Page 32 of The Bleeding Woods

I had one task, one duty: Keep them safe.

I always keep them safe. What am I if I can’t?

What do I become? Am I just here, waiting patiently for pandemonium, floating aimlessly toward a maelstrom of madness?

Am I just here, without Clara, but with Joey’s sneaker leaving flakes of dry blood under my fingernails?

J. W.

I reread his initials a million times over and think of his name until it’s a soup of unspoken syllables.

I scratch off a patch of brown to reveal a crudely drawn smiley just to the right of it.

Released from the sneaker’s vinyl surface, a puff of coppery air ascends toward my nose.

In it, I smell Joey’s laugh last Christmas when he opened the game console I’d gotten for him.

I smell his cries, quieted by stoicism as we stood at our father’s grave.

I smell the way he looked at me, asking for the hug our mother—in her grief—wouldn’t give him.

All at once, I am eleven years old, meeting my infant brother for the first time.

I am twenty, teaching him to ride a bicycle despite my pile of assignments to be finished.

I am twenty-seven, handing him money for chocolate bars.

I am right here, right now, wishing I’d given him more of everything.

More laughter. More bicycle practice. More chocolate. More time.

Jade grabs the sneaker, crushing it in her fist.

“Clara was telling the truth,” she seethes.

Instinct tells me to nod, but I am held in place. A statue, a body in the morgue. It should have been me. I should have let that thing take me.

“I’ll kill it.” Her voice is the rumble of a revving engine. “It’s hurting my sister. I will kill it.”

Keep them safe, Grayson.

I failed Joey, but now is not the time to wallow.

He wouldn’t have wanted that. If he were here, he’d be telling me to wrap up the dramatics, eat a granola bar, and get back to work.

It’s my father who would have told me to take a minute, but he’s not here either.

Right now, it’s just me, Jade, Clara, and the anarchic eldritch beast I’m about to tear to pieces.

“No.” I stand. “That thing is mine.”

Jade opens her mouth to protest, but when I turn to look at her, I’m not glaring bullets.

I’m launching a ballistic missile. Her lips seal like an envelope, its contents likely rich with swears.

Still, she speaks none of them. Instead, she gazes down at Joey’s shoe, her eyes softening until they are lined with silver.

“I’m so . . . I’m so sorry, Grayson,” she says.

He’s holding my hand as we stand beside the biggest roller coaster on Coney Island. I’m smashing his face into his twelfth-birthday cake. We’re ten hours into a puzzle, complaining about a missing corner piece over microwaved pizza rolls and lukewarm ginger ale.

I take the sneaker away from her hands, returning myself to the forest. I’m not sure what’s worse: swimming in a memory spiral or standing at my brother’s colossal, unmarked grave. I’ll mark it, if not with a headstone, with a sentiment that transcends one.

“Give me your lighter,” I order.

She tosses it to me. I sink my teeth into the thick plastic barrel holding the fluid.

When it cracks, it sends a bitter droplet onto my tongue and makes a bloody mess of my bottom lip.

I douse the sneaker in leaking petroleum, then throw it to the glowing embers at our feet.

The minutes crawl by as it erupts into a compact inferno. A pocket phoenix.

“He told me he’d want a Viking’s funeral,” I explain, watching the flames writhe. “S-someday.”

Jade’s face is soaked with tears but scrunched into a vengeful scowl.

Soon, the sneaker becomes one with the ash, a cavernous husk of curling leather and synthetic fumes.

Joey’s initials were the first to burn, the first to dissolve into the unrecognizable mass.

The eruption of heat and light subsides.

I plunge my boot through what’s left of it. The darkness returns, wicked as ever.

“From now on, we stay together.”

Jade nods. All around us, the forest rustles.

It’s an invitation, a call to arms, a challenge.

With sinful delight, every shadow’s edge becomes an emaciated finger, curling inward, beckoning.

They move to and fro, but there is no wind.

The ground is reeking and rancid, the stench like that creature’s own personal cologne.

It’s so dark that when I hold my hand up in front of me, it is nothing but a thinly outlined silhouette on a pitch-black backdrop.

“Let’s move,” I say.

Together, we leave in search of Clara. He’s doing something to me, she’d said. She hadn’t wanted to take his hand. He forced her to do it. He forced her. My teeth ache, clenched together inside bear-trap jaws.

As we wander, millions of eyes glower at us. We are two foreign entities, two malignant human growths. We are the illness, and so we must watch for white blood cells.

The soundscape is a mausoleum’s orchestra.

It’s all echoes, footsteps, and whispers of the dead.

The hairs standing at the nape of my neck are the string section, my heart the percussion.

The winds come from my trachea, now the neck of a strangled saxophone.

My body is an instrument of jazz and terror.

Jade’s face is scrunched inward, reminiscent of lemon rind or urine.

