Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Horror Short Stories Page 8

  Since she’d stopped moving, she was chilling quickly as her sweat dried. The sun was sinking lower, and she knew she needed to set her tent up before it became too dark to see. The ground around the stream was uneven and sloped, so she backtracked for a few minutes until she came across a relatively flat glade. She shrugged her camping backpack off then spent a few minutes clearing rocks, leaves, and sticks away from where she planned to put her tent.

  The light was already dimming towards twilight, so she moved quickly as she assembled the two-sleeper tent. Her father had sold his camping equipment many years previously, so Anna had bought a cheap model for this trip.

  She had to admit, though, as she fitted the canvas over the tent poles, camping was more enjoyable with company. She’d broken up with her boyfriend only a month before her father had passed, and she was feeling the isolation.

  “Still,” she muttered, forcing a metal peg into the soft ground with her hands, “it’s nice not to have to argue about what we eat.”

  Her parents had never agreed on what food to bring. Her father would have wanted sausages, steaks, onion, and eggs, all fried over the fire. Her mother, practical and cautious, had always insisted that meat was not safe to consume after spending the day in a warm backpack and suggested sandwiches and tinned food instead.

  As an adult, Anna tended to side more with her mother. The last place anyone wanted to get food poisoning was in the middle of the woods. Still, they’d eaten dubious sausages and steaks for ten years’ worth of camping trips without any disasters, and because her visit was a testament to her father, she’d brought a pack of sausages wrapped in a small cooling pack.

  Anna finished setting up the tent in good time. The ground wasn’t firm enough for the pegs to anchor it properly, so she placed some largish, clean rocks inside each corner of the tarp base. She kicked and scraped the dead pine needles away from an area in front of her tent, creating a large circle of exposed dirt. A quick search turned up several more rocks, which she built into a ring to protect and contain her fire.

  She needed to have water nearby before she lit it, so Anna pulled one of the larger pots out of her backpack and walked to the stream. The sun was halfway set, and the twilight played strange tricks on her eyes, blending trees with shadows. As she neared the stream, she once again heard the strange noise that sounded like wild laughter. She stopped short. The sound was much closer than it had been before, and seemed too deep to belong to a bird. An animal, maybe?

  The sound broke off, and Anna strained to hear it again. The atmosphere seemed different, somehow, and she realised that all other sounds—birds, animals, and even the insects–had quieted following the strange call, leaving only the rustling of the trees.

  The skin on her arms prickled into goose bumps. Suddenly wanting a fire more than anything else, she broke into a jog.

  She was relieved to finally push through a patch of bushes and find herself at the bank of the river. A thinner canopy above her allowed more of the waning sunlight through, and Anna paused to soak it up for a moment before kneeling beside the running water and dunking the pot into it. The fish were gone, probably hidden somewhere to sleep for the night.

  Anna stood slowly as the strangest sensation crept over her. She felt as though she were being scrutinised, as if her every movement were being followed. Anna lived in the city, where there were eyes everywhere. At any minute she could have a half dozen gazes her, but she’d never before felt watched like she did at that moment.

  You’re in a forest. There’s no one here.

  She turned in a slow circle, pot clasped in both hands, as she scanned the woods around her. It’s so quiet. Even the trees seem to be holding their breath.

  Then the wind changed direction, and a strong, foul musk invaded her nose. Anna gagged and water sloshed over the lip of her pot. It was unlike anything she’d smelt before; it reminded her of rotten eggs and decaying meat, with a bitter, metallic undertone.

  She didn’t wait any longer, but began jogging up the incline towards her tent. Water spilled out of the pot and soaked her pants and hiking shoes, but she didn’t slow down. By the time she reached her camp, she could no longer smell the odour, but it hung in her mind like a fly she couldn’t swat away.

  “No wonder they built a fence,” she muttered, setting her half-full pot beside her tent and rubbing at her nose, “I would, too, if it kept me from smelling that.”

  Anna chuckled to herself, then kicked off her wet shoes and crawled into the tent. She opened the backpack and rifled through it until she found her comfy sneakers. They were no good for hiking–she’d brought them to wear at night while she sat by the fire–but they would do well enough until her hiking shoes dried.

  She climbed out of her tent and began gathering dry firewood. The sun was almost completely set, so she searched by feel more than sight. She’d badly underestimated how long setting up the tent and the fire pit would take, probably because last time she’d been camping, she’d had two parents to help.

  She put a small stack of fire starters in the centre of the pit then stacked dry pine needles and small sticks on top. She lit them and sat to watch as the flames licked over and eventually caught onto the wood. Once the kindling had caught, she put a few larger pieces of wood on top and began pulling food and the frying pan out of her backpack.

  The day’s walk had drained her, and she almost settled on eating tinned fruit for dinner, but she knew her father would have been disappointed. “If you’re going camping, you’d better do it properly,” he’d once said while he poked at the sizzling sausages and her mother dourly buttered bread.

  “This is for you, Dad,” Anna said, putting two of the sausages in the pan and setting it over the growing flames. She’d never felt so lonely.

  The air chilled rapidly as night overtook the woods, and Anna pulled on her spare jackets. Twice, she thought she caught traces of the rotting smell on the wind, but it passed quickly. Maybe something died down by the river.

