Then, for fun, Perry started firing his gun at the tree-things, and the cloud in Pete’s head evaporated.
The first bullet tore through the wooden shoulder-knot of one of the creatures closest to Perry in a tiny spray of splinters and bark. The thing jerked back a moment and screamed, a wind-wail, a keening sound but loud and angry. Then it kept coming. A second bullet tore into another tree-creature through the lower end of a thick root-leg which it dragged along as it bellowed in rage. Another thought that Pete was sure was not his own passed through him like a breeze: Die like the ax man. It was the tree-creatures’ intent he was hearing in his head. They were angry.
The trees moved . . . Todd had told him. Oh God. Oh God . . . Pete’s paralysis was broken and he drew his gun, intending to help his partner. He only made it three or four steps, though, before something whipped around his wrist and tightened. The pain made him drop his gun and he swore. He looked down and a tree root or vine had reached up from the carpet of pine needles and grabbed him. Another snaked around his leg while a third reached for his free arm. He twisted out of its way, and set to work trying to loosen the first root’s grip.
“Perry!” he called as he kicked at the searching vine. It lashed at the offending leg, sending pain down the length of it to his knee. “Perry, run!”
Perry danced and laughed and fired his gun.
One bullet whizzed past Pete’s head as he struggled with the vines. Another bullet fired into the woody meat of a third tree-creature’s torso, knocking it to the ground. Two others helped it up, and then the tree-creatures were on top of Perry. Their screams faded and were replaced by his—horrible, high-pitched shouts from beneath the tangle of branches and twigs.
Pete tried to reach for his gun, straining against the vines, but they yanked him back.
“Perry!” he shouted, half in horror and half in dismay.
And the vines killed him . . .
He could see the long, crooked arms of the tree-creatures reaching in to the dog-pile on Perry and pulling out chunks of red stuff, which they flung away into the grass. Perry’s screams had softened some, and were punctuated now by wet gurgles. More red, chunky stuff flew upward, a spray of it landing just near Pete’s feet. It took a minute to recognize what it was, and when he did, he felt his stomach lurch.
It was Perry’s liver.
Another wet plop delivered a loop of his intestine nearby, and Pete bent over and dry-heaved the bile in his stomach onto the grass.
It was a long time after Perry stopped making noises that the tree-creatures stopped tearing at him. When they did finally seem to find him sufficiently dead to back off, there wasn’t much left of Perry. Pete felt his stomach churn again and he took several deep breaths to calm it. He could see Perry’s head, his wide, glazed eyes, and a hollowed-out cavity where his ribs had once protected his internal organs. He watched in horror as vines from beyond the trees weaved through the remnants and dragged them into the undergrowth.
Suddenly, the attention of the tree-creatures shifted to Pete. He furiously renewed his efforts to free himself, but found to his surprise that as the tree-creatures approached, the vines around his wrist and leg loosened on their own, slithering back through the grass.
The tree-creatures were about ten feet away when Pete thought to reach for his gun. He looked from it to them, his heart pounding throughout his chest cavity (still intact, for the time being). They watched him with those green eye-lights. Their thoughts rustled like leaves. He couldn’t understand any individual sentiments, just impressions of wariness and distrust. He was acutely aware of the feral danger they presented, their capacity for predatory violence. They seemed to him a separate but affected element of Nilhollow; it had been theirs before time had noticed them, theirs before whatever had killed Todd Mackey had begun to well up from the ground.
He extended his foot and kicked the gun away, toward them.
“S-see?” His voice in his own ears sounded too loud, too shaky. “N-no threat. No threat.” He wondered how fast they were, and if he bolted, whether they would be able to catch him. He suspected they very likely could.
“No gun,” he told them. “No ax.”
They watched him in silence, but there was the slightest shift in the sentiment they exuded.
