Charlie Mann didn’t meet their eyes.
He was shit scared.
He was sure they could smell the urine that had trickled down his inner thigh. The denim clung stickily to his skin. His heart hammered. He blinked. He clenched his fist. He concentrated on the pain his nails caused, digging into his palm. Fear was going to betray him. There was no way he was walking away from the wood.
He kept his head down.
The dirt had never been so fascinating. He stared at the browned, curled leaves from last year’s fall that had turned to mulch in the mud. A few more good rainstorms and they’d be gone, to dirt returned.
He wasn’t like the others.
Somehow he was still himself.
He didn’t know how it had happened—what had protected him, not ignorance despite the fact that he hadn’t grasped what was happening until it was too late; he’d thought it was all some sort of game Penny was playing for his birthday and been happy to go along with it, running behind her, laughing and whooping as he barreled into the ancient forest. And then everything had changed.
By the time he’d realized it wasn’t a game it was too late; Penny was dead. And then she wasn’t.
Charlie was fucked.
Utterly. Completely. Totally. Fucked.
He wanted to go home. To hide in his room. Pull the blankets up over his head.
But he couldn’t.
He couldn’t move a muscle. Not while there was a war being fought inside his body. It wasn’t pretty. Despair was winning hands down; hope didn’t stand a chance.
Charlie couldn’t begin to understand what had happened to his friend. It didn’t make sense. None of it did. The only thing he was remotely sure of was that it had all gone to shit after she’d touched the lightning-struck tree outside the old pub. But how it had gone from that to Penny stumbling into the stream and the guy in the weird antlers pushing her down beneath the surface until she stopped fighting him?
Charlie ground his teeth, chewing on his lower lip until he tasted blood. He couldn’t get the memory of how her hair had fanned out around her lifeless body from his mind. The way the bubbles died along with Penny Grainger would haunt him for the rest of his life—however long or short that ended up being.
Charlie had felt the pull of something then, impelling his feet forward one agonizing step after another as the sweeping echoes of the great song threatened to overwhelm him, and in that moment he almost lost himself, finally. He wanted to. He just wanted it to be over. But when he looked at Penny now, there was no second truth, the filth of the stream clung to her body, and try as he desperately might he couldn’t convince himself that she still had somehow miraculously returned.
Whatever that thing inside her skin was, it wasn’t her.
Some basic survival instinct stopped him from running. Instead, he faked it, walking side by side with her as she followed the antlered man in his robe of rotten leaves to the stone circle back in the clearing they called the fairy ring. Danny Ash was there: his knees covered in dirt, his shirt torn; but he was smiling, happy. His face betrayed no flicker of recognition when he saw Charlie. Danny was one of them. Whatever they were. Tommy Summers was there, too. He looked like death. And there were others who’d lived with them at the group home, too. Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke.
They started calling each other weird names, and talking like they’d known each other forever about stuff that made zero sense. Rather than risk betraying his difference, Charlie kept his head down. He tried not to listen to what they were saying, but it was hard to ignore talk of murdering kids. He watched Penny make crowns of flowers. She seemed so innocent and childish next to the others as she put the flowers on their bowed heads and promised they’d lead them to the children that needed to die.
Those two ran off, tasked with the actual killing. Blackmoore and Brooke.
Charlie watched them go.
For a moment, he dared to believe he might actually get away with hiding in plain sight.
The antlered man prowled around the clearing, sniffing the air, turning and turning again.
Behind the man, the dimgate shimmered, a trail of mist snaking out around the stones at its foot.
Charlie saw shadows moving about in there. What those insubstantial wraiths were didn’t bear thinking about.
A frigid breeze blew through the gateway.
The Horned God stopped moving, tossing his head back and throwing his arms wide. In that moment Charlie Mann knew that he was screwed. He knew he should run, but he couldn’t move. Lank black hair fell across the man’s face as he brought his head forward. Vegetation was matted in the wet locks. As his hair fell away from the root where the horns embedded into the plates of his skull Charlie realized the man wasn’t wearing some weird crown of bone; the horns protruded from his skull.
Charlie’s feet shuffled in the dirt, barely a scuff but enough to draw the full intensity of the antlered man’s hateful gaze.
Charlie was face-to-face with the devil himself, and the devil knew he was a cuckoo in this particular nest.
The antlered man leveled the bulbous head of his staff at him and spoke, and as with everything else that had come from his mouth, Charlie hadn’t got a clue what was being said. There was no natural instinctive understanding for him, no connection buried deep in the primeval part of his hindbrain. He wasn’t one of them. He didn’t belong here. To his ear, the words were nothing more than deep guttural sounds, grunts barked out. But they didn’t need to make sense for Charlie to grasp the menace within them.
The antlered man approached, reaching out a cadaverous hand for Charlie. The Knucker followed loyally at his side. The boy fell to his knees, unable to look away. Black fingernails rested on his chest, right above his heart. He stared down at the hand, feeling his gut rebel as the man began slowly to apply pressure and the nails dug in painfully, and kept on digging as though he intended to force them between blood and bone to close around the vital organ.
Charlie was sure in that moment that he was going to die—not at some distant point in time where immortality would eventually wear out, but right here, right now. Before he could, the antlers whipped around, the Horned God’s gaze turning skyward as he barked out a challenge to some unseen threat.
Charlie followed the direction of the blackened fingernail and saw the dark smudge set against the bank of clouds: a solitary black bird.
The antlered man barked out more guttural commands, and delivered a punch to the air above his head. There was something wrong about his clenched fist; it appeared to stretch, not beholden to skin and bone, elongating like a streak of lightning that burned bright in the sky as the jagged end of the bolt mutated into antlers and the body of the stag became obvious as it rose to meet the crow head on.
