Page 28 of Marked By Shadows

Freya nodded. “Sure, let me call the Juarez family and see if anyone’s seen or heard anything. They have a barn on their property that isn’t used much. I don’t know why Byrony and Joe would go there, but it doesn’t hurt to check.” She lifted her phone, but frowned. “I’ll have to go back to the trail and see if I can catch a signal.” She had no problem finding her way back that I could tell.

“Maybe they scared themselves and got lost,” MaryAnn suggested. “They did seem to really like paranormal stuff. She and Joe have been talking about creating a YouTube channel for ghost hunting.”

“It’s a lot of work and equipment for little to no payoff,” I said.

“Unless they are faking stuff,” Chad added. “Then they get big TV deals.”

We made our way a little deeper into the woods, this end of it a bit thicker with brush and the trail we’d followed off the path completely vanished beneath debris and overgrowth. Everything was dry and more brown than green, and it didn’t look like anyone had been through here in a while. Alex was examining the area too, maybe seeing more than I was since he had military training.

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been through here,” I said softly.

“No,” agreed Alex. “But the ground is pretty hard. Unless they stumbled through some leaves it would be hard to tell they came through at all. Dry places suck for tracking.”

“Too bad it’s not the rainy season,” Freya said, finding her way back. “Nothing from the Juarez home, but I left a message for them to call and check their barn.”

“Byrony? Joe?” Julie called.

“You bitches best stop playing!” Jonah shouted into the darkness. The group was getting a little more spread out than I would have liked, though Alex remained plastered to my side.

Melissa tried to call their phones. I don’t know if she even had a signal but it was clear she didn’t get through. Though everyone paused to listen for the ring of phones anywhere in the distance.

“Maybe their batteries are dead?” Nicole said.

“Or they turned them off for their goofy witchcraft stuff,” Julie agreed. Which brought back the question, where were they? Gone almost twenty-four hours with no word?

“Let’s create a line. Search for things on the ground, cloth, strands of fabric, marks in the dirt, leaves that look disturbed, anything that points us in a direction,” Alex gave everyone clear instructions. “No more than five feet apart. Make sure the rest of the group stays in sight. If you have trouble or spot anything, call out. We’ll cover more ground, faster this way.” He didn’t want to let me go. That was clear in his eyes as I tugged my grip free from his and took several steps away. The forest was dense enough that any more than the five feet or so, and you had to really look for someone’s light. I couldn’t help but be hyperaware of my light and my neighbors, including Alex, as a sort of safety net against anxiety.

We followed the regime for a little while. Slowly walking a few feet, examining everything around us carefully, and taking turns calling out then listening. I admit to falling into the rabbit hole of my thoughts after about twenty minutes into the search. When Alex had vanished, we had him on camera. There wasn’t much area to search, even if the entire city had been put on watch for him. However, I wondered if this was how everyone had felt when I’d gone missing. Had they set up grids and shone flashlights in the dark? Probably. I’d never asked as it had always been a touchy subject. Why the human brain latched onto guilt when there was nothing I could have changed about it, I would never understand. I hadn’t asked to disappear, or for people to search for me. Would Byrony feel the same?

The change in my focus, the noise in my own head, once again distracted me from the things I should have noticed. The stilling of the wind. The absence of birds and crickets. But even my own overactive brain couldn’t make me ignore the burning prickle trailing over my arms. It began slow. Almost a chill on my flesh rather than the usual ants. My skin tightened into goose bumps, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck rising. I stopped, blinking into the darkness as the feeling intensified.

There was movement ahead. Not an animal that I could tell. It was too big for that and moved… oddly. Like a person with an injured gait. Step, step, limp, step, step, limp. Large, lumbering, perhaps labored.

Fuck! Was one of them hurt?

I raced forward, darting around trees and brush expecting after a few meters to run into one of them, Byrony or Joe, and praying that Alex was following. I thought I could hear his footsteps behind me and didn’t waste the few seconds to check. But as I rounded the last tree that I thought would reveal one of the missing, all I found was darkness. More trees like a wall of fortress defenses rather than a forest, and stillness. A complete absence of movement. No Byrony or Joe, no wind, no animals, simply darkness that comes from a lack of stars, moonlight, and all sources of artificial brightness. Even the light from my phone had vanished.

