James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

Eddie stood up, grabbed the man by the back of his shirt collar, and yanked him to his feet. “I’ve been fighting these creepy bastards all day, so no offense, but I’m not worried about handling a little dipshit like you.”

“You’re making a terrible mistake.”

“I’m sure I am. Walk. Slowly.”

“My name is Martin Booth. I own H.F. Enterprises.”

Eddie hesitated. He’d seen a picture of the guy in the company newsletter, but had never met him in person. “Did you shave your beard?”

“Yes. Quite some time ago.”

“It looked good on you.”

“It itched. And you are?”

“Eddie Turner, tram driver.”

“Here’s the deal, Edward—”

“Eddie.”

“Here’s the deal, Eddie . If I leave this tram, more people will die than you can possibly imagine. I’m talking about horror on an apocalyptic scale. There will be oceans of blood on your hands if you interfere with this. I encourage you not to interfere.”

Eddie stared at him for a long moment.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I disagree.” Eddie shoved him forward, still keeping his hand on Booth’s collar. “Let’s go.”

The trees kept on coming, rising from the desert floor in a growing tide that blotted out the previous boundaries of the Haunted Forest. Mullins kept them abreast of how things were going elsewhere along the perimeter, though unfortunately they were going about the same, complete with trees rising through the highway extension that led to the offices. The good news was that there were two side roads that would let them get around the new growth. Other good news seemed to be in short supply.

Most everybody else at H.F. Enterprises had left. Mark thought that was a fine idea, but Steve had insisted that he and Hannah stay for the time being. “You two know what’s out there, and we may need your expertise.”

Mark’s expertise at this moment was pretty much limited to the knowledge that they needed lots of big guns to kill monsters with, but he didn’t protest.

Outside, another twisted, gnarled tree broke through the dirt and rose into the air. Mark watched for a moment until something caught his attention. From the corner of his eye he saw something sweep between the trees, close to the same height as the window he looked through. He only saw it for a moment, but it was enough to capture his full attention.

Mark had spent four years studying the denizens of the Haunted Forest for a living. He’d never seen anything like this. Never imagined that anything like this could exist in the forest. How could it possibly have been living in the forest for four years without offering up any evidence of its existence?

His heart pounded in his chest as he scrambled for his cell phone. The shape disappeared between two trees for a moment and he held his breath, praying it would show itself again.

He got lucky and the dark shape swooped up toward the sky just long enough for him to capture its silhouette on his cell phone’s camera. The picture wasn’t perfect, but it was clear enough to make his skin crawl and his testicles try to find a safe place to hide themselves. As he looked out the window, the thing that caused his amazement dropped down below the tree line and vanished from sight.

“Hannah! Hannah, we have a new one! A big one!” He ran toward their office and had to force himself to breathe. He tried swallowing a few times but there was no saliva left in his mouth.

There was little by way of a point of reference in the shot, just a couple of trees, but he hoped they would be enough.

On one hand, he was ecstatic: a find like this was the sort of thing that had started him down the long and often penniless path to being a cryptozoologist in the first place. On the other hand, he was terrified: a creature like the one he’d just seen could potentially change everything that they understood about the Haunted Forest, and had the potential to do a lot more damage than the ogres.

“Mark? What is it?” Hannah was frowning at him and her eyes were just a little wet. He realized that she’d probably been crying, and as much as he might have liked to comfort her, this was far more important.

“Hannah, just… just look at this, okay? Please tell me you still have your computer hooked up and then look at this.”

“I do.” She pointed to the monitor, and without another word he dropped down his knees in search of the USB port that would allow him to download the single image he’d managed to capture.

Hannah waited as patiently as she could and dabbed at her eyes until they were dry. He tactfully ignored the slight run of mascara at the corner of her left eye and then showed her the new image.

Hannah looked at the silhouette on the screen for several seconds in complete silence and then started fiddling with the keyboard, trying to clarify what she was looking at. She finally managed to zoom in enough to show a partial of the creature’s head.

“Oh shit.” Her voice was as weak as his knees.

“Yeah.”

“You saw that outside?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s… okay, I’ve said that enough things aren’t possible for one day, but give me one more: That’s not possible.”

“I know. But we’ve got a dragon.”

Emery Mullins lived for flying his helicopter. Technically he didn’t own the machine, but he thought of it as his own, and since he had no children, the ’copter functioned as a perfectly good surrogate. Better, actually, because Duchess never gave him any backtalk or attitude. Fill her up with fuel when she needed it, perform regularly scheduled maintenance, and their relationship was pure bliss.

He banked around what had been the edge of the forest and looked at the unsettling amount of new growth. He didn’t like what he was seeing. The growth seemed to come in waves, and they weren’t getting smaller, they were getting stronger. At a guess, the new trees had expanded the forest by close to a quarter mile in a few places. He also knew that the forest was almost perfectly circular, which meant that the ragged growth spikes going on right now would probably fill themselves in before it was all done. If it was ever all done.

That was a scary notion. He didn’t know if much could stop a forest like this from growing if it wanted to. You could gather the world’s lumberjacks en masse and put ’em to work, but if fully grown trees were sprouting faster than the most aggressive weeds known to man, a whole army of chainsaw-wielding laborers wasn’t going to be able to stop them.

He’d had plenty of discussions with his buds at Ricky’s Bar about whether the forest should be destroyed. He always stood on the side of keeping it, but only because he depended on the damned place for a living.

Still, he’d thought of different ways that the forest could be destroyed. Bulldozers might be able to do it, but again, there’d have to be tanks or something bigger to help. As for fires, well, he’d seen the footage of the fire pit. The trees around the area should have gone up in smoke a long time ago, but they hadn’t. Far as Emery knew, trees didn’t take well to lava, but none of the ones in the area had suffered even a little heat damage according to the people at the home office. So he had to doubt fire would work. What did that leave? Toxic chemicals? Napalm? His Aunt Helen, who’d killed a plant a day for twenty years?

Just thinking about it gave him a headache.

Below him another tree started rising toward the sky. This one was all by its lonesome so far, and further out than any of the others he’d seen, almost half a mile from the edge of the forest. He envisioned the entire planet completely engulfed by trees. The hippies would be ecstatic.