And then the line went dead.
No, no, no, no, no—
A notification popped up in the center of the screen.
No Service.
Up at the top, the service bar had vanished, replaced by an X icon. Hands trembling, Chloe resisted the urge to scream. Of course. Of course it had happened like that. Why would anything start being fair now?
Still. It had been enough to download her messages. That wasn’t nothing, she supposed. Chloe brought up her texts and thumbed at the most recent one, from her mom.
Chloe, please just come home. We’re all so worried about you. We love you more than anything and we just want you to be safe. Please come home.
4:02AM, 5/28
Sorting through the rest, she found they were all variations on that same theme, steadily decreasing in panic as Chloe wound the clock back, scrolling through four days of Mom-texts, all the way back to the one she’d fired off Friday evening.
Have fun with your friends, sweetheart! You earned it. Senior year, here you come! I’m so, SO proud of you. Love, Mom.
9:30PM, 5/25
She’d even followed it up with a string of emojis, because of course she had. Nobody used emojis when anything was seriously wrong. Stifling a surge of tears, Chloe stared at her mom’s text messages for a long time before thumbing over to the voice mails, picking one stamped yesterday morning, from her dad. Selecting it and hitting Play, she held the phone to her ear.
“Hey, Scooter, not sure if you’re getting this or not, but I just thought you should know I love you. We love you. Your mom loves you. Whatever’s going on, wherever you are right now, I hope you’re okay. I miss you, and we’ll be waiting for you to get home. Just come home soon, okay? Please come home. As quick as you can. Please. I love you.”
She went through all of them, one by one. Aunt Lori’s messages—both voice and text—were garbled, but Chloe got the gist. It wasn’t a surprise that she was drunk, especially now, but at least she was trying. That was something. The numbers she hadn’t recognized were from the Randolph Police Department, then from someone at the New Jersey State Police. Both basically the same. Totally useless.
The phone buzzed in her hand again, and she pulled it back from her face to look. It read 5% Low Battery! for a moment, then the screen went black and stayed that way.
“No, no, no!” she wailed, clicking madly at the power button. But it was no good. The battery had finally given out. She was alone again. Wiping a fresh spill of tears from her face, Chloe jammed the dead phone back into her backpack, almost more by routine than anything else. She didn’t know what good it would do her, but throwing it away still felt wrong somehow.
Reaching for her branch, she pitched herself up to her feet and started looking around for her cousin. Beside her, his sleeping bag lay empty, his backpack unopened next to the other orphaned bags they’d been carrying with them—Nate’s, Adam’s, Josh’s, and now Nicky’s too.
After they’d returned to the fire last night, Parker had helped her climb into her sleeping bag and said that he was going to stay up for a while, to keep watch, just in case. But he wouldn’t say in case of what. Chloe supposed he didn’t really need to. They both knew what was hiding out there, waiting for them.
Through the trees, she could see him sitting on a weathered log just beyond the edge of their camp, facing the way they’d ran after Nicky last night. She wondered if he’d slept at all or if he’d just sat there, staring off into the trees, wishing things were different than they’d turned out. Leaning heavy on the branch, she limped toward him, leaving the camp in disarray as she closed the distance between her and her cousin.
“Hey,” she called out to him when she got close.
“Hey yourself,” he said back, without turning to look.
“You okay?”
He shook his head. “No. You?”
“No.”
“Okay,” said Parker. “Glad we got that sorted out.”
Chloe circled around to ease herself down next to him, gazing into the shadowy green void they’d gone crashing madly through only hours before. Nothing moved, not even the boughs against the wind. It was still and dead. Just like everything else in this forest.
“I don’t think she’s coming back, Parker.”
“I know she’s not.”
Chloe lifted one slender hand and set it down over the top of his giant paw, curling her fingers in between his and giving them a good squeeze.
“Were you out here all night?” she asked. “You’re cold.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess.”
“Well, why don’t you come on back and we can get a fire going, maybe warm you up a little bit.”
“This is all my fault, Chloe.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t feel right to agree with him. Instead, she said nothing and squeezed his hand a little bit tighter.
“I brought the gun,” he said, unbidden. “I pulled the trigger. I made my choices, but we all have to deal with them now. I’m sorry, Chloe. I’m so, so fucking sorry. None of you deserved any of this.”
She leaned over and rested her head against the curve of his big, broad shoulder. “No, none of us did. Including you,” she added. “But the best thing we can do now is get out of here while we’re still standing.”
Parker nodded.
“Are you still hearing her? That woman, Mary?”
“It’s not really her,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “No more than it was really Nate. She got trapped here, just like we did, and when she died, this place made her part of itself. Another mask in its collection. Just like everything else that dies here.”
“But it’s still there?”
Chloe let her eyes sink shut again and listened to the silence that filled up the forest around them. She’d been hearing it in the distance ever since they’d hobbled back to camp last night—the voice of the thing under the lake. At first she’d thought it was an echo, some lingering remnant of her last vision, but the longer she listened, the louder it got. Not a remnant. Not an echo. She’d been stealing the signal before, tapping into something she’d hardly understood. Now she was hardwired into it.
