The windshield wipers of Julian’s truck were fighting a losing war. They slapped back and forth, a frantic metronome counting down the seconds of my twenty-four-hour head start, but the world outside was nothing but a blur of charcoal and gray.
I killed the headlights as I turned onto the old service road that bordered the lumber mill. Driving by the light of the fog lamps alone was suicide, but visibility was a luxury I couldn’t afford. If Miller had put out an APB, a pair of high beams cutting through the Shroud would be a lighthouse alerting every deputy in the county.
The truck bucked and groaned as the asphalt gave way to washboard gravel, then to mud. I wrestled the steering wheel, my hands slick with sweat and rain, feeling the heavy weight of Julian’s .38 banging against my hip bone in my coat pocket.
Boys always have a hideout.
I knew where I was going. Or, at least, the twelve-year-old girl living inside my head knew. She was guiding my hands, pulling the wheel left where the road forked, steering toward the section of the forest the locals called “The Throat” because it swallowed everything that entered it.
I parked the truck behind a rusted-out loader that had been reclaimed by blackberry brambles. It looked like a dinosaur skeleton, ribs of iron jutting out of the green.
I grabbed the heavy Maglite from the glove box, killed the engine, and stepped out into the deluge.
The silence of the forest wasn’t silent at all. It was a roar. The rain hammered the canopy, a million drumbeats on cedar needles and fern fronds. The wind howled through the ravine, sounding disturbingly like a human scream cut short.
“Okay,” I whispered, the word snatched away by the wind the second it left my lips. “Find the path.”
I clicked on the flashlight. The beam was thick and yellow, cutting a tunnel through the mist. I swept it across the wall of trees.
To an outsider, the Weeping Woods looked like chaos. A tangled mess of undergrowth, devil’s club, and rot. But I knew the code. Elias had taught me.
Look for the things that don’t belong.
I plunged into the brush. Instantly, the forest tried to stop me. Thorny vines snagged my jeans, tearing at the denim. Mud sucked at my boots, trying to pull me down into the earth. It felt personal. The woods didn’t want me here. Or maybe they were trying to warn me.
I scrambled up a slick embankment, grabbing onto roots that felt like cold, wet snakes. My breath burned in my throat. I slipped, my knee slamming into a rock, but I scrambled up before the pain could register.
“Where is it?” I hissed, sweeping the light back and forth.
I was looking for a marker.
When we were kids, Elias and I had built a network of trails. Invisible highways. We marked them not with paint or ribbons, but with the trees themselves.
I pushed through a cluster of ferns that reached my chest, soaking me instantly.
And then, I saw it.
About ten yards ahead, a young alder sapling was bent over, its trunk twisted into a perfect, unnatural loop before continuing upward.
The Eye.
Relief washed over me, hot and dizzying. It was real. It wasn’t just a delusion born of trauma.
I hurried toward it, running my hand over the bark of the loop. The wood was scarred where it had been bent years ago, the bark healed over the trauma.
“I see you,” I whispered to the tree.
I stepped through the loop—or ducked under it, rather; I was taller now—and found the game trail on the other side.
It was faint, barely a depression in the moss, but it was there.
I followed it deeper. The terrain grew rougher. The ground here was uneven, pitted with sinkholes where old root systems had rotted away. One wrong step and I could break an ankle, or worse, drop into a void that no one would ever find.
But as I walked, something began to nag at the back of my mind.
The path was… easy.
Too easy.
I stopped, shining the light at the ground.
I was a mile in. By all rights, this trail should have been overgrown. Twenty years of unchecked growth in a temperate rainforest consumes everything. Ferns grow six feet in a season. Saplings become walls.
But the path ahead of me was clear.
I knelt, touching a fern frond near the ground. The stem was severed. Cleanly. Not broken by a deer passing through, but sliced.
I shone the light on a branch hanging over the trail at head height. The end was pale, the wood fresh. It had been pruned.
I stood up slowly, the cold feeling in my gut having nothing to do with the rain.
This wasn’t an abandoned memory. It was a commute.
Someone walked this path. Someone walked it often enough to bring shears. Someone walked it often enough to keep the forest at bay.
He was here.
I gripped the revolver in my pocket. The metal was the only warm thing in the world.
“Elias,” I breathed.
I moved faster now, driven by a mix of terror and a grim, suicidal curiosity. I needed to see the end of the line.
The path wound down into a ravine, the air growing colder, heavier. The smell of ozone faded, replaced by the smell of deep earth—mushrooms, decay, and wet stone.
The trees thinned out as I reached the bottom of the gorge. Ahead, a massive, overturned root ball of a fallen cedar tree loomed out of the fog like a black wall. It was easily twenty feet high, a tangled sculpture of wood and dirt.
I knew this tree.
” The Castle,” I whispered.
When we were twelve, we pretended it was a fortress. We crawled into the hollow space beneath the trunk to escape the rain.
But Elias had done more than pretend.
I approached the root ball. The flashlight beam played over the gnarled wood.
Hidden deep in the recess of the roots, shadowed by the overhang of the trunk, was a structure.
It wasn’t a child’s fort made of sticks.
It was a door.
Heavy planks of timber, darkened by age and moisture, had been fitted into the earth. Iron hinges, rusted but sturdy, held it in place. There was no handle, just a loop of rope hanging from a hole.
It looked like the entrance to a mine. Or a tomb.
I stood before it, the rain dripping from my nose. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
This was where he went. When the river rose in ‘99. When the shed washed away. He didn’t die. He came here. To the root cellar of the old logging camp that he had found and claimed.
He had been living underground. Like a bulb waiting for spring.
For twenty years.
I reached out for the rope loop. My hand trembled violently.
If I opened this door, I wasn’t just opening a room. I was opening the past. I was letting the monster out.
He’s already out, I reminded myself. He’s been out for days.
I gripped the rope. It was slick, gritty with dirt.
I pulled.
The door groaned. It was heavy, swollen with damp, but it moved. The hinges shrieked—a sound that echoed the cry of the toy chest in my bedroom.
A blast of air hit me from the darkness below.
It didn’t smell like rot.
It smelled like laundry detergent. And peppermint. And something metallic.
I shone the light into the opening.
Steps. Rough-hewn earthen steps reinforced with wood, descending steeply into the black.
I drew the gun. I clicked the safety off—no, Julian said there was no safety. Just point and pull.
“Hello?” I called out.
My voice didn’t echo. The earth swallowed it.
There was no answer. No movement. Just the steady, rhythmic sound of water dripping somewhere deep below.
I took the first step.
The mud was slick under my boot. I braced my hand against the wall of the tunnel. It was lined with plastic sheeting, cool and damp.
I went down. One step. Two. Five.
The rain faded behind me. The silence grew louder.
At the bottom of the stairs, the tunnel opened up. I swept the light around, and my breath caught in my throat.
It wasn’t a hole in the ground.
It was a home.