21. Friday, November 3, 2023 #4
She manages to give him a smile. “Thanks, honey. And text me if she comes back.” Quinn nods and Alice leaves the room to prepare for her search mission.
She notes that Geoff has gone back to cooking and her mother to flipping through her magazine.
Alice resists the urge to turn back and rip the magazine from her mother’s hands and the knife from Geoff’s, and—
It’s like they know something about those woods that the rest of us don’t, she thinks.
The thought breaks through the rage, stops her in her tracks, and makes her whole body run cold, despite the hot flash.
Quinn
Quinn looks over at his dad stirring the pot, his face devoid of anything but deep concentration. His nana is leaning down to read an article in the magazine, one thumb stroking away the condensation on the side of her highball glass.
“How do you know Polly is going to be ‘better than fine’?” Quinn asks. It’s the same question his mom asked moments ago.
His nana looks up and he sees the same strange shadow pass over her eyes that he saw in his dad’s. She’s sitting under the pendant lights too, so he guesses that’s why.
“We just know,” his nana says, speaking for herself and his dad. For reasons Quinn can’t quite pinpoint, that creeps him right out.
His mom rushes back into the kitchen dressed in leggings, a hooded sweatshirt, a winter coat, and running shoes.
She’s carrying a big flashlight that he recognizes from the camping trips they took when he was little.
He has a memory of him and his sisters huddled around the flashlight in the tent they always shared.
Polly telling them a scary story, Lucy with an arm wrapped around him protectively.
“Anything you’d like to say before I head out?
” his mom asks his dad and nana. “Any advice?” They glance up with smiles and shake their heads at the exact same time, then go back to what they were doing.
His mom glares at them, and he’s pretty sure she’s about to unleash one of her epic rages but then seems to think better of it and turns away from them.
She gives him a quick hug before flying out the door.
He watches her march across the backyard with purpose and then disappear through the trees.
Despite the presence of his dad and nana, he feels overwhelmed by loneliness.
Even Panda isn’t at his side, choosing to hide in his room instead as she always does these days.
Deciding his dog has the right idea, he leaves the kitchen and heads to his room. Pulling his phone out on the way, he taps on it to bring up his mom’s location. He stops short, his stomach sinks, and a pulse of panic courses through him.
No location found.
Alice
The flashlight throws a wide circle of light, which illuminates the path but does little to reassure Alice as she moves deeper into the woods.
Beyond the circle is total darkness. It doesn’t help that she feels something, or someone, lurking right there, just beyond the light.
The bravado that got her from the kitchen to the woods has disappeared and her stomach squirms with fear.
The one thing keeping her feet moving is the need to find her daughter.
“Polly,” she calls out every few feet or so, sticking to the path.
The only sounds in return: bare tree branches clapping together in the wind, her feet slapping the wet earth, and the odd twig snapping underfoot like a gunshot in the deep quiet.
She moves past the point where she fell into the ferns, working hard not to envision the pale, naked bodies of her husband and mother.
“Polly?”
This time the air is filled with a piercing screech that stabs her eardrums. It comes from just above her, and she ducks down. The sound of beating wings causes her to shine her flashlight up just in time to see an owl swoop overhead and disappear into the darkness.
Once her heart rate has returned to normal, she starts walking again, this time humming as she goes.
She read somewhere that humming or whistling helps regulate the nervous system.
After a few bars, she realizes that she’s humming a children’s song, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.
” Seems fitting, she thinks, but then remembers some of the lines from it and stops humming.
Slipping her phone out of her jacket pocket to check the time, she hits the button on the side.
The screen stays black. She stops, and using both hands holds down the buttons on each side, praying for it to light up.
Nothing. She knows her phone was at 86 percent when she left the house.
She’d checked it. Sliding the phone back into her coat pocket, she takes a few deep breaths to quell the rising panic.
She calls out for her daughter again. No response. She’s afraid to go any farther, but just as afraid to abandon her mission and go back. She swings the flashlight around and spots a fallen log only a few feet off the path. She decides to sit down for a little while.
