by Greg Herren
I stood there for a moment before starting to walk again myself. Logan and Carson were waiting at the fork, Logan leaning on the sign. When they saw me coming, they headed down the path leading deeper into the woods.
After the fork, the path started going down a slight slope. The trees formed a canopy of limbs over our heads, so we weren’t in direct sunlight even though the blue sky was visible through the thickly knit branches from time to time. It was quiet in the woods, other than the slight hum of insects and the occasional chirping of birds. There were also some big rocks embedded in the dirt in places. The rocks were covered with green moss, which was kind of slippery, and I found myself having to grab for branches or tree trunks occasionally when my feet slipped and started to go out from under me.
The forest was beautiful, pristine and still and green. Every so often a bird would soar by just overhead, heading from one tree to another. In places, the growth of bushes and fledgling trees almost hid the path from view, and I had to push branches out of the way to get through. The majority of the trees closest to the path were small and young, the trees getting bigger and thicker the farther they were from the path, and it occurred to me that the path must have been much wider at some point, more like a dirt road than the narrow path it was now. Every once in a while, we had to climb over a rotting fallen tree, beetles and other bugs crawling along the surface of its brittle, fragile bark. But the air was so fresh and clean, with the scent of flowers I couldn’t identify and pinesap and maple. I turned and looked behind me, and there was no sign of the road or anything other than forest. We walked into a small clearing at one point, and I saw a deer, frozen in place and staring at us before it turned and bounded away, disappearing into the trees in a matter of seconds. There was a small creek lazily twisting through that clearing, so narrow it was easy to step over and so shallow and clear I could see the rocks on the bottom.
I stepped over and followed the others back into the woods. I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures of everything—the trees, bushes, moss—one after the other, as quickly as my phone could snap. I was starting to sweat a bit, the underarms of my T-shirt getting damp as I slapped at mosquitoes and horseflies when they landed on my bare skin.
I don’t know when the feeling really started, to be honest, but I went around a curve and saw an enormous tree just off to the side on the right, whose trunk split into two enormous branches jutting up toward the sky about five feet over my head, other heavy branches shooting out of the separated trunk. There was a knothole in the trunk, maybe about a foot below where the trunk split. As I raised my phone to take a picture—
—I was looking into the knothole, and it wasn’t far over my head but only just above my eye level, and the path was, in fact, a lot wider, and there was a folded piece of paper inside the tree, and I was filled with joy as I grabbed it and pulled it out, unfolding it—
I was startled back into the present when I heard Logan shouting. I looked ahead and I realized I couldn’t see them—they’d gotten far ahead of me while I was standing there looking at the split tree. With one last glance at it, I started hurrying along the path. It took another turn to the left after about twenty yards or so, and I kept walking as fast as I could, not wanting to run because the ground was still damp and slippery. I caught myself as the ground—and the path—began sloping sharply downward. I almost slipped, grabbing onto a branch to catch myself, and I took a deep breath.
Everything seemed so familiar.
I could see Rachel and Teresa ahead of me on the path, and they both waved me to come on. As I came closer to them, I realized that while the path itself continued to wind down, the ground to my left ended in a sharp cliff, and just beyond it, on a plateau or shelf where the ground leveled off into another big clearing, was something that looked like—
“Is that a roof?” I said as I caught up to them.
“It’s not a good idea to get separated from us in the woods,” Teresa replied with a frown. “And, yes, it’s some kind of building—a cabin.”
The small building had collapsed inward on itself at some point. It was made of wood, and in places where the building had collapsed the wood had split and splintered. The clearing wasn’t clear anymore—small young trees were growing everywhere, but so were rotten old gray stumps. “Carson and Logan went looking around,” Rachel said. “They told us to wait here for you.”
“You don’t think anyone lives there, do you?” I asked, feeling a weird sense of déjà vu, like I’d been there before.
But it looked different now.
They both looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Well, unless the person who does doesn’t care about electricity or access to the road, I’d say no one lives there.” Teresa smiled at me, rolling her eyes a little bit. “No, it looks abandoned. It doesn’t look like anyone’s lived here in about a million years.”
“I meant like a hobo or a tramp.”
But as I looked at the wrecked cabin—and at the trees beyond, and heard the sound of water rushing—the sense of familiarity grew stronger and stronger. I walked past them and saw there were mossy round stones set out, leading from the path to what would have been the front door of the cabin at one point. A horsefly flew right past my face, and I swatted at it with a shudder as I pushed my way through the tree shoots and bushes that had grown up along the stone path. I saw the green baseball cap Logan was wearing over the collapsed building—he was looking around behind it. In the front of the wreckage were rosebushes gone wild, covered with dying and rotting blooms.
I froze and almost gagged.
The place smelled of death.
There was another, smaller collapsed structure on the side far from me, rotting wood collapsed in a big heap.
It’s the well, for water.
The cabin or whatever it may have been at one time was small, far smaller than the cabin my family was staying in. If it had ever been painted at any point in its history, the paint had peeled away years ago. The wood was rotting, and from the angle the roof was sitting at it looked like it had probably collapsed under the weight of snow during a brutal winter sometime years ago. As I stood there, Logan and Carson moved into my sight—
—and everything changed.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes.
