The Haunted Forest Tour

CHAPTER NINE

Tommy felt like his heart was going to explode inside his chest. His sides ached, and it was almost impossible to catch a breath.

He’d lost his Aunt Jean, and then he’d lost everyone else around him. They were all gone and he was alone in the woods, with monsters moving between the trees and sniffing around for more people to eat.

He wanted his mommy.

He knew the other people were nearby, but he was too scared to scream. What if the monsters heard him first? There were a lot more monsters than there were people.

Tommy stopped running, trying to keep the sounds of his ragged breaths as soft as he could. His legs shook and his hands trembled. Just to make sure he didn’t fall over, he leaned against the rough bark of a black tree that had enough leaves to make everything under it seem as dark as bedtime.

For the first time in a very long while, the world around him was quiet, save for the pulse of his own beating heart. The air was sticky and just warm enough to keep him sweating.

Something moved on the other side of the tree. He didn’t hear it, but he felt it: a delicate tapping that vibrated through the heavy wood and made his back tingle where it touched the bark.

Tommy took a deep breath and let it out in a trembling gust. He didn’t know what was causing that vibration, but he knew it would be bad. Everything around him was bad.

“Aunt Jean?” His voice refused to go over a whisper, and maybe that was a good thing.

“Little boy? What are you doing all by yourself?” He looked over to the voice that came from his right and saw six people he’d spotted on the tram car earlier. They were all looking as frightened as he felt, but the one closest to him was a tall woman who was as big as his Uncle Perry, with dark red hair pulled into little pigtails on the sides of her head like puppy ears. She stared at him for a second while he tried to remember how to make his voice work, and then she came toward him, taking mincing steps, as if the ground beneath her feet might be thin ice over a very cold river.

“Come over to me, okay? My name is Becca and I won’t hurt you, but you need to get away from that tree.”

The people behind her—two more women and three men, most of them already injured and bloodied in the attacks from the bad things—took a step back. Tommy knew that if he turned around and looked at what was behind him, he’d start screaming and never stop. The looks on the faces in front of him said that whatever was there had to be worse than the Boogey Man himself.

Becca came a step closer, her skin as white as a glass of milk.

“Come on, hon. You come over to Becca, okay?” Her voice shook as she spoke and her hand rattled in the air.

Tommy’s heart beat faster than ever before, and he resisted the urge to look at the monster he knew was behind him. His daddy always said you should face your fears, but he thought Daddy was wrong this time. You only faced them when they couldn’t hurt you in real life and this, whatever it was, it could do more than hurt him.

Though the forest was gloomy and filled with shadows, the large shadow behind him blocked out all of the others, spreading over him like a black pool as the thing moved closer.

Tommy ran, pumping his short legs for all they were worth, and Becca crouched to pick him up. One of the men standing behind Becca aimed his rifle and pulled the trigger. One bullet left the weapon and whizzed past Tommy’s head. He never saw if the bullet hit its target. He closed his eyes instead, as Becca turned and the thing that had been behind the tree came into view for one split second as the wood and bark he’d leaned against splintered and broke with a sound like thunder.

The massive tree toppled, falling in what seemed like slow motion before bouncing off another trunk and rolling to the side, instead of crushing them all into the ground.

Before Tommy could worry about how close he came to dying—the tree had missed him by less than three feet—the thing that had knocked the tree aside seared itself into his mind.

Every nightmare he had ever had was moving behind that tree. The shape was massive, so big that his mind wouldn’t allow him to see it completely. The skin of the thing was mottled in shades of gray and black, with pale splotches that wanted to draw his eyes, because they moved and there appeared to be screaming faces within them. There was too much skin on the nightmare monster, it moved in ways that made no sense, and parts of it stretched toward him, hungering and shrieking in high, piping voices. Did he see eyes? Yes, oh yes, far too many. Did he see mouths? Yes, more than he could count, each filled with teeth that wanted to tear his flesh away from his bones and chew him into tiny pieces. Were there limbs? He thought so, but none of them looked like anything he’d seen before.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Becca ran, her breaths blowing past him, her legs lifting and falling without any rhythm or comforting pattern. She screamed each time she exhaled and her hands, clutched at his back, hooked into claws as if she were afraid she would drop him if she didn’t sink her nails into his tender skin. He felt her nails cutting but didn’t dare protest. She might drop him if he did, and then he would be dead.

His face was pointed at the nightmare, but his eyes remained closed. He heard the wet, meaty sound of the others dying but did not see it. Tommy knew deep in his heart that if he dared look, he would never, ever be able to forget what he saw.

Becca let out a scream. Not the high, whiny sounds she’d made before, but a yowl of pain, and Tommy couldn’t help but open his eyes again.

Some part of that hideous, mottled thing had reached Becca and touched her. Where it touched, her skin was distorted, pushed out of place as more of the gray thing pushed forward and deeper into her skin. Her eyes rolled almost blindly, and her face twisted into the ugliest mask he had ever seen, purple and red and filling with blood like the blister he got once when he pinched his skin in a door hinge.

Still, Becca saved him. She bent forward and lowered him almost to the ground, even as he tried to catch her hands in his because he knew what was going to happen.

Becca straightened up and threw Tommy as hard as she could. Tommy’s fingers lost their grip, and the nails in his back let loose of him, sending him arcing away from her.

Tommy saw Becca’s body torn apart. Whatever was within her sloughed away her skin and drew in the muscles and blood and bone that had been inside of her. Even as he saw her die, his body rolled over the top of the sprawled tree that had been his shelter only a few minutes before. He hit the heavy bark and rolled across the top of it, scraping his legs and hands and face in the process, and then he was over the side and falling, trying to grab with his hands, trying not to fall too fast.

The ground punched him hard, stole his breath away, and bloodied his lips.

Tommy gasped on the floor of the Haunted Forest, his mouth tasting of blood and dirt and dead leaves, and then he started to cry.

On the other side of the fallen tree, something screamed with a thousand voices. At least one of those voices sounded like Becca’s.