The Wall

I

I

Kelly looked down at the hastily spray-painted black line across the path. It wasn't straight or particularly bold. It didn't even go across the whole path; just one thin, lazy swipe. It looked like a vandal, on his way home from scrawling "Mike wuz here" on the backside of Wal-Mart, was looking for one final canvas to mar with the last bit of paint in his can. Scrawled above the line in chicken-scratch capital letters were the words DO NOT CROSS.

Kelly snorted to herself and muttered, "Idiots." On the whole, she didn't actually have a problem with graffiti. Yeah, yeah, gangs, defacing property, illegal, blah, blah. But a lot of graffiti was just as beautiful and intricate as anything you'd see in an art museum, and many of the true graffiti artists of the world didn't do it for money or recognition, but for the simple love of art, for the love of sharing it with all eyes who cared to notice, for free. But this purposeless scrawling by bored teenagers with an extra can of spray paint tagging stupid shit like bike paths was a waste of paint and the brain cells they killed huffing the fumes. She shook her head and began walking again, striding confidently over the line and its warning without giving it any credence.

Later, she wouldn't be able to recall just how many steps over the line she had taken before she began to feel a vague sense of unease, but she didn't think it was very many. It was a balmy late summer evening with a light breeze, and she'd left her apartment for her daily walk in a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt. The sun was hovering just above the horizon when she started down the forested path, aglow in the early evening light with leaves that were just beginning to change from green to bright orange. She estimated that she had about twenty minutes for her walk before the path became too dark to be safe for a lone young woman. Now, past the line, she began to feel an autumn-like chill in the air that she hadn't expected. As goosebumps pimpled her skin, she looked at the trees around the path and realized that she could no longer see the sun's light breaking through their boughs. In the absence of the yellowy light, the forest had taken on a grayish sheen that reminded her of foggy mornings on the river back home.

"Huh..." She said to herself as the sense of unease grew stronger and tickled the hairs on the back of her neck. Did I misjudge how much time I have? She wondered. Did the sun set beyond the horizon? She slowed her pace and observed her surroundings. It wasn't just that things were grayish, but everything seemed less vibrant, less there somehow. Now she came to a stop in the middle of the path, thinking. There was something else bothering her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

Kelly sniffed the air, lightly at first, but then she inhaled several deep breaths of what was supposed to be the heady, earthy scent of the forest around the path, a scent which had always relaxed her, but... She smelled nothing. There was absolutely no scent in the air. And that wasn't all, she realized. There was no sound either, and no breeze - no moving air at all. There were no birds in the trees nor the sounds of their sweet goodnight calls in the distance. There were no crickets chirping in the shadows, no squirrels chasing each other up tree trunks, no gnats flying around her face. It was as if the forest itself had suddenly died.

The unnerving stillness fell like a heavy curtain over the evening and Kelly felt as if some predator would suddenly leap out of the woods and attack her, the abrupt silence of the woods signaling its arrival.

Maybe I don't really need to go for a walk tonight, she thought. You can take a night off. No one will know; no one is keeping track of those 10,000 steps but you. Just go home and have a salad for dinner. Then you won't feel so guilty. Right. And then you can sit on the couch and watch Friends reruns until you feel this whole thing is really quite silly.

Just the thought of turning around made Kelly feel lighter. She turned on her heels to walk back toward her apartment building and was immediately halted in her tracks by the sight before her.

A wall. A very, very large wall.

Kelly was so stunned that she took several steps backward, peering at the gray cinderblock in shock. The wall sat there, completely unaware of its incongruous appearance in the middle of a popular wooded bike path, where previously there had been nothing more than trees and a strip of blacktop. It stretched off to the left and right for twenty or thirty feet before the trees blocked it completely. It rose so high that Kelly couldn't even see where it stopped, as if it went right on up into the heavens.

She spent several minutes just staring at this new wall, letting her eyes rove over every part of it, trying to wrap her brain around this completely impossible development. She even tried blinking it away as a hallucination before her eyes were arrested by something she hadn't noticed before, or something that maybe wasn't there before.

Words. On the wall, about eye level and centered over the path. They were scrawled in a familiar black chicken-scratch, screaming in capital letters across the suface of the wall.

I TOLD YOU NOT TO CROSS.