by Rick Hautala
But no one was there now.
“Audrey?” Bri called out, her voice frail, almost a whisper.
Scowling, she turned and started back toward the path, but then the voice called to her again.
“Bri ... “
Am I imagining this? she wondered as she tried to hold back a rising flood of panic. Am I going nuts or something?
“Over here … “
With a sudden shout, Bri raced forward to the place where she thought she had seen Audrey. Her heart was hammering in her chest; the sides of her neck pulsated as she swung her hands at the trees to clear her path. Pine branches swished and snapped back into her face, and then she broke into the clearing. She spun around in a wild circle, scanning the woods for the source of the voice.
“Is this another one of your tricks?” she shouted, clenching her fists in frustration. “Like disappearing on the beach?”
The thought struck her that it might not even have been Audrey. It seemed more like something some kid might cook up to tease her, to make her think she was crazy.
“Well you don’t scare me!” Bri yelled.
She picked up a rotting branch and swung viciously at the branches around her. On the third or fourth swing, the branch snapped in her hand and hit the needle-covered ground with a dull thud.
“Over here … “ the voice whispered again … so faint this time Bri almost didn’t hear it. She was so worked up, she knew she wasn’t reacting rationally as she kicked and scuffed the forest floor.
“Screw you, Audrey!” she shouted, spinning around so her voice projected in all directions. “Screw whoever you are!”
As her voice faded in the woods, she spun on her heel, thinking to head back to the path and catch up with her parents, but again a shadowy figure deeper in the woods caught her attention. Stunned, Bri froze in midstride and looked. There was no doubt now that it was Audrey. She was standing in the shifting shade of the trees, one hand raised and slowly motioning for Bri to follow.
“Come on over here ... Bri … “
“No, goddamnit!” Bri shouted. “I’m not going to play any of your stupid games.”
She waved her hands in frustration as she started backing away.
“I’m sick and tired of you teasing me.”
Tears flooded her eyes, making the dim figure look even more indistinct.
“If you want to be friends, we can be friends, but I’m not going to play any stupid games.”
With that, she quickly turned around and started running back toward the path. Her footsteps were muffled by the thick carpet of pine needles, and moving soundlessly, she had the momentary impression that she was drifting — flying, as if in a dream. Low-hanging branches swished against face. One caught her headband and almost pulled it off, but she kept running, wanting to put as much distance as she could between her and Audrey.
Her mind was spinning as she ran. She was thinking how much she liked Audrey, how much she wanted to have a new friend, but she was also thinking that she really didn’t know a thing about her. She acted so strange, like a spooked-out weirdo who might not be all there. “She’s got the phone, but no dial tone,” as her stepfather would say.
As she ran, a squeezing fear gripped her. She realized she should have crossed the path by now. It was a well-trodden path. It would have been impossible for her to miss it.
So why hadn’t she come to it already?
Air rushed into her lungs like fire, and she was grateful for the heavy panting sound filling her ears. Otherwise, she might still hear Audrey still calling to her.
She leaped nimbly over deadfalls, and dodged trees and boulders as she ran, but the farther she went, the more she knew she was in trouble.
Oh, God! I’m lost, a voice in her mind screamed.
She didn’t slacken her pace, but she started looking around for any familiar sign — a break in the thickening woods where she could get her bearings. The woods were getting deeper, thicker. Up ahead was a big boulder sticking up out of the earth like a solitary giant’s tooth. She knew she would have remembered seeing that.
A whimper, so low it sounded strangely disembodied, escaped her throat as she ran toward a grove of pines dripping with shadows. And in those shadows, an indistinct figure was standing … waving to her … beckoning to her.
She tried to stop quickly, but the pine needle-covered ground was slippery, and she fell down, skidding like a baseball player sliding into home plate. Her right foot plowed up the pine needles, exposing thick, black soil, and it was only luck that she got her hands into position in time to save herself from smashing her face into the ground. Her nose was filled with the dank, earthy smell of fresh soil.
“Bri ... “
The sound filled her ears, but she wasn’t sure … she couldn’t be sure if it was actually there … or if it was an echo in her mind.
Her chest like it was going to burst from the pressure pushing out from inside her. If she screamed now, she would probably strip her throat of flesh.
Pine needles and forest mulch flew into the air as she scrambled to get back up. Her panic was blind now, and she ran back the way she had come, figuring that, in her confusion, she had gotten turned around and missed the path.
Head uphill, her mind shouted. They’re up at the top of the hill.
She clenched her fists and pumped her arms, pushing away the pain in her desperate run. Her knee was numb from the fall she had taken, and she was sure she had a nice, deep gash in her leg from a buried rock. Pain throbbed up to her hips.
The effort of running up the steep slope soon took its toll, and before long she was lunging and stumbling forward more than running. The muscles in her legs felt unstrung. She was convinced a presence loomed behind her, something dark and nameless, and it was closing the distance between them, but she didn’t dare turn and look back as she ran.
Just run! ... Run, damn it!
