Jonathan felt it somewhere out there – true reality. He had been half asleep for so long, trapped within his guilt and terror. His body moved, but he fell deeper and deeper. Something tried to wake him. He could feel it now.
Daryl Teague’s face pulled from both sides into a grin, and he stepped back into the darkness.
Jonathan could see the firepit and oakwood bench where they found Bill Flood’s body. He could see the doorway of the shed where they’d hung the deer and stripped it of skin and meat ten years ago. He could smell something gentle on the wind that moved softly through the trees and caused the snow to dance.
Where is Jacob?
He was out of the Gulch now and stood beneath the electric floodlight, facing the wooden wall of the cabin. He could see the driveway from here. He saw Conner’s Suburban parked in the driveway, large and heavy, the light glinting off the body, the tires new and polished. He turned and looked again into the doorway of the shed, its entrance black and beckoning. The snow fell silent through the shadow and light. He still heard them in the trees; he heard their rustling feet, their whispers and taunts. He waited and breathed and then turned to look.
In the light of the overhead lamp his own footprints leading from the trees to the cabin were the only ones he could see. The tracks curved slightly with the small incline, showing a line of indentations and slash marks where his right foot dragged like an animal with a broken leg. The wind pushed the snow sideways for a moment but then ceased, and the snow fell dead and straight again. He waited there in the night for what seemed like hours, and they waited in the trees, watching.
He heard a tree snap somewhere in the darkness. He unslung his rifle and waited. All went silent, and he could hear only the beating of his heart – it sounded a million miles away.
A face appeared from behind a tree like a mannequin pushed slowly into his range of vision. It showed no movement or life – a wooden mask painted by a disturbed child who saw the world in flashes of carnival terror. It stared with unblinking black eyes. Atop its head was a crown of antlers. Its impossibly tall body was clothed in a Druid robe. It floated farther out from behind the tree and faced him directly. Then it began to float toward him over the snow.
Jonathan chambered a round in his rifle and raised it to his shoulder, aimed and fired. The sound echoed off the mountains and disappeared.
The figure did not flinch or move, as though the bullet hadn’t touched the cloth of its robe. It simply continued to float silent and unmoving toward him. It didn’t look real, but it was there, in front of his eyes. He could see it – the light landed on its wooden mask, which grew larger and larger with its approach. It existed, and yet it did not because it could not be killed.
Jonathan chambered another round and fired again. The figure continued toward him. It grew large in Jonathan’s eyes, coming so near now it seemed he could reach out and touch it.
It was what hid behind the veil of this dream world. It was where Jacob, his little boy, would be taken to suffer with this unspeakable thing keeping watch over him like a monstrous father figure, reveling in the terror of a child woken from a dream, plunged into a cold, empty hell.
He chambered another round and fired again and again till the rifle was empty and there was nothing but the hollow click of the firing pin.
The figure stood before him now, face-to-face. An arm like the broken branch of a tree rose up from beneath its robe. A long, bony finger reached up to the wooden mask and pushed it aside. A deep, croaking and guttural voice rose up from the darkness, as if the land itself had cracked open and, from a great crevasse, its words filled Coombs’ Gulch and poured down into him.
“Do you see?”
Jonathan stared into its true form. He could see. It was all he would ever see.
He could not look away.
Chapter Thirty
The lights flashed on bright, making Mary’s eyes water. A small microphone nestled in her lapel. The Channel 8 news reporter – Sonya Martinez – sat across from her in a chair, pleasantly pretty and covered in makeup.
“What would you like to say to whoever took your son?” Sonya said.
Despite the rehearsals, the words she had memorized and the coaching from detectives and experts, Mary could only bring herself to say, “Please, bring him home.”
And even that was choked and dead on arrival.
It had been three weeks since Jacob disappeared and her husband, Jonathan, had returned home, crazed and alone, talking nonstop about something in the woods, some kind of ritual, demons and children lost in space. The police immediately hauled him away. He put up a fight in the middle of the police station and tried to escape, injuring a couple of officers with strength she did not know he possessed. They placed him in a locked psychiatric hospital and charged
