Page 11 of The Bleeding Woods

I turn toward the sea of maybe maples and beeches, and my senses are drawn somewhere far away.

The narrator in my head fades like cream dispersed through coffee.

I feel sleepy again. My muscles come undone, like ribbons pulled out of bow tie butterflies.

I find myself meandering toward the edge of the road, where the asphalt meets an abyss of dark branches.

Somehow it’s warmer here. Rosy sweetness swims up my nose, pulling me like a teasing fingertip into the brush.

Hidden in the rustling leaves, whispers speak my name.

They beckon me forward in streams of sonic silk.

The longer I watch, the more the thorny limbs appear as arms outstretched and eager to embrace.

I want to be embraced. Goodness, how long has it been since my last embrace?

Some primordial instinct comes back online. I speak, breathless. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” asks Grayson. I can tell he’s lingering close by, but his presence is distant.

“The trees . . .” My legs bring me forward, toward the edge of the great black river. My entire being is pulled elsewhere by a symphony of faint, wicked whispers. “The trees are speaking.”

“Clara, hey. Hey, look at me. What’s happening?” Grayson gives my mousy frame a shake.

Jade pulls up beside him. “Relax. She’s just weird. She’s always been weird. She was just going on about maples and bitches or something.”

“They’re saying my name,” I admit.

“Who?” Grayson pleads, ignoring Jade entirely.

“I don’t know . . .” A name slithers through my ears, the owner’s voice charming and silvery. It sets sparks alight in my stomach. Jasper.

The color drains from Grayson’s face. The woods continue their siren song.

Murmurs kiss my ears and tug at the rhinestones that puncture their lobes.

Ensnared. He said he was ensnared. My attempt at flirting was all but elegant, and still he was ensnared.

Logic tells me it’s impossible to expect the unseen voices to be his. Paramnesia keeps me dreaming.

Grayson herds us all back toward the Hummer, making certain his brother stands closest to it. “All right, Clara. You just sit down. It’ll be okay.”

“I’m fine.” I shake my head, leaning my back against the rear tire, which has lost its friction-born warmth. “Let’s just get back to finding some cell service. You said we were going to hike for a bit, right?”

“Take a second to rest,” he instructs.

“I don’t need a second.”

“Take it anyway, please.” Shutting down all further argument, he straightens his spine and approaches Jade, who is busy stomping out the glow of her cigarette butt.

Something in me is grateful for how Grayson cares.

Secretly, perhaps selfishly, I’ve always loved being an object of his concern.

Circumstance has shown me that I am a thing to be chased away, not cherished.

Yet, against all logic and higher reasoning, he’s always been there, worrying for the likes of me.

He’s always been there—checking in, doting, and providing all that I do not deserve.

Despite Jade’s biases and place as his best friend, he’s always treated me like a person.

A person. Should my quest for my confounded pink orbs fail, I hope he’ll still be there to sit me down and insist I do ridiculous, restful things.

It’s a delusion, but I’d like to believe he’d be as good a knight to a dragon as he would to a damsel.

“Maybe it’s a vertical concussion,” Joey declares with the confidence of a hardened doctor.

“That’s not a thing,” Grayson retorts.

“It could be. Maybe she was standing there, and the force of gravity just—”

“I’m going to stop you right there. You just failed medical school.”

Jade snorts. “She’s been talking about trees speaking to her since we were kids.

I’m serious. Every time Dad took us to the park, she’d start chatting up a spruce.

On weirder days, it was rocks. Trust me, we have more important things to worry about.

Remember those buildings? We’re probably closer to them now.

Let’s see if they’ve got anything we can use. Tools, spark plugs, gas. Anything.”

For a woman who can barely mask her emotions, Jade just put on a stellar performance. Suddenly, I suspect she sabotaged the engine herself. She needed a reason to kick off her amateur investigation, and now she has one.

“I don’t know, Jade. It might not be safe.” Grayson rests a hand at the nape of his neck.

“Oh, and sitting on the side of the road waiting patiently for starvation to pick us off is better? Could you go ahead and grow a spine for me, Grayson?”

“I just think we should be more responsible about this.”

“Like you’re the king of responsibility. You packed us into a car that stops sometimes!”

Their conversation escalates into an argument that quickly loses its intrigue. I stride toward the line between the woods and the man-made strip that divides them. The baritone voices of the trees grow louder, more oppressive, and more compelling. The world becomes an all-consuming blur.

Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.

Goodness, I want to. I want to more than anything.

I step off the road. As soon as my foot touches the ground, a ring of red light pulses from the forest and pulls in toward it.

It gathers sharply at the base of my boot, gluing it to the crackling dead leaves below.

One of my eyes tingles, and I whirl around to catch a glimpse of it in the reflection of the Hummer’s passenger window. My iris irradiates impossible crimson.

Something is standing behind me.

It is a tall, shadowy figure made entirely of black tendrils of smoke and spiny branches.

Horrifyingly thin and easily forty feet tall, it looms above my body like the branch of a weeping willow.

I cannot see its face, only a portion of its emaciated legs, torso, and arms. My body fills with carnivorous fear, but before I can pull my foot off the forest floor, the creature dissolves into a pool of spiraling mist. It gathers around the piece of me still secure on the road, then shoves me off it.

I feel both my eyes shift from brown to bloodstain.

My mind goes molten. The whispers collide into one terribly beautiful, familiar voice. It caresses the edges of my consciousness like vines twining themselves around a pillar.

“Clara,” it purrs. Red wisps gather around my body, pulling me forward. “Don’t be afraid. Follow my voice.”

