On the far bank of the chasm was a tree-creature, just like the rangers had said, but it was huge—easily the size of a small oak. Its humanoid form was made entirely of wood and vines covered in gray-brown bark, and thin branches grew from its back and the top of its head. Its eyes were dual mini-chasms of blue fire. It moved on powerful legs, its roots clutching the earth beneath it and chucking it away as it walked.
“Oh my God,” Hoss breathed.
It stepped over the width of the chasm and stopped, tilting its head as if studying the assembled officers. The creature’s branch-fingers flexed. Then it leaned forward and its lipless mouth opened to issue another roar. What filled the officers’ ears was the sound of a hurricane, the sound of a mountain falling.
Gibbons drew his gun.
Your guns will not help . . .
Alvarez saw it a second too late to stop him. “Gibbons, wait—”
Around them, in the moment of silence just before all hell broke loose, Alvarez heard the trees speaking again, and this time the words, if not all of their meanings, were perfectly clear: The Kèkpëchehëlat will kill you all . . .
Then Gibbons fired on the giant tree-creature.
The bullets flew into the wooden torso and the creature jerked a little with each one. The holes filled with sap before sealing over completely with new wood and bark. The blue fire in its eyes flashed. In two powerful steps, the creature closed the gap between itself and Gibbons.
Someone screamed, other guns were drawn, and chaos erupted in that little clearing.
The creature reached down and picked up Gibbons by the neck. The officer kicked his feet wildly, and dropping his gun, began clawing at the rough, wooden fingers. His face paled, then went from red to purple to a kind of blue, his eyes bulging. The creature then took Gibbons’s legs in its other hand and folded the man in half backwards.
The snap of Gibbons’s spine struck Alvarez as so loud—too loud, even over the din of confusion and fear going on around him. Greer was backing away, shaking his head slowly as if his brain refused to accept what his eyes were telling him. Jack Hoss was circling around behind the thing, gun drawn, and Susan Brinks was aiming her own firearm at the creature’s face. Walton and Sykes were facing off with the creature, ostensibly trying to figure out how to get it to release Gibbons without incurring further wrath. They, too, had their guns drawn. No one fired, though. Alvarez supposed no one quite dared.
He had his own gun drawn as well, and considered shooting it in the eye. He thought, with luck and keeping his cool, that he might be able to bury a bullet in that blue fire. It wouldn’t save Gibbons now—the state trooper was a mess of bloody flesh and jutting bone—but it might save his own ass, or those of the other officers. He took a deep breath and aimed, coolly exhaled, and fired into the tree-creature’s eye.
The bullet found its mark, engulfed by the blue flame, which subsequently shot outward like a blowtorch for a few seconds, then settled back into the socket. It roared again, shaking the earth beneath them, flung Gibbon’s crumpled body behind it like it was discarding a wadded-up ball of paper, then turned on Alvarez. The other officers opened fire.
The creature appeared stunned by the onslaught of bullets from different directions, its body taking them in with little twitches. They did no damage, though, other than to enrage the creature. It reached down to grab Brinks around the waist, and as she screamed, it tore off her bottom half in a spray of blood. Her eyes took several seconds to glaze over. She stared at her ruined hips and legs lying on the ground below and heaved. Blood spurted from her mouth and down her chin.
Dropping the two pieces of the Missing Persons Unit officer, the tree-creature turned on Jack Hoss, reaching for him just as the trooper dived out of the way. It tried again but Hoss dodged its hand. It growled, covering the distance between it and Hoss in seconds. Its hand shot out—the thing moved more quickly than Hoss evidently had expected—and pinned the ex-soldier against a tree. He struggled against the creature’s palm, straining to pull air into his lungs against the pressure. He managed to wrestle his arm free and shot at the creature’s face. It shook off the bullet and scooped him up despite his emptying his clip into its arm and shoulder. Then it threw Hoss into another tree, hard enough to bend the man’s body around the trunk with a sickening series of snaps. Then it grabbed Karen Sykes, whose terror had paralyzed her, around the waist, but she didn’t scream; even the ability to do that had left her. She looked so small in its hand. Then it shook her like a rag doll. The way her body rocked and dangled in its grasp, the way her head knocked around on her neck, was grotesque and unnatural, and it made Alvarez a little sick to watch. The remaining officers could hear her bones snapping and cracking like a series of tiny fireworks. The sound seemed to echo throughout the forest. When it stopped shaking her, she looked flatter and somewhat shapeless. Her head lolled and her shoulders slumped. When the creature dropped her and kicked her out of the way, she landed in a crumpled heap.
