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 sinking, and there is a hint of yellow over the tops of the cycads and ferns. The sky overhead has begun to shade toward a dark gray, the beginnings of twilight.

“What could have made

that?” Mike says. He stands resolutely in the path in front of you, blocking the way, his eyebrows furrowed toward the treetops.

The call comes again, a bit closer still, and in the next ten seconds there are three others from other parts of the woods. Before the last one ends, you hear the original call once more. It is perhaps fifty yards away.

You push Mike forward, and he begins to move. He plunges up the path at his bulldozer’s pace, and you hurry behind him, finally grateful to be walking quickly. The long arms of the ferns brush you as you stride past them, and they cast long shadows across the path as they are struck by the stretched beams of the falling sun.

There are a dozen of the marimba-calls in the space of a minute now, and they have been joined by another sound, more intermittent but louder, a kind of hollow thrumming.

There is an opening ahead, a place where the path and the trees end together and the light is a sweeping mass. There is a wide open space there, a field or a plain. It is not far.

Toward the edge of the woods, the heavy undergrowth thins out almost to nothing, and as you clear the final hundred paces you catch glimpses of the forest floor, covered over in branch litter and the heavy husks of fallen trees and the curls of dropped leaves. Brilliant green vines curl around many of the fallen trunks like veins. As you look at them, they almost seem to pulse.

The calls of unseen living creatures are all around you. They have become a solid force, one that seems to push aside the blanket of the sun’s light. Whatever the things in the trees are,

(they are bugs they are bugs they are bugs)

they have come out in hundreds, perhaps thousands. Their sounds fill the entire forest.

You take a step off the path and reach down to grab hold of a dead branch. “We need wood,” you call ahead to Mike. “As much of it as we can get.”

Your arms are loaded up in less than a minute, and you come with your burden to the place where the forest ends. Grassy fields stretch for miles, dotted occasionally with copses of trees, and, farther off in a few places, the shadowy sprawls of other forests.

You walk a hundred feet out from the edge of the forest, but as you come to the place where you plan to clear the grass for the tent, you stop dead.

There is a ring of stones on the ground before you, and inside, a circle of packed brown dirt. A short distance to one side, the grass is laid down flat, not cut, but padded down evenly in one direction as though prepared for a tent.

There are miles of grass, but you see no one.

Something looms up beside you, and your skin crawls, but you realize before you even turn that it is only Mike. He dumps a big double-armload of wood beside you. “It looks like somebody has already camped here.”

“No one lit a fire, though,” you say, only realizing the fact as you speak the words. “There are no spent embers or signs of burned wood. It’s just...ready.” You drop your load of branches next to his, and toss your backpack toward the area where the grass is packed down. The rolled tent is tied across the top of it.

Right now, you don’t have time to wonder why there is a space laid out for you.

You turn back toward the woods, and just before your eyes settle, a shape launches from the thick canopy of one of the tall trees, sending tremors through the entire upper structure, and descends below the treeline and disappears. Your mind will not allow you to fully interpret what you have seen; it recoils at the prospect of putting definition to the flitting shape. The thing was large and black, and you are left with a sense of the delicate vibration of wings, and of an unknown number of twisted spindles. It might have been a mosquito the size of a golden retriever.

“We need more wood,” you say. You start toward the forest. “Much more.”

“I’ll get it,” Mike says, striding past you. “You can set up the tent.” You cannot read in his face whether he saw the flitting thing; he is keeping his expression carefully locked. But you can tell that he understands as well as you do that a fire must be lit before the sun finishes setting.

The sun nearly touches the horizon. The sky overhead is a dark, dull blue, and the first stars have begun to appear. It is getting more difficult to see what you are doing, more difficult to see anything at all.

By the time he returns, almost borne down by the weight of all the wood he has piled in his arms and balanced under his chin, you have finished assembling the tent. In the last few yards he stumbles, falling hard on one knee and spilling the wood across the ground in front of him. He curses loudly, angrily, and when he rises, his mouth is twisted in disgust.

“I’ll start it burning,” you say.

He looks at you for a moment with a trace of what might be resentment, and then he turns away and walks toward the trees.

You have built many fires in your life. You take a small hand saw and matches every time you go into the woods, because lighting the fire used to always be your favorite part. You snap up the tinder and set it down, lean on a few strips of kindling, set aside a small pile of sticks to carry you through the next few critical minutes. The wood catches easily. It is strangely pliable, even dead, and it smokes heavily, but it burns--and, almost as importantly, it looks as though it might burn long.