I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing.
Was I losing my mind?
The cabin was no longer a ruin. It looked new, built from strong and sturdy wood, and I could almost smell the raw timber. The roof was solid. The well looked like any other working well would, a round brick base with a wooden cover and a wooden crossbeam, with a rope wrapped around it and a bucket hanging. Even the trees seemed different somehow—the smaller ones were nowhere to be seen, and the stumps looked raw, like the trees had only recently been chopped down. All of the underbrush was gone, and the rosebushes were short, maybe only a foot high, and the sweet smell of the recently bloomed red roses filled my nose.
It was a perfect little place to live.
As I stood there gaping, I heard someone coming down the path through the woods. I turned—there was no sign of either Rachel or Teresa anywhere, it was like they had simply vanished into thin air—and a young man came into view from the woods, coming down the path. He was wearing dark brown pants, and his dark reddish-brown hair hung loose and tangled to his shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the sun shone through the trees on his tanned, firm skin that glistened with sweat. His skin was covered in freckles, and he was smiling. He was carrying an ax, and once he reached the level of the clearing, he walked over to a woodpile behind the cabin that hadn’t been there just a moment before, when things had been different, passing so close to me I could have touched him if I hadn’t been too terrified to reach out and touch him, and I watched as he swung the ax and lodged it in the center of a big stump.
I’ve lost my mind, I thought in horror.
He looked just like Marc.
This was just like my dream in the car yesterday, when
I dozed off on our way up the mountain. But I’m not dreaming now. What’s happening to me?
Logan and Carson were nowhere to be seen, either.
I felt a scream rising in my throat but I fought it down.
My heart started racing, and I put my hand against a tree to keep myself from falling as my knees buckled.
What the hell was happening?
As I leaned against the tree, the young man, whoever he was, started chopping wood, the muscles in his back flexing as he swung the ax and the wood splintered.
I felt drawn to him somehow, as though I should know who he was, and once the dizziness and panic passed, I felt an overwhelming sense of love.
Albert, I wonder if he’s Albert.
I don’t know how long I stood there, watching him, the gentle warm breezes of spring—how do you know it’s spring—bringing the scent of wildflowers and honeysuckle to my nose. Bees were buzzing as they flew from flower to flower, and the silence was encompassing, like a blanket wrapped around me. The only sound was the ax whistling through the air as he swung it, the sound of the wood splintering, and his grunts as he raised the ax and swung it again.
“Scotty? Are you all right?”
I shook my head again and was back in the present.
Teresa and Rachel were both staring at me, their faces concerned.
“I’m fine.” I ran my shaking hands through my hair. I’m just losing my fucking mind, is all. I took a deep breath and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Carson was kneeling next to the wreckage of the well, trying to see down inside it. He looked up at us.
“It’s been sealed.” He shrugged. “I guess it would be dangerous to leave it open.”
I couldn’t see Logan anywhere. I closed my eyes and could vividly see the young man in my mind as clearly as I had just a moment ago.
He looked so much like Marc…
“I’ve been talking to you for about five minutes now,” Teresa said in a hushed voice. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“You were like in a trance or something,” Rachel added. “Just staring off into space like we weren’t even here.” She licked her lips. “And your face…” Her voice trailed off. She was pale, her eyes wide.
She looks terrified, and for that matter, so does Teresa. What just happened here? How can I possibly explain what just happened without sounding completely insane? How, when even I had no idea what it was?
“My mind just wandered.” I gave them what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I got lost in thought, I guess. Sorry.”
“Uh-uh.” Teresa shook her head. “I’m not buying it. Maybe we should take you down to town to see a doctor. I’m sure there’s an emergency clinic or something—”
“Absolutely not!” I snapped, feeling a little queasy. I swallowed and took some deep breaths. “I told you, I’m fine. Forget about it, okay?”
I walked past them and over to where Logan was kneeling by the wreckage of the old well. “What are you looking for?” I asked when I reached him. He hadn’t moved since I—
lost my mind for just a minute before coming back to my senses?
—had reached the clearing. He was still kneeling there on the ground, staring down into the blackness through a hole in the wooden planks that had been nailed down to cover the hole. Even though the structure over the well had collapsed at some point in the past, the wreckage didn’t completely cover the planks. I frowned. In my vision or whatever the hell that had been, there had been a low brick wall forming the base of the well, but there was no sign of it now.
So it wasn’t a vision or anything, it was a weird daydream. Your mind just went somewhere else and created a whole scene from the reality of what your eyes were seeing. You invented a well like wells you’ve seen before, but there couldn’t have been a brick wall like you imagined because it would still be here, and if they took the bricks down they wouldn’t have left the rest of the structure here, covering it so haphazardly, it’s kind of dangerous the way it is, anyone could stumble or trip and fall down the well.
Great. I was convincing myself that I was going crazy.
And what about yesterday’s dream?
