The Night Will Find Us
Page 21
“Except for the fact that the forest doesn’t want us to leave,” she said.
“Yeah, except for th—”
A distant scream split the night around them, the sound of it ragged and horrible and far too clear to be anything but human. Chloe nearly jumped off the tree, twisting her whole body to look back toward the glow of the campfire, her eyes painfully wide. She couldn’t see much from where they stood, just the fire and three empty sleeping bags.
Wait.
A blast of cold exploded in her stomach.
“Oh, Christ, Nicky,” she gasped.
15
The voice, high and lilting, cut through Nicky’s dreams like a hot razor, starting at the very outermost edges, slicing deeper and deeper inward until the sound of it was all she could hear.
“Nicky… Help… Help …”
Curled up in her sleeping bag on the bottom of the ocean, she rolled over and fought to stay underneath the heavy black waves. Sleep was good. Sleep was safe. When she was asleep, she didn’t have to think about or feel anything that she didn’t want to. At night, in dreams, she could be anywhere she wanted, be anyone she needed to be. Yet the voice pierced every last layer, a bright, bladed beacon sent to raise her from the half-death of sleep, back to the land of the living.
“Nicky, I’m … hurt … Nicky, please …”
She felt herself surfacing from the depths, crashing through vertical miles until she found herself laying on the forest floor again, bundled in nylon and still as scared and angry as she’d been when she’d closed her eyes. Gradually, she let her eyes hinge open, adjusting to the darkness that had fallen around her, watching the camp-fire shadows that danced and played across the trees in the distance. She lay there and gazed at the flickering shapes as they jumped and skittered, warped in on themselves and became something new, then changed again.
After a time, she blinked the fog of sleep away and craned her neck farther out of the bag, straining to hear that voice wending through the night again. A moment later, it came to her once again, floating on wings wrought from the breeze itself. So light, so delicate, but there. Undeniably there.
“Babe, I’m here … I need … help …”
Josh.
He was out there. He was still alive. Jesus Christ, she’d buried him alive.
Screaming out in horror, Nicky was out of her sleeping bag in a heartbeat, her pulse a machine-gun death beat in her temples. Her whole body throbbed along with the rhythm, the veins in her neck and in her legs nearly singing with pressure. She took off into the dark without hesitation, fleeing the light, not even pausing to pull on her shoes. She could go barefoot. Her soles could take the drubbing; it was a small price to pay to get him back.
“Just like that, love,” his voice urged her on, louder now, clearer. “Come on, I’m so close. All you have to do is reach out, and I’ll be there …”
Nicky scrambled into the woods, madly flailing her hands out in front of her face, slapping away low-hanging branches and patches of scrub that dared stand in her way. Thorns and broken sticks and brambles slashed at her bare skin, leaving red-hot welts in their wake, but she didn’t notice or care if she did. Getting to him was more important.
“I’m coming,” she whispered to herself.
“I know you are. I’m so excited to see you. I love you so much …”
“I love you too,” gasped Nicky. All around her, the forest hunched up its shoulders and enfolded her inside itself while she outraced the campfire light, sprinting madly into the dark. She’d always been fast on her feet, ever since she was a little kid, but only now did it feel like there was a purpose to it, a reason. Josh was out there, and she would find him, wherever he was. She could be there in an instant if she wanted to. Her legs would carry her.
He was somewhere out there, and when she found him, everything was going to be worth it. All the blood and pain and loneliness would have paid for something, and she was never going to let him go again.
She was so close now. She could almost feel the warmth of his skin in the trees ahead of her, barely out of her grasp. But not for much longer.
Nicky kept running.
They followed the sound of her crashing through the trees as fast as they could, limping through the darkness in pursuit of their friend. The hole in Chloe’s ribs screamed with pain as she juddered along, so much worse than it had been before, but she swallowed back the agony and kept pace, nearly dragging herself forward by the stick nocked tightly under her armpit. The ground was rough and uneven, hard to navigate in the shadows, but she managed it, though going slower than she would have liked.
