turned down the hallway towards his room. Stopping at the doorway, he leaned against the trim staring back toward the bedroom door. He knew he couldn’t stand to look in there at his old friend again.
“What is it?” Harry asked, the sleep finally wearing off, along with it the incredible grumpiness.
“In the shower…” Scott stammered, his voice trailing off to a whisper. “In the shower.”
Harry walked past him and into the bathroom, his shoes squeaking on the tile.
“What?” Harry asked, his eyes scanning the glass enclosure.
“Right there, on the floor in the stall.”
“Is that real marble?”
“What?” Scott asked, shaking his head and closing his eyes momentarily before whirling and stepping into the bathroom behind Harry.
Pushing him to the side, Scott walked right to the edge of the shower and stared through the open door.
There was absolutely nothing there.
Not a single drop of blood could be seen on the marble surface, the brass drain shining as though freshly polished. His eyes covered the floor, looking for any trace of the droplets of blood that had freckled the tile only a moment prior, but there was nothing. Shoving past Harry once again, he grabbed the horizontal blinds, noticing immediately that there were no splotches on the blades. Throwing them upward, he stared at the windowsill only to find the white trim looking just like new without the slightest hint of the crimson that had traced lines across the painted wood.
“Did I miss something?” Harry asked.
Turning, Scoot just stared at him, his mouth opening and forming words, but no sound came out. His brow furrowed as he paused, then quickly turned and stared out the window.
“It was there. I promise you. It was there just a minute ago.”
“What?”
“Jeremy… an old friend. He was in my shower.”
“Well,” Harry said, unsure of what to say or believe. “Where is he now?”
“There!” Scott shouted as he stared out onto the snow-covered lawn. There was a wide dark streak running straight through the center of the yard toward the line of trees. He could barely see a pair of bare feet at the edge of the undergrowth, but only for a split second as they were dragged out of sight into the darkness beyond.
Bounding out of the bathroom, Scott grabbed a pair of shoes from the floor and slipped his bare feet straight into them, grabbing the button-down shirt from the floor where he had tossed it, slipping his arms into the sleeves as he ran out of the bedroom. He hit the hallway at a full sprint, grabbing the wall to keep from slamming into it, not even bothering to button up the shirt. He leapt the stairs, landing in the entryway, his whole body functioning on pure instinct.
Unlatching the lock, he slid back the sliding glass door and bounded out into the blowing snow. The channel carved into the accumulation was still there, the powdered mass of flakes melting back from the warm red stain as whatever new flakes fell atop it fizzled into water. His eyes followed the line of flattened snow to the edge of the forest as his legs slowly began to move forward.
There was something on the wind, an unnatural scent of sorts. It was almost like a mixture of sulfur and copper that he could taste as well as he could smell. It was all around him, yet seemed to be resonating from within the confines of the closely packed trees that led back into the wilderness. And he could feel him there, too, watching him with stoic eyes as he crossed the lawn and peeled back the first layer of undergrowth, entering its domain.
The sound of the whistling wind dissipated into the night as he pressed deeper into the pine grove, the only audible sounds were those of his heavy, labored breathing and the needles of the branches as they caressed one another, scraping from side to side as he passed beneath. It became increasingly difficult to follow the trench through the forest. It shifted from side to side as it meandered through the maze of trunks, the redness fading to a pale silver on the white ground as there appeared to be no more of the red to stain it.
An owl hooted in the upper reaches of the needle-covered branches above, its long feathers clapping together as it rapidly took to flight.
Scott finally stopped, leaning his hands on his thighs. He doubled over in an effort to catch his breath. Steam swirled in bursts from his ruby red nostrils as his eyes scanned the thin lines of darkness between the closely packed trunks, peering through the masses of green and browning needles for anything resembling a human form. Granted, there was a large part of him that really didn’t want to find whatever it was that he had chased out here into the forest, but there was another part that just had to try to force some form of resolution. He couldn’t keep doing this night after night with no end in sight. He couldn’t just lie awake waiting for whatever monstrosity stalked the darkness to parade the slaughtered corpses of two hundred of his friends in front of him, if that was, indeed, the whole point.
And there was a part of him that wanted to prove that it was nothing more than a dream, a bad dream that he just couldn’t see the way out of. If he could just track down whoever this was out here in the night, he might be able to wake up, because, after all, there was absolutely no way that this was his friend he had watched die right in front of his eyes so many years ago. Regardless of what the diary may have insinuated, or what Harry had seen at that house in the valley, he needed to prove to himself that his deceased friend Matt wasn’t skulking around in the shadows taking his revenge in the form of a garish bloodbath.
Wiping the crystallized drops of sweat from his forehead, he jogged deeper into the woods, dodging the branches and trunks. They came at him with surprising speed, his tautly-wound reflexes spring-like in their reactions. The hollow thud of his footsteps atop the frozen ground resonated within his head, hammering like the thumping of the blood through his temples. His brow furrowed with a will of its own and his churning legs slowed to a walk, and then finally stopped all together.
He was in the center of a small circle of trees; the needled arms lacing together like fingers above his head to blot out the slivers of light that crept through the clouds from the moon. The piercing cold stabbed at his bare chest, penetrating through the flesh like a series of needles, ripping at the skin as though to peel it back. His swirling breath lingered around his face like a localized fog before fading into the darkness. Turning in place, he watched the ring of trees around him.
There was no doubt in his mind that there was someone nearby, just out of his line of sight. He could feel him there, the heavy stare fixed upon him as he stood alone in the center of the grove. There was that coppery smell again, climbing into his sinuses and dripping down the back of his throat as it filled the forest on the thin breeze.
Peering beyond the shadowed trunks, he could see nothing but the thick blanket of darkness that enshrouded the shrubbery. It masked whatever animals slumbered through hibernation or brumation or whatever small prelude to death slowed their functioning through the frigid winter months, allowing them to arise in time for the mating season in spring. Perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the darkness seemed to be gaining mass, piling blackness upon itself until it seemed to pulse behind the lichen-crusted trunks. Threatening to swell all around him and spill through the thin gaps between the trunks into the small circle where he hesitantly waited for whatever had drawn him here to reveal itself, it called to him with words that he could feel, but not necessarily hear.
He looked straight up into the darkened mass of interwoven branches, their needled extremities shuddering against one another. A thin cloud of snow sifted through from above. There was nothing around him, at least nothing that he could see with his own eyes, yet still he knew that it was there with him, standing just outside of his line of sight, sharing the same frigid night air that rifled through his lungs. He could taste its rotting breath on the tip of his tongue and feel its damp warmth on his exposed skin.
Staring down at the white-dusted ground, he could see something etched into the frozen, crusty snow in the dim light. Though barely visible, he could tell it was there. Kneeling, his face only a few feet from the hardened surface of white, his finger traced the carvings. They were letters, marked into the snow by a human hand, his finger fitting perfectly into the thin channels.
“White lace?” he mused, discerning the patterns of letters.
Why in the world would anyone take the time to write the words “white lace” in the snow in the middle of nowhere?
His mind raced in circles, the words echoing over and over in the corners of his brain, which churned like an engine in response to the letters. Knowing they were written there for his benefit, for his eyes only, he frantically sought to decipher the cryptic code.
