by Lissa Kasey
“What’s wrong?” Alex asked me.
“Is the cat there?” I whispered, trying to focus on whatever it was he saw in the opposite doorway.
“Not exactly. What’s wrong?”
“Byrony and Joe are missing,” MaryAnn announced to the group. “Melissa says they didn’t come back last night.”
“From out in the woods?” Nicole asked.
“There are a couple houses nearby,” Chad pointed out. “Maybe they got lost on their way back and stopped at one?”
“And didn’t call?” Melissa asked. She held up her phone. “I’ve called them both dozens of times. Even walked out to the path, where it stops and breaks off, called and gotten nothing. Not even the sound of their phones ringing somewhere in the distance.”
“What would you like for us to do?” Freya asked her. “We could call the police, try to report them missing. If the police don’t think they are in immediate danger they won’t start looking for a few days. There is nothing in these woods. Nothing bigger than a racoon or some deer. We haven’t had wolves or bears for years.”
“What if they fell and got hurt?” Julie said.
“Both of them?” Jonah asked. “Like at the same time?”
“Someone could have taken them,” Melissa said. “Hurt them.”
“Unlikely,” Jonah said. “Byrony’s attitude would have made a kidnapper return her by now. Or kill her.”
“Not funny,” Melissa snapped.
“They could be taken like Micah was taken,” Nicole said in a quiet voice, her gaze falling on me.
An edge of tension and silence fell over the table. I could almost hear Alex’s heartbeat in my ears, his anxiety rising like a cloud of emotion to cover us both. They all knew of my incident, having met them all long before it happened, but I didn’t think any of them had actually been involved. None had helped in the search, not even Freya who lived the closest. I didn’t blame any of them for that. Though the dynamics of our group had changed a little since then. Their hesitation to reconnect with me afterward had been clear, taking each of them several days and sometimes weeks to respond when I reached out. It was a normal response. Human even. The fear of loss and pain keeping them from compassion. I didn’t blame them. Or at least I tried not to.
“This land isn’t part of the state park,” I reminded them all. There were a handful of similarities of those who went missing like I had. And a few that even I hadn’t fit, since I’d survived, and some still questioned if I should have been grouped with the rest at all. “They are probably lost. It’s a big forest area, and the cell reception out here is questionable. Technically if they walk in a particular direction long enough, they will end up in the state park.” Though that was a couple miles of a zigzag type trek.
I pushed my plate aside, not hungry anyway as fear gnawed at my gut. The sun had already mostly set, leaving that final edge of purple-blue sky with a tiny hint of starlight until the moon completely rose. When I got up out of the chair Alex grabbed my arm.
“No,” he said.
“I have flashlights in the car. Flares. Walkie talkies. Even a survival pack with first aid gear and thermal blankets.” I felt heat flush over my face in embarrassment. “Your brother insisted I take them.”
Alex did not look happy, but began to get up from his chair.
“No. You stay and eat. I’ll go with Melissa to look.”
“Not a chance in hell,” Alex said. He pushed his plate aside. “I’ll go help look. You stay here.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. His protective side, while cute for stories, annoyed the fuck out of me. The idea of going into the woods at night scared the crap out of me, but I would not be left behind like some damsel in distress while Alex put himself in danger. “If you go, I go,” I told him.
“We all go,” Chad said, getting up from his chair too.
“Girl, I know you didn’t volunteer us all to tromp around the woods in the dark,” Jonah said.
“I’ll help!” Nicole said.
“Me too,” Added Julie.
“If we all look, we can cover more ground. Find them faster,” Chad said rationally.
Jonah sighed. “Fuck. Not a single one of us is the outdoorsy type.” He pointed to himself. “Nerd.” He fluttered his hands around the room. “We are in a group of nerds. It’s required for cosplay.”
“I’m a nerd,” Alex agreed. “But also, an ex-Army Ranger. Which is why I should go. Everyone else can stay here. I just need Melissa to tell me where she last saw them.”
