He’d found him. But everything was worse now—not better.
Holding his breath against that cloying grave stink, Parker gathered what was left of his father up in his big, thick arms and deposited him back into the coupe, folding the old sleeping bag over the top of him like he was tucking him into bed. Whispering a few quiet words, Parker ran his hand across his father’s desiccated brow a final time, then stood back up and shut the door tight again. There wasn’t anything more for him in there.
Farther back, Nate’s ghost stood in a small clearing, staring at his feet while the white trees swayed and bent in toward Parker like eager eavesdroppers. Parker walked up without looking too long at his dead friend, pausing in place to roll his head around on its pivot, twisting until the joints in his neck popped like overgrown knuckles.
Head cast down like a chastised child, Nate looked at Parker from under the line of his brow.
“What do you think happened?” That bitter edge had crept into the dead boy’s voice again, that sick, mean thing that needled at Parker’s nerves and had pushed him over the edge to pull the trigger that first time.
“I don’t know. Nothing good. Gets cold out here in the winter, you know? Really cold. Maybe he thought he could last it out, weather through the freeze inside the car. He knew how to hunt. He could find food out here if he needed to. He didn’t starve.”
“Yeah, no, I saw,” Nate said with a sneer. “Looked like he was trying to turn his wrists into ground beef with that bone-handled pocketknife of his.”
Parker’s stomach lurched at the thought. “It just doesn’t seem like him at all.”
“And what, fucking off into the great green yonder without any warning last year suddenly does?”
Parker glared at the ghost, and when he spoke, his words came out deathly serious and half-whispered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nate bugged his eyes out and threw his hands up, the universal gesture for don’t shoot the messenger. “I’m just saying, given the other weird shit surrounding the situation in toto, isn’t it possible that you’re not the authority on what he was and wasn’t capable of?”
“Shut. Your. Mouth,” Parker said, his voice like something rising out of the grave.
“Or what?” Nate taunted. “You gonna hit me? Shoot me again? Do it, pussy. See what happens. See who looks fucking stupid then. Face it, asshole—you’re stuck with me.”
Parker didn’t move, feeling the tension coil and vibrate in his shoulders, an overwound spring on the verge of exploding.
“You can never go back,” Nate said. “You have to know that by now, don’t you? You’ve gone too far, you’ve done too much bad shit for them to ever forgive you for it. Even if you manage to skip away from shooting me in the fucking face, what are you going to tell your mom? That you found dear old dad withered up like that? Or are you going to lie and say you never found him at all? You really think that you can lie about something like that for the rest of your life, big guy? Or the rest of hers?”
“Fuck you,” Parker said, holding his ground. “You don’t talk about them. You don’t know shit about them, or me.”
Nate’s eyes flashed to the side, just over Parker’s shoulder, and his lips pulled into a bitter smile.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck me. Got it. But you know what? Me and your dad are both dead, but only one of us came back for you. So maybe—just maybe—I might know a bit more than you think. Make do with what you’ve got, prick. I’m just trying to help you out. Keep you moving forward, onward and upward, you know, all that inspiring-type bullshit.”
Hearing him say it like that, something caught in Parker’s head, like a thread yanked from a knit sweater. He could already feel it all unraveling.
“You’re not, though. You’re not trying to help at all,” said Parker.
“The fuck are you talking about? Of course I am.”
“No, you’re not,” said Parker. “You’re just trying to wind me up. This whole time, all you’ve been doing is driving me crazy, making things harder than they needed to be. I was fine out here before you showed up,” the big kid said. “I was doing okay. And then I open my eyes yesterday morning, and you’re there with some song and dance about how you’re like, tied to me or something? What even is that? How would that even work?”
“You think I know?” Nate jeered. “I’m just trying to deal with it, man. I don’t know why you’re not.”
And just like that, Parker felt the thread pull completely loose, the knit falling apart around him. The question was so obvious, he truly couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked it before now.