It is soured, like spoiled milk. While it’s not an uncommon expression for her, tonight it sits atop another.

Her masks are layered, and the frown at the surface is paper thin.

Beneath it, she’s furious. Beneath that, she’s terrified.

Somewhere lingering in the depths of her rugged performance, she’s worried about her sister.

I raise a hand to touch her shoulder and offer something of emotional use.

“I’m glad you two talked.”

She sighs. When she speaks, her voice quivers like it had at the burial. “I’ve been horrible to her.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Joey and I, laughing through a movie so bad, it’s good. Joey and I, glancing at one another as Mom scolds us for staying at the Lovecrofts’ too late. Joey and I, hand in hand at our father’s headstone.

“. . . you can make it right. While you still can, please make it right.”

Her eyes soften into molten sympathy. I’d take this opportunity to reject pity, but . . .

Just over the crown of her head, a mirage of red, blinking lights has gathered. They move in dizzy spirals around the base of a tree, all going in different directions. Fireflies, to an extent. Real, only possibly.

“Jade,” I whisper. “Over there.”

Her head snaps to the left. “What?”

“Do you see that?”

She squints until her lashes touch. The insects are thoroughly visible to me, so if she’s already exerting this much effort to see them, it means they’re a mirage meant only for my eyes.

Clara’s perfume, her signature blend of dainty florals with a bite of spice, wafts under my nose.

Before I can stop myself, I’m already in motion.

I crash through the foliage, snapping branches with my shoulders and deracinating bushes with my boots.

Thorns slither in unnatural ways into my pant legs, moving without muscle to sample my blood. Sharp, nervy pain races up my legs.

“Grayson, hold on! Wait!” Jade clambers after me, but her footsteps fade, transient echoes in this sprawling tomb. I disobey my own order, reaching the tree before she can even hope to catch up.

The fireflies move their kaleidoscope dance off the trunk.

They begin to round my body like flecks of dark pixie dust. If I think of a horrible thought, perhaps I’ll take flight.

Dizzy. They’re making me dizzy. Spiraling patterns.

Incessant buzzing. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm.

There is a musicality to this. There is a musicality to all of this.

This place is a crypt and a concert hall.

A catacomb, a sound chamber. Every snapped branch, rustled leaf, bellowing crow, and fizzle, fizzle, fizzle of fluttering wings is a single chord in a much longer song.

My head spins. The world spins. I want to sing.

I want to dance. I want to die, die, die.

I throw my forearm to the bark to get steady.

It ripples beneath my skin. It moves. It isn’t bark.

My eyes travel upward, following a trail of bioluminescent blinks.

I crane my neck until it is hinged at ninety degrees, my cerebellum parallel to the ground.

Another neck is hinged, only in the opposite direction.

Forty feet above me, two red pinpricks sit within glaring pools of sunken-in ebony.

A face is looking down on me. Rows of teeth, layered like a shark’s, shine within a lipless, smiling mouth.

In his hand, held level with his head, Clara’s body dangles.

Her arms and legs swing limply, and her head is hung forward.

“Clara!” I screech. Too quickly, the screech dies, resurrected three seconds later as a gravelly threat. “Give. Her. Back.”

In my head, his voice manifests like a hurricane of sirens.

“I can’t do that, I’m afraid.” He chuckles. The chuckle metastasizes into a roar of maniacal laughter that shreds my eardrums from the inside out. “So brave, little Grayson Warner. Just like your brother.”

Riding dirt bikes through sand dunes on our first trip to the coast. Arguing over the final pizza slice at three in the morning. Scraping the blood off his sneaker.

His last words to me. What were they? Why can’t I remember them?

I didn’t commit them to memory. I didn’t think they’d be his last. Now I don’t know.

I’ll never know. Joey. My brother. I’ll never see him again, and it’s his fault.

His fault. His fault. His fault. My head doesn’t feel right, and neither do my fists.

I ram them into his leg, the one I’d mistaken for a tree, to throw him off balance.

When he topples, I’ll catch Clara. Jade will take her, and then it’ll all be over for—

Jade.

Jasper’s laughter returns for an encore that nearly liquifies my brain.

Whirling to my right, I see a senseless maze of tree trunks and screaming faces frozen in their grooves.

I see balmy mist gathered on the ground, turned milky white as the clouds clear away from the moon.

I see shadows bent in contradicting directions, red fireflies, and hundreds of pockets of demonic dark matter. But I do not see Jade.

“No! You can’t do this! You can’t—”

He’s gone. His glaring eyes. His bony, disproportionate limbs. His hollow chest of ribs and roses. Clara, dangling helplessly in his hand. Gone. I’m alone, just another sorry silhouette on this torturous canvas of Stygian dread.

“Clara!” I shriek.

Only an ancient sigh of evil incarnate responds.