Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

Not in the forest, but on the tree right in front of him. Something was stirring the tree’s upper branches, something more than wind.

When he saw it, he still couldn’t believe it. That was part of the problem. The other part was that he was driving Elena’s car, not his old jalopy. So while he was frantically groping for a way to shut the window, with his eyes glued to the thing detaching itself from the tree, he was groping in all the wrong places.

And the final thing was simply that the beast was fast. Much too fast to be real.

The next thing Matt knew, he was fighting it off at the window.

Matt didn’t know what Elena had shown Bonnie at the picnic. But if this wasn’t a malach, then what the hell was it? Matt had lived around woods his entire life, and he’d never seen any insect remotely like this one before.

Because it was an insect. Its skin looked bark-like, but that was just camouflage. As it banged against the half-raised car window — as he beat it off with both hands — he could hear and feel its chitinous exterior. It was as long as his arm, and it seemed to fly by whipping its tentacles in a circle — which should be impossible, but here it was stuck halfway inside the window.

It was built more like a leech or a squid than like any insect. Its long, snakelike tentacles looked almost like vines, but they were thicker than a finger and had large suckers on them — and inside the suckers was something sharp. Teeth. One of the vines got around his neck, and he could feel the suction and the pain all at once.

The vine had whipped around his throat three or four times, and it was tightening. He had to use one hand to reach up and rip it away. That meant only one hand available to flail at the headless thing — which suddenly showed it had a mouth, if no eyes. Like everything else about the beast, the mouth was radially symmetrical: it was round, with its teeth arranged in a circle. But deep inside that circle, Matt saw to his horror as the bug drew his arm in, was a pair of pincers big enough to cut off a finger.

God — no. He clenched his hand into a fist, desperately trying to batter it from the inside.

The burst of adrenaline he had after seeing that allowed him to pull the whipping vine from around his throat, the suckers coming free last. But now his arm had been swallowed up past the elbow. Matt made himself strike at the insect’s body, hitting it as if it were a shark, which was the other thing it reminded him of.

He had to get his arm out. He found himself blindly prying the bottom of the round mouth open and merely snapping off a chunk of exoskeleton that landed in his lap. Meanwhile the tentacles were still whirling around, thumping against the car, looking for a way in. At some point it was going to realize that all it had to do was fold those thrashing vine-like things and it could squeeze its body through.

Something sharp grazed his knuckles. The pincers! His arm was almost completely engulfed. Even as Matt was focused entirely on how to get out, some part of him wondered: where’s its stomach? This beast isn’t possible.

He had to get his arm free now. He was going to lose his hand, as sure as if he’d put it in the garbage disposal and turned it on.

He’d already undone his seat belt. Now with one violent heave, he threw his body to the right, toward the passenger seat. He could feel the teeth raking his arm as he dragged it past them. He could see the long, bloody furrows it left in his arm. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting his arm out.

At that moment his other hand found the button that controlled the window. He mashed it upward, dragging his wrist and hand out of the bug’s mouth just as the window closed on it.

What he expected was a crackling of chiton and black blood gushing out, maybe eating through the floor of Elena’s new car, like that scuttling thing in Alien.

Instead the bug vaporized. It simply…turned transparent and then turned into tiny particles of light that disappeared even as he stared at them.

He was left with one arm with long bloody scratches on it, swelling sores on his throat, and scraped knuckles on the other hand. But he didn’t waste time counting his injuries. He had to make it out of there; the branches were stirring again and he didn’t want to wait to see whether it was wind.

There was only one way. The ditch.

He put the car in drive and floored it. He headed for the ditch, hoping that it wasn’t too deep, hoping that the tree wouldn’t somehow foul the tires.

There was a sharp plunge that made his teeth clash together, catching his lip between them. And then there was the crunch of leaves and branches under the car, and for a moment all movement stopped, but Matt kept his foot pressed as hard as he could on the accelerator, and suddenly he was free, and being thrown around as the car careened in the ditch. He managed to get control of it and swerved back onto the road just in time to make a sharp left turn where it curved abruptly and the ditch ran out.

He was hyperventilating. He took curves at nearly fifty miles an hour, with half his attention on the Old Wood — until suddenly, blessedly, a solitary red light stared at him like a beacon in the dusk.

The intersection with Mallory. He had to force himself to screech to another rubber-burning stop. A hard right turn and he was sailing away from the woods. He’d have to loop around a dozen neighborhoods to get home, but at least he’d stay clear of any large groves of trees.

It was a big loop, and now that the danger was over, Matt was starting to feel the pain of his furrowed arm. By the time he was pulling the Jaguar up to his house, he was also feeling dizzy. He sat under a streetlight and then let the car coast into the darkness beyond. He didn’t want anyone to see him so rattled.

Should he call the girls now? Warn them not to go out tonight, that the woods were dangerous? But they already knew that. Meredith would never let Elena go to the Old Wood, not now that Elena was human. And Bonnie would kick up a huge noisy fuss if anyone even mentioned going out in the dark — after all, Elena had shown her those things that were out there, hadn’t she?

Malach.An ugly word for a genuinely hideous creature.

What they really needed was for some official people to go out and clear the tree away. But not at night. Nobody else was likely to be using that lonely road tonight, and sending people out there — well, it was like handing them over to the malach on a platter. He would call the police about it first thing tomorrow. They’d get the right people out there to move that thing.

It was dark, and later than he’d imagined. He probably should call the girls, after all. He just wished his head would clear. His scratches itched and burned. He was finding it hard to think. Maybe if he just took a moment to breathe…

He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. And then the dark closed in.

Matt woke, fuzzily, to find himself still behind the steering wheel of Elena’s car. He stumbled into his house, almost forgetting to lock the car, and then fumbling with keys to unlock the back door. The house was dark; his parents were asleep. He made it up to his bedroom and collapsed on the bed without even taking off his shoes.

When he woke again, he was startled to find it was nine A.M. and his mobile phone was ringing in his jeans pocket.

“Mer’dith?”

“We thought you were coming over early this morning.”

“I am, but I’ve got to figure out how first,” Matt said — or rather, croaked. His head felt twice its usual size and his arm at least four times too big. Even so, something in the back of his mind was calculating how to get to the boardinghouse without taking the Old Wood Road at all. Finally a few neurons lit up and showed him.