Original Work - 60 Long
60 Long
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
Robert Frost
***
Alex awoke with to the sensation of a very tiny, very angry man, hammering nails into her skull from the inside of her head. He was perched somewhere right above her eyebrows, and god, was he ever enthusiastic with his work. At the same time, her mouth tasted like a rodent had possibly died in it weeks ago, its tiny rotten corpse only recently removed while she had slept.
"Nrrrgh," she articulated, followed by a loud and empathetic, "Ergh."
The latter exclamation had been uttered as Alex had committed the inevitable mistake of opening her eyes, which resulted in daylight becoming immediately visible to her. Shutting her eyes with an almost audible snap, Alex let out a groan of misery as she flung a tired forearm over her face. For a few minutes, she lay there in her white tank top, attempting to force herself back to sleep, an escape from the nightmare she'd woken up to yet again. When slumber refused to return, she sighed heavily, and with great effort, hoisted herself up to a sitting position.
That was when she realized she wasn't exactly alone in the relatively small bed.
"Oh. Good," She said out loud, staring at the motionless body beside her. For a second, she wondered if her bed mate was in fact, a corpse. This suspicion was put to rest when the body twitched. Instead, it was replaced by a general sense of annoyance and vague dread. Closing her eyes again, she counted to ten before blinking them open, only to find that no, she still definitely had a companion in bed with her.
With a sigh, Alex shook her head, only to regret that action immediately.
"Gah." She held her head in her hands.
"Oh my god, go back to sleep." The man lying beside her said into his pillow. "It's like…early."
"No it isn't, it's fucking bright out." Alex snapped.
"It's summer. It's never not bright." He said, turning to look at her. "You know, I think I told you this last night, you look really familiar."
"I get that a lot." Alex muttered, half stumbling, half falling out of the motel bed. The sheets felt sticky and damp, clinging on to her almost as if they sought to hold her in. Although she could hear the room's air conditioner sputtering, the air that smelled like sweat and sex made her feel as though she were wading through a warm pool.
Her companion rubbed his eyes and lifted a hand to his forehead, saying, "Jesus, how much did I have to drink last night?"
"How should I know?" she asked, pulling on a pair of panties she fished out from the laundry bag beside the television, which was a cubed behemoth from another era.
"Hungover are we?" he asked from the bed, sitting up and staring at her with a quizzical smile on his face. He squinted in the sunlight that streamed in through the threadbare curtains in the window, as she cursed under her breath, rummaging in the clutter.
"Let me buy you breakfast, at least." He said after a while, making no move to leave the bed. "Or you could come back to bed and…"
"Get out." Alex said, not looking at him. "Please."
She ignored the silence that ensued, her fingers closing around the small plastic container filled with pills. Stalking into the bathroom, she ran the faucet, leaving the door open. His clothes rustled as he put them on; she could hear him in the doorway behind her.
"Hey. Um…listen, I had fun last night. I'm pretty sure." He paused, and the continued. "If you're gonna be at the bar later, again, maybe we could, I dunno…be there. Together."
Popping open the container, she shook two brightly coloured capsules out, onto the palm of her left hand.
"Or maybe...look whatever. If you wanna hang out, I'll see you later. I know where to find you. Anyway." She could feel him looking at her a moment more. Against the thin carpet, she could hear his footsteps padding towards the doorway.
After the front door was shut, Alex pushed the capsules into her mouth, and cupping both hands under the running tap, she bent and washed her painkillers down with a mouthful of water that tasted like rust. Peering up at her wan image in the mirror, she studied her thinning blonde hair, the hollows under her eyes and lingered on the way her cheekbones were becoming so sharply apparent, she could have cut herself on them.
She wondered exactly what he could have seen that would have looked familiar.
***
The movies always made it look like it'd be easy to write, she thought, staring at the blank page on her laptop screen.
Apparently, moving to a shitty town, checking into a shitty motel and drinking shitty liquor every night wasn't enough to trick a novel out of a person, no matter what pop culture tried to persuade her into believing. The only thing she'd written so far was a crappy, melodramatic poem that went:
It seemed a dream,
And in that dream,
There was a stream I followed.
It led me through lush forests that
Stretched above me to the heavens;
Through canyons,
Where the cliff sides rose around me,
Like a cathedral to the gods.
In the shadows of the waters,
That had widened into freezing rivers,
And then still deeper lakes,
Serpents whispered their secrets to me,
From their hungry mouths.
My feet lost cheap purchase,
The world slid from under me.
As the cold dragged me under,
Deeper into its murky depths,
I knew it was the end of all dreaming,
In the temples of those that named
Themselves our keepers.
