This week is part 2 of "The Woods", and there's going to be blood (as if that wasn't evident from the conclusion of part 1 last time!). Who will make it out of the Woods alive? Who won't? You'll have to read on to find out!
Before that though, let's see what Brennan and Riz are up to, maybe the rat has found a way to cheer his friend up... Or not!
The Comic Tales of Brennan and Riz
I think Riz can pull off a convincing Brennan, don't know about you. Sadly, I may have miscalculated things so last week will be the last 'spooky season' themed strip (for this year at least!) As the blog after next week will go out on 1st November. Got a good one planned though, let's hole I pull it off!
Daemon Soul Update
Been quiet on this but I'm pleased to say we're over a third in now! The edits are sublime and I think the editor has done a fantastic job of getting something good from my slop! The next few chapters will be very interesting!
I still have a big edit to do involving a sheath, but I've got time right?
Short Diversions: The Woods Part 2
Here's the concluding part to last week's story (if you haven't read part 1, click here!).
Let's dive straight in with the concluding tale:
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The Woods
2.
Clive raced through the trees, not caring when the twigs snagged and ripped at his clothes and skin. He heard the voices of his friends on the wind that had crept in along with the clouded sky. By the time he got there everyone was gathered and doing their best to comfort Beth, only Sid was looking up at the corpse, spitting at it with disdain.
“Is everyone okay?” Clive asked, but he knew the answer, he just thought that was the expected thing to say in a time like this. Beth threw up, to prove what a bad question it was. Plucking up his own courage, Clive approached Paul’s body as it swayed, the pained expression hinting at the terror that he must have felt at the moment of death.
“It’s what he fucking deserved,” Sid said with no remorse. Clive shot him a concerned look, but it was ignored.
“I’m just saying what everything was thinking, I’m just sad it wasn’t me who did it!” Sid continued.
“This isn’t the time,” Clive peeled his eyes away and took a deep breath, putting his back to the body of his rival. “What we need to do now is ring the police, then wait for them to find us.”
“What kind of braindead idea is that!” Sid angrily shouted, forcibly making his friend face him. “Who do you think the police will suspect with this eh? Look around, we’re the only sodding people here!”
“We’ve got the phone footage to prove we didn’t do it, unless you’ve got a guilty conscience,” Sanda piped up, putting her into the conversation as she still tended to Beth, who was sitting on the ground, looking despondent.
“Yes…the phone footage. Where did you go Sandra?” Clive asked, allowing some bitterness to seep in.
“Where did I go? You think I did this!”
“You did say you wanted to hit him,” Sid added unhelpfully, which allowed Sandra a chance to strike back at him.
“You were the one who said you wanted to kill him!”
“I wouldn’t waste my strength on him! Besides, you think I could do all that! Without anyone knowing! I may be strong, but that…” Sid took another look at the bloody mess that had once been a person. “That’s beyond anything a human can do. We need to get out of these woods, and we need to do it now. Call the police, yeah, do that, but do it from the safety of a pay phone somewhere else!”
“I’d hate to be the one who agrees with Sid on something,” Fern admittedly. “But I think he’s right. I think staying here, and waiting, is just going to get us all killed!”
“Why would I need to ring from a payphone?” Clive asked, not understanding the real point Sid was trying to get at. “We all have mobile phones with GPS trackers in them as standard. The police won’t be searching for us, they’ll come and find us. It’s the safest thing to do, especially if we stay as a group. We stick together, we survive. That’s how it’s always been for us hasn’t it?”
“You’re really comparing us being outcasts at school because we wanted to do Drama to an actual bloody murder?” Sandra asked in disbelief.
“My point, if you’d been paying attention, was the sticking together part. Now if someone can please ring the police for me, we can deal with the situation at hand,” Clive stated again.
“Uhh, I’ve got no signal?” Ted spoke up, holding his phone so that everyone else could see that he wasn’t choosing that moment to make a bad joke.
“You and your crappy phone!” Fern said, showing a bit of stressful frustration. She pulled hers out and stared in horror as the same message showed up on hers as his. No signal. “I’ve got no signal either?”
“Me too,” Sandra chimed in, shaking her head.
“What the hell is going on here!” Sid shouted at his phone, shaking it as though that was what was causing the issue the whole time.
“What about yours Beth?” Sandra crouched down near her own friend who was staring at the little screen, where the exact same message was displayed. “Now what do we do?” Sandra asked everyone else.
“Maybe one of us could try and get to the cars? We might be able to get a signal in the car park?” Ted suggested.
“Okay, off you go then,” Sid gestured towards the woods, in the general direction he thought they’d parked up.