“You’re not Nate, are you?”
Skitch.
WHACK.
Skitch.
WHACK.
Skitch.
The tip of Chloe’s improvised crutch bit into the ground as she stalked away through the trees, until the stiff clacking sound of Nicky piling rocks on top of rocks faded into the background noise of the forest. She marked the trees on her path with the hammer to guide her way back, leaving deep divots in the trunks as fast as she could swing her arm. She wasn’t complaining about having some time to herself. With the breeze, it was actually almost nice out here. As if anything in this stupid fucking forest could be called nice.
She tried not to think about Josh. She tried not to think about Adam. That … thing, whatever it was … it wasn’t their friend anymore. Adam wouldn’t—couldn’t—have done the things that creature did. Chloe imagined it out there, long and pale and spindly, watching from the shadows, waiting for the right time to strike. She’d wandered too far already; it was too late for her now. Nicky wouldn’t even hear her screams when she died.
No, stop it. Stop that shit right now. You can’t think like that. Might as well lie down and die right here if you let those thoughts take over, so stop already.
She was falling down that same black well that had taken Nicky so completely, she could see that. What her own mother called doom spiraling. And she knew that if she gave into that kind of thinking now, none of them were ever going to escape. She had to keep it together, just for a little longer. Just until they got out.
Squinting her eyes against the light, Chloe turned her head up to see how far the sun had traveled across the sky since she’d been walking—not very far at all. She’d been gone for twenty or thirty minutes at the most, hiking away from camp, scoring the trees as she limped, trying to clear her mind. An hour away from each other would doubtless do she and Nicky both some good.
WHACK. Chloe hacked out another little gap in another big tree and pressed on. The hole in her ribs ached something terrible, but it was at the very least a little familiar. She could rely on it, sort of like her new crutch. The branch under her armpit wasn’t even that uncomfortable anymore. It was a hundred times better than no crutch, anyway. She checked the sun again. Yeah, she could go a little farther before she’d have to turn back.
Through the trees, Chloe limped along, listening to the hush and warble of the forest around her, the blood ringing in her head. It was so quiet out here. Stopping for a second, she leaned backward, carefully stretching her spine, feeling the wind blow across her small, skinny frame, and heard the wind trill like it hadn’t before. She turned her ear to the wind, listening closer. It took her another minute, but yeah, she was able to pick up on it again. There, in the distance, a murmuring through the trees, the sound of something rising and falling, punctuated with furtive silences.
Were those … voices?
She stood there, listening to the round, muffled sounds of people speaking in the distance, too far away to make out individual words, but close enough to hear the music in it—the rising and falling, the pauses, the abrupt interjections, the stutters and false starts. There were at least two people out there, she could tell that much. She was definitely hearing a conversation.
Without warning, her mind flashed to images of police officers, firemen, some team of well-prepared emergency workers dispatched to fin
d them and bring them out of this endless green wasteland. Her heart leaped at the notion. We’re going to get out. We’re going to go home.
Home. Even the word sounded beautiful inside her head. Marking the trees as she hobbled along, Chloe followed the sound, listening to the voices as they grew clearer. There were two of them, one softer, the other louder.
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. Nothing good. Gets cold out here in the winter, you know? Really cold. Maybe he thought he could last it out, weather through the freeze inside the car. He knew how to hunt. He could find food out here if he needed to. He didn’t starve.”
“Yeah, no, I saw. Looked like he was trying to turn his wrists into ground beef with that bone-handled pocketknife of his.”
“It just doesn’t seem like him at all.”
“And what, fucking off into the great green yonder without any warning last year suddenly does?”
Cutting in between the low-hanging conifer branches, Chloe drew closer and closer to the argument. The voices themselves were familiar, somehow. Not firemen, not emergency workers. Something else. Keeping low and quiet, she crested the little hill that stood between her and the voices and peered through an open space in the branches.
