Page 52 of Lost in the Never Woods

The shadows behind him gathered, piling up high then forming long, sharp fingers. He laughed and it shook Wendy’s bones. She tried to struggle but he held tight. The shadows lashed out and crashed down over her.

Wendy thrashed and jerked herself upright. She was home, in her own bed and drenched in sweat. Her clothes stuck to her skin and her hair was matted to her forehead. Shuddering gasps wracked Wendy’s body as she gripped her sheets. It was just a dream, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to steady herself. But it felt so real.

Wendy gulped a deep breath, but when she looked down, a strangled shout caught in her throat.

She scrambled back so quickly, she slammed the back of her head against the headboard.

Everything was covered in red.

At first, Wendy thought the ink was blood, but after the initial terror cut through her, she realized that she still held the red marker she had fallen asleep with.

They were drawings of the tree, over and over again, in haphazard lines that crossed and dragged over everything—her nightshirt, her legs, and all over her sheets. Pages of her bullet journal were also covered in red, ruined and ripped from the notebook. Gnarled branches and tangled roots buried her carefully written notes.

Clutched in her other hand was the acorn.

Wendy threw the marker and clutched the acorn tight to her chest as she tried to steady her rapid breathing. Had she done all of this in her sleep?

Wendy squeezed her eyes shut.

What was happening to her?

Surrounded by torn pages and red ink, she felt trapped. The shadows, the drawings, the murmurings—everything was creeping in.

Wendy dropped the acorn into her bedside drawer. She leapt out of bed and yanked the fitted sheet free. Some of the red had bled through and stained the mattress. She bundled everything up into a heap and ran into the bathroom, where she shoved it to the bottom of her hamper and out of sight, along with her ruined nightshirt.

She couldn’t have her parents seeing what she’d done. Wendy was the only one who did laundry around the house. This was the perfect place to hide it until she could sneak it out into the trash.

As she shoved the bundle of sheets and torn pages under her dirty clothes, Wendy caught a glimpse of her hands. They were smeared with red. Some had even gotten under her fingernails.

At the sink, Wendy turned the hot water faucet on full blast. With shaky hands, she scrubbed furiously at her hands with soap and a facecloth.

That tree. It had been so familiar to her when she had seen it in her drawings. There was something there, some sort of connection she couldn’t place, but after seeing it with her own eyes, she couldn’t deny it anymore. She knew that tree. She had seen that tree in person. Been next to it.

To call what she’d experienced a dream just wasn’t true. It was more than a dream. She could smell the earth and feel the cold of the snow. The forest looked just as it had that winter when Wendy and her brothers had gone missing in the woods. It wasn’t a dream; it was a memory.

A shudder ripped through her from head to toe, her hands jolting so hard that she dropped the bar of soap. She scrambled to grab it out of the sink and began working on the red slashes of marker up and down her legs.

A memory. She’d spent years with a gaping hole in her mind where those six months had been ripped out. Wendy had been dropped into a flashback, however brief.

And the boy in her dream—there was no doubt in Wendy’s mind it was the same person who had approached her in her driveway right before Alex went missing.

It was Peter, but it also wasn’t Peter.

It had his face, but a horrible, nightmarish version.

Was that Peter’s shadow? Wendy had assumed that his shadow was just that—a black, amorphous thing. Could it take a solid human form? Did Peter know?

She needed to find him and tell him. If Peter’s shadow could walk and talk, and knew where she lived—

Wendy shut off the water and gripped the edge of the sink. Her hands were bright red, the knuckles blanched. Pin drops of blood spread through the dry cracks. The hot water had burned, and her skin stung, but she’d gotten rid of the ink. Even her legs only had bright streaks left from being scrubbed raw.

A shaky breath filled Wendy’s lungs, an attempt to steady herself. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. The hair at her temples and the back of her neck was damp with sweat. Her gray eyes stared back at her, puffy and bloodshot.

She needed to find Peter and tell him what had happened. He was the only one who could make sense of it.

The clock on Wendy’s counter read 11:32 a.m.

“Shit!” she cursed. She had told Peter to meet her at noon.