James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

Tommy whimpered, his mind’s eye showing him a small smile spreading on the Gray Man’s face, his head tilted as he listened for another sound.

“Tommy, are you there?”

Tommy felt the bump on his head, half expecting to feel the moist heat of blood, like that time a year ago when he’d dropped the cookie jar and it broke against him. Instead he merely felt the sting of the growing lump. When he was certain he wasn’t going to bleed all over himself, he tentatively tried standing. Aside from a brief dizziness, everything seemed to be working.

Tommy reached out with his hand and felt the edge of the desk. This time he’d be smarter and move slowly. Moving around without being able to see was harder than he would have expected, because at home he always had his nightlight.

The desk worked just fine for keeping him going in the right direction. He took a careful step and then another, feeling more confident about being able to avoid the Gray Man.

The hand that covered his was cold and wet. The skin felt like the flesh of a rotting peach, and leaked something obscene across his knuckles.

Tommy flinched back, but the Gray Man’s fingers closed over his wrist with a damp squelch.

“ There you are, Tommy …”

Oh, how he wished he could scream.

Mark finished with his backups and dropped the bundle of memory sticks into his pocket. The miracles of modern technology: four years’ worth of research and notes, more man-hours than he even wanted to think about, and all of it fit easily into his pocket. Well, the autopsied ogre didn’t, but all of the notes and pictures did.

He moved to the next door down the hallway just in time to see Hannah finishing up. She was in an office that did not, technically, belong to her, but they had to salvage everything they could. “Got it?” she asked.

Mark nodded. “Yeah. All of it.”

“Good.”

“What the hell happened? There’ve never been any problems in the past and all at once, everything that can go wrong does!”

Hannah shrugged her shoulders and looked out the window, though there was nothing new to see. “We’ve never gone this far into the forest, either. There’s a reason we’ve got all the safety features on the trams, Mark. You know that better than anybody.”

“I just have to believe that there’s something more going on than a really inconvenient systems failure. I mean, come on, Hannah, in four years not so much as a rabid squirrel has come out of that forest. Now we have ogres charging the building? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Preaching to the choir, Mark.”

“It’s just crazy.”

“Still preaching to the choir, Mark.”

Mark sighed. “We better get back to the control room before someone figures out what we’ve been doing.”

Hannah put a hand on his and chuckled. “I think we’ll be okay. We’re protecting H.F.E. assets.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want them suddenly deciding they have to do a security check when we leave.”

“Hey, we could always tell them we were making out…”

Mark laughed off her comment, which was much easier than it would have been under normal circumstances. But he’d just watched giant ogres murder a bunch of heavily armed soldiers, which had something of a cold shower effect on his libido.

“Either way, the sooner we talk to Steve, the sooner he’ll tell us to get the hell out of here,” he said. “I’m dedicated to my work, but I’m not going to be one of those researchers who drives into a tornado.”

Hannah nodded, and they headed back to the control room.

They got there at a quiet moment. No new insanity had ensued. Steve was already talking with Laurie Schaefer from the public relations arena and two men that Mark assumed were lawyers. Thick as thieves , he thought.

There were fewer people in the office than there had been earlier. Hopefully the others were someplace far from the forest by now, perhaps Rhode Island. Mark walked over to the east side of the control center and looked out at the parking lot. Mostly empty. In fact, there probably weren’t many people left behind that weren’t in this room. Good.

Hannah had stopped to talk with Steve and his cronies. She looked his way with an anxious expression on her face. He quickly moved over to where they were all standing. “So what’s the latest joyful news, guys?”

Steve looked at the two lawyers and then over at Laurie, who was looking as stressed as a crippled mouse in a mountain lion’s paws.

“Well, Mark, you saw what those ogres did. Gonna be hard to put a positive spin on that for the media, especially since they killed some members of the media. No news on the tourists that were in the forest. We have Mullins flying around the perimeter right now, to make sure that all of the critters are staying within the boundaries, because these two,” Steve waved his hand to indicate the lawyers, “tell me that we could be held liable if anything gets out of there and attacks someone else.”

“How can you be held liable? It’s not like you invited them in. Booth just owns the land.”

One of the lawyers, who looked like he sucked on extra-tart lemons every day, shook his head. “It isn’t that easy. As the owners of the land, H.F. Enterprises is responsible for whatever happens on the property. Kind of like the owners of a pit bull that gets loose.”

“But we don’t own the ogres. We own the land.”

“Sufficient safety precautions were not taken. Kind of like the owners of a supermarket where somebody slips and falls on a patch of mop water.”

“We took every reasonable safety precaution.”

“But they didn’t work. Kind of like—”

“Okay, okay, I’m not even involved in this part of the company. I just study the monsters. Do what you need to do.”

“I’m on your side,” Lemon Sucker reminded him. “We’ll find a way out of this, although right now we’re presuming that the tourists inside the forest are all alive and well. If they aren’t, that could cause, ah, additional concern.”

“Y’think?”

The lawyer gave Mark a cold smile. “We should talk soon. Obviously, the person responsible for studying the creatures would have been responsible for predicting their potentially deadly behavior, right?”

Mark wanted to punch him in the face, but elected not to. Great. He could end up spending the rest of his life in prison for negligence.

“At this point, H.F. Enterprises still has a chance,” said the lawyer. “Clearly, the security personnel were well aware of the possible danger, and the media placed themselves in harm’s way. If the tourists are fine, we may be fine. Assuming that the remaining forest inhabitants stay put. The town of Dover’s Point is only a few miles away, as you know.”

Mark turned to Steve. “So, has Mullins seen anything yet?”

Steve shook his head. “Thankfully, no. It looks like they’re still staying inside the perimeter of the forest for now.”

“So what are we doing to get the tourists out?”

Steve opened his mouth to answer and then stared past Mark, his mouth hanging wide and his eyes bugging. “What the hell?”

Mark and Hannah and the cronies all turned to look where Steve was staring. Mark felt his mouth drop open and stared, petrified by what he saw.

Twenty-five feet from the edge of the forest, a tree was rising from the ground. It thrust into the air, spilling arid topsoil as branches grew from the thickening trunk.

“No way.” Hannah’s voice shook. “Just… no way.”

“Oh, shit,” Mark said. This was so very bad. The Haunted Forest hadn’t had a single new tree pop up since it came into existence. Nothing grew to replace the trees they cleared out to make room for the tram path. The forest hadn’t expanded by a single inch in four years.