Pausing for a moment, Chloe drew a deep breath and raised her head to the night sky.
“Nicky!” she howled. “Nicky, wait!”
Overhead, the moon slipped free of the clouds, a cold, white scythe shearing the darkness apart, casting scattered light across the forest floor. Chloe squinted through the scant glow, trying to see any sign of her friend, but finding nothing.
“What would she run for?” chuffed Parker, a few strides ahead. “Why would she even do that?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe panted back. “I have no idea.”
Somewhere in the distance before them, the scream came again—closer now, but no less horrible. Chloe drew up short and pulled in another lung-bursting breath.
“Nicky, we’re coming! Just tell us where you are!”
Only silence greeted her. Up ahead, Parker stopped and turned back to face her. “We can’t keep going like this,” he said. “We’re going to get lost.”
“Just a little farther,” said Chloe. She could still see the campfire behind them, though judging by how small it was, they’d already gone deeper into the trees than she’d thought. “We can go a little farther and be okay, right?”
Parker’s face looked unsure. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Probably.”
“Good enough for me.” Chloe threw herself forward again, ignoring a fresh howl of agony from her wound.
They were going to find Nicky. She couldn’t lose anyone else.
The two cousins dashed into the night until the fire back at their camp was just a far-off pinprick of light in the distance. That’s when the wave hit her. At first it had been faint; another tidal rush of the low-level dread she’d been nursing ever since Parker had pulled the gun on Friday, exhaustion and nerves fucking with her again. But when the wave really hit, her body lit up with a searing black light that rose from the earth and soil, from inside her, and dragged her completely under.
Instantly, the dread was all she could feel. It eclipsed the burning in her lungs, the pain blowing through her ribs, the rubber in her legs. It all washed away, little more than thin silt to that churning black crash. Stumbling underneath its weight, Chloe stabbed her crutch out into the soil to keep from toppling over, then pitched forward anyway and retched.
Beside her, Parker recoiled, then lunged forward to catch her, as if she were falling. She might have been falling. She might have never stopped. She couldn’t tell anymore.
“Jesus, Chloe—”
“We shouldn’t be here,” she gasped, dribbles of green vomit from her lips staining his forearms. “We shouldn’t … something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong here. It’s in the earth, and the trees … Jesus, Parker, what the fuck is happening?”
“What is it?” Parker asked, bracing her in place, holding her upright, his big slab arms surprisingly tender. He’d always been gentle with her, even when they were kids.
“Just … oh, god …” she gasped, trying and failing to suppress a dry heave. In the distance, another scream rang out, pinballing madly off the trees, but she only barely heard it over the din roaring beneath her skin.
“We can stop,” said Parker. “We can stop here for a minute.”
“No, we can’t! Parker, she’s out there—she’s out there, and she’s going to die,” Chloe stuttered, straining uselessly against him. It was like trying to shove past a brick wal
l. “We’re the only ones who can help. We have to, we have to help—”
“I know. I know, Chloe. Here, just breathe for a second,” he said. “Okay? We’ll catch up with her, I promise. Just try and catch your breath.”
Eyes still shut, she let him lead her, one arm locked around her shoulders.
“Here,” he said, guiding her to a place where dead leaves crunched underfoot. “Just lean here for a minute, all right? There’s a tree right in front of you, okay? All you have to do is reach out and lean against it. Do you think you can hold yourself up?”
Eyes shut tightly, she sucked cold air into her lungs and held it there, trying to get her body back under her own control. Breathing out in a thin stream, she nodded in what she thought was his direction.
“Okay,” Parker said. “Okay. Just … here. Just keep your hands out. It’s literally right in front of you. Just like that, okay, easy now …”
He guided her slowly until she was moving under her own power again. For half a second, everything was quiet. Everything was calm. She was going to be okay.
Then she opened her eyes and saw it at the last moment—a flash of dead, ash-white bark, the exact texture of a scab.
“Oh fuck, Parker, no—!”