“I . . . I just want the girl. She’s lost in your woods. I want to bring her home—out of the woods,” he told them. He felt a little silly; there was nothing in their wooden faces to indicate they understood anything he was saying, or cared one way or another. “Just want to find the girl, before . . .”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t know how to finish the thought. Before what? Before they did? Before their forest or whatever crazy sickness that had infected Todd and then Perry could get to Julia, too? Or him? And what if it had already?
Before the Kèkpëchehëlat, their thoughts finished for him. He didn’t know what the word meant, but he understood from the sentiments surrounding the thought that they deferred to whatever it was, and found it threatening. Maybe it was the name for whatever was wrong with Nilhollow, the madness affecting those who spent too much time there. Pete had no clue. But he told them, “Yes. Yes, before that.”
The tree-creatures considered his words for a moment, and then other alien thoughts found their way into his head.
Go. Go now. All is unwell. The Turning grows stronger. Much is and will be forgotten here. Swallowed up. Time is short.
He nodded, though he didn’t fully understand what they meant by that, either.
The command to go echoed in his mind as the tree-creatures broke into piles of leaves that a sudden chill wind twirled away. Pete closed his eyes a moment, and when he opened them, all trace of the things that had killed Perry, as well as any of Perry himself, were gone. Pete’s gun was gone, too. He stood by himself in the woods.
He let out a shuddering breath and sagged a little where he stood, the high-alert tension in his muscles slowly easing.
“Okay,” he said to himself, inhaling and exhaling deeply. “Okay. Okay.” He looked back toward the woods from which he’d come and thought about heading back in there without backup. Without Perry.
Perry. His partner was dead. Why had they killed him and not Pete? Was it really simply because he’d shot at them? Were they so capricious? So crazy? He nodded grimly to himself. Given what he’d experienced of Nilhollow so far and his experiences with Todd Mackey, it was probable that everything there was to some degree insane, steeped in whatever was wrong with the place. Maybe it was a matter of the length of exposure and whatever immunity a person might naturally have to Nilhollow’s effects. Maybe like illnesses or poisons, it affected everyone a little differently. In this case, it had gotten to Perry first, had hit him harder, and he’d poked the tigers, so to speak.
Crazy, unpredictable tigers that had torn Vince Perry apart. Had Pete not been in shock, he probably would have teared up.
He walked over to the spot where the tree-creatures had attacked his partner and was surprised to find most of the blood had already sunk into the ground. A few splatters on the long blades of nearby grass and a tiny pool visibly draining between the pine needles and into the dirt were all that was left of Perry. There were no scraps of clothing, no bits of flesh. It was like Perry had been scrubbed out of existence.
It was hard for Pete to wrap his brain around, even with most of the brain-fog gone now. Todd Mackey, the marked trees, Perry, the blood, the tree-creatures . . . He was going to need backup.
Mallon would no doubt come looking for him soon; the man was sharp and had a good instinct for knowing when there was trouble. When he didn’t call to check in, it would raise a red flag. It was just a matter of time. For now, though, he was alone.
Alone . . . but not really. They . . . those things . . . were still watching him. He felt that. They would bide their time for now, but they had told him things in Nilhollow were unpredictable, and unpredictable could be very deadly. He wouldn’t have much time. Even if he could fin
d the car, the search would probably be a waste of an hour he didn’t have. No, if he were to have any chance of saving Julia, then he couldn’t wait for Mallon and backup.
Before he changed his mind, Pete dove back into the forest.
SIX
That morning Julia had woken up to the sound of chirping, which immediately ceased the moment she opened her eyes. She had noticed somewhere in the background of her thoughts that birds seldom if ever chirped there—and ditto any crickets or tree frogs. The sound, she thought, had only been part of a dream. Since entering the woods, she had seen no lightning bugs, no squirrels or chipmunks, no deer or rabbits. She was fairly convinced that most times, she was the only one in those woods.
Most times.