The two clashed.
Charlie didn’t stick around to watch the fight.
He ran.
He didn’t look back. He raced across the clearing, head down, arms and legs pumping furiously to drive him on, and burst through the shield of trees, hurdling deadfall as he bounced from tree trunk to tree trunk, staggering as he pushed himself on. There was no beaten track to follow. He plunged on into the undergrowth, snapping branches that whipped back to slash at his face. The new buds stung where they struck.
Ancient trees roots protruded from the earth, each one reaching up to try and snag him as he ran. The sharp edges of broken stones made the ground treacherous. There was nowhere he could safely put a foot as he raced on. Charlie breathed hard, fear a cold fist around his lungs, squeezing them tight.
He could hear them crashing through the undergrowth behind him, taunting him. They called out in that guttural language he didn’t understand. He wanted to scream. They wouldn’t go away. He couldn’t lose them. There was nowhere to hide. They dogged his passage every step of the way.
Charlie didn’t slow down. He couldn’t. To slow down was to surrender himself to the monsters he’d heard plot to kill a bunch of kids. He was under no illusion what they’d do to him.
He crashed through a tangle of brambles ignoring the pain as they tore at his arms as he wrestled them aside.
Wild roses tangled with creepers to form a wall.
He had no choice but to push on through it.
Charlie cried out as a thorn opened a deep cut on his cheek.
The sounds of pursuit seemed to come from all sides.
He scanned the trees, his eyes drawn to any and every movement.
To the left he saw a loosely built cairn of rocks. It wasn’t high, but would offer some cover at least, so he changed direction, angling toward the pile of stones. He ran along the wall of tightly entwined vegetation. The light was barely strong enough to pierce it. It had a curious effect on sound: wrapping him in the crunch of his own feet, the rasp of his own heavy breathing, and the susurrus of displaced leaves as he ran. Beyond it lay a shallow declivity lined with a stone wall that supported one side of the gully. There was no obvious path alongside the crack in the ground. A trodden path ran down into it, a hollow way, the hard-packed earth worn smooth. Without thinking Charlie took the trodden path, following it down to an almost-dry streambed. He ran on, following the meandering curve, the beginnings of a stream trickled around, splashing on, always running, always forward because back was where they were—plotters, child killers, monsters.
The stones of the gully’s man-made wall were furred with fungal growths.
The air reeked with the sour stink of spoiled water.
Charlie slipped on the slick surface of a wet stone, turning his ankle. He went over, landing hard on his hands and knees. Looking up he saw a shallow cavelike opening beneath the huge root system of a giant tree that grew out of the gully’s wall, its roots all the way down into the brackish water. He pushed himself up to his feet only for his ankle to give away beneath him before he’d managed a couple of steps. He looked back. He immediately wished he hadn’t. Always forward.
There was movement in the trees. Closing in.
He tested his ankle. He managed to hobble three tentative steps before a flare of pain had him reaching out for the wall for support. The fungus was wet beneath his hand. He heard something. A voice. A girl’s voice; calling to him from the darkness of the tree. His mind was playing tricks on him. It had to be. But in that moment it sounded like Penny. It had to be a trick. Something they were doing to fuck with him.
But he listened to her.
Hide, she whispered. Here, she promised.
He stumbled toward the deep dark cave beneath the root system and not knowing what else to do, splashed forward on his hands and knees, and crawled inside. The ripening leaves of the trailing branches fell across the cave mouth, a living veil between hunter and hunted.
It was small, smaller than he’d imagined from outside, the roots forming a cocoon around him. The dirt was wet, but there was a ledge at the back of the wooden cave that promised dryness.
Charlie pulled himself up onto the ledge and curled up against the cold dirt wall of his hiding place, drawing his knees up to his chin and wrapping his arms around his legs. The opening in the earth wasn’t deep. It barely offered enough shadow to hide in now he was inside it.
He stared through the veil of vegetation, looking for a glimpse of his Hunters moving around out there.
He could still hear them, and if he could hear them they could hear him.
Charlie gripped his knees tighter, pressing up against the hard-packed soil at his back.
Still your breathing, Penny whispered. You’re safe, she promised.
He didn’t believe her.
He didn’t think he’d ever feel safe again.
His heart hammered against his rib cage. It felt like it was trying to beat its way out.
Close your eyes. Rest. Sleep. You are safe. That is my promise to your friend. My thank-you. She gave everything so that I might return. Keeping you safe is the least I can do. No harm will come to you; you have my word.
He heard footfalls in the shallow stream. Pebbles grinding under heavy feet. He was sleepy. He hadn’t been, but suddenly his eyelids weighed a ton. It was all he could do not to close them as he felt the roots swaddle him, offering shelter. Sleep, my dear sweet friend. No, he promised himself. Not while they were still out there. Not until he was safe.
He heard sniffing from beyond the veil of vegetation. Breathing. Loud, shallow, excited. They had his scent. Charlie rocked in place. There was nothing therapeutic or healing about it. He was going out of his mind. The sweat dripped down the ladder of his spine, betraying him with each fragrant bead of perspiration. He wasn’t getting out of this hole alive.
The roots curled protectively around him, cocooning him. He felt them moving like snakes around him. And still he heard the others out there, prowling around the gully, sniffing at the air for any lingering trace of him. He couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go. He rested his chin on his knees. Outside he heard the splash of water. They were moving away.
Let the forest cradle you. Let Mother shelter you. I will wake you when it is safe. Sleep.
And despite everything, that was exactly what he did: he fell asleep, safe in the embrace of Jenny Greenteeth’s sanctuary.