But it was too late. Chloe pitched forward, and her body, the traitor, reflexively stuck both hands out to catch itself against the sentinel tree, despite the voice in her head screaming Don’t touch it don’t touch it, please don’t fucking touch it—
Her bare palms slapped the ugly white wood as one, and for a second, she didn’t feel anything.
Then, she felt everything.
Reality fell away from her in mangy clumps. She felt it collapse out from under the soles of her shoes, leaving her floating in an empty void, her heart and guts stuck in that motionless, held-breath moment before the roller coaster plunge. She tried to draw breath, but there was no air for her to breathe. She tried to move, but there was nowhere for her to go. She was trapped in the nothing and nowhere, locked in her own body for a single, horrible moment that lasted lifetimes, until a new reality began to assemble itself around her. Piece by piece, it materialized, and she found her footing, coming to rest on a tiny patch of dirt while the forest fell into place.
It was daylight again. Or still. She had no idea how long she’d been standing here, bathing in the cold white glow like this. She craned her neck toward the bleached-out sky. The sun hung overhead, perfectly still and punishingly close, yet she felt no heat. She watched as the trees swayed and danced in the breeze, but felt no wind against her skin. The forest around her seemed somehow thin, as if it were made from papier-mâché. Like all it would take was working her bare hands into the fragile cracks to tear it apart in sheets.
This was the forest, but it wasn’t her version of the forest. She hadn’t seen this place yet.
She surveyed her surroundings as they drifted into place. Close by, she could hear footsteps, quick and light, getting closer. Chloe turned to look and saw a young woman come running out of the trees. She wasn’t much older than Chloe herself—perhaps twenty—and she was wearing a long black dress, her battered leather shoes moving briskly underneath its hem. Her face was blister-red around spaced-out eyes, puffy cheeks smeared with earthy black stains, slashed through with tear tracks. Standing there, watching her approach, Chloe raised a hand and waved, but the girl took no notice of her. She didn’t seem to see her standing there at all.
Chloe knew who she was. She’d seen her before, in the middle of the night, standing in a field as an estate house burned behind her.
Mary Kane. Her name was Mary Kane.
The girl whipped past her without a glance, and as if dragged along by some invisible cord, Chloe followed. Automatically, she winced and braced herself against a fresh shock of pain from the hole in her ribs, but the pain never came. Padding after the strange young woman, Chloe found she could move effortlessly, like she’d never been gored at all. Idly, one of her hands went to the spot in her side where the wound had been punched into her, but there was nothing there. No blood, no sodden hole driven through her flesh, no explosion of hurt.
She looked down and felt a sickening vertigo lurch when she realized she couldn’t see her feet. She couldn’t see them, because her feet weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere. They were just … gone. It was the same with her legs, her midsection, her arms, her chest, all of her. Oh. She was in another memory, vision, nightmare, whatever. Good to know.
Letting herself be pulled along through the trees, Chloe took a mental inventory of the things she’d seen before. There had been the scarecrow man, the maid, the dead family, and the burning house. The escape into the forest. The strange, hypnotic voice whispering to Mary from inside her own head. The massive old oak. She could feel the way Mary had felt, escaping the tall man’s clutches again, the elation of escape and bottomless shame at what she’d let him do to the Ganders family. They hadn’t deserved that. They’d been patient and kind and good, and Simon had slaughtered them like they were cattle, while Mary ran.
Every so often, Chloe would glance at their surroundings, pausing to get as best a read as she could on where they were, where they’d been, where they were going. She knew that Mary didn’t have any sort of plan, but still the older girl ran on with blind determination, Chloe dogging her every step. Every so often, a sound would slip free of the trees behind them, an odd note here or there, too musical to be a mistake. It happened a few times before Chloe understood.
Someone back there was singing.
The two girls sprinted past a winding creek and over another hill to a place where the trees suddenly just … stopped, making way for a wide clearing that looked like a scar riven into the earth, a stretch of empty ground surrounding an ancient, gnarled tree. Chloe had seen this before too.