Down ahead of her, there was a collection of those evil-looking white trees, the same kind as the one Adam had run her through with. She’d seen them scattered all over the forest, but their placement had never been so dense and deliberate as this. Bare and scabby, the white trunks all stood at attention, like watchful guards. Sentinel trees, she thought idly to herself. It almost would have been funny, if the thought of it didn’t creep her out so much.
Beyond the sentinel trees, she could see an old-timey car sort of buried in the ground, like it had been driven halfway into a pit and been abandoned. She’d never seen a car like that before. Standing not too far away from it were a pair of young men arguing in tense, raised voices. One of them, she recognized right away—she’d know her cousin’s enormous frame from a mile off—but her brain had to work to process the sight of the other one. He was familiar, but in a way that made her brain shiver a bit, like a frozen breeze had blown across its surface. It took her a second to realize, but when she did, her breath caught tight in her chest like an icy hook.
No.
There was no fucking way.
Nate?
In the middle of the clearing, Parker was talking to their dead friend, his broad back knotted tight with tension, his voice drawn and thin. Across from him, Nate stood with his arms crossed, a mean smirk stitched from cheek to cheek. Stooped there, Chloe had to admit that for someone who used to be dead, Nate looked pretty all right. The hole Parker had blown through his head had even healed over. Good for him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying, given the other weird shit surrounding the situation in toto, isn’t it possible that you’re not the authority on what he was and wasn’t capable of?”
“Shut. Your. Mouth.”
“Or what? You gonna hit me? Shoot me again? Do it, pussy. See what happens. See who looks fucking stupid then. Face it, asshole—you’re stuck with me.”
Chloe listened to the argument, shifting to try and see both of their faces, but she couldn’t get a good view of Parker’s. Nate’s, on the other hand, she could see just fine. He was grinning at Parker in that same superior way, his lips drawn thin and tight, the smile not even close to his beady black eyes. It was a crocodile smile, the kind you saw just before you got chomped and dragged under the waves.
Chloe knelt there in the trees, totally transfixed by the sight … and then Nate turned that smile on her.
It wasn’t an accident, a muscle twitch or an errant flicker of the eyes; it was too deliberate for that. No, he meant to do it, to turn his cinder block head and look her right in the eyes. It happened fast—so fast that she was almost sure that Parker missed it. But to Chloe, pinned there by fear and confusion, it was clear as day.
Nate saw her, and he fucking grinned.
Chloe flinched away from that horrible, dead-eyed smile and shrank back into the foliage, desperately trying to hide herself again, crouching down as low as she could against her crutch. Balancing herself precariously on the rough branch, Chloe tucked herself away and watched her cousin argue with a dead boy, praying that neither of them would turn and look her way again.
The ghost’s face twisted up like a pretzel, all its features turning in nauseating knots before bouncing back to its original configuration.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You’re not him,” Parker said to the apparition. “You never were.”
As he said it, Parker reared up, making himself as large as possible. He wanted to be angry; he wanted to explode with a blast of that same volcanic fury he’d felt back at the camp. But that rage had long burned off and buried itself in the ground, gone somewhere so deep that he couldn’t lay claim to it anymore. In its place, he’d found a kind of stony resignation, a chilly stubbornness that spread through his body like his veins were freezing. That adult voice, ringing in his head again.
“You look like him, and you’re mean like him, but you’re not him. You’re just wearing his face. So I’m done listening to you.”
The ghost scoffed. “What are you talking about, man?”
“The church. The knife. The way you keep knowing things before you should’ve been able to. Like you’ve been here before. Like you’ve seen all this before.”
“The knife? You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Nate raged. “Parker, you saw what I saw. Guy slashed his wrists all to shit. What d’you think he did it with, a rock or a leaf or something?”
“You said bone-handled,” Park said, his voice drawn like a garrote. “Why would you have said that if you didn’t already know?”
