I couldn't help but be unnerved by this wilderness. Perhaps during the day, and so far from our final destination, we were reasonably safe. Though things were dark, we'd be able to see most approaching threats and prepare ourselves against an attack.
That wouldn't be the case after dark.
Perhaps it was the fresh air that loosened him up, however Jake proved rather talkative. He regaled the two of us with brief stories about his childhood. “My dad and I never got along too well. He's a hard-ass, real strict. But now and then, in the summers when he could get the time off work, he'd take me out to the woods—to some place real scenic down south—and we'd go camping for a week or two. I loved it. It was the only time my dad and I were ever, like... close. He taught me how to build a fire, how to fish and hunt. It's the only time of my life, except for holidays, when I can remember him being genuinely happy and carefree.”
I wasn't sure why he was telling us this; I guessed that the earthiness in the breeze had roused some latent olfactory memory in him. He was soon asking Jane about the fishing in the area, about the history of the place, and she gave him clipped answers.
“This land—some of it is what you might call 'virginal' forest. Untouched by loggers, for the most part. Some sections got hacked down way back in the day—by miners and such. But when this area thinned out population-wise, and certain parts came under government protection, well, it was left to sit undisturbed. People hike through this area now and then, but you'll find most outdoorsy types stick to the established routes. They don't do the kind of off-road exploration we're doing now. It's not safe, and there are no guidebooks to keep them from getting lost. It's denser here, too, which plays tricks on your technology.” Jane sighed. “Some of us locals, though, we get around.
“I remember, after my parents passed away and I came under my uncle's care, I spent a long time hiking these woods. It was before things went all crazy—before he got real serious about his experiments. I'd walk for hours, finding little bits of old homes, old settlements, and I'd sit in the shade wondering what kind of people had once lived in 'em, where they'd gone to, what the places had looked like in their prime. It was my favorite thing to do, and with a compass I was able to more or less find my way. My uncle would even come with me now and then. There was a time, believe it or not, when he was a reasonably caring man.”
That was something I couldn't believe, but I nodded anyhow. “Hard to picture a guy like W. R. Corvine as a naturalist,” I said. “So, that cabin was meant to be his personal Walden, I guess?”
Both Jake and Jane looked to me blankly.
OK, so neither of them were fans of Thoreau.
We wandered on. Jane had a compass in hand—a decidedly old school choice of navigational instrument—and kept us going north. Now and then I looked down at the gun strapped to my chest, my pulse quickening at the thought of it accidentally discharging. Jane noticed and called me out on it. “It'll only fire if you pull the trigger. Newer guns won't even discharge if you drop them out of a helicopter. Only the trigger will do it. Quit stressing.”
That was supposed to comfort me, I guess, but it didn't. I felt like I had a time bomb pressing into my breast.
Something in the scenery pulled me out of my own head and made me pause. I stood against a tree trunk, clearing my throat and directing the attention of my companions to my left. Some thirty feet away—or perhaps more, as distance was difficult for me to judge within the tangled forest—I saw what looked to be a human silhouette. My hand rose to touch the handgun, and behind it I could feel the charging of my heart. “There's... there's someone there,” I muttered.
The other two said nothing, but froze as they followed my gaze into the woods. Eventually, they singled out the form that'd caught my eye, a leaning thing half-masked by a veil of swaying green. Its shape was that of a leering humanoid figure, and yet the longer I stared, not sensing any movement on its part, the more certain I became that I was looking at some kind of bent, leafless trunk.
Jane sighed deeply and slapped me in the arm. “It's nothing. Just an old tree.”
Though he didn't seem quite so sure, Jake stared at the formation a short while and then continued following Jane in silence, keeping his eyes pasted to the forest floor, lest he see something similarly anthropomorphic in the distance.
My heart never did quite slow, because even after the shock faded from my system I found I had to march in double-quick time to keep up with Jane. My pack-a-day habit was catching up to me. I shifted the load on my back and jogged ahead so that I was beside Jake, and started chatting to keep my mind from singling out strange shapes in the wilderness. “What do you think our odds are of encountering Eli and his boys out here?”
