Through the Trees

The floor tasted like chalk, woody ash, and whatever other secrets hid within it. A taste I've become shockingly familiar with over the years. My knees would be riddled with splinters from these dry-rotted planks if it weren't for my sturdy cargo pants. A sweep of my hand over the old floorboards releases a puff of dust and leaves a thick film of dirt and sand on my palm. 

"It must've been one hell of a storm to knock this place out," I remark, scanning the room one last time before rummaging through my duffle. "How long do you think it's been abandoned?" I ask, but I don't get a response. I look up to see Finn, my partner in ghost hunting crime, staring at me like I just grew a third head. "What?"

He stands there, frozen in place, his eyes wide and an incredulous smile on his face. "What?" He repeats with a dumbfounded huff, "What do you mean 'what'? Do you think what you just did is normal?"

I look back down at my hand still covered in dirt. I shrug, "Dude, it's fine. I can wash it, and I've got sanitizer in the van if you're gonna be a germaphobe about it." I wipe my hand on my pants.

"You're kidding. Right? It's not the damn hand. Tarrah, you licked the floor! You full-on put your tongue directly onto one-hundred-year-old, never-cleaned floor! Do you know how many animals probably come in here and piss where you just put your tongue?" I admit that wasn't really my first thought when I did it, and now I can't get the image out of my head. Nonetheless, I must stay confident in my decisions.

"One does what they must do in the name of investigation." I stand my ground, yet I swallow once extra hard to keep down the bile bubbling in my throat—reminder for next time: rotting wood, dust, and animal urine are not a pleasant taste. "I learned it from an archaeologist…Okay, it was a movie, but they consulted real archaeologists while filming it."

Finn raises his brow at me, "Then tell me, what exactly have your archaeology skills taught you today?"

My lips press in a thin line of embarrassment. "The floor's really dirty," I mutter.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." He huffs at my attempt to outsmart him. He goes back to the duffle I had been rifling through earlier and pulls out the EMF reader. A low-level beeping begins immediately when he starts his lap around the room. 

Finn and I have shared an interest in ghost hunting and the paranormal since we watched Paranormal Activity in third grade at our first Halloween sleepover. That eventually became a yearly tradition, and we've since upgraded from scary movie marathons to full-on ghost hunting trips. As we're approaching our thirteenth Halloween together, we planned the ultimate paranormal road trip—only the best for lucky number thirteen. We started in Salem for something more traditional, then Waverly Hills Sanatorium and the Bell Witch cave, and now, we're in an abandoned cabin we came across on a back road in Texas. 

We're supposed to be on our way to Goatman's Bridge as a grand finale, but this cabin gave out an energy we couldn't ignore. Plus, we blew out a tire, so we had to stop anyway, but the cabin really felt like it was calling to us. It's ancient, somewhere from the 1800's if I had to guess, and the layers upon layers of dust and dirt prove no one's been here in God knows how long.

Beep. Beep. BEEP. BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-

"Dude, you gotta get over here! This thing's freaking out!" Finn calls out to me from the other side of the cabin. He's standing right by the wooden back door, and the EMF reader is flashing and beeping like crazy. 

"Do you think there's something outside making it go off?" I ask, analyzing the area for anything that could have triggered it. "Was there a power line out there or something? It could be a false reading if it hadn't picked anything else up anywhere." I try to reason.

He finally looks up from the reader and shuts it off once the constant high-pitched beeping became unbearable. The door creaks when he twists the handle, but he has to give it a good shoulder shove to actually get it open. The only thing as far as the eye can see is trees. Trees everywhere. "I don't remember driving through a forest," Fin states.

"We weren't." I careen my neck around the doorway to peer around the wall. "I could have sworn this was all desert." Fin stays right there staring into the tree line while I go back to the front door. There's just brown grass and dirt. I run around the side of the cabin. "There's nothing out here!" I make it to the back of the cabin, but Finn isn't in the doorway anymore. "Finn? Finn!?" 

I run back the way I came, back through the front door. Suddenly, I smack into Finn, who had just been running in through the back door. "Where were you? I went out the back and ran to the front, but you weren't there." He asks me.