  She kept the fire small, just hot enough to cook the sausages and warm her a little. She sat on the ground close to its heat as shadows danced around the edge of the clearing. The daytime birds had fallen silent shortly after sunset, and owls and night animals had taken over. Their hollow calls floated to her through the night air.

  She pulled the sausages off the fire and ate them straight out of the pan, savouring the warmth as it pooled in her stomach and spread outwards. They were overcooked–better over than under, her mother would have said–but because she was famished, they tasted like a feast.

  She’d also packed dessert: an apple with its core cut out and a chocolate bar pushed into the hole. She rolled the apple, which was wrapped in foil, into the coals to heat through. It was another of her father’s favourites, and one dish her mother had approved of.

  While she waited for it to cook, she went back to her tent to inflate her blow-up mattress and unroll her sleeping bag. The fire’s light was strong enough to come through the tent’s canvas and illuminate her. It threw jumping shadows on the wall opposite. They seemed to move independently of each other, some travelling left while others went right, and she paused her work to watch them.

  Then she realised the light was growing dimmer. The fire shouldn’t need more wood yet. She’d put two branches on it only a few minutes previously–but as she turned around to look at it, the campfire went out with a harsh sizzle, plunging the tent into darkness.

  Anna’s heart leapt into her throat as she stayed still, listening. The woods outside were perfectly silent. Then she smelt the stench again—thick, cloistering, and nauseating. She had to suppress the urge to spit it out of her mouth.

  Fear spiked through her, and she scrambled for the torch in her backpack. The pine trees were too thick to let any more than a few scraps of moonlight through, leaving her nearly blind, and she struggled to find the torch among the spare clothes, blankets, maps, and cutlery.

  She finally found it in a side pocket and turned it
on with shaking hands, holding it like a sword in front of her body as she advanced out of the tent. The air felt colder than it had before, as though the temperature had dropped five degrees in the two minutes she’d been inside. Her breath misted in front of her face, and her nose started to burn from drawing in the chilled air.

  She stopped just outside the tent and roved her torch in a semi-circle, searching for movement. Tree branches twitched and shook in the wind. Her torch’s beam was too narrow to light much; all it could do was tease her with small snapshots of her surroundings.

  She moved towards the fire. It was completely dead; there weren’t even any coals left. Anna pressed a shaking finger to one of the logs. It was still warm, but not hot, and felt slightly damp. Unnerved, she pulled away from the dead fire and swung her light across the border of the glade again. What could make the coals wet?

  The answer came to her quickly. The pot of water, of course. Did someone find me and tip it over the fire?

  She turned to where she’d left the pot beside the tent. Chills crawled up her spine as she dipped a finger over the rim and found it was still filled with water. Then what…?

  The sickly, thick smell still permeated the air, though it seemed to be lessening. Anna rotated slowly, trying to hold the light steady as she searched the trees. She knew she had only two options: pack up and hike out of the woods as quickly as possible or stay the night.

  It wasn’t much of a choice. The hike alone was five hours, never mind the time it would take to pack her equipment, and she would be much, much slower in the pitch black. By the time she left the woods, it would be dawn–or close to it–and she wasn’t sure she had the energy to stay alert and conscious of her surroundings until then.

  Looks like we’ll be spending the night here.

  Anna shivered and retreated into her tent, zipping it closed behind herself. She pulled her knife out of her bag and sat for a long time, too scared to sleep, gripping the torch in one hand and the knife in the other. Eventually, exhaustion dampened the anxiety enough to let her crawl into the sleeping bag and close her eyes, but she kept a firm grip on the knife just in case.

  Her last thoughts were about the smell, which was almost gone, and the calls of an owl perched somewhere above her tent.

  She dreamed about the last time her father had brought them camping to Morrow Woods, when she’d been fourteen years old. They’d stopped at the town that bordered the forest to pick up a few last-minute supplies. Her father had gone to see if he could find a more up-to-date map of the woods, while she and her mother bought fresh bread, a small square of butter, and a tub of live bait for fishing in the river.

  Her father was gone for a long time, and when he came back, he looked older, somehow. He’d pulled Anna’s mother off to one side and talked to her in a hurried, hushed tone. When he turned back to Anna, he put on one of the most forced smiles she’d ever seen.

  “Your mother and I were thinking, Annie,” he said, “there’s another forest an hour’s drive away that we’ve been wanting to visit. We thought we’d give it a try.”

  “What? Now?” Anna glanced out the shop’s window. She could see the edge of the woods not even fifteen minutes’ walk away. “But we always camp here!”

  Her father just laughed and ushered her back into the car, then drove them to the smaller, tamer pine forest he’d mentioned. It had been nowhere near as pretty as Morrow Woods was, and Anna hadn’t been able to understand why he’d wanted to visit it so badly all of a sudden.

  Anna woke up with a start. It was still dark. The torch illuminated the inside of the tent, turning it into a small, golden cave. The smell was back, saturating the air. She held still, wrapped in her sleeping bag, knife clasped in one hand and torch in the other, listening hard. She thought she could hear breathing, but it was so well-disguised by the rustling trees that she couldn’t be sure.

