Of course. Of fucking course it wasn’t going to be that simple. They were insects scrabbling at the ankles of ancient, cruel powers that could no doubt crush them at any time.
A great, black desolation settled into the pit of her chest. If the Everclear hadn’t worked, then what would? There wasn’t anything else.
Actually, wait a second.
She did have something that might do the trick—and if not?
Well, she’d think about if not when it happened.
Stepping back, Chloe unlooped the black hatchet from her belt and held it up high so the silver line of flint in the blade’s edge glinted in the sun. She could do this. Of course she could. She’d seen that Phipps asshole do it enough times, and he was a psychopathic primitive. All she had to do was snap it down into the rocks like this—
Sparks exploded at the foot of the closest tree as she raked the blade over the stones, blooming into tongues of gasping blue flame that spread quicker than Chloe had expected—the Everclear, finally doing its job. In an instant, the fire grew and raced up the length of the white trees, turning from blue to orange-black as it jumped eagerly from branch to branch, a forest fire in fast-forward.
A mad, desperate wail split the inside of her head, like it was sawing the two hemispheres of her brain apart. Chloe screamed through clenched teeth and doubled over, raking at her eyes with numb fingers, her crutch dropping out from under her arm, useless. The sound was enormous and catastrophic, and when it finally subsided, the silence that settled in between her ears in its wake was deafening. She barely had a chance to catch her breath before the sound ripped through her again, even louder this time, angrier, and she felt a terrific heat scorching her hand, so terrible that she thought that she’d caught fire alongside the trees.
Looking down, she saw the black hatchet pulsing and throbbing in time with the heartbeat of the fire, forming stress cracks along the wood and metal that radiated a kind of sour red light. The forest’s own bad magic, working against itself. Chloe could have laughed.
Then the hatchet shattered, detonating in a spray of fire and shrapnel that bit into her face and arms and neck and chest. Chloe reeled backward, trying to escape what had already happened, her body bright with new pain, falling, falling, falling until she hit the ground.
It didn’t take Parker long to realize he wasn’t alone. There wasn’t any one thing that tipped him off to it—no nearby footsteps or heavy breathing. It was more like a feeling he got every few seconds, as if sharp, reptilian claws were plucking at the sweaty spot between his shoulder blades.
Stopping for a moment, he stared back into the trees and the shadows that had surrounded him when he wasn’t looking. The darkness was nearly absolute; it was like the night never quite left this place, instead hanging on like grim death in the places where it could hide itself, underneath branches and brambles, in between the white trunks and buried under knotted roots. He thought about calling out to whatever it was that was traveling along in his wake but knew it couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. Not in any recognizable human way, at least. Not anymore.
Hiking Nate’s overstuffed bag higher on his shoulders, Parker kept on the path, listening to the crunch of his shoes against the ground, the wheeze in his lungs, his heartbeat thudding inside his temples. The trees were growing closer together the farther in he went. Parker had seen pictures of trees that had grown together like this in Earth Science class. Mrs. Sandoval had said that trees growing into one another like that usually meant a forest fire was inevitable, to clear the ground and make way for new life. Fires were good, she’d told them. Fires were change incarnate. Nothing in this world walked away from fire unscathed.
Parker smiled at the thought. He was getting close now.
Some part of Chloe knew that she was bleeding, that there were dozens of new wounds blown into the soft, dirty skin of her face, like she’d been blasted with a shotgun or a pipe bomb. But somehow, that didn’t matter much right now. Inside her head, the scream had turned itself into a physical thing, a black, razor-toothed tendril that had curled around her brain to bore through the middle, like a finger trying to wriggle through a raw steak.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Chloe whimpered on the ground, clutching at her head, curling up as small as she could. “Get out, please, just stop, get out, let me go …”
The tentacle burrowed deeper, excavating memories she hadn’t thought of in years: her seventh birthday party when her dad got too drunk; the first time she’d ever kissed anyone (Stacy Cale, at a sleepover in eighth grade, on a dare); her childhood teddy bear, a battered yellow Pooh, sitting on the windowsill of her bedroom, draped in sunlight.