Mike returns, lugging an enormous branch along the ground behind him. By the time he tosses it down, the fire is raging like a tiny, furious mountain of light. You stand and turn to the woods, a spark of pride kindling within your chest. You face the darkening treeline defiantly.

In that moment, another sound comes from the forest, low and deep, almost throbbing.

RIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

Your pride vanishes.

You put on a couple of small logs to keep the fire burning for a few more minutes, and then the two of you go back to the woods together for the last load. As you pile branches into your shaking arms, the trees around you seem to seethe with sound. The things are all around, and close. They are over your head, clinging to the canopies and the upper trunks of the trees, but you cannot see them.

The edge of the forest is not far. Through the trees to your left, you see the last thumbnail of sun falling beneath the horizon, leaving a narrowing band of pink and orange glow in the west.

You start walking very quickly. Mike bends to grab one last branch and follows. Behind you and above, as you leave the trees for the blessed openness of the fields, you hear a new sound, a dry rasp, like something long and heavy dragging itself across the bark of a tree.

You clear the last distance at a run, throwing your load down as you race to the dwindling fire and stack on more kindling. The wood you have will have to be enough.

Night falls.

You sit together in the grass near the fire, and an uneasy truce begins between you and the flames and the things in the trees. The heat and the smoke will keep you safe, as long as you keep them alive. There is no question of sleeping in the tent anymore. There is no question even of going to sleep. If you stray too far from the fire, or if it dies, there will be nothing keeping them back anymore.

Before long, the things are all around, not just in the trees. Out in the fields to all sides, you can hear their calls. The bone-marimbas are the quietest and most constant, a backdrop for all the rest. Layered over these are the hollow thrummings, and the high keening that starts loud and fades until it falls silent. You can pick out others--more and more as the night goes on. And every so often, above it all, like a monstrous cicada in an echo tunnel: RIIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

The fire keeps them back, but they are drawn to the light. Almost constantly, you can hear the whirring as they circle the fire’s glow or pass overhead. The light catches them, just barely. They move too quickly for you to interpret their forms, but you catch fleeting glimpses of creatures the size of gallon buckets and kitchen wastebins. They must only be the smallest.

Mike sits close and puts his arm around you, pulling you tight against his chest. As though he is the brave one, and you are the one who fears.

He didn’t own a tent, and he was the one who suggested that your two-person tent would be enough. You knew he would. You’ve been seeing each other for almost a month, not knowing what to call it, and so not calling it anything. He has been gentle but persistent. He has made it very clear how he feels. Tonight would have been the first night in the tent. If there had not been the things in the darkness, you would be in there together, and you do not know what he would do.

The fire needs to be tended, so you shake him off and put more wood on. This process repeats itself many times throughout the night.

The smoke is in your eyes all the time. You are very tired.

Eventually, you suggest to Mike that you take shifts at the fire. He curls toward the flame and sleeps precariously, spasming softly, his hidden terror bubbling to the surface while his subconscious reigns. Like a child.

You find yourself trembling often in spite of the warmth. You are the next closest thing to alone with the night sounds and the things that make them. For a long time, all you can do is pile on logs and listen to their calls. Once, alarmingly close, you hear a tearing noise that you cannot identify.

A part of you wishes that the smoke did not obscure most of the stars, so that you could look up at them. But another part of you is glad that you can’t see what constellations sit in this sky.

You let Mike be for what may be a couple of hours, and then you wake him for his shift. He pokes sullenly at the fire with one of the sticks.

After a short time, without having fallen fully into sleep, you start awake. The fire is low. Mike is on his side, eyes closed and flickering. You rush to the fire and nurse it back to health. A few times during the remainder of the night, you see Mike’s eyes cloudily open, watching you, but he does not say anything. You stay awake with the fire for what is probably many hours more.

Dawn breaks. As the sky lightens to deep blue and the crack of gray appears to the east, the sounds of the multitudes retreat back into the trees. As light creeps across the sky, they fall silent, turning off one by one like lights in a cityscape, until the woods are quiet again except for the sound of the breeze in the leaves.

The weight of exhaustion has long since overtaken thought. You find the strength to lay yourself down in the grass, rather than fall.