“Cover me,” Dave shouted to Alvarez and Greer as he holstered his gun. He picked up a large, sharp-edged rock from the ground and flanked the creature. Alvarez and Greer opened fire. Infuriated, the creature began moving toward them. Dave approached it from the side, and when he got within a few feet of it, he hurled the rock at its knee. Alvarez supposed he was trying to snap the branches of its leg and cripple it. It was strong, but it couldn’t keep advancing on them if it couldn’t walk.
The rock wedged itself between a root and the wood of its leg. The creature stopped, looked down, and plucked the rock out again, tossing it away like a splinter. The blue fire-eyes narrowed, and it changed direction and in the next second, loomed over Dave. The officer barely had enough time to open his mouth to scream before the creature raised a large root foot and stomped Dave flat into the ground. Alvarez could feel the impact of its foot connecting with Dave’s body, and then through it into the earth beneath, right up through his boots. There was a horrific crunch and an ooze of blood from under the creature’s foot.
Alvarez and Greer exchanged looks and reholstered their guns.
“Run?” Greer asked.
“Fuck yes,” Alvarez replied.
They turned to bolt back over the tall grasses when they noticed a pair of fiery lights, much like the giant tree-creature’s eyes, but smaller and bright green. And then another pair lit up next to the first. And then another and another.
Alvarez glanced around the clearing and saw it dotted with similar twin pairs of glowing green eyes.
“No,” Greer muttered in panic. “Oh, fuck no.”
As the officers’ gaze darted between the different lights, more tree-creatures, similar in appearance to the first but smaller, maybe seven or eight feet tall, began to emerge from the woods. Alvarez wondered if they were as strong or as murderously insane as their much bigger brother. He believed it was quite likely.
“Shit,” Alvarez whispered. They began closing in.
Then he heard shouts and words from beyond the creatures, a little deeper in the woods, back in the direction that the officers had originally come from. They were human voices this time, not trees. Alvarez prayed they meant some of the other units were close. Then Alvarez saw erratic flashlight beams darting between the trees.
“Officers down!” he shouted as loud as he could. “Officers in need of assistance! Help, goddammit!”
The tree-creatures, even the big one, paused, watching him.
“Alvarez?” came a return shout. More unintelligible words followed, but at that moment they didn’t matter. Help was on the way.
“Yes, it’s Alvarez!” he shouted back. It hurt his head very much to shout. “We’re under attack!”
With effort, he turned back to see the big tree-creature was slowly advancing on Greer, who retreated with cautious and measured steps. Alvarez wanted to help, but the fog in his head was spreading down to his body, weighing him to the spot. He knew there was something he was supposed to be doing in this situation, something police
training had taught him about helping fellow officers . . . what was it? He couldn’t remember and didn’t care. Greer was on his own.
Greer tossed his gun away into the brush and held up his hands to try to placate the thing. “See?” he called to it. “No gun, okay? No gun.”
It didn’t much seem to care. With a broad sweep of its hand, it batted Greer into the air. His shoulder connected with a cedar about ten feet up and there was the same nauseating crunch of bone that Alvarez had heard with Hoss. Greer cried out and then fell to the ground. It took a great deal of effort for him to get slowly to his feet. He staggered a little to keep his balance, clutching his broken shoulder. That arm dangled uselessly. He glared at the big tree-creature.
“Fuck you!” he shouted. “Fuck you.” He spit blood onto the ground.
