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Slowly, she comes to a stop.
She should have reached the peak by now.
She should have caught up with them long before that.
Her lungs wind unto themselves like split-ended threads coiling onto a spool. They weigh heavy in her chest, smother her heartbeat.
She checks her watch.
Her veins run hollow.
7:30am.
They had left the lodge at 6:00. Chris had complained enough to veer them onto a shorter route. Sam chose it herself, and said herself: “We’ll be at the top by 7:30.”
Blinking away the echo of her voice, she studies her surroundings and takes slow, punctuated breaths.
Easy, Sam, easy. Where are you now?
She nods. The midpoint.
To her left: thick swathes of spruce and juniper sit flush to the track of flattened dirt. The underbrush shudders like a green mist at their roots, rolling down a gradient to the lower rungs of the trail.
To her right: a slope stretches up to the next section of the trail, transitioning to shelves of green from a base of partially exposed rock.
Josh told her that he’d seen something in the slope, once. After a rainstorm he went up alone and trudged through the mud, and there in the sludge he saw a skull and the beginnings of a spine. Beth had smacked his head, saying something like ‘stop scaring my girlfriend, you ass,’ and though Josh had laughed while fending her off, Sam saw him tense.
Nothing here but rocks and leaves, Sammy. You, the rocks, the leaves, and a half hour separating you from your friends. You got a little turned around. Just keeping walking and you’ll be okay. That’s the bend in the trail there. That’s where they went.
She checks her watch again.
7:30am.
“What the hell ,” she says, tapping at the glass. The second hand ticks and tocks and the minute hand sits firm. Her hand drops to her side as she frowns. She looks to the bend.
Something pops in her chest and she stomps down the path, readying herself to yell at them before they can spook her.
“Good job, you guys, you got me!” she says, rolling her eyes as she nears the turn. “Messed around with my watch, ran off into the bushes. Let’s see who makes you guys breakfast when we…”
Nothing but the trail, the rocks, and the leaves.
Nothing else.
The path ribbons higher, tucking up into a short bluff marked with trees.
Her brow wrinkles as she thinks back to only half an hour earlier.
She’d definitely been here; the memory appears in her mind more palpable than the syrupy haze that accompanies déjà vu. She’d come here after—after she’d lost them.
One knee in the dirt, the other against her chest as she messes at the lace of her boot, as she catches Beth’s eyes roaming through her before she disappears with Josh and Chris round the rock. She stands, she follows. And then—
The path.
Clenching her hands, she runs her thumbs over the curvature of her fingers. Then she makes for the bluff.
She remembers its sharp curve and the stones jutting from the ground, the mushrooms thrown in garland along its interior. When she spots ahead the dip in the trail and its consequent veer upward, she feels relief coax the shell from her fists and her steps fall lighter against the ground.
That is, until she ascends to what should be the next section of the trail.
Trees to the left, the slope to the right.
She finds herself again at the midpoint.
Her watch says 7:30am.
And it is quiet.
More than quiet.
Not a sound wavers between the leaves. Not even in the distance. The air feels thin, as if someone had taken a knife to it and pared it down to wisps. Her eardrums bow outward to equilibrate. The change in pressure suggests a shift to a higher altitude, and yet another feeling pervades her, the feeling that she stands at the bottom of an abandoned ocean, has a form held together only by the weight of the water. A dull ache flitters between her temples, but she still whirls on her heel. Her heart tightens into a knot.
The trail slinks away between the trees marking the beginning of the midpoint. Beyond it, though, webs of darkness fill the gaps afforded by the branches, a skin spreading between the needled arms. She almost reaches out her hand, draws back when she imagines the sensation of velvet.
Her headache worsens when she turns and she inhales sharply.
She sees someone by the slope.
“Oh God,” she says, her voice trapped between a laugh and a tremor, “oh my God, no.”
A tree.
Standing just atop the rocks, its pendulous branches drape over the hunched spine of a trunk. The upper layers culminate into a malformed bulb that hangs downward. Sam sees a shawled figure bent close to the earth, its head bowed.
Where did it…?
Is it…real?
She approaches, keeping to the further side of the trail. Shivers ripple over her calves, send sparks down her splayed fingers. And the tree remains motionless, absorbed in a trance of its own. Tamping down her imagination, she ventures closer. Notices the overturned dirt where the head of the tree trains its gaze. Her interest piques in a way that chills her skin, but she manages to walk past. She doesn’t remove her eyes from the tree until she makes it around the bend.
Once more, the bluff.
7:30am.
This time, she walks slower.
The sky, crystalline when they had left, appears now dull, clouded. With every step she takes it becomes more opaque, coagulating like rotting milk. Light filters over the tops of the trees, descending as curtains over the trail and failing to illuminate anything outside of this boundary. It tumbles towards her, drops cool against her tongue. Fog.
Pressing forward takes time now, for her. The will to run puts heat in her legs, yet just as quickly the dirt seeps inside and takes it away. Her head throbs, desperate to process even her own heartbeat. Silence still reigns.
