The Children Are Missing

Chapter 2: Home is Where Hell is

Behold, miles and miles of scorching hellfire. Black smoke reaches like a groping hand into the sky. The sound of cracking and breaking branches fill the otherwise quiet night, a morbid song for anyone who's listening. The Wood is burning. Again.

Ashy tastes on Kit's tongue bring her back to focus. Around her is the town of her memory, her childhood. The people stand in open mouth expressions, wide eyed and mesmerized by the spectacle before them. Gosh, it's hot. Sweat covers her face, her neck, her shaking palms. Kit's legs can barely move, but she pushes, moving agonizingly slow. Like wax figures, the people are softening, melting. Their features curl in on themselves. Eyes fall out of sunken faces. They fall unceremoniously to the ground. No one is screaming, but shrieking echoes through the expanse. Kit realizes the screaming is coming from her, as she chokes on ash, gasping and raspy breaths scratching her throat. The Wood is burning, and Kit is standing amongst a sea of corpses.

Eyes staring unseeingly at the stretch of road before her, Kit's mind replayed the frightful scene of her nightmare again, again. Her left leg hadn't stopped bouncing since she came within a hundred miles of home. Now, blazing down the highway, high and overlooking where she used to call home, Kit found herself gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles shone white. Chest tightening, Kit took deep breaths to try and relieve the coil in her stomach. It was just a dream, you've had it before.

From here, one could overlook the Wood. In all its unholy glory, stretching and reaching with groping branches to the sky, it almost looked a sickening sort of beautiful. Kit supposed it was beautiful, to those who were able to keep a distance, romanticizing the concept of the precious Wood. To come and go as they please, promising to come back, and never really doing it. For Kit, the Wood represented some haunting being, some malevolent beast that feigned delicacy, until it eventually ripped you apart. The depths of the Wood were no less dangerous than that of the sea; the dangers had simply changed, and were even more unknown. What secrets were whispered between the leaves? What beasts roamed the cascading depths, skulking in the bottom where not even the light of God could reach?

The Wood represented some unanswerable, always asking, question. The kind of question that kept you up at night, wide eyed and sleep deprived, bashing your head against the wall trying not to wonder. The kind of question that drove idiots and scholars alike to try and traverse the Wood, only to become part of the mystery. Kit recognized she existed as her own exception, and that frightened her more than anything.

The 80's style home, with vines falling over the sides and dropping into flowerbeds carefully tended to by her mother offered some sense of relief from Kit's spiraling thoughts. She knew the cracks in the stone steps. She knew the porch light, even now, had not been replaced.

"What the hell?" Kit mumbled under breath. She jiggled the door handle, pressing her shoulder against the wooden door. Trying her key again, she gasped in indignation when it didn't fit. She all but broke the door knocking. Cracking open, a pair of familiar green eyes peered out, reflecting worry.

"Damn it, Kit, you're early," sighed Nev, opening the door enough to slip outside with Kit. Nev ran his hands over his face, rubbing sleep deprived eyes. "What time did you even leave to get here?" He said in lowered tones. Nev's brows creased; Kit looked worse than he did.

Kit dropped her voice to reply, "About four? I...hadn't slept well. Looks like you didn't either, Nev, why are you at my house?" She gave him the up and down. "And what's with the all black get up?"

Nev sighed, looking away uncomfortably. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he and Kit took a few steps away from the door. Opening his mouth, and closing it again, Nev tried to find the words. "It's a wake. Well, I mean kinda. It's more of a mournful brunch."