I opened my eyes, then, with a groan, covered my face with the palms of my hands when the too bright light streaming down on me caused sharp pain to explode within my head.
It was so strong that I could not see anything, I had no idea what produced the light, where I was. But it moved through the air, then hovered directly above me, I noticed, observing it through my fingers. I was cold. The noise... what was that? Music? I couldn't focus, my own heartbeat echoing in my ears and the awful headache made it impossible.
Feeling too drowsy to keep my eyes open a moment longer, I let them close, my last conscious thought belonged to the light vanishing gradually beyond my eyelids.
When I came to my senses again, the sun was shining in the sky above me, blinding me. My head still hurt but not quite as much as before, and I still felt the strange drowsiness. I forced myself to stand up regardless.
Turning around, I noticed that I was in the middle of a clearing surrounded by snow-covered forest. When I looked up I realised that it was still snowing, despite the strong sunshine, but the huge snowflakes I saw fluttering through the air did not reach me-- there was no sign of snow, or grass, on the perfectly flat circle of ground under my feet.
Where was I?
When I forced myself to think, tried to remember something, anything, a sudden sharp pang flared up behind my forehead, making me wince. But I had to try... The last thing I could recall was...
A small hotel. On the outskirts of a city, very close to a forest. My friends!
I turned around again, slower this time, looking for them, expecting to find them hiding under the trees.
"Kate, Julian, Sarah... This is not funny! Liam!" I called.
Even if the others may have planned this as a sick Halloween joke, Liam would not let them take me in the middle of this forest and leave me here alone, would he...?
"Liam!" I called again, wanting to scream their names over and over again.
Because if my slowly returning memory did not lie, this wasn't just any forest.
The small, shabby hotel I recalled with difficulty, trying to ignore the awful migraine, sat on the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca and this was... Hoia Baciu. The most haunted forest in the world, a place where strange paranormal phenomena had been consistently reported ever since the sixties. I recognized it by the strangely twisted trees growing around the clearing, looking young despite being at least two hundred years old.
I walked towards them wanting to get a closer look, even as I called again, my voice growing weaker with doubts, "Kate, Sarah!"
The trees moved as I approached them, as if they were caught in a gust of wind which I could not feel. And no wonder-- before I could touch the closest trunk I bounced against a supple, invisible barrier. A... membrane I could not walk through.
As I moved across the clearing, the cone of light shining from above followed me. Now, as I stood here alone and helpless, my hands pressed against the barrier I could not see shaking with fear, I admitted to myself that the sun would never do that... There was something, a flying object hovering high above the clearing, but I could not see it. Looking up made my headache escalate, it was becoming unbearable.
"Liam!" I screamed in a panic, then dropped to the ground and pulled my knees to my chest trying to become as small as possible as I saw them approaching.
An enormous herd of eerily silent, snow-white sheep. They materialized from the shadows under the trees and passed around me like a tide.
"Two hundred." I muttered, rocking back and forth, watching them seep through the barrier I could not cross, remembering the stories about this forest Liam read to us on the train on our way here.
"A herd of two hundred sheep along with their shepherd disappeared in the forest...." I whispered, feeling their soft wool brush against the bare skin of my arms, wondering how it was possible-- they did not look completely corporeal.
Why am I only wearing Liam's T-shirt? I mused briefly, before I got distracted by a memory.
"... sheep disappeared in the forest in the early seventies." The story continued in my mind in Liam's voice. "No one had ever seen them again."
"Nonsense." Sarah giggled, the sound of her voice barely audible above that caused by the moving train. "What else does it say?"
"Hmm, it says that the forest is inhabited by the devil himself. It mentions ghost sightings, spooky spheres of light, unidentified flying objects and The Clearing." Liam replied, his finger slipping down a page of the book he held open on his lap.
"The Clearing?" I heard myself ask, saw myself snuggling closer to him, giggling like Sarah before.
"The perfectly round clearing without any sign of vegetation in the middle of the forest. They found some natural uranium in the subsoil, making the whole place slightly radioactive. It is stronger in The Clearing. Some say it's an entrance into a parallel world..."
"Yeah, right." Kate said, rolling her eyes.
"And tell them about the women!" Julian prompted him, grinning widely.
"No, that will creep them out..."
"It won't, come on Liam." Sarah insisted.
"You asked. So, for instance, there was this woman who disappeared in the woods one day. She was found years later, a fifteen century coin in her pocket. And then there was a five-years-old girl who vanished in the forest and reappeared precisely five years later, wearing the same clothes and not having aged at all..."
I could see her now, the little girl appeared the moment the last sheep vanished. She stood under the trees directly across the clearing from me, looking as ethereal as the animals before.
I stood up, freaked out and anxious, but decided not to leave her here, wandering through the forest alone.
"Hey, wait." I said as she started moving away from me even as I approached.
I only reached the center of the grassless circle when I felt my legs give way... but I wasn't falling... it was more as if someone switched off the gravity suddenly, and I was... gliding upwards, pulled into the strange light. Finally, the headache and my anxiety disappeared, and so did the forest. The world faded into perfect blackness.
I woke up to the blaring of an ambulance. Opening my eyes tentatively while taking a deep, ragged breath, I tried to make sense of what the confused, excited voices around me were saying. It... wasn't my language, I did not know these people...
Still, I could understand them perfectly. They spoke of burns, severe rash and high fever, while they examined my body. They talked about a young tourist who disappeared from her hotel room seven years ago...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
