Snared

“Get away from me!” Lindsay cried.

“Or…,” he said, taking a step back. He threw his arms out, again in that pose of surrender. The tinkle of glass filled the room behind him. Something glimmered in the air over his shoulder, like a firefly. Then it seemed the air was full of fireflies, with lights flashing and fading. Only the swarm she witnessed was not living; it was made from the shards of glass. Like the dust, they defied gravity, moving like twinkling ghosts.

“Oh no,” Lindsay whimpered.

“Those don’t look terribly stable,” Mark said, pointing at the low corners of the door. Lindsay looked down at the icons, their imperfect placement. “Little Jacky wasn’t being very careful. I’ll bet the glass will find a way in. All it takes is a tiny break in the veil, like when Jack fell over the threshold of my room. Such a minor thing. The glass will slip in, and then it will start its work. The shards will spin and cut and gouge. You’ll feel like you fell into a food processor.

“Or, you can just come on out now, and we can do away with the gratuitous violence. I’ll snap your neck. You won’t feel a thing.”

Lindsay couldn’t answer. She searched Mark’s face for any sign of humanity and found none.

“No?” Mark asked. He balled his fists and struck the doorframe with a deafening blow.

Lindsay screamed.

Mark pounded the jamb again. He was trying to knock the icons loose. If even one came free, Lindsay was dead. She knew it. She knelt down and crawled across the closet floor. She reached out to hold the metal corner pieces in place. When her fingers touched the icons, a flare of fire met her fingertips. She yelped in pain and crawled away.

Mark stared in at her. A look of confusion spread across his brow. He took a step back.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Lindsay gazed up. Mark looked scared, though why she didn’t know. The boy next door took another step back.

Jack appeared at Mark’s shoulder. His face was lined with red cuts and his black shirt was torn in a dozen places. The brand rested in his palm. Jack shot out a hand and grasped Mark by the back of the neck.

“Burn,” Jack whispered, and flames exploded across the top of the metal disk. He thrust the brand forward with a punching motion, driving the searing metal into Mark’s cheek.

Mark’s eyes grew wide. His mouth fell open to scream, but no sound escaped. In fact, the only thing Lindsay heard was the crackling of burning skin. Lines like black veins traced over Mark’s face, down his neck, and over his chest. In moments, his arms, his torso, every exposed inch of skin was marred with the black lines, like a ragged mesh.

Jack backed away. He dropped the brand and watched in awe as Mark fell to the floor. The lines blossomed into black flowers of charred skin. Mark’s eyes, once as beautiful as a summer sky, turned white and cold and empty.

“Is he dead?” Lindsay asked. “Really dead this time?”

Jack looked up from Mark’s charred remains. “I think so,” he said, as if confirming a UFO sighting.

“I thought he couldn’t die,” Lindsay said.

Jack had no answer. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking like a fireplug. Slowly he shook his head back and forth. “Is it possible?” he asked.

From the back of the room, Doug Richter moaned. Jack ran to him and knelt down. The man’s entire body was covered in dust. Lindsay couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt, but he wasn’t dead, and she was grateful for that.

“I think it’s over,” Jack said, helping Doug sit up. A shower of dust fell from the tall man. He shook his head and coughed, raising a cloud around himself. “He’s gone.”

“He can’t die,” Doug said, his voice a thin and pained squeak. He wiped the remnants of filth from his face. “You know that. He will always walk among us.”

“But look,” Jack insisted, pointing toward the closet door.

Lindsay stood up. The blackened skeleton, which was all that remained of Mark, did not move. The flesh did not re-form. He was gone. Truly gone. It was time to get away from this place and find her parents, to hug them and tell them how much she loved them.

She stepped forward. Orange light flared, and her skin erupted with pain as if someone had set it on fire. Lindsay yelped and leaped back from the doorway. She searched her blouse and body for the source of the searing ache, but neither fabric nor flesh was scorched.

“You see?” Doug said. “Always among us.”

“Oh no,” Jack said, his face crumbling to an expression of utter despair. “That poor, dear girl.”

“What’s happening?” Lindsay cried. Panic replaced her pain. It sparked throughout her entire system, making her skin tingle and twitch disturbingly. Desperate to be free, she tried again to step over the threshold, and another sheet of burning agony pressed against her body. This time her scream was piercing. She danced anxiously from foot to foot, unable to understand what was happening to her.

“Jack?” she shrieked. “What’s going on?”

And for the second time that night, Lindsay felt something move low in her abdomen, like a worm twisting to make itself comfortable.

Mark?

Always among us.

17

A boy named Chris Herren wandered through the woods, swatting at the ground and the occasional shrub with a thick tree branch. Snow crunched beneath his boots. A chill wind worked its way beneath his scarf.

Get some fresh air, his father said. You’re not going to enjoy the trip if you just sit inside.

Yeah, like this festival of nettles and poison oak was going to improve if he immersed himself in it. He didn’t know what the hell to do in the woods. He knew what bears did in the woods, which made his current trek all the more disturbing, but Chris had grown up in a co-op in Midtown Manhattan. He didn’t even like to be close to nature, let alone surrounded by it. They were supposed to be skiing, but there wasn’t enough snow. Oh, there was enough to make walking a chore, but not enough good powder to justify waiting in the lift line. They didn’t even bother driving to the resort that morning.

He swung the tree branch, connected solidly with a fir trunk, and dropped the stick. Chris looked back down the trail the way he’d come, and then up the hill. A glimmer of light caught his eye, and he peered through the trees to get a better look. More than likely, he was seeing a bit of sunlight catching the top of a discarded beer can. But as he focused on the place from which the glint came, he noticed more movement. A slender tendril of smoke rose through a break in the trees.

A chimney? Neighbors?

Chris wondered if anyone his age lived up there. Or even better, maybe some college kids had rented a cabin for the Christmas break. Thoughts of keg parties and scantily clad coeds flitted into his mind.

It was worth a look.

The cabin, a large log structure, appeared slowly. Each step Chris took revealed another row of logs, then the break of the porch on the right. A window came into view, dark as night. Then he saw the porch railing and the rest of the window.

Chris hugged a tree, not wanting to get caught sneaking up on the place. He just wanted to see what his neighbors looked like. If they seemed cool, he’d wander up, pretending to not even notice the cabin until he was standing right next to it. The place looked empty, but he saw a car parked in the drive. Sunlight shimmered off a