Craning her head, Chloe strained her ears, listening. After a moment, she heard it—a sharp susurrus, folded underneath the sounds of the woods, threaded through them, so well-hidden that it was barely there at all. Tuning into that noise—the voice—Chloe found that she couldn’t make out the words anymore, but maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe the things it took had thought in individual words, but what ran through the head of the thing buried in that dead city was far more feral and baroque: emotions, images, urges, acts. That was what Chloe could hear now, woven into the fabric of this place—hate, pure and true.
She opened her eyes again.
“Yeah. It’s still there.” Chloe felt him wilt, hearing that. “How about you? Anything weird happen while I was out?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She could tell it was a lie. “No more ghosts?” she asked.
“Not that I’ve seen.”
She looked away from him. “Well, that’s a good thing, right?”
“I guess. You sleep okay?”
There were a million different ways she could answer that question, but none of them seemed to fit. “I don’t know. No. It was sleep. You sure you don’t want to try and get some?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
He turned to look her in the face, his brown eyes glassy behind his dirty spectacles.
“I will be,” he said. “Eventually. Once we get out of here.”
“And how are we planning on doing that?”
With two fingers, Parker pointed out at the trees to their right. “Well, the sun came up over there this morning, so that must be east, right?”
“I guess.”
“I’m thinking that we walk that way until we hit a highway or the ocean. Whatever comes first. New Jersey doesn’t go on forever, and neithe
r does this haunted house of a forest. It’s got to end at some point.”
“All right,” she said. “Great. Good plan. I like this plan. Let’s get going.”
He held up a finger. “Except.”
“Except what?”
Nodding to the right again, he said, “Thing is, if we go that way, I think we’re going back the way we came yesterday. Through the town. Past the lake. Into the trees.”
Her heart pinched, then fell. “Shit.”
“Right,” said Parker.
“So we find another way,” she said, spinning her wheels. “There’s got to be another way. It’s New Jersey. There are highways everywhere.”
“We’ve been saying that for four days now,” Parker reminded her. “Look where it’s gotten us. Shortest path back has gotta be the way we came. We keep on that line, and we’ll probably hit something sooner or later. But we need to keep to the line.”
“Except there’s no guarantee it’ll work, right?” Chloe asked. “There’s every chance the forest keeps fucking with us, turning us around to keep us trapped inside. What happens then?”
Parker sighed heavily. “I don’t know. We fight it, keep pushing, hurt it bad enough to make it let us go.”
“Any ideas on how we might go about doing that?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing. What about you? Any brilliant ideas?”
Chloe turned halfway around to look at the backpacks piled by their sleeping bags, wincing at the way the motion pulled against her wound.
“Actually, yeah. Now that you mention it, I think I might.”
17
Weighed down with backpacks that were and weren’t theirs, Chloe and Parker set out along the path they’d walked the day before, through the trees and scrub, back toward the buried car and the empty town and the dead white forest beyond the lake. Because he’d asked her to, she talked Parker through every part of the vision again—all the things she’d seen, felt, everything. Together, they examined every detail, every little moment that she’d experienced, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. It wasn’t exactly an easy task; it was already fading from Chloe’s mind, like a dream that she couldn’t cling to, no matter how hard she tried. Every time they went through it, she could feel herself leaving out details she’d included before, but found herself unable to recall what they were or why they were so important. They’d simply thinned out and disappeared, like morning mist under dawn’s burning eye.
She let her cousin lead them through the woods, following as fast as the crutch would carry her, wincing against the pain that burned through her midsection pretty much constantly now. She wasn’t sure when the acid throb had started. Maybe when she’d woken up this morning, maybe while she’d been sleeping, maybe even before—last night, perhaps, when they were dashing through the woods to try and catch up to Nicky. Maybe she’d torn it wide open while they were out there in the dark and hadn’t noticed because of the adrenaline pumping through her bloodstream. It could have happened any time, but she supposed the when didn’t really matter that much. All she knew was that it hurt more now than it had since she’d first been gored.
Stopping on the path, she rolled her shirt up and peeled the makeshift bandage back to look. The wound was already worse than it had been early this morning, purple-red around the edges and black across the middle, slithering out under the surface of her pale skin with bright-red tendrils she didn’t like the look of. A few steps ahead, Parker rolled to a halt and turned back to see.
“Shit. That’s not looking so good, Chloe.”
“Gee, thanks, Dr. Cunningham. I hadn’t noticed.”
“Does it hurt?”
She nodded. “Yup.”
“Bad?”
“Really bad.”
He took a step closer to her. “Yeah,” he said, stepping in closer. “That’s seriously infected.”