She used to tell the kids that if they got lost in a store to stay in one spot and wait for her to find them—she promised she would always find them.
Now she’s taking her own advice, even though she’s the one who’s supposed to be doing the finding.
For all she knows, Polly could already be home.
The whole family may be sitting down to dinner.
Geoff may be explaining to Polly how Alice freaked out and took off into the woods.
How she doesn’t trust her nineteen-year-old daughter enough to go for a walk on her own.
Maybe they’re coming up with nicknames for her like “Anxious Alice” or “Manic Mom.” Who will rescue her?
she wonders. And her heart aches when she can’t come up with an answer.
Before her self-pity can fully bloom, she’s distracted by the sound of movement in the darkness.
“Polly?” she calls out, holding her breath, listening with every part of her body.
There’s another sound, louder this time, the crack of wood splitting.
Alice stands up and points the flashlight at the sound.
About ten feet away, right at the edge of the beam of light, a shape slowly takes form, emerging from a thick tree trunk.
Alice can make out the shape of a head, and shoulders, and then a body. Was it there all along, she wonders, hiding there up against the tree, or are her eyes playing tricks on her? “Hello?” she says, the word a croak of fear. The shape doesn’t move and makes no sound.
Accept the gift of the woods.
The voice echoes inside her head, but it’s not her own, it sounds like it’s been pulled from the depths of the earth, low, deep, ancient, and crackling. The words scrape through her, leaving a throbbing in her temples and an ache in her womb.
Rebirth for them brings peace. Do not fear it. Protect it.
Alice drops the flashlight and puts both hands over her ears.
There’s a moment of silence and Alice slowly lowers her hands.
The voice suddenly booms, GO HOME TO YOUR FAMILY.
The words are like hammers striking each side of Alice’s head.
She looks away, back to the path, searching for escape, somewhere she can run without getting tangled up in fallen logs or branches.
When she glances back, the shape is closer, only inches from her now, spotlighted by the beam of the flashlight shining up from the ground.
She catches a fleeting glimpse of its face—skin pale but rough as bark, mouth open wide and deep, eyes bottomless, and black hair twisting around the face like a tangle of tree branches.
In the split second before the thing connects with her body, before it passes through her, filling her nose with the stench of wet earth, rotting leaves, and sulfur, and filling her mouth with the taste of soil, before knocking her back over the log and onto the ground, she hears her own scream echo through the woods.
Quinn
Polly arrived home an hour ago, but his mom is still out there.
He texted her, but it came back undelivered.
He’s trying not to freak out. Seems that everyone who goes into the woods comes out eventually.
He’s just not sure what they come out as.
From a distance, he thought it was Polly who emerged from the trees, soaked right through but seemingly unharmed, even with a smile on her face.
He was wrong.
“Hey little man,” she’d said when he stepped out on the back deck to greet her. As if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t been in her room for days sleeping and crying, having a nervous breakdown.
“You’ve been gone for hours!” Quinn exclaimed. “What the fuck were you doing out there?”
Looking confused, she pulled out her phone to check the time. “Oh my God,” he heard her say under her breath. “I didn’t even realize I’d been gone that long. It felt like half an hour, tops.”
“What were you doing in there?” he asked, circling her as surreptitiously as possible. Looking for signs of a change.
She shrugged. “Walking?”
“Is that a question, or is that what you were doing?”
She put a hand to her forehead. It had a streak of dirt across it but the rest of her was pristine. “Honestly, I don’t really remember anything other than coming out of the woods right now and seeing you at the window.”
“Mom went in there looking for you.”
Polly glanced back at the woods as though she’d forgotten they were there. “She’ll be fine,” she answered. “There’s nothing in there that will hurt you.”
“You sure about that?” Quinn said, cocking his head to the side. “Did you forget the night of the séance when the ghosts of Justine Gordon’s family came out to play? Her murder victims. Murders that she blames on those woods.”
Polly dismisses him with a wave of her hand. “That night was such bullshit. Don’t even give it a second thought. I’m sure Sierra orchestrated the whole thing.” She started toward the back door. “Is dinner ready? I’m starving.”