Your dreams are terrible, and full of things that move. They loom huge, twist in and out of sight. You cannot make sense of them. They are on you, crawling, their legs twitching against your skin, and there is something bigger, some suffocating weight that presses you down and holds you while they crawl over you.

In a moment of awareness, you realize that Mike is lying pressed against you, his knees pushed up into yours, his arm bearing down on your shoulder and laid across your chest. He is asleep, and you cannot move from under him. His arm imprisons you. You close your eyes and try to forget.

Your sleep is fitful.

When you wake fully, the sun sits high in the sky. Mike is no longer there. You stand and survey the fields in the full light. Wind blows gently, tossing the grass in ripples that carry on for miles. You can see nothing but the grass and the trees. There is no sign of anything that will tell you where you are or where you can go from here. You know only that you have come from the south, and you will not go back that way.

The landscape swells and dips in soft curves, too long and shallow even to be called hills. They are like the contours of flesh, as though the land is a slumbering body laid out. The field gradually descends from the place where you camped, forming a kind of small valley. It is part of the reason you can see so far.

Mike is down there, peering out into the distance. When he sees you standing, he begins to make his way back. As you wait for him, you brush off your backpack and pull it on.

The far side of the tent, the darkward side, has been torn open. Inside, you find the dead body of an insect-like thing. It is black and chitinous, but the part of you that was a Girl Scout knows that this is not a true insect. It has seven legs, for one thing. And its body is in four segments.

(you are not in kansas anymore you are not even on earth)

Its wings are insect-like as well, long and translucent like a mosquito’s but downy like a moth’s.

Mike is standing close to you. “Ugly,” he says. He lowers himself to a crouch and reaches in to take hold of it.

“Don’t,” you say. “The tent is useless now. And we aren’t going to sleep in it again anyway. Just leave it. Please.”

He stands and pulls his water bottle out of the holder on the side of his backpack to take a drink. He shakes it, realizes it is empty, and grins sheepishly.

“We have to get out of this place,” you say.

He points to the northwest, toward the largest of the distant pockets of forest. “That way.”

You stare at him. “Why that way? We should stay away from the woods. That’s where they all live.”

He shrugs and runs a hand through his hair. “It’s as good as any other way. And we won’t go in the woods, just follow along the edge. Call it a hunch, I guess. If there’s another path, we should take it. If there isn’t, we’ll still have a good view of the fields.”

As you leave, you spare one last glance at the firepit that was simply waiting for you last night when you arrived, and you wonder.

You cross the miles quickly on open ground. There is nothing in the fields but you. Copses of squat trees and ferns drift by, but you don’t get too close to them.

The world is beautiful and very, very green. No sign of a road, no distant roar of passing cars, no airplanes crisscrossing high overhead, no tiny white Lego-blocks of towns in the far valleys. The terror of the previous night begins to recede from your mind, as the sharp shock of trauma always appears to do at first, threatening to be forgotten. There is a part of you that is trying very carefully to stow the memories of the fear away where they will never be found, like a child pushing the pieces of a broken vase underneath the couch, and there is another part that understands you must not forget the dangers. There are many parts inside of you, you are coming to realize. It seems sometimes that the pieces of you are held together so tenuously, and that a bat swung in the wrong direction could smash through you and send the whole mess tumbling down.

You cannot stay in this place, wherever it is. Not for long. You will lose your mind after a few more nights like the last one.

By mid-afternoon, you are tracing the edge of the northwestern forest from a hundred feet out. There are some of the high, pine-like trees here, but mostly the forest is low and dense. Thick-bodied trunks are hugged by masses of vines, and fat tendrils drape between them. The cycads are thick here, and the ferns are taller and farther between. There are huge, dome-shaped plants on which enormous flowers grow in shades of pink and orange.

The bugs are in there somewhere. You cannot see them moving, but you know. When it gets dark, they will come.

Every so often, you find your eyes turning to the position of the sun, taking measure of the color of the sky. Mid-afternoon creeps on to late afternoon as the trees float by on your left in an endless, marching mass.

You find things to say to each other. You talk about nothing to pass the time while you walk. It is not so bad.

You do not find a path, and part of you is glad, because you do not want to be caught on one when night falls. But late in the afternoon, after the sun drops below the tallest of the trees, you come to where an arm of the forest reaches out ahead of you. And as you make your way around it and the trees clear from your view, you see two things almost at the same time that make you stop in your tracks.

