by L J McIntyre
I click my watch and the screen lights up: 6.13 am.
“You awake?” Annie whispers.
“Yeah, it’s later than I thought.”
“What’s the time?”
“Just after 6.”
“Shit.”
I know what that ‘shit’ means. No explanations needed. Our time in the protective capsule is coming to an end. Can’t stay in here forever.
“I think it’s time we escape through the forest. We have no other choice. This is a last resort.” she whispers. “At least at this hour, most of the town will still be in bed. Now could be our chance.”
“Screw it. You’re right. Let’s make a run for it and deal with whatever comes our way.”
“We should wait till 6.30, though,” she suggests. “Gives us a chance to get ready and wake up a bit.”
I’m already wide awake, already thinking about this bastard town. I refuse to believe the driving force behind all of this is anything supernatural. Voodoos and curses are nonsense. I could possibly be pushed toward believing the town has been brainwashed en masse or hypnotised.
Those people in the stinking house last night, their faces and rigid bodies, sitting vacantly: I’ll admit that wasn’t normal. And the blinking streetlight outside didn’t help.
The streetlight.
What if there’s something going on with the lights?
What if the people are in a trance or something like that? A lot of the streetlights are blinking erratically. At first I thought they were just broken. Maybe the Watchers yesterday, rather than staring up into the sky, were actually fixed on the lights.
Jesus Christ, what the hell am I talking about? Mass hypnosis? I must be going insane.
The dream of my mum and dad bubbles back to mind. I turn to Annie. “Annie, don’t you have any family, or something like that, in New Zealand who you can call for help?”
Her silence evokes a wave of doubt in me. Maybe family’s a sore spot for her. It is for me.
“We fell out, my parents and me,” she says. “Haven’t spoken in years, you know. It wasn’t a big argument or anything like that. It was just a combination of me being a dickhead teenager and them never being around. I don’t know. We were like three strangers in the same house. They’re separated now, I think. I don’t even have their phone numbers anymore and I doubt they’d accept my call.”
“So, no one you can call?”
“Pathetic, I know.” After a few seconds, her voice goes quiet and she asks, “Jack, are you scared?”
“Very.”
“You have to promise me one thing, okay?”
“What is it?”
“Don’t hurt anyone.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I mean, unless they’re attacking you, of course. But don’t be the aggressor. There’s too much of that out there in the world.”
I don’t tell her that I inherited the red-faced monster from my father, that I have something inside of me that could make me hurt even the people I care about, something that terrifies me and has already ruined another person’s life.
“Okay,” I say.
We both stand up, arm ourselves with torches, and I slide open the cold metal bolt holding the door closed.
Chapter Twenty Nine
We turn our torches on. I push my body weight forward and the door of our protective cocoon scrapes open. The factory space is dark, extremely dark, but nothing like the black wall that hit us last night in this same space. Small cracks in the wall, joins that no longer join, are leaking dull light from the outside. I shine the torch straight ahead and see the wheel-less corpse of Betsy alone in the middle of the litter covered floor.
It’s quiet.
We creep toward what we believe is the exit, framed by a border of light pushing through.
“When we open the door, should we run?” I ask.
“Maybe we shouldn’t exhaust ourselves straight away.”
“Okay, fair enough, but let’s keep close.”
Annie opens the door to the cool dawn light.
Like the morning before, a low, calming mist covers the floor, weaves around the tree trunks in the forest a few metres to our left. We kill our torches, duck down and jog until the forest. We try in vain to walk lightly over twigs and crinkly leaves. The forest and its floor are an ethereal green from the thick coating of moss on everything. Any rock underfoot is made slippery by the addition of freshly layered dew. My photographer’s mind, even in the midst of danger, is telling me this scene is special, potentially viral if captured properly. The rest of me sees it as hauntingly still. Too still.
We haven’t agreed on any particular direction to travel in but the town is at our backs: that’s all that matters. There’s no way Nesgrove is going to let us escape this easily. And yet, there’s no sign of life, no movement, not even that faint feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me I’m being watched.
We walk for a short while until the trees give way to a clearing where a small building—a church—sits disused and crumbling, the doors and windows boarded up. Around the church is a graveyard packed with headstones. The atmosphere here feels serene, peaceful, rather than laden with dread and apprehension like the old cabin by the lake. Small birds flitter from grave to grave and a flurry of rabbits dart away from us as soon as they sense us.
I manage to read some of the headstones as we cut across the graveyard. We hit a patch of fresh graves, two with withered flowers in vases at their bases. On the base of another is a muddy Matchbox toy car lying on its side. I scan the text on each of the new headstones.
“Did you see that?” I ask Annie when we pass the final grave.
“What?” She looks at me.
“The graves we walked past: the final ones were all from the last couple of years.”
“Yeah?”
“They were all between eighteen and twenty four years old.”
“Jesus, that seems like a lot of dead young people.”
“Especially for a town so small.”