"Where was I? Where were you? I ran around to the back, and you were gone. I was trying to tell you there are no trees out there" 

His face scrunches up even further. "No trees? Are you kidding me? There are trees all over the place. I couldn't even see the road. I didn't see or hear you anywhere."

"I didn't see you either." I take his hand and pull him to the front door. "Look, no trees." He freezes when he sees the lack of foliage and whips his head around, taking it in.

Finn grabs my hand even harder and drags me back to the back door. "Look." I do, and there really are trees everywhere. So many that it would have been impossible not to see them from the front. 

"Okay," I take a breath, trying to rationalize this all, "here's what we'll do: you walk out the back, and I'll walk out the front. We walk around that side of the cabin," I point to the wall on my right side, "and we'll meet in the middle to see both sides at the same time."

He nods, still with knitted brows, "Yeah…yeah, okay, sure."

We both go to our respective ends of the cabin and start to walk around. I make it around the side, but Finn isn't there. I call out to him a few times, mentally noting that there are no trees in sight, before going back through the front. I jump when I see him walking back in, looking just as confused as I feel.

"I didn't see you out there. Could you hear me?"

"No, I couldn't find you either."

"But did you see the trees?"

"Everywhere. You?"

"Not a one."

We stare at each other for a while before… 

"Get your stuff." Finn pushes past me, his breath coming out fast. "Get your stuff and get in the car."

"What?" I watch him throw the EMF reader in the duffle bag and pack it all up. "Finn, we've just found a real-life anomaly. We have to check it out." I go to him and pull his hand away from the bag. "This is huge."

"This is dangerous." He argues, "Normal forests are dangerous enough, and you're telling me you want to go through a magic disappearing one? That's insane!" He rips his hand away from mine to zip the bag shut. He slings it onto his shoulder. "We're going home."

I am not about to pass up this opportunity to discover something that's never been seen before, so I rush in front of him to block the front door. He stops walking, but he won't meet my eyes. "Please, we don't have to stay long. We don't even have to go that deep in. Just to where we can still see the cabin." His eyes stay focused on the car, still parked on the side of the road. 

I don't know what I'm expecting him to say. He's always been adventurous and drawn to these sorts of things, but I've never seen him so shaken up. Realistically, the most we've ever actually encountered on one of our hunts is some mysterious knocking or a blurry figure in a polaroid—nothing like this. Nothing so intensely real and unexplainable, so I shouldn't be shocked that it doesn't sound like a good idea to explore it, but I want to. I want to so badly. Something pulled us to this place for a reason. The blown tire. The abandoned cabin. The EMF reader. The doors. A series of coincidences that all came together to lead us right here. 

Finn's jaw twists, and I know he's grinding his teeth; he always did when he thought too hard. "Fine," he finally looks at me directly, "we can go, but we're coming back as soon as AAA gets here. After that, we're going straight home." He adjusts the duffle on his shoulder and heads back to the back door. 

There really isn't anything but trees for what looks like miles. Lush and looming pines surround us the second we step outside. Their green needles cover every inch of my vision, and the scent floods my nostrils. There isn't much to scope out since it's just trees, trees, and more trees. I don't think I've even heard a bird trill or a squirrel rustling in the branches. Finn keeps checking behind him to make sure he can still see the cabin.

"You're stressing yourself out. We're walking in a straight line. If we wanna go back, all we have to do is turn around."

He doesn't say anything, but he takes a deep breath to steady himself and keeps walking beside me. Of course, I can't quell all of his fears, so he still takes one more look behind us.

"Tarrah." He exhaled, stopping in his tracks.

"Hm?"

"Tarrah." The shake in his voice forced me to turn around this time. "I can't see it."

"What?" I turned around, and sure enough, the cabin was nowhere to be seen. We couldn't have gone that far, but the way his knuckles turned white around his bag strap overrides my need to keep exploring. "It's okay. We'll just turn around and walk back. Just keep going straight." I hook my arm around his, and we begin our journey back.