Distantly, Chloe understood what was happening here. She was being probed, explored, cored like an apple. The forest—and the thing underneath, for they were one and the same, she saw that now—had had its fun. Now it meant to take her too; just like the others. Mary Kane, Uncle Dave, Nate, Josh, Nicky, Adam—they were all long dead, thrown into the gaping maw of the Pine Barrens as sacrifices, or worse, food.
Chloe didn’t plan on joining them.
Marshaling her strength, Chloe gave a mental shove against the black tendril and felt it withdraw—not much, just the tiniest bit, but that might have been enough. Forcing her eyes open, she saw that the fire was spreading too quickly, racing along the ground where she’d previously spilled a trail of the grain alcohol, crackling and thrashing. It had already jumped from the sentinel trees to the regular pines and oaks now, too, blooming out in a wave of destruction—heat and smoke and light all working in concert to cause as much damage as possible, painting her face and skin with a brutal, dry heat that stole her breath. She could tell that this was only the beginning; things were about to get a whole lot worse for the Pine Barrens.
Inside her head, the forest thrashed and screamed, consumed by the flames. Then it withdrew, leaving a kind of impression where its presence had dug in, another scar in Chloe’s collection. The thing had taken the bait; now it had bigger concerns than one broken, bleeding little girl. The fire was spreading, and left unchecked, it would grow to consume everything. She could imagine it happening already—the entire southern half of New Jersey ravaged by fire and smoke and cinders. She’d started something she couldn’t control, and the only thing to do about it now was let it run its course.
Smoke, thick and billowing, rankled at her throat and her lungs, dancing through her insides, leaving pinpricks of bright, itching pain in its wake. Chloe grasped at the skin underneath her neck as she forced out cough after cough, trying to catch a breath of clean air. No such luck.
Moving on her hands and knees, she clambered over to the river’s edge, feeling the foamy, rushing waves slap coldly against her palms and wrists. The water was deep here, so deep that she could only barely make out the silt and rocks at the bottom. Her skull throbbed terribly where the forest had attempted to wrench its way through, but for now, she was alone inside her own head again. Not that it would last. Once the thing realized that there was nothing it could do to stop the burning, it’d be back to finish the job. Better for Chloe to not be close by when that happened.
Wincing from the pain that pulsed through her entire body, Chloe drew deep breath after deep breath, then dumped herself into the rushing waves below.
Cold, stone-hard and absolute, dragged her down, snatching the air from her lungs and the sight from her eyes in a single shock. But already she could feel herself moving through the freeze, hurtling away from the banks, propelled by the river. She could feel herself spinning in the icy waves, glancing off rocks and dirt and sunken logs, but the impacts barely registered.
She would have laughed if she had been able. She’d done it. She’d actually gotten away. All she had to do now was ride the river all the way to wherever it took her.
She bobbed upward without meaning to, breaking the surface of the water in a heaving, bubbling mass, drawing air into her lungs so hard that it pained her. The river rushed her away, growing wider
and deeper and faster by the second, churning with whitecaps as it carried her along through straits and perilous turns. Holding her hands out, Chloe tried to brace herself from colliding with more flotsam, but she could only do so much; she needed her hands to stay afloat, and couldn’t do both at the same time.
Underneath her, she could feel debris whipping past her legs, roots and rocks and the like, but she didn’t truly realize just how fast she was being dragged until the waves dipped, then spun her in place and caromed her off of something hard and sharp. She heard a soft, meaty crunch inside one of her legs—and for a moment, she went numb from the thigh down, a curious sensation replaced a moment later by pure agony.