Not very long after the accident, she had dreamed such a dream, and she'd remembered it with a sharp clarity no amount of alcohol had yet to wash away. In her dream, she could see Lucas waving at her in a crowd, smiling his sunny smile, beckoning for her to come closer. But each time she took a step, he simply receded further, until the crowds gave way to cold stone, and the ground beneath her nothing but thin ice over dark and rushing water. When she had awoken, she'd been glad it was nothing but a dream, glad that it was but a figment of her mind. Turning sleepily, to burrow herself deeper into Lucas, she was met with nothing but space and silence, save for the sound of her own breathing.
From the next room, Alex could hear the sounds of someone crying, uncaring that the walls were thin. The sobbing became louder after a while. It made Alex's skin crawl. Impulsively, she grabbed her car keys and her purse. For all of a split second, she cast a glance at the cell phone she was leaving on the crumbling night stand, before she pushed open the front door and let it slam shut behind her.
***
She was warm and thirsty, and still she pressed on.
In the forest all around her, she could hear tiny creatures scrabbling in the underbrush. She could hear the rushing of water not too far away, and the summer sound of birdsong overhead, but her steps never slowed once.
Many summers ago, she'd been here, though not alone. She'd wanted to hear the lowing of the moose, wanted to see deer passing in the forest. She'd been fascinated by the sight of small snakes on the ground, by the tiny toads hopping desperately out of her way.
"If you try to walk just a little softer," he'd told her, "The deer up in Yukon might not hear you."
"Fuck you." She'd said then, flipping him off and making a face, before breaking out in a smile.
Her feet splashed in the muddy water.
***
She did stop once, when her feet were on what could only arguably still be called a path, and it would have been a thin one at that. She hadn't glanced once at a trail marker, and couldn't have told where she was, if there was anyone to tell it to.
In the stillness of the forest, she felt a twinge of wonder, and was surprised that she felt it at all. Swallowed in the deep green, she almost felt as if she could feel the trees growing all around her.
"In the old days," Lucas had told her. "They believed that there were spirits in the forest, and worshipped them like gods."
"Pagans? Like, the druids?" she'd asked, slapping away webs and branches that threatened to blind her.
"Not only." He had said. "It wasn't just the druids. The Chinese believed that snakes and foxes appeared in human form to lure travellers in the forests to their doom. The Natives were heavily into shamanism. Aboriginals in Australia were very much animists. It's all different names for the same beast."
"I can't blame them." She stopped then, as she stopped now. "Can't you feel it?"
He asked, "Feel what?"
She said, "This entire place feels like…and this sounds like cheesy, hippie shit, but the forest feels like it's alive. Literally. If I stood here long enough...the ants will crawl over me first. Them and the flies, the ones that want my blood so bad they've been following me for the last two miles. They'd take my flesh and clean my bones. The plants, the moss…they'd climb through my ribs and crawl through my skull. Hikers would pass, and not even know that a person stood on this spot."
She looked at him, a small smile on her lips. "I feel like the forest wants to take me, if I gave it half a chance."
Lucas had given her a long and speculative look. Finally, he said, "You sure you shouldn't quit acting and just become a crazy sci-fi writer locked away in a crappy motel somewhere with a bottle of gin or something?"
"You're such an asshole sometimes," She rolled her eyes and kept on walking.
In the present, Alex breathed in and waited in the gloom. Nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen.
After a while, she began to walk once more, ignoring her dry, burning throat and the tears in her itching eyes. When she found herself back in the parking lot beside highway sixty two hours later, she couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.
***
"Hey."
She kept on sipping on her scotch, staring at herself in the mirror behind the bar.
"You ok? You look a bit bitten up around your shoulders." Her companion from the night before slipped into the seat beside her. Sparing him quick glance, she wondered briefly if he had even told her his name the last time they had met.
"It was driving me crazy today. Trying to think about where I know you from." He signalled at the bartender, who nodded in response, and began to fill a tall glass from a tap. "And then I flipped open a paper and guess what I see?"
Finishing her drink, Alex waited for the bartender to come by again.
"Well. You know what I see." He continued, reaching for the beer that had been placed before him.
"I'll have another." She said to the man behind the counter.
"You know, people are looking for you." The guy continued, and the bartender's eyebrows shot up.
"You've got the wrong person." She said at last, reluctantly, wishing that the bartender would go away now that he had brought her another tumbler of scotch.
"Who?" he asked, shit-eating grin on his face. Through the mirror, she studied his expression, and could see why she had taken him back to the motel the night before. "Who do I think you are?"
