The Night Will Find Us

by Matthew Lyons

  “He had all night to crawl, Chloe. All. Night. You don’t know how far he might have gotten, okay?”

  Chloe had wanted to say Neither do you, but that wasn’t going to help anything. If Nicky wanted to shout her voice to sandpaper, that was her own business. After all, it wasn’t like Chloe had a better idea. Wandering around and screaming like a bunch of assholes was all they had right now. She pushed the thought away and raised the hammer again just as Nicky drew another breath. This time, they did it together:

  “Adam! Are you out there?” WHACK. “Adam!”

  Josh looked back at Chloe as she ripped the hammer free from another trunk.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said. “Yeah. Fine.”

  “As long as you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure. I just wish we were looking for something specific, instead of waiting for him to shout back.”

  Nicky spun in place, her face already taut with rage. “Okay, if you don’t like what we’re doing right now—”

  “Guys,” said Josh.

  “Nicky, I never said that—”

  “—then you can piss off back to the campsite—”

  “Uh, guys?”

  “I just think that if we had a plan of some sort—”

  “—because we can do this on our own!”

  “Hey!”

  Nicky and Chloe both stopped midsentence to look at Josh, who nodded off to the side of the path they’d been walking. “Look.”

  The two of them turned their eyes to see where Josh was looking. There was a sort of small grove in the middle of a cluster of trees, the growth uneven and battered, like it had recently been torn up. Or trampled over. Josh broke off from the two girls to get a little closer, squinting underneath the bill of his ball cap.

  “Stay here, okay? I just …” Josh trailed off.

  Chloe felt her brow knit itself into deep worry lines. “Just what?”

  Josh turned to look at her. “I’m going for a better look.”

  Before either Chloe or Nicky could protest, he stepped into the brush and the grove, bent low. The two of them watched him hunt around, keeping his eyes trained on the ground.

  “Oh, shit,” they heard him say after a moment. “Oh, shit.”

  “What is it?” There was an uneasy quaver in Josh’s voice that Chloe didn’t like the sounds of.

  He knelt to pull a plant out of the soil, holding it up for them to see. Its leaves were stained rusty red. “Blood.”

  Beside her, Nicky gasped. Chloe asked, “How much is there?”

  Looking around at the foliage by his feet, Josh’s face was grave. “A lot.”

  The girls followed him into the grove. It was smaller than it had looked from outside, just a small open space in the middle of the endless sea of trees. Nicky crossed over to the far side while Josh knelt back down where the grass had been flattened the most.

  “Look, I know I’m not like, some experienced woodland tracker or anything, but this is bad, right?” he asked.

  “It’s not good,” Chloe said, stepping over to stand next to him, trying to not look too closely at the messy red smears scattered across the leaves. The smell of dull copper still hung in the air like a hex.

  “There’s a trail over here,” Nicky called to them. “It goes on for a long ways.”

  Josh looked at Chloe, anxiety stitched across his face.

  “You think it’s Adam?”

  She nodded her head. “I don’t know who else it would be.”

  “I mean … we should follow it, right?” Nicky’s voice quavered. Chloe looked back to see that her expression had softened a little bit for the first time all morning. She supposed hope had a way of doing that to people.

  “Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “Yeah, we should. Nicky, you lead the way. We’re right behind you.”

  “All right,” Nicky said. “Babe, you okay to go?”

  Josh nodded, tearing his eyes away from the ground. “Yeah, I’m cool. Let’s go find him.”

  Following the thin trail of blood, the three of them filed out of the grove, into the dark of the woods once more. As they passed into the shadows, Chloe brought the hammer down across another tree.

  WHACK.

  Up ahead, Nicky drew another deep breath and cupped her hands around her lips.

  “Adam? ADAM, WE’RE HERE! CAN YOU HEAR US?”

  The words danced through the trees like fire, distant but deliberate. Nicky. Parker couldn’t tell how close she was exactly, but it couldn’t have been that far. She wouldn’t be alone, either. Beside him, Nate cracked a wide, cruel grin.