“Don’t be stupid Ted! You go off in those woods alone you’ll get yourself lost or worse! Have we forgotten there is clearly a killer lurking out there!” Fern shouted, glaring at Sid.
“Maybe we should all go then? We shouldn’t be too far away from the car park, and it should be easy to direct a team back here,” Sandra suggested.
Clive mulled it over, though there was a voice in the back of his head that told him that it was the most obvious thing to do at that point. He gave a final look at Paul, before nodding to Sanda:
“Fine, we’ll do that then. Help Beth up please. No one gets left behind, and we only move once everyone is ready.”
“Yes, director,” Sid said sarcastically.
“Don’t be a dick at a time like this,” Sandra said sternly. “No one is in the mood.”
“Whatever, let’s just get on with it.”
With that, the group slowly set off. Beth walked unaided, but her pace was meandering, with Sandra having to prod her into keeping up.
“Odd though, isn’t it?” Ted spoke up, breaking the heavy silence that had fallen upon them all.
“What is?” Fern said, humouring him.
“That the phones all lost signal at the same time? They worked before when Clive was looking through the streams we were doing. Plus there’s something else that’s been bothering me…” Ted trailed off as he looked around.
“Bothering you? You have a brain to bother?” Sid muttered.
“No, just, where did the stars and moon go?”
As soon as he said this, everyone looked up, even Beth who seemed in her own world.
All that was above them was an inky blackness, the kind that you imagined you’d see if you looked into an never ending abyss.
“I can’t look anymore…” Beth spluttered, as she started to cough, falling to her knees. Clive was about to turn away as well when he felt something moving around in his head, a pain stuck him and he too fell. The others seemed to be affected as well, and only Sid remained standing, though his nose had started bleeding as he was grinding his teeth.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Ted frantically shouted, as he struggled to get to his feet. He lent down to help Fern when, before everyone’s eyes, he was pulled away, leg first. He was dragged through the undergrowth, and out of sight of everyone else.
Clive’s perception was altered, as all the events that were playing out in front of him made it seem distant, like he was watching something that had already been settled years ago. The voices of all his friends were muted as they cried out in horror, Fern racing into the darkness after Ted, but the sound of wood shattering and a ghastly scream and the sound of meat being pulled apart, spoke of Ted’s final moments.
“Clive!” Sandra pulled on his shirt, dragging him near her. “We’ve got to get out of here!” She hauled him to his fee, along with Beth.
“Fern?” Clive asked. Before Sandra could answer that, Fern’s scream was cut short as it sounded like she was choking on her own blood.
“It’s too late,” Sandra whimpered, she was trying to hold back tears.
“Why are you talking? RUN!” Sid shouted at them, he’d taken pole position of the group, leading them further into the woods. There was no planning here, no method. All that remained was their instinct to survive.
They kept on running, as time lost all meaning. Five minutes turned into twenty, twenty turned into an hour. No matter how far they ran, the trees bore the same shadows, and the same silence surrounded them.
“Enough! This is useless!” Sid threw his hands up, signalling the end of their flight. “How long have we been doing this for! And it’s still not even eleven o’clock! Whatever is chasing us…It’s won!” Sid started laughing hysterically. He sat against a tree, an unhinged smile plastered over his face. “All I wanted was to finally score some girls. Prove that I was a man.”
“You didn’t have to do that to prove you were a man,” Sandra wheezed, but she too, had given up on running. She helped Beth to sit first, as Clive unceremoniously slumped on a tree. “In fact, those things to me say you’re just a child pretending to be a man.”
“Shut up with the sanctimonious crap. You’ve been trying to get with Beth this whole fricking time! Don’t think I’ve never noticed the way you look with her, flirting with her just as much as I tried!” Sid used exaggerated hand movements with what he was saying.
“There’s a big difference between me and you! I’m not an arsehole for one thing! Second, you don’t want a relationship, you just want sex and nothing else.”
“Oh, know you’re saying everything that you’ve wanted to say, aren’t you?”
“Two of our friends have been murdered by some…thing. Might as well hold nothing back!”
“...And Paul,” Clive interrupted.
“Well..Yeah, but he most assuredly wasn’t our friend,” Sandra clarified.
“He was at one point, before my parents split up,” Clive explained somberly. “We used to have great fun, making movies in the garage, challenging each other to do better. Why did things have to change?” The admission had done nothing to alter the mood.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Beth admitted coldly. “What he did to me, his hands…reaching.” She grabbed herself and rolled onto her side.
“It’s okay, Beth. He’s gone now, he can’t hurt you anymore,” Sandra said, trying to be as soothing as possible considering what was happening.
