The Haunted Forest Tour

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Did you ever lose anyone close to you, Lee?” Mindy’s voice was laced with sorrow, but as much as he longed to comfort her, he didn’t move forward. It would be inappropriate, all things considered.

“Oh yes.” He looked past her for a moment and stared out at the well-kept lawn a story below and the bright stars that shone down from above them. He felt almost suave in his tuxedo, a rental, and she looked stunning in the strapless black affair she was wearing. Thirty other people milled around in small groups on the marble balcony, moving with the casual pace of folks just having a good time. Not far away from her, Barbara was looking his way, almost begging for his attention.

“I lost my wife, Angela, to cancer almost fifteen years ago. I lost my son, Jeff, to Operation Desert Storm.” He sighed and looked back at Mindy. She shook her head in sympathy, the loss of her own son still fresh in her eyes, even six months after everything that had happened on that damned forest tour.

“How did you ever cope?” Her voice faltered and almost broke, but she held herself together.

“It wasn’t easy, of course. I’d been with Angela for close to thirty years. I woke up with her every day and went to bed with her every night.” He felt the sting of tears start at his eyes, but did nothing to stop them. “I spent every minute I could with her, because she made my world a brighter place. Even when she was dying, when the chemotherapy failed to stop the cancer and I knew she was in agony, she made my world better.”

Barbara nodded from off to the side and moved closer. Tina wasn’t far behind her. Tina’s losses were just as fresh as Mindy’s and both of them looked at him as if he could somehow offer them the wisdom to survive losing a loved one. There was no wisdom to offer, of course. Condolences, yes, but he’d learned nothing of how to grieve painlessly. He still suffered from the losses every day.

“You’re a very brave man, Lee. You’ve been through so much.” The redhead, Jean, Tommy’s aunt, was the one who spoke now, moving in on the other side of Mindy. Four beautiful women, dressed to the nines, and all of them with him at the remembrance of the fateful events that occurred half a year earlier. It was also the debut of his account of the affair. The publishers had pushed hard to get the book ready as quickly as possible, and Lee had delivered. He knew how to write a fast book, and in this case the story was easy to research. He’d lived it, after all.

“What will you do now, Lee?” It was Mindy who spoke again. Or at least he thought it was. It could have been Barbara, or even Jean. They all sounded a lot alike, really.

He frowned at that. No, they didn’t sound that much alike. Not when you got down to it. Jean had a California non-accent, and Barbara sounded like she was from Arizona. And Mindy? Mindy was pure southeast, one of the areas where other accents had merged and diluted the gentrified southern accent, but definitely from that area. They didn’t sound much alike at all, at least they hadn’t before tonight.

Mindy put a hand on his arm and smiled up at him. She was a beautiful woman, no two ways about it. She opened her mouth to say something… and then screamed instead. Part of her face exploded away from her skull, leaving a cavernous hole where her left eye had been.

The women in front of him shimmered and the world around the balcony where he stood celebrating his literary victory grew blurry.

Lee shook his head again and looked at Mindy. She was gone. He could still feel her hand on his arm, but she was gone. He looked at his arm and saw the wriggling mass of serpentine fingers that gripped his shirt and sank into his flesh. The pain hit a second later.

“Ow! Damnation!” His voice was a dry croak, and his ears were ringing.

“Get away from him!” Mindy was back, only this time she was covered in sweat and dirt and her clothes were disheveled. She’d never looked lovelier.

Without a legitimate weapon to use for attack, she’d resorted to swinging a metal hole punch she’d found somewhere inside the office up one flight of stairs. Not far away from her, Barbara was aiming her now-empty pistol at the ruptured cowl of the Proof Demon, which still held onto his arm with its wicked talons.

Lee yanked his arm back and lost a generous portion of skin along with his shirtsleeve. The sting from where the sharpened nails had dug in was like a slap in the face and helped knock the cobwebs out of his head.

Mindy swung with her makeshift weapon and struck the mostly undamaged side of the cowl covering the demon’s face. What passed for blood spilled out of the ruin on the opposite side of the monster’s head and it stepped back, hissing. Several shapes moved under the hood, and the entire form under the draped cloth shivered violently.

