circle. Though they’d surround her, at least no one would be able to grab her from behind. That felt safer somehow.
Her breaths came in short little bursts, an aftereffect of the running. Her skin felt warm and clammy, despite the dropping temperature as the sun dipped toward the tree line. The fire poker was warm iron in her hand.
“Come and get me,” she whispered, knowing they would hear.
It took them longer than she thought it would. The shift was slow; but she did notice it. The air felt stiller—calmer—as though it was welcoming them. The forest swayed regardless of the lack of breeze, the boughs bent toward the creatures as they appeared, dark shadows amongst the tree trunks. Their footsteps were nearly silent, most people would have probably missed the rustling noise altogether; but Cassie had been prepared, she was listening for them.
She saw Aidan first, coming at her straight on. Corey and Laney were to his right, Laney hidden somewhat behind Corey. She grinned at Cassie over her lover’s shoulder, one hand resting on her ever-growing stomach. Jude hung back, closest to the rock wall on Cassie’s left. To Aidan’s other side were three creatures she was less familiar with, though she got the sense she had met them before. Behind, lost in the trees, Cassie could see distant movement. On the back of the wind, soft laughter, like that from a child, ruffled toward her like a scattering of dead leaves.
“Have you come for me?” Aidan whispered, not aloud but in her mind. He watched her eagerly, a smile contorting his mouth. She shook her head in response.
“She brings a weapon,” one of them chuckled. Cassie didn’t know his name; she didn’t recognize him. She could see him though, tall and stately, he towered above the rest. The redheaded woman that Cassie recognized from the coffee shop stood next to him, laying her head on his shoulder. He brought one hand up, curled it under her chin, resting long, pale fingers against her cheek. The last unknown, another woman, smiled cruelly, the only one present who seemed to already understand why Cassie had come. She leaned forward on the balls of her feet, ready to fly at the younger girl.
“Those kids are dying,” Cassie said, projecting her voice. She tried to look straight at Aidan, but she couldn’t. It seemed more important to speak to the older ones, the creatures whose names Cassie did not know. She wasn’t sure what she expected, a smattering of regret, a sense of unease. She saw nothing. The creatures stood, staring, regarding her, but not uncomfortable.
“They are human,” the woman Cassie didn’t recognize said. Her voice was cold, but Cassie could detect no outright cruelty, more that she was expressing known fact. “Humans die. There is nothing we can do about that.”
“Not entirely true, Gaia,” the man caressing the redhead’s face said, locking eyes with Cassie. “Are you ready to put that down?”
Cassie recoiled, bringing the fire poker up higher, tightening her fingers around the warm, iron handle.
“Cassie!” Laney reproached, frowning at her. “Listen to Lucas. Put that down.”
“You have one choice,” Cassie said, speaking over her old friend and looking directly at the monster who was holding her in his gaze. “Leave now. Forever. Don’t come back. Or I’ll have no choice.”
She wasn’t sure what she expected. Laughing, perhaps. Trepidation, maybe. But she wasn’t prepared for the actual reaction.
“Oh, my dear,” the man named Lucas drawled, a faint Celtic accent marring his speech, “you really have no idea, do you?”
A rush of misty air flew over her, blowing her back. Her clothes felt pressed against her skin, a sweet, sugar-laced air was forced up her nose and down her throat, choking her. Her vision swam and black spots appeared in her sight. She saw the world in flashes. Aidan moving forward, the fire poker falling from her fingers. The world tilting and she with it, the brush and foliage of the forest floor coming up at her face at an angle, her hair sweeping around her cheeks and over her eyes. Her head hit the forest floor with a dull thump that she just heard through her clouded ears. Faces converged over her, grinning maniacally. It was a vision from her nightmares. Jude looked as though he could just barely suppress his glee. His hands rubbed together in slow motion, a twist of fingers that caught Cassie’s fading attention. Voices pattered all around her like the chirping of birds on a new spring morning. It was Laney’s that she heard last, her voice pressed into her mind as the rest faded to black.
“Come back to me, Cass.”
Cassie woke slowly, as though from a dream. The world around her tilted and shifted. Laney’s voice, her strange new one, floated around her before settling in her ringing ears.
Why wouldn’t you want to? Why wouldn’t you want to?
It was the memory of a question. Though Cassie wasn’t sure anymore why she wouldn’t want to. When Laney had first asked, sitting by the pond on a beautiful clear day, Cassie had known. She was so sure why she wouldn’t want to join the creatures, join Laney, forever. Now, she wasn’t so sure. The earth below her emitted a pleasant heat, a soft vibrancy to the air she inhaled. It was the sweet, powdered sugar air that settled all around her. The moss beneath her cheek moved and rose, lifting Cassie’s body in slow motions, like she was sleeping on a giant, his chest rising and falling beneath her.
It was the noise that roused her, the slither of roots beneath the topsoil, a ripping and tearing of the earth’s crust.
She picked her head up, pushing through the rush of blood that blurred her vision and made her temples throb.
“What have you done?” she whispered, pushing her hair from her face. No one answered. The ground rippled beneath her. She saw the mist as it rolled over the dips and crests of the earth, surrounding her with warm, muggy air. She swallowed hard through shallow breaths, struggling to not breathe it in.
