The Evil Within the Woods Read online

  “Now, now,” the tabby cat soothed. “Shhhh…” The animals began to quiet.

  Paladin was surprised how softly she spoke.

  She’s an animal of some importance, he thought.

  “We have no reason to believe this rabbit would not let us out,” she reasoned. Her eyes remained fixed on Paladin, assessing him. “I see no treachery in his eyes. After all, why should we not believe it? Is it so surprising that the elahs would not put a lock on his cage? He is just a rabbit, after all, and poses little threat. Come closer,” she purred.

  Paladin crept closer to her cage, flattened along the floor as he went. The tabby lowered her head and looked into his eyes. Were it not for the cage between them, Paladin would have never come this close to a cat this size. She was an intimidating size indeed, and her eyes were piercing. “Tell me,” she purred. “What is your name?”

  “P-P-Paladin.” He couldn’t help but think that – if his own cage-door had no lock on it – there might be another cage in here without a lock. And if so, it might only be a matter of time before one of the prisoners discovered this and made a quick breakfast of him!

  “Paladin?” she repeated and looked around, as if for unseen approval. The name rolled off her tongue, as if she was trying to decide if she liked the way it tasted. Smiling at last, she said again: “Paladin.” Paladin looked at the large tabby but his eyes landed on something else. After a slight pause, she said: “My name is—”

  “Jemimah,” Paladin cut her off.

  The tabby’s eyes widened, and now she took an involuntary step back. “How,” she gasped. “H-h-how do you know that?”

  Paladin pointed. “It’s written on the medallion around your neck,” he said.

  Jemimah looked down at the I.D. tag dangling from her collar. It glinted in the growing light of dawn. She stared at Paladin, and for a moment, the two of them regarded each other without speaking. Paladin’s head cocked to one side and he fidgeted under the weight of her stare.

  What is she thinking?

  All at once, Jemimah burst into laughter: “I don’t believe it!” She threw back her head and exclaimed louder: “I DON’T BELIEVE IT!”

  The animals in the truck now listened intently to see if they would believe what Jemimah seemed she could not. She raised herself up onto her hind legs and leaned against the door of her cage. To all the inhabitants of the truck she announced loudly: “The rabbit knows the WORD!”

  Gasps and sighs filled the air, waning to murmurs and whispers. Paladin rose on his hind legs, trying to ascertain what was happening. Jemimah smiled widely into Paladin’s face. “My dear rabbit,” she said smoothly, her eyes aglaze with tears. “There is more to you than meets the eye. I had no idea you knew the Word! Another gift from this ‘Son’ of yours, I wonder?” She smiled.

  “Actually—” Paladin began.

  Then all at once there was a loud rumble, and the whole room shook. Paladin dropped to the ground as the sound pressed upon his ears. Cries and shrieks once again erupted in the cabin. Frank Sanders and Lenny Colditz had returned from their $5.95 blue-plate special and fired up the semi again.

  “There is no time!” Jemimah shouted. “They’ve now come back and will finish their dreaded mission—whatever it may be!” She looked at Paladin, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Perhaps you may be of some use to us after all, rabbit.”

  Paladin stared at her intently; there was something about her voice. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What would you have me do, Jemimah?”

  “Listen closely,” she said. “There must be some kind of mechanism to unlock these cages – a key of sorts. Look!” she pointed. “There is a desk in the corner of the room with drawers and such. Serve your fellow gloiuwathoni (here, she used the word for chendrith from her own feline dialect) by using your wits and paws, rabbit. And . . .” she looked at Paladin eagerly. “And use the Word, Paladin! Use the Word! Quickly!” she cried. “See what you can find!”

  There was something about her speech that roused Paladin. He dashed towards the desk amid a chorus of cheers and whistles.

  Amazing how a crowd can change its opinion!

  Paladin slid to a stop on the smooth floor of the cabin before the large desk. He searched frantically for a way to get on top. The room swayed around him as the semi was back on the highway now, moving at a good clip.

  In the end, he simply jumped.

