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A body landed on top of him, knees slamming against his chest and knocking the wind out of him. He pushed away, rolling to his hands and knees, gasping for air. He wanted to scream in anger and pain, but his bruised ribs and shocked lungs refused to cooperate.
In the black above him he saw the approaching flashlights of his group as they worked their way down the hill. Judging by how far out they were, it looked to Bryan as if he’d rolled at least fifty yards down the hill. Even through his pain, he realized how lucky he was to have not broken his neck, or cracked his skull against a large rock.
“Man, that really hurt,” Ben said from beside him, invisible. “Who did I fall into?”
Bryan kneeled there, concentrating on filling his lungs, unable to respond. Several seconds later, everyone reached the bottom, panting from the exertion.
“Dude, are you ok?” Kyle asked. He kneeled beside Bryan, shining the light from his phone on the ground in front of them.
“Yeah,” Bryan said, barely managing a whisper. “Just had the wind knocked out of me.” He tasted blood in his mouth and assumed it came from his tongue. His anger at Ben boiled and he wanted to lash out, but he didn’t have enough breath to do so.
“Christ, Ben, pay attention to what the hell you’re doing,” Kyle said. “You almost killed Bryan! Goddamn nerd can’t even run.”
Bryan spit out the blood that had pooled in the bottom of his mouth and stood up. His ribs begged him to stay still, but they finally allowed him to breathe again. “Is that thing following us?”
Everyone stood in silence, listening to the dank woods. Nothing but silence surrounded them − not even a cricket contributing a chirp.
“I think we’re OK,” Kyle said. “What did you see? You freaked out as soon as I pointed my light into the woods and then started shoving me. I could hear it, whatever it was. It sounded big.”
Bryan lifted the bottom of his t-shirt up to his face and wiped away some of the blood that had begun to streak down it. In the dim light he could see that he was bleeding more than he’d initially thought – stitches were likely in his future.
“I didn’t see much of it, but what I could make out was... horrible.” Bryan wouldn’t allow himself to describe the hideous claw.
“What the fuck is going on?” Travis asked, interrupting them. He shined his light on Katie’s face, demanding an answer. The rest of the group looked at her as well, everyone assuming she was some kind of expert on the situation.
“Get that light out of my face,” she said, blocking it with her hand.
“Don’t pussyfoot around any questions this time – we need to know what’s happening,” Travis said redirecting his flashlight.
“I think I know what happened to Danver’s people forty years ago,” Katie said.
“Who gives a shit about them? What’s happening to us?” Travis nearly screamed at her, the cords in his neck apparent even in the dim light.
Kyle grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him forward, almost lifting him from the ground with one arm.
“Keep your voice down, you stupid fucking moron. If one of those things hears you we’re all dead.” He let go of Travis’ shirt and pushed away, his face a silent snarl. Travis looked at the ground, the fight in him gone.
“What we’re experiencing right now is exactly what Danver did three decades ago.” Katie’s eyes swept over the dark forest surrounding them as she spoke. “We’ve crossed over.”
“Say that again?” Bryan asked, though he’d already begun to suspect what she had implied.
“I think you know what I mean,” Katie said, turning her attention to him. “Just as those creatures in the church were able to come into our world, I believe we have gone into theirs. We falsely assumed that the door only opened one way, but it appears that assumption was incorrect.”
“Are you saying we’re in the spirit world?” Kyle asked. His eyes darted around, fear in them. “Is this Hell?”
“I’m not entirely sure where we are, but that wormlike beast in the church certainly didn’t seem to be the spirit of a human being. Perhaps this is some form of alternate dimension, a world between worlds,” Katie said. Her eyes glazed over as she spoke, her mind seemingly somewhere else.
Bryan watched her, unsure if she was serious, or if she had slipped into some kind of writer mode, her imagination taking over. The things she spoke of seemed beyond implausible, outright ridiculous even, but here they were, fleeing what could best be described as monsters. Perhaps Lovecraft wasn’t as sophomoric as he thought.
“Other dimensions, what does that even mean?” Joey said. His earlier attempts at intimidation and bravado were long forgotten.
“There are no stars in the sky, everything around us smells of compost or rot, and there are things that go bump in the night all around us. Our cars are gone, and these woods appear to be completely different from those that we drove through to get to the Danver property. It’s a safe assumption that we aren’t in the Appalachian Mountains anymore.”
Travis raised his arm and jabbed his finger at Katie, opening his mouth to start shouting again. Kyle glared at him, his chest puffing slightly as he took a half step forward. Travis paused, his eyes examining Kyle’s massive frame, before dropping his hand and brooding in silence.
Bryan wiped at his bleeding face with his forearm, which was also cut from the fall, and smeared grime and blood across his cheek. “If what you’re saying is true, what are we supposed to do? How do we get out of here?”
