I reached out to her. “Be careful, you’ll fall in.”
“Caroline, you there?” Alex crackled over the radio.
The girl looked up at me, her eyes full of sorrow. “I know.”
She fell face first into the pond and before I knew it, sank out of sight.
“Oh my God!”
I jumped in after her, expecting to grab her dress or touch ground in the pond. Instead, the water rushed up over my head. I sputtered on pond water, flailing my arms. Where was the bottom? Where was the girl? How the hell could a pond be so deep?
Suddenly my feet found purchase. I pushed up and broke the surface, coughing and wiping pond scum off my face. I spun around, searching, swinging my hands through the water in search of the girl.
Nothing.
I stood in the pond at a loss, gazing through the forest around me. She was nowhere to be found. And for some reason now the pond was no longer as deep as when I’d first jumped in. Weird. I crawled out of the water and stood on the bank, assessing my situation. Pack, wet. Me, wet. Radio, gone. Little girl, vanished.
I gazed around. Funny—nothing looked quite like when I went in. At least as far as forests went. The trees were more open here, less underbrush. Dead leaves carpeted the ground but the treetops above were still relatively green and not in full blown autumn color change. Disquieted, I looked back at the pond. The stream led the other way now; north, not south. I frowned and then shook my head. No. I was just confusing myself. Everything was the same; I’d just gotten all turned around after nearly drowning in a frigging pond.
“Ugh.” I found a flat rock to sit on and undressed, wringing out my socks and garments before going through my daypack. At least my notes would still be intact. Thank goodness for waterproof notebooks and pens.
I sat there for a while, running my hands through my brown hair and flipping it around to try and get as much water out as possible. It would dry well enough as I walked, but it was still going to be a bit annoying. At least my socks weren’t too wet; waterproof boots had done their job, not only repelling the water but the collar keeping it from going down inside the shoe. Hooray for high quality.
At length I slipped back into my damp clothes. I held my daypack at my side; it was still much too wet to put on my back. I stared at the stream. I’d head down it, meet up with the path, hike the few miles out and go home to a nice hot shower and explain to Alex later that I must have been seeing things, because there certainly was no girl here. I stared in the direction the stream led off to. That was the way I needed to go, and yet, I really didn’t want to go that way. A nagging sensation pricked at the back of my neck. Something bad was down that way. Something very bad.
I shook it off, grunting. Stupid. Stupid. Everything is fine.
And that’s when I spotted the little girl out of the corner of my eye, running away through the trees. I bolted after her.
“Hey!” She’d tried to commit suicide in a pond and I’d tried to save her and now she was running around like everything was hunky dory? Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her get away again. I sprinted after her. She was so far ahead I was afraid I might lose her. But the underbrush was almost nonexistent in this part of the forest and her blue dress was too bright to miss.
“Come back here,” I shouted, more angry than concerned. What was she playing at?
“He’s after me. They’re after me,” she cried.
Oh man, what was her problem? Maybe she had some mental illness and her rich parents took her for a walk through the woods and she’d gotten away. She’d mentioned wolves earlier—maybe she’d manifested some wild idea in her mind and was now running amok.
Goody for me.
She headed toward a cottage that emerged from the trees. Thatched roof, whitewashed stone walls. A wooden door and round windows. Like something from a fairy tale. She swung open the door and disappeared inside. I followed after, shutting the door behind me so she couldn’t get out. Whatever her problem was, I needed