His voice . . . it’s a rush of euphoric warmth.

It’s part liquid, part vapor, a hot spring of sound.

Out here, it’s suddenly so, so cold. I want to sink beneath his waves and let the heat dissolve me.

I want his fever and all the dreams that come with it.

I want to move into his oasis, one step at a time.

The needlepoint branches claw at my arms like hands in the night.

Grimacing at the sensation, I narrow myself as though slipping through a tapering alleyway.

Still, the fingernails reach for me, intent on littering my skin with tattoos of their own design.

It hurts. It’s too hot. I’m burning up, I’m drowning, and I need—I need—

“Grayson . . .” My thin voice struggles to surpass the heavy air. Again, some primitive part of me fights to survive, to stay above this hypnotic hypoxia. Frigid as it feels, the cold is safer. I’m sure of it. “J-Jade—”

“Shhhh.” A sweet hum resonates through the ground below, shaking the soil in the most delicate manner.

The brittle leaves silence their crackling complaints, and the orchestra of undead crickets quiet their nightly concert.

A hush falls over the landscape like a blanket of darkness on the evening sky.

Warm again. Everything is warm again. I’m not drowning; I’m comfortable. I’m so, so comfortable. I’m no longer in a thermal spring, but tucked beneath a quilt of silence and starlight. Just like it, I want to be silent too.

After moving through the branches, I arrive at an impossibly curated clearing.

It is covered with muted moss akin to a rug laid out over a hardwood floor.

Fragile weeds dare to grow at the edges of it, all of them weak and drooping.

Fireflies buzz dizzily through the branches, blinking at an unsteady but drunkenly synchronized pace.

They are all red.

“Hello again.” Jasper breaks the auditory peace. His resonance is gorgeous, rich, and ghastly. It swims through my ears like sirens through the sea. My heart jumps as though trying to escape the veiny prison of my rib cage.

“Who are you? Where are . . . ?” My voice is freshly breathless; the heightened heartbeats have sent my vision swirling into vertigo. A lovely, unwavering chuckle vibrates the surroundings. It is a shock wave, and it urges a barrage of leaves to fall toward the mossy floor.

“Come, now. Surely you haven’t forgotten me already.”

He takes form. A whirlpool of deviant, vermilion light manifests before revealing its source, who smiles from ear to ear.

His eyes are no longer the color of honey, nor are they abyssal.

Like mine, they glow a brilliant, unmooring shade of red.

He appears human, but the unfolding events suggest otherwise.

What I’d seen in the reflection of Grayson’s car suggests otherwise.

“What?” My thoughts have grown faint and difficult to take hold of for further rationalization. If I were in my right mind, I’d be running by now. “How? Y-you were . . . I was . . .”

“It’s not important.” He slinks closer, limbs too fluid to be held in place by bones. “What’s important is that you’re here. With me.”

“Did you follow us?”

Jasper inches closer, his grin widening. He does not provide an answer, more amused than accommodating. “Is this your form of flirting? Because if so . . . I’m ensnared.”

Though intimidated by his otherworldly beauty, I stand my ground in seriousness. “How are you here?” I assert. “No one was behind us.”

“So many questions. If you must know . . .” His smile spreads so that it no longer looks human.

It is too wide, too wicked. The corners of his lips caressing the tips of his brows, everything about him shifts from alluring to appalling.

His eyes sink into his head, leaving only two holes of darkness with a beady dot of bloody light in each center.

His body is still human, but his face is anything but. “This forest is mine.”

His transformation is more than enough to quell further questions.

No longer interested in interrogating him, I back away with the intent to run for my life.

Still, something holds me here. The movement of my limbs is languid; the panic hasn’t reached them.

My brain screams, but my body relaxes in staunch opposition.

“What are you?” One final inquiry, the most important one, falls from my lips like water I’d been drowning in.

“The true question is . . . what are you?”

His voice echoes all around me before dissipating into a disorderly ensemble of whispers once more.

A tornado of red overtakes the landscape, surrounding and suffocating me like a python coiling around its prey.

I hold my hands over my ears, but the gesture is futile.

This malevolent music is already thoroughly etched inside the walls of my skull.

Slowly, however, they become voices more familiar.

Grayson, Jade, and Joey are near. They scream my name.

Everything gets louder and more distorted as all but Jasper’s eyes disappear into the haze. Two hands reach through. They are strong, firm, and grounding as they clap on my shoulders. They belong to Grayson. The moment I hit his chest, the woods lose all abnormality.

“Clara! Clara! Snap out of it!”

“G-Grayson?”

Jade yanks my arm until I’m gracelessly stumbling in front of her. The motion is a show of brute strength, and it pairs well with her visible fury. She is scowling, trying to re-create my mother’s unshakable austerity. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I stiffen, eyes darting around behind her in search of Jasper. All I find is a stiff and shaking Joey. “I’m sorry, I just—”

“You just wandered aimlessly into a creepy-ass forest, that’s what you did!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“That’s for sure.” It takes me a few moments to register it, but the look on Jade’s face is not one of utter disdain. She’s making every attempt to mask it as annoyance, but behind her eyes lies the last emotion I would have expected: concern.

Regardless, my attention is drawn back to the woods.

Jasper, in all his irresistibly terrifying glory, is branded across my brain waves.

I am confused, conflicted, and against my better judgment, captivated.

There is no end to the forest in sight. It prevails for miles in every direction.

The car, the road, and all forms of life outside this realm seem too far away to find.

Red whispers ride the breeze, laced between each pocket of silence.