  “Well, now, that is definitely a surprise,” the ghost said. “Thought you’d left them behind. Looks like it’s not so easy to get away from all your problems, is it?”

  Parker pushed a low branch out of his way and kept walking. “Shut up.”

  “They’re going to come for you, you know,” Nate said. Parker could hear the smile in his voice, that sick little upturn at the edges of each word. “I’m serious, man. They’re going to find him, and then after that, they’re going to come and kill you.”

  Parker kept walking, feeling the comfortable pressure of the revolver in the waistband of his pants, the weight of the hatchet in his hand, and thought of his dad hewing his initials into the white tree in the middle of that burned-out house. He was close to him—closer than he’d been in a long time. He wasn’t going to stop now.

  If his friends wanted to come and hunt him down before he did what he needed to do, they were welcome to try.

  He was done hiding.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before they found the cave: a yawning, jagged hole blown in the side of a house-sized rock that looked like it had been here ever since some elder god had fastballed it into the earth. Josh saw it first, pointing to it through the trees.

  “What if he made it all the way in there?” he said in a tone that sounded like he hoped he was wrong, or that the two girls would veto the suggestion.

  They didn’t.

  The three of them had followed the trail of blood all the way out here, and it sure looked like it was leading them to the mouth of cave. They weren’t going to stop now.

  The area around the cave was rocky and bare, save for the dead white tree that sprouted out of the earth beside it. They closed in on it in single file, their boots rough against the craggy ground. Thin and uneven as it was, the trail of blood was unmistakable, smeared in rusty hooks and scythes across the grass and soil and rocks. The stains led into the cave, but not out again.

  He was in there. He had to be in there.

  Nicky was the first one to step forward, bending over to call half-heartedly into the dark.

  “Adam?”

  Nothing.

  “Adam, it’s … it’s Nicky. We know what happened with … with Parker. We came to help.”

  More silence. Chloe and Josh exchanged a grave look, but said nothing. Ahead of them, Nicky leaned farther into the cave and cleared her throat.

  “Adam, please just say something …”

  A groan, low and wheezy, shook from deep in the cave. Nicky’s eyes bugged out, and before Josh or Chloe could stop her, she dove into the cave in a quick, catlike lunge, her long, lithe body disappearing into the shadows.

  Everything went quiet. The moment stretched out until forever. Chloe couldn’t breathe, couldn’t look away, couldn’t do anything but silently pray Please come back, please come back, please come back until Nicky emerged again, stooped over and dragging what Chloe thought—at first—was a bag of garbage. It took her a second to realize the ugly truth.

  It was Adam, but at the same time, it wasn’t. The creature that Nicky had dragged out of the cave had Adam’s face, wore Adam’s clothes, but it wasn’t really him. This boy, this thing, was bent and warped, its skin clammy and so pale they could see the web of blue veins running underneath the surface like a madman’s atlas. His spine was curved forward like a fishhook, while his head had arched
so far back it was nearly pressing between his shoulder blades. One of his legs was soaked in blood, the jeans torn and soaked through with rusty red around the knee. His mouth was ringed with messy purple stains and his eyes fluttered open and shut, bloodshot to bright red; he shielded them from the light with a strained, bony hand Chloe could almost see through. In his other hand he clutched a broken branch, long and sharp and bone white. Chloe was sure he’d torn it from the tree at the mouth of the cave, but she couldn’t tell where from. Adam pressed the branch to his sunken chest like a crucifix, his fist so tight that Chloe was sure his bones would break through the skin.

  The heat coming off of him was astonishing. He boiled the air around him in thick, cloying waves, the alien radiation revolting against his friends’ skin. It was like his fever had caught a fever. He twitched and shuddered in place, muttering to himself, whatever nightmare he was having bubbling to the surface in half-words and syllables sheared from the larger whole, totally incomprehensible.

  “. . . e’s he . . . s’tchin . . . Sho . . . l’t . . . ve ten th . . . uit . . . let mys . . . d . . . Jus . . . ese . . . jus . . .”