“I can’t keep running like this,” Ben said. “I’m too out of shape.” He didn’t look at anyone else in the group, choosing to stare at his feet. His cheeks twitched in an odd rhythm as he did, making Bryan question if Ben was starting to lose hold of his sanity.
Katie’s eyes refocused at Bryan’s question. “You’re asking me questions that I don’t have the answers to. This isn’t exactly a situation that we discuss at writer’s conferences.”
“Then guess,” Kyle said. “If one of those things finds us...” He trailed off, not wanting to describe what none of them wanted to hear.
“Perhaps we should go back to the church,” Katie said. “It stands to reason that if that piece of land is the crossover point, then we should stay there and hope that we can move back through whatever wormhole, or gate, has been opened before it closes again.”
“How do we go back through the gate? I don’t even understand how we went through it in the first place?” Bryan asked. He wiped at his brow with the back of his hand absentmindedly, oblivious to the dirt he rubbed into his wounds. “What happens if we don’t go back through? Are we stuck here?”
He couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the ‘celestial alignments’ Katie had mentioned earlier. At the rate things were going, he didn’t think they would make it forty more minutes here, let alone forty years.
“Again, don’t look to me for answers. If I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have gone through with this, now would I?”
“I hate to point out the obvious, but if we go back to the church, we’re going to have to deal with a giant, pissed off centipede,” Kyle said. “You know, the thing that was breaking down a solid wood door?”
Travis and Joey had huddled together, shining their flashlights in wide arcs around the forest, jumping every time a reflection would bounce of a rock or tree stump. They were both shivering, though Bryan figured the temperature had to be at least seventy-five degrees.
“No way am I going back there with that thing hanging around.” Creepy Joey’s eyes were as wide as saucers, and appeared to be stuck that way permanently, as he continued looking around the forest.
Ben had wandered a few feet away, stumbling around a small grouping of rocks as he mumbled to himself.
“Ben, what the hell are you doing?” Travis asked, trying to keep his voice low.
“What?” Ben asked. He turned back to the group, his ankle rolling when the rock he stepped on shifted. Crying out in pain as he fell backward, he clutched at his calf.
“Goddamn it, Ben,” Travis said. “I’m not carrying your stupid ass out of—”
A long, gangly arm reached out from the darkness behind Ben and grabbed a hold of his face. Several thin fingers wrapped around his head, too many knuckles running their lengths, and yanked him backward, into the black forest.
His legs kicked wildly as he disappeared before them, his screams muffled by the hand covering his face. He grabbed some of the fingers wrapped around his head, trying to pull them free. His hands covered two of the knuckles, leaving three more exposed, further illustrating their unnatural size.
Then he was gone, pulled into the darkness surrounding them. His muffled cries continued for several seconds, getting quieter with each passing moment before falling away completely. Everyone stood in stunned silence, watching the place where he had been taken.
Travis and Joey began screaming in unison, and bolted toward the hill behind them. Joey’s ample belly slowed him down as he tried to run up the slope, not allowing him to bend over far enough to grab a hold of the rocks that jutted out of it. Travis moved up the hill faster, his short legs allowing him to scale it rapidly at first, though he slowed after several yards, his breathing growing increasingly ragged.
Bryan and Katie watched them as they fled, rooted in place. Kyle never took his eyes from the spot where Ben had vanished.
“I’m going after him,” Kyle said after several seconds.
Bryan jerked his head around, staring at Kyle in disbelief. “What? We need to follow them and get out of here! Did you see what that hand looked like? It pulled him into woods like a fucking rag doll!”
“I saw it,” Kyle said. His voice had taken on a calm, determined tone. “I won’t be able to live with myself if I leave him here without even trying to help.”
“You hate him!”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I’m going with you,” Katie said. She fixed her gaze on Bryan, her eyes sharing the same determination as Kyle’s. “I have to see what else is here. This is the discovery of a lifetime.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Bryan couldn’t believe what he heard. After everything they’d seen in the last ten minutes, how could they even consider going further into the forest?
“Maybe,” she said. “I won’t be long though – I’m afraid our time here is going to turn short rather quickly.”
“Kyle, even if you find Ben, what are you going to do to the thing that grabbed him?” Bryan asked.
Without answering, Kyle began inspecting the ground around them before bending down and picking up a large stick. He tried to flex it with both of his hands before finding it satisfactory, and turned toward the spot where Ben had disappeared.
Bryan grabbed his shoulder, hoping to convince his friend to keep from committing what he could only see as suicide. “Kyle, don’t do it! This isn’t a fucking football game, you can’t win this!”
Kyle turned back to his friend and gave him a fierce glare. “Would you want me to leave if it had taken you?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked into the darkness, his cell phone supplying just enough light for him to see a few feet in front of him.