The first is a large pool of water nestled into the forest’s edge, a pond or a natural spring, maybe two hundred feet wide. The water looks almost perfectly clear, and deep, so that the light-colored silt at the bottom makes it appear a brilliant, pure blue that deepens toward the center until it becomes a great empty darkness at the bottom. Behind it and around the sides, the plants grow thickly and well, and they trail down into the shallows, drinking in the water. But the front of the pool is open and inviting.

The second is a house.

For a moment, you can do nothing but stare. It is two stories tall but is small and cozy. The roof is painted aluminum, the sides built from rough stone along the bottom and wooden planks the rest of the way up. There are bay windows on every side.

“That’s amazing,” Mike says.

You shake your head and let out a nervous breath of laughter.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s fill up our water first. There probably isn’t any plumbing in there, and we need more.”

He is right. He has been walking all day without water, and even though you paced yourself for a two-day trip, your second and last bottle is almost empty.

You make your way down together. A few yards from the water’s edge, you stop to take in the scene again, feeling strangely giddy. The water is serene. It feels like something this beautiful and safe cannot possibly be happening. But then, nothing else since you found yourself on the wrong trail yesterday was possible either. The creatures whose terrible singing dominated the past night cannot exist. The pond and the cabin are the things that are actually possible, that are mundane. How could your sense of reality have turned so far upside down?

Mike is laughing at something, maybe at everything, as he kneels down to fill the bottle. And as he lowers it toward the surface of the water, you catch motion in the darkness at the bottom of the pool.

He submerges the mouth of the bottle. Air is expelled and water rushes in with a strangled swallowing sound. The deep darkness moves again, and this time you are certain that it was not a trick of the light, that something is down there. It is not that something moved within the darkness. The entire mass of darkness moved.

“Mike...” You managed to choke out.

He looks up. “Yeah?” Bubbles of air are rising from the bottle as the water pours into it. Glugglugglugglug.

You have an uncle who used to work in a little local brewery. The first step to brewing a beer, he says, was mashing, or mixing the malted barley and other grains in hot water to break the enzymes down into sugars. The water was heated in a couple of big metal tanks called mash tuns. One day, so goes the story that he tells over and over again at family gatherings to whoever will listen, as the water slowly heated to its peak at temperatures no living creature could tolerate, a monster crawled out of the tank. Uncle Lars nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of the gargantuan insect, almost four inches long, that pulled itself up out of the water like it was rising from Hell, blade-like forelegs held out ahead of it like a bear-trap ready to spring.

One of the other men at the brewery called it a toebiter. An internet search years later showed that it was Lethocerus americanus,

a “giant water bug.” The twelve-year-old Girl Scout you were then marveled at the pictures she found.

It was unbelievable,

Uncle Lars says every time. It was the biggest goddamned bug I ever saw.

You are frozen in place. Mike stares at you, head cocked slightly to the side, as the bubbles of air rise from the water bottle.

The darkness is shifting, growing, slowly rising to the surface. A round swath of darker blue in the blue of the water, unfathomably large.

His eyes hold yours for what feels like a long, long time, as though there is a thread between you that ties you together. He watches you as you try to find your voice. Then, swiftly but without seeming to be alarmed, he turns his head. He is looking in the direction of the pool, but up, into the tops of the trees. His eyes dart back and forth.

The water, previously so still, begins to lap at the silty shore as the thing rises. There is a churning on the surface of the water directly over it, yards and yards wide, as the water is displaced by the movement of its submerged body.

The bubbles cease to rise from the bottle as it finally fills to the top. Mike stands and twirls the cap back onto it, and then walks away from the edge of the pool.

The darkness hangs for a moment, then descends, becomes indistinct, and disappears into the blue of the deep water as it falls still. The entire episode cannot have lasted longer than seven or eight seconds.

“There isn’t anything there,” Mike says. “You must have imagined it.” Not it must be gone now,

but it was never there.

He gives you a patient look as he passes you heading toward the cabin. “It’s fine.”

The sense of safety you felt only moments before is gone. You feel like a gazelle on the banks of the Nile, overtaken by a crocodile without warning. Its teeth rip through your neck and you are being dragged down. If you ever find a way out of this place,

(you will never ever get out you will be here forever)

you are not sure that you will ever be able to wade into a pond or a lake again for the rest of your life.

