Of the Trees(22)

“Guess we’re really gonna have to get used to hiking at sunset, huh?” Cassie asked after a swallow of water. They had paused at the top of a steep bit of trail, able to see a small valley of forest below them. Ryan smiled.

“You don’t mind?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to keep at it, since school and everything.”

“No, I don’t mind,” she answered, shoving her water bottle in her backpack and pulling it into place. She shifted her shoulders, adjusting the pack, and fell back into step with Ryan, treading carefully down a washed-out section of the trail.

Ryan hadn’t spent the night on the trail yet. It surprised Cassie, actually. Their packs already held a sleeping bag and enough food for two days. His was better equipped than hers, especially now that he had swapped his lighter summer sleeping bag for his new heavy-duty winter one. Ryan had insisted. He wanted to get used to the weight, adjust his contents now while he still had a car to pick him up each night. And he’d need all those things—the camp roll and sleeping bag, the mini burner for cooking food, and the food to cook on it—once he started his five-month trek. So it was better to have them now, get used to hefting the weight around and using the items when they could. Still, he hadn’t spent the night on the trail.

Cassie knew, logically, that Ryan’s mother wouldn’t want him camping all night alone. He could ask Jon. He hadn’t asked her, hadn’t even brought it up. She wondered at that. Not that she thought her parents would allow it; as much as they liked Ryan, they would definitely draw the line with Cassie wanting to camp out overnight with him. Was that why he had never brought it up? Or was he not interested in spending the night on the trail with her?

She dismissed the thought, not wanting to dwell on that possibility, and instead let her mind wander through the lost pathways of the forest around her. It was soothing here in the woods. No people to worry about, no nightmares following her about. There were still some leaves left on the trees, though not at the tops. Those barren branches, unprotected, had been stripped by the wind already. The tops stretched menacingly toward the sky, like the tips of skeleton fingers whose meaty palms were still covered by the flesh of living tissue. Soon, all the pulp and life would be stripped from the branches, brought cascading down to the forest floor by gusts of northeastern wind. Already, the trail was coated in patches of yellow, red, and orange. They crunched under her boots, not yet worn down enough by water and decay to cushion her footsteps. The trees surrounding them were ashy and gray now compared to the healthy browns of the summer when moisture and heat would saturate the bark. The trail markers snagged her attention, bursts of color unnatural to this place, as was the bright blue of her jacket. The duller orange of Ryan’s jacket matched, however, another reminder that this really was his place.

Something else caught her eye, her focus pulled from the trail and onto the bark of a smooth ash tree.

A carving, life-like in its intensity. Eyes, carved exquisitely among the fine lines of the tree bark, peered at her, seeming to watch her as she moved along the trail. They looked familiar. She had seen these before. Somewhere. With the same intensity of the Gray Lady Cemetery, they seemed to scream out: Look at me!

Look at me!

LOOK AT ME!

Cassie fell, pitching into the back of Ryan. He stumbled, turning around and grabbing at her forearms, helping her to right herself.

“Sorry!” she cried out, her cheeks flaming with heat. He chuckled.

“Catch a root?” Ryan asked, looking down. It was in fact what tripped her, an old root jutting into the path. “I should have warned you about that one.”

Cassie shook her head. “I got distracted, my fault.” She moved away from him, his hands sliding from her arms as she did, and turned to look at the ash tree. The eyes seemed less sinister now. They were well done, finely carved and out of place on the trail. Still, only a carved set of watchful eyes.

“Not cool,” Ryan said, frowning at the tree carving.

“They’re strange,” Cassie agreed, her gaze tracing the deep groves of the eyelids, mapping the contour that formed the knot of an eyeball.

“They’re bad etiquette. There’s a Leave No Trace practice. You’re supposed to leave the trail as you find it: no campfire, no trash, no tree carvings.”

Cassie found her gaze lingering on the eyes. She wasn’t sure what she found so fascinating about them, except that maybe they were so out of place. She had never come across graffiti on the trail before. Ryan was right, people generally left the trails as they found them. It could be what was so unsettling, but she didn’t think it was that exactly. It was the intricacy, the detail. These took time, attention, and skill.

Why would anyone do that, out here, isolated on the trails? Why would anyone put so much work into something that would never be admired, only scorned because of its location? Cassie didn’t know, but she did find it hard to turn her back on those eyes. The skill with which they had been carved, the way they seemed to watch her, it brought the very tree to life and left a tingling chill racing up her backbone as she turned away.

Ahead of them, backlit by the last rays of the dying sun, was a three-sided shelter. Cassie and Ryan had hiked past many of them over the course of the summer. They ranged anywhere from five to fifteen miles apart, so along their various routes they had come across several. None of them were much to look at—wooden floors and walls, completely empty—but they would keep someone dry in the rain or sheltered overnight. Ryan paused in front of it, letting his pack fall to the ground. He stooped and yanked on the zipper, pulling his mini stovetop out.