Jonathan tried to scream, but that heavy hand, ripe with dirt and oil, clamped down over his mouth. The figures picked him up and carried him through the trees. He fought and struggled and cried, but the grip was so strong – the arms a vise over his small body – it was useless. They seemed to fly through the trees. They traveled far, far into the woods, and he struggled until shock finally set in and his body went limp. His eyes were open, but he could not move. The procession went on endlessly into the night. Darkness swelled up from behind the trees.
They took him to a place, a clearing where everything was silent and still, and white rocks gleamed in the moonlight in a circle with lines tracing through, which formed an empty square in the center. They set him down in the center. He stood with the man behind him, each of his powerful hands clamped on Jonathan’s shoulders. The three figures began to chant in words he did not understand, their dark hoods over their heads, their faces writhing and crawling.
The rocks glowed in the night. The chanting filled the cold air until it was all he could hear.
And then there was a new presence in the circle with him, massive and stinking with death. He felt it, heard its strange breath. The man released his grip on Jonathan’s small shoulders, and two long arms with clawed hands reached around and embraced his tiny body.
Then he was gone – gone from this world, gone from time and space. The sharpened tips of its claws danced over his body, and he seemed to melt, spreading out into those interstitial spaces. It was all like a never-ending dream, or perhaps a nightmare, in which he was everywhere and nowhere at once.
He faded in and out of reality, in and out of places and times, materializing in strange forests and disappearing again. He would see people – campers, hunters, hikers at various times – dressed in clothes he did not recognize. He could see them, but he was far from them. He would scream out and cry for help, and they would turn to look but never see.
Other times he came to in a forest at night, and he would wander, trying to find his way home, lost and terrified. But the woods were not his own, the places cold and endless. He wandered through these forests in the night, and it would walk behind him like some strange guardian making sure he did not run off. He could feel the branches and leaves; he could touch the cold ground and breathe the scented air. He could see the animals that stared at him and then bounded off in fright. His clothes were not enough to keep him warm, and he trembled and cried and shivered in the darkness.
Then he would disappear again, melt into time and space, and his small body was racked with pain; there was nothing but frozen, empty space. His eyes could see, but there was nothing – absolutely nothing – to be seen. He couldn’t tell if those blank spaces lasted seconds or millennia. The incomprehensible pain overwhelmed all time and thought. It was as if his bones were trying to escape his flesh. He cried for his mother during those times, but there was no answer, only more cold and pain and timelessness.
He wandered along a brook in the night, with the presence following his steps as if marching a slave. It was freezing. He shivered and walked to stay warm, but all he truly wanted was to lie down somewhere and die so the endless torture would end. He wandered near a giant bush, and suddenly, in the darkness, he saw a bright light. It was like looking down a long and dark tunnel. The light turned toward him, blinding white, and he turned away for a moment. The creature behind him croaked in a deep and unknown language. There was a flash of fire in the distance, and something struck the back of his head. Then, suddenly, he felt release and freedom, freedom from pain and bondage and suffering.
For a moment – an immeasurable increment of time before he was finally released – he heard the sound of men’s voices whooping and cheering in the night.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jonathan woke with relief and terror, shivering and cold like poor Thomas Terrywile on that night. His back was wet with lake water from the small pools nestled between rocks on the shore. The water soaked through his jacket. Small, light snowflakes fell from an expanse of gray clouds, which rolled like ocean waves overhead. He woke with a gasp, terrified that he was still alive, like being born again, from one hell into another. Now he was among the living, though unsure what that meant. Here in the cold, he could feel the gravity of the world again and realized now the trap laid for them – the trap they had built themselves, stick by stick with guilt and fear throughout their lives. They had imprisoned themselves for the hunter.
Jonathan had never even put up a fight.
It was not a cage. Rather, it was like a grisly maze. Jonathan realized that he had been led to this very place from the beginning. They were not ahead of the thing that stalked them in the woods; it was miles