From under her furrowed brow, she shot him a death glare. “I do have eyes, Parker.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
She drew a deep, slow breath through her nostrils as she probed with bare fingers at the edge of the black scab. Right by the tip of her finger, the scab had torn away from her skin slightly. Pinching the edge between her thumb and forefinger, Chloe pulled it farther back, sending a thin trickle of yellow-and-red fluid down her skin. Little waves of pain jumped through her body as she tugged. Stop it, stop it, stop it.
Rolling the bandage back in place, she pulled her shirt down and looked at her cousin, a weary look on her face.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.
“What about like, antibiotics?”
“That’s a great idea,” Chloe snipped. “Did you bring any?”
Parker’s cheeks flushed red, and he turned away. “Stupid question,” he said. “Sorry.”
Chewing the inside of her cheek, she felt shame needle at her insides. “No, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. You’re just trying to help.”
Parker nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“But it was a pretty stupid question.”
She cracked a grin in his direction, and she was relieved when he smiled back, even if it was sad and tinged with worry. It was better than nothing.
“Well, try to hang on, okay?” Parker said. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“Hooray.” She pulled the backpack higher on her shoulders and tried to ignore the pain chewing relentlessly at her ribs. Parker walked on, and Chloe followed him.
After a while, she started to recognize the terrain. She figured that at some point behind them, they’d passed the little footpath that led back to the ancient car that had become her uncle’s grave. She felt a little pang of guilt for not having seen it as they passed by, or for asking Parker if he wanted to stop and pay his respects. But maybe he’d seen and hadn’t wanted to stop. She wouldn’t have blamed him for it. If it was her dad’s bones out there, she wouldn’t want to see them again if she could help it. Especially if they were surrounded by all those sentinel trees.
They lined the path as they walked, those trees. They were everywhere, if you looked for them. The forest was sick with them, bony spears of it stabbing up through the cursed earth, its own private network, Mary Kane’s body and soul twisted and brutalized into this horrible new form until it was impossible to tell where the forest stopped and she began. Chloe watched the trees, and she was sure that they were watching them back.
Eventually, the path wound through a thicket of pines and down a hill, then the trees verged off to either side as the town came into view. They rounded the church on the left and came to stand in the middle of the wide, dusty main road that led through the town proper. From where she stood, Chloe could already see the lake. Being this close to it made her want to jump out of her skin.
“Eeaugh. I hate it here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “There used to be people who lived here. Families … Whole lives. Now it’s just … empty. Gone.”
“Sad, when you put it that way.”
He gave her a look. “Was this the … the thing? Do you think it did this?”
A cold wire of unease snaked through her. “Maybe. Probably. Not like we can do anything about it now. Can’t resurrect a dead town.”
“Guess it’s just us and the ghosts, then,” said Parker.
“I guess.”
He led her down the path and through the hunched little settlement, cut from gray wood and broken shingles, stepping carefully to minimize the crunch of their shoes against the dirt, which echoed so goddamn loudly in the empty town. As they made their way down the hill, Chloe gave in to the familiar, curious tug at the back of her head; she wanted to know what happened here, wanted to break into every house and outbuilding that still stood to try and figure out where they’d all gone. It was just like Parker had said: there were people here, once, with lives and secrets all their own, and that stubborn part of the old Chloe ached to unearth everything they’d hidden away, just to know why.
She tried to look at it like a puzzle to keep her mind off the lake. There had to be a reason. Nothing ever happened for no reason. That wasn’t how things worked. Cause and effect were universal truths, and more often than not, the cause was hiding in the little things, details you wouldn’t normally notice or even think to look at. Like the fact that they’d walked past that church three times now and she hadn’t seen a graveyard anywhere. Like the fact that most of the houses around them were all still standing, despite time and weather and the natural creep of decay. Like the fact that her uncle Dave hadn’t been the only one to leave an offering on that altar below the church; he’d just been the latest. It was a riddle, and she knew she could solve it, given enough time.
They were about halfway down the hill when Parker turned around to look at her, taking the incline backward.
“You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “What about you?”
“I don’t know. I guess. If I have to be.”
“You have a real way of inspiring confidence,” Chloe said.
“We just need to get around it,” he said. “We’re not swimming across it, we’re doing our best not to touch it.”
“We’re not touching it at all,” she said, her voice stony. “At all. Understood?”
Slowly, he nodded. “Understood.”
She let her eyes sink halfway shut as she followed him, conjuring up the vision of the light at the bottom of the water again until she felt those yellow eyes start to hinge open inside her head, old and heavy and cruel.
Walking ahead, Parker led her around a corner that signaled the end of the little clapboard town. “Here we go,” he said.
Chloe rounded the corner after him and resisted the urge to scream. The lake was enormous, crystal blue, and perfectly circular, as if some cruel god had jabbed a finger into the surface of the earth, leaving a perfect divot in its wake. Standing here, looking at it like this was like watching a nightmare come to life, building itself out of whatever body and blood it could steal from the air around her. Inside her head, she felt memories start to crystallize and sharpen again as she gazed out across the water, so vivid and knife-like that she feared they might actually slice her open.
The Night Will Find Us Page 23