Jane looked down at her compass and then stuffed it into her pocket, tossing her shoulders. “Dunno, but if I had to guess, I'd say they're low. They likely set off into the woods last night, looking for the Occupant. If they found her... then I expect things went one of two ways...”
“The Occupant either got them or they managed to put her down,” I said, knowing full well that the former scenario was most likely in this case.
Jake stumbled a little, turning his wide eyes to meet mine. “Y-You don't think they hurt her, do you?”
“Based on personal experience, I'm a little more concerned about what she may have done to them,” I said.
This wasn't good enough for him. He staggered on a few steps, muttering to himself. “I hope they didn't hurt her.” He was in another world—a world in which we weren't hunting for a bonafide monster. He was still under the impression that we could somehow sweet-talk the Occupant into giving up its nefarious goals. I wasn't so sure, but I knew one thing: I was damn tired of talking about it. When the time came, we'd have to do something to stop the thing, and I knew that killing the girl wasn't off the table.
“Me too,” replied Jane, wetting her lips. “I hope they didn't hurt her.” She paused, a slow smile crossing her lips. “I'd like for that to be my honor.”
10
I wasn't sure how long we'd been walking when we stopped for a smoke break.
With a lit Marlboro in hand, I took a swig from a water jug and squatted onto the trunk of a fallen tree as though it were a bench. My brow had begun accumulating beads of sweat, and as I puffed away they began trickling down my face, making my eyes sting. Somewhere in the last hour or so the temperature had started going up, and despite the lack of direct sunlight I discovered a most inconvenient feature of this dense woodland—the heat, once it broke through the canopy, was trapped. Owing to the recent rains, we were now wading through not only warmth, but humidity.
I pulled the collar of my damp shirt away from my neckline, cursing, and tried to savor the last of my cigarette. Jane joined me on the tree trunk, setting her bag down and crossing her legs. Not bothering to de-load, Jake paced between a pair of white cedars and, when he wasn't smashing granola bars, guzzled spring water. Leaning against one of the trees and choking down the last of his third or fourth Nature Valley bar, he eyed Jane and I curiously.
“What?” I asked him, ashing my cigarette.
“Why do you guys smoke?” he asked. “It's gonna kill you. And it smells like crap.”
I blew a puff of smoke in his direction, then glanced down at the burning tip. “Nothing like a good smoke to put hair on your chest,” I replied. “Everyone's a critic these days, but when I was a kid, in the 90's, nothing was cooler.” I arched a brow. “Nowadays, people like to vape. They have these big, obnoxious-looking contraptions that spew clouds of vapor everywhere. Me? I'll take the elegance and simplicity of a good cigarette any day.” I was mostly bullshitting with him, and figured that, if I survived this mess, I'd go shopping for some Nicorette once I got back home.
Looking up at him with an arched brow, Jane had a different answer. “Sure, it might kill me,” she said. “But sometimes, just being alive can be Hell. We all need a crutch of some kind to make it through the day, to take the edge off.” She t
ook a long drag, then put the cigarette out on the heel of her boot. Her eyes became distant for a moment, and she slumped on the makeshift seat, kneading her hands.
It was easy to forget that Jane had been Dr. Corvine's first subject—the first person, to my knowledge, that'd ever made contact with the Occupant. Her innocence had been stolen by that man, and the bulk of her life had been spent in unceasing terror due to her forced participation in his outre psychological experiments. She hadn't been of the right stock to serve as a portal for the entity—Enid Lancaster would go on to fulfill that role some years later—but the impression that the Occupant had left on her was clear and undeniable. Even though the experiments had taken place more than thirty years ago, Jane had never stopped living in those days, had never been able to fully put those events behind her and resume a normal life. In that sense, it made her assistance on this journey all the more impressive. She was coming with us into the forest, preparing to square off against an evil that'd haunted her for years.
