(Image by Etienne Marais on Pexels.com)
Their tent was ripped apart when we came back from the lake. Don and Beverly’s packs were strewn about, left in tatters, giant gashes cut through. A viscous substance coated the ground, reflecting the light, blinking and sparkling.
My girlfriend Lauren screamed behind me and told me to run. I did.
At some point we separated. Shadows followed me, elongated and unnatural. I climbed a giant oak, praying for safety. A shape ran through the brush, shaking the leaves, thundering along the ground. Didn’t get a good look. But I swore I smelled daffodils. Mom grew them in our backyard every year.
I silently crawled to the dry ground, my heart smashing in my ears like a timpani.
Escape. Escape. But where? What about Lauren?
The abandoned cabin at the front of the trail! The one she told me about. I hoped its door still locked.
Sprinting, my quads aflame as I made it to the rickety front porch. A terrible scream followed me from the trees. Inside I slammed the flimsy door shut, yanking down the ancient wooden lock, wishing it to hold. In the cabin’s darkness, I saw movement in a corner and gasped.
It was Lauren, shivering, drenched, her black hair hanging like tentacles around her pale skin.
“I fell in the stream,” she said, her voice shaky. “I got away from it.”
I held her tight, trying to warm her. She was so cold, like a meat locker. And so wet. Sticky. When I pulled back, I swore she sparkled. Glitter in her hair. I reached to look and—
“I’m so hungry,” she whispered, stopping me. “Do you have any food?”
I’d left my bag at the campsite. My pockets empty of protein bars. Nothing in the small room. Lauren’s eyes looked off: they couldn’t focus, jittering like a bird’s.
Then a large crash came at the door.
I jumped back, guarding Lauren. Three loud knocks, fast, from a meaty fist.
“Don’t answer it,” she said.
“What if it’s Don or Bev?” I asked.
“It’s not,” she said. “It can’t be.”
“How do you know?”
She didn’t answer. The person outside slammed on the door again and yelled. A familiar woman’s voice, muffled by the thick wooden walls. But it couldn’t be.
I peered out a window, hiding behind the thin curtain, my hands shaking from adrenaline, from fear. Lauren stood on the porch, shouting my name. Her clothes were dry, her dark hair tied back, her skin flush and red.
As my skin grew cool, I noticed a clear film on the cabin’s floor, glimmering and sparkling, like stars at night. I followed the trail behind me. At its end, Lauren—not Lauren—cocked her head and licked lips on a face that was now too large. More of the substance on the ground sapped out of her, twinkling in the light of the setting sun. The liquid pooled on the cabin floor beneath her feet, the fluid spreading toward me.
I smelled daffodils again, stronger this time. She stepped toward me.
In a voice I felt more than heard she said, “I told you not to answer it.”
Andy Boyle is a Chicago-based writer whose work has been in Esquire, NPR, NBC News, the Chicago Tribune and more. The author of two non-fiction books with Penguin Random House, his short fiction has appeared in Uncharted Magazine and Rock and a Hard Place Magazine.