How many times had he told me in the past few days not to go into the woods without him? And he thought I’d let him go racing into the woods alone? I crossed my arms across my chest and met Alex’s eyes with mine.
“Fuck,” he sighed.
And that was how we found ourselves in the woods after dark.
Chapter 10
The trail itself was a wide swath of path that curved and swung around in a broad arch. Even with only the handful of flashlights illuminating the woods I could tell it was something people in the area used regularly for hikes, perhaps runs, or even peaceful walks.
All in all, the woods felt like normal woods. The trees large, but not that epic stretch that could be found in some of the national forests. Distantly the sound of cars echoed, mostly blocked by the trees, but occasionally finding its way through the darkness. The path from the house extended a couple dozen meters before turning into something that might originally have been a game trail reclaimed and widened by humans.
I had expected the area Melissa talked about leaving the path to be a sort of dead end. We walked over a kilometer from the house, fifteen or twenty minutes thereabouts, before finding the sharp turn that cut off the trail. It wasn’t a dead end, so much as a tiny dirt line snaking off the path and into heavy brush. Alex gripped my hand hard enough to hurt, but I didn’t pull away. We both had lights. Everyone had a torch or flashlight of some kind. The group was broken into pairs, a walkie talkie for each, plus our cell phones. Alex was not taking any chances.
“I don’t feel anything,” I whispered to Alex. No bugs or fire on my skin, only a slight chill from the evening breeze. “Do you see anything?”
He shook his head. “Stay close to me.”
“Byrony?” Chad shouted. We’d been taking turns calling for them every few feet. “Joe?” We would stop and listen. It became a sort of stuttering dance of movement and stillness. Nothing but birds and bugs responded. I heard a squirrel a few times, watched them scamper away in a dark race of fluffy tails. Normal forest noise. The kind of silence that was easy to tune out.
“Is there another house nearby?” Alex asked Freya. “A neighbor you can call to see if they might have heard someone out here?”
Freya nodded. “Sure, let me call the Juarez family and see if anyone’s seen or heard anything. They have a barn on their property that isn’t used much. I don’t know why Byrony and Joe would go there, but it doesn’t hurt to check.” She lifted her phone, but frowned. “I’ll have to go back to the trail and see if I can catch a signal.” She had no problem finding her way back that I could tell.
“Maybe they scared themselves and got lost,” MaryAnn suggested. “They did seem to really like paranormal stuff. She and Joe have been talking about creating a YouTube channel for ghost hunting.”
“It’s a lot of work and equipment for little to no payoff,” I said.
“Unless they are faking stuff,” Chad added. “Then they get big TV deals.”
We made our way a little deeper into the woods, this end of it a bit thicker with brush and the trail we’d followed off the path completely vanished beneath debris and overgrowth. Everything was dry and more brown than green, and it didn’t look like anyone had been through here in a while. Alex was examining the area too, maybe seeing more than I was since he had military training.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been through here,” I said softly.
“No,” agreed Alex. “But the ground is pretty h
ard. Unless they stumbled through some leaves it would be hard to tell they came through at all. Dry places suck for tracking.”
“Too bad it’s not the rainy season,” Freya said, finding her way back. “Nothing from the Juarez home, but I left a message for them to call and check their barn.”
“Byrony? Joe?” Julie called.
“You bitches best stop playing!” Jonah shouted into the darkness. The group was getting a little more spread out than I would have liked, though Alex remained plastered to my side.
Melissa tried to call their phones. I don’t know if she even had a signal but it was clear she didn’t get through. Though everyone paused to listen for the ring of phones anywhere in the distance.
“Maybe their batteries are dead?” Nicole said.
“Or they turned them off for their goofy witchcraft stuff,” Julie agreed. Which brought back the question, where were they? Gone almost twenty-four hours with no word?
