Dark City

1.

There was something about the forest. Whether a small thicket or a sprawling maze, it made people lose their minds. A forest was the perfect setting for a tale of adventure, and little Alexandria, having grown up on the edge of a forest, had always longed to explore it by herself.

She lived tucked away in a neighborhood called River Hills and from her eastern window, she could see the pointy tops of evergreen of what the locals called Ghost Woods. Her parents always told her to stay within eyeshot of the house; the woods were dangerous. And kids at her church told her legends of a pale, winged creature called the Jersey Devil. Sometimes Alex would dream of the creature scraping its sharp claws against her window, singing for her to come to the forest and play.

She knew the woods hid some wicked inhabitant; she would see wounded creatures wander out; squirrels missing their tails and stray cats whose fur was sticky and stank like alcohol. Her best friend Hannah told her that Satanists congregated there at night to conduct their black masses. They were led by a figure called the Night Man, a spirit of the forest who fed on blood and danced with witches under the full moon.

Alex might have kept out of the woods forever, but she found her fear confining. Her life was a safe one, a life her parents had planned out for her. She would attend college, earn a liberal arts degree, marry some boy she met in school. She would have her own children, watch them do the same thing and then she would die, just another pretty link in a chain of soft spoken women living out their lives in parlors and bedrooms. Every woman in her mother's family had followed this pattern. Alex had to break free of it.

So one afternoon, when she was only eight years old, Alex donned her only pair of pants, and went out of her window to meet her friend Hannah below.

"Come on!" Hannah called in a projected whisper from below. The ruddy-faced girl ran around the side of the house to see that the coast was clear. "Hurry!"

Upon landing safely on the lawn, Alex and Hannah bolted toward the forest.

Hannah was ten. She lived in the neighborhood but did not come from a family of the same ilk as Alexandria Stockton. When they played together they always did so at Alex's house, ever since Alex's mother saw the state of Hannah's home environment.

"The kids go around barefoot. The inside of her shoes were black," her mother had whispered with disdain. "They're trashy people."

Alex disagreed with her mother, as she had done on just about everything since she was four years old. She believed her hair looked better unbrushed and long. She liked dogs better than cats. She didn't think it was such a travesty to have a hole in the knee of her stockings.

"Are you okay?" asked Hannah.

Alex blinked, casting her mother from her thoughts. "Fine."

The wind chilled their skin and imbued the air with a rich, marshy scent. Alex pulled her sleeves down over her hands, gripping the cuffs tightly. As the two girls came through the mouth of the forest, that aroma of the wet earth thickened. The canopy leaves glistened overhead like rubies and yellow diamonds. Through Alex's eyes, it was the vortex of a fire spell flickering in the maw of some terrible dragon. She gripped Hannah's hand and ran forward, screaming, "Run! Before it eats us!"

Hannah laughed, gasping as she ran alongside the screaming Alex. When they had cleared the fiery vortexes, Alex said that to avoid getting lost, they should mark their path.

"Like Hansel and Gretel," she said, and pulled the blue ribbon from one of her braids to mark a nearby branch.

The girls continued on their way, dead leaves crunching underfoot. Alex imagined a story about Hannah and herself, that they were both princesses, sisters, bored with palace life, and they had run away to seek the advice of a forest witch. She walked along the side of a steep incline thick with trees, gripping the trunks as she moved from one to the other.

Then she heard a crack from above and a loud rustling of leaves. She looked toward the sound and saw a tawny beast descend in their direction. Shrieking, Alex jumped behind Hannah as the monster passed. Slowly, she recognized the species. She'd never seen a buck so close before. It darted straight down the steep earth with impeccable balance and grace. She couldn't look away.

"It's the first unicorn sighting in these lands for over a hundred years," Alex whispered. Hannah giggled.

The buck vanished into a deeper wood. Alex untied her other braid and left this ribbon on another tree branch. "Let's follow it," she said. She wanted to see if there were more unicorns.

Not far down the incline, the land was level at a clearing encompassed by several great oaks, all of which were oddly bent inward toward a singular massive tree. Its bark was flecked with ball head pins, each one impaling ragged butterflies, beetles, and tree frogs. Alex gasped and hugged Hannah close. A gust of wind loosened a rain of star-shaped leaves as the forest exhaled.

"We should go," Alex whispered.

"Who's there?" A voice from behind them startled the girls. It sounded like a boy. Alex spun around several times looking for the source. She and Hannah were alone in the clearing, but the voice came from nearby. Could this be like that chance encounter between Aurora and her prince?

That thought was obliterated as a rock came spinning at their heads. It passed in front of Alex's eyes, and she turned toward the direction of its launch.

"Hey!" she shouted. "That's dangerous!"

"Shh," whispered Hannah. "What if it's the Night Man?"

Another rock came flying and clipped Alex on the cheekbone. The pain jolted through her the same way it had once several years ago when she touched an exposed light socket. Her vision got spotty and dark.

One instinctive thought raced through her mind. "Run," she said. The girls darted back the way they came. Alex hated herself for coming here, she hated Hannah for convincing her to leave the safety of her home. If one or both of them were hurt, nobody would know where to look. Her panic made her thoughts race and her body couldn't keep up. Her legs melted beneath her. Climbing the steep incline, she tripped and fell back down the hill, sliding through sharp twigs and dead leaves. Hannah ran on ahead.

Alex saw her assailant through the trees, a skinny teenager with a long face and hateful half-moon eyes.

"Don't do this!" she screamed, or meant to, because before she could finish, there was a second blow to her head, but this one didn't hurt at all. Her body felt like cold rubber.

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Music: "Explorers" Muse

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