I stumbled, lost my balance, and collapsed, dragged down by the weight of my pack. A good thing, it turned out; a silver blur passed through my vision, close enough to brush a gust of wind against my face. The boy’s hunting knife, swinging for my head. It would have shattered into my temple, I would have felt the cold iron against my eyeball—
“What are you doing?” I rolled and pushed myself back onto my feet, scrambling backward, fumbling for my pocket knife. Not real, this couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be happening. “Hey—hey, stop it! Stay where you are!”
The boy didn’t stop. He stepped toward me.
“I’m warning you, kid. One more step and I’m gonna have to get violent.”
The scar cutting through his face stretched, creasing and pulling like fresh taffy. Another step, his hunting knife gleaming silver in the moonlight.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I step in and get physical? Should I run? Something was wrong with him; he didn’t look at me, he looked through me, like I wasn’t even there. He moved again, raising the hunting knife. I panicked, made a snap decision.
I threw myself inside his reach, aiming the triangle of my shoulder at the center of his rail-thin chest. I was six-two and a buck seventy-five, even after two weeks of constant movement and not enough water. He was eleven years old and a hundred pounds including the blade he clutched in one hand. As far as the physics went, he didn’t stand a chance. I dropped my own knife in the collision and stumbled to my knees, but he went sprawling ass over teakettle, knife flying out of his hands.
I shrugged off my pack and scrambled in the dirt, hoping to hit the handle of the hunting knife or my knife, I didn’t care which.
“Listen, kid, I don’t know what your deal is, but you need to step the hell back, right now.”
In the corner of my peripheral vision he stretched toward the charcoal sky. His gouged cheek tightened, his mouth opened and a scream like nothing I’d ever heard before split the air. It cracked and splintered, high-pitched, angry, and challenging. So loud I abandoned my search for the hunting knife, covering my ears. It raised the hair on the back of my neck, and made my testicles shrink. That wasn’t the sound a human made.
He threw himself at me, snarling. Catching fistfuls of my hair, clinging like a goddamn spider monkey.
I grabbed at his shirt, and it tore in my hand; he crawled along my back and I twisted and jerked like a rodeo bull, but he clung tight, his breath hot on my neck.
A white-hot pain lanced through my head, a flash of agony.
“God damn it!” My hands caught something solid—his throat, fingers crossed—and I hurled him off. The side of my head was on fire. My right hand came away bloody.
He scrambled to his feet, black eyes gleaming. He panted, chest heaving. His lips stretched into that horrid grin, except now they gleamed slick with red. The little bastard bit me. He spat on the rocks and wiped his mouth, smearing my blood across his face.
Warm drops splattered on my shoulder, trickling down my face. My heart hammered hard enough to send my pulse shaking through my fingertips. I started to sob in big, chest-heaving waves.
This is crazy, this is bullshit, I didn’t do anything, help me—someone help me.
The boy cocked his head and screamed at me again, the muscles in his neck bulging. His chest heaved.
My stomach dropped into my toes, and my legs wobbled. I didn’t think twice about it.
I turned and ran.
* * *
I fled, heedless of trail or terrain, clutching my ear. The echo of his scream followed me, and so did he.
“Who—who are you? Why are you doing this?” He didn’t answer my pathetic cry. The ridge rose and fell, writhing northward and I followed it, staggering and clutching my head.
He was fast. My blood still shone on his lips. His face was flushed with excitement. He made an odd, rasped whooping sound.
I had twenty feet on him, then eighteen, then fifteen. Every time I twisted to check the distance, he closed in on me, a shark after blood.
Ahead of me, the terrain split. To my left, the ridge rolled into a thick pine forest, dropping into a nameless ravine. To the right it dropped into the basin beneath the crumbling cliffs, an eighty-foot drop at least. I broke left, half falling, half running toward the trees promising the vestiges of safety. I’d lose him in the ravine, hide up in a tree until he got frustrated and went away.
I fell twice, my feet flying out from underneath me, scraping against the grass until I caught my balance. The little bastard screamed each time I fell, running and falling after me with gleeful abandon. I made for the forest, trying not to think about how much closer he was getting, how much he was gaining on me.
