Crawl, Aaron Redfern [books to get back into reading .TXT] 📗

sinking, and there is a hint of yellow over the tops of the cycads and ferns. The sky overhead has begun to shade toward a dark gray, the beginnings of twilight.

“What could have made

that?” Mike says. He stands resolutely in the path in front of you, blocking the way, his eyebrows furrowed toward the treetops.

The call comes again, a bit closer still, and in the next ten seconds there are three others from other parts of the woods. Before the last one ends, you hear the original call once more. It is perhaps fifty yards away.

You push Mike forward, and he begins to move. He plunges up the path at his bulldozer’s pace, and you hurry behind him, finally grateful to be walking quickly. The long arms of the ferns brush you as you stride past them, and they cast long shadows across the path as they are struck by the stretched beams of the falling sun.

There are a dozen of the marimba-calls in the space of a minute now, and they have been joined by another sound, more intermittent but louder, a kind of hollow thrumming.

There is an opening ahead, a place where the path and the trees end together and the light is a sweeping mass. There is a wide open space there, a field or a plain. It is not far.

Toward the edge of the woods, the heavy undergrowth thins out almost to nothing, and as you clear the final hundred paces you catch glimpses of the forest floor, covered over in branch litter and the heavy husks of fallen trees and the curls of dropped leaves. Brilliant green vines curl around many of the fallen trunks like veins. As you look at them, they almost seem to pulse.

The calls of unseen living creatures are all around you. They have become a solid force, one that seems to push aside the blanket of the sun’s light. Whatever the things in the trees are,

(they are bugs they are bugs they are bugs)

they have come out in hundreds, perhaps thousands. Their sounds fill the entire forest.

You take a step off the path and reach down to grab hold of a dead branch. “We need wood,” you call ahead to Mike. “As much of it as we can get.”

Your arms are loaded up in less than a minute, and you come with your burden to the place where the forest ends. Grassy fields stretch for miles, dotted occasionally with copses of trees, and, farther off in a few places, the shadowy sprawls of other forests.

You walk a hundred feet out from the edge of the forest, but as you come to the place where you plan to clear the grass for the tent, you stop dead.

There is a ring of stones on the ground before you, and inside, a circle of packed brown dirt. A short distance to one side, the grass is laid down flat, not cut, but padded down evenly in one direction as though prepared for a tent.

There are miles of grass, but you see no one.

Something looms up beside you, and your skin crawls, but you realize before you even turn that it is only Mike. He dumps a big double-armload of wood beside you. “It looks like somebody has already camped here.”

“No one lit a fire, though,” you say, only realizing the fact as you speak the words. “There are no spent embers or signs of burned wood. It’s just...ready.” You drop your load of branches next to his, and toss your backpack toward the area where the grass is packed down. The rolled tent is tied across the top of it.

Right now, you don’t have time to wonder why there is a space laid out for you.

You turn back toward the woods, and just before your eyes settle, a shape launches from the thick canopy of one of the tall trees, sending tremors through the entire upper structure, and descends below the treeline and disappears. Your mind will not allow you to fully interpret what you have seen; it recoils at the prospect of putting definition to the flitting shape. The thing was large and black, and you are left with a sense of the delicate vibration of wings, and of an unknown number of twisted spindles. It might have been a mosquito the size of a golden retriever.

“We need more wood,” you say. You start toward the forest. “Much more.”

“I’ll get it,” Mike says, striding past you. “You can set up the tent.” You cannot read in his face whether he saw the flitting thing; he is keeping his expression carefully locked. But you can tell that he understands as well as you do that a fire must be lit before the sun finishes setting.

The sun nearly touches the horizon. The sky overhead is a dark, dull blue, and the first stars have begun to appear. It is getting more difficult to see what you are doing, more difficult to see anything at all.

By the time he returns, almost borne down by the weight of all the wood he has piled in his arms and balanced under his chin, you have finished assembling the tent. In the last few yards he stumbles, falling hard on one knee and spilling the wood across the ground in front of him. He curses loudly, angrily, and when he rises, his mouth is twisted in disgust.

