James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

“Yeah.”

“Good. I think your chest would look good with a checkmark.” Pestilence slashed a checkmark-shaped line on Christopher’s chest. This one cut deeper than the others and he grimaced.

“What the overwhelming majority of you humans don’t realize is that all of the vastness around you is just part of one dimension. Let’s call it Dimension #1. Meanwhile, in another plane of existence, there’s Dimension #2. This dimension isn’t quite as nice as yours. Most of the denizens aren’t very polite at all. It’s also much smaller than your dimension and a lot more crowded. Still with me?”

Christopher nodded.

“Good. How about a smiley face next?” Pestilence slashed a large smiley face into Christopher’s chest.

Christopher spat blood into his face.

“Okay, now you’re taking the macho thing too far,” said Pestilence. The demon grabbed Christopher’s leg and flung him across the ice, much harder this time. Christopher struck the opposite wall with such force that his vision went black.

“Stay with me… stay with me…” said Pestilence, shaking him. “You fall asleep, the skin-flaying begins. You won’t like the skin-flaying.”

Christopher looked up at the demon and said something, but he wasn’t sure what.

“Anyway, I’m a powerful guy, but the kind of project I wanted to accomplish required a lot of resources. And by resources, I mean sacrifices. Those sacrifices just piled up, believe me. Body parts everywhere. But it was worth it, because I then was able to push Dimension #2, mine, into Dimension #1, yours. That’s where the forest came from. Never knew that, did you?”

Christopher forced his mind and vision to focus. “So you did all this just to give tours?”

Pestilence laughed. “No, no, no. I found a human and he struck a deal with the devil. Or a deal with a demon. Whatever. The people running your little vacation may think that they’re just in the business of giving tours, but their real boss has much more nefarious intentions. It took a while to set the whole thing up, but hey, I’m a patient demon. But believe you me, Chris, it won’t be long before your whole precious dimension turns into our own personal tourist buffet.”

Pestilence licked his lips. “In fact, why don’t we get started with that little sacrifice I mentioned earlier, huh?”

“Did you ever lose anyone close to you, Lee?” Mindy’s voice was laced with sorrow, but as much as he longed to comfort her, he didn’t move forward. It would be inappropriate, all things considered.

“Oh yes.” He looked past her for a moment and stared out at the well-kept lawn a story below and the bright stars that shone down from above them. He felt almost suave in his tuxedo, a rental, and she looked stunning in the strapless black affair she was wearing. Thirty other people milled around in small groups on the marble balcony, moving with the casual pace of folks just having a good time. Not far away from her, Barbara was looking his way, almost begging for his attention.

“I lost my wife, Angela, to cancer almost fifteen years ago. I lost my son, Jeff, to Operation Desert Storm.” He sighed and looked back at Mindy. She shook her head in sympathy, the loss of her own son still fresh in her eyes, even six months after everything that had happened on that damned forest tour.

“How did you ever cope?” Her voice faltered and almost broke, but she held herself together.

“It wasn’t easy, of course. I’d been with Angela for close to thirty years. I woke up with her every day and went to bed with her every night.” He felt the sting of tears start at his eyes, but did nothing to stop them. “I spent every minute I could with her, because she made my world a brighter place. Even when she was dying, when the chemotherapy failed to stop the cancer and I knew she was in agony, she made my world better.”

Barbara nodded from off to the side and moved closer. Tina wasn’t far behind her. Tina’s losses were just as fresh as Mindy’s and both of them looked at him as if he could somehow offer them the wisdom to survive losing a loved one. There was no wisdom to offer, of course. Condolences, yes, but he’d learned nothing of how to grieve painlessly. He still suffered from the losses every day.

“You’re a very brave man, Lee. You’ve been through so much.” The redhead, Jean, Tommy’s aunt, was the one who spoke now, moving in on the other side of Mindy. Four beautiful women, dressed to the nines, and all of them with him at the remembrance of the fateful events that occurred half a year earlier. It was also the debut of his account of the affair. The publishers had pushed hard to get the book ready as quickly as possible, and Lee had delivered. He knew how to write a fast book, and in this case the story was easy to research. He’d lived it, after all.

“What will you do now, Lee?” It was Mindy who spoke again. Or at least he thought it was. It could have been Barbara, or even Jean. They all sounded a lot alike, really.

He frowned at that. No, they didn’t sound that much alike. Not when you got down to it. Jean had a California non-accent, and Barbara sounded like she was from Arizona. And Mindy? Mindy was pure southeast, one of the areas where other accents had merged and diluted the gentrified southern accent, but definitely from that area. They didn’t sound much alike at all, at least they hadn’t before tonight.

Mindy put a hand on his arm and smiled up at him. She was a beautiful woman, no two ways about it. She opened her mouth to say something… and then screamed instead. Part of her face exploded away from her skull, leaving a cavernous hole where her left eye had been.

The women in front of him shimmered and the world around the balcony where he stood celebrating his literary victory grew blurry.

Lee shook his head again and looked at Mindy. She was gone. He could still feel her hand on his arm, but she was gone. He looked at his arm and saw the wriggling mass of serpentine fingers that gripped his shirt and sank into his flesh. The pain hit a second later.

“Ow! Damnation!” His voice was a dry croak, and his ears were ringing.

“Get away from him!” Mindy was back, only this time she was covered in sweat and dirt and her clothes were disheveled. She’d never looked lovelier.

Without a legitimate weapon to use for attack, she’d resorted to swinging a metal hole punch she’d found somewhere inside the office up one flight of stairs. Not far away from her, Barbara was aiming her now-empty pistol at the ruptured cowl of the Proof Demon, which still held onto his arm with its wicked talons.

Lee yanked his arm back and lost a generous portion of skin along with his shirtsleeve. The sting from where the sharpened nails had dug in was like a slap in the face and helped knock the cobwebs out of his head.

Mindy swung with her makeshift weapon and struck the mostly undamaged side of the cowl covering the demon’s face. What passed for blood spilled out of the ruin on the opposite side of the monster’s head and it stepped back, hissing. Several shapes moved under the hood, and the entire form under the draped cloth shivered violently.

Mindy moved in to swing again but the creature was too fast, slipping away from where it had been a second before and rearing up in front of Lee with all the speed and grace of a cobra.

“ We… will… meet… again… Lee …”

Lee didn’t need that. The Proof Demon’s voice was creepy enough without adding “Lee” to the end of the sentence. He really didn’t need that.

The brown cloth and everything under it fell backward and dropped over the side of the small stairwell, landing in the darkness below.

Lee grabbed for his rifle and tried to aim, but by the time he was ready to draw a sight, the monster was gone.