Mindy moved in to swing again but the creature was too fast, slipping away from where it had been a second before and rearing up in front of Lee with all the speed and grace of a cobra.

“We… will… meet… again… Lee…”

Lee didn’t need that. The Proof Demon’s voice was creepy enough without adding “Lee” to the end of the sentence. He really didn’t need that.

The brown cloth and everything under it fell backward and dropped over the side of the small stairwell, landing in the darkness below.

Lee grabbed for his rifle and tried to aim, but by the time he was ready to draw a sight, the monster was gone.

“We can’t just sit here.”

Barbara looked at Tina and tried not to sigh with exasperation. Tina was right, of course. No one would find them anytime soon if they stayed in the water reclamation plant, and it wasn’t like they had any supplies to keep them alive during a long wait for the search party. They didn’t even have an aspirin to help Brad, whose face was far beyond simply being “pasty.” Barbara didn’t say anything, of course, but the man looked absolutely terrible.

“We have to, at least for now.” Barbara leaned in and spoke as calmly as she could. “Eddie is out there trying to get help for us, and there’s just no way we could get out of here with Brad. When Eddie does bring help, he’s going to bring it here, not to some other random location in the forest, so we need to stay put. And it’s going to start to get dark soon. It’s dangerous enough when we can see. The flashlights aren’t going to keep us from getting ambushed.”

“Well, we can’t stay here forever,” said Jean.

“I’m not suggesting that we stay here forever. We’ll wait until tomorrow morning, sunrise, and then we’ll go. Maybe we won’t have to wait all that long. Maybe Eddie will come back with reinforcements before then. For now, we have shelter, and it’s best not to leave it.”

Jean slid her arm around Tommy, who was staring at the wall again, fascinated by whatever he was seeing. There was nothing on the wall, of course. Tommy’s only reaction to his aunt’s touch was to blink and look back at Brad where he rested on the ground.

“I realize it’s still very early, but I think we all could at least use a nap.” Lee spoke softly, his face haunted. The encounter with the Proof Demon, as he called it, had obviously rattled him badly. He wouldn’t even look at anyone else. “When assistance does arrive, it may not be an armored tank. We may still need to be awake and alert, so now is a good time to get some rest. I propose a watch.”

Mindy nodded. “I’m for that. We’ll take it in shifts. Maybe two people at a time, just to be safe.”

The others agreed immediately, except for Jean, who said nothing.

“We can barricade the doors,” said Barbara. “That’s a good starting point.”

They all grew silent for a few moments. Lee’s haunted expression faded, and he got an ornery smile on his face. “So who knows a few good ghost stories?”

Jean practically exploded. “You think this is fucking funny?” She stood up, knocking Tommy aside without even seeming to notice it. Barbara looked at the woman and ground her teeth together. Jean was not finished with her rant. “I lost my husband earlier today! We’re stuck in the middle of this goddamned dump, which is in the middle of this fucking forest full of fucking monsters and you want to crack jokes? Fuck you!”

Lee glanced at Jean for a moment and shook his head. His lips pressed together firmly.

Barbara looked from one to the other, wondering what she could say to defuse the situation.

Mindy stared only at her hands as she spoke. “You should have shot her, Lee.”

Jean’s head snapped around fast enough to cause whiplash. “What the fuck did you say?”

“I said he should have shot you. It would have been a mercy killing.”

Jean sputtered in return, her mouth gaping open and snapping closed a dozen times.

“You think you’re the only one, is that it? You lost your husband? I lost my son. So don’t you dare whine about how shitty your life is. We all get it.”

Jean didn’t answer. Instead she settled back against the desk and leaned her head back. She closed her eyes and acted as if none of them were there.

Lee coughed softly. “Everyone get some rest. Who wants to join me on watch?”

Barbara settled in as best she could, while Mindy and Lee took the first watch. She did not sleep. Exhausted as she was, she had trouble believing she’d ever sleep again.

But they slept, most of them, as well as was possible in the cramped, spooky quarters. Tommy tried to join them, but after a while he sat up because he could feel the nightmares coming. They were trying to sneak into his head when nobody was looking, and he didn’t trust them to stay away.