The larger tree-creature turned to the littler ones and grunted. A few responded with low wind-whistles and growls, and then the two closest to Greer glided across the ground and flanked him. Just as the officers of at least two other units came crashing through the brush into the clearing, the two littler tree-creatures—tree-spirits, Alvarez corrected himself somewhere within the fog of his head—drove their sharp, branchlike fingers into Greer’s stomach and neck. His eyes grew wide and his body began to shake uncontrollably. His uniform grew darker with his blood. Then his eyes rolled back into his head and his body stopped moving. The creatures withdrew their fingers and shook off his blood.
“What the fuck are those?” an officer shouted from the group gathered at the far edge of the clearing. The officers behind him stood dumbfounded, rooted to the spot. Alvarez saw a number of them try to radio in with their shoulder-mics and wince at the feedback.
He tried to go to them to warn them, but rough, cold wood wrapped around one of his biceps. He turned to see a pair of green fire pits blazing into his own eyes. He tore his gaze away and looked down at his arm. A branch-hand had encircled it tightly.
Alvarez turned his attention back to the far side of the clearing. The shouts and muttered expletives were increasing in number as more officers started to pour into the clearing from around the trees. They stopped short, too, when they saw the tree-creatures, their hands finding their holstered firearms.
“Don’t shoot at them!” Alvarez shouted. At least, he thought he shouted, but he couldn’t really tell through the haze in his pounding head. The pain had become a gauzy thing wrapping itself around his thoughts. “No! They’ll attack if you shoot! Don’t shoot!”
His message was lost amid the chaos. Troopers and local officers alike were pulling out their guns and firing at the bellowing creatures. The creatures in turn laid into the assembled officers like scythes through wheat.
Your strength will not help . . .
The clearing became a cloud of swarming bullets flying into the wooden pulp of bodies that roared and growled, then healed as if never shot at all. The creatures felt those bullets, though. Those sounds they made, like angry winds and falling things, and the fury that emanated from their bodies like a kind of heat, proved that. Their violence was a storm and the officers were in the thick of it.
One state trooper was hoisted into the air and thrown beyond the treetops. His shouts faded until they abruptly cut off. A tree-creature backhanded another officer and she went flying backward into the chasm. With one arm, she held on to the edge, trying to pull herself out. Blood ran down her forehead into her eye. Then thin, ropy vines emerged from the depths and wrapped around her arm and throat. With a violent tug, they yanked her into the chasm itself. All around Alvarez, the tree-creatures were tearing, slashing, stomping, and ripping apart human beings. The clearing filled with screams and the hot stench of blood and decaying plants.
Alvarez noticed for the first time that the chasm depths emitted a coppery glow that eerily illuminated the carnage. Every time those vines could snake out and drag a mangled body, dead or dying, into the chasm, the glow brightened and the roaring hum grew louder. Once, Alvarez thought he’d even heard laughter. Or maybe the laughter was coming from the trees.
It took a few minutes to understand that the laughter was actually coming from him.
The fog in Alvarez’s head had now engulfed his whole body. Bullets and shouts alike whirled around the wooden forms and the human ones, but he just couldn’t feel the sense of danger he had before. In fact, the strange war dances going on around him were pretty damned funny. People looked so silly, all folded up and bent in ridiculous angles as the vines tried to cram them down the narrow throat of the chasm.
It was growing, though, that throat. It was getting wider and longer. Pretty soon, it would be able to extend its fault line right under the feet of the officers and they would just fall back, fall right into it and it would bury them alive or burn them with that copper glow or—
His thoughts were interrupted as something round rolled across the clearing floor and bumped against his toe. It was a head with wisps of gray hair matted to the head by streaks of blood. The face was a mask of shrieking surprise, the upturned eyes glazing. They blinked once and then the light went out in them. He smiled down at the funny thing and kicked it back in the direction it had come.
