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Smoke?
She whipped around to look at the house, terrified that it might be on fire. But there was nothing. No licking flames. No sign through the blowing snow of any smoke against the black sky. No smell, either.
Your mind playing tricks on you.
But it wasn’t. It was that same feeling of being watched she’d felt under the yellow gaze of the deformed mountain lion. The same one that tugged her eyeballs to another car racing down the highway to meet the look of someone staring back at her. The twinge of someone gawking.
She squinted through the swirling snow, opening and closing her bloodied fist in her pocket. On the second floor of the house, a light was on in her bedroom, dim through the storm.
Outlined there was the figure of the Corner.
She knew that view. It was the only window that gave a clear line of sight across the driveway, where her deep tracks cut through the snow. That window was the one and only place that let you see all the way to the entrance of the path where she stood now, staring back at the house.
The silhouette vanished. The light went out.
He saw you.
The fear rolled down her throat. She screamed but there was no sound.
Why can’t you ever scream?
She hiked the coat up awkwardly in her arms, turned, and fled down the trail.
Her eyes blurred with the cold, the wind, the speed. Her feet were somehow still moving, but they were uneven, one barely able to hold her up when she put weight on it. Her heart cracked her ribs. Her lungs burned with ice.
Don’t look back, don’t look back!
There’s blood on the track.
She stared just ahead, trying to see what was coming through the darkness, what was under her sodden, aching, frozen stump feet. The snow on the trail was thin, that same uncanny thinness as always, just enough to hide tree roots. To hide slippery, decaying leaves. She stumbled, lurched. Again and again her legs staggered sideways, slid backward, and still she kept forward momentum. She slipped on a rock under the snow and fell. She scrabbled up, yanked the coat high to free her legs, and let them run.
The air was thick and strange, difficult to breathe, her body in a new dimension between the earth and water.
Are you moving? Are you running? Everything is so slow. Why can’t you move faster?
The tunnel of the path narrowed, distorting the distance ahead as if the end of the path grew ever farther away.
It’s because the path is haunted. That’s why it looks funny. That’s all. All the ghosts with their skirts making the air curdle. Keep moving.
Something tore at her coat so forcefully her shoulder made a cracking noise, her mouth ahuh!sound as she was pulled bodily backward.
Don’t look back! Go!
She pulled, she ripped away. She wrenched herself forward, freed. From a branch? A hand? Again she ran.
Then there was a slap her across her cheek, her eyebrow, her forehead. The shock of it made her reel back a step and fall to the ground, stunned. One eye went dark and bitter and bloody. She wiped the drip of it with her unhurt hand. Something black arched in front of her, vague and without depth as she looked up at it with her one working eye.
Just a branch. You ran into a branch. Weighed down and low with snow.
No, no, it’s the Corner, it’s a claw.
It hovered above her, razor taloned, and as she stood it became a branch again.
Keep moving. Don’t let him grab you! He’ll use you against the children.
“Delicious,” wheezed the Corner.
Everything was uneven now, ground tilting at odd angles. Trees circling. The woods were whispering.
