Jonathan Hemsworth's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The thing came through the trees fast. The masked man ran from it. Jonathan grabbed Eva's wrist and pulled her away from the fire, toward the dark hills. She kept reciting even as she stumbled. Behind them the grass flattened in a wide circle, and the cold reached them before the shape did. Jonathan saw boulders ahead, a cluster of grey rock with dry grass hanging off the sides. A black mouth opened between them. A cave. He dragged Eva inside. The dark swallowed the firelight. Jonathan pressed Eva against the cold wall and clamped his hand over her mouth. "Stop," he whispered. "Please. Stop saying it." Her lips still moved under his palm. Then she went still. The silence was worse than her voice. Something filled the cave mouth. It was short and hooded, draped in torn grey cloth. Grey claws hung from its sleeves. Where its face should have been there was only black, a hole under the hood deeper than the cave itself. The thing did not walk. It slid toward them over the stone. Jonathan looked away. He grabbed Eva's chin and turned her face into his chest. "Don't look at it," he said. But he had already made his mistake. He had glanced too long into that black hood. The dark under the hood pulled at him. His arms went loose. His knees softened. Eva turned her head. He felt her body go slack against him the same moment his own did. The black spread out from the hood and filled the whole cave. He heard Eva's voice, far away now, still shaping those twisted words. Then nothing. His world went out like a match. Jonathan woke on hard gravel. Sunlight hurt his eyes. He was lying on his side, and his cheek was pressed against warm concrete. Birds. He heard birds. He sat up too fast and his head spun. He was outside the gas station. The old pumps stood quiet in the morning light. The windows glowed yellow, but it was only the sun. His hand was full of something cold and damp. He looked down. Mushrooms. Brown-capped mushrooms, crushed in his fist. More lay scattered around him in the dry grass, growing up through a pile of weathered rocks. Eva lay beside him. She stirred and opened her eyes. Her glasses were crooked. Her hand, too, was full of mushrooms. She looked at them, then at the rocks, then at her own fingers. "Jonathan," she said. Her voice was her own again. Flat. Tired. "We ate these." He remembered now, in pieces. The car dying. The long wait. The hunger. They had found the mushrooms near the station and shared them. Everything after was a fever. The book. The man with the hook. The masked stranger. The hooded thing in the cave. None of it had happened. There was no book in her hands. There never had been. Eva opened her fist and let the mushrooms fall. "Don't tell anyone," she said. She wiped her hand on her skirt and stood. She did not look scared. She looked like a woman who had wasted a night and wanted it back. Jonathan got to his feet. His legs held. His head was clear. He checked his pocket out of habit. The bottle of liquor was there, unopened. He took it out and set it on the gravel by the pump. He did not want it. The station door was locked and dark. No old man watched from the corner. Maybe there had never been one. Jonathan did not knock. He turned toward the road instead. "We walk," he said. "Someone will come." This time he believed it. They left the Tesla where it sat. They walked down the center of the empty road in the morning sun. Eva kept pace beside him, saying nothing, and for once he did not fill the silence with checking his phone or mistaking light for headlights. After a mile the signal bars climbed back onto his screen. He called a tow company, then a cab. By noon a truck came down the road, a real one, dust rising behind it. Jonathan waved it down with both arms. The driver leaned out and asked if they were the folks with the dead electric car. Jonathan said yes. He helped Eva up into the cab first, then climbed in after her, and did not once look back at the pumps, the rocks, or the dark place beyond the trees.