Khalid > Books: favorites-horror‎ (14)

Daniel ran through the forest. Like a wild animal released he didn’t look back. Not once. Toils of ivy snagged his legs. With his hands he fended off barbs of thorns and the wet stems that whipped across his face. He knew the way, but his haste had scattered his bearings. His was a compass spinning in dizzying circles. The trees seemed to shift through the earth, blocking his path, throwing their bodies in front of him as though they had been gifted life and worked their branches like limbs to ensnare him. It was a maze; a darkening, ill-lit labyrinth where decay and dying things ruled supreme. Madeline was still calling his name. She was chasing him, but in that moment – driven by sheer fear – he was faster.
His breathing was loud and erratic. He muttered senseless sounds that even he couldn’t understand. Panic had gripped Daniel hard with the intent to break him, but instead it threw him forward. He had veered from the route he knew. Despite everything that stood in his way, still he kept one eye on the ground. Some burrows were wide enough to catch at a glance, but others he wouldn’t see until it was too late; until he slipped from the light and fell within their reach. He fought back his tears, but their coming was inevitable.

I exhaled slowly, my eyes trained up at the night sky. Stars twinkled down at me like curious crystals and I felt my chest heave. They looked so beautiful. They looked hopeful. They looked like happiness, dragging me towards them, millions of light years away.

"John’s voice had changed, and whatever Nicholas heard in it sent him running—falling—down the embankment. He mounted his bike, sped off without a backwards glance, and was gone.
John Hawthorne remained standing on the rise. That was the fact of him, perhaps more than anything else: he remained. He stared down at the marker between his feet, at the name scratched crudely into its iron-gray surface. Theo had been a good dog. They had gotten on well, mostly. But in the end, Theo had been his son’s. Every bone in Theo’s body, and bones were all that was left now, had belonged without question to a sixteen-year old boy named Trevor Hawthorne. John closed his eyes. He could not call up the memory of that night twenty years ago. The memory was gone, had never been. And yet he could feel it all the same. Woods moaning in a howling wind. Branches creaking under a frosted white moon.
There are things the brain forgets, but the blood remembers.
Oh, the blood remembers.
He raised his head, opened his eyes to the day, and the winter he carried inside settled back into his marrow. The sun laid a warm hand on his cheeks, his brow. It was the last time the sun would touch him. He stood there, looking east from his high place in the San Gabriels, breathing in a wind that smelled of last year’s wildfires, of smoke and cinder and destruction. He stood there, at 7:47 a.m., on the precipice of a great and terrible journey that would take him across a hollowed, gutted America, a nightmareland born on the grave of a sane world.
He stood there in the light.
And then he stood there in the dark."