As you turn back toward Mike, who is walking toward the cabin, your back feels exposed to the forest behind you. You brace yourself for the sound of the first high vibrato call, the fan of wings and the sudden lance of pain as their legs dig into you. But not yet. Except for the leviathan in the water, they are still asleep.

You put your feet in motion, following where Mike has already stepped. Deep inside, you know that going into the strange house is a bad idea. But there are no good ideas left in all the world.

And night is coming.

Mike holds the door open for you and gestures you in with a small flourish. You step into a tiny foyer, barely large enough to hold you both, but strangely inviting. A staircase with a dark wooden bannister leads up to the second story, and an entryway opens to another room on your left. In the hallway running between, two empty wooden picture frames hang on the walls. The floor is hardwood, just marked enough to feel fashionably well-worn, and you realize you are standing on a wool mat. The mat is decorated in a pattern reminiscent of dragonflies.

Mike steps in. He shuts the door behind him with a heavy click. A few seconds later, you hear the bolt tap into place.

“There,” he says. “Nothing can get in. We should be safe here for the night.”

“As long as that’s the only way in,” you say.

He nods. “Let’s take a look around.”

The room to the left is a living area. The south face of it, the side from which you entered the house, is taken up by the big bay window. A leather sofa sits below the sill, and a purple chenille loveseat faces opposite. There is a wooden stand in one corner where a television might be positioned, but nothing is on it. The far wall has a fireplace, but it too is empty. Except for a brass chandelier overhead, there is nothing else in the room.

Mike flicks the light switch, and the chandelier springs to life. “That’s good,” he says. He makes his way over to the window. “Hey, you want to pop one open? Get a breeze going through here during the night?” He gives you a cocky grin.

You laugh in spite of yourself. It is short and nervous, but it is laughter. It is the first time in two days you have laughed like you meant it.

He motions to the fireplace. “Seriously, we could get a fire going though. I bet the chimney works. We’d just need the wood.”

“I’m not going out there until morning,” you say. “Not for anything.”

The sky is dim with its first gloamings, and the sun, which you can just see out the side of the bay window, is deepening to orange over the horizon. As you stand there looking out the window, you hear the first of the bone-marimbas give out its rattling call. You wonder if the dead thing you found in your tent this morning was one of the ones that made that sound.

There is one more thing. A brass-knobbed door near the far end of the north wall. It is small, and you think that it must be a closet of some sort. You feel drawn to it for some reason.

You find yourself staring down a flight of narrow stairs. You can only see about halfway down before the stairway becomes obscured by darkness. Not a closet at all, but a basement. You find a switch inside and flip it, and a single flourescent bulb lights the rest of the stairs. At the bottom, where the steps end, there is more darkness.

You leave the matter alone. You don't want to go down there. There is probably nothing down there

(you don’t know that there could be anything)

anyway. You close the door.

The bone-marimba calls again, and is joined by two others. The forest is waking up.

Back in the foyer, you follow the hallway to a kitchen. You beckon for light, and five recessed fixtures in the ceiling comply. The countertops are marble, the deep pan of the sink stainless steel. tiny corner shelves are installed over either side of the kitchen to hold knick-knacks, but there is nothing on them. Over the counter is a long spread of cabinets, and there is an island in the center of the kitchen with a butcher’s block resting on top of it. Not that you have anything to chop. You are running low on food, a problem you will have to deal with another day. There is a refrigerator, but it is empty, and it isn’t running. A quick check reveals nothing in the cabinets either. But off to the side there is a quaint mohogany fold-out dining table with chairs for two.

Mike tries the faucet. No water comes.

“I guess you can’t have it all,” he says. You nod absently, and he looks pleased.

From outside, two of the hollow thrummers also respond, almost in unison. Their sound joins the sounds of the bone-marimbas.

You go back to the living room window, where you can still see some light in the west. Twilight is coming on fast. The sky overhead is becoming a dark blue, like the bottom of the pool. The sun is almost under, and the band of light over it is not wide. If there were clouds, they would be edged in a pink like bloody milk, but there are none. You realize you have seen no clouds in the last two days.

The forest is fully alive with sound.

You should be safe in here. There should be nothing to be afraid of tonight. You are inside, and they are outside. They cannot open doors. But you do not feel safe.

RIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

They are out there, and you can sense that they will be drawn to the light, and they will want to get in.

(there is nothing you can do bugs always find a way in)

(what if they break the glass)

Outside, the darkness is almost complete. The sun is gone, eaten by the earth, and the golden light on the horizon is a knife’s edge haloed in dying blue.