He turned to the tree-creature holding his arm and with his free hand, pointed to the chasm. The creature whisked him to its edge and Alvarez swayed a little to keep his balance. He looked down into it but couldn’t see anything at the bottom except the coppery glow. Wait . . . there was something else, besides the roots of those snaking vines. There was a swirling, amorphous thing like a coal-gray cloud, zipping back and forth like a bug caught in ajar. Was it trapped down there? It didn’t seem to be. It seemed excited. It swelled and ebbed, zipped, stretched, pulled together, swirled into a spiral. It was dancing.
Alvarez wondered if anyone else could hear the trees laughing at them and feel all the hideous ideas that the chasm was belching forth—terrible things one could do to children, ways to torture the elderly, how to scar a woman’s insides during a rape, how to prolong suffering when killing someone. The cop part of him, now buried deep inside his psyche, was screaming that this was madness and barking commands to pull together and get the hell out of there, but the message was too far away to penetrate the fog. He wondered if anyone else felt the same disconnect from logical thought. His gun dangled at his side. He couldn’t fight. He didn’t want to. He wanted to cry and laugh and scream all at the same time but his mouth wouldn’t work.
Then another rough wooden hand grabbed his other arm. He felt the pressure and heard the tearing before he felt any pain. It wasn’t until the sides of his ribs grew warm with his own blood that he saw his arms had been torn off. He looked up at one of the tree creatures, and before he could cry out or sink to the ground, weak from shock and blood loss, the sharp branch-fingers of the creature’s hand stabbed into the soft skin beneath his eyes. He felt the fingers moving around beneath his eyeballs, knocking against his sockets. Then everything went dark as the nerves were severed and his eyes pulled free of his skull. He sank to his knees, amused by how the keening of the wind across his empty eye sockets sounded like the voices of the little tree-creatures. He pitched forward. The grass felt soothing and cool against his cheek. The wind blew across the back of his neck. Screams erupted in the dark all around him.
Alvarez used the trunk of his body to drag himself as close to the chasm as he could. Then he rolled himself over the edge and fell down, down, down. The last thing Alvarez thought on this earth before the copper glow enveloped him was that his grandma hadn’t ever told him that the trees could be so cruel.
FOURTEEN
Julia , Pete, and Mallon knew they had found the clearing. They could hear unearthly roaring, which Pete and Mallon seemed to be in agreement was coming from the forest king. They explained to her that they thought it was an elemental spirit, a forest god that the essence of the chasm had driven insane beyond all hope of recovery. They heard human screaming, too, and Julia could tell from their faces that it pained them to hear the de
aths of their brothers and sisters in blue and not be able to run in there and save them. They could also smell that rot of vegetable matter, the death of whatever part of the forest was still healthy and natural, and the animal smell of hot, spilled blood. Mallon had been right: Nilhollow was bringing them right to its center, right to its throat, because it wanted to devour them. It didn’t know they intended to slit that throat and silence its madness and cravings for good.
They had to make it there first. Close to the clearing, Julia’s mind was flooded with images from her dream, interspersed with all the ways her ax could dismember a body. She could feel what the effort of lifting and dropping an ax was like in her arm muscles, could feel the phantom sensation of blood splatter on her face. Her ankle blazed white-hot with pain, and she couldn’t think of a better way to treat it than to chop the whole damned foot off. When she managed to shove those thoughts aside, it bombarded her with all of her flaws, all of her weaknesses, all the ways that she was a useless burden to the two men beside her. To her, it was more of the same self-doubt that had characterized her entire experience in Nilhollow. She was weary of its attempts, but it was relentless in trying to crumble the last vestiges of her sanity.
Oh yes, they were close to the source of madness in Nilhollow, all right. She didn’t know what kinds of thoughts were passing through the men’s heads, but she could tell they were struggling with them. Were they imagining killing her? Were they repulsed by all the things the chasm was telling them were her weaknesses? Was Mallon going to drop her on her ass and burn off her face with the blowtorch, or would Pete bury the ax into her back?
The grips of both men tightened around her, and they trudged on. No one spoke.
They reached the clearing, and Julia felt dizzy. Up close it was much harder to fight down the wellspring of panic and despair that threatened to overtake her. She just hoped Mallon knew what to do when they got there, because she wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold on.
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