“Are you okay, baby?”
“I think so. I don’t…do you remember what happened?”
Amazed at the steadiness in her voice, Lawrence said, “No…I think…I was smoking by the car. We had just packed up the tent, right? That’s the last thing I remember.”
Brooke twisted her bound legs beneath her so that she could sit upright. “I remember double-checking the campsite, making sure the fire wasn’t still smoldering in the pit. I…I heard a creak behind me, thought it was you. There was a smell…”
“Like something burning, right? Like a fire? I smelled it too. Then…” He rubbed the back of his head and flinched at the pain. “Then we woke up here.”
“What the fuck, Lawrence, what the fuck? Where are we? Who would do this?”
Stay calm, sweetie, please stay calm. If you panic I’m gonna lose it. Sweat dripped down his forehead, hung off the tip of his nose, and fell to the mud unheeded.
“I remember something else,” she said. “The trees, right before we were hit by whatever hit us.” She leaned forward, fixed his wide gaze with conviction. “They moved—”
The door camouflaged into the far wall slammed open with a wet thud. The couple shrieked like a single organism and scuttled backwards, stopping with pained grunts when their leg shackles pulled taut.
The stench of a thousand swampland logs swept into the earthen room. Lawrence gagged and buried his nose into his filthy sleeves. The air was fat with the smell of wood, the stink of wet things. He shut his eyes, afraid to let the poison in, and let toxic tears flow. The stench wasn’t nauseating in itself—it smelled green, lush, alive—but the concentrated thickness and intensity of the smell overpowered what little resolve Lawrence still possessed and drove a string of whimpers from his throat.
It’s a dream, he thought. This is a dream smell. But when the sound of shuffling footsteps followed the stench into their prison, he opened his eyes and prayed to be awakened.
The figure striding into the room was easily seven feet tall. He limped towards Lawrence with an unsteady gait, his legs teetering and seeming to threaten collapse with each step, like a toddler learning to walk but too inexperienced to trust his limbs. A gown of thick brown fabric covered his thin frame to where his knees should’ve been, and a hooded cowl capped his head, rendering shadows over his face.
Brooke lunged against her chains. “Who the fuck you think you are the fuck did you do to—” She stopped as the towering figure turned in the middle of a rickety step and strode towards her.
“No!” Lawrence screamed. “Me! Come to me!”
The figure drew his right hand from his robes. A mound of black dirt lay in its palm. Brooke had backed away as far as her binds would allow, and Lawrence saw blood ringing her thin ankles where the chains bit. The man—that’s no man you know that’s no man—stopped in front of her, dark crumbs falling from his upturned hands. With a crack that stained Lawrence’s jeans with a spurt of urine, each of the figure’s legs bent at the middle and snapped, creating a pair of splintered, jagged knees. Brooke screamed, covered her ears as if preparing for the next explosion of breaking joints.
The thing knelt before her, its face cloaked in the darkness of its hood. Its left arm emerged from its sleeves, as straight and unwavering as its legs had been before the deafening crack. Lawrence envisioned a snake slithering from its den as the arm grew longer, longer, knotty yet smooth. Lawrence lunged, fingers curled and eager for the thing’s neck, but his chains locked tight and he pitched forward, his face slamming into the earthen floor. He raised his head into blindness, tried to scrape the grime out of his eyes. His ears, however, were ruthlessly keen, and pain riddled his chest as he heard his wife’s shrieks collapse into retching, choking sobs.
The thing was on him before he could regain his sight. A hand as hard as granite grabbed the back of his skull and wrenched his head back. Lawrence screamed. A ball of dirt smashed into his mouth. He shook his head, tried to dislodge the filth, to see his attacker. Blinking away enough for a hint of blurred sight, he saw only the hooded figure’s arm, directly in front of his face and shoving the soil down his throat. He gagged, spit, shrieked behind the wall of dirt filling his mouth, and finally, he swallowed. The dirt, now muddy with his saliva, slid down his esophagus like a ribbon of slime. He coughed, exaggerated the action in an effort to expel the dirt from his mouth, his stomach, his lungs, but the thing pressed harder. Lawrence could taste its fist in his mouth, and it tasted like timber.
He raised his teary gaze to the thing’s face. Shadows still embraced its details, but a creak sounded from within the darkness like a door opening upon a haunted room. It’s smiling, he thought, and closed his eyes again, praying he’d never have to see that grin. He thrashed against the thing’s pressing arm, its shoving and choking and suffocating arm…
Bark, he thought. Its arm looks like bark.
It spoke then, its voice a log dragged across bones. “The trees did more than move. They screamed.” It lowered its face to within inches of Lawrence’s own. It reeked of oak and summer. “Remember your greatest sin, murderer.”
It rose and backed away. Lawrence heard its irregular footsteps retreating, heard the moaning and spitting of his wife across the room. He shoved his fingers into his mouth, digging for loose dirt, spitting and spitting and screaming when nothing but flecks came out.
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER PASSING out, but when he awoke, the stench of vomit dominated any lingering odor of wood or mud. A crusty film of dried puke coated his face, and he wiped the gunk with his shirt, managing only to smear sweat-saturated dirt into the mess.
Brooke moaned from behind him. He sat up, reached for his wife, his fingers just able to brush her outstretched arm, her face fuzzy in the thin moonlight. She gave him a mockery of a smile.
The bravado was gone, all the spunk and grit and attitude he had fallen in love with, gone. Her eyes shook off her smile with disdain and broadcast the truth: she was terrified and lost. Lawrence had never seen this expression in her eyes before, didn’t think defeat had ever been wired into her genes. But even the effort of smiling, her attempt to placate the fear that must be plastered across his own face, spoke of the fight in her bones, the strength of her soul.
He didn’t blame his wife for her fear. He was mortified, beyond the capacity to control his terror. Every cell in his being shrieked for release, begged to awaken from the nightmare. Raw courage in the midst of insane violence, brashness in the face of murderous psychosis, spitting into the grin of your kidnapper while chained to the ground and blinded by his blade, none of those responses to the world’s basest evil held true outside of the clichéd heroes of Hollywood. In the real world, terror bit with monstrous jaws and didn’t let go after a hail of curses and a few clever one-liners. It scoffed at your defiance and giggled at your anger.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too, Lawrence.”
“We’re gonna get out of this.” Her smile returned, even less convincing than the first.
“You were throwing up in your sleep,” she said. “I was afraid you’d choke.”
“I wouldn’t call it sleep. I think I passed out.”
“He said something to you, didn’t he?”
He let her call the hooded beast a “he,” figured to correct her by saying “it” would only add to her anguish. “He told me the trees laughed. And to remember my greatest sin.”