“I’ll start it burning,” you say.

He looks at you for a moment with a trace of what might be resentment, and then he turns away and walks toward the trees.

You have built many fires in your life. You take a small hand saw and matches every time you go into the woods, because lighting the fire used to always be your favorite part. You snap up the tinder and set it down, lean on a few strips of kindling, set aside a small pile of sticks to carry you through the next few critical minutes. The wood catches easily. It is strangely pliable, even dead, and it smokes heavily, but it burns--and, almost as importantly, it looks as though it might burn long.

Mike returns, lugging an enormous branch along the ground behind him. By the time he tosses it down, the fire is raging like a tiny, furious mountain of light. You stand and turn to the woods, a spark of pride kindling within your chest. You face the darkening treeline defiantly.

In that moment, another sound comes from the forest, low and deep, almost throbbing.

RIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

Your pride vanishes.

You put on a couple of small logs to keep the fire burning for a few more minutes, and then the two of you go back to the woods together for the last load. As you pile branches into your shaking arms, the trees around you seem to seethe with sound. The things are all around, and close. They are over your head, clinging to the canopies and the upper trunks of the trees, but you cannot see them.

The edge of the forest is not far. Through the trees to your left, you see the last thumbnail of sun falling beneath the horizon, leaving a narrowing band of pink and orange glow in the west.

You start walking very quickly. Mike bends to grab one last branch and follows. Behind you and above, as you leave the trees for the blessed openness of the fields, you hear a new sound, a dry rasp, like something long and heavy dragging itself across the bark of a tree.

You clear the last distance at a run, throwing your load down as you race to the dwindling fire and stack on more kindling. The wood you have will have to be enough.

Night falls.

You sit together in the grass near the fire, and an uneasy truce begins between you and the flames and the things in the trees. The heat and the smoke will keep you safe, as long as you keep them alive. There is no question of sleeping in the tent anymore. There is no question even of going to sleep. If you stray too far from the fire, or if it dies, there will be nothing keeping them back anymore.

Before long, the things are all around, not just in the trees. Out in the fields to all sides, you can hear their calls. The bone-marimbas are the quietest and most constant, a backdrop for all the rest. Layered over these are the hollow thrummings, and the high keening that starts loud and fades until it falls silent. You can pick out others--more and more as the night goes on. And every so often, above it all, like a monstrous cicada in an echo tunnel: RIIIIIIIIIK-RIK-RIK.

The fire keeps them back, but they are drawn to the light. Almost constantly, you can hear the whirring as they circle the fire’s glow or pass overhead. The light catches them, just barely. They move too quickly for you to interpret their forms, but you catch fleeting glimpses of creatures the size of gallon buckets and kitchen wastebins. They must only be the smallest.

Mike sits close and puts his arm around you, pulling you tight against his chest. As though he is the brave one, and you are the one who fears.

He didn’t own a tent, and he was the one who suggested that your two-person tent would be enough. You knew he would. You’ve been seeing each other for almost a month, not knowing what to call it, and so not calling it anything. He has been gentle but persistent. He has made it very clear how he feels. Tonight would have been the first night in the tent. If there had not been the things in the darkness, you would be in there together, and you do not know what he would do.

The fire needs to be tended, so you shake him off and put more wood on. This process repeats itself many times throughout the night.

The smoke is in your eyes all the time. You are very tired.

Eventually, you suggest to Mike that you take shifts at the fire. He curls toward the flame and sleeps precariously, spasming softly, his hidden terror bubbling to the surface while his subconscious reigns. Like a child.

You find yourself trembling often in spite of the warmth. You are the next closest thing to alone with the night sounds and the things that make them. For a long time, all you can do is pile on logs and listen to their calls. Once, alarmingly close, you hear a tearing noise that you cannot identify.

A part of you wishes that the smoke did not obscure most of the stars, so that you could look up at them. But another part of you is glad that you can’t see what constellations sit in this sky.

You let Mike be for what may be a couple of hours, and then you wake him for his shift. He pokes sullenly at the fire with one of the sticks.

After a short