Another scream came clamoring out of her, and she thrashed at the water, trying to right herself, trying in her pain and panic to somehow gauge the extent of the damage done to her leg. Something was wrong, she knew that much. Something was very fucking wrong here. Spitting out a murky, bitter mouthful of river water, she tried to push away from another tangled cluster of branches, but her hands had already gone numb from the icy water, and she only sent herself spinning around again, careening sidelong toward a rock that jabbed out of the surface of the water like a broken tooth.
She caught the edge face-first, the impact rocking her whole body with a sharp, hollow crack that she felt all the way down to her toes. A blade of white light tore through her skull, clouding her left eye with a curtain of muddy red that ebbed away and replaced itself every time her face dipped under the waves. She tried to scream again, tried to cry out, tried to wipe the blood away, but it was too much. She was all bad angles and numb digits now. Nothing worked the way she told it to. As she was swept downriver, Chloe could already feel herself spreading out and fading away, a single drop of blood diluted in too much water. In the last glimmers of consciousness, she hoped that Parker was right, that this river would lead her out of this fucking forest and not into some deeper part of the nightmare they’d been trapped in all this time. All she wanted was to get out, and to see him again.
Then she passed out and didn’t feel a thing anymore.
20
Lightly, Parker stone-hopped across another bent hairpin creek. could smell it in the air now—a sort of cinnamon sweetness buoyed along atop a hot, billowing musk. It smelled like campfires and fireplaces and his dad’s cigars, all at once. He couldn’t see the smoke yet, but yeah, it was definitely there.
As he walked, Parker smiled faintly to himself. She’d really done it.
He walked on and on, and time grew loose around him, warping like he was trying to scoop up melting butter with his bare hands. He didn’t know if he’d been walking for minutes or for hours, only that the farther he went, the more the white trees grew taller and thicker, crowding in together so tight that he felt like he needed to hold his breath and turn sideways just to squeeze between them.
Up ahead, just past another copse, he could see the ground rising up into a steep little hillock, blanketed in trees so tightly packed it looked like a head of hair. He had no idea how he was going to get through something like that, but he’d have to figure out a way. No sense in coming this far and not seeing it through to the end.
Chloe had told him about this place. Back at the camp, she’d searched her memory and told him that if they came to a hill like this, they’d gone too far off the path and they needed to turn back. Beyond this was the place where Mary Kane had died.
They were supposed to give the tree a wide berth; that was the plan the whole time. Same as the lake. The whole forest was cursed, but there were some parts that were worse than others, and according to Chloe, the tree was about as bad as it got. But plans changed. And Parker still had some things that needed doing before he could be done with this place.
A chill wind blew in from behind him and swiped at his sweat-dappled neck, raising the hair there to stiff attention. Whatever inhuman thing that had been dogging his path, it was close now. Maybe close enough for him to reach out and touch.
As if on cue, a shape emerged from behind one of the largest trees on the hill—short and round, his face snarled up with bitter contempt, his T-shirt drawn too tight across his broad, soft chest.
Nate.
Except it wasn’t. The forest made it so easy to make that mistake again, to take what Parker was seeing as truth. But the longer he stood there and looked at the thing wearing his dead friend like a mask, the more he saw the places where the glamour was imperfect. He’d seen it before, the way the ghost’s face seemed to melt and churn when he looked at it for too long. At first, he’d written it off as trick of the light, a side effect of Nate being somehow-dead-yet-here; now he knew better.
Parker slowed to a halt, feeling his heart wilt and fall into his guts. His body ached, his head hurt, his feet were little more than swollen bags filled with blood and bone. He pulled his glasses off his face and buffed the lenses on the bottom of his T-shirt before slipping the frames back over his nose and ears and fixing the impostor with a hard, exhausted look.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Nate—not-Nate—shrugged and cracked a smile.
“What can I say?” it said. “I like you, Parker.”
“Just like you liked my dad?”
“That was different,” the apparition told him. “That was complicated.”
“And this isn’t?”