We couldn't have been walking for more than five minutes before Finn realized we couldn't see the cabin, but as we walked back, five more minutes came and went. Then ten. Then fifteen. Still, there was no sight of the abandoned building. We never took any turns or curves, so it should be a straight shot back. This forest is like a never-ending maze of pine trees that should have ended a long time ago. But there's a clearing. Not too far to our left, with rays of light peeking through and the sounds of people. Had we gotten so lost that we ended up on the other side rather than the way we came? Finn and I exchanged a perplexed glance, but we were only more confused as we came across the start of a road that went straight into the clearing but stopped not far into the forest. 

Once the trees began to clear, an even stranger sight was waiting for us. It is indeed a town, but the buildings are all in the same fashion as the cabin, and are just as waterlogged, with paint peeling off in chunks. The dirt road continues straight down the middle of the town, just like the one we had broken down on. There's no way there would be a phone for us to use, or a car to get us back, and there are no people to be seen.

"It's like a ghost town," Finn said and wandered down the buildings. He isn't wrong. This entire place looked abandoned, just like the cabin. "There's no way no one knows this is here, right? I mean, you can't lose track of a whole town." 

Everything is deathly still until the door of what looks like a saloon creaks open. The sudden noise pierces through the deathly silent atmosphere of the forest. The face of a pale, frail woman peers around the door, and she looks just as shocked to see us as we are to see her. I'm finally about to ask her for help, but she interrupts my thought by grabbing the rope of a bell attached to the doorframe and starting to ring. 

There isn't much Finn and I can do but stand frozen in the middle of the road, keeping unbroken eye contact with this sickly looking lady in her old-timey clothes. It's hard to take my eyes off her sunken ones, but I tear them away when more doors and windows begin to creak. Dozens more people emerge from every building, all gaunt and deathly pale and wearing clothes that look straight out of the History Channel. Finn takes my hand and pulls me close when they keep getting closer. 

I finally speak up, "We're just trying to find our way back to where we came from." The people stop walking, and a tall, broad man in a fancy suit and top hat steps forward. Something about him exudes authority.

"And where is it you two came from?" He questions in his deep southern drawl.

Finn and I don't say anything immediately, just giving each other silent, panicked looks until he's the one to buck up the courage. "A cabin," he answers, "we found it abandoned and just kept walking until we got lost."

"The cabin?" The man chortles lowly, and a wide grin creeps up his face. "You folks are exactly where you're meant to be! It's just down the road." He points to the other end of the road where it fades back into the trees, and sure enough, there it is, but it doesn't look as beat up, and it's facing the wrong way. There are no yellowed windows or loose panels on the roof, but it is undoubtedly the same cabin we came from. "All you gotta do is get back in through that back door, go out the front, and you'll be right back home."

My feet move before I can think, and I start to pull Finn behind me as I run towards it, but the strange man catches my shoulders to stop me. "Not so fast, deary. We haven't had visitors in a long time." Finn is suddenly yanked away from behind. Two other men from the group of silent citizens hold him tight on either side as he thrashes against them. He tries to scream, but the woman who rang the bell steps in front of him and shoves a bundle of fabric between his teeth. I try to charge at them, but the man grabs me first. His hands send a chill through my arms, both from fear and from how unnaturally cold he is. "You really think we're gonna let you youngin's go so easily?" His equally freezing breath hits my ear, and being so close, he smells like dirt and mildew. "We were wiped off the map. The city folk knew there was a hurricane coming, and they abandoned us to drown. It was a natural disaster, but we were murdered. Then the world forgot about us, but now you're here. You think I can't tell a couple city kids from a mile away?" He spat out, "No, you're gonna stay here, and you're gonna end up just like us. There’s no going back now." 

"Sheriff!" He calls out. "You know how to deal with them."

Finn and I can only thrash and struggle harder, but it's no use against their inhuman strength. A man whom I can only assume to be the sheriff steps forward menacingly. He comes up to me first, removing his gun from its holster. "You'll get used to it here, Darling. Eventually, the world'll forget about you too." He raises his arm, and I can barely get out a scream before the handle of the gun meets my skull and the world goes black.