By the time she crosses the bluff and stumbles around the turn, sees the tree waiting for her in the mist, she can’t find it in herself to move anymore. Her bones tunnel deep into the earth, or maybe it’s the other way around. The earth has burrowed into her soles. In any case, she can’t move.
Not until she considers for a second time what the tree studies beneath its gaze.
She puts her gaze there, too. Her headache paints spirals in her skull, swirling and swirling and swirling and her mouth goes dry. The dirt trembles. She can’t focus on anything else. By degrees she walks forward, unaware of the shadows flowing in from the trees and meandering just behind her heels.
In front of the base of the tree, she kneels.
Her bones feel raw, full of a softness that sends strands of numbness down her arms.
It guides her, compels her to lift her hands to the dirt, and she digs. The dirt carries no sensation. Something akin to ash.
Soon, the skull emerges from the earth like an enormous mushroom cap.
In her hands, it radiates warmth. She accepts it and it tips into her like a drink.
Her headache disappears.
And then, a pressure.
Against the outer ring of her ears it touches, settling there with a hovering weight as would an open mouth. She doesn’t—can’t—check over her shoulder.
Instead, she cups the skull in her palms, walks round the bend up to the bluff; the fog tugs her ankles.
Running her fingers over the skull’s surface, her pupils tighten to circlets. The sockets are meant for eyes much larger than any human’s, dominating the face and encroaching upon the maxilla. Save for its cranium, she finds the skull shaped with angles; against her thumbs, the cheekbones sit like teeth. And as for the real teeth—she gasps and her brain begs her to drop the skull. The teeth are long and misshapen, carved into knife points that threaten to slip into her wrists.
Drop the skull and run.
No, says the phantom mouth at her ear. No.
At a gradual pace, the skull becomes warmer.
You won’t run.
So she doesn’t.
The midpoint.
She can just read the face of her watch. 7:30.
Her legs drag her onward with purpose. She feels like a ghost, her body reduced to a mere suggestion inside of a shell, her commands no more than a breeze. She watches the tree and the tree watches her, though she obtains no response from it; its concern centers more on the empty pit at its knees. Unintelligible words dapple the inside of her ear, spoken with the delicacy of a secret. Dread fills her; even without her comprehension, she can sense the underlying malice.
The trail continues to fall prey to the dark until the bend simply dissolves.
Once her feet settle at the point where she should see the bluff, she is released.
Something between a choke and a cough bursts from her mouth, and her hands fly to cover her lips. The skull plummets to the ground and rolls, rolls.
Rolls away onto a path in the underbrush.
Her mouth slants.
She knows these woods, knows them as well as—probably better than any Washington.
That path should not exist.
Catching her breath, deepening each inhale by raising her shoulders in time, she waits for her heart to return to her, to feel solid in her chest and warm with her own blood. She runs her thumbs beneath her nails and scrapes out the dirt. When she passes a glance to the ‘bend,’ she faces only a wall of darkness, the outline of trees struggling to press through an inky film.
Behind her, the midpoint entrance paints a similar picture.
“The only way is down, Sammy,” she tells herself.
It’s not the mouth at her ear, no.
Chest tight, she wades into the embrace of the underbrush.
The path spans only five or six feet, ending just as soon as it had started. She finds out through her foot slipping over the edge and almost catapulting her forward. Grabbing at the bushes and using her other foot as a stop, she catches herself in time and tucks herself into a crouch. She huddles amongst the leaves for a moment, working at her lip with her front teeth.
The mouth at her ear says: Down there. Look.
As she parts the undergrowth with her hands, the branches scratch against them with emaciated fingers. She does as the mouth at her ear says. She looks down.
There is a hole.
About six feet down a grassless slope, it leads straight into a mass of rock. No adornments, no warning. A hole.
She swallows.
It seems to move in time with her breaths, the darkness in the hole. An animal, lying in wait.
Turn around and leave. That’s all you need to do. You’ll get out of this.
Her ankle pivots, and in the same beat the phantom mouth domes entirely over her ear.
“Sam, I’m waiting for you.”
She flinches.
“B-Beth?” she says, raising her head and peeking above the brush.
“Sam,” the voice presses, “I’m down here.”
Her eyes follow a wave of dread that oozes through her towards the lip of the hole.
There, two arms reach out of the pitch, the hands face-down and settled in the soil. A bead bracelet encircles one wrist—
“Beth?” She blinks a few times. Her vision runs clear. The hands begin to flex their fingers, as if to test out joints unused for a long, long time. “What are you…doing down there?”
The voice nudges into her ear from behind and warbles from the hole all at once. “I’m waiting for you.”
She clutches her arms. It’s not her. It sounds like Beth, the enunciation is hers, for sure. But it’s not her . It sounds more like a pull from a recording; stilted, garbled. Repeated back by someone else who hadn’t spoken in years.
Her mouth firms, her eyes widen as the hands begin to scrabble in the dirt like worms in need of rain. Slow and rhythmic.
“Sam, the others. They’ll be here soon. Come on . Hurry .”
Sam presses her fingers into her elbows, squeezing the bone. She racks her thoughts.