  He calculated the distance from where he was and sprang onto the chair. From there, he scrambled with a great deal of effort onto the desk. Papers and pens fell to the floor. Paladin looked this way and that, feeling overwhelmed. From all around him came the desperate cries of the caged animals, driving him with a sense of inescapable urgency.

  Where to start?

  Along one wall he noticed several small, glass squares. They looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place them at first. Then he remembered: “Cage boxes,” he whispered. They were like the TV in the Son’s house, only much smaller. There were six of them in all—three on top and three on the bottom. They were dark and blank, except for one. Paladin drew near and noticed something strange beneath two of them. These screens were side by side; but underneath each – written in black marker upon a piece of white masking tape – was a single, yet different word.

  The first said: “CRAGPOW.”

  The second said: “WHIPFANG.”

  This last screen that was not completely blank. It showed a gray, tunnel-like room. It was grainy and hard to make out—but it was there. Paladin wondered at this, but could make no sense of either of the two words. However, now was not the time to try to figure out what it all meant! He returned to looking for a key, or some other way to free the caged animals.

  The desk was littered with the usual human paraphernalia: pens, pencils, staples, paper clips—even a half-empty cup of cold coffee. Paladin looked all around but found nothing. He grew desperate.

  “Here!” a voice whispered nearby.

  Paladin saw a Chihuahua shaking a nervous paw toward something on the side of the desk. Paladin followed his paw. “Eet’s a door of some kind zat pulls out dees way,” the Chihuahua said. It was a drawer. Paladin understood immediately what the Chihuahua was talking about. He had seen similar drawers like this in the Father’s desk when the Son took him into the office. The elahs kept things in these; the trick was how to get it open! Paladin scanned the surface of the desk until he found a long, flat silver tool (a letter opener). It shone like a blade in the dawn’s light. Carefully, Paladin jumped back down onto the chair and inserted the letter opener into the crack where the drawer met the desk. After a good deal of pushing and pulling, Paladin pried the drawer open. The Chihuahua bounced up and down ecstatically. “Eee’s opeeened eet! Eee’s opeeened eet!”

  Paladin dropped the letter opener to the floor and scrambled into the drawer itself. He rooted amongst the small trays located there for a key. Nothing. He was just about to search the trays on the other side of the drawer when something caught his eye. Paladin stopped and looked curiously at the thing upon which he was standing. It was glossy with a shiny surface, and full of color. Paladin had seen things like this before in magazines and books. It was a photograph. He turned his head this way and that, and then pulled back from it a moment, trying to see what exactly it was.

  Then, he saw.

  His blood ran cold.

  The photograph showed an animal—or what used to be an animal. What exactly had been done to it was difficult to tell. Paladin discovered several of the photographs, all stacked on top of each other. He rifled through them, like a chamber of horrors. I cannot describe what Paladin saw; it would haunt your dreams forever. He stared at the photographs, trembling. The chaos of the surrounding room was forgotten. The tortured images in the photos screamed at him. Tears welled in his eyes—tears of anger and terror.

  Was this his fate? Was this the fate of all of them?

  What sort of evil did the elahs have planned for them?

  “What’s going on d
own there?” Jemimah cried.

  Paladin shoved the photos back into the drawer and turned to see if any of the others had seen. Apparently they had not.

  “Nothing!” he shot back. “Nothing yet.” Paladin knew he had to get the animals out of there—had to. The tales and yarns and legends that Bull had blithely spoken of before was a more horrifying reality than any of them imagined! Panic and fear paralyzed him. It was difficult to think clearly. His mind was clouded by the images in those photographs. He grew frustrated, knowing the more time he wasted the more he increased their chances of ending up just like those images! He rooted through the trough on one side of the desk drawer, almost forgetting just what on earth he was looking for! He had to consciously remind himself over and over. His paws worked frenetically as though he tried to dig a way out instead of find a key. Grunting sounds escaped him; he muttered to himself over and over. A single thought dominated all others:

  I’m not going to make it! I’m not going to make it!

  Then a few things happened at once.

  A screeching sound filled the room.

  The room stopped moving.