“Let’s create a line. Search for things on the ground, cloth, strands of fabric, marks in the dirt, leaves that look disturbed, anything that points us in a direction,” Alex gave everyone clear instructions. “No more than five feet apart. Make sure the rest of the group stays in sight. If you have trouble or spot anything, call out. We’ll cover more ground, faster this way.” He didn’t want to let me go. That was clear in his eyes as I tugged my grip free from his and took several steps away. The forest was dense enough that any more than the five feet or so, and you had to really look for someone’s light. I couldn’t help but be hyperaware of my light and my neighbors, including Alex, as a sort of safety net against anxiety.
We followed the regime for a little while. Slowly walking a few feet, examining everything around us carefully, and taking turns calling out then listening. I admit to falling into the rabbit hole of my thoughts after about twenty minutes into the search. When Alex had vanished, we had him on camera. There wasn’t much area to search, even if the entire city had been put on watch for him. However, I wondered if this was how everyone had felt when I’d gone missing. Had they set up grids and shone flashlights in the dark? Probably. I’d never asked as it had always been a touchy subject. Why the human brain latched onto guilt when there was nothing I could have changed about it, I would never understand. I hadn’t asked to disappear, or for people to search for me. Would Byrony feel the same?
The change in my focus, the noise in my own head, once again distracted me from the things I should have noticed. The stilling of the wind. The absence of birds and crickets. But even my own overactive brain couldn’t make me ignore the burning prickle trailing over my arms. It began slow. Almost a chill on my flesh rather than the usual ants. My skin tightened into goose bumps, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck rising. I stopped, blinking into the darkness as the feeling intensified.
There was movement ahead. Not an animal that I could tell. It was too big for that and moved… oddly. Like a person with an injured gait. Step, step, limp, step, step, limp. Large, lumbering, perhaps labored.
Fuck! Was one of them hurt?
I raced forward, darting around trees and brush expecting after a few meters to run into one of them, Byrony or Joe, and praying that Alex was following. I thought I could hear his footsteps behind me and didn’t waste the few seconds to check. But as I rounded the last tree that I thought would reveal one of the missing, all I found was darkness. More trees like a wall of fortress defenses rather than a forest, and stillness. A complete absence of movement. No Byrony or Joe, no wind, no animals, simply darkness that comes from a lack of stars, moonlight, and all sources of artificial brightness. Even the light from my phone had vanished.
I stared, frozen for a moment, my brain racing through a thousand scenarios. But had only a half second to react when I realized the darkness in front of me wasn’t normal, but more of a giant black mass of voided light, edged in a slate of devouring blackness.
For a few tense seconds I felt like I was staring face to face with something not human. Some undefined other perhaps. Then it moved, a sudden flight forward so fast I hadn’t even enough time to draw a breath. It slammed into me with a ferocity that knocked me a meter or so backward, yet turned my skin to ice with its touch.
Panic came fast. I sucked in air, lungs screaming for breath. The sensation of cold terror rolling through me. Stars popped around my vision, not real ones, but flickers of warning signs from my mind, screaming that I wasn’t getting enough air. It was a conscious effort to force myself to suck air in slowly, and let out long breaths, staving off passing out.
I immediately thought to run to Alex. Tried to get enough air to call for him. Only he wasn’t there. No one was there. Not as far as I could see. My light was on, barely casting a glow in the thick darkness, but nothing else moved. And again, the silence encased me like a tomb of thick concrete walls muting life. I drew in a stuttering breath, forcing myself to calm, and focus. No bird this time, squawking or whatever it had been. No sign of a dimensional portal or whatever people claimed they thought I had seen that day. Simply me and the silence of absolute darkness. Which had touched me and left me cold.
I trembled. Couldn’t stop shaking actually, partly the temperature of my skin having dropped and partly from fear. I swung around with the light, trying to find the dark mass that had touched me. Had that been some sort of portal? I couldn’t find anything, just trees and more brush. Which direction had I come from? How did I get back? Had I stumbled through something? Was that possible? Was that where Byrony and Joe had gone? I knew in my gut that Alex would not have let me wander away from him. Even when I’d run, thinking I’d seen them, he would have followed. So where was he? Where was everyone?
