Shroud

The gray mist nipped at Cynthia’s neck and hands. As she trudged along, risking the occasional anxious glance over her shoulder, she tugged her wool sweater tighter. She would seem to shrink further in on herself, the damp cold bearing down on her with a surprising thickness. It was midday, though here, in the thick of it, it was hard to tell.

Limbs like fingers clawed at her through the fog. Elongated caricatures of men loomed all around her, impossible to count was they were shadowy silhouettes swallowed by the haze. Tears broke free down her cheeks, causing little hisses to escape her as they touched the many tiny cuts on her skin.

Cynthia thought to her own sister’s death, the fog projecting Meghan’s gruesome end in full color around her. She was there. She could feel the cold of the snow. The snow had blanketed the entire forest, leaving sounds muffled and distant. Meghan was running in a panic, her face raw with primal fear. She clawed at the branches and they clawed at her.

“Stop it!” Cynthia shouted. “Get out of my head!”

She clamped a hand over her mouth and gasped. She knew how this ended and she didn’t want to have to see it again. It was downright cruel to have to watch it, again and again, from the front row. But the woods didn’t care about that. So, the scene continued to play out in the mist surrounding Cynthia.

“Please!” She cried, swatting blindly through the mist, fogging the scene before it could go further. “I’ve seen it enough! Let me through!”

And, as if the fog itself were alive, it brushed gently by and faded back into the inky black undergrowth at the edge of the woods. Now, Cynthia stood in a clearing. Honey-colored waist-high grass swayed gently in the breeze. The sun now shown down, giving the small clearing a chance to breathe. But Cynthia’s own breath hitched and caught in her throat. There, just on the edge of the clearing, was her sister Meghan. She looked to be sprinting into the woods, though she was frozen in mid-stride.

“Meghan?” Cynthia breathed through her fingers.

She advanced slowly, dreamily, until she was standing behind Meghan.

“Meghan?” Cynthia asked once more, walking slowly around Meghan’s back towards her face. But Cynthia’s heart began to pound when she could never find Meghan’s face, no matter which direction she looked on the figure. She was perpetually looking at the back of Meghan’s head, her slouchy beanie barely hanging on the back of her head. Her body remained in position and looked “normal” for all intents and purposes, but her head… Her head was a chilling imitation.

Cynthia clamped her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. Meghan was dead. Is dead.

“Dear God, am I going mad?” she sobbed out. “This isn’t real.”

As she opened her eyes, the scene around her blurred as the fog broke through in its true form and cleared the projection.

“Run,” Cynthia heard.

It was a whisper that seemed as much a part of the forest as the fog. It came breathing and creaking from all around her.

“Run.”

No, not a whisper. Not a human sound at all, but the sound of branches, all coming together in a cacophony of sharp, cutting clicks. Now Cynthia knew she was going mad. She was hallucinating. How could the forest talk?

“The forest is alive,” she remembered Meghan warning her after they had just moved in, seemingly as a joke.

Cynthia had laughed at first. Meghan was always such a prankster, but this time a sweat glistened on her forehead and her pupils were dilated. She was deathly afraid of something and she had been running.

“Come sit for a spell and I’ll bring you some water,” Cynthia said shakily as she took Meghan’s elbow and led her up onto the porch.

“We’ve got to go,” Meghan whispered. She turned to face Cynthia again, tears welling up in her sister’s green eyes. “We can’t stay here. I’m telling you there’s something not right in the forest.”

Cynthia squeezed her eyes shut once more and screamed out into the curtains upon curtains of gray.

“Run,” the trees repeated coldly, as if Cynthia had never left to be in her own mind.

“Fine!” she shouted out into the silence.

She launched herself forward, stumbling and clambering her way through limbs and roots and bushes and rocks. She snagged her foot in a gnarled root blackened with rot. A small cry escaped her lips, but she twisted around to free herself. Coldness gripped her heart and the spindly hand of a bush had snared her ankle and was winding its way slowly up her leg.

The mist pressed in around her as more and more branches came to her. They twisted and knotted together over her and pressed her slowly into the dirt. Cynthia wailed up into the trees as the roots dug into her flesh, slowly working their way through her own circulatory system. Soon she found she could no longer think; no longer breathe. The bush, no, the forest was absorbing her.

She looked through the vines snaking across her face and at the tree above her. In the center of the curvy trunk was a knothole. Out of it protruded a bloodshot green eye. It blinked down at Cynthia callously as the roots and branches covered her face. The gray vacuum of the fog crept ever closer. With every inch of Cynthia that was taken by the forest, the mist floated in dreadful whisps across the ground, up the trunks of trees, and through the branches.

As the fog surrounded her, Cynthia watched, again, as the forest shuddered and then snapped Meghan up into the air. Branches and vines held her up, briefly, before pulling each of her limbs from her torso in one swift tug. Cynthia cried out, muffled by her own entrapment, and watched in horror as her sister’s bloody torso fell to the ground and was immediately pulled into the undergrowth. Meghan’s limbs were dropped down into the shivering bushes below.

Cynthia, herself, slowly dissolved into the ground. The forest had saved her one brown eye and set it within a new tree across from the green one. The two would forever be locked in silence, forever trapped with all the other souls here. As the fresh eyes looked around, other mutated eyes began to open and bear down on them.

The forest was alive with the souls of the dead and the great, immense fog was their burial shroud.