Logan looked up and smiled. “Not looking for anything, really.” He stood up and wiped his hands on the sides of his shorts. “I was just trying to see if I could tell how deep it was. I felt like…” He shrugged. “I just had this really weird sense about it, is all. It doesn’t make sense, I know.”
I stared at him, wondering. I turned to see Carson stepping over the threshold into the wrecked cabin—
And I remembered doing the same thing. The door was unpainted, and it was open. The windows were also open, and the plain white curtains danced in the soft breeze. The inside of the cabin was just one big open room. The floor was unvarnished, raw wood. In one corner was a fireplace and next to it was a wood-burning stove. Cast-iron pots and pans hung neatly on the wall next to the stove, and there were several iron buckets on the floor beneath them. There wasn’t much furniture. In a far corner of the room, a small pallet was made up as a sleeping area. A large wooden trunk with a flat lid had some books stacked on top of it. There was a table made from raw wood with two small chairs made from the same wood. A lantern sat in the center of the table. The place smelled masculine, of sweat and hard work, and slightly of sawdust…
“Carson Wolfe, are you completely insane?” Rachel shouted. “Come back out here right this minute!”
How can I be remembering any of this? I rubbed my eyes and leaned against the trunk of a tree. I felt tired, maybe a little nauseous.
Carson stuck his head back out through the doorway, that I’m-up-to-something grin on his face, his eyebrows arched up almost all the way to his hairline. “This looks like a place kids come to party,” he said, tossing out a filthy whiskey bottle. “Lots of empty chip bags, beer cans, and liquor bottles.”
“I can’t imagine anyone coming to this place,” Rachel sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Out in the middle of nowhere, and disgusting.”
“Out in the middle of nowhere is probably part of the appeal,” Logan pointed out. He stood back up, wiping his hands on his shorts. “No one would think of coming looking for kids here.” He pointed to a rock circle with long-dead embers in the center. “You come up here to camp out, build a fire right there—and hang out and get drunk all night long.”
“You’d think the Bartletts would notice the smoke,” Teresa said. She turned to me and said in a low whisper, “Are you okay, Scotty? You look kind of green.”
I closed my eyes and knelt down, taking some deep breaths. I didn’t feel very good, to be honest. The nausea was getting worse and coming in horrible waves, each wave progressing stronger than the one before. My eyes were burning, my head was starting to hurt, and my stomach was churning.
The well—it has everything to do with the well.
“I don’t—feel so hot,” I said out loud and got another flash of the shirtless man, standing in the doorway with a big smile on his face.
And as everything went dark, I heard the voice calling again.
“Berrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-tiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee.”
Chapter Seven
The black began to fade.
It was like being underwater, like I was at the bottom of a darkened swimming pool and I could look up and see the sunlight shining on the surface of the water. I started to make my way upward toward the light. The pressure in my lungs was building and I needed air, I was almost there, almost…
I opened my eyes and found myself staring up at four pale, wide-eyed faces.
Carson let out an explosive sigh, as their concerned faces all seemed to relax in relief. “Are you okay, man?” he asked, reaching down to touch my forehead with the back of his hand. “No fever—if anything, his skin feels cool.”
“I’m fine.” I could see the sky above them, through the tops of trees, clear blue and bright sunshine. “I don’t know what happened. Did I pass out?”
“Dude, you s
cared the shit out of us,” Logan said after a moment, the relief clearly showing in his face. “Your eyes just rolled up in the back of your head and you went down like a ton of bricks. Your skin looked green.” He peered down at me. “You’re getting your color back now.”
“Sorry—didn’t mean to scare you guys.” I tried to sit up, but everything started spinning and I got dizzy and a little nauseous. “Whoa, maybe I’d better lie here for a little bit more.” I lay back down, putting my hands behind my head. I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths.
“Here, drink some water,” Teresa said. I opened my eyes and she passed me her water bottle, her hand shaking slightly. I came up on my elbow and took the water from her, and took a drink. I was really thirsty, and I gulped down the water until the bottle was completely empty. “Sorry,” I handed it back to her. “Where’s mine? And my phone?”
“You dropped your water.” Rachel’s voice was faint and a little shaky. “But I picked up your phone.” She gave me a weak smile and handed me my phone.
I slipped the phone in my pocket, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up. I wasn’t dizzy anymore—the nausea and the headache were also gone. “Is there any more water?” I asked, and Carson handed me another half-empty plastic bottle. I took a long pull on the water and handed it back to him. “I feel a lot better now,” I said, smiling at them. I shivered, but then felt like my blood was flowing again. “Sorry if I scared you. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. But I’m better now, really.”
They exchanged concerned glances, and Teresa gulped a bit.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at each one of them in turn, trying to read their facial expressions. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Carson cleared his throat. “Okay, um, while you were unconscious”—his voice broke, and he took another deep breath before he continued—“you were talking.”
“It was creepy,” Rachel said, shuddering. “Really creepy.”
“Talking?” A chill went down my spine, and I swallowed down the fear that was growing inside of me. “What do you mean, talking? I thought I passed out—how could I be talking if I was passed out?”