Katie followed him, using her high-end flashlight to search the ground. “I won’t let him stay out there for long, you have my word.” She continued into the forest, following Kyle, and leaving Bryan alone at the bottom of the hill.
He watched as their lights moved away from him, trying to understand how everything had gone to shit so quickly. If they had to get back to the church, how much time did they have to lose looking for Ben? Was he actually considering leaving a kid like Ben behind to save his own ass?
Ben was an asshole, that much he knew, but he didn’t deserve what had happened to him. His friends and employers had left him behind, which told him that leaving with them would likely make him as big a scumbag as they were. Either way, without a light, he had to make up his mind now, or be stuck in total darkness.
“Shit,” he said to himself under his breath. He bent down and felt blindly along the dark ground beneath him, trying to find some kind of weapon. His hand brushed against a rock with a jagged edge on one side. With both hands he pulled it free from the ground, estimating it to weigh at least twenty pounds.
“Hey Kyle, do you remember the time I followed you into the woods to fight monsters with nothing but a rock? Oh you don’t? That’s probably because we’re both dead.”
He carefully followed their lights, which had begun to shrink as they moved away from him, and tried to catch up. Losing his balance several times, he kept staggering forward, slowly closing the gap between them. The darkness surrounding him was terrifying in its solidity. He held the rock to his body with his right hand and held his left out in front of him, trying to ward off any loose branches that might jab at his eyes.
The only things visible to him were the two lights ahead, moving back and forth as Kyle and Katie looked for Ben. Twice he stopped when he heard sounds off to his right. Both times he held his breath and listened, praying to a God he hadn’t believed in earlier in the day that nothing was coming for him.
The flashlights were forty or fifty yards ahead of him and he wasn’t closing the distance as quickly as he wished. Every time he stopped to listen for something, he lost what ground he had gained. He wanted to yell out for them to wait, but was afraid to give away his position to whatever shadowed him to his right. His shins and toes were sore and bleeding from continually running into stones and logs while he tried to catch up.
As he pushed further into the forest, he noticed the smell of salt water grew stronger with every step. The humidity in the air grew thicker, reminding Bryan of the beach more than the mountains of Pennsylvania.
After another twenty seconds of staggering through the woods, Bryan was about to shout out for them to stop, when the lights ahead of him halted in place. Trying to use their pause to his advantage he crept forward, careful of the treacherous ground. He could hear their whispering as he closed in, finally able to see them as he got within twenty feet.
The woods came to an abrupt end and Bryan stumbled out of them with his feet sinking into sand. Katie and Kyle stood just outside the edge of the forest, shining their lights along its edge, blinding Bryan as he approached them.
“What the hell? How are we on a beach?” Bryan asked.
“Glad you came with us,” Kyle said, dropping his hand on Bryan’s shoulder. “We were just following the trail from Ben and that... thing, when we ended up here.”
“It’s fairly obvious why we’ve smelled salt water for the last few hours.” Katie looked down the beach, into the darkness ahead. “We’re by an ocean.”
Bryan shook his head slowly, trying to understand how they could be near an ocean. Not even an hour ago, he’d been standing in redneck country in Pennsylvania. Whatever had happened to them in that church had taken them far beyond what he could have imagined.
He looked at Katie, trying to understand how she could remain so calm during everything. Bryan knew Kyle well enough to know that he thrived under pressure, and always kept himself together when things went wrong. He’d been involved with the volunteer fire department down the street from their college for the past three years, and had dealt with some disturbing situations during that time.
Kyle was at his best when everyone around him was panicking. But what about Katie? How could a reclusive author handle this kind of insanity? All Bryan wanted to do was run back to the church, and hope for the best. Katie seemed more interested in discovering about this world, or dimension, or whatever it was, than keeping herself safe.
“Wherever we are, it’s certainly not a mirror representation of our own world,” Katie said, turning back to them. The high humidity and exertion of running through the woods had her sweating profusely. Her t-shirt clung provocatively to her tight stomach. Bryan thought about slapping himself for noticing her attractiveness at a time like this.
“Is there any sign of Ben? I seriously want to get back to the church – monster inside or not.” Bryan held the rock in his right arm tighter to his body, wondering if he was wasting his time even carrying it. What could a rock do to something that could carry a full-sized man away by his face?
Kyle pointed his light at the sand between them, illuminating a trail running further down the beach.
“It looks like it dragged him this way. Check out the footprints beside the path,” Kyle said. “The prints aren’t too big, so hopefully it’s something we can handle.”
Katie slapped at her leg, cursing and hopping away on one foot. “Something bit me!” They couldn’t see anything, but Bryan thought he could hear something scampering away through the sand. He felt like they were being watched.
Ben screamed from somewhere ahead.