The Splendor of Fear Read online

  Jared raked a hand through his hair and exhaled loudly. “I... I went looking for you, but after awhile I totally lost your trail. I spent probably an hour calling out to you, but I never got any response. Before I knew it, I was pretty lost. I spent awhile trying to gain my bearings but the woods only got darker, and deeper. There were spots out there where the trees grew all over each other—places where I had to crawl to get through. Finally, I turned back and decided to focus on getting out of the park, securing help. I managed to get back to the creek, and I found a spot where I thought I could cross it. I made the jump, but...” He rubbed at his knee with a wince. He slowed his pace a little and stared down the path for a moment before continuing. “There was one bit I remember...

  “I was crawling through this knot of trees. I didn't see any other way forward. Well, I passed them and found myself standing before three corpses hanging from vines. They were swaying in the moonlight—looked like they'd only just been hanged, the three of them. Big guys, wearing raggedy clothing. I didn't know what to make of it. It scared the hell out of me. So, I just kept walking.

  “No sooner had I passed them by did I hear the vines straining. Then all three of the nooses snapped and the bodies hit the ground like bags of wet cement. But they didn't stay down.” As he spoke, I could feel his hand trembling against mine. “They started crawling through the grass on their bellies—slithered—like snakes. I ran from them, ran as hard as I could on this bum knee of mine. Then, there was another spot, this old ruin.

  “It had been a stone building once, and most of the walls were still intact. Here and there you could see gaps in the bricks, though, and as I wandered past it, I saw a bunch of people looking out at me from those openings. So many eyes... It was like I was having a nightmare, and no matter how hard I ran or how badly I got hurt, I couldn't wake up.”

  His experiences hadn't been so different from mine, it seemed. I told him about what I'd experienced—the scenes in the house, the chases through the woods. “You saw those three men hanging from trees, right? That reminds me of something I read. Three local men wound up mysteriously hanged close to Ellie Pomeroy's house back in the day. I'll bet those were the three you saw. As for me, while I was in the house, I dreamt of a woman sitting in the room with me. She lit her dress on fire and laughed as she burned. There's a record of that happening in Newsom's Landing, too—some local woman who might have been under the witch's influence burned herself to death in a church. I think the two of us have encountered the ghosts of the past in this place. I think they're still here in some capacity.”

  “I've been thinking about that a lot,” said Jared. “I think, right now, these woods are home to more than one reality.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He took some time in searching for the right words. “You and I, we've been fighting our way through here, thinking we're merely hallucinating. But I don't think that's quite right. You said yourself that the burning woman, and those three hanged men, were real people—that they really died in that way once upon a time, right? I think that, somehow, we've been wandering in and out of the present time and have run into memories of the past. The woods hold onto these memories like a mist, and depending on where you wander, you see different things, pick up different pieces.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, “but how does the witch work into all of this, then?”

  “You know how some people claim to see ghosts in certain houses? If a house is built over a battlefield, they'll claim to see a ghost in a Civil War getup, right? Well, maybe it's because that land can't shake the memories that were made on it. You can knock a building down, but you can't scrub away memories that were written in blood. So, these woods—considering everything that happened in the 1800's—have held onto a lot of nasty things. And maybe, sometimes, those lingering memories overlap.

  “On this night, the 14th, things change, though. Ellie Pomeroy was murdered, but she wasn't like the other victims, was she? She drove people insane, made them do things—she was a witch, just like they all feared. And when she died—when she was buried in these woods—she spread all throughout them like a long, long tree root. Once a year, on the anniversary of her death, when her connection to the world is at its peak, she reaches out to all of those nasty memories and moves them around like pieces on a chess board. She wanders through the woods and manipulates all of these different realities, and whoever's nearby gets subjected to them. At least, that's my theory.”

  “OK, but... how do we stop it, then? How do we get out of this mess and tune out all of the other memories?” I asked.

