James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

Mark’s phone rang. Unknown number. He hoped to God it was Chloe calling from somebody else’s phone. “Hello?” he answered.

“Mark Harper?”

“Yeah.” Please don’t be a lawyer or reporter…

“Eddie Turner. We met earlier. You gave me your… oh, shit! Pull up! Pull up!"

Mark heard somebody on the other end shout at Eddie to shut the fuck up and let him fly.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked.

“You’re a biologist, right?”

“Cryptozoologist.”

“Well, forget that. Forget everything you think you know about the forest. You still got Booth with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let on what we’re talking about. You think it’s strange that our boss was on the tour, and wanted to run back into the forest even though just about everybody else got slaughtered? Pull down! Pull down! ”

“More than a little, yeah.”

“Okay, you’re going to have to give me some big-time trust on this one, but when you hear what I have to say, keep in mind that trees are popping up everywhere. This ain’t science or technology. It’s magic. Really bad magic. Wanna save the world?”

“Uh… sure.”

“Booth is the key to all of this. He’s the host. If you don’t want this forest to keep growing forever, you need to take care of Booth.”

“Kill him?”

Hannah glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow.

“No! That would be bad.”

“Okay, good.”

“You have to torture him until he kills himself.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ Swerve left! No, right! No, left! Fuck! ”

Mark almost asked what was going on, but decided that he didn’t want to know.

Really bad magic. Yeah, he was a man of science, but he also was not a complete idiot. Though they studied the forest and its inhabitants as scientific phenomena, it was understood by all that a forest did not sprout up fully formed in a matter of hours without something else going on.

There were ghosts, for Christ’s sake.

It was haunted.

It was magic.

“You still there?” asked Eddie.

“Yeah.”

“You need to stop whatever you’re doing, and make our boss want to kill himself. You need to do it fast. The entire town of Dover’s Point has been consumed—”

And Chloe along with it…

“—and more are gonna follow. Make him want to die. Make the host want to kill himself. You can’t just kill him, he has to want it. Understand?”

“I’m not—”

“ Oh shit, don’t let it —!”

The phone went dead.

Mark pulled over to the side and turned off the car’s engine. “Who was that?” Booth asked.

Mark looked at his boss in the rearview mirror. His boss who’d been on the tram for no reason, on the very tour where everything went to hell. His boss who had to be forced out of the forest at gunpoint. His boss who’d been talking to somebody who wasn’t there.

He’d never met Eddie before today. The guy could be a complete whack-job. Or he could be the one responsible for all of this.

Mark turned around to face Booth. “Are you the host?”

There was a flash of concern on Booth’s face, and then he frowned. “What are you talking about?”

The flash was all Mark needed. He leaned over and punched his ex-boss in the face, as hard as he could.

Tears streamed down Lee’s face as he lay on the ground in a crumpled heap. He’d landed feet-first, and if the bones weren’t shattered into a million pieces, it was at least a thousand.

They’d left him behind to die.

Not that he could blame them. You couldn’t get an old man with two broken legs up a two-hundred-foot rope ladder.

So this was how he died. Alone in the forest, easy pickings for the ravenous inhabitants.

Well, not that easy. Eddie had given him a pistol and some clips of ammunition. He could fend off the monsters for a little while longer, anyway. He’d shoot them until he had no bullets left, and then he’d throw his empty gun at them, and then he’d throw goddamn leaves at them until they finally got the better of him. It might be a pathetic fight, but Lee was going down fighting.

His legs didn’t even hurt all that much. He wondered if that was because he was dying.

The helicopter veered sharply to the left. The rope ladder trailed behind it like a flapping tail on a kite. Christopher clenched the rope so tightly that he thought his knuckles might burst. There was no way he could climb right now, so he just had to hold on.

And do a lot of screaming.

The dragon missed the helicopter by less than ten feet. It was moving so quickly that it sailed past its target and kept going.

Above, he could see Barbara and Tina struggling to pull up the rope ladder. They didn’t seem to be making much progress, but every inch helped, assuming that the dragon were to miss him by a single inch, which seemed unlikely.

The dragon, which was hundreds of feet away, flew in a half-circle and then headed toward them again, wings flapping vigorously. Huge bursts of fire jettisoned from its mouth.

It was going to be upon them in a matter of seconds.

The helicopter abruptly veered upward, and the dragon sailed underneath Christopher’s feet, missing by quite a bit more than an inch but not by nearly enough to keep him from wetting himself.

He screamed some more.

“What did you do?” Hannah screamed, as Booth slumped over onto his side. “Why the hell did you punch Booth?”

“Do you trust me?” Mark asked.

“Well not now !”

“I need you to trust me, because things are going to get more fucked up than you can imagine.” Mark got out of the car, opened the passenger seat and dragged Booth out.

“Have you gone mad?” Booth asked.

Mark punched him again, knocking him against the car. One more punch to the face and Booth dropped to the ground, stunned.

“Mark! What’s going on?” Hannah had gotten out of the car, and she rushed over as if to stop him.

“Don’t come near me, Hannah,” Mark warned. “Not until you hear me out.”

He told her, quietly so that Booth couldn’t hear.

Her reaction was predictable: “What the fuck ?”

“It all makes sense,” Mark said. “Well, no, no, it doesn’t make sense at all, but there’s something going on, and this is the only solution that makes any sense whatsoever, even if it makes no sense. Am I making sense?”

“No!”

Booth rubbed some blood from the side of his mouth. “He’s gone insane, Hannah. You’d better run.”

“Tell her that you’re the host,” Mark said. “Tell her what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“Then why were you on the tram?”

“I wanted to see the tour.”

“Why did you want to go back into the forest?”

Booth was silent.

“Listen to me, Hannah, I realize this is one big-ass leap of faith, but we don’t have anything else except a forest that’s growing and that probably—” his voice cracked “—killed Chloe.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

“I’m sure she’s not fine!” Mark pointed to Booth. “And it’s his fucking fault!”

“I did nothing! Hannah, don’t listen to this madman. Get away from him. For your own safety, get away from him.”

Hannah looked at Booth, and then she looked at Mark.

“Okay, Mark, what do you need me to do?”

“Get me some things out of the trunk.”

The helicopter dove down to avoid another dragon attack. The lower half of the rope ladder slapped against the treetops, and Christopher sincerely hoped that one of the rungs wouldn’t get caught on a branch and snap the whole thing off.