You reach up to pull the curtains across the big bay window, and then you realize there are no curtains.

Something flutters inside of you, trembling in dreadful anticipation. Moments later, a bug the size of a tom cat thumps

against the window. You can hear the sound very clearly. The two panes of glass it hits both quiver very slightly, but they hold steady. It is mothlike, with fan-shaped feathery wings, and its belly is a light gray. On the undersides of its wings are two huge circles like eyes, and they--

A second creature smacks into the window. It is long and narrow, with ten legs and a many-thorned mandible that opens and closes at you on the other side of the glass. Its three big black eyes stare at you.

Within a minute there are three more, crowding most of what is left of the window, and you can see more shapes flitting behind them, jittering back and forth through the air.

The last of the twilight is gone. Night has arrived.

You cannot tear your eyes away from the window. One of the creatures takes off and is instantly replaced by another, like the first mothlike creature but bigger. They crawl across the surface of the glass, their legs clicking with each step they take, and the sound is just audible amidst the chorus of hellish singing from farther outside.

The sounds go on and on. They are stacked in layers, loud and louder and loudest. The bone-marimbas form the background, a wall of high vibrato, a thousand thousand points that rise and fall chaotically. The other sounds arc over them randomly, or rumble beneath. There are so many sounds. You cannot tell whether some of them are the same. They are everywhere, all around the house, in the forest and the fields and over the roof and on the other side of the walls.

chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. Grummm. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. EEEEEEE-eeeeeeeeeee. Grummm. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. chiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrr. RIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

You back away until you stumble against the loveseat and fall seated into it. You are still staring at the window, because

(there are millions and millions of bugs and they are going to get)

you cannot help yourself.

The things are moving all across it, trying to get inside to the light. They crawl across the face of the glass. The ones on the window flit off constantly, and new ones instantly come to fill the empty spaces. The window is mobbed with their pale undersides, tangled over with their spindly legs. For several minutes, a bullet-shaped body the size of a wolverine drags itself diagonally along the length of the window.

You briefly entertain the idea of turning out the light, but you do not want to be in this strange house in the dark.

Mike is leaning in the doorway between the living room and the foyer, watching you more than the bugs. After a time, he walks over and sits on the arm of the loveseat, near you. He begins to run his fingers through your hair.

You do not want to be here. You do not understand why you are here. You don’t understand what is happening at all.

Mike continues to stroke your hair. One of the strokes is rough enough to pull your head to the side slightly, but the others are gentler.

A huge moth thing is battering at the other creatures on the window, trying to push its way into the space.

There is a sunken feeling inside of you that goes from your abdomen to your chest. It has been rising up in you for a long time. The house is wrong. The house cannot be here. A part of you is coming to a dawning realization--not the part that used to be a Girl Scout, but a part that you tried to bury. It is not buried anymore; it is free, and it is careening up to the surface of your mind. It knows that what you have been through so far was only a prelude, that something is beginning, something big and unimaginably wrong.

Somewhere outside, there is a sound far bigger than anything you have heard yet. It emerges from the other sounds, grows louder and louder. It is like a huge, chopping hum. It is somewhere south of you, somewhere out the window, near the trees. You cannot imagine anything living that would make a sound like that. It is moving; it starts over the forest, high in the air, and then it comes down and down until it reaches the ground. Then it stops. A piece of the night has fallen silent around where you heard it.

Mike’s hand has stopped. “Was that a helicopter?”

“No,” you say. “No. That isn’t possible.”

“What if it is?” He says. “There could be people out there.” He starts toward the door.

“Don’t!” You hiss at him. “Are you crazy?”

He hesitates, and then he cocks his ear to listen for more sound. After a moment, he seems to reach a decision. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “There’s nobody out there.”

The full symphony has resumed. You try to tell yourself that you both imagined a noise that sounded like a helicopter, but you are not convinced. The lesser creatures, the ones the size of egg baskets and table lamps and lounge pillows, peer in at you, jostling like the crowd at a brawl, creeping relentlessly over the glass.

“I’m going to have a look upstairs,” Mike says. He doesn’t wait for you to respond. You hear his steps track across the foyer and thump up the stairs and fade away.