“Parker, you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is crazy. You realize that, right? You sound like a crazy person.” Nate—or the pretending thing that had assumed his form—didn’t say anything further, the smug grin on its expression melting away to a cold, dead neutral.
“No,” Parker said. “Crazy was believing that you could really be him. But Nate’s dead, and wherever he is, I don’t think he’s coming back. You’re just a shitty imitation.”
Underneath its stolen face, the ghost licked its teeth again and flashed a wide grin at Parker. The silence between them was enormous and obscene, and it lasted a lifetime.
“I tried to do this nice,” it said. “I really did.”
“What are you?” Parker asked.
“I’m a shitty imitation,” the ghost oozed, smiling. “I’m every awful thing you’ve ever done. I’m nothing. I’m whatever you want me to be.”
The dead thing’s face began to bubble and droop, a wax mask left to bake in the sun. It stepped back from Parker, looking less human by the second, a sly smile playing at the corners of its dribbling lips. “None of you have any idea what’s waiting for you out here. There are horrible things buried in this forest, and you children think you can dance atop the graves and walk away clean. But you’ll learn.”
Park shivered at the thing’s words, at the thought of all the awful dead things hiding in the trees around him. Left to the imagination, this place was filled with horrors. The ghost was proof enough of that. Shame and fear overwhelmed him. Parker had led his friends into a starving, open mouth, and then he’d been fool enough to fall for its tricks. No longer. The spell was broken, the glamour was falling off. The ghost bled like a watercolor. Its features smeared and melted into the air around it, slipping away drop by drop, leaving behind only the vaguest outline of a person, with two burning black eyes set deep in the smudge that used to be its head. It didn’t even bother using Nate’s voice now; the sound that issued forth from it was a malignant, guttural thing.
“None of you are going to last out here,” it said. “This forest eats people. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, it doesn’t matter how hard you fi
ght—you’ll die begging, and broken, and alone. Just like he did.” The ghost pointed one runny arm toward the car half-buried in the hard forest floor.
Then—legless, armless—it drifted toward the pale trees, blown along by a breeze that wasn’t truly there.
“You deserve what you get,” the ghost muttered as it seeped between the white trunks. “All of you.”
Then the ghost was gone, like he—it—had never been there at all.
Parker felt numb, like his whole body had been struck cold and dead. Standing there, hands bunched into bloodless club fists, he realized he couldn’t feel much of anything. His ears rang with the ghost’s threats, his mind reeling at the image of the hateful spirit melting away into nothing. This forest eats people. Parker was starting to understand how true that was.
There was a rustling close by. He turned and looked toward its source—a cluster of low trees at the top of the little hillock by the path. Suddenly, without the hatchet or the gun, he felt very exposed, almost naked. Nothing to do about it now, he supposed. Strapping his father’s watch tight around his wrist, Parker squared his shoulders, ready to throw himself at whatever it was that came through those bushes—ghost, monster, whatever.
Of all the things he was expecting to burst out of the forest, the small brunette girl with the sad smile carrying herself on an improvised crutch didn’t even make the list. At first, he didn’t even really believe it was her.
“Chloe?”
His cousin raised a hand toward him, a limp, half-hearted wave. “Hey, Parker.”
He rushed over to the bottom of the hillock to meet her, holding his arms out to catch her if her legs gave out, but she made it to the bottom despite her unsteady gait and waved him off, keeping her distance.
“What are you doing here?”
“I, uh … it’s complicated,” said Chloe.
“Is it … are you actually you?”
“Of course I’m me,” she said. “Who else would I be?”
He reached a hand out to touch her, but she flinched away, opening up a wound deep in his heart. Still he persisted, bridging the distance, feeling his fingertips sparkle with nerves. Please be real, he thought over and over, like a mantra, like a summoning. As if he could make it true if he wanted it hard enough. Please be real. Please be her. Not another trick. Anything but that.
The Night Will Find Us Page 18