I wasn't quite ready to get moving yet. I took some time stretching my legs, working my ankles in my hands very slowly until they popped. “If you don't mind me asking, what'd you do after your uncle was out of the picture?” I asked her.
She stood, brushing herself off and staring up into the canopy, her face glowing in a narrow shaft of sunlight. “I put the old man in the ground and then I tried to live a normal life,” she began. “Of course, there isn't any moving on after that. But I didn't know any better, and I did what I could to live like everyone else. I got a job in town—a few, actually. I spent some time camping out of an old tent, eating canned food, until I could afford to rent my own place. It took awhile, but I eventually bought that trailer, and I've lived in it for a long time now.
“Eventually I got a better job, got involved with a man some years older than me, Rick. It didn't work out, of course. We lived together in that little trailer, but he insisted on drinking himself to death. It wasn't much of a relationship, anyhow. We had fun together, but it wasn't really 'love'. I couldn't open up to him, couldn't tell him the truth about where I'd come from, what I'd experienced. He wouldn't have believed me even if I had. And hell, that ain't the kind of thing you talk about out loud. For a long time, I did my best to bury it. To forget.” She shuddered even as she wiped sweat from her forehead. “But I can't forget, and that's why I'm here. You know, I envied Rick. He died ignorant; died without knowing what awaited him after that final curtain. Me, though? I've known for a long time what I'm in for in the end. We're all damned, set to become strands in that black web. I've seen the other side, and when it's time for me to go, you can be sure I'll go kicking and screaming.”
I didn't say anything. Nothing out of my mouth would serve to comfort her or change her mind. Instead, I took another gulp of water and held it in my mouth for a beat, taking in the sound of leaves rustling in the wind.
“I don't get it,” replied Jake. He seemed awfully bothered by Jane's reply, and fidgeted continuously with the straps of his bags between the pair of towering cedars. “Don't you believe in Heaven?”
Jane shook her head slowly, deliberately, her face marred by evident sadness. “I don't know if there is a Heaven or not, to tell you the truth.” She glared back at him, pulling her compass out of her pocket. “What I do know is that I wouldn't be welcome there. When a thing like the Occupant has touched your life... when it's been in your head, known your heart... it leaves you changed. Damaged.” She looked at the compass, waited until she had a good read, and then started off into the woods, leaving us to clamber after her.
I couldn't help but feel unsettled by her little talk. Though I'd never been strapped to a chair and been used as a puppet by a dark spirit, I'd been touched by the Occupant in my own way. And so had Elizabeth. Jake, too, by extension. Our little group had wandered far closer to this hideous and enigmatic thing than any living person was ever meant to do. If Jane was right, and the fate of those who encountered the Occupant was really that grim...
Let's just say that I felt one hell of an existential crisis coming on.
* * *
We'd been marching for hours. Though we'd taken a few breaks along the way, the steady hike through the woods—which, if you can believe it, only seemed to grow denser the further we went—had left me feeling beat down.
We were in a secluded pocket now where the trees grew so close together you couldn't get anywhere without taking greenery to the face. Branches had raked our arms and legs along the way, and we were now fairly drenched in a well-earned sweat. The day's heat, filtered through the canopy and converting the puddles into vapor, turned the woods into a goddamn sauna. The visibility in this area, as can be imagined, wasn't so good. If there were any threats looming beyond the next tree, you weren't going to know about them until it was too late.
The problem of the day's heat was set to resolve itself very soon, as the shards of sunlight reaching us from above took on the dull, golden hues of dusk.
“It's going to be getting dark soon,” said Jane, funneling some trail mix into her mouth and crunching contemplatively. Her blonde hair was sticking to her forehead and her cheeks were red. The three of us had already run through a jug of water combined, had guzzled it like it was going out of style. We'd brought quite a lot of it with us—the bulk of it hitching a ride on Jake's back—but I wondered for a moment what we'd do if we ran out. Were there bodies of water around here clean enough for us to drink out of? Jane derailed my train of thought as she continued. “We need to start thinking about camp.”