Exhaustion twisted inside her body, peeling away her muscles, shredding her lungs. And then, with a startled shout, she tripped and fell forward.
At first she thought she had stumbled over a fallen tree. She barely registered that her foot had hit something soft and yielding. But as she scrambled to get back on her feet, she looked down and saw something that sent panic crashing through her. The sunlit woods all around her suddenly telescoped into a laser-narrow beam focused down at her feet.
Lying on the ground was the thing that had tripped hera horribly decomposed human body.
Bri stared at it, gaping. She took a ragged breath, but that only crammed her scream further down into her chest.
Only the top half of the body was exposed. From the waist down, it was covered by thick, black mulch. Wind and weatherand possibly wild animals and carrion birdshad stripped away all but a few tatters of flesh. Some remnants of clothes, heavy with mold, clung to the bleached skeleton. The eye sockets, like two dark inkwells, stared sightlessly at the swaying pines overhead.
Bri’s heart contracted into a fist-sized stone. Her teeth clamped down hard together as she stared unbelievingly at what lay at her feet. A scream would have burst from her lungs and throat, but there was no air, no pressure to let it rip. Bright spinning spots of light exploded in front of her eyes, but the darkness of those two vacant eyes grew stronger … pulsating … swelling … swallowing her. Her head was spinning wildly, like she was drowning … being pulled into those two black sockets.
Barely aware of anything except that sightless skull staring at her, she struggled to get up, to run away. Her arms flailed the air as if searching for a handhold. Her feet slipped on the slick carpet of pine needles again, and she went down for a third time. Her head hit a glancing blow against a tree trunk, and then the darkness of those vacant eyes filled her mind.
And she fell into the darkness.
III
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Julia asked.
She was sitting on the edge of Bri’s bed, holding a cold washcloth on her left temple where she had
skinned it against the tree trunk when she had fallen. Bri had complained of a headache, but the Tylenol she had taken when she got home was kicking in.
“Yeah ... I mean, it still hurts, but I don’t think there’s any brain damage or anything,” she said, forcing a tiny laugh.
“You sure had me and your father worried,” Julia said. She took the washcloth away, refolded it, and then held it to Bri’s head again. “You’ve got to remember, when you’re out for a walk, never leave the trail. You found out today how easily you can get lost.”
Bri nodded, even though the motion sent a sliver of pain shooting through her head.
She wanted to tell her mother that she wouldn’t have left the path, but she had seen her friend Audrey and followed her. That might be a mistake after all, though, so she remained silent.
When she had come to in the woods, her father was gently slapping her face to bring her around. She had started babbling about a decomposed body half buried in the forest. No matter how much she insisted that’s what she had seen, her parents had shown her — pointed directly at — the rotting deadfall she had tripped over. When she had grown more insistent, they had pointed out to her where her foot had kicked the log, removing a big piece of the rotting wood. They showed the scuffed ground where she had fallen and then tried to scramble to her feet.
“There couldn’t possibly be someone buried there,” her father had kept repeating.
“I know what I saw,” she had protested. But the protestation had gotten gradually weaker until she finally accepted their suggestion that, in her panic — maybe after she had bumped her head — she had imagined seeing a dead person there.
Even though serious doubts remained, she finally told them she accepted their explanation — if only so they would drop it for now and let her rest. The pounding in her skull, though fading, still sent out jabs of pain that made her wince. In her heart, she knew what she had seen, and she was smart enough to know that, if she kept insisting she had seen a dead person instead of a rotten tree trunk, they might have a strong argument for brain damage. There wasn’t the slightest trace of humor in that thought.
“We were so worried when you didn’t answer me,” Julia said, shaking her head.
The whole incident, Julia thought, had been ... “unusual” wasn’t the best word to describe it, but it was the closest. No matter how much she thought about it, she couldn’t account for the weird sensation she had gotten while she and John were at the top of Bald Hill looking at the view that Bri was in trouble. John’s rambling reminiscences about playing out here as a boy should have been soothing … nostalgic. They should have given her a sense of the kind of childhood she had never experienced. Instead, she had been filled with a dark foreboding and — as it turned out — an accurate fear for Bri’s safety. All she could think was
What if I hadn’t thought something was wrong?
What if Bri had been out here alone when she got fell?
What if I hadn’t insisted that we go back and look for her?
She laughed, trying to dismiss such thoughts as the usual fears a mother has, but the truth was, Bri had been in trouble. She had gotten lost. She had fallen and hurt herself, maybe more seriously than it seemed. If they hadn’t combed the woods for her — they had been looking for more than a half hour before they found her — she might still be out there, lying unconscious in the woods.
That body she thinks she saw, Julia thought as the dread she had experienced echoed in her head … That could have been Bri if we hadn’t found her.’
She repressed a shiver as she smiled fondly at her daughter and stroked her hair back.
“Who knows?” she said, letting her smile widen even though she was trembling inside. “Maybe this will be good for a day off from school.”
“Maybe,” Bri replied sleepily. “Actually, I’m feeling kinda wiped. Would you mind pulling the shades so I can sleep?”
