A. Colucci - Seeders

“I am truly sorry. You deserve better.”

She smiled at him, still feeling the kiss on her lips. “You never married?”

Jules released a long sigh. “My work has always been my life, to the point of ignoring everything else. Of course I’ve never been good with intimate relationships, terrible with commitment.” He hesitated. “I had a difficult childhood too. My mother suffered from schizophrenia. When I was six years old, she tried to kill me.”

“How awful.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

Isabelle couldn’t think of anything to say and turned toward the window. She gasped a small breath. Sean was walking down the trail toward the woods, dragging a walking stick.

“I should call him back inside.” She took a step toward the door.

“No, don’t,” Jules said. “It’s good for a boy to explore on his own.”

“He’s not safe wandering around by himself.”

“How do you know? You don’t give him much freedom, do you?”

It was true; she was barely a child of five or six when she started running around the island, and she never got hurt. Just a few cuts and scrapes. But Sean was different, and a man had just been murdered. “What if—someone’s out there?”

He raised a brow. “I can assure you we’re quite alone.”

She bit her lip, nodding. “So you believe my father killed Hodges.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the most logical conclusion.”

Her shoulders dropped. It was only morning and already Isabelle was exhausted. Her mind spun in so many directions. Her suicidal father might have been a murderer. She was having romantic feelings for another man. Jules’s mother tried to kill him. Sean was walking around the woods alone. She didn’t even want to think about telepathic plants.

“Excuse me. I’ve got to see about breakfast.” She turned to the window, where Sean had already disappeared into the woods, and she rubbed her hands nervously. Jules was once again absorbed in his work, peering into the microscope.

She left without another word.

Sean trudged through the woods, dragging his stick in the dirt and taking small bites from a biscuit. He vaguely remembered getting lost on the trail yesterday, and the horrible smell of the body Luke found, but he wasn’t scared. There was something comforting and familiar about the woods and he felt an urge to be surrounded by nature.

The air was cold and quiet, except for the soft crunch of dried leaves underfoot. His breath came out in little puffs of vapor that he stabbed with his finger. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve, stopping to look back at the trail. For some reason, he felt he wasn’t alone. The idea that his mother might be following was irritating and he scrutinized the gaps between the trees.

Sean froze. He dropped the walking stick.

There was a doll head hanging from a branch not far from where he stood, suspended by a length of frizzy blond hair. A child’s face, but old looking, and her half-closed eyes were more sinister than sleepy.

Sean was scared to move. He tried to turn away, and that’s when he saw another head, hanging from a thin, white rope. The paint on the right side of the face had peeled off in patches, exposing shapes of brown clay beneath, so it looked like a puzzle with missing pieces. On the other side, half of the doll’s skull was gone. She hung lopsided; one glass eye staring up, the other fixed on the ground.

Sean blinked hard, hoping there were no more heads, but there were several more on other trees, dangling like fruit. The painted face of a clown with his mouth open in a maniacal laugh, staring from the corners of his eyes in an expression of utter madness. Another had no eyes at all and hung like a black ball of soot, its features hardly distinguishable, as if it had been thrown into a campfire. Staring down at Sean, and close enough to touch, was a face that looked remarkably lifelike. So realistic that for a moment he thought she was breathing through her nostrils, her pink mouth caught in a sudden smile.

Then her lips seemed to part ever so slightly.

Sean fell back hard and got tangled in a bush. He struggled to recover and scanned the trees, spotting dozens of doll faces, maybe hundreds. His heart began beating like a piston.

A breeze picked up, making the heads sway. Gently at first, and then the wind gusted and some of the heads clanked together, filling the air with a soft clattering sound. Sean turned to run, but quickly stopped in terror. Thousands of doll heads hung from every tree like macabre Christmas ornaments. They swung in the wind, knocking together, staring with dead expressions, missing eyes and fissured cheeks.

Sean scrambled for the path, but it was gone. The woods became darker and there was nothing but bushes and doll-infested trees all around him. As he took off, twigs and branches caught on his jacket and he hacked his way free, then he slipped on wet leaves down an embankment, scraping his palms.

He sat in the dirt, out of breath and inspecting his stinging hands.

The clattering sound was gone and the wind had died. He looked up at the trees.

No doll heads. That was good.

Sean shifted his attention back to his hands. There were thin lines of blood that he licked with the tip of his tongue.

A voice echoed, like a child falling down a well.

Sean—

He whipped his head around, but he was alone. A chill ran down his neck as he suddenly remembered being lost in the woods the day before, and the voices in his head.

Leggo—

Sean hastily got to his feet, but wooziness pulled him back on his knees like a burst of gravity and the world around him began to spin. It felt as though weights were tied to his back and he got on all fours until the feeling passed. He sat up on his knees and noticed right in front of him a thick vine wrapped around the trunk of an old maple tree.

The vine moved. Slightly at first, and then it slowly twisted. Sean moaned in fright as it tightened around the tree’s girth and slithered across the bark, coiling like a serpent. He could hear a sound like cracking bones as it uncoiled, touched the ground, and crept straight toward him. That’s when Sean noticed that all the trees were looped with heavy vines spiraling down their trunks. He crawled backward.

All at once, the ground burst like a grenade underfoot, and he turned around to see the roots of a tree blasting out of the soil. Above his ankle, a long root swayed back and forth, like a cobra ready to strike.

Sean rolled sideways and leapt to his feet, wanting to move quicker and cursing his sluggish muscles. He awkwardly sprinted in jags over roots and rolled over a clump of thorn bushes, where he landed in a clearing and faced a sea of crackling, undulating vines in every direction. Roots exploded to the surface in a spray of soil and leaves.

He headed toward the only tree not plagued with slithering creepers—a knobby old cedar, petrified to a dull gray. Without thinking, Sean heaved himself onto the lowest branch. It felt dry and brittle, but he kept climbing the thick limbs. They were mostly broken and ragged on the ends, hardened from the elements, but he found enough footing to climb ten feet.

Sean—

He looked down at the snake pit below where sidewinders clambered toward him and locked around the base of the tree, staring up at him.

Leggo—

The branch beneath his body twisted like an arm, trying to shake him loose. He heard the cracking of wood and tensed, straining to hang on.

Then there was a loud snap and the limb shattered like glass.

Sean toppled headfirst through the air and his skull hit the ground with a thud.

THE BEACH WAS WARM, the sky pale blue.