The forest swallowed me. Beneath the canopy of pitch-black pine, the pale moon was only the barest suggestion of light.
I pitched left, moving as fast as I dared, hands outstretched to ward off low-hanging branches from my face. My eyes hadn’t adjusted, and I slammed into the trunk of a tree with a blinding flash of light. A dull roar filled my ears. I fell to the slope with a gasp of surprise and pain.
Run, run, you have to run.
I couldn’t see shit in the darkness, but I could hear him behind me, slapping against tree trunks and ruffling the deadfall. His grunts of effort and pants of excitement followed me, hovering in my ears like gnats.
I zigzagged left and right, pitching in crazy angles across the steep ridge to lose him among the black trees. I kept moving downhill, sometimes doubling back on my own tracks. I held my hands over my mouth, trying to muffle the heaving gasps that would give me away. Tears obscured my vision, made it even harder to see. I wiped them away with clumsy, shaking fingers.
It worked; the sound of his pursuit fell back until it was a distant rustle.
A while later I slowed to a cautious shuffle, my pulse roaring in my ears. I could see now, but just. The trees were absolute black shapes, separated by inked-in shadow. My hands trembled; my breath came in rocking sobs that shook my entire frame. I swallowed them, bit them back before they could betray where I was. I clamped down on my nose and held my breath. The world spun. I lost the horizon. Ten seconds of silence, and I allowed myself to breathe again. The adrenaline on the back of my tongue tasted like shiny pennies.
At a guess, I’d made it more than halfway down the ravine. A river churned over rocks some distance below me to the right—the floor of the valley, and the fastest path out. Maybe, if I was very, very lucky, it met up with a bigger river, somewhere with campers on the banks. They could help. They could protect me.
I didn’t even consider climbing back up the ridge and walking high along the shoulder of the valley. He waited for me, that way.
Trapped.
Slowly, I slunk down the slope of the ravine toward the sound of falling water. I tested each footfall before I put my weight on it, moving away dry sticks with their traitorous snaps. Rocks that would clatter and roll downhill. Ten minutes crept by, then fifteen. Still no sound of my pursuer.
You can do this. Go slow, stay calm. You’ve lost him, you can follow the water to get help. Stay calm.
No fresh breeze cut beneath the trees. The air sat, stifling and oppressive. Sweat trickled down my face, stinging as it met my ear.
The white-noise roar of falling water got louder.
The canopy opened about twenty feet ahead of me, allowing a measure of moonlight to light the way.
Beneath me the valley fell away into unbroken black trees and darkness. The falling water proved to be a river with a small waterfall, collected in a shallow pool fifteen feet beneath me. No chance for a trail to help me navigate that drop, choked with dead tree trunks and granite boulders. I’d have to pick my way down on my own, slipping and sliding on soggy timber waiting to betray my every footstep.
Looking at the stream made me thirsty—my tongue rasped, thick and clumsy. I fell to my knees and gulped handful after handful. I didn’t even care how many thousands of microbes, bits of dirt and bugs I sucked in with every slurp, that’s how thirsty I was. I’d risk the Giardia.
I splashed water on my sweaty and flushed face, blinking hard, slapping my cheeks. My heart still trip-hammered in my chest, but at least it didn’t echo all the way down to my fingertips anymore.
It’s all right, you’ve gotten past it. He’s gone. I closed my eyes. My senses tripped all over the place, overworked, numb from the onslaught. Five things I could see. A tree, the river, a dark rock with a white splotch. My shoe, a dead leaf, floating lazy downstream. I wondered if I should pick my way step by step back up the ravine to where I ditched my backpack. Four things I could touch. My skin, hot, feverish. The smooth fabric of my shirt. The dirt, soft and crumbling. I came back down to myself, one step at a time.
Breathe. In the dark, in the silence, I hunted for the lessons Dr. K had taught me. I grabbed a leaf, focused on the way it crackled and crushed in my palm. I might be able to head back down the basin and be in Bedal by sunrise or sooner. Someone there would have a phone. Three things I could hear. The water, burbling. A happy sound, like a little chuckle. Laughing. If I climbed back up the basin, I would have my tent, all my supplies—
Across the three-foot streamlet, a single twig snapped.