  A crunching sound was followed by a lurching sensation, and Paladin was thrown against the front wall of the room, held by an invisible force.

  He looked up to see all the other animals pinned inside their cages.

  Something about the room seemed horribly wrong.

  From the front of the cabin, he looked back down the room in the direction of the other cages. But it seemed to Paladin that he was looking up, and not as though he were sitting against the wall and looking across the room as it should be. Instead, it seemed as if he were lying on the floor and looking at the ceiling. What was rightly called the ceiling now had a sensation of being one of the walls, and the back of the room – where the exit door was located – seemed to have become the ceiling.

  Everything was topsy-turvy.

  It felt like they were falling.

  All of this registered in Paladin’s mind at an incredible pace. He had little time to process it. Another lurching sensation – this time like an impact – and the room shook violently and toppled. Desk contents spilled everywhere. The animals shrieked, rolling and careening off the walls of their cages. Paladin struggled for footing and watched insanely as water began to cascade into the room from the grated window in the wall above him. The same window that had – not long ago – ushered in peaceful sounds of the night outside. The room became a cyclone of debris. Animals offered a horrified dirge. Water flooded the room.

  And Paladin began to scream.

  CHAPTER 21

  “The Crash”

  What happened was this:

  Lenny and Frank had taken longer to finish their breakfast than anticipated, much to the chagrin of Lenny, and due largely to the fact that Frank had found one of the waitresses to be particularly friendly. He justified his delay by maintaining he needed “one more cuppa coiffee” for the road (in fairness, this was probably a legitimate concern, as the restaurant had run out of regular coffee, and the waitress kept pumping him full of decaf). So there was Frank, downing cup after cup of what he believed to be full-strength coffee, without ever feeling he was becoming more alert. In the end Lenny’s insistence won, and the two had made their way back to the rig just as the sky above was turning a pale-ish sort of color. The night was far spent indeed.

  Tiredly, but with a nagging sense of anxiousness, the two climbed into the rig. Since they were running extremely late (but also very tired), they behaved quite recklessly. Frank pulled the transport onto the road and headed like a runaway freight train for the bridge that spanned Dakota Lake. He knocked over several rubbish bins as he did, and creamed an innocent mailbox, as well. He was like a zombie on a mission. More cars populated the road now; people heading to work early. This was another factor hurrying them. The Boss Man preferred the transports to not be seen. And so, before long, Frank pushed the rig along at a dangerously fast clip.

  Inside the truck, the two men fell silent. Neither of them talked about the fact that they would be late in making their delivery to the facility. They did not want to consider the consequences of such negligence. Lou Lyons – their boss – was not a forgiving type of person. They rode in silence. The only sound filling the cabin was the hypnotic hum of the rig barreling along the tarmac. It had an extremely sedating affect. Lenny nodded into a doze. His mouth hung open wide; his tongue lolled out of his mouth, half-comically and half-pitifully. Frank Sanders had to pilot the rig alone through wide, tired eyes that strained at the merciless tarmac before him in the dim throw of the waning headlights.

  Before long he was blinking.

  Somewhere along the bridge, Frank lost control of the huge vehicle.

  §

  Dakota Lake was partially frozen in places, giving the surface a patchwork quality. Sunlight danced off the still-frozen portions like finely-cut crystal, resembling a child’s giant art project—a lake made from sprinkling glitter onto dark blue construction paper. The forest outlined the lake in brilliant greens and darker brown camouflage. Patches of untouched snow still retreated from the dawning sun—defiant, quiet reminders that it was still winter. The scene seemed alive, as if at any moment the pines might march to the water’s edge and jump right in. Were it not for the long bridge spanning the lake and the few houses dotting the shoreline, the setting could have been plucked out of a favorite fairytale.

  Frank drove on, oblivious to the wintry splendor, concentrating solely on THE ROAD. Icy patches had formed on the bridge. The truck toyed with the idea of hydroplaning; Frank could feel it, and he gripped the wheel with white knuckles. His lips moved soundlessly. Despite the cold, sweat began to bead on his forehead. He wanted to wake Lenny. At least an argument with his less cerebrally-endowed colleague would keep him awake, no matter how un-stimulating it proved to be. But, as he saw the opposite end of the bridge approaching, the notion left him. Frank relaxed a bit.