Her first night in Nilhollow had been rough, to say the least. She’d slept fitfully and yet still dreamed, and the dreams were ugly. In the one she remembered best upon waking, the one that had bothered her the most, she had started off in a beautiful clearing surrounded by oaks, cedars, and pines. There was a mountain outcropping that extended upward into the clouds of dream-irrelevance, and she had been sitting on one of the rock outcroppings overlooking a small pool of clear water. The stone beneath her was smooth, warmed by the sun, and her bare feet were dangling in the cool water. She’d heard singing far off beyond the trees, and it had seemed like a good idea to follow that singing to its source. So she’d hopped off the rock and wandered away from the pool along a sun-dappled dirt path that wound among the trees. Quickly, though, the sun faded and the shadows knitted together to blur the details of anything but the closest tree trunks. The wind picked up and she remembered feeling more anxious than cold, as if the trees knew something was coming and shook their branches in prediction.
She supposed her mind had incorporated random dream images then, as well as sounds she heard in the twilight of half sleep, which her brain fleshed out in odd ways. As she followed the path, she passed strange and disquieting beings among the trees. One was an unnaturally flexible contortionist in a moonlight-colored leotard, whose skin had been painted entirely white. Her thin lips were black, as were her nails. Her black hair had been pulled into a tight bun so that it wouldn’t obscure the rippling of her lean muscles as she folded herself backward and peered through her legs. She blurred for a second or two and in the next, her body had turned over but her head remained upright. The contortionist turned again and then again, her head never moving, but her neck bulged and strained as it twisted to keep her head in position and her eyes always on Julia. Those eyes were entirely black, like shiny obsidian, and she seemed to always have one too many limbs—an extra arm arcing wide here, an extra leg nimbly navigating the terrain there. The contortionist followed her a few feet in a sort of crab-walk, then stopped and watched with those nothing-eyes.
She passed a man on the right who was naked except for a loincloth of leaves and moss. Large patches of hair had been roughly and unevenly shaved off, leaving nicks and cuts that bled a little. What was left was a washed-out blond, like straw, but heavily dusted with dirt. At first Julia thought he was kneeling in the grass, but as she got closer, she saw he had no legs below the knees. His arms were a tangled, broken mess bound to his back by vines, all forming arabesque shapes she was sure even the contortionist couldn’t make. His eye sockets had been hollowed out, and sprigs with budding leaves grew from the blood-ringed holes. That bothered Julia more than his maimed body, more than the black feathers and tiny bones stuffed into his mouth or the blood that ran down his chin onto his bare chest. She was sickened by those eye sockets, reclaimed by an indifferent, wild thing of nature . . . and the secret import of the series of simple and complex lattice-symbols drawn all over his body in dark wine-colored lipstick.
She saw an ax in what she thought was the ripped-up remnants of human flesh. She could see the detail, even in the dream—the pores on the skin, the tiny hairs, the watch Darren wore, an eyebrow with one of Darren’s eyes, a finger . . . and wet, squishy things beneath that, red and pooling outward, drawing flies, cooling and stinking and rotting in the gloom of the forest’s in-between places.
She saw desiccated bodies hanging from trees, barely twitching, the shrunken gray skin wrinkled and tumorous with odd mushroom growths, like the humus of decaying trees.
Then there was the figure from the night before. In her dream, it didn’t speak, but it did move. It approached her on the path, a thing clothed in sheaths of dead leaves, its wooden face devoid of any detailed feature. Branches grew from its head. It regarded her with eyes that glinted, reminding her of the way a cat’s or deer’s eyes will reflect whatever little light is available in the darkness. It took her arm in its long branch-fingers and led her to a new clearing. This one was nothing like the first: The plants here were dead, twisted into unnatural shapes. Sharp rocks and roots along the ground had been overturned, the earth scratched in long furrows. In the center of the clearing was a chasm. It was not wide, but she knew with dream-certainty that it was infinitely deep. Across it was a large slab of striated rock, about six feet in length and four in width—big enough for a person to lie down on. Carved along either side of its length were grooves about an inch wide.
