by Fox, Logan
Strange—she still has a smear of lipstick on her lips. I’d have thought the rapids would have erased those traces of promiscuity from her.
Lipstick won’t do her any good out here.
Survival depends on intelligence. Common sense. A yearning for life.
If Clover doesn’t have any of those things, she won’t live.
And I’d be corrupting my own data if I stepped in to help.
I turn away, smudging paint over my skin as I graze nails over my face.
This study is already fucked—why do I keep trying to salvage it?
Could it be sympathy?
A tangle of memories light up my mind. This wasn’t the exact spot, but it’s close enough.
The chase, the river, no fire.
It’s like she’s tracing my own journey through this forest. My own journey to discovery—to freedom.
Despite everything, this is more than I could ever have hoped for. Is that why I can’t give this up?
Everyone must walk their own path. No one knows the way, but…
I never had a guide. I came to this journey like a newborn child, still wet with amniotic fluid.
And I barely came out of the experience with my mind intact. What if she doesn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with this?
I chose the forest because of the many lessons it has taught me over the years, but I’ve just put Clover through a crash course.
And what if it comes for her like it did for me? I haven’t seen tracks, but I didn’t that night either.
It will come for her too.
* * *
Eight years earlier
I’ve lost time. I don’t know how, but it’s full dark already, and I’m still wet. Shivering now. I can barely keep my feet moving, let alone find my way in the dark.
I should never have run. My experience was supposed to take place in a clearing close to home.
Why did I run?
Because something frightened me.
In a forest I knew so well, something moved in the shadows, and my body switched off all reasoning. It took control out of a desperate need for self-preservation and it made me run.
If I had stayed where I was, then I could have been at home already. I could have been warm and dry and—
And in the presence of my father.
He wasn’t around that much—he worked in the city and for long stretches he’d only be home one night a week.
But mother had informed us that his therapist had scheduled him three days off. And he’d decided to spend it with his family.
Instead of taking the Ayahuasca three weeks from now, I moved up my schedule.
I didn’t want to see him.
Didn’t want him to see me.
If he did, then he’d undoubtedly find something to criticize. My grades, perhaps. The fact that I hadn’t yet grown to his height—would I ever? How I wasn’t home enough to look after Mother.
And then he’d start comparing me with Holly, and that I couldn’t take.
That’s why I’m here now. In the woods. Mind poisoned with a brew that’s supposed to show me the way through a mind that’s become as tangled as this forest.
I’ve tried to get clean so many times. Mother secretly paid for more visits to rehab clinics than I can keep track of.
They never work.
It’ll be a day, a week, a month. As soon as I hear my father is coming home, I relapse.
I make it easy for myself too. There’s a part of me that hides just enough stash for me to get off and escape.
I never remember hiding it.
But I can always find it when I need to.
That alone scares me more than anything. I don’t want to part of a collective consciousness where decisions are out of my control.
Father would disapprove.
The thought sends a shudder through me. I pause, trying to make sense of the dark, twisted forest around me.
And that’s when I see those eyes in the dark.
So the hallucinations have begun.
But no…
This was the same creature that’s been hiding in the shadows all along.
It followed me, even after I’d fallen and nearly drowned in the river.
And now it’s come to claim its prize.
A wolf steps from the shadows, silver fur radiant in a stray moonbeam that manages to pierce the canopy above.
It snarls at me and lets out a sound that turns the marrow of my bones to ice.
Again, I run.
Chapter Forty-One
Clover
I wake up, and I don’t know why. I mean, I should have been dead. I know this on some molecular fucking level. I was too cold to survive.
I shift, my eyes narrowing at a brilliant flash of light.
No, not a flash. A pulse.
A fire.
There’s a fire burning less than two feet away from me.
Hunter.
I scramble to a sit, whipping my head around as I search the shadows.
It’s night, so he could be anywhere. I’m a few yards away from the river, but the forest is a snarling mess around me. Animals whoop and trill in the distance, and the sound is less than calming.
I feel bugs on me. Spiders, millipedes, beetles. But when I jump to my feet, a red cloak falls onto the ground by my feet. I’m still wearing the hoody and boxers, but there’s nothing on me. Nothing crawling in my hair, ready to burrow into my brain.
Fuck off, I’m sure as shit something like that can happen. I don’t want no fucking spider eggs in my brain.
I calm down, but only because it’s pointless freaking out when there’s no one around to calm you down.
And I am alone—there are no eyes watching me from the shadows.
Why would Hunter save me and then disappear?
I sit back down, crowding against the fire. I haven’t died of cold, true, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still damp and shivering. I wrap the red cloak around my shoulders, my eyes darting here and there as I interrogate the shadows.
Where were you last night at 3am? Who were you with? Had you been taking drugs prior to that?