Nightmares were always trying to do things to him. Like what they were doing to his parents. Mom and Dad would go to bed at night and sometimes he’d hear them when the nightmares got to them. He could hear them crying out, or arguing because of the bad dreams.

Mr. Lee was talking in his sleep. Aunt Jean was crying, but he couldn’t tell if she was awake or not. She’d been crying a lot. He wished he could help her, but he was afraid to move. The Gray Man might get him if he moved. Everybody else called him Brad, but to Tommy, he was the Gray Man. Mostly because his skin had lost all of its tan and gone a sickly shade of gray. Miss Tina was worried about him and kept checking on him and saying she loved him, but Tommy wasn’t worried about him.

He was worried about the thing inside of him. Tommy couldn’t see it, but he could smell it. So could everyone else when they got close to the Gray Man, but they kept looking around like the smell was coming from somewhere else. Tommy knew better. He’d walked around the room a few times earlier, and he knew the stinky mold scent came from the Gray Man as surely as he knew that his uncle was dead and the nice lady, Becca, was dead too.

Tommy closed his eyes for a second and then opened them again, wishing that he was back in his bed. Even if Mommy and Daddy were fighting, it would be better than this place.

Something moved off to his left, where the Gray Man had been resting. He heard a dripping noise, like water trickling from a busted pipe—Daddy had fixed one of those last year and he still remembered the sounds—and then the smell from the Gray Man came along, stronger than before.

Tommy tried to make a noise, but no sound came from his mouth. His voice was frozen.

The Gray Man moved again, letting off more wet noises. It sounded like his clothes were soaked, and the stench of mildew grew so strong that it made Tommy’s nose wrinkle.

Tommy held his breath.

“Tommy?” The voice was faint, a hint of a whisper that he knew no one else would hear. “Tommy, can you help me? I’m very cold. I can’t see.”

The Gray Man was speaking to him. Tommy’s skin crawled and he bit his bottom lip to make sure he didn’t make a sound. The Gray Man’s hand moved closer, reaching for him. Tommy had stayed in the same spot for most of the time they’d been in the building, except when Mr. Lee took him to go pee outside. Now he was back at his seat at the desk, and perched on the rolling chair. He slid off the seat as quietly as he could, avoiding the clammy hand that reached for him.

He wanted to wake Aunt Jean. She would know what to do. All he had to do was remember where she was, because it was too dark to see her anywhere. He wanted to call out for her, but ever since he’d seen the…

…his mind refused to let him remember what had happened to Becca and the others. He could remember them and that they were dead, but beyond that, he could manage nothing…

…well, ever since he’d been lost in the woods, he couldn’t make himself talk.

Tommy took exactly two steps backward and tripped over his own foot in the darkness. He fell, pin-wheeling his arms, and slammed the edge of his head into the desk with an audible crack.

He winced and closed his eyes as the pain lashed through his skull and made his eyes water. His hands moved up in a futile effort to protect the spot where he’d just done himself harm.

The Gray Man stopped moving, stopped whispering, and even the wet sounds from around his body ceased.

Tommy whimpered, his mind’s eye showing him a small smile spreading on the Gray Man’s face, his head tilted as he listened for another sound.

“Tommy, are you there?”

Tommy felt the bump on his head, half expecting to feel the moist heat of blood, like that time a year ago when he’d dropped the cookie jar and it broke against him. Instead he merely felt the sting of the growing lump. When he was certain he wasn’t going to bleed all over himself, he tentatively tried standing. Aside from a brief dizziness, everything seemed to be working.

Tommy reached out with his hand and felt the edge of the desk. This time he’d be smarter and move slowly. Moving around without being able to see was harder than he would have expected, because at home he always had his nightlight.

The desk worked just fine for keeping him going in the right direction. He took a careful step and then another, feeling more confident about being able to avoid the Gray Man.

The hand that covered his was cold and wet. The skin felt like the flesh of a rotting peach, and leaked something obscene across his knuckles.

Tommy flinched back, but the Gray Man’s fingers closed over his wrist with a damp squelch.

“There you are, Tommy…”

Oh, how he wished he could scream.