  The three of them stared down at their friend, this broken, monstrous imitation of the boy they used to know, with disgust and horror.

  After a moment, Josh whispered, “What happened to him?”

  “I … I don’t know …” Nicky’s voice was strained and pitched, a violin string tightened to the verge of breaking. “I don’t know … God, he … he didn’t look like that yesterday …”

  No shit, Chloe thought, not unkindly. Still, she knew that they couldn’t just stand here and do nothing while he suffered. Josh and Nicky weren’t making any moves, so she supposed it was up to her. Again.

  She knelt down over Adam, trying to get a better look at his face. His bloodshot eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets without seeing, his hair was glued to his forehead with sweat, and his lips were drawn back in a thin, deathlike rictus, exposing every tooth in his head all the way back to the hinge of his jaw. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t okay. There had to be something they could do to help.

  Chloe extended a hand to brush the blood-spackled hair away from his brow but paused when Nicky made a choked little animal noise in the pit of her throat.

  “No, no, Chloe, don’t,” Nicky said. “Please.”

  Chloe turned to look at her. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just … please don’t touch him. Please. I tried to touch him in the cave, and he freaked. The only way I could get him out was by dragging him by the shirt.”

  “Nicky, it’s okay,” Chloe told her. “If he freaks, he freaks. He’s sick. He’s hurt, and he’s scared. He needs a doctor.”

  She set one hand on Adam’s clammy gray forehead and immediately knew that it was a mistake. There was something wrong with his skin, something slick and vile, like running her palm across a snake’s back. The feel of it turned her stomach in a hard, vomit-inducing flop. She tried to jerk her hand away, but it was already too late.

  She didn’t see Adam move so much as she felt it, the speed and force of him too fast to be witnessed by the naked eye. Underneath her small hand, she felt him lash out and hit her in the stomach with a whack, just like she’d been marking the trees along their path. She stumbled back, struggling to take a breath. Operating seemingly of their own accord, Chloe’s legs kicked and thrashed out, bicycling her away from her friend, sending her tumbling onto her back with a heavy thump where the rocky ground met the forest floor. Eyes toward the sky, Chloe tried to find purchase and get back to her feet, but her body wouldn’t obey, her limbs buzzing and gummy. Why wasn’t her body working the way it was supposed to?

  Nicky screamed, staring at her with wide, horrified eyes, and Chloe followed her eyes down to try and see what was freaking her out so bad.

  Oh.

  The branch stuck out of her rib cage where Adam had driven it into her, a white dagger punched straight into her midsection. Blood welled out from around the ashy wood, soaking into her shirt in a slow wave that gained speed the longer she lay there and watched it. It was a curious thing, like a growth she’d sprouted abruptly and without warning—part of her, but entirely separate in its newness. Unbidden, her mind vortexed around this new addition for a moment longer, unable to make any sense of it in the framework of what her life and her body had been up until this point.

  Then the pain hit, and Chloe started to scream too.

  Her entire world contracted into a little shell of bone-wracking agony that set her every nerve on fire. For one awful, fleeting moment, Chloe could feel every inch of herself illuminated by the pain as it traveled through her body, slashing and burning and pinballing back to the epicenter, the new hole in her belly and the jagged trespasser that had opened it. The screams poured from her with the blood, as if they’d been trapped there for years, just looking for a way out. In the fog beyond the pain, Chloe could hear her friends barking madly at each other, their voices draped with panic and confusion. It was a funny noise, totally abstract in its urgency.

  “Don’t pull it out of her, don’t pull it out of her—!”

  “Josh, she’s bleeding!”

  “And she’s going to bleed a whole lot more if you pull it out! It’s the only thing keeping her insides inside right now!”

  “You’re not a doctor, Josh! You were only in Boy Scouts for like three years! You don’t know shit!”

  “My dad’s a doctor—”

  “I don’t care about your doctor dad right now!”

  “He taught me some first aid, Nicky! So, yeah, I think that in this case, I know a little bit more than you!”

