The houses I passed were all dark. Here and there, a crack of light peered out from under curtains. There were no street lamps on my father’s street, and the night was darker than I thought possible in a place where people lived—dark like the bottom of the sea. I used my phone as a flashlight as I walked. The crickets sang out from every side, and I prayed they’d keep singing.
In the distance, I heard what sounded like a howl—someone’s dog, I hoped. It was answered by another, further away. I quickened my pace, searching out Hector’s address in my email, trying to map it out. I shook my head at how crazy this was. People were dead, and if I didn’t hurry, another of my friends would join them.
I froze as I suddenly found myself bathed in the beam of a headlight. From behind, I heard a car slowing down.
“Clara?”
It was Keith, leaning out of his Jeep.
“Oh my god,” I said. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Jesus, so did you. I was just coming to try to talk to you.”
I slipped into the passenger side.
“We have to hurry,” I said. “Please, I’ll explain later, we have to get Hector, and then go find Ash.”
Keith swallowed whatever questions he was going to ask when he saw my face. I probably looked as terrified as I felt. I told him how to get to Hector’s.
“I came as soon as I heard. You-you guys really saw Danny?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Keith shuddered. I realized then that I didn’t know anything about Danny until I read the diary—just that he was Neil’s friend. I clearly didn’t know his history with Keith.
“He and I, well, we were good friends a while ago. We didn’t really hang out anymore, but—”
He shuddered again.
We pulled up to Hector’s house. I texted him, Get out here now, we have trouble.
What, where are you? he texted back.
Outside, come here. Explain later.
We sat for a tense, silent moment in the car, hoping his parents wouldn’t see us waiting and blow the whole thing. Then I heard the creak of a screen door from the back yard, followed by a muttered curse, then Hector emerged from the back of his house. His eyes widened when he saw Keith at the wheel.
“What’s the crown prince doing here?”
Hector flashed Keith a resentful glare, and to my surprise Keith looked down, ashamed.
“I heard about Danny—”
Keith’s voice was thick with emotion, and that seemed to be enough for Hector to let his guard down at least a little. He hopped in the back.
“Ash is in danger,” I said. “I think she’s going to be next, unless we can stop it.”
“Next, as in what happened to—” Hector looked grim as he realized what I meant. “How do you know that?”
I was a second away from full on panic, and I had no idea how to explain.
“I need you to trust me, please. I hope I’m wrong. Do you know her address?”
“No, but I can find it. Take us down the street in case my parents look out.”
Keith took us slowly down the road as Hector whipped out his phone, working the touchscreen with frenzied fingers.
“Let’s see, PTA records. They always put too much online. . . . Here, got it: 1820 Cedar Street.”
Keith nodded, and we were on our way, speeding through the darkened streets. The address was on the other side of town. I gripped the arm rest until my knuckles turned pale, thinking please let us not be too late. None of us spoke on the way over, terrified of what we might find. Keith’s Jeep raced through the black streets of the town, headlights bathing the trees ahead in a ghostly glow.
When we finally pulled up in front, I was afraid we’d found the wrong house. The yard was overgrown, and even on the pitch-dark street, the house’s peeling paint and cardboard-patched window were obvious. There were no lights on.
“Are you sure this is right?’ I said.
“Of course it’s right,” Hector said, though he didn’t look as sure as he sounded.
Then I saw Ash’s car in the driveway, the cigarette butts in the front yard. I knew she had a hard life, but it was something else to see it like this, without being invited. I just prayed she was all right. I couldn’t handle losing her just as we’d become friends. I was about to walk up to the front door when Keith stopped me.
“I don’t know if anyone’s home,” he said. “Let’s check the back. Maybe her room’s on that side.”
We crept through the narrow side yard to the rear of the house. The back yard was strung with a clothesline, and part of it was set up as a garden, but the rest was mostly mud. Ash’s backyard bordered directly on the forest that surrounded the town, just like my father’s. The back door was ajar, creaking faintly in the breeze. Then I saw the footprints.
“Look!” I said.
They made a trail through the mud from the front door out to the tree line. They were made by sneakers, about the same size as Ash’s feet, from what I could remember. Immediately I thought of my promise to Elaine to stop the junior detective stuff. I’d broken promise after promise to the adults in my life, but I had to break one more. Until now, I’d been hoping we’d just find Ash at home with nothing amiss, but now there was no choice but to believe the note. I followed the footprints to the edge of the forest, Hector and Keith behind me.
We stopped for a moment at the tree line. We all knew what we might find at the end of this trail, but none of us wanted to say it, or even think it. The darkness of the forest ahead made the street look bright. The trees were hulking gray shapes in the purple gloom. The wind whipped my hair into my face and made an eerie rustling sound as it blew through the branches.
“We have to go,” I said.
Hector and Keith nodded, and we set off down Ash’s trail. Her footprints were soon lost in the darkness and the uneven ground. Not even moonlight penetrated the canopy above us. We had to take out our phones to see the way forward.
I thought of my first trip into the forest and shivered.
“Stay together,” I said. “No matter what you hear, don’t run off after it.”