  Then the sound from the day before split the silence. A twisted, broken, wailing laugh came from just outside the tent’s entrance.

  Anna bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from crying out as the laugh cut off abruptly and silence rushed in to fill the void.

  Don’t move, she thought as she tried to control her heavy breathing. Don’t let it hear you.

  The silence stretched out. An itch crawled across Anna’s back, but she didn’t dare move to scratch it. Sweat was drenching her clothes and beading on her forehead despite the cold, and she struggled to slow her thundering heart.

  Szzzzzzzzrch…

  Anna jumped at the new noise but couldn’t immediately tell where it was coming from. The source became horribly clear when she saw the zip at the tent’s entrance was moving along its track, pulled by a force outside the tent, creating a gaping hole in her meagre fort.

  The time for silence was over. Anna scrambled out of her sleeping bag, kicking at the thick, fluffy fabric when it got stuck over her feet, then scrambled backwards until she was pressed against the rear of the tent.

  Her sudden movement didn’t disturb the zipper’s progress. It glided in a smooth arc, and as the released part of the door began to flop out of the way, she caught a glimpse of the outside.

  She focussed her torch on it, hoping to blind the intruder or at least see it, but whatever was unzipping her tent stayed out of view. She could see the trees, twitching and shivering, and even parts of her ruined fire, where the foil-wrapped, half-baked apple still sat in the blackened patch, winking at her like silver treasure.

  szzzzzzzzzzrch… tch!

  The zipper hit the end of its runner, leaving the door wide open. Anna’s hands were shaking too badly to hold the torch steady; it jittered over the opening but failed to show her the opener.

  “Who’s there?” Anna called. She had never heard a silence as complete as what followed her voice.

  The trees had fallen still. The animals of the night seemed to hold their breaths. She heard no sound at all, not even the gentle tap of falling pine needles.

  The smell invaded her nose with each breath, turning her stomach and making her dizzy. She pressed herself against the back of the tent as she waited, her shaking hands pointing the torch and knife towards the tent’s opening.

  Then claws, large and viciously sharp, plunged through the canvas at her back. One snagged her jacket, and she lurched free with a shriek.

  Carrying only the torch and the knife, Anna threw herself through the doorway and into the dark embrace of the night. At once, noise returned to the woods, swelling and growing in pitch as though the trees were exhausted from holding their breath. Birds–both those that belonged to the day and those that lived in the night–began to cry. Animals screamed. The wind, after holding still for so long, burst through the trees and brought down a shower of pine needles. The sound surrounded her, deafening her. She could barely hear her own gasping as she ran for the cover of the trees.

  Something large, dark, and fast was racing around the edge of the tent. It was moving too quickly for her eyes to fix on it, and she only got a vague impression of ragged clothing and brightly white teeth. As it ran it called to her, adding its hideous laughter to the noise of the woods.

  It–whatever it was, human, animal, or something else entirely–darted across her path. Anna was running too quickly to change direction or stop, so she raised the point of her knife and let her momentum force it into the creature’s chest.

  Blood sprayed from where the blade pierced its flesh. The creature wailed, and its scream was a terrible cacophony that filled Anna’s head and made her ears feel as if they were about to explode. She closed her eyes, let go of the knife, and continued running, her blood-dampened right hand held in front of her face to shield her from branches, her left hand doing a poor job of focussing the torch on her path. Her breath sticky and thick in her lungs, she ran until the woods quieted and the stench left her nose. She ran until her legs ached and her arms throbbed from scratches. She ran until she thought her heart was about to burst and her lungs burnt.

  Th
en she let herself fall to the ground. She was too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to cry, so she lay on the floor of pine needles and roots, doing her best to draw breath quickly enough to replenish her oxygen-depleted muscles. She could hear the gentle rustle of the trees and the occasional animal noise, but she didn’t think she had been chased. The smell was gone, too.

  Anna pulled herself to a sitting position and found she was dizzy. Her head throbbed, her arms stung, and her legs ached. The moon wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the unnaturally tall trees, so she picked up the torch from where she’d dropped it and gingerly inspected her stinging forearms. They bore dozens of tiny cuts from the branches and vines she’d raced through. She could feel some tender patches on her cheeks, too. Her right hand–the one she had held the knife in–had a pale pink, jelly-like liquid sprayed over the fingers and wrist. She tried to shake it off, but it clung to her skin. Disgusted, she picked up a handful of pine needles and used them to rub off most of the liquid. Then she brushed the hand over her sweater and jeans to clean it further.

  She had no idea which direction she’d run in or how far she was from the fence. She knew she could find her direction reasonably well once the sun came up, but until then, she couldn’t risk moving farther into the woods, so she huddled at the base of the tree.

  Anna didn’t let herself fall asleep as she waited. Every ten minutes, she got up and paced in circles to ward off the exhaustion that threatened to lower her guard. She focussed on searching for the smell, assuming that, as long as the air was sweet, danger wasn’t too close.

  The night air was freezing, and before long, she was shivering. Her jacket did a reasonable job of protecting her top half, but the jeans she’d slept in did nothing to warm her.