“It won’t take long,” he whispered.
Aidan’s words sent a bolt like electricity racing along her nerves. She pushed her torso up and out of the fog. The air was cooler—sharper—overhead. She gasped at it, struggled to clear her lungs of whatever foul thing saturated the mist. She brought herself to her knees and then into a crouch, balancing on the balls of her feet as the forest floor pitched below.
Laughter echoed from the shadows all around her, sharp bursts of triumph that faded to murmurs of amusement. The earth ripped open with a sound like thunder and a root sprang free, slithering like a python toward Cassie.
She leapt back, unsure just where she was. The rock wall she had sought out for protection was gone. The monsters had dragged her off the familiar path. She was lost in the forest. The sun was still in the process of setting. The sky had that deep, bruising purple look that came just before all light left completely. Trees surrounded her and though she knew the creatures hid among them, now, without the light, she couldn’t see them.
“Don’t fight.” It was Laney’s voice. Cassie’s chest caved at the sound of it. “It’ll be easier, Cass. Trust.”
Cassie wouldn’t. She refused.
Cassie skittered back, kicking leaves and fallen branches, they rolled under her sneakers and she fell. Her arms swung, grasping for anything to solidify in the empty air as she fell. She caught herself against a tree trunk; it scraped her palm, warming her skin with her own blood.
Above her a rumble of thunder sounded low, the air became saturated not only with mist but with moisture from low hanging clouds. A storm rolled in around them, weighing on the atmosphere. Lightning pierced the sky in
a quick, unexpected flash. Cassie saw the creatures in the sudden burst of light. Their outlines were unforgiving silhouettes, but their features were stark, clear. Sharp teeth and fingers that grew to points, they had claws at the end of their unnaturally long hands. Their spines were elongated, pointed toward the angry sky with spiky knobs at each vertebra. Suddenly they were more animal than human, more terrifying and like the monsters of her childhood nightmares.
Cassie reared back, screaming as she saw them. Collectively, they stepped closer.
The bark at her back vibrated under her touch, pulsing and drawing her body closer. It suckled at her skin and the murmurs of laughter grew, a crescendo of hysteria through the whispering trees. The trunk shifted under her body, shaped itself to her form and she felt herself become melded to it, become one with it. Aidan’s voice rang out above them all.
“Mine,” he sneered, only the words weren’t spoken, they were whispered inside her mind. His voice grew until it was no longer the soft taunting at the back of her skull. The next words roared as they invaded her head. “Forever, mine.”
Panic, real and blinding, seized her. Thunder crashed again. She wrenched her shoulder from the sucking grasp of the bark behind her, jerking her feet free of the roots that had started to snake up her legs. She twisted around, pirouetting from the whispers. Cassie didn’t look back, didn’t think. She picked a point on the horizon and ran as fast as she could.
Lightning burned across the sky, angry spikes that ripped the blackness open. Thunder followed in echoing booms; but it was the trees that frightened Cassie the most. They wove and pitched, crashing together in a cacophony that was louder than the peal of thunder. The branches creaked and split as they collided in the air above Cassie’s head. The air became saturated with the smell of resin and sap, dirt and dead leaves. The ground beneath her feet rose in waves, as though giant snakes were wriggling beneath a thin layer of soil. Though it wasn’t snakes, it was roots, seeking, searching, waiting to break free and snatch at her legs as she ran.
Whispers followed her through the night, rode on the outstretched limbs as she tore pass.
You can’t run, they hissed. We’re coming. We’re already here.
She pushed harder, her muscles burning and her lungs frozen. It wasn’t until she felt the cold tracks in the wind that she realized she had started crying.
It was confusing in the dark; but the fairgrounds might be close. The sun had lingered above as Cassie had turned her back on the parking lot hours before. She followed the lightness of the sky, the last smudge of illumination from the setting sun, in the hopes of stumbling into that big, huge open space with buildings and pavilions, paved roads and a large parking lot. There could even be people still there. People who had been setting up just hours ago, someone to help her.
The bramble tore up her legs, seeming to reach with brittle fingers up her body. She felt the tips scratch into her skin, but they were dry and snapped easily as she ran through. Ahead she could see a change, a lightening in the deep velvet of the silhouetted forest. At the next shard of lightning, she saw an opening in the trees and she sprinted forward, bursting from the forest as a crack of thunder welcomed her into a gravel parking lot.
The fairgrounds looked deserted; but there were still buildings to hide in, a place to tell Gibbons to find her. He was her first thought, stark and serious, and carrying a badge and a gun. She pulled her phone out of her pocket as she moved forward, typing awkwardly as she ran.
Cassie: Fairgrounds. Help.
It was enough. He’d know from that. In a quick moment Cassie was grateful she had impulsively put his number in her phone. The taunting whispers never slowed. Interspersed with Aidan’s seductive call and Corey’s persistent confidence, there was another voice, a voice so familiar it sent icy daggers through Cassie’s heart.
“Cass, please,” Laney whispered, sending her plea through the trees.