Clive didn’t know how ro reconcile those versions of the person he had once known, He never had been able to. His thoughts drifted to Ted and Fern. He tried not to think of their final moments, what they would have been. Instead he thought of the pair’s usual antics, the way they injected fun into proceedings. He had gotten cross with them before, for not taking things too seriously, but he was still grateful that they were there. He wished he’d told them that when he had the chance.
“You can tell them soon enough.” A disembodied voice said, causing Clive to sit up straight, his face frozen in fear. To him, the voice sounded like everything terrifying in the world had meshed together, and decided to hang on the breeze. He didn’t dare look behind him or at any other angle, not wanting to see who the voice belonged to. That it was the voice of the killer was obvious, but that didn’t mean he wanted to prod the wasp’s nest. Judging from the looks on his remaining friend’s faces, they hadn’t heard anything, or they’d also look like Death had slid his skeletal palm across their necks, getting ready to snap them whenever he fancied.
“Who should I kill next, Mr director? You ought to be filming this! All those people who laugh at your silly show won’t be laughing once they see this footage.” The voice was almost whispering into his ear, Clive’s hair began to stand on end, as the presence lingered.
“I’m not choosing anyone!” To his horror, even his outburst, which surely wouldn’t have gone unnoticed to those sitting right next to him, was ignored.
“Who will it be then? One of the girls? The one you had playing the victim in your little movie certainly wasn’t very good was she. Her friend? It would be fun to completely break that spine of hers. I could kill the guy, shall I? One of those three who will it be?”
Clive tried not to think of an answer. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that the voice was in his head, feeding him lines only he could hear. The director had been reduced to a staring actor, one with only a few scenes left in him. A multitude of thoughts was pressing against his skull, as he desperately thought of a memory that wasn’t linked to any of his remaining friends. He put his ramshackle memory to the test, bringing any mundane thought or incident to bear. If this act of rebellion meant that a death was averted, then he would gladly do it till he breathed his last.
“How noble, protecting your friends, or just protecting your tools. How many times now have you viewed them as little more than the dolls you were moving around your stage? Surely, there must be one of them you value less, or they value less. If I was to ask them the same question, what would they tell me? Who would they say to save themselves?”
With that question, Clive couldn’t help himself, he thought about it logically, there could only be one solution. Both Beth and Sandra would name Sid because of all the times he’d gone on with them. Too late, did Clive realise that settling on one of them, gave the entity exactly what it wanted.
“Cheers for that, Sid it is! He wants to be touched so badly, let me do the touching!”
“Sid! Move now!” Clive yelled, wasting no time. He wished he could freeze the moment, explain to them what he’d been experiencing in the last few minutes, but he hoped that they trusted him enough to listen.
“What are you talking about?” Sid rolled his eyes in response. “We’re all going to fucking die out here, so the least you could do is give the orders a rest!”
“Sid!” Clive put his all into his last shout, but it fell on deaf ears. He, Sandra and Beth could only watch as Sid jerked forward as though something had struck him from behind, he jerked violently, blood spewing from his mouth in bursts timed as whatever it was forcibly entering his body. He lurched forward, arm outstretched, moving towards Beth.
“H-Help…H-h-help…M-me!” his cry was broken, the pitch all over the place. In one last moment, a black tendril erupted from his mouth, wrenching his head in half, and with that, Sid was dead. The tendril retreated quickly, letting’s Sid’s standing cadaver fall to the ground in a heap, the pieces of his head hanging loosely.
“N-n-n,” Beth started stammering, unable to take her eyes off the fresh corpse. Clive was the same. He wanted to confront who was playing with them, taking their lives with ease, but he couldn’t muster up the strength to speak, let alone act with such courage. Sandra had hauled Beth up to her feet, and forced her to face the other way, she looked over her shoulder, and motioned for Clive to move as well. Seeing Sid die like that had reignited a last reserve of energy, a desire to escape this hell hole they had wandered into.
“Go, run. It’ll only make things more entertaining,” the voice added its seal of approval to the plan. “Maybe you just need motivation. How’s this?” As if on cue, a multitude of black tendrils shot out from the forest, making it look like the trees themselves had come alive. Each one drove themselves into the ground near the survivors. Forcing them back lest they met a bloody demise. The three ran into the darkness, aiming themselves at any spark of light they could see, but no matter where they went, that damned voice was there to taunt them, wearing away any sanity they had left.
“Ohhh, you almost got away that time! A moment more and you might have lived…”
The three looked at each other, wanting to see any indication that they might make it out alive. Beth was despondent, now relying on Sandra to carry her. Clive was running on fumes, every breath feeling like it could have been his last.
“Are you really done? All the others ran for much longer. Guess it’s a sign of the times.” The voice echoed around them, but to Clive, it felt like it was coