After all, whatever the man had told him, he believed that he could have helped. He didn’t know what exactly Cutter was, had no idea who he had been before he’d come to Brighton, apparently carrying with him Matt, a baby then, but he knew that the man was not a normal man, at least not in the way that his father—or the man who had claimed to be his father—had been a normal man. He could not imagine Cutter bouncing him on his back and playing “horsey” as his father had, could not picture him sitting at dinner with his family, laughing and telling jokes.
He pictured him, instead, for reasons he did not know, standing on a slight rise in the middle of a great field, a field in which lay thousands of countless dead. And he, Cutter, the only one standing. He pictured him holding some great, massive weapon, a sword, perhaps, or a club. No, that wasn’t it. He pictured him with an axe, a great, double-bladed axe with a haft so thick and a blade so heavy most men wouldn’t have been able to lift it. A black-handled axe with a black blade. He pictured him lifting the axe above his head easily in one hand, tilting his head back and roaring in mad glee as the blade dripped crimson drops onto the ground.
That image was so powerful, so all-encompassing and altogether terrifying that, for a moment, Matt forgot what impulse had dragged him from his bed. Worse than that, he thought he could almost hear the man’s wild, roaring laughter, the laughter of some demented god bent on destruction. Then the voice came again.
“Please, help me,” it pleaded. Not it, though—her. The worst of the storm had passed, the snow had stopped falling and in the stillness, in the quiet that often followed such storms, Matt could hear her clearly. A girl, alright, and a young one by the sound of it. He wondered for a moment, how such a one had managed to find herself here, in the Black Woods, wondered what possible reason she would have had to come, what terrible tragedy might have driven her here. But then, it had been tragedy that had driven him here too, hadn’t it?
He considered waking Cutter, but in the end decided against it. The man’s presence—while frightening in its own respect—might have went some way toward calming his nerves, toward banishing the strange, otherworldly feeling of dread pulling at Matt’s heart, but he dared not wake him. Cutter, he’d discovered, was a man of a single mind, a single purpose, and it was likely that, should he wake him, the man would refuse to go help the girl and would keep Matt from doing so as well.
Then she would be left alone, much as he was alone, for while Cutter was many things—many things, Matt thought, that he even now did not guess at—the man was not much for companionship. Not a friend. A person would have a better chance of befriending a bear and, Matt thought, would probably have less chance of getting mauled.
“Please.”
The voice was closer now or seemed to be. “I’m coming!” Matt yelled. Cutter might have been a cold-blooded bastard, but he was not, and he’d be damned if he was leaving anyone else to be alone, especially a little girl. Matt glanced around him at the great, black trunks of the trees, seeming to almost throb perversely in the moonlight, then started in the direction from which the voice had come. He would show Cutter—show himself, too—he could be brave. He was no child, not anymore, even if he had been a few days ago. He was nearly a man grown, and no man save perhaps Cutter would leave a child in the wilderness alone.
Luckily, there was a path through the trees that seemed to run in the exact direction from which the voice had come. That was a good thing—it meant that the girl was clever enough to stay on the path, knowing that was her best chance of being found. How she had survived the night he couldn’t imagine, but Matt knew she couldn’t be doing well, a thought reinforced by the weak, thready quality of her voice.
He walked for a few minutes then stopped, frowning. It was ridiculous, of course, but by some trick of the darkness and the pale moonlight, the trees seemed to have slowly crept closer, seemed to be crowding in around him.
He felt a twinge of panic but fought it down. “Say something!” he shouted, doing his best to remain calm, in control. They were only trees, after all, nothing to be frightened of.
“Here! Help, please!”
Matt’s frown deepened. That was strange. The voice seemed to have come from somewhere close behind him—which was impossible. After all, he’d only walked for a few minutes, and the voice had seemed much farther away than that. He couldn’t imagine how he could have walked past her, but he must have done so without realizing it, no doubt due to the darkness. He turned to start back down the path only to have the breath catch in his throat as he realized that the path which he had walked only moments before was no longer there. In its place, thick undergrowth choked the forest floor, seeming to glow in a