  “I don't have a good answer for that,” he admitted. “Maybe it's down to the calendar, like we thought. Maybe, once the 15th shows up, Ellie Pomeroy gets put in her place for another year and we're released from this. If that isn't the case, then maybe we have to do something—placate the witch, or set something right in the woods—before it'll stop. Every curse has an initial cause. We'd have to look into that, and then do something about it. Then again, there's always a third option.”

  “And what's that?”

  “That there's no solution, and that we're shit outta luck.”

  I frowned. “I don't know how much time has passed, if it's still the 14th. But you mentioned the curse's cause. These woods are cursed because of what happened to Ellie Pomeroy. She was murdered and buried here by a mob, remember? There's nothing we can do about that now.”

  Jared fell into thoughtful silence for a moment. “That isn't necessarily true. These woods are full of memories—different realities, right? Maybe, if we interact with her in the right spot, or witness the right memory, we'll be in a position to communicate with her. And, if so, we might be able to do something for her—convince her to call it all off.”

  This was a nice line of thought, but it was all theoretical. The two of us had passed from one hallucinatory horror from the next without any clear sign. If Jared's thesis was correct, maybe Ellie Pomeroy's death was playing out somewhere in these woods the way it had more than a century ago—and, maybe, if we interacted with that memory we could draw things to a close. There were so many “maybes” in the equation that it hardly seemed worth pursuing, however. “We could walk forever and never find the spot where she died,” I explained. “She was killed in her home, and then the house was burned. I don't know what they did with her after that—maybe the mob buried her nearby, or else they carried her into the woods and buried her someplace else, where no one would look.”

  “I get it, and there's no guarantee it would work. But that's the only chance we have if we want to be proactive. We can either run through the woods all night the way we've been doing in the hopes that this will all wear off when the clock strikes midnight, or else we can find out where she died, see if we can't communicate with her, and approach her at her most vulnerable.”

  At her most vulnerable. Something about that phrasing roused a memory in me, and I stopped abruptly on the trail, tugging at Jared's sleeve. “There's—there's something else. Something I saw, while I was walking in the woods and looking for you.” I thought back to the strange sighting I'd had of the witch in the woods. After I'd fled from the house, I had seen her floating into a strange, rotten clearing. She'd paused there, had seemed to rest, until she'd noticed me and given chase. Was that the place she'd been buried? Did that spot have any connection to her death, or was I mistaken? “I saw her while I was heading back to the creek. She stopped in this clearing. The trees and ground were all strange there—nasty—but she stopped and sort of laid down in the dirt. I wasn't sure what to make of it, and when she noticed me she came running, but do you think that could be the place? The place where she died, or got buried?”

  “It could be,” he said. “You might be onto something. Where was it, exactly?”

  “Eh... I don't know the precise spot. It was fairly close to the creek—across it. I remember what it looked like, at any rate.” I sighed. “Should we turn back and have a look at it?”
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br />   He shook his head. “No way. Let's get to the Jeep. It could be that the curse is over with, that she's done for the night. If at all possible, I just want to get out of here. We can keep that in our back pocket if we need it, but now that we're here, I'd rather not go back into the woods.”

  I couldn't argue with that. We continued down the path, towards the parking lot. Yellow lights broke through the trees ahead—lights issuing from the crooked streetlamps surrounding the lot. Despite our pains, we jogged, hand-in-hand, down the remainder of the path, ecstatic. “We made it!” I declared, shuffling out onto the asphalt. We halted there and took a good look around—there was the tiny kiosk, the meandering road leading out of the park, and—

  The Jeep wasn't there.

  Jared staggered out into the lot. “What the hell?” His voice boomed in the openness. Turning to me, eyes wild with bewilderment, he asked, “Where's the fucking car?” Spittle flew from his lips. He was asking as if I knew where it'd gone—as if I'd hidden it from him as a joke. He shifted on his heels and took another look at the spot where the Jeep had been parked, and then took up a handful of his hair in his fist. “You've got to be kidding me.”

