Glenn’s heart tripped hard. She could see clearly for nearly a mile down the trail, and no one was there.
“Kevin!”
There was a crash off to her left — someone was moving through the woods. Glenn caught a glimpse of his tan coat and the sound of footsteps running away. Why was he running? Glenn dove in, stumbling down a hill where the land fell off from the road, down into the forest. Kevin was hundreds of yards ahead and running like he was fleeing for his life.
It grew darker as she ran. The woods were like a curtain closing around her, until Glenn was surrounded by a swamplike murk, an eerie twilight. There was the sound of water running somewhere close by. It was slow at first, a quiet whoosh flowing parallel to Glenn’s path, but grew louder the farther she went. A river. Soon it was in front of her as well. A few more minutes, she thought, and she would run right into it and be cut off.
And so would Kevin.
Glenn made it through a tangle of trees and burst out onto the green bank of a fast-moving river. It was brighter there, and the sun dazzled her eyes. When they adjusted she saw Kevin standing at the bank of the river with his back to her. One side of his shirt was stained with fresh blood, but he paid it no mind.
“What are you doing?”
Kevin turned fully toward her now, but what looked at her was not Kevin. There was not the live-wire smirk she was so used to seeing; there wasn’t even his anger from earlier. Instead, there was something older and twisted inward. A silent determination that she had never seen before. Worse still, Glenn was positive that the person who stood in front of her didn’t recognize her at all.
“I have to go home,” Kevin said in a voice that wasn’t his. “She’s been waiting all this time.”
Glenn was speechless. Before she could move, Kevin was off and running down the bank toward a pier that jutted out from a bend in the river’s course. Waiting at the end of the pier was a small boat, and at the back of it stood a tall and impossibly thin figure clothed in a long black cloak and hood. It seemed less like a man than it did a dark slash cut into the day.
“Kevin!”
Kevin made straight for the boat. Either he didn’t hear her or, for some reason she didn’t understand, he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — stop.
Glenn put her head down and ran, making it to the pier just as Kevin stepped calmly into the boat and sat down.
The figure at the back of the boat plunged one end of the pole he was carrying into the river and pushed away from the pier.
“Kevin!” she screamed, but the boatman leaned into the pole and the boat moved away, out into the inlet and toward the faster run of water.
Glenn got to the end of the pier just as they were out of reach.
She called to Kevin again, but neither he nor the boatman paid her any mind. The current was fast and the boat slipped away, growing smaller and blending in with the gray churn of the water.
In seconds Kevin would be gone. Glenn searched for a solution, and found only one. She took a running leap and jumped into the river.
She hit the water hard and was swept away. Without thermals in her clothes, the icy water was cold enough to make her lungs seize in her chest. Glenn scrambled to remember all those days at the beach, the swimming lessons her mother had drilled into her again and again. She got her arms up as fast as she could and straightened her legs behind her. The current alone wouldn’t be enough. If she wanted to catch Kevin, she needed to swim for it. Glenn tore into the water ahead of her, keeping her head up and her eyes on the boat. The boatman held his pole up out of the water, letting the current carry them along. Glenn felt a shock of hope as she closed some of the distance between them.
The landscape rushed by them as the river took a sharp turn into the dimness of the forest they had come out of. There, the water grew murky and colder and choked with debris. Logs and masses of dead plant life littered the surface. Glenn’s clothes had become soaked through and heavy, eager to drag her under. Her arms felt like they were filled with concrete.
Glenn closed her eyes and saw Kevin lying spread out in the snow, every ounce of his blood fleeing from a gunshot in his side. All because of her. And now this. Glenn thrashed with her legs and knifed her arms into the water, almost crying out from the effort.
The boat eased out of the current to a moss-covered bank. When they reached it, Kevin stood up, stepped onto dry land, and walked off into the woods without a look back. The boatman stood motionless.
Glenn forced her hands and feet into the muddy bank to pull herself up. As soon as she came out of the water, she seized nearly in two. The freezing water had actually been keeping her warmer than the air outside. She wrapped her shaking arms around her chest as she staggered off into the trees.
Glenn turned to follow the shoreline down to where Kevin had left the boat, keeping the boatman well in sight. He didn’t move in the slightest, and the boat itself barely seemed to rock despite the motion of the water. As Glenn drew closer, she saw that whatever it was that surrounded the boatman wasn’t a cloak. At least not made from any fabric she had ever seen. It seemed to move and shift in liquid patterns of black and gray while deep inside other more solid things turned, surfacing and disappearing again. It was like the dark surface of the river come to life.
Glenn backed away from him and picked her way through the
trees. She tried her best to not make a sound, but her body was numb and moved clumsily. Jolts of fear stabbed into her when a branch snapped or a leaf crackled underfoot.
