filthy spout. Her eyes were white and wet and frightened. She didn't look funny, like Lucy and Ethel getting their beauty treatments. She looked dead. Dead and badly inbarned, or whatever they called it.
Speaking to the face in the water, Trisha intoned: 'Then Little Black Sambo said, 'Please, tigers, do not take my fine new clothes.' '
But that wasn't funny, either. She smeared mud up her lumpy, itchy arms, then lowered her hands toward the water, meaning to wash them off. But that was stupid. The goshdamn old bugs would just bite her there.
The pins and needles had mostly worked out of her arm and leg; Trisha was able to squat and pee without failing over. She was also able to stand up and walk, although she grimaced with pain each time she moved her head more than a little to the right or left. She supposed she had a kind of whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn't been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in a neck brace for six weeks. Maybe they would put her in a neck brace when she got out of this. Maybe they would take her to a hospital in a helicopter with a red cross on the belly like in M *A * S * H and
Forget it, Trisha. It was the scary cold voice. No neck brace for you. No helicopter ride, either.
'Shut up,' she muttered, but the voice wouldn't.
You won't even get inbarned because they're never going to find you. You'll die out here, just wander around in these woods until you die, and the animals will come and eat your rotting body and some day some hunter will come along and find your bones.
There was something so terribly plausible about this last-she had heard similar stories on the TV news not just once but several times, it seemed-that she began to cry again. She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first, just a stone, but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.
'Stop it,' she whispered, walking back to the fallen tree and the wrinkled spread remains of the poncho under it (she hated the poncho now; she didn't know why, but it seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong). 'Stop it, please.'
The cold voice would not. The cold voice had one more thing to say. One more thing, at least.
Or maybe you won't just die, Maybe the thing out there will kill you and eat you.
Trisha stopped by the fallen tree-one hand reached out and grasped the dead jut of a small branch-and looked around nervously. From the moment of waking all she'd really been able to think about was how badly she itched. The mud had now soothed the worst of the itching and the residual throb of the wasp-stings, and she again realized where she was: in the woods alone and at night.
'At least there's a moon,' she said, standing by the tree and looking nervously around her little crescent of clearing. It looked even smaller now, as if the trees and underbrush had crept in closer while she was sleeping. Crept in slyly.
The moonlight wasn't as good a thing as she'd thought, either. It was bright In the clearing, true, but it was a deceptive brightness that made everything look simultaneously too real and not real at all. Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
Something twitted in the woods, seemed to choke, twitted again, and was silent.
An owl hooted, far off.
Closer to, a branch snapped.
What was that? Trisha thought, turning toward the snapping sound. Her heartbeat began to ramp up from a walk to a jog to a run. In another few seconds it would be sprinting and then she might be sprinting as well, panicked all over again and running like a deer in front of a forest fire.
'Nothing, it was nothing,' she said. Her voice was low and rapid ... very much her mother's voice, although she did not know this. Nor did she know that in a motel room thirty miles from where Trisha stood by the fallen tree, her mother had sat up out of a troubled sleep, still half dreaming with her eyes open, sure that something awful had happened to her lost daughter, or was about to happen.
It's the thing you hear, Trisha, said the cold voice. Its tone was sad on top, unspeakably gleeful underneath. It's coming for you. It's got your scent.
'There is no thing,' Trisha said in a desperate, whispery voice that broke into complete silence each time it wavered upward. 'Come on, give me a break, there is no thing.'
The unreliable moonlight had changed the shapes of the trees, had turned them into bone faces with black eyes. The sound of two branches rubbing together became the clotted croon of a monster. Trisha turned in a clumsy circle, trying to look everywhere at once, her eyes rolling in her muddy face.
It's a special thing, Trisha - the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared - because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh - and then it comes for them, You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane. If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming. But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh . . . and they laugh ... and they laugh.
'Stop it, there is no thing, there is no thing in the woods, you stop it!'
She whispered this very fast, and the hand holding the nub of dead branch clutched it tighter and tighter until it broke with a loud report like a starter's gun. The sound made her jump and utter a little scream, but it also steadied her. She knew what it was, after all -just a branch, and one she had broken. She could still break branches, she still had that much control over the world. Sounds were just sounds. Shadows were just shadows. She could be afraid, she could listen to that stupid traitor of a voice if she wanted to, but there was no
(thing special thing)
in the woods. There was wildlife, and there was undoubtedly a spot of the old kill-or-be-killed going on out there at this very second, but there was no crea-
There is,
And there was.