“This isn’t a path,” Keith said. “This is no good . . .”
“No choice now, man,” said Hector.
The crickets were still chirping around us, and I gave silent thanks for that. The undergrowth here wasn’t dense, but the tree roots were hard and gnarled and seemed to rise up out of the ground on purpose to trip us unawares. There was a heaviness to the air that grew as we got deeper in. The trees ahead were shrouded in a pale mist.
“We’re getting close to the lake,” Keith said.
Just then, an ear-splitting howl rang out from somewhere in the forest. It froze us all to the spot. It was answered by others further off, savage growls that rose to a frenzy of high-pitched baying yips. We took off running deeper into the forest. Wherever we were going, I hoped it was toward Ash.
We were almost at the lake—I could see a silvery ribbon of reflected moonlight ahead. Then I caught sight of a lone figure walking between the trees, making for the water. She moved slowly, swaying as if she were still half-asleep. The cascade of matte-black hair was unmistakable.
“Ash!” I shouted.
She didn’t even turn around. She was clear of the trees now, walking down the rocky shore toward the lake’s edge. We ran toward her. The lake was a pool of utter blackness, like a second sky, with its own near-full silvery moon to match the one above. I thought of all those times I’d seen the lake during the day and thought there was more to it I wasn’t seeing. . . . At night, it’s true face was visible, a dark, yawning void, like deep space. I couldn’t look directly at it—I was afraid it would swallow me whole.
Ash was almost to the edge when I caught up with her.
“Stop!”
I grabbed hold of her shoulder, wrenching her back. She stopped, shaking her head, then stared at me, bewildered. The question she was about to ask me died on her lips, as her eyes suddenly went wide with terror. My eyes followed hers, a shape even blacker than the darkness of the lake had risen up from the water, towering above us. It was like a cloud of dense shadow, standing twice the height of a full-grown man. We stumbled backward as it advanced toward us. From around us in the forest, the howling rose up again, closer this time. We tripped over rocks and roots, scraping our arms and legs, running back toward the trees. Hector and Keith both saw what followed us, their faces pale with fright.
“Run!” I shouted.
Hector took off with us back into the trees, but Keith stood rooted to the spot, unable to move. The rest of us drew back in terror. My mind raced, trying to think of some way to help him, but what could we do against something so unreal? I threw a loose rock at Keith, hoping to stir him from his trance, but it only bounced off his shoulder.
“Keith, run! You’ve got to fight it!”
The shadow drew closer, drawing itself up even taller. The howling around us in the forest had risen to a gibbering chorus, and I knew then we wouldn’t be safe, no matter how fast we ran. The shadow stood there in front of Keith, a negative stain like an afterimage burned into the eye. I felt certain it concealed something, something even worse than what we could see.
The air around us was electric. I could feel my hair stand on end. Keith still hadn’t moved. He was staring right into that mass of darkness. It moved toward him slowly, as if it had all the time in the world. All of us could feel the same rank, animal fear that rooted Keith to the spot. We were all holding our breath.
Here it comes, I thought, do something.
I fumbled on the ground, looking for a rock, for anything that could help. Then I remembered the old iron clasp in my pocket. I pulled it out and hurled it at the cloud of shadow, hoping that for once in my life I could manage to throw something straight.
The clasp arced over Keith, striking the darkness as it rose above him. There was a terrible hiss, like a nest of snakes, and the darkness drew back.
It hovered there for a tense moment. I was afraid it would come back toward us, and I was about to scream for everyone to run. Then, slowly, it withdrew, sinking lower to the ground like an animal on all fours, backing slowly down to the lake. In a moment, it was gone, and it was as if the whole forest breathed out at once. The crickets burst out in a frenzied chorus. In the trees, a flock of night birds took panicked flight. In the distance, I could hear one last mournful howl fade to silence. We caught our breath. Ash almost fell to the ground, catching herself on a nearby tree branch.
“Thanks,” she said, “thank god you were there. I-I don’t know what happened.”
“Yeah,” said Keith. “Thanks. I don’t—I couldn’t—”
I looked back into the depths of the forest. The iron clasp my father had given me was out there somewhere, but I couldn’t bring myself to take one more step in that direction.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
We walked back toward Keith’s Jeep in hushed silence. My head was brimming with questions, but I didn’t feel ready to speak yet. It took us until Ash’s back yard was in sight for the fear to even start to lift.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“I was here, at home. My mother had gone to bed, her medication makes her sleep like the dead. I was just sitting up, watching something stupid on TV. Then-then everything after was like a dream. I heard a voice whispering to me, telling me to come outside. I knew I shouldn’t, but it was like I wanted to so badly. I had to.
“When I opened the door, it wasn’t my back yard. I was walking down a garden path. The flowers were glowing just like the moon. I heard singing in the distance. A voice I wanted to follow. It was beautiful.” She shuddered.
“What—” Hector began, his voice hoarse. “What the hell was that back there?”
Keith had been vacant-eyed the whole way back, walking in a daze just like Ash had, but at Hector’s question, he seemed to come around.
“I’ve seen it before, when I was a child,” he said. “It’s called the King of the Wood.”