Night Film(158)

The bridge was arched, made of dark gray stone. The construction looked meticulous, as if every piece had been laid by a master’s hand, a delicate curved structure diving up and over a deep ravine, where, I saw as I stepped closer, a river was raging, icy and black. I noticed the water didn’t flow freely but dammed around the rocks, then rolled over them in lumps like tar. Yet the sound of an ordinary river surged in my ears.

Or was that the wind?

The bridge was long, ending in another grove of trees.

Ashley ran the entire length of this bridge.

She was the first human soul to cross it.

I stepped onto the first laid stones. I had nothing to fear. The curse was finished. The devil had what he wanted. Ashley. Yet I found myself whipping around to stare behind me into those skeletal trees to make sure no one was there, that Sam hadn’t somehow followed me, believing I’d been kidnapped by trolls.

When I was halfway across, I was hit by a rush of vertigo. It was as if the bridge had been rising imperceptibly under my feet, because I could see great distances, high over the branches of an immense forest, stretching out for miles, churning in the wind like a mad sea. A roof with black spikes protruded from the treetops, so far away.

A nauseating dizziness suddenly overtook me, and I had to turn away, staring ahead to the bridge’s end.

Something was there.

I felt myself go numb. It was only half human. What the other half was, I didn’t know. It was tall, seven or eight feet, with gaunt arms and a round, wide face so coarse it looked like bark. I could see its eyes, round red eyes, like two fire holes in the dirt, a mouth of thorns.

I had to be hallucinating. Or I was asleep, in a coma. Dead.

What in the hell was happening to me? How flimsy sanity was.

I waited for my eyes to tell me it was an illusion, a hoax of the birch trees and the shadows falling in dark piles across the bridge as if they’d been severed from the objects that had created them. I reached for my pocket knife, realizing I was holding Popcorn’s compass.

How had it snuck into my hand again? The red needle had stopped spinning and was now pointing straight ahead.

The wind launched into another shrieking fit. I blinked, staring back to the end of the bridge and saw in disbelief that that thing wasn’t a trick of my eyes. It was still there, yet beginning to slink away, its bony limbs gyrating as if caught in some invisible eddy before vanishing into the trees.

Get off this bridge, a voice screamed in my head. I tore down the incline, slipping on the leaves plastering the stones, stumbling blindly off, barreling down a dirt path, which led me into a circular clearing.

It was deserted.

That strange vision, whatever it was, had to be hiding somewhere. It was here they performed the rituals, where Cordova became one of them. I stepped forward, the movement making me so off balance I fell to the ground, staring up at the night sky, a sky so smooth it looked like black liquid had been poured between the trees. What was happening to me? My limbs were melting.

I willed myself to sit upright. I wasn’t sitting in ordinary dirt, but fine black powder glittering with minerals, a few feet away, a charred log. I reached for it, astounded that even though it looked like the ordinary remnants of a bonfire, it was as heavy as iron and I couldn’t lift it.

A ripped piece of white fabric was caught underneath it. It looked like it’d been torn off a child’s blouse.

I pulled it loose, but a blast of wind whipped it out of my hand, sending it tripping like a stray white leaf across the clearing, vanishing into the trees. I stumbled after it. When I saw where it had escaped to, what had just sucked it down, I could only stare in horror.

It was a trench filled with children’s belongings.

I could make out every item lying there, some fifteen feet below: tiny slippers and T-shirts, baby dolls and trains, undershirts and sneakers, all of it decomposed and sodden, some blackened as if burned. It was here where Cordova had thrown it all, the stolen objects, his attempts at an exchange. I could see it so vividly, a clarity that seared my eyes—his mania, his desperation, his willingness to let every corner of his soul go black so that his daughter might live.

I realized in shock that I was lying facedown in the dirt.

How long had I been lying here? Hours? Days?

I lifted my head, which was throbbing, the dark ground and spindly trees swinging drunkenly away from me.

I wasn’t alone.

Black robed figures were standing farther off, all around me, silent, hidden by the dark, as if they’d grown off of the shadows themselves. One suddenly streaked between the trees, wearing a hooded black cloak, and then another beside him. And then another.

They were moving toward me. I scrambled to my feet.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “Don’t come any closer.”

Was that me shouting? The voice sounded miles away. I fumbled for my pocket knife. It was gone.

It wasn’t normal, how fast they moved, faces missing inside those black hoods, and then I felt hands gripping me as I was pulled backward.

There was the night sky and then a bag over my head, smells of dirt and sweat and my herringbone coat—no, no, it was my backpack—wrenching off of me, my arms pulled as if to tear them off. I heard one man’s terrible screaming. When the cries didn’t stop and I felt myself hoisted into the air, I realized they were my own.



When I opened my eyes I was aware of nothing but a moth.