They are pushing to get at you. Sitting alone on the loveseat, you remember another time, the third-closest you have ever come to being really hurt, to suffering violence. You were at a party, and there was a boy. You don’t even remember what he looked like. You flirted a little, because your friends always told you you were too shy, and because he was charming. You ran into him many times as the night went on--in the room where the bodies were dancing, in the kitchen where they filled their cups, on the stairs. You did not take any of the drink he gave you--there was a part of you that knew not to drink it--and instead you found an excuse to be away from him and you poured it down the sink.

You are back at that party; you remember it like it is now. Later, when he sees you again, he comes straight for you, his swagger deceptively soft, his hands in his pockets, he is coming in close and looming half a foot taller than you. And even though you did not take the drink, you see the way he looks at you, and know that the dancing bodies are not noticing you at all. And you think, This is happening to me.

But someone jostles him hard, and he becomes distracted for a moment. You shove through the bodies and run to your car, and you are gone.

The bugs are outside, separated from you only by panes of glass. Somehow, you know that you cannot stop them from reaching you. You feel as though you are only waiting for them to come.

Once, one of your friends convinced you to go rock climbing on a massive cliff wall in the mountains not far from where you used to live. You hate heights. You have never been able to go far even on climbing walls, because no matter how many times they tell you it is safe, you do not truly believe in the protection of the rope. But somehow, she convinced you to come. She said that it would help you overcome your fear.

A third of the way up the face, two hundred feet off the ground, you realize that you can go no farther. There is no hold above you, and none even to the sides. Your fingers cannot grip the rock ahead of you. And then, looking down--dizzied, your vision wobbling in spirals--you realize that you cannot reach down either. If you lower yourself far enough to catch the foothold that you pushed up from, your fingers will lose the rocks and slide away.

You hang there for two long minutes, your muscles screaming, your fingers beginning to tremble, unable to move in any direction, knowing that you cannot hold yourself up much longer. You are going to fall, the fear is pounding through you like blood pulsing out of a severed carotid artery, you are going to die and waiting to die is the worst thing you have ever felt, and suddenly your fingers slip a fraction of an inch more and you just let them go.

Twenty feet down, the rope catches you and you slam into the rocks. You hang there for what feels like a long time, calling back to your friend as she asks if you are all right, and then when you find the strength to move you begin to take yourself slowly back down the rock wall. You spend fifteen minutes in the car while she climbs the rest of the way down, hugging your knees and shaking. You have discovered something. You have learned that the fear of dying is stronger than the desire not to die.

A part of you wants to run to the door and let them in. But not yet. There is still a part of you that clings to hope, that thinks maybe you will make it out of this after all.

“There’s a bed upstairs,” Mike says from the steps. “Come on.”

You look up at him. He is halfway down the staircase with the light directly over his head. Shadows form dark half-ovals around his eyes.

“I don’t want to go to bed,” you say. “I think I’m going to stay down here.”

His eyebrows furrow for an instant, but then he relaxes them. He says your name almost gently. And then: “You’re only hurting yourself staying down here. We can be safe up there. We can forget about this.”

He is coming down the stairs.

“Please just leave me alone,” you tell him.

“Why? Are you afraid?” He comes down off the last step and moves around the bottom of the handrail. “They aren’t going to get in. It’s going to be fine.”

He is in the entryway.

“You can’t make me go with you, Mike,” you say.

“No?” he says. He is smiling, like everything is a game. “Maybe I can convince you.” He is halfway across the room, and he reaches out to take your arm.

There is a sound from the basement, loud enough to be heard over the symphony of the creatures outside.

SliiiiiiideTapTapTapTapTap.

In the silence that follows between you and Mike, staring at each other in the fading remnants of a frozen moment, it comes again. Heavy tappings, many of them one after another, as though something with far too many legs, each carrying nearly as much weight as a man’s, is crawling over a hardwood floor.

You are out of the loveseat and across the room before you even understand why, and you are standing there with the door thrown open, looking down the stairs into the darkness at the bottom. There is a light down there now, very dim, cast from somewhere out of sight, and it flickers and sways like a lantern held by someone walking down a dark road.

You are going down, one step at a time, and Mike, his steps hesitant, is following not far behind. You are going down, and more of the basement is coming into view with every step. You have had enough. You cannot let the creature crawl in the basement unseen and watch the ones outside batter at the windows and be trapped between them. Something terrible is down there, and you have to know what it is. There is nothing else left for you to do but face it.