“Not at all.” Julia said. “Just promise to tell me if your headache doesn’t go away.”
Bri grunted as she snuggled down into her pillow, careful to keep the hurt side of her head up.
Julia went over to the window and pulled the shade down. She wished she could feel relief, but she didn’t. The sense that something was wrong … something had been wrong and was still wrong ... wouldn’t go away no matter how many times she told herself to stop worrying. Bri was safely home now.
That’s what mattered.
The darkened room filled with the sound of Bri’s deep, even breathing. Julia stood by the window, watching her daughter and experiencing those feelings all parents experience, that she would do absolutely anything to keep her child from harm.
Quietly she tiptoed to the door and eased out into the hall, letting the door click softly shut behind her
“Please,” she whispered, staring at the solid wood door. “Please let my baby be all right.”
IV
“Oh, yeah — sure.”
John narrowed his eyes as if he were in pain as he paced back and forth in front of the picture window in the living room. He continually slapped his fist into his open palm, making a fiat, wet sound. A stub of a cigarette was hanging from his lower lip.
“It was a great way to start the project. I should have that much fun every goddamned workday.”
Julia was sitting on the couch, sipping a glass of rose as she watched her husband pace. He had come home from work late, and the first thing he did was grab a glass and fill it half full of whiskey, straight. When that was gone, he filled it again, but now the glass was forgotten on the coffee table as he strode back and forth across the living room floor.
“You want to know the worst thing about it?” He smirked and shook his head with disbelief. “It wasn’t just that this truck driver — whoever the hell he is — decked this guy because he’s opposed to these condos going in and tried to stop his truck, or that this guy who got hit is probably going to sue his ass. Hell, not just the driver … He’ll probably go after the whole damned company. Christ! Maybe he’ll come after me because I got between them and tried to stop the fight. No, the worst thing is —”
He took a drag of the cigarette in his hand, clenching it so tightly between his fingers he almost crushed it.
“I — uhh, I’m there, helping this guy up off the ground, you know, and fucking Randy Chadwick is standing there, smiling at me like I’m some kind of Benedict Arnold because I’m working out there.”
He exhaled noisily, went over to the coffee table, and ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. He immediately lit another, sending a plume of smoke up to the ceiling.
Julia ducked her head to one side, trying to avoid the billow of smoke, and smiled weakly.
“Come on,” she said mildly. “It probably wasn’t as bad as you thought. You told me Randy said he wasn’t actively protesting — that he had just shown up to see what was going on.”
“Yeahsure,” John snorted. His eyes fastened on his whiskey glass, and he picked it up and took a swallow, wincing from the burn as it roared down to his stomach. “And then I said to him ... I actually said to him, ‘Small world, isn’t it?’ I can’t fucking believe that was the best I could come up with.”
“You were probably a little more concerned about the guy who’d gotten punched,” Julia said. “For crying out loud, John, give Randy a break, and watch your languageBri’s upstairs, doing homework.”
“Sorry ... sorry,” John said, but he didn’t stop pacing.
“You didn’t hear any more about it this afternoon, did you?” Julia asked, keeping her voice as mild as possible.
John shrugged. “No. Nothing when I got back to the office, but Barry and I were on the site the rest of the day. We didn’t leave the island until after five o’clock.”
“The cops never came, so maybe this guy isn’t going to press chargesnot if he didn’t report it to the cops.”
“Jesus!” John shouted and then, cringing, glanced toward the stairs and lowered his voice. “He
had a good twenty or twenty-five witnesses there. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble getting a few of them to back him up. I mean — this could turn into a real shit storm. It’s enough to make me want to quit the damned job and do something else.”
Julia chuckled softly under her breath. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” John said, his face suddenly rigid. “We don’t need the money from my job the way we used tonot living here with no mortgage.”
“Bri’s going to be heading off for college before we know it.”
John waved his hands in front of his face. “We’ve got savings, and we can always take a school loan. I don’t see why I have to bust my ass day in and day out. I could“ He snapped his fingers in the air. “Wait a second. I’ve got it! Maybe Randy would hire me to help him lobster. Or I could get my own boat and set some traps in my father’s area. Nothing much to get started, but I could do it myself.”
“Get serious,” Julia said, shaking her head.
“I am serious. Maybe I hate this friggin’ island because of the way my father was always pushing, telling me I had to go to college and leave this island so I didn’t end up like him. Hell, he even“
John stopped himself, but in the sudden silence that followed, he locked eyes with Julia.
“He what?” she asked.
“No … Nothing.”
“What were you going to say?”
John stared down at the floor, considering for a moment as he shook his head from side to side.
“He was responsible for breaking up me and Abby back in high school.”
“Oh ... really?”
John shifted from one foot to the other, then went over to the picture window, drew the curtain back, and stared out at the ocean. “If I had a dollar for every goddamned time he told me not to get married right out of high school and settle down here. Christ!”
“He was doing what he thought was best for you. He wanted you to have a better life than he did.”