I froze, searching the inked black shadow for a form or hint of movement.
Please God, be a squirrel. The skin in the small of my back seemed to shrink and shrivel. Nothing moved.
He exploded from the darkness like a ghost. His eyes burned with triumph, his grotesque face twisted. The knife poised over his head. I scrambled backward, screeching in incoherent panic. I crab-walked straight over the edge of the waterfall and plunged onto the rocks beneath me.
My right hand stretched out, touching the boulder that “broke” my fall. The ligaments and bones in my wrist bent the wrong way, snapping loud enough for me to hear. Glass shattered inside my wrist, and a million ants poured inside, biting.
I screamed so hard spots blinked in my vision.
I bounced from one boulder to another, then to the rocked-shallow of the waterfall pool.
The boy leaped onto a dead tree, dropping from boulder to boulder faster than my eyes could follow.
Clutching my injured wrist to my chest I flailed through the shallows, sputtering. I ran downstream, kicking up water left and right, feet plunging through water and empty air.
The boy screamed again, and this time the sound roared up the throat of the ravine, reverberating until there were three, five, ten of him. His footsteps splashed in the river behind me as he chased, panting.
“Leave me alone!” I howled. The tears were back, raw and burning as they flooded my vision. The river swam, the ravine wavered. The forest ran with the boy, chasing me, swallowing me. The ravine twisted, narrowed, widened, then narrowed again. The streambank was choked with willow reeds, slapping and tearing at my pants.
In front of me, the ravine forked. To the left it curved northwest into another nameless valley, to the right it fell to a lake. Through the gap in the mountains I could see the huge, three-finger summit of Glacier hanging over the lake, sweet salvation. The PCT lay that way, civilization—
The splashing footsteps quickened, outpacing me, racing along my right. I turned away from him, crying, thinking of nothing else but putting more distance between us. I scurried into the valley.
I ran as fast as I could, looking for an alternate path, but the landscape didn’t break, didn’t offer me an escape. The woods swallowed me.
The boy fell behind me, struggling against water up to his ribs. I ran until the only sound was my own heaving breath. I half sat, half fell into a hollow beneath a tree, puddled with black. I let my knees buckle and sink me beneath the dirt. It swallowed the sobs rushing to my throat. I put my face in the dirt that smelled of gentle rot and decay and cried in voiceless heaves.
Shit like this didn’t happen, not in real life.
A mass of sweat-stinging blood clotted my ear, and pain bit my feet each time I put my weight down. My wrist, though . . . I probed it, biting my tongue to avoid hissing aloud. Swollen already. Even the slightest pressure from my fingertips sent pain lancing as far up as my elbow. Broken, for sure.
Tree roots cupped my shivering and shaking form in a dirt hollow, like a rabbit in a warren. Just like Green-Eyes.
The night grew ten degrees cooler. How far was I from where I found him? Fifteen, twenty miles? A day’s hike, no more. Easy enough ground for a psychotic, murderous boy to cover, especially if he knew the backcountry trails.
A sudden and unyielding urge to get the fuck out of the tree hollow gripped me. I stumbled through the forest, squinting at the canopy overhead, trying to get my bearings.
I was deep in the Mt. Glacier wilderness by now—an entire mountain stood between me and any signed trail. A hiker came into the Glacier wilderness for only two reasons; to hike the PCT, or to summit Glacier. Beyond those, it turned into a dense collection of hard-to-reach valleys and peaks avoided by most.
Great.
I followed the river, limping on the banks against the current. The night breathed softly, silently except for the occasional squawk of a late-flying raven roosting in the trees.
I moved slowly. Every sound scratched at my raw nerves, every shadow a wet-wax grin on a dead face. A mouse skittered from one escape hole to another, and I swallowed a panicked eep. In the distance the valley pitched upward. Pale cliff faces and snow-capped summits white-washed in the fading moonlight. I’d never felt so small. Overhead, the stars burned.
He moved from behind a tree, a black-on-black silhouette.
A whine built in my throat, and I pitched into a stumbling run, the breath stilling in my hot and harried lungs.