We both hear the unmistakable snap of a branch from somewhere behind us. That loud, it can only be a person or people. We run past the church to where the forest starts again and hide behind a thick fallen tree trunk. Lying flat on our chests, we have a narrow view between the trunk and the uneven ground. We wait to see who our pursuers are.
I knew they wouldn’t make it easy.
I hold my breath while I scan beyond the graveyard and into the trees. Another twig snaps, closer now than before, then another twig, and some rustling leaves, and through the dense wood there’s movement about fifty metres away.
Maggie, the old lady from the motel—shoulders pulled in and holding a small, green potted plant in her hands—slowly weaves through the forest and into the graveyard. She’s alone, it seems. I hadn’t noticed before, but she has a slight limp. She hobbles through the graveyard until she arrives at one of the new graves, one of the headstones I read just moments earlier.
She stares at it for a while, head bowed as if praying, and then bends down with difficulty to place the plant at the base of the headstone. When she tries to stand again, her leg gives way, forces her to stay in a kneeling position, her hand resting on the gravestone. She begins to sob. The deceased must be her grandchild.
I feel like I’m peeking behind the curtain. My first glimpse of Nesgrove in the flesh. Back at the motel, Maggie was a one-dimensional robot, sprouting lines, moving rigidly. Here she’s a person, bearing her soul in a way that most only do in complete privacy. And that’s why, despite the nightmare I’ve been living these last two days, I’m compelled to look away from her, to let her cry and grieve in peace.
I’m also more afraid than I was before. I’m not sure why. Maybe the gravestones are proof that the town really is cursed. Or if a curse doesn’t exist, it could be that these people have lost a lot and will do anything they can to stop the rot, including killing two unfortunate passers-by.
“We should go,” I whisper to Annie.
We slowly crawl on our hands and knees away from the church and Maggie. Back in the safety of the forest, we get to our feet. Making our escape, we keep constant check over our shoulders.
After a few minutes of treading through the woods, I start to worry about the direction we’re headed. We have no idea where we’re going, where this invisible path leads us. Christ, we could be walking around in circles for all we know. Everything looks the same.
“Annie, we’re in real danger of getting lost in here. We need to plan a route.”
No response comes so I glance over to her. She’s staring straight ahead, fixed on something. I look through the wood and catch sight of red and blue. It’s coloured material dangling from branches, like the white material dangling from the wooden cabin by the lake. And carved on some tree trunks we see that damn symbol again.
We reach the red and blue hanging cloths. There’s a lot of them, all attached to branches overhead. Their position marks out a large circle. In the centre of the circle is a tree with a wooden plaque nailed to it. There’s an inscription which reads, “They came in spring. Their gift was Rebirth in autumn.” I take a photo of it with my phone.
Annie grabs my arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
We still haven’t worked out a direction but we keep moving anyway. We wade through a sea of green and brown and that’s when we see the first one: the hooded man.
Chapter Thirty
He’s standing between two trees maybe twenty metres away, like an apparition no one ever wanted. His arms are by his side, legs in a wide stance as if ready to run. He’s wearing blue jeans and a brown jacket. Most distinctive of all, however, is the tattered grey hood, once an old pillowcase, over his head and the holes that have been cut out for his eyes to see through.
Annie and I instinctively freeze and I scan him for any little detail, anything that tells me if he’s friend or foe. We wait for him to act first.
He’s perfectly still. So still I wonder if he’s even seen us. As the seconds pass, I begin to suspect he’s simply a mannequin; another grotesque surprise by the sane folks of Nesgrove.
His right hand twitches. Just a small movement but one that sends a similar twitch to my legs. They’re primed for escape.
He’s definitely a person.
He slowly brings his hand to his mouth and lets out a sound so terrifyingly familiar that instead of running, my legs feel glued to the ground.
“Yeep, yeep,” the man calls out. His voice is carried in the air and cuts through the morning calm.
“Yeep, yeep,” a call comes back.
“Yeep, yeep,” comes another from somewhere else.
“Yeep, yeep,” a quieter voice filters through the forest.
I search desperately for the source of each voice. My feet become unglued, and Annie and I are both stumbling backwards. We can’t run because the voices are everywhere, all around.
Another apparition, a woman, steps from behind a tree to our left. A dirty, yellow hood covers her head. She plants her feet on the ground, head cocked to one side as if listening for any faint sound we make.
There’s movement to our right. A round man, green hood, strides towards us. It feels like he’s charging directly at us. His fat legs bursting through his pants, trundle forward, belly-flopping left to right. He stops abruptly about twenty metres away, close enough for us to hear his breathing, to see his breath push the hood in and out where his mouth is. He watches us without moving. His grey T-shirt has a coffee stain running down from his chest to his bulging stomach. I don’t know why that frightens me.
Everywhere around us silence is replaced by footsteps crunching on dry leaves, loose stones being kicked, twigs breaking; each sound louder and louder until the crescendo reaches its climax and the dead are summoned from Nesgrove.
