Whispers Beyond the Forest

Chapter 4

After Tom left, Maya and Dennis came back to see her. The rest of the day was spent talking, asking questions, and telling stories. There was so much to tell. Those seventeen years Emily had lost could not be told in just one day. Maya and Dennis took her to the grocery store, where she'd worked for over a year. They took her to the town square, where she'd been obsessing about Tom for months before they'd finally got together. They took her to Maya's house, where her mother told her all about what she'd been like as a small child – very energetic apparently, she'd been climbing on everything she could climb, even falling out of a tree or off a fence every now and then.

"The first time it happened, I had to take you back to your parents while you were crying your eyes out." She laughed at the memory. "I was so relieved when your parents just laughed it off and told me you did that all the time. Yeah, you were a little rascal at that age. I couldn't take my eyes off you guys for even a second, if it was all four of you here."

"Wait, four of us?" Emily asked confused.

"Yeah, you three and Joshua!"

"Oh, we haven't told her that yet!" Maya interrupted her mum "When we were little, it was always the four of us. Joshua moved away when we were about seven years old."

"The worst day of my life!" said Dennis full of self-pity. "He left me behind with two girls..."

Maya gave him a playful push.

"You were all pretty upset about him leaving," said Maya's mum. "Your response to it was growing closer than ever, to make sure you'd never fall apart."

Maya and Dennis grinned at their friend proudly. "We let nothing come in between us. Of course we fight sometimes, but we always make up again really quickly."

"What do we fight about?" Emily asked curiously, hoping for yet another story.

Dennis rolled his eyes. "You two about useless girls-stuff."

"And us two with Dennis about him acting like such a punk. It's really not that cool," Maya immediately shot back.

"Weren't you guys fighting the other day?" said Maya's mum. "Couple of weeks ago?"

Emily looked at her friends expectantly, only to see them exchange another glance before Maya said, "Oh, that... Uh, that was nothing... Not a nice story."

Dennis cleared his throat and said, "I think we should go. We've still got a lot to show you."

The town they lived in gave her friends plenty of stories to fill the rest of the day with. But to Emily's deep disappointment, none of it was familiar even in the slightest.

Early in the evening, the three friends walked back to Emily's house. They purposely took a different route, so that Emily could see a little more of town. Just in case.

"That's the church," said Dennis, pointing to a small building with a high clocktower. "But nobody ever goes there anymore."

"A few streets that way is school," said Maya. "And we'll pass the swimming pool, too. We haven't been there in ages, but we used to swim a lot when we were little."

They took a left into the next street. In the distance, past a row of dilapidated houses that appeared to be empty, grew trees.

"Is that the forest?" Emily asked curiously. Eddy had been talking about that this morning. The craziness of his story hadn't left her mind yet.

Maya and Dennis glanced at one another uncomfortably. "Yeah. It is."

"Can we go there, before we go home? I just want to see it," said Emily.