"You sound crazy." She said, deciding the best course of action was to behave in such a way as to leave no doubt that her companion was completely off his metaphorical rocker.
"Mark, maybe go away." the bartender suggested after a second. "No, seriously."
"Why? I'm just making conversation." The guy, apparently named Mark said. For whatever reason, he sounded smug - like he'd won some sort of argument.
Scowling more ferociously than before, Alex slouched further, but said nothing. The bartender hesitated, before walking away slowly.
"People are looking for you. It's all over the news, and the papers. I'm not sure how nobody's noticed you yet around here." Mark smiled, though this time his smile seemed far kinder.
"They don't expect someone like me to just hang around a neighbourhood bar without even trying to hide who I am," Alex responded.
"I don't suppose so. No." he took a sip of his beer. "I read about what happened. I'm…I'm really sorry."
Knuckles suddenly white around her tumbler, she raised her glass to her lips and took a big mouthful.
"I lost someone too, once." He said, staring ahead now, instead of looking at her. "Wasn't quite as brutal as what happened with you, but..."
She gave a short, rough bark of laughter. This was beginning to feel too much like a scene from one of the many scripts she'd worked on in her career. And it wasn't even a well-written one. With a sneer, she said, "Sure sounds like you wanna be the guy who got to fuck and save Alex Fenworth."
"I'm sorry?" he stared at her like she was the one who had lost her mind, and maybe, she thought, she had.
"You think I buy your sympathetic crap? Your greeting card sentiments? You want to know what I think?" Alex stood up, trying not to show how shaky her legs felt under her. Her voice came out in a murderous whisper, "I think you're being fucking presumptuous, coming up to me trying to tell me you know how I feel. You wanna tell people you fucked a celebrity, you go the fuck ahead. But don't you think for one second you know anything about me just because you were a drunken mistake."
Mark shook his head, his smile gone now, utterly. His voice stayed shockingly even as he said, "I didn't even know who you were when I met you last night."
Even through the hot tears streaming from her eyes, Alex could see the pity now etched in his features. Somewhere in the back of her head, she knew she was being unreasonable and childish. But she also knew that she was tired of every single person she met approaching her with the same pitying expression on their faces, telling her how they understood, how they sympathized with what she was going through. The sane part of her that still existed deep inside knew that they all meant well. But the part of her that felt as if it had been mangled raw by the same truck that took Lucas wanted to scream at them, to tell them in no uncertain terms that no one could possibly understand what it was like, waking up every day and knowing that she would never see that smile again. Never fall asleep beside him again, or hear him tell another joke.
"I'm sorry." He said, almost gently. "I didn't mean to upset you. I'll leave you alone."
"I need to go." She rubbed at her face with the back of her hand like a child would. Digging into her pocket, she pulled out a few crumpled bills and dropped them on the sticky bar top.
***
It was still early enough that the sun was still very much hovering above the western horizon. Here, where the world bordered the northern wild, summer days rarely ended, and when night did come, the darkness did not linger long.
On the highway, Alex drove past her motel, back in the direction of the reserve. She didn't feel like stopping just yet, and wasn't sure where she was headed.
In the month since she'd come north, she'd walked alone through many of the trails in the woods, uncaring where each one took her. A few times, her feet had slipped on the edges of steep cliffs, sending her skidding only inches away from certain death, but her only response had been to crawl up and to soldier on. The skin on her knees were worn away in parts, her palms scratched and torn. The surface of her skin burned.
As the forest sped past her windows, out of the corner of her eye, a small yellow sign caught her eye. Alex wasn't sure, but in the month she'd wandered through Algonquin, she was fairly certain that she had become quite familiar with the trails scattered along the green corridor. Without really thinking about it, she slowed her car down, and made the turn into the small dirt road marked only by the tiny sign, which, upon closer inspection, bore the stencil of a man in a boat.
The driveway was a lot bumpier than the others she'd travelled down, and it seemed longer. Eventually however, she reached the small, empty parking lot.
Still a little drunk, Alex stepped out of the car and looked up at the bright sky, wondering idly if it were a good idea for her to take on a trail at this time of the day. Shrugging, she slammed the door of the vehicle shut and stepped onto the trailhead. On the billboard beside the entrance, where a map should have been was nothing but a water-stained white canvas under the yellowing plastic screen. In the small and rusting shelves underneath, only one guidebook remained, but it looked as if the weather had turned it into an illegible, damp pile of paper.
For the first time in a long while, Alex hesitated. She looked at the small path leading deeper into the woods, squinting her eyes in an effort to find a trail marker. The wind blew and the trees shifted; sunlight caught the reflecting surfaces of the little blue disks nailed to wooden trunks.