Men and women, hooded and eyeless, emerge from the green and brown and almost sail along the carpet of mist.
Once they’ve encircled us, they stop moving.
Annie whispers to me to stay calm.
I’m anything but calm.
With each breath, their hoods puff out then in, out then in. Some have their heads cocked to one side, like the woman before. They’re so close I’m sure they can hear the thumping of my heart. I catch a pair of brown eyes, dark and receded in a hood; they’re bloodshot but wide.
I wait for them to say something, do something, but instead they’re motionless apart from the rising and lowering of their chests as they breathe and watch and listen.
“What the fuck do you want?” Annie shouts at them.
Silence.
One of the figures, tall and muscular—maybe the lumberjack-looking man from the pub—has what seems to be dried blood caked on his hands and arms. Not his blood, clearly.
My hand is in my pocket, clenched around the penknife. I don’t remember putting it in there. Maybe the monster I inherited from my dad is close to the surface and bursting to hurt someone. This is the only time I’ve ever wanted that evil from him.
I’m tired of being a puppet on their string; being trapped for no good reason; being a victim in all of this.
Without thinking, my legs start moving. I’m running toward a thin man with a dark blue hood. I’m going to hit him, barge through him, do anything to break this fucking circle. He doesn’t move a muscle, not so much as a flinch as I bare down on him.
“Jack, don’t!” screams Annie.
For a second or two, the air is split by a shrieking noise, like a high-pitched fog horn. It stops me in my tracks.
In unison, the circle of hooded figures all look into the sky and they hold their gaze up there.
As I go to yell to Annie to start running while our captors are distracted, I see a single hooded man who stands out, slim with an orange T-shirt, casting a glance around at his fellow hoods. He signals with his hand for us to come closer.
We both hesitate.
He signals again and hisses, “We don’t have much time.”
He breaks the circle and starts striding away from us. Annie and I glance at each other. She looks as bewildered as I feel. We both run through the gap in the circle until we reach the man.
“We only have a few minutes, so please don’t talk,” he says.
I don’t recognise his voice.
“You’re not alone here,” he continues. “You’ve got help.”
“Why are they doing this?” I ask and look over my shoulder. The circle of hoods are motionless, still transfixed on something in the sky, almost as if they’re receiving a message from somewhere. Something beyond the circles catches my attention. The man in the black suit is casually leaning against a tree. He lifts his hand and waves at me.
The hooded man pulls me back to him and Annie but ignores my question. “There are only two ways for you to free yourself from Nesgrove. The first is by car. Your car. We know where the wheels are.”
His use of the word ‘we’ comforts me.
“But if you do escape by car, you’ll be in trouble. The police planted evidence in the trunk. They’ve framed you for Sally Adams’ murder.”
“So she was murdered?” I ask.
“They’ve got the murder weapon and gloves and have somehow contaminated everything with your DNA. Basically, you’re left with option number two.” He checks his watch. “We need to hurry.”
I’m not paying attention to where we’re walking. I’m dodging every bush and tree as it comes while trying to process everything he’s saying.
“What’s option number two?” I’m certain I don’t want to know the answer to that question.
For the first time, he looks at me, and I can see his blue eyes in the shadow of the hood. “The old cabin by the lake, the one you went to yesterday; you need to go there tonight before midnight. You need to confront the thing that’s in there.”
Chapter Thirty One: Three Years Later
Jack Coulson: Session Five
“Let’s talk about your degree, Jack,” Paul said. Today he wore brown sa
ndals that distracted me because they were so bloody ugly.
“My degree? What do you want to know?”
“You said you gave up writing after your degree because one of your short stories was rejected.”
“Shouldn’t we be talking more about my dad, instead? Isn’t he the reason why I am the way I am?”
“Of course we should talk about your dad. That’s why I’m asking you about your degree.”
“Okay, so yeah, that’s why I gave up writing.”
“I’m curious, didn’t you ever fail an essay at university?”
“Yeah, once.”
“When that happened, did it affect you the same way as your short story rejection?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“They were different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, you know, everyone got bad grades at university sometimes. And education is structured. The lecturers had a job to do. I was just another student, just another essay to mark.”
“And the person from the magazine who rejected your short story, were they doing their job?” He scratched his ear, searched my eyes with his.
“It felt more personal. What are you getting at?”
Paul went for his trademark move, dusted off his glasses on the sleeve of his brown jumper. I folded my arms and eyed him.
“Last session you said you were who you were. That you are hardwired to be the way you are. And yet, you faced the same type of rejection in two different situations but reacted entirely differently to each one.”
He placed his glass back on.
“Can’t I be hardwired to respond differently to different situations?”
“When you say ‘hardwired’ do you mean your DNA is encoded in a particular way that caused you to respond differently?”
I nodded.
“It seems very unlikely to me.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, our DNA is the result of a very long evolutionary journey, but one that more or less stopped a quarter of a million years ago. The makeup of our DNA is pretty much identical to the DNA of the first modern humans.”