I stared, frozen for a moment, my brain racing through a thousand scenarios. But had only a half second to react when I realized the darkness in front of me wasn’t normal, but more of a giant black mass of voided light, edged in a slate of devouring blackness.

For a few tense seconds I felt like I was staring face to face with something not human. Some undefinedotherperhaps. Then it moved, a sudden flight forward so fast I hadn’t even enough time to draw a breath. It slammed into me with a ferocity that knocked me a meter or so backward, yet turned my skin to ice with its touch.

Panic came fast. I sucked in air, lungs screaming for breath. The sensation of cold terror rolling through me. Stars popped around my vision, not real ones, but flickers of warning signs from my mind, screaming that I wasn’t getting enough air. It was a conscious effort to force myself to suck air in slowly, and let out long breaths, staving off passing out.

I immediately thought to run to Alex. Tried to get enough air to call for him. Only he wasn’t there. No one was there. Not as far as I could see. My light was on, barely casting a glow in the thick darkness, but nothing else moved. And again, the silence encased me like a tomb of thick concrete walls muting life. I drew in a stuttering breath, forcing myself to calm, and focus. No bird this time, squawking or whatever it had been. No sign of a dimensional portal or whatever people claimed they thought I had seen that day. Simply me and the silence of absolute darkness. Which had touched me and left me cold.

I trembled. Couldn’t stop shaking actually, partly the temperature of my skin having dropped and partly from fear. I swung around with the light, trying to find the dark mass that had touched me. Had that been some sort of portal? I couldn’t find anything, just trees and more brush. Which direction had I come from? How did I get back? Had I stumbled through something? Was that possible? Was that where Byrony and Joe had gone? I knew in my gut that Alex would not have let me wander away from him. Even when I’d run, thinking I’d seen them, he would have followed. So where was he? Where was everyone?

I wrapped my arms around myself, heart pounding, body shuddering with the frozen tremble that wouldn’t let up. I shined the light around, trying to find a sign of anything unusual. Shadows were everywhere, stretching from every tree and bush, moving with the light like some ancient dance of evil. Too much in my head reminding me of old stories, legends of tales told by people who claimed to have been touched by the darkness. Most driven mad by what they’d seen and experienced. Some possessed.

My stomach ached and cramped with intense anxiety. I had to fight the urge to throw up. The light caused the shadows, I told myself rationally. A play of trees and flashlights over bushes and branches. Nothing really moved. It couldn’t move that way. The gloom I’d encountered hadn’t been anything. Perhaps a pocket of cold air. Darkness wasn’t a living thing; it was an absence of light. It didn’t move on its own and manipulate the landscape.

Only something did. To my right a shadow took steps between the trees and for a moment I hoped that it was Alex. It was fully defined with the shape of a human, arms, legs, a head above shoulders I could make out, and a perfect silhouette. Or at least that’s how it began. When I swung my light that way the beam died, leaving me staring at something dark again. Large like the first shadow I had encountered, but farther away, and the edges slightly more defined. More than a simple echo of the enclosed forest beneath towering trees, the shadow extended like a physical giant, arching across the distance, expanding, reaching for me with elongated arms and spindle-like fingers.

I opened my mouth to scream, frozen in fear, and yet angry with myself for standing there. “No,” I said. “Not again.”

I threw myself backward, a self-defense sort of roll, down and over until I was back on my feet and pointed in the opposite direction. I ran. I could sense it reaching for me in the darkness like giant hands carved from the trees themselves to drag me back to some other world. I didn’t see the tree branch that wacked me in the face, making me fall backward and clutch my cheek and eye.

I expected blood, while my heart pounded in my ears and my breathing labored, but the only wetness I felt on my face was more liquid than the thick ooze of blood. It was the salty assault of tears I hadn’t realized I was crying. My mind swirled and stuttered, unable to think of a solution to so many questions. The cold arch of something icy seeped into my flesh where I touched the ground. Fingers first, where I’d caught my fall, then my ass and legs, causing them to turn to jelly.