“Go away,” I whimpered, turning my head. “Please, please just go away. You don’t have to do this.”
No shadow broke the still mask of night, no insane grin materialized in the stygian gloom. I shambled forward still, my child-like cry of fear still on my lips. Where did he go?
“I see you,” a soft voice whispered, two feet to my left. I shrieked and jumped, twisting my head to see, but saw nothing.
He’d found me, flitting between the trees.
Something to my right moved. I jolted away from it, moving deeper into the valley, stumbling, sobbing. My ear hurt, the bones of my wrist replaced with red-hot rocks. I couldn’t keep my breath; it whistled through my wasted lungs.
Something hissed behind me. Monsters in the dark with a thousand deformed mouths. Blood smeared on their chapped lips and hunger in their bellies.
A raven burst, screaming, from the black tree canopy.
I scrambled into a moonlit clearing, falling into the water of a scummed-over pond. The black faces of the cliffs and peaks glared down at me.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep running. My chest burned with effort, my legs shook. I flailed in the knee-deep shallows, turning to face him. The needling in my fingertips, the first stages of that ever-waiting panic attack. If I’d ever found a situation that warranted it, this was it.
“Come on, then!” My strained and hoarse voice comforted me; my own echo, a hollow and threadbare shell of me. Switchback, lingering in the curved tree branches. “Come and get me!”
I slapped the water, trying to muster whatever courage I could. Bravado, born of desperation.
He came then, walking out of the blackness between two trees. He licked his cracked and grinning lips, and the curled cleft of his cheek gaped at me, a second smile. He didn’t come for me. He stood there, smiling.
“Come on! What are you waiting for?” I’d grab one of his legs, hold it in the air. Keep his contorted face beneath the surface of the pond until he stopped thrashing. Even if he cut me, even if he took me down with him. At the end of all things, he was a boy and I was a full-grown adult. My heart pounded all the way to my toes. My pants ran warm, wet. I might have pissed myself. I didn’t care.
A second shape materialized from the trees, some distance away. His mouth moved with the words that came from the other’s, a corpse’s harmony:
“The Woodkin feed the Feast.”
Another boy. I could count the ribs sticking out of his bare chest. A black, gaping fissure gauging deep into his cheek, turning his eye into a clouded waste. He was missing half his long and lank hair, the skin puckered and scarred into a rope. He stretched his lips into the same dead-man’s smile.
“What the fuck?” I spun from one boy to the other. “What are—”
“The Woodkin feed the Feast,” the two boys intoned in one voice. The second one held a club in one hand, studded with what looked like nails.
They didn’t move toward me. They stood still.
Another emerged from the forest, this one a full-grown man. His teeth chattered clear through the same cleft in his cheek, and his milk-eye glared at me.
“What are—hey! You!” An adult—I could reason with an adult. The last vestiges of reason left in my screaming mind. “Help me—please, I’ll give you anything you want!”
He moved with the rest of them, staring through me. They said it over and over, in one voice:
“The mountain. The mountain.”
They appeared one after another, shadows come to life, men and boys. Each carried the ruination of scarring, each spoke the words. Some carried clubs, others knives. They surrounded the pond and me. With each repetition, the words got more and more heated, angrier. The words became a chant, and the chant became a howl, rising to surround us. They beat their chests, they slapped themselves, leaving raised red welts on their skin.
The first boy, the one who’d attacked me on the mountain, stepped out of the crowd. His words came alive:
“The Woodkin will feast in His glory.”
His lips moved with the others’. Nothing in his eyes but me.
They fell on me at once, closing the trap. I ducked under one of the fists, but the second one caught me dead in the jaw, sending a blinding flash through my eyes. I threw myself into the water, trying to swim, but they caught me, clutched me. One of them rabbit-punched me in the kidney. My turn to scream. They dragged me out of the water, dumped me on the bank and beat me, a flood of fists and feet. Someone slammed my head against the ground. Blood burst into my mouth, bright salted copper. A foot connected with my balls, and I writhed into the fetal position, crying.
This is how I died. In the dark, in the shadows.
Something blunt and heavy crushed my temple and the darkness swallowed me.
I’m sorry, Deb.