Crawl by Aaron Redfern (ebook reader computer txt) 📖

The change happens gradually, you will later suspect. Because you are lost in thought with your eyes on the bare, packed dirt of the trail where your feet are soon to fall, you do not notice until it is complete. But there’s a moment when even the dirt is different. As you plunge into damp loam, something nags at the edge of your awareness, and you look up and see. You have been in this stretch of woods, on this branch of the trail, ten or eleven times in the few years since you moved to Mount Redding. You know exactly the way it is supposed to look. There have been times when you’ve even thought of some of the ancient oaks and sycamores as old friends.

You are somewhere else. What should be familiar trail is alien instead.

Mike is tromping along the trail a half dozen steps ahead, which is why he does not see you pause. He was the one who suggested the trip, because he knows you love hiking. But a part of you knew that you would find it difficult being in the woods--your woods--with him. A part of you knew that he would blunder and complain, that camping would cease to be exciting to him the moment he failed to light a fire, that he would hurry through like a storm and scare off all but the bravest of the animals that carry out their lives under the canopy. But you don’t see any sign of animal life now, not even so much as a squirrel. You don’t hear the birds that should be singing somewhere in the trees. There have probably been none since the change happened.

He crashes forward like he has somewhere else to be, as always unconsciously eager to be finished with whatever he’s doing and starting something new. He does this all the time. He pushes ahead, outpacing you even when you try to keep up, probably without meaning to. It’s just the way he is.

You ignore him for the time being and, tapping absently with a finger on one strap of your backpack, look at your surroundings. You have no names for any of these trees. The largest of them are both squatter and smoother than oaks; their leaves are huge, something like the great green fan-blades of the tropics, but with intricately jagged edges. Somehow, those leaves give a sense both of softness and of the softness being an illusion. The green of this forest is more vivid than the green you have come to know.

An eerie, empty calm fills the space where the birds should be singing. The leaves rustle gently together.

You are not worried yet.

The part of you that was once a Girl Scout, that grew up almost as much in a tent as under your parents’ roof, takes over. You are not lost. All you have to do is go back the way you came.

“Hey,” Mike calls from up ahead. “Look at this!” He is thirty yards up the trail at the edge of a clearing that you know you have never seen before. He looks back at you from the window of light that the trees frame where they edge the trail. “What’re you doing way back there?”

You walk to where he is already probing the clearing, kicking his way through thick, calf-high stalks of grass and brushing at branches that hang in from the surrounding forest. There is a thick-bodied plant at the far end of the clearing that you would swear is a cycad, straight out of the dinosaur books you read when you were little even though your parents thought you should be playing with dolls. “This place is pretty cool,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve seen plants like this before.”

“Yeah,” you say. “Listen, Mike, something isn’t right here. This isn’t the trail.”

He grins. It lights up his face, and for a moment you can almost appreciate his obliviousness.

“Sure it is, babe,” he says. You hate it when he calls you that. You’ve asked him to stop, but he doesn’t. “It picks up again on the other side. Didn’t you say you’ve been this way before?”

“We were going the right way,” you say. “But we aren’t anymore. All of this looks wrong.”

“So?” He says. “It’s a trail you haven’t been on before. It’s good to try new things. It can be an adventure. What, are you nervous or something?”

The part of you that used to keep packs of little girls from panicking when one of them knocked down a hornets’ nest with a rock wants to hit him for that. Instead, you start walking back up the trail the way you came. “We must have made a wrong turn somewhere. We should figure out where it happened.” He stands stubbornly at the edge of the clearing for a few moments, but then you can hear his heavy footsteps following you.

Fifty yards along, the loamy path begins to disappear. Tall grass like you found in the clearing has grown in from the sides and choked it. It looks like it has been untouched for a year or more.

(maybe when you first noticed the change it was not yet as complete as you thought maybe you could still have turned back)

Fifty yards farther, the trail ends in an enormous stand of ferns. The central stalks, still furled, stand taller than you can reach with your arm raised over your head.

