Hedge Lake

by Brian Harmon

  He stood there, holding his breath, listening.

  Was that more weeping he heard?

  Spooky cried at him, urging him along.

  “I’m going,” grumbled Eric.

  Was it odd that the cat didn’t seem afraid of these woods? It seemed to him that its feline senses would warn it away, yet it appeared completely unaffected by the strange goings-on around it.

  Maybe cats didn’t believe in ghosts.

  Eric continued onward.

  After a while, he heard the scream again. It was farther away now, but he was sure it came from his right. He turned and walked in that direction, hoping it would lead him at least closer to where he wanted to be.

  Was there something different about the forest now? Or was that only his imagination? The trees didn’t seem to be turning red, yet. And he could see none of that hazy mist hanging in the air.

  Pete’s cell phone rang. It was Karen.

  “Are you going to yell at me again?” he asked as soon as he lifted it to his ear.

  “Maybe,” said Karen. “Do you need yelled at?”

  “I think I’m good, actually.”

  “Good. That saves me some trouble. I just wanted to ask if you were almost ready for Holly.”

  “Almost. I think I might be in the triangle. Or…on the invisible path…or whatever it was she said.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Just a forest right now. Nothing really looks any different, yet. But the sound’s funny out here. There’s an unnatural hush. And I think I can hear the dead screaming.”

  “Ugh… That’s so creepy.”

  “I know.”

  “Holly’s already starting. I guess it takes a while for her to start seeing anything. She’ll call you when she’s ready.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “How’s Isabelle doing? She told me the triangle’s energy was making her feel sick.”

  “She’s holding in there. Hopefully we won’t be here much longer.”

  “Hopefully,” agreed Karen.

  Was that someone giggling in the forest? That was even creepier than the screaming. “I should go for now. I’ve got to concentrate on where I’m going.”

  “Eric?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  “I love you.”

  Eric assured her that he loved her, too, and then disconnected the call. He hated when she started to sound scared.

  I’LL LET HER KNOW YOU’RE SAFE

  “Thanks. That’ll help. I know she worries.”

  SHE DOES. A LOT MORE THAN SHE LETS ON

  He scanned the forest all around him. The spirits had gone for now. Not a single one was lingering in the surrounding trees. But they’d be back soon enough.

  Was he inside the triangle yet? He felt like he must be, and yet it was impossible to tell.

  On a positive note, he hadn’t seen any more monsters. Hopefully that was a trend that would continue.

  He heard no more screams or phantom giggles, so he continued on in the same direction he’d been walking, hoping he was where he was supposed to be. Minutes passed. Once he thought he glimpsed a shadow stalking along beside him. And once he quite clearly witnessed an entire group of small shapes running across his path. Ghostly children bathed in eerie silence.

  And speaking of silence…that hush had grown more pronounced. The forest was unnaturally quiet again.

  He recalled what Cordelia said about the anomaly being like a wound. He focused on that, tried to feel where the world was broken. She told him he would make it to the bottom. She told him that was the whole reason he was here. And Mrs. Fulrick’s dreams had confirmed that. He was supposed to be here. He was supposed to find his way to the worm.

  There must be a way…

  His cell phone rang. It was Holly.

  “I hope you’ve got something for me,” he told her, “because I’ve got nothing.”

  “I’m looking into the water now,” she told him. “I already see you walking through the mist. You’re surrounded by spirits. I see them clearly, but you look hazy for some reason.”

  “I do?”

  “It’s strange,” she said. “You’re not entirely there.”

  “I’m all here,” he assured her. “I made sure to check after… Well, let’s just say I checked.” He really didn’t want to tell anyone his fish story. Not today. That might be something to brag about next week, when he was safely at home and over this whole mess, but right now, the very memory of it still made his skin crawl and his stomach knot. If he had to describe what it felt like to be in that thing’s mouth, he was pretty sure he might vomit again.

  “I’m sure you are,” she told him. “The water speaks to me in riddles sometimes. Even more so when you’re not as practiced at it. My sisters can do this a lot better than me.”

  “You’re doing great. Just keep at it.”

  “You’re sweet. But just remember, I can’t always tell what it means.”

  “Any idea yet how I’m supposed to navigate this secret path?”

  Holly fell quiet as she stared into the water. Almost a full minute passed. Then she said, “It still looks to me like you have a compass.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Eric. He’d almost forgotten. He reached into his pocket. “I think I might’ve found the compass, but I don’t know if it even works anymore.”

  Fumbling with the flashlight, he withdrew the watch and examined it in the beam. He’d looked at it in Mrs. Fulrick’s bathroom and it wasn’t working. But now the hands were turning again. They were much slower than they were the first time he examined it, but they were definitely moving. Maybe the gears were starting to dry out.

  “Well, it’s not broken,” he said. “But I still don’t know how to use it. It just looks like a watch.”