She began walking.
***
The darkness was not a sudden thing.
Rather, as she wandered deeper down the trail, Alex couldn't help but notice how the light was fading fast. Under the thick cover of trees, this wasn't unusual, and when she looked upwards, she could still see patches of blue sky.
Less than a mile in however, the light was far fainter than it had been mere minutes ago. Overhead, the sky now appeared as a dull grey sheet. It was strange, how there wasn't any other movement in the forest all around her, how no birds cried out overhead. All around, the trees, which had been lush and thick with summer's leaves only a short distance back, appeared to be thinning out. Dead leaves crunched with every step Alex took. She was also quite certain that she was stepping on the bones of small animals, breaking them into splinters and shards, but - and she was loathe to admit this - she did not dare look to see if this was true.
Peering backwards was of no use - the way back was obscured by a gathering mist. The trail markers stared blankly at her from the rotting boughs they were stuck to, making her think of unseeing eyes. Ahead, she could hear the sound of softly lapping waves and nothing else.
A storm was coming, Alex thought, proceeding forwards once again. A storm was coming, and it would have been better if she turned back, she thought, though her footsteps did not slow.
By the time she got to the shores of the lake, under a sky that had become blacker than any night Alex had ever known, she had stopped lying to herself. In front of her, the lake lay almost as still as glass, surrounded by the bones of dead trees. Standing on the shore in the strange darkness, all drunkenness gone, she felt her solitude keenly in the utter silence.
Except she wasn't alone. There was a man in front of her, approaching in a small boat. He was so close that Alex wondered how she could have missed his presence to begin with; so close that Alex wondered how deep the water really was. The man himself was an odd sight in a place like this. He wore a tattered baseball cap, which further shadowed his gaunt face, and an old plaid shirt over a stained wifebeater. His boat, though old and peeling, had an ancient looking motor that made absolutely no noise.
"You called," he said, breaking the stifling silence. Alex shivered. "I came."
She said, "I didn't call you."
"You have been calling me for days Alexandria," his voice was flat and devoid of expression. "I could hear you summoning me even before you came to these woods."
Alex stared at him, beginning to comprehend.
"Will you come with me Alexandria Fenworth? Will you ride with me to the next shore?" the ferryman asked.
"Is Lucas waiting for me there?" she asked at last, quietly.
"It is not my place to say what awaits you." He replied. "Though he had indeed, been my passenger."
He waited for her answer, and when none was forthcoming, he said, "Come with me now or come with me later. It doesn't matter to me when I take you across. But here in this moment, I need an answer."
She took a deep breath.
"No."
He said, "Are you certain?"
Oddly enough, he actually sounded almost as surprised as she felt.
"Yes, I'm quite certain." Alex nodded, suddenly beginning to feel mild traces of embarrassment. "I'm sorry if I wasted your time. But I'm not ready yet."
He stared at her a moment more, and ever so slightly, he smiled. "I suppose not."
"Do I just turn around and go back?" Alex asked, but already, he was moving away from her. She made a face. "Well. That was certainly helpful."
Sighing, Alex turned, and began to follow the path back to her car, through the wet and cold mist.
***
The sun was setting by the time she got back to the parking area. It had been later than she had thought when she'd first arrived at the trailhead. She wasn't alone however; Mark was waiting for her beside his vehicle. He looked worried, scared even.
"I followed you. I know this sounds creepy, but I was worried about you. You seemed really drunk when you left the bar." He explained in a rush. "I would have come in after you, but I wasn't sure you'd be pleased to see some weirdo tracking you in the middle of the woods."
"I…thanks." Alex attempted a smile.
"Are you ok?" he asked.
"Yeah." She said, and knew it to be true. She took a small step towards him, crossing her arms. "Look, I'm really sorry I've been a jerk. I've just been having a very bad time."
"That's fine." He looked over her shoulder at the trail that was now becoming even less visible in the growing shadows. "Did you have a good walk?"
"Not much to see." She said flippantly. "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."
"Right." He nodded. "Um. Anyway. Do you need a ride back to the motel? Maybe grab some dinner?"
Alex couldn't think of a reason why not, and she said so. She could come back for the rental car, or perhaps, get someone else to fetch it later.
As they left the forest behind, Alex looked out the window and knew that when she got back to the room, she was going to pack. And then after, she was going to get out of this town. She ought to, perhaps, give her housekeeper a phone call. She wondered if she would ever find the trail again, and believed she would only find it if she were truly searching for it.
Either way, it was time to find the road that led off highway sixty.