“Your dad was looking for something that he wasn’t ever going to find out here,” it said. “Wasn’t a good fit for anybody. But you know him. Soldier to the core. He kept pushing, kept trying to force the issue. Tried that all the way up until he put the knife to his wrists.”
“Stop.”
“I mean, does that sound familiar at all to you? You knew him pretty well, so—”
“Just fucking stop,” Parker moaned.
The ghost held its stolen hands up—I’m just saying—another perfect pantomime of Parker’s dead friend. “Listen. You’re anything but weak. You came out here looking for answers, and you found them. Not everybody could do the same. You can hold steady, stay strong. You can really make a difference here.”
“What are you saying?” Parker asked warily.
“I’m saying this doesn’t need to be the end. For anybody. I know why you did what you did—I know why you left her behind and came looking for me, for this place. It’s the same reason you came out to the forest looking for the truth. All you need to do is change your endgame a little bit. We can both get out of here. There’s still time.”
Parker spat. “I’m not your Renfield.”
He started walking again. The ghost kept pace with him.
“Why are you still wearing his face, anyway?” Parker asked. “I—we—know what you really are underneath it all.”
The ghost sneered. “I’m sure you think you do.”
“Chloe told me all about what she saw. The city under the lake. Mary and the reverend. Philips, or something.”
“Phipps,” the ghost corrected. “Simon Phipps.”
“That’s the one. Phipps. Whatever happened to that guy?”
“He died.”
“That’s all? Sounds like he deserved worse than he got.”
The ghost shook its head. “You have no idea.”
“And you still haven’t answered the question.”
“Maybe I like wearing him,” the apparition mused. “Maybe I like the way he fits, the way he looks. Why, not a fan?”
Parker didn’t say anything.
“Oh, what, did I strike a nerve? Not a fan of having your fuck-ups thrown in your face? I mean, I get it. There are so many of them. There was Nate, obviously. Adam, Josh, Nicky, now Chloe and you too. Not to mention your poor mother and all their parents too. Brothers and sisters. Teachers, friends. Everybody who hears about what happened here. People notice when kids die, Parker. Especially when they die ugly. Really, there’s no counting the number of people you’ve hurt in four short days. All with one little bullet.”
“Not Chloe,�
� said Parker. “Not her. She got out.”
Not-Nate leaned in, grinning. “You sure about that? Because last I saw, she’d split her skull open on a rock while she was trying not to drown. What are the odds she’ll be able to swim for her life, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound? I’m not sure, friend. I don’t like her chances much at all.”
Parker looked at the ghost, grinding his molars, trying to tell how much of it was a lie. He bristled at the thought of Chloe hurt, but he had to believe she was going to be okay. He reminded himself that he could already smell the forest fire on the wind. She’d done it. She was going to get out. She was going to be okay.
“Hey, let me ask you something,” Parker said casually, straightening his expression. “Did it hurt? When Chloe set the trees on fire, did that hurt? Did you feel it?”
Not-Nate laughed at the question, not a damp, throaty chuckle now but a full belly laugh, a perfect replica of the one Parker was so used to hearing from the boy he’d killed just days ago.
“Physical pain is a small concept for small things,” not-Nate scoffed. “You children have no idea what true pain really is.”
“That’s a yes,” Parker said, snapping a finger-gun at the thing’s melting face. “Good.” He drew another deep breath, the heat and cinders and burnt sugar of crackling sap syrupy in the back of his throat.
Not-Nate laughed again, but it was harder this time. Colder, older, and meaner.
“Fine,” it said. “Have it your way. But when he’s ripping your guts out, I want you to remember I gave you a chance.”
The ghost’s face drooped into one final hateful glower, and then not-Nate dissolved in midair as quickly as he’d appeared. Through his fading frame, Parker could just make out another silhouette crouched at the foot of the little hill. Its body and limbs were warped and distended, its pallid skin draped in wounds and blood, pockmarked with holes it shouldn’t have been able to survive.
The Night Will Find Us Page 26