  “Maybe it was towed? Maybe one of the rangers came by, saw it, and had it towed out of here? Remember how we called the office and—”

  “I remember,” he barked. “But it should still be here. No one's come out to this parking lot since we got here—I'd bet my life on it.” He looked back at the path, at the woods, and his lips were creased in a deep-set grimace. “It's that bitch. She's still messing with us. We're still stuck in her world—playing by her rules.” He groaned at the sky. “This is so fucked! I've had enough!”

  “Jared, we don't know that,” I said, holding onto his arm. “Let's go a bit further—towards the main road. Maybe it really was towed. Or, if we get far enough down the road, someone might see us, and—”

  “And we can walk all the way back to Ohio, is that it?” he snapped.

  “Just keep calm!”

  The look in his eye was venomous. “Don't start with that shit! I've been calm, babe. I've been calm since the minute we set up camp. I was calm when we got lost out there, when you ran off, when I saw a bunch of fucking spooks out there in the middle of the woods and they all dropped from their nooses to crawl after me like snakes. You know what, though? I'm done with being calm. I got us out here, to the parking lot, didn't I? I did what I was supposed to do, kept my cool. We were supposed to drive out of here, escape. This was my last fucking straw. The car's gone. It's gone. And that's not an accident! Nobody came out here to tow the damn thing on the least busy day of the year. It's gone because you and I just stepped into another world completely—because you and I are knee-deep in Ellie Pomeroy's shit, that's why!”

  I didn't have the energy—or the nerve—to talk him down. What's more, I was filled the the creeping suspicion he was right. The car's absence was likely to be the newest link in the witch's chain. Its disappearance had been intended to sap the hope our reunion had fostered, and it was working.

  Hands in his pockets, Jared stalked off like a moody teenager, kicking up clouds of leaves as he shuffled through the lot. He set his steely sights on the winding entrance road and said nothing as we wandered on. Maybe he was too in his own head, too pissed off, to see it, but as we meandered across the empty lot, the surrounding woods seemed taller somehow. Or perhaps the two of us were smaller. Whatever the case, I stared up at trees that seemed to scratch the moon's belly with their withered fingers and wondered at their prodigious height. The shadows that grew up between them seemed darker than before, too. Those shadows had weight about them—the empty space wasn't as empty as it looked.

  I said nothing, sure that I must have been seeing things, and just focused on keeping pace with Jared. He stopped suddenly as we neared what should have been the border of the lot and the start of the road leading out of the complex. The expected road—the one we'd driven in on—wasn't there. It was like the materials comprising it had been folded up and tucked away—like it'd never existed. Untamed grass stretched on for several feet before the way ahead erupted into solidly-packed forest.

  Jared pressed a palm to his brow, and to my surprise, he laughed. “Am I having a fucking stroke, or is the road really gone?”

  “It's gone,” I said, kicking at the tall grass. “You were right. We're still her playthings.”

  Jared sat down in the grass, legs crossed, and stared at the wall of trees before us. Blackness hung about the trunks like a mist—churning, drifting, circulating—and the longer he studied it, the paler her got. “It's a dead-end.”

  “You don't think we should press on—that the road is beyond these trees?” I paced through the grass, came within feet of the treeline, and tried to parse something hopeful out of the punishing darkness that clotted up the open spaces.

  “No,” he snapped, leaning forward. “No. That's not the way out. There's something in there.”

  I took a step back and saw that he was right. The darkness was alive, roiling. If this night had taught me anything, it was that there could be no safe passage through that kind of darkness. You'd take one step into it, only to find yourself transported to a completely different sphere. “So,” I asked, “what'll we do?”

  Jared didn't respond. Lowering his gaze, he stared blankly into the grass and shrugged. The night had broken him.

  I decided to join him. Easing myself onto the ground, I sat down beside him and rested my head against his shoulder, waiting for something to happen—for a change in the scenery. “If we wait here long enough, do you think these trees will vanish and the road will reappear? I mean, what we're seeing isn't real, right? It's just a memory—a ghost, sort of.”