  “Oh, fuck off—”

  Nicky fell into Chloe’s field of vision and smiled at her, the first real smile Chloe had seen on Nicky’s face since yesterday afternoon. She was so beautiful when she smiled.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Nicky said. Her voice was like warm honey, or sunshine that had been somehow transmuted into sound. “I promise. I’m going to get this out of you. Just hold on, okay?”

  Behind her, Josh barked, “Wait, Nicky, don’t—!”

  Then Nicky curled her hands around the branch and pulled.

  The pain came back like a bomb set off inside Chloe’s guts. It was too much; the suffering too enormous to be fully comprehended. Her mind couldn’t wrap around the sheer force and scale of it.

  Nicky was a liar. She was hurting her on purpose. That was the only explanation.

  Nicky pulled on the branch again, jerking it back and forth inside her, and Chloe screamed again, louder, trying to thrash away from Nicky’s clumsy cruelties, but it was no good. She couldn’t move, pinned to the earth by the pain. Her eyes rolled in nauseous circles inside her head, searching for something, anything to distract her from the hurt and the panic and the fear.

  In the moments before she finally passed out, Chloe swore she saw Adam, bent and gnarled, rise up from the ground and sprint into the trees. Parker said he shot him in the leg …

  Nicky yanked again. Darkness started to crowd in at the corners of Chloe’s vision, and for a moment, she thought Well, at least if I pass out, it won’t hurt as much. But there was something behind the darkness, something deep and old that wore the emptiness like a mask. Images rose up out of the shadows like memories, clutching at her with cold, stick-like corpse fingers. She didn’t know what she was seeing, but it was too late to do anything but sink. The thing in the darkness had her now.

  Chloe’s eyes sank shut, and she saw.

  The young woman ran through the forest, her lungs burning from the cold, but she didn’t slow, didn’t dare stop. She couldn’t afford to. Not now. Not when he was so close behind. She didn’t know what he would do to her if he caught up to her. Was it even an if anymore, or was it simply a matter of when? She no longer knew.

  The memories passed through her mind like waves in a river, impossible to catch or hold. Her head felt suddenly full, as if she was no longer alone with her
thoughts. She’d been going for too long. She was too tired. She could barely remember her own name anymore. The details had started to bleed away, like she’d been stuck with a blade or something worse, ebbing out of her in tidal pulses that kept time with her heartbeat. She’d been losing pieces of herself ever since she’d fled Mount Holly, she could see that now. She’d had to leave those pieces behind if she wanted any chance of surviving. The woman who escaped this would no longer be herself, but someone—something—else entirely. Until then, she only knew she had to get away, and fast.

  She crested a hill and came to a clearing around a great old tree, an ancient, twisted black oak that stood above all the rest. It stood alone in a field of dark soil, its branches thick and curled with age, its roots thicker than a man’s legs, knotted and half-buried in the earth. There was a hollow in its heart, an empty, dark space that she might be able to fit into if she squeezed herself just right.

  That voice—the Voice of the Lord—has led me here, she told herself. The Lord has a plan for me.

  The Lord will protect me.

  Bracing one foot against the closest root, she clamped both hands around a low-hanging branch and lifted herself up into the hollow. Making herself very small, she nestled inside the trunk, curling back into the soft bark and black, crumbling heartwood, hoping the shadows would be enough to hide her if (when) he came this way. From where she’d tucked herself, she could still see a scrap of sky in the distance, through the other trees, a window leading off into infinity. She could hide here, and with a little luck, he’d pass her by, the skeleton man with his ghosts and his madness, his hatchet and his fires.

  She was exactly where she needed to be.

  There was a horrible ripping noise from inside her body, and Chloe’s eyes snapped open again as she woke to the sound of screaming she only distantly understood as her own.

  She was back. Not coffined in some tree. She was here. She was here.

  Briefly, Chloe had the feeling of being unplugged, as if she was a lamp or a toaster that had been popped from the wall socket, all the power cut in a single yank. Useless. Nicky was still kneeling over her, now cradling the bloody, jagged branch in both hands, her eyes dancing back and forth from it to Chloe and back again.