It is long-bodied and low to the ground; its legs, thick and hard as the posts of a chain-link fence, are held out to the sides as it moves along the far wall. How many legs? Ten? Twelve? Its head is a smooth, eyeless roundness that seems fused to its segmented body; underneath it, you can see objects in shadow, some convolution that must be its mouth. Near the back, its body curves up into a kind of tail, and on the end of it is a hollow opening that glows inside. It emits a beam of light, and the tail is casting around, tossing the beam back and forth in front of the creature as it moves, searching along the ground.

You stand there in horror and awe. And then, as you take the final step off of the stairs and onto the hardwood floor, a beam creaks.

The creature turns, and the beam of light swivels slowly until it rests on you. The head looks up at you, and even though it has no eyes, you know it can see you.

It begins to move. It is frighteningly fast. It covers three yards in the full second it takes you to react.

(YOU ARE GOING TO DIE IT IS GOING TO RIP)

“Go!” You shout, and you are not even sure if it comes out as a word. You shove Mike ahead of you and run after him. He is stumbling up the steps, and you are pushing after him. The thing impacts something somewhere behind you, and the tapping of its many legs is erratic for a brief moment but does not stop.

The door is open and you are in the living room and you are running past the loveseat and through the entryway and it is behind you it is shoving its way through the narrow door it is coming.

You take hold of the knob, throwing your weight against the door as you turn and shove into it with all your weight.

The door is locked. You remember now.

It is coming across the room, its legs clicking. The beam of light is trained on you and your own shadow is cast against the door, leering back at you.

You throw back the bolt, you force your whole body against the wood, and the door is open. A mass of winged bodies hits you as the creatures outside pour in, hurtling toward the light, careening off of you, their wings beating against you, and the beam of light is darting all around, confused.

You are racing through the grass, across the pitifully small patch of ground where the light is cast on the grass from inside of the house, and then you are in the darkness, and every voice inside your head is screaming in unison.

Mike shouts your name from somewhere behind. You can just hear his steps through the enormity of all the other sound, crashing through the grass. He is running too, trying to find you, but you do not stop.

Things rush through the air past your head. Something hits your chest and bounces off, and for a brief, horrible instant there are wings against your lips and inside your mouth, but then it is gone and you keep running, running, running.

He calls your name again, his voice carrying over the bone-marimbas and the thrums and the high keening wails. And then, ahead of you, something enormous springs into motion. It is close, and suddenly all you can hear is a chopping roar, like the blades of a helicopter, passing over your head so close that you think you could almost reach out and touch it. A rush of air strikes you, so powerful that it almost throws you off your feet. And then it is past you, shooting toward the house.

You do not stop running. Something inside you has broken apart, and all the screaming voices are pounding against the inside of your head, trying to break free as though you are too slow and without you they can outrun everything that is happening.

Behind you, where you last heard Mike’s voice, the enormous thing comes crashing down. There is a tearing of earth, a sound almost as huge as its wingbeats, as all of its legs punch into the ground at once, tearing up clods of dirt and grass as it skids to a halt. Mike’s voice begins to make another sound, high and wordless, but then you hear a monstrous tearing. And then nothing more, or else the rest is lost in the other sounds of the night.

You are racing over the grass. You know that they are everywhere and you will never get away from them, but something keeps you in motion, as though your feet will take off from the ground and you will fly up into the stars. Something hits you again, and you can feel its legs digging into your shoulder. You grab hold of its body, which writhes and wriggles against you, and you tear it free and hurl it away with all your strength.

You are in utter darkness, surrounded by sound, the air blowing against you and around you, and you are racing forward--

Your entire body siezes up in shock as something icy cold wraps around your lower legs. You let out a strangled sob as you realize that you are in the water, that you have driven headlong into a great, deep pool of water. Your momentum carries you a few steps farther, and you are up to your thighs in it.

A part of you, very small and muffled, pleads with you to turn back, but you know that it is already too late. You can feel the water sloshing lightly around your legs, then becoming a wash and then a surge as it is displaced by the impossibly huge body rising up from the deep. Instead, you take another step forward as the biggest goddamned bug in the universe pushes up through the surface of the pool with a cataclysmic upheaval of water, and with a cry of confusion and despair, you throw out your arms to meet it as though in an embrace.

Impressum

Texte: Aaron Redfern
Bildmaterialien: Pixel Art by Aaron Redfern
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 19.11.2012

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