  Again, he shrugged. “It's real enough.” He picked up a pebble and flicked it towards the trees. It clicked against a trunk and disappeared into the darkness. “Those trees shouldn't be there—you and I both know that—and yet, here they are. If you reach out and touch them, you can feel their bark, rest in their shade. If Ellie decides to call the whole thing off, maybe the trees will disappear and we'll get back to the world we know, but then... how much of the world we know is actually real? What sets it apart from what we're seeing now—what makes it truer, huh?”

  “OK, I get it, I get it. No need to give a whole TED Talk.” I looked up into the sky and watched as a shadowy mist passed by the face of the moon like the end of a silk scarf. “You know what I want more than anything?” I asked.

  He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, gave a quasi-interested grunt.

  “A grilled cheese.”

  That incited a smirk.

  “Good bread, lots of cheese. Maybe, like... gouda, or something. And chocolate milk. A whole gallon of it.”

  His brows arched incredulously. “I'm hungry as hell and that honestly sounds... like a terrible combination.”

  “Fine, whatever. More for me.” I stretched my legs out in front of me and studied my boots. They'd been new when I'd started this trip, but they looked years old now. The leather was scuffed and soiled; they'd taken a hell of a beating over the course of the night. “You know, I spoke to Diana the night before we set out. She had this idea, that this whole trip was—” I chuckled to myself. When we'd set off for Kentucky, I'd been expecting a very different sequence of events. I thought we'd do some camping and fishing, and that, maybe, I'd be heading home with a ring on my finger. That all seemed so distant now, so trivial.

  “That the trip was what?” he asked.

  I held my tongue, finishing with a sigh. “Never mind.”

  “Well,” he admitted, “to be fair, this trip didn't end up at all like I'd expected. I'm sorry we came out here at all. We should have stayed home.” With a groan, he stood up and took a few moments to test his sore knee. “But she has to give up eventually, right?”

  The two of us paced back up the gravel lot, and we would have kept wandering between the crooked streetlights like moths had something not ca
ught Jared's eye. We had gone back to the spot where the two of us agreed the Jeep had been parked, and after a careful study of the asphalt, could find no evidence of recent tire tracks. Jared took this as proof positive of the witch's jiggery-pokery, and started into an expletive-laden rant when the reception kiosk entered into his line of sight and he stopped cold.

  “What is it?” I asked, jarred by his sudden silence.

  He didn't answer—his jaw clenched too tightly for that—but he did manage to point at the little building, hardly larger than a bathroom stall, and to single out the cause of his unease. I remembered the thing well, with its panel of scuffed-up glass, and the fliers pasted to the inside for the benefit of visitors, but I saw there was a new addition.

  Standing in the dark hovel was a slumped, naked form. The shadows hid much, but as the figure loomed they couldn't erase the hatred in the gaze that came through that glass. We were being watched. There was no way to know when the surveillance had begun; perhaps she'd always been there. The two of us stood stock still, eyes locking with hers until Jared and I both had no choice but to drop her poisonous gaze. Looking into those eyes too long instilled a peculiar kind of dread. It was like staring into the eyes of a cobra and waiting for it to strike.

  When next I looked up at the kiosk, I saw that Ellie Pomeroy was no longer inside it, but in front of it. She floated a foot off the ground, her cyan toes bobbing in the air. She looked like a human-shaped balloon—parts of her swollen to grotesque proportion, weightless, and she even loosed a series of hisses from that battered, sealed mouth of hers that mimicked the slow escape of air from a punctured car tire.

  “W-What do you want?” asked Jared. He spoke with evident difficulty; though the words came out clearly, his lips quaked with every syllable.

  The witch of Newsom's Landing pierced him with a cold stare. By the minutest gradations, she lowered herself to the ground until those grub-like toes were planted firmly on the asphalt. Without warning, the hag began towards us. Her stride was short and jerky, and as she moved, every joint could be heard to pop and creak discordantly, as if the mediating tissues within had dissolved and the points of friction were solely bone.