She threw herself into the first building she came across, sliding the large barn doors closed behind her. In the flash of lightning that followed, she could see she was in the horse barn. The stalls already had a thin coating of hay strewn across the cement floor. The pens were separated by metal fencing, wide enough to fit the large animals that would be shown there. Cassie could see the names and photos of the horses that would be entered in the competitions, they hung in the darkness at the back of the stalls.
She moved forward slowly, aware of each footfall as it landed on the stiff hay. She couldn’t stay here. They must have seen her enter, and they would come looking. Soon.
There was a small door to the right of the closed barn door in front of her, opposite the one she had first barged through. She walked toward it, jumping when thunder crashed, the sides of the barn trembling at the force. The noise felt so much closer in the large, open barn. The air vibrated with energy. Cassie saw the flash of lightning in white streaks through the crack in the barn doors. She counted in her head.
One, two, three, four—BOOM!
Four seconds. Cassie waited for the lightning, counted again to four, and slowed her breathing as she did. She tried not to think of the nurses pounding on Mark’s chest, but the counting brought it back. One, two, three. When she hit four, she opened the door, hoping the thunder would mask her escape.
She couldn’t see anyone as she crept onto the dark fairgrounds. The sway of trees was just a distant blur on a dark skyline. Raindrops began to fall, cold and fat on her cheeks. In seconds, the sky opened up, and Cassie was drenched as she jogged across the midway and to a second row of buildings. These were smaller, used to house the crafts and homemade pies that people around town entered for blue ribbons. There would be photography displays, the quilt the ladies from the library always made and auctioned for charity, a section for ridiculously overgrown pumpkins and squash. There was always a row of handmade items from the local nursing home, every item getting a ribbon of some kind hung on it.
Cassie didn’t find herself in one of these homey, empty buildings though. When she slipped inside a small building, out of the mud the ground had become, shivering with wet and cold, she jumped as the item that hung on the door swung toward her. The thunder that sounded masked her yelp.
An antique pitchfork hung from the door she had pulled shut behind her. The iron tongs were black and coarse, no sheen of light glinting from their rough surface as lightning flooded the small space with its brilliance.
The building was filled with antique farming tools, showpieces that were already hung, swaying in the energy-strung air. In the spaces between lightning flashes, they disappeared, stolen by darkness into the black walls that held them up. When the lightning lit the sky, they appeared, ravenous mouths with teeth clacking against each other, looking for a bite.
Cassie moved slowly to the center of the room. She thought for a moment of finding a weapon, there were plenty strung around her, but instead her fingers wrapped around her phone, lighting the screen. Gibbons had texted back, sometime between thunderclaps and lightning strikes. He was on his way. She punched back a reply, telling him what building she was in. It wasn’t until after she hit send that she realized that even knowing she was in the antique farm tool building, he would have no idea where that was on the fairgrounds.
Still. As long as he got here soon, she could run to him, get in his car, and get out of here alive and human.
Involuntary shivers rocked her body. She pocketed her phone and crouched under a nearby display. Above her, antique hand rakes sat out in a row, small identification tags tied to their wooden handles. The ground at her feet was protected from the direct onslaught of the rain, however water seeped under the walls that surrounded her. The dirt underneath her slowly got softer.
She shifted her position, keeping her eyes on the slit between the door and the frame, waiting for the sweep of headlights that meant Gibbons was outside.
Instead, she saw a shadow. Dark and tall, it slid past the closed door. Something sharp dragged alon
g the wall behind Cassie, a nail scrapping over the exposed wood of the siding. It dragged and shuddered, pulling along the natural splinter of the outside walls.
Cassie kept quiet, counting silently in her head.
One, two, three, four. Another boom! Another shadow. Light flashed, and in the quiet that followed the thunder crack, she could hear the creatures outside sniffing through the rain.
One, two, three, CRACK! The air sizzled around her and the door shook. Lightning whited the cracks in the building, flooded the one window. Every tool along the walls trembled.
One, two—the door flew open, splintering the frame. The iron pitchfork that hung on the door shivered in the gust of rain and wind that swept through the small space. The air crackled with noise and energy, and above the thunder, even from the corner of the building she was tucked into, she could hear them again, the trees. They taunted and screamed, shrieking at her that they had won. She was lost.
Five bodies stood backlit by lightning. In the sharp, wavering flash, their silhouettes were long and lean, tall in the doorframe. And other … it was in the way their backs curved, the length of their fingers and the way each digit narrowed to a point, like a claw. Cassie could hear them, even though they didn’t speak.
Now. Take. Ours. Mine.
Their thoughts and intentions snaked through her head, growling and crawling over one another. In a moment they were atop her, pulling at her legs and dragging her from her hidden space. They saw through the black of the night, heard her breath or smelled her scent amid the rain and mud and the sharp tang of iron.
Cassie screamed as they yanked her out, her hands flailing above her. Her fingers brushed a small tool, the rotting wood handle crumbling under the rake of her nails. She twisted and stretched but to no avail; they pulled her into the open space of the building, too far to reach a weapon. Too late, she wished she had held one.
The five creatures converged over her, a tangle of voices, wind, and drops of cold rainwater flicking over her body.