  I’m gonna make it.

  Then came one of those fateful moments when all the elements combined in one brief second that spelled tragedy: Frank’s haste, his sleepiness, the speed of the truck, the ice. Frank didn’t even know his eyes were closed until the rig struck the guardrail. The sound jerked him awake—a cold, steely, ripping sound. He overcompensated and yanked the wheel to the left, away from the guardrail and into a bad icy patch. He lost control. As if pulled by an unseen tow cable, Frank felt the truck slide at a dangerous rate and in a direction and angle that it should not be. Lenny snapped awake to screaming tires and a screaming Frank inside the truck cabin. Without knowing what was happening, Lenny also began to scream. The world outside rushed past sideways!

  “Shut up!” Frank yelled. He wrestled the steering wheel with arthritic hands—hands that belonged to some eighty-year-old man. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and thought he saw a face to match. Frank worked the brake pedal up and down, but the brakes protested against the icy bridge. The large semi lurched and spun through a laborious 360-degree turn along the bridge, careening off guardrails and blocking traffic from either direction.

  Far away, a man enjoying a quiet cup of coffee overlooking the lake looked up as strange metallic sounds came to him across the water.

  Inside the truck, all was bedlam and terror!

  The truck punched through a guardrail as easily as crumpling tinfoil. The world went silent. Everything paused as the huge S.I.N. vehicle plummeted silently from Dakota Bridge. Two screaming figures leapt from the cab and into the cold morning air. There was a hideous crash, followed by metallic groan as the huge rig splintered the ice covering Dakota Lake. Metal steamed and hissed like a fallen satellite. Seconds later, two screaming men followed the rig.

  By now, they were wide awake.

  And both of them were out of jobs.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Back in the Truck”

  Paladin fought to understand what was happening.

  For a brief, queasy momen
t, his body lifted off the floor and hung in mid-air like a June bug. Black ooze flowed through the small grated window above him. It did not register with him that it was water. He had never seen water as wild and threatening as this. It seemed to crawl through the window like a living thing, invading every crevice as though seeking out some unsuspecting prey. The approach of the water was slow and stilted, like a flow of molasses. Within moments, Paladin’s mind registered what was happening. A cold, unfriendly thought forced itself upon him, though he wished for it to not:

  Why is the room filling with water?

  For the first time in his life, Paladin felt something new. He thought he had felt it before, even when his da had struggled in the hot, fresh tar of the black strip so long ago. He thought he had felt it in the wild, when the shadow of a bird of prey passed overhead, causing him to flatten to the ground. He thought he felt it just last night when the two shadowy figures pursued him from the Son’s house. Or here in the back of the truck when he found those horrible photographs just moments ago. Paladin thought he had felt it. But it was not until this moment that Paladin realized he had never known terror. Raw, un-distilled terror broke upon him like a dark, lazy cloud bursts open in summer heat and covers the world in steaming rain.

  Something was terrifyingly wrong.

  Something was happening that – from Paladin’s perspective – had absolutely no logical basis. Something was happening that seemed to defy all reality: the room was filling with water. Somehow, the room they were in was sinking!

  Sounds swirling in the room reflected the terror of this impossibility. The animals had been thrown this way and that inside their cages. Their cries for help now corresponded to a threat far greater than mere confinement. They jumped, and scratched, and whimpered, and howled! Others crouched in their pens—frozen with fear. Paladin searched for Jemimah. His orientation of the room was completely thrown off. His eyes met Bull’s. The bulldog simply plopped on his side and lay there, panting. He made no attempt to dig out of his cage. He did not bark, or howl, or whimper. There was no look of fear on Bull’s face. What Paladin saw instead was calm resolve, as though the bulldog understood that this new fate was horrible, but far less dreadful than the one revealed by the photographs Paladin had discovered just moments ago.