You step out of the grassy corridor and make your way to the other side of the ferns. You avoid the serrated leaves of the larger trees, but each time your hand brushes aside a too-green bough, each time your foot comes down near a dense tangle of vegetation, the muscles along your back tighten in a wave, as though you are a torn doll being knit back together, the needle punching through your skin and plunging in and in and in again. There is a part of you that already recognizes that your entire world has been overturned and spilled out on the ground and its pieces are rolling away, and that same part also realizes that anything could be living in the undergrowth. Anything at all. But so far, nothing has shown itself.

You reach the other side of the stand of fern and confirm what you already know: there is no path. There has never been a path here at all.

Off in the distant treetops--you know Mike can’t see it, with the stand blocking his view--you catch the hint of movement in the corner of your eye, as if something large and dark is floating between the branches. But it is gone when you look.

You still have not allowed yourself to worry. You manhandle your psyche into compliance. Everything is going to be ok.

Mike is contemplating the ferns. The intelligent mind you know he possesses has been activated, and you can see the calculations running behind his eyes. He is beginning to understand.

“I’m sure this was it,” he says.

“It was,” you say.

He continues to stand and stare for what seems like many seconds, ideas clicking mechanically into place within his skull. His willful good cheer is gone. Then he shakes his head. “No. That isn’t possible. We must have taken the wrong way back.” He looks behind him, studying the way. “Let’s double back to the clearing.”

At the clearing, there is only the path you have taken, running south, and the place where it begins again on the other side, heading north.

“I see,” Mike says. “We must have gotten turned around when we were checking this place out.” He points to the opposite trailhead. “That way is the right way.”

“It’s not the right way,” you say, your voice beginning to rise with the confusion and frustration. “I never completely left the path. And the sun is--”

He shrugs. “Can’t be. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.” Stupid girl.

He reaches up and pats your cheek, his touch tender and possessive. “Let’s go. We’ll head back and find the main trail.”

When did you do anything to earn the right to lead?

you think after him. Who said you could assume command?

But you are too disoriented to argue, and you find yourself beginning to follow him, dragged along three steps behind in the effort to keep up with his long strides. You wish that he would slow down. The trees, their branches stretching out over the path and dangling low with the weight of their heavy leaves, seem to reach for you.

The campsite would only have been a couple of miles farther on from where you first noticed the change. It was one of your favorite waypoints; most people preferred to stay closer to the base camp, and you almost always had it to yourself. You would have reached it by now. But you know you will never reach it on this path. Not even if you walk for the rest of the day and into the night.

The woods continues to change. The cycads and ferns cluster thickly, consuming the entire forest floor; you cannot see more than a dozen feet into the forest except over the tops of them. There are taller, pine-like trees too, towering high overhead.

The sun, which lances golden light through the spaces between the upper trunks, is beginning to sink low.

You struggle to keep down the feeling of dread that has been rising in you since you came to the stand of ferns. It is not strong yet, but it brushes the underside of your awareness, creeps around the edges, begins to trickle in.

If there was a way into this strange place, you tell yourself, there must be a way out. You could even look at it, as Mike says, like an adventure. The woods are quiet and calm, even peaceful. There is a kind of beauty here.

Somewhere off in the trees to the west, there is a sound. It is long and high, and there is a vibrato to it, or perhaps more like a rattle. It is like a note rolled out on a marimba made of bones. Or like a cricket might sound, if you were the size of a mouse.

Two heartbeats later, it is answered by another, identical sound, this time more distant.

Mike stops. Your heart stops too, and there is a stillness inside of you, but your feet keep moving, and you almost run into him.

“What was that?” he says. “It sounded close.”

“No,” you say. “It sounded big.”

You stand together on the path for a few moments. There is an almost imperceptible hum in the air, and then the first call comes again. It is a few yards closer than before.

The sun is