I slowly surveyed our surroundings, wondering in which direction the shadowed town of Milsbourne might be found. Up to this point, we'd found nothing in the way of human settlements—historical or contemporary. Having walked for miles and miles we hadn't seen so much as a stray soda can mixed in with all of the foliage. Animals lived here—we'd seen insects, a few deer milling about, and had spotted the occasional degraded carcass picked over by scavengers—but this was not a place where humans could usually be found. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that this was a place where humans didn't belong.
Thankfully, we'd seen no trace of Eli Lancaster or his men, either. As the hours passed, the odds of our running into the gang of armed men seemed to shrink. It occurred to me that several people could wander these vast woods and never once run into each other. That didn't exactly help our case as we searched for the Occupant, but having one less threat to worry about suited me just fine.
As we paused to discuss our plans moving forward into the evening, I found my gaze wandering to the walls of greenery that pushed in from every side and sensing, in some way, that I was being observed from nearby. I raked the treetops with my gaze, stooped to peer between closely-grown trunks and shoved aside a few branches.
“What's the matter?” asked Jane, noticing my sudden change in demeanor.
I didn't answer her at once. The last mouthful of water I'd sucked down began to gurgle in the pit of my stomach as my senses went haywire. Only moments ago there'd been some birdsong in the air, and the whirring of flying insects had been an omnipresent nuisance.
Now, the woods were completely silent. As if the world were holding its breath, even the breeze paused uncomfortably.
Jake's large hands locked around the straps of his bags till his knuckles went white. He could sense it, too. He sniffed the still air, a bead of sweat rolling off of his chin in the process.
“We're being watched.” I hadn't intended to whisper, but my voice had naturally withered to almost nothing in the pervading silence.
Jane held her rifle in both hands, kept it at her side so that she might take aim at the drop of a hat. I wasn't sure if she could feel it, too—the unrelenting pressure of foreign eyes that bored into us from somewhere in the tangle of green—but she stood stock still and waited for me to go on.
“How close are we?” I asked her, my voice still a grainy whisper. “To the mines—to Milsbourne?” The air was thick, suffocating.
Carefully pulling the compass out of her pocket, Jane prepared to do some quick figuring. Instead, she suddenly frowned, staring down at the instrument narrowly.
I glanced over at it and understood why.
The compass wasn't cooperating, the needle edging right to left, right to left, as if being nudged by an invisible finger. I'm no Boy Scout, but I didn't think a compass was supposed to work that way and asked her, “What's wrong with it?”
Rather than answer, she dabbed at her paling face with the back of her hand and returned it to her pocket, brushing aside a nearby branch with the tip of her gun.
That was when I saw it.
Huddled between a number of trees that dwarfed it and left it blackened with shade was a tottering wooden shack. Just how old it was was impossible to say; the bulging, loose-fitting planks that formed its exterior were the kind that had seen at least a hundred springs, a hundred brutal, Michigan winters. The shape of the thing conjured up visions of frontier towns—a bygone aesthetic. The real mystery was how it still remained standing after so many years. That its construction had been so sound as to spare its complete ruin over more than a century's existence in these woods never crossed my mind. Rather, it was a kind of stubborn energy, most evident in the harsh angles and singular deep-set window, that must have been responsible for its survival.
I would have liked to ponder its age further, but at that moment my heart found its way into my throat and I felt myself on the verge of illness.
The boxy little structure, glimpsed at a distance of tens of yards, was small and relatively unimposing in and of itself. But through that dark, glassless window, I caught first movement, and then registered an unmistakable humanoid shape stirring just inside it, largely hidden in the murk.
Whoever they were, and whatever it was they were doing inside the shack, their eyes were on us. Of that much I was positive.
The Occupant: The Afterlife Investigations #3 Page 5
