When Park Ranger Ray Harper's First Nations former colleague, Tom Clellis, goes missing somewhere in the remote wilderness of Tweedsmuir National Park, Ray feels he owes it to his friend to set off to find him. Tom, son of a shaman heritage and hidi...
Ray leaned his head back onto the thin, faded leather of the chair, eyes trained on the forest outside the cabin window. For the first time he no longer felt at home amidst the tree cover, noting every crack of a twig, every shuffle of the odd passing night creature outside. The trees were silent, all birds seemingly departed to their roosts. But eventually, with the warm lights inside the cabin and Clancy Evans' soothing monologues, Ray's weary mind floated off on the 95.6 MHz waveband. He collapsed on the bed, falling quickly to sleep.
He stood on the porch of the cabin, because something had called him out of his sleep. The deep shadows of the woods gave no clues. The scent of pine and cedar, fungus and leaf decay filled his head, speaking to him in its own alien language.
Whatever it was that summoned him remained elusive, drew him away from the manmade dwelling with an urgency. He started to run and as he did a wind struck up about his feet, whirling him along. pulled him deeper into the darkness of the forest. The air howled in his ears, leaves, twigs, branches whipping past in a blur.
He reached the origin of the call, a darker patch of shadow. His heart pounded hard in his chest, blood thumped in his ears, but still he felt drawn towards what waited for him.
Something moved, black on black. Something with the appearance of horns, gigantic, wreathed in mist, brushed against the bark of what Ray could just make out as a redwood, a big one.
Eyes, clear, rich brown and gold, looked back at him from vast primeval depths. Past twisted silhouettes of branches, giant, bulbous growths, lichen draped like giant's beards from branches higher than a cathedral's arches. Behind it all the gaze remained. Alien, yet also vaguely familiar. A scream rose up from his feet, bubbled into his throat and ripped through the trees, into the air above...
Ray jerked up in bed, sweating.
His memory of the nightmare was already fading, but not the terror. He groaned, got up, used the bathroom, opened a bottle of mineral water. The cd had finished, so he put another in, adjusted the volume up a notch. He didn't want the silence of the forest haunting him in these early hours.
His hands shook and it was a while till that stopped.
He'd switched off the generator earlier. There was something about the mechanical sound that felt wrong amidst the natural sounds and rhythms that surrounded the cabin. He had a couple of camping lamps and plenty of batteries for his cd player, so he wasn't exactly huddling in the dark.
The wood of the bed creaked comfortably beneath him as he collapsed back in. The memory of the nightmare had mostly melted into nothingness, though not the unease. But eventually, as he listened to the faint strains of chill-out music, the DJ's soft tones, the sighs of the night breezes through the branches outside the window, his eyelids grew heavy and sleep finally and thankfully took hold again.
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