I wrapped my arms around myself, heart pounding, body shuddering with the frozen tremble that wouldn’t let up. I shined the light around, trying to find a sign of anything unusual. Shadows were everywhere, stretching from every tree and bush, moving with the light like some ancient dance of evil. Too much in my head reminding me of old stories, legends of tales told by people who claimed to have been touched by the darkness. Most driven mad by what they’d seen and experienced. Some possessed.
My stomach ached and cramped with intense anxiety. I had to fight the urge to throw up. The light caused the shadows, I told myself rationally. A play of trees and flashlights over bushes and branches. Nothing really moved. It couldn’t move that way. The gloom I’d encountered hadn’t been anything. Perhaps a pocket of cold air. Darkness wasn’t a living thing; it was an absence of light. It didn’t move on its own and manipulate the landscape.
Only something did. To my right a shadow took steps between the trees and for a moment I hoped that it was Alex. It was fully defined with the shape of a human, arms, legs, a head above shoulders I could make out, and a perfect silhouette. Or at least that’s how it began. When I swung my light that way the beam died, leaving me staring at something dark again. Large like the first shadow I had encountered, but farther away, and the edges slightly more defined. More than a simple echo of the enclosed forest beneath towering trees, the shadow extended like a physical giant, arching across the distance, expanding, reaching for me with elongated arms and spindle-like fingers.
I opened my mouth to scream, frozen in fear, and yet angry with myself for standing there. “No,” I said. “Not again.”
I threw myself backward, a self-defense sort of roll, down and over until I was back on my feet and pointed in the opposite direction. I ran. I could sense it reaching for me in the darkness like giant hands carved from the trees themselves to drag me back to some other world. I didn’t see the tree branch that wacked me in the face, making me fall backward and clutch my cheek and eye.
I expected blood, while my heart pounded in my ears and my breathing labored, but the only wetness I felt on my face was more liquid than the thick ooze of blood. It was the salty assault of tears I hadn’t realized I was crying. My mind swirled and stuttered, unable to think of a solution to so many questions. The cold arch of
something icy seeped into my flesh where I touched the ground. Fingers first, where I’d caught my fall, then my ass and legs, causing them to turn to jelly.
The ants beneath my skin, fire, intensified until every nerve in my body seemed to throb, the pain excruciating. I had to bow forward over my knees, gasping for breath, explosions of light in my head telling me I wasn’t getting enough air. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure how I survived, the agony making me wish for an immediate end. Folding in on myself did little to ease the hurt, but chased away some of the chill. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to focus on something else, some thread of hope or anything.
Above the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears, I could hear something moving in the trees, stalking closer, and a looming presence of doom. Having experienced it several times over the years, I knew exactly what that feeling was. Had a vague sense of it before I’d first met Alex, and in those days before my disappearance. It was the weight of anxiety times a thousand, all pressing down on my soul, squeezing out any sense of logic or calm. Did it mean bad things for Byrony and Joe? Or just a warning for me?
I refused to look up, instead burying my face in my lap, curled around myself as though it would somehow put a stop to the terror. It didn’t matter that it was cowardly, irrational, and part of a broken response to past trauma. Survival had narrowed to the noise in my head, and the feel of my limbs turning to ice while terror raced through my veins.
Sound came back in a whoosh of noise, almost too loud to bear. Shouting, cracking of wood, wind, voices, and a quiet mewling that I didn’t realize was me until something touched my back and I screamed, full on murder scream over and over until I was gasping for air.
Strong arms wrapped around me, adding to the panic for a few seconds until the chill began to ease, warmth seeping into my body from the embrace. And the soft brush of textured hair on my neck and cheek helped me catch a breath. Alex.