It must have stood a hundred feet high, maybe two hundred, with heavy, knuckled branches grasping out from its massive, knotted trunk, and leg-thick roots stitched into the earth around it in a rough circle. There was a hole torn in its side that she liked the look of—a man-sized hollow filled with shadow, sheltered from the midday sun.
Black soil crunched under Mary’s feet as they approached the enormous old oak tree. Chloe looked to Mary, her face scrunched up in thought, and felt what the girl was feeling: her lungs burning, her legs nearly dead, her head pounding, her hands starting to go numb. A body wasn’t meant to go this far for this long. She didn’t have much left in her now. All she wanted to do was rest.
Mary didn’t hesitate. Chloe watched as she braced herself against the half-buried roots and then heaved herself up and into the hollow part of the trunk, nestling her body down to hide in the shadows. Everything went quiet after that. Even Chloe, invisible as she was, held her breath.
He burst from the tree line only moments later, tall and deathly lean, with a joyless grin held so perfectly still on his face that it might as well have been carved into the flesh. In one hand, he held the black hatchet, spinning it around and around like the counterweight of a clock.
When had he closed the distance between them? How had he moved so fast?
He walked like a cartoon skeleton or a broken marionette, his movements jerky and awkward; it was as if at any moment, he might burst apart into all the individual pieces that made up his hideous whole. Crossing the clearing to stand beside him, Chloe inspected his face up close. He wasn’t good-looking to begin with, but the gauntness of his body and the way his skin looked like wet paper draped lazily around a cheap Halloween decoration made him look positively ghastly. He carried himself with the bearing of a once-bigger man who had grown terribly thin. His mottled, liver-spotted skin hung in loops and folds around the edges of him, the loose flaps of his jaws and neck drawn tight by his god-awful, gray-toothed smile. There was something wrong with his eyes too—the irises were too pale, the pupils too wide.
Instinctively, Chloe conjured up his name from another stolen memory.
Phipps. Reverend Simon Phipps.
Chloe wanted to scream out to the girl in the tree, tell her to run, hide, go anywhere but here, but Mary wouldn’t—couldn’t—hear her. Because this wasn’t really happening. Chloe understood that now. She hadn’t fallen into an alternate dimension, a different world, nothing like that; she’d crashed through into a memory that wasn’t hers, and memories didn’t change just because you wished hard enough.
Slowly, almost delicately, Phipps stepped in close to the ancient tree, running one skeletal hand across its ashy old wood, getting a feel for its texture. He didn’t even look at the girl curled inside the hollow as he stroked his fingertips across the trunk.
“Hello, my dear.”
For a moment, Chloe was unsure if he’d actually spoken or if someone else had snuck up on them while she wasn’t looking. Where Phipps’s singing voice had been a sonorous, almost beautiful baritone, when he spoke, the words came out parched and reedy, like a broken rattle. Inside the tree, Mary shrank back into the little corner of shadow that she had left, crossing her arms over her chest, like that would protect her from anything. Chloe could feel the way her nerves chattered under her skin as he drew near, worsening when he spoke to her. Mary didn’t say a word, too paralyzed with fear to even move her lips.
Standing there, Chloe watched as the reverend’s smile split wide open, revealing rows of crooked yellow-gray teeth, all mismatched, like they’d been pulled from a dozen different heads and assembled haphazardly inside Phipps’s lopsided mouth. He rolled his shoulders, then his neck, twisting until the joints all popped. With a flash of his arm, he buried the hatchet blade in the wood just above Mary’s head, cleaving a line down the grain, then reared back and did it again, horizontally this time, leaving a crude cross hacked into the wood. Mary cried out with each impact, flinching away from each swing, but Phipps didn’t seem to hear her; he just went on, driving gash after gash into the dry trunk, stopping only when he’d covered the big old tree with crosses. When he was finished, he juddered his bones around to stand before the hollow once more, holding his arms straight out to his sides, grinning face turned up toward the sky, like a man reveling in his own crucifixion.