CHAPTER FIVE [indica]
Dusk swooped in on a scorching summer breeze, and the woods changed. It’s hard to describe how they changed, exactly but it was unmistakeable.
It might’ve been that the sounds were different. The rustling of the trees. Crickets and cicadas singing. Birdsong slowly fading out in the humid end-of-day heat, as though it were tethered to the fleeing sunlight, spirited away for the night to return again in the morning.
A morning that, for some, would never come.
The woods, yes. Under the witching glow of twilight the woods change. The shadows grow bolder in that ephemeral hour, they swell plump and larger than they have any right to be.
Watch this one, for instance: the one that loosened itself from its fastenings and went off flitting between the trees, no longer just a shadow, but now something with form, purpose, ambition.
Watch, now:
The shadow was a whirl of flapping leathery wings and ominous whispers. It sets its sights on a target: a boy named Byron, who reached the mouth of the river and found himself at long last at the place called Marauder’s Cove.
The shadow followed Byron from a distance, hung like a bat from the branches of an oak tree as the boy tripped over something, sprawled in the dry grass, picked himself up, turned–
And screamed.
***
The sequoia loomed darkly, and in the late summer dusk it revealed its true nature, as many things do. This particular sequoia was over four thousand years old — so old it had its own center of gravity. It pulled things toward it, nightmarish creatures with spindly legs and glowing eyes. Disembodied voices that had wandered too far from their owners. Misshapen things with their limbs all askew. Fades and shades and all kinds of sinister entities that the forest keeps secret until nightfall.
Ozzy had no trouble leading his new friends to the sequoia — it was almost as though something was guiding his feet. He hadn’t been certain that he would find the place again, but as he saw the flashes of pink and blue light up ahead through the trees and heard the echoing bang that accompanied them, he remembered the firecrackers he’d glimpsed in the inner pockets of Nell’s jacket.
Here we are…
Ozzy decided that finding the tree again was the only thing that had happened that entire day that made any kind of sense.
“This is it?” said Meg softly.
Ozzy nodded — and then his heart leapt. There she was, sure enough: approaching the sequoia from the other side, hand-in-hand with… Who is that? Ozzy frowned. Some bent old hag.
Then Meg said something that made him uneasy. “Oh, shit. Look who it is.”
“Is that her?” said Jack.
“Nell Ferrin?”
“You guys know Nell?” said Ozzy — but Meg and Jack were already rushing over the grass toward her. Ozzy hurried after them. “Nell!” he shouted.
Nell looked up, and even in the deepening light and from several yards away Ozzy could see her eyes widen in horror.
Nell–
She let go of the old crone’s hand and stumbled backward, just as Meg pulled something out of her pocket — a pocketknife —
Jack and Meg cornered Nell against the trunk of the sequoia. “What are you doing?” Ozzy demanded, running to catch up with them. He slowed as he approached them. The blade of Meg’s pocketknife was pushed up against Nell’s neck, right under her Adam’s apple.
“Never expected to see you again,” Meg hissed. “Thought you’d be smarter than that. Or did you already forget about Summer?”
“Stop it!” Ozzy cried, gritting his teeth in rage. He lunged for Jack — but Jack span around and decked Ozzy in the temple, so hard Ozzy crumpled to a gasping heap on the sequoia’s roots.
“Or maybe you thought we would forget,” Meg growled in Nell’s ear. “Huh? Is that it? Thought it wouldn’t be such a big deal in the end? Thought you could just ruin someone’s life and get away with it?”
“What? Nell’s voice broke, and she had to choke her next words out around the sobs: “What are you… she was… she was… my friend…”
“Your friend?” Jack turned his attention back to Nell now, and his voice simmered with fury. “We were bad kids, man,” he said, “but Summer was good. She was kind and smart, she did real well in school, and she was gonna redeem our family’s name and — and do something really good in the world. And you ruined her.” He jabbed a long, slender finger at Nell. “So next time you– OW!”
Ozzy managed to push himself weakly up onto his elbows, just in time to see that Nell had bitten Jack’s hand. Jack wrenched himself backward. “Freaking savage,” he muttered.
And in one smooth motion he swivelled around and punched Nell in the face. Crack. Nell’s head snapped back, her knees buckled. But she remained on her feet, pinned there against the sequoia, her nose bleeding now, blood spattering onto the lapel of her jean jacket.
Ozzy pulled himself to his feet.
“Listen,” Jack grunted. “The way we see it, you owe us, big time. But we’ve heard you have something that’ll make up for all of that. That’s what your friend told us, anyway.” He snorted and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Ozzy.
“Some friend, huh?” said Meg.
Nell started to cry. Rage boiled in Ozzy’s chest, but before he could even do anything his knees gave out again and he fell, again, onto the roots.
“Now,” Meg was saying, still holding the knife against Nell’s throat, “where’s the Summer Haze?”
She flicked the knife so that the blade bit into Nell’s neck, and Nell broke. “Fucking take it!” she screamed, ripping open her jacket. Meg leaned down, reached into the jacket’s inner pocket, rooted around for a second–
“Yesssss.”
She pulled something from one of Nell’s inner pockets: a Ziploc bag full of nuggets of green herb. Thick, full nugs covered in trichomes, like icing on a cake.
Meg drew back from Nell, opened the bag, sniffed it. “Mmmm.” Her voice was a crystalline whisper. “This is the real deal, Jack. Summer Haze. I’d know it anywhere.”
“Fine haul of it, too,” said Jack. “Must be at least a quarter ounce, eh? I think we’re even now, Nell Ferrin.”
The sandy-haired twins left Nell crumpled on the tree’s roots. They brushed past Ozzy — “Thanks for the tip, kid,” Meg sneered — and within seconds they were swallowed by the darkness of the woods.
Quiet fell, a heavy kind of quiet, the kind that has weight, that drags at your soul; and it was broken only by the rustling of the trees and Nell’s muffled sobs.
The shadows had watched the whole thing, and from a safe distance the milky-eyed crone watched too, as something ancient, forgotten and lost stirred in the sun-scarred desert plains of her memory.
***
Byron ran into the night.
He ran, pursued by a retinue of gigging, grisly shadows that were no longer concerned with masking their presence.
He ran, but not fast enough to outrun the memory — it was burned into his brain, branded.
Those lifeless, staring eyes. Six pairs of them.
Blood soaking the golden grass.
Tom. He hadn’t especially liked the guy. But that was a moot point now.
Who could’ve done this?
Tom, Lily, Adam, Hailey, Jason, Vera.
All six of them, murdered.
Byron ran, his breathing panicked, his heart on rapid-fire. He ran until the shadows caught him, and after that his soul kept running — away from Marauder’s Cove, away from the fading whisper of twilight on the horizon, into the night’s hungry jaws.
J. Herrera Kamin 