Standing in front of the slab was a very tall, very gaunt man in tattered robes of faded gold mottled with red. They reminded Julia a little of autumn leaves, an idea emphasized by the leaf-and-twig crown he wore. His long hair and beard were scraggly streaks of storm-cloud gray, and small bits of rock and plant were caught up in them. Although everything else in the dream had until that point been very vivid, Julia couldn’t make out the face of the man at all. It was a smear of off-white, a blur. His hands, though, she could see—bony, gnarled things that beckoned her toward the rock.
The King in Yellow fall fashion collection, she remembered thinking, and both giggled and then choked down a cry.
She was aware that she was naked without ever having taken off her clothes. Her own body, usually tanned, was very pale in the light of the moon streaming down on the clearing. The tall man instructed her to lie down on the slab and she did. There seemed no point in resisting his silent command. She could feel a warmth, a hunger for her rolling up from the chasm beneath. Its vines, long fingers from those depths, snaked up over the edge of the stone slab and wrapped around her wrists and ankles, spreading her legs and arms out until she felt like one of her lipstick Xs.
Until that point, she had felt disquieted and occasionally disgusted, but she didn’t feel real panic until one of the vines wrapped around her neck. Another wedged itself into her mouth and down her throat, and she gagged, on the verge of throwing up or choking but unable to complete either. She wrestled against the vines holding her down, but they constricted, rope-burning her where they rubbed against her skin. Another slithered up along the inside of her thigh and pushed into her, deep enough to startle her, to fill her up down there. Another crisscrossed around her breasts, pressing on her chest, her heart, her lungs.
She was going to die. The tall man and his branch-fingered assistant, the oddities of the woods, the multiple pairs of curious firelight eyes that had gathered at the edges of the clearing to watch—they all wanted her to die. It would make whatever was hungry at the bottom of the chasm go away for a while. All would be satiated.
The tall man leaned over her with a large stone dagger and carved a hand-sized symbol like an X, or more like a headless stick figure, into her stomach. It felt like each place the dagger touched her was seared by contact with it. The blood from the cuts welled up and spilled over the sides of her, running off the slab and into the chasm. From all around, a low keening, growing louder as he cut, filled her ears.
Julia could only gag, tears blinding her then spilling away.
The tall man opened his fist and sprinkled something into her wounds—seeds. He was planting seeds. She blinked away more tears. There was a sudden silence as the woods around her held its breath in anticipation. The vines retracted, first from her inner places and then from around her body,
but she could only lie there. She had been something else’s, and it took a few minutes to regain that feeling that she belonged to herself again. It didn’t last long, though. Something was inside her, growing, draining her of the things it needed to live. The watching, glittering eyes became fireflies and rose up into the sky. The sounds of the forest—all the crickets and frogs and birds she never heard when she was awake—filled the silence.
The thing inside her sprouted up through the wound, but she was awake before she saw what it was.
She cried for a long time, quiet, heaving sobs that were meant only for her. She was a big believer in the idea that crying served a number of healthy purposes—a release of anger, frustration, or sadness, for example, or a means of clearing out all the intense emotion so that she could focus on what to do about the problem at hand.
Her problem, she realized as she sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, was that she was good and lost in the woods, and she needed to find her way out. Now that a good bit of the emotion had cleared, a small idea had been uncovered that she had not allowed herself to give credence to before. It was the notion that there was something supernatural, something potentially dangerous, out there in the woods with her. It was something that had both the desire and the means to keep her lost there, though she didn’t want to speculate why. She couldn’t prove in the light of day that it was true, but she felt it deep inside her. Maybe she really was losing it, but the idea felt more real to her than most of what she’d experienced since yesterday. This was Nilhollow, after all, and the place didn’t have its reputation for nothing.
She lifted her shirt and looked down at her stomach. There were no marks on her, no headless stick-figure shapes. She supposed the logical side of her had known she wouldn’t find anything, but the dream had left a very real impression on her.
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