Three or four stab wounds made themselves felt around my own knees. Illusory, not real, no real harm done, but I still felt it, still screamed, a strangled sound. I closed my eyes, to shut out everything else, to keep myself from losing my lunch as my vision wavered.
Adrenaline flooded my body. Again, not real adrenaline. Only an illusion, the desperate sort of energy one got when they had no other choice but to face terror head-on.
No doubt in my mind: destroying one’s own body in a desperate attempt at freedom and escape was terrifying.
He wrenched himself free, tumbled over some invisible barrier, and collapsed in a heap, radiating agony.
The old spatters of blood from his earlier theatrics faded as the new ones appeared.
He wasn’t moving. I didn’t, however, trust him to stay still when I hit the ground. Not with how my own mobility might be suffering.
“You’re free,” I said. “What now?”
“I’m- I did it,” he said, without rising. “My… my arm. I’m supposed to have an arm. Day! Day, can you hear me!?”
He was barely there, his voice faint.
“What now?” I asked, again. “She’s not responding. She can’t respond.”
My real voice was enough for the pale Others in the woods to turn my way.
I wasn’t exactly sure what they were, but they moved as a flock. Pale haired, pale skinned, dressed in white, bleeding from their ragged Hyena-inflicted wounds.
I got a bad vibe from them. Of all the Others here that were in pain, they were in a eerily quiet, bottled-up sort of pain. They were solemn. They were different, cold, and I liked them less than I liked anything else I could make out.
Now they were headed my way.
“You’re free of the car, Day isn’t listening. What do you do?”
I couldn’t keep the desperation out of my voice as I asked that last question.
Maybe the desperation was what he paid attention to.
“Wait by the car.”
“The car isn’t here,” I said.
Just like that, he was gone.
I couldn’t say whether it was one more straw, to break the camel’s back and unravel him or if he’d simply gone back to where the accident happened, but he was no longer beneath me.
I dropped from the branch. Half hopping down, half letting go.
The snow crunched under me, and my ‘wounded’ knees didn’t hold my weight. I fell, the snow crunching again, beneath my weight. Both crunches echoed around the space.
The brute and two more ghosts seemed to react to the ghost noises, but the pale ones weren’t so foolish. They were heading for me, moving with a quiet sort of insistence, heedless of branches in the way, to the point that they got caught, branches scratching their faces and digging into their chests and guts. But each branch in turn broke, and they were making headway.
The phantom pains in and around my knees faded swiftly, now that ‘Mr. Legs’ was gone. I found my feet, assessed the general dangers around me, and headed for the nearest gap, the same direction the ghost boy had gone.
The false adrenaline faded, and I made myself slow down, take stock of where I was going, where I was coming from, and what I needed to do.
Branches were broken here or there. Had I not seen the Others, if I were viewing all of this in blissful ignorance, I might have dismissed it as the casualties of winter. Ice and snow tearing weaker branches from the trees.
As it was, I was aware that these were more wounds, of a sort. Something big had come this way, and its mass had knocked healthy branches free, scattering them to either side. The clearest, most open path available to me was also the path that it traveled.
More things were veering my way as I made my way through the woods.
I shouldn’t have been making that much noise, but…
I was multiplying the amount of noise I did make.
As much as I wanted to keep moving, I made myself stop, and I manually altered the glamour.
How were they finding me? There were too many variables to cover.
Rather than dwell on it, I chose a simpler concept, focusing on it.
Insulation.
Hold in the heat, hold in the sounds, the smells.
Abstract. But the Hyena seemed to be a very concrete being. One that dealt directly with the world, gouging it, biting it, leaving it ruined and in pain. I had to work against its basic nature, and that meant being a little less direct.
In a simpler sense, there was no fucking way I was going to fight it on its turf, using weapons of its choice.
I started off again.
Quieter.
I could make out a stream through the trees. No more than ten feet wide, it had largely frozen over.
A cluster of ghosts sat by the water. A family, it looked like, haggard, maybe homeless. All but the youngest child were bloated, drenched and wet. All had been wounded by the Hyena.
I circled around them, giving them a wide berth. They paid me no mind, only sitting there, shuddering, occasionally exclaiming in pain.
Reaching the stream, I saw another ghost by the water’s edge. The hooded boy.
“Water in my boots,” he said, with that peculiar affect ghosts had. Maintaining the emotions they had at the moment of death. “Wet socks.”
I judged his outfit. The hooded coat wasn’t really meant for the worst of winter. The boots were closer to rain boots than anything else. Not the simple rubber sort, a little warmer, but not that warm. When had he died?
Fall?
“Cold water, huh?” I asked.
He spoke, but it sounded more like he was talking to himself. “Feet are cold, but I have to keep running. Have to. If I keep running and keep hiding someone will come and find me and I can go home.”
That said, he took off. No snow crunched under his feet. There was only the sound of wet socks squishing.
I looked back at the family. Too many ghosts for one area. How many of these guys had followed the Hyena from its last haunt?
Or did it have a way of engineering these deaths? Spook a car into going off the road? Drive a homeless family into the water?
Doing whatever had been done to this boy?
If I’d had any hesitations about setting foot on the ice, that idea was one more reason to stay back.
Taking risks was a bad idea. If this thing was cunning, it was all too possible that it was capable of something more devious.
I traveled alongside the stream.
Another ghost squatted on the far end of the stream, face impossible to make out, pants down, hands holding nearby branches for balance. It was shitting an endless stream of liquid shit and blood at the edge of the stream. Claw marks criss-crossed its back, having gouged flesh, shattering ribs and spine.
They apparently hadn’t been having a good day before the Hyena appeared to savage their ghost.
I could hear the intermittent grunts and groans well after the ghost was out of sight.
“Sorry, ghost,” I murmured. “If my life wasn’t what it was, and if this wasn’t what it was, I might come back to put you to rest.”
Alexis had once given me a hand to help me up from the lowest point in my life. Or the lowest point before I inherited the house, in any event. Even if this was a ghost, a psychic echo, I felt like it deserved the same. I knew it wasn’t real. It was merely a replay, a bad recording. There wasn’t anything to it beyond the scenes it lived out in perpetuity.
But I still felt like I should be doing something.
I started hiking up a steep hillside with large rocks jutting out.