“ Hurry, Sam .”
“Beth, listen. I…I think I hear them. Doesn’t that sound like Chris? I’ll bring them here, okay? Wait for me.”
“Okay, Sam. But hurry back. I’m down here.”
Hurry back. Yeah. She shoves at the bushes around her and shifts around and—
“ Sam! What the fuck—? What are you doing there?”
Someone grabs her shoulders. They’re little more than a blur.
“Guys, I found her! She’s here! Beth!”
She stares up with wild eyes and struggles against the hands on her until she’s pulled into a cone of light. A flashlight? She looks around.
Night has fallen.
Stars puncture a clear sky, her ears hum with crickets and the rustle of leaves and dirt crunching underfoot.
A new person touches her arm, softer.
Her eyes drop.
It’s Beth. Josh steps back, talking over his shoulder. Chris appears a second later, adjusting his glasses nervously.
Beth taps her arm to get her attention and speaks with urgency. Red tinges the edges of her eyes, her brows pull taut. “God, Sam, where were you? Do you know how long you’ve been gone?”
“No, I—I don’t know what happened— what time is it ?”
Beth gawks, then pats her pocket and pulls out her phone. “It’s…9. Sam? Are you okay?”
“It’s been a whole goddamn day,” Josh says. “You’ve been gone since yesterday morning.”
“ What ?” Sam’s knees quiver; Beth moves in closer to hold her hand.
“Do you remember anything?” Chris asks.
Sam shakes her head, more in response to her locking onto Beth’s bracelet than the question posed. “Um. Yeah, I. I remember us making it to the middle of the trail? And…I stopped for a second. I saw you guys go around the bend. And then…” She shakes her head again. “I don’t know.”
“We thought you went a different way to get back at Chris,” Beth says. “We went back to check on you and we must’ve been there for…for an hour or so. Waiting for you to show up. Then Josh said you might’ve gotten to the top already. But you weren’t there either. Did you fall? Your arms are all scratched up.”
She thinks back to the undergrowth and the voice and the hole. “Maybe,” she replies, but she doubts that will convince any of them.
Chris rubs his neck. “We should probably head back before they send out a search party for all of us.”
“Mom’s gonna freak if she isn’t doing that already,” Josh says, clicking on his flashlight. “S’good thing Hannah stayed.”
“God, yeah,” Beth says. She looks at Sam, her eyes watery under the moonlight, and pulls her into a hug. Sam receives it without complaint.
“Sorry,” Sam says.
“No, no. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
They walk back together in a slow-moving row.
*
Back at the lodge, Sam sits by one of the windows in the living room. She’d had a difficult time keeping food down and had left the table early. Beth had made her tea before making off to placate her mom with Hannah.
The trees sway in a soundless wind. It soothes her, and she leans against the window to close her eyes before jumping at the voice that clears itself behind her. She puts a hand to her ear.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s me.”
Josh waves from the doorway and smiles before strolling inside.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey. You holding up okay?”
“I’d say I was up until you showed up,” Sam says.
Josh puts on a scandalized face as he seats himself across from her. “ Damn. Throwing punches before I even sit down.”
Sam shrugs and gives Josh’s shoulder a little jab. “Natch.”
Josh chuckles, leaning against the window. He spares her a glance. His expression changes as he looks out. It hardens. “So, you found them, too,” he says.
“Found…” The rest of the words sit at the back of her mouth.
He matches her stare. “The bones.”
“I… yeah . I—I did. So that was—that was all real, then? What was that?”
“Hell if I know,” Josh says, “but it was pretty fucked up, huh?”
“Understatement of the year,” Sam says, her voice low. She occupies herself with her tea. “Whatever I saw…it wasn’t human, Josh. It was something else.”
“And it’s still out there.”
“Did you have to say that?” Sam says, poking his folded leg with her foot. She wants to play things soft, but she can’t work the tightness from her lips. She also wants to know more . Did Josh see—?
“It’s true. That thing’s still out there.” Josh looks at her, then past her. She copies him and sees Beth in the doorway holding a steaming mug. “Hey, where’s mine? I put my order in ages ago.”
Beth sticks her tongue out at him. “Tough luck, brother. I’m not that generous.”
“For your own flesh and blood ,” Josh says, moving to stand.
He feigns a chase and Beth flits off, yelling, “Fuck off!”
When he faces Sam again, he says, “Hey, be careful, alright? Might not be so lucky next time.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Thanks.” She’ll talk to him later.
Beth comes back. “Movie night, anyone? I think that’d be a good way to defuse after all this shit, huh?”
“I’m down,” Josh says.
“Sam?”
“Let’s do it,” she says, nodding.
Josh leaves the room and makes sure to bump against Beth’s shoulder. Beth waits.
Sam sips her tea and places her feet on the ground. Takes one last look out the window.
Outstretched, squirming, protruding from the line of trees surrounding the lodge.
Just catching the light coming from the window.
A pair of arms decked with a bead bracelet.
She doesn’t let go of Beth’s hand for the rest of the night.