  “A watch?” asked Holly. “I feel like I saw a watch earlier…”

  She probably did. What was that last clue that she gave him? After the purple giant and the invisible footpath. That he should “watch where he was going?”

  Now he got it. Watch where he was going. Watch. And where he was going. The watch was the compass. “That’s stupid…” he decided.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Anything you can tell me about how this thing works?”

  “Sorry. I just see you using it. So you must be able to figure it out.”

  She was right, he realized. If he was meant to have this, and he was meant to find his way to the bottom, then he was also meant to figure out how to use it.

  He stared at it, watching the hands as they spun slowly around. After a moment, it came to him. The hands turned normally outside the yellow house, where Cordelia said he’d descended three levels into the anomaly. They turned much slower here, where things still seemed normal enough to suggest that he was only barely within the triangle. And they had stopped entirely at Mrs. Fulrick’s, which existed outside of the anomaly altogether, up on the surface.

  The water hadn’t damaged it at all. As long as the hands were spinning faster, he was venturing deeper into the triangle.

  In the background, he heard Karen tell Holly that he’d figured out the compass. Clearly, Isabelle had contacted her while he was discussing things with Holly. That was good. They were fully interconnected now. They were a team. In spite of the fact that they were in three different states, they were functioning as one.

  It was kind of cool, he supposed. But he didn’t appreciate the irony that once again the cell phone that he so often bitched about had become an invaluable tool for survival.

  Stupid irony.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.” He glanced down at his feet, but Spooky was gone again. Apparently, now that the idiot human had finally realized how to use the compass, the services of the feline were no longer needed. He was again on his own.

  “Be careful,” yelled Karen.

  “Always,” promised Eric. But like always, it sounded
like a lie.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The compass showed him if he was going in the right or wrong direction by speeding up and slowing down, respectively, but not which direction to go. He quickly realized that the journey into the depths of the triangle was going to be a long and tedious series of trials and errors. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that simply turning around and going back the way he came after finding himself pointed in the wrong direction didn’t always take him where he wanted to go. It seemed that he sometimes had only one chance to get it right or he would be thrown backward again.

  Holly had called it an “invisible footpath.” Mrs. Fulrick referred to it as a “secret path.” And Fettarsetter had described it as an “unfathomable labyrinth.” All of these descriptions were perfectly accurate, he realized. One couldn’t simply walk from here to the bottom of the triangle. There were dimensions involved that couldn’t be reached through the basic logic of traveling from point A to point B.

  In other words, you literally couldn’t get there from here.

  Cordelia had described the layers of the triangle as pockets, separated by skins. It was through holes in these skins that one could venture up and down the various levels of the anomaly. But Eric was discovering that the differences between one level and the next were almost nonexistent, making it impossible to know exactly where these skins were.

  In short, he was winding his way through the dark forest, blindly hoping to pass through an imperceptible doorway into another level of this reality that was so much like the one before it that only the compass could tell him that he’d even moved.

  In addition to all this, he had to deal with the constant distraction of darting shadows, whispered mutterings and the occasional distant wail of some poor, tormented soul lost for untold years in this grim forest. And, of course, there was that looming probability that one or more of those freakish monsters would be showing up to complicate things even further.

  He couldn’t possibly deal with all of this with a phone pressed to his ear.

  Holly was still sitting with Karen at their kitchen table, still staring into her bowl of steaming water. She’d stay there until he was done, watching, reading. She’d call him in an instant if something useful turned up, but even in her bowl, the forest was clouded with a strange, unnatural mist that made it hard to see.

  Isabelle, likewise, was checking in with Karen regularly. This allowed Karen to know that both she and her husband were still okay.

  It was going to be a long night for all of them.

  Eric pushed on. Somewhere nearby, it sounded like someone was weeping. He didn’t investigate the sound. That didn’t work out so well last time. And he wouldn’t risk backtracking. The faster he found his way to the bottom, the faster everyone could move on with their lives.

  Or…afterlives…or whatever…

  The compass had been gradually speeding up for the past half-hour, but now it suddenly slowed. Eric stopped immediately and shined the light around. The trees had turned red again. The underbrush had thinned out. He’d even begun to see that haze when he shined his light far out into the forest. He’d been making progress. But suddenly he’d lost the path. He had to be careful or he’d back himself all the way out to the surface again and have to start over.

  It was insane how difficult this was. He’d stumbled blindly into the triangle’s upper levels several times since he first arrived here late that morning. He even made it as far down as Cordelia’s house in the third level without the aid of a compass. Why was it so difficult now?

  He supposed making it to Cordelia wasn’t much of an accident. The purple monster had shown him the path. But regardless of that, he’d been passing in and out of the uppermost layers enough to have encountered almost every legend the Hedge Lake Triangle had to offer.

  For that matter, he still didn’t understand why so many people seemed to be immune to wandering into the triangle. How many people had visited the lake over the years and returned safely to their homes? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands over the decades and centuries leading all the way back to the first nomadic settlers? And yet scores of people came here and were never seen again. He was beginning to think that only a certain kind of person could enter the triangle at all. It was only those people who were in danger here. But what was it that made those people special? What made him special? Why could he wander in and out of the anomaly, but not Owen or Pete or Ned?

