“No, that’s ridiculous,” he muttered. Of course the path was there—it had to be. He’d just walked down it, after all. “Damn this darkness,” he cursed. Darkness that made it near impossible to see his hand in front of his face. He hesitated, studying the undergrowth crowding in all around him, thinking. He had gotten turned around, that was it, that had to be it. After all, in the darkness, such a thing was easy to do and his mother and father had often warned him of just such an occurrence when venturing outside of the relative safety the village of Brighton provided to go hunting or gathering berries as they sometimes had.
The night played tricks on even the most perceptive, and even expert trackers had gotten lost in such darkness, never to be seen or heard from again. In the darkness, things looked different, that was all. That was a truth even children—perhaps especially children—knew. After all, it was children for whom, in the night, coat racks became bogeymen lurking in the corner of their rooms and empty shoes peeking out of their closets became the great furred feet of some monster. Children’s thoughts, children’s fears, yet they sent a superstitious shiver of fear through him, and Matt hissed, giving his head a shake. “Relax,” he whispered, rubbing his hands in front of his face in a vain effort to bring some warmth back to them. “You’re not a child to be scared of make-believe monsters.”
He took a deep breath then began pushing his way through the undergrowth in the direction of the voice. The bushes stubbornly stood in his path, seeming to cling and pull at him as he forced his way through, but he continued to make steady—if slow—progress. After he’d been shoving his way through the undergrowth for around five minutes he stopped again. It was weird. The girl’s voice had sounded close, and even with the time he’d lost forcing his way past the bushes, he would have thought he’d come upon her by now.
The bushes seemed to be crowding closer, pushing toward him as if intent on suffocating him and despite the fact that he knew the thought was a childish one, Matt held his hands out, slowly spinning in a circle for some superstitious fear that the bushes were moving, only doing it when he wasn’t looking. “Hello!” he shouted, unable to deny the crack in his voice now, thinking less of saving than of being saved. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
Matt jumped, spinning. The voice had seemed to come from right behind him, and there had been something strange about it, hadn’t there? It had been the same voice, that much he knew, but it had sounded different, somehow…older. No, that was silly. It was just the night, that was all, just the night and his own fear working at him, making his mind play tricks. “Where?” he asked breathlessly. “I can’t see you.”
“This way,” the voice said, and it was strange that the more panicked he felt the less panicked the voice seemed to sound. “Just a little farther.”
Suddenly, the choking pressure of the bushes—imagined pressure, no doubt—eased, and, turning to the sound of the words, Matt saw that he wasn’t surrounded after all, but that there was a path, one small enough he must have overlooked it in the near-darkness, leading in the voice’s direction. “I’m coming,” he said, “just…just don’t move anymore, alright?” Please. Please don’t move.
“I won’t,” the voice assured him. “I’ll wait for you. Just come…a little…closer.”
But despite the voice’s assurances, it seemed to be growing farther away with each word, and Matt found himself rushing down the path, eager to find the girl. To save her, yes, but also to no longer be alone in the darkness with the trees looming all around him and the bushes seeming to creep in the moment he turned his back. He hurried forward, shoving errant limbs out of his way and then suddenly the ground vanished from beneath his feet, and he let out a cry as he stumbled and fell and began to roll.
Pain shook his arm and legs as he tucked his head in, rolling down a hill in a bumping, painful fall. He finally came to a panting, groaning rest on his back, blinking up at the night sky, a sky which seemed devoid of any stars at all. There was only the moon, a moon which seemed huge in his sight, so big and close that he was overcome with the certainty that, should he reach out, he would be able to touch it.
After the worst of the pain and his own shock had subsided, he became aware of a sound. It was the gentle, gurgling sound of water. Frowning and swallowing hard, he sat up and turned to the source of the noise to see, to his astonishment, that what he’d heard was the sound of a small stream less than a dozen feet away. A gentle, burbling stream that seemed to sparkle in the moonlight as if millions of diamonds lay just beneath the water’s surface. And on the bank of the stream, sitting with her back to him, was a little girl.
She wore a bright white dress that would have looked far more at home on some noble child having dinner in her father’s manor than in the middle of a forest in the dead of night. And, perhaps stranger still, there wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on the dress which seemed to almost glow. Matt thought that was odd considering she’d been lost in the woods for the gods alone knew how long, but he brushed the thought aside. Now that he had found the girl, Matt could admit to himself that he was just glad to not be alone any longer, to have a companion, in this place, even if it were only a small girl that no doubt still hid under her