Fuck, Clover—sanity is rather fucking important right now. Hold on, bitch. Hold. On.
I do, but to the cloak. Sanity is a bit of an abstract concept anyhow. But this cloak? It’s thick. It’s warm.
It smells like him.
Why? Why would it smell like him?
Because he doesn’t smell like cologne, or aftershave. Hunter smells like the forest.
I hadn’t realized that last night. I was high on life. Clean. Free.
Until he drugged me.
The thought’s a bitter one. But not just that. I haven’t even processed the fact that I’ve gotten high for the first time in six months.
And I hardly noticed.
Why?
Because Hunter was fucking me at the time.
What kind of sick—?
A twig cracks behind me. I let out a tiny shriek and spin around. I’m holding a stick, but fuck knows what I plan to do with it. Beat the dark to death? This stick will probably snap before I even do damage.
Maybe the forest is settling, like houses do. I mean, it’s old. Houses are old.
The house I lived in with my uncle was ancient. The sounds it would make—
I force the thought away so violently that my head spins.
Flames.
I focus on them with the determination of a drowning man and empty my mind.
It’s worked before. Once or twice.
Heroin, of course, works much fucking better.
The flames are hypnotic. Sensual.
I’m starting to understand why our ancestors would sit around a fire and tell stories. Well, beside the obvious lack of binge-on-demand entertainment, a fire is an entrancing thing. As the logs turn to embers, I can see things in those glowing lines.
Faces.
Animals.
Hands.
I squeeze my eyes shut. My
stomach turns over, and I’m not sure if it’s from hunger or nausea.
Time to take stock. You’re stuck in a forest in the middle of nowhere Mallhaven. The only person that knows you are here is the same person that put you here in the first place. Let’s not count him as ally just yet.
Enemy? Possibly.
Nemesis? Most definitely.
So is this a game? A test? An experiment?
Is there even a fucking difference?
Not really. But in each instance, there’s a winner. A goal. A conclusion.
Which is what, exactly?
I survive the forest and that proves what? That I’m a descendent of neanderthal man?
Or is there more to come?
Jesus fucking Christ.
What if all of this was just the first round?
Maybe I haven’t even reached the actual test yet.
My stomach makes an unhappy sound.
Suck it up. You’ve had worse. Remember the binge of ‘16? Ain’t nothing went into your stomach except chewing gum for over seventy-two hours.
Hunger, dear Clover, is the least of your fucking concerns right now.
The dark? That’s something you should be worrying about.
This fire isn’t going to last forever unless you keep feeding it.
Shit! It’s burning out. The logs are almost spent, and if I don’t get something dry and crackly in there in the next few moments, I’ll be spending the rest of tonight alone and damp.
I get to my feet. Around me, the forest goes silent.
A glance back at the fire confirms my fear—I have ten, maybe fifteen minutes to find more wood. If I wander too far off, I might never find this fire again.
And then I’d be dead because, for some reason, Hunter gave me a reprieve. He brought me fire, saving me from death.
Will he do it again? Who the fuck knows.
I’m not taking a chance that he will.
I have to find wood. Dry wood.
My hoody is still damp, but at least it’s not cold anymore. In fact, it feels more like a Floridian summer than anything.
I wouldn’t know - I’ve never been there. But fuck - alligators couldn’t be worse than this, right?
* * *
The fire’s blazing again.
I have time—perhaps even till the break of dawn. Hey, isn’t that a song? I dunno—my brain’s mush.
My body’s pumped with adrenalin from my frantic search for dry wood, so I can’t sleep. But staring at the fire is starting to do eldritch things to my brain.
My past is starting to seep through cracks in those walls I took so much time plastering up.
The dark.
It presses against my shrine of light like a physical presence.
It was a physical presence, you fucking dolt.
I was sixteen. Maybe I didn’t have the mental fortitude to handle shit like that. I guess I might have done some weird, psychological shit in my brain to cope.
After all, I know the dark doesn’t have hands. It can’t touch. Feel. Invade.
But still I attribute those violations to every dark shadow, every closet, the space under every bed I’ve ever slept on.
Does that mean I’m delusional? Or simply trying to make sense of something that could never make sense to anyone…ever?
An owl hoots in a distant tree and the present claws me back.
The forest is strangely quiet this late at night if you don’t take into account the crickets and their orchestra of chirps.
I close my eyes and lose myself to their song. The rhythm is intoxicating, soothing.
My eyes flicker open on the edge of sleep, and I spot a familiar shape in the shadows.
Hunter.
He’s here—watching me.
I guess I should be used to that by now.
He’s been watching me all along. None of this was random.
Oh no.
Hunter Hill had a plan.
And as soon as I was booked into his facility, he had a subject primed for his research.
Doesn’t he get it?
I’m not a fucking addict anymore.
“I’m clean, motherfucker!” My yell echoes in the trees, and for a long moment I can’t get over how disparate it sounds to the forest’s breathing.
“I’m clean,” I mumble, but the words are lost in my knees, my face pressed into my defensive huddle.
Fuck it, I know I’m clean. No one could endure six months of rehab and not have addiction out of their system.
Fuck that.
But still, the dark reaches for me.
How am I supposed to keep it at bay?
Heroin was always the answer to that, but now?
I’m not sure sheer force of will’s going to cut it.
I need something stronger.
For a demon like this, I need a fucking exorcism.
Chapter Forty-Two
Hunter
At this point, I am unsure if any data from this trial can provide anything worthwhile to my research. But if I hadn’t meddled, she would be dead. And then she would be absolutely no use to me. At least now, I can study her from the dark. She seems anxious, fidgety.
It’s not fear.
I recognize those micro expressions crossing her face.
She’s craving.
I should be victorious. Instead, I’m weighed down. Giving her body a taste of the compound it had been addicted to for the past five years was essential to my experiment, and I’ve just confirmed it.
Only an addict could crave again after such a small dose. She was never clean, she was just—
“I’m clean, motherfucker!”
I start. She’s staring right at me again, face a picture of wrath. But then her eyes flicker, flicker, drop. She hugs herself and begins rocking.
That was uncanny—and I don’t use the word lightly. Mass hysteria is a well-documented phenomena. A misleading term, too. You don’t need a mass, all you need is more than one person. Shared experiences create an ephemeral, psychic bond between humans capable of relaying information. Like a school of fish out maneuvering a shark.
Odd, that something like that has happened so soon though. An element of Clover’s near-death experience? It could be anything…and another variable to add to the exhaustive list of things this study needs to establish.
The rocking ceases. Clover slumps even more. And then she’s on her side, that bright red cloak a blanket.
We’re running behind schedule, girl. But you’re useless to me if you're exhausted. You must understand how I am going to save your life.
The fire beckons me, but I refuse to let it lure me from the shadows. My clothing will protect me, and I brought along a windproof jacket. The night might not be comfortable, but I will survive it.
Clover will survive it.
And, in the morning, we’ll begin.
Chapter Forty-Three
Clover
A bird trills urgently nearby, jolting me awake. I sit up in a rush, clutching my cloak-blanket to my chest. The little clearing doesn’t show signs of life and, after my abrupt waking, it’s silent too.
I swallow hard—fuck, I’m thirsty—and stretch out stiff limbs and a sore neck.
This is the second night I’ve slept on a forest floor. I should be used to it by now.
I snort at the thought and get to my feet. The fire’s gone gray, but strangely I can still feel warmth coming from it. Compared with the breath-misting cold of morning, it’s most welcome.
Fuck, I need to pee. I need to eat. Water. Clean clothes.
God, Clover, you’re alive. Bask for a moment, you entitled bitch.
Okay, done basking. Still need all that shit.
Seriously, how did we ever get this far? I mean, we got to space, for fuck’s sake, and I can’t even handle two days in the forest.
Admittedly, astronauts go through training. The closest I’ve been to roughing it was that one time I fell asleep at a bus shelter waiting for a dealer who never came.
Separating my rat’s nest of a hair do into three hanks, I braid it. It works, kind of, and I use the hoody’s drawstring to tie it off.
There. Good to go.
The river runs nearby and fuck it, I’m drinking that water.
I mean, I’ll probably die by bear before I die of cholera, right?
Right?
I wince as my bare feet crunch over the forest’s gritty floor. I have several cuts down there, and the ball of my left foot feels so tender I must have bruised it. But, eventually, I make it to the river bank.
I stoop and cup some water to my mouth, glancing around as I slurp it through a lip that’s still tender where it split.
You know, if I wasn’t barefoot, starving, and being chased by a homicidal maniac, I might have been able to appreciate the beauty of this place a little more.
But I have more important things to consider.
I scrub my face with the river’s icy water and splash some on the back of my neck. When I’m done rinsing out my mouth, I almost feel like I’m going to make it through this.
Almost.
As I’m walking back to my impromptu camp site, the sun dims. I look up, but it’s impossible to see more than a few dappled slices of the morning sky.
A cloud passing over the sun, or is the day becoming overcast?
Mallhaven got a lot of rain the past six months I was at rehab. I thought it was their rainy season, but I passed through two different seasons altogether. Mallhaven just likes rainy days, I guess.
Christ, don’t let it rain.
At the camp site, I scoop up the cloak I was using for a blanket and take a last look around the place for something I may be leaving behind. You know, like a Happy Meal or a pint of ice cream.
Ugh, just the thought makes me salivate.
A flash of color catches my eye.
An arrow.