  Two years ago, the universe made sense to him. He knew how the world worked. He knew what was real and what wasn’t. Then he had a very peculiar dream that changed everything.

  Now, as he turned around, shining his light over those strange, red trunks that surrounded him, searching for the telltale eyes of something menacing watching from the darkness, Eric desperately wished he could have that blissful ignorance back again. He’d never asked for any of this knowledge, after all. He’d never wanted it. It was thrust upon him against his will. He was perfectly happy living his life without the knowledge that monsters and ghosts were real and a colossal worm could bring the world to a cataclysmic end at any moment.

  He reminded himself to breathe. He had to force himself to be patient. If he moved the flashlight too fast, the light would reveal something watching him from the shadows that would always be gone before he could bring it back. The more panicked he became, the more the forest haunted him, making it impossible to rush even though he was rapidly running out of time.

  His jaw hurt from clenching his teeth for so long.

  This whole experience was torture.

  Checking his watch—his actual watch, not the watch that was really a compass—he saw that he’d already lost more than an hour. The temperature was dropping. He had a sick feeling that the rain would be arriving earlier than the weatherman predicted.

  “Come on…” he groaned as he slowly circled back around, his eyes fixed on the hands of the compass, searching for a place where they spun a little faster. “Where are you…?”

  He stopped. Was it moving faster here? It was hard to tell. It was subtle. And he had nothing to compare it to. But he thought it was.

  He didn’t dare take a step back for fear that he’d lose it. But he also didn’t quite dare to move forward for fear that he might be wrong.

  But he couldn’t stay here. He had to choose.

  He chose to move onward.

  He stepped between two trees and then crossed over a small hill.

  It seemed right. The hands appeared to move a little faster.

  When he reached the other side of the hill, he was startled by the appearance of a man stumbling around among the trees in his flashlight beam, muttering to himself.

  Eric stopped.

  The man walked a long, arcing path through the trees, his eyes wide-open, but strangely blank. He was dressed in a nice suit that was disheveled and dirty, and his black hair was filthy and greasy. It clung to the sides of his face.

  In spite of the fact that he was aiming a heavy-duty flashlight at the man, he didn’t seem to notice that Eric was there at first. He only staggered around, muttering to himself, looking lost and desperate.

  When he finally did turn his head in Eric’s direction, he wore such a blank expression that for a moment, he wondered if there might be such a thing as zombies. He had the same empty look on his face that he’d seen in countless horror movies (all of which he still deeply regretted seeing). But instead of lurching after him, crying out for brains, the man became as still as stone.

  The two of them remained like that for a moment. And they might have remained that way for much longer, if Eric hadn’t been on such a tight schedule. But with the rain and the worm fast approaching, he decided he couldn’t afford to wait for this guy to make the first move. He cleared his throat and said, “Do you need help?”

  He wasn’t sure the guy would respond, but almost immediately, he shouted back, “I said I’d only be gone a little while!” His voice had such a depth of despair that it completely t
ook Eric by surprise. “I promised!”

  He wanted to tell this man that he was sorry, but he couldn’t find the words.

  “Just a little while…” sighed the man in the dirty suit. Then he turned and stumbled away again. Eric didn’t call after him to stop. He didn’t ask him who he made these promises to. He didn’t offer to help this poor man. He couldn’t. When the flashlight shined on the back of his head, he caught a glimpse of gleaming crimson and realized that his hair looked greasy and dirty because it was matted with blood.

  He stood where he was for a moment, pondering the encounter, feeling inexplicably sad.

  Then, elsewhere in the endless forest, the hellhound howled.

  Eric moved on.

  The shadows grew more restless. Not one seemed content to remain in one place. Some danced around simply because he fumbled with his light, but many, he was quite sure, had agendas of their own and other places they wanted to be.

  Every few minutes he glimpsed a face peering back at him from the cover of the trees, some of them indistinguishable from a living, breathing person, most of them ghastly pale or gray as a corpse. Occasionally, they stared back at him with gaping holes where their eyes should be or with the skin peeled from their skulls.

  Not for the first time, he wondered what the hell happened to all these people. How did they end up in such awful states? Had they all fallen prey to twisted killers like that Jeremiah Bog? Or was it the lake itself that did all these awful things?

  His cell phone rang. Eric fumbled with the light and the compass, arranging them so that he could hold the light and the phone in the same hand, allowing him to see where he was going and still read the compass. It was awkward, but it seemed to do the job.

  “So I got an idear!” slurred Paul.

  “Are you still conscious?”

  “Mostly, yes,” he replied. “So here’s my idear.”

  Eric rolled his eyes. “Okay?”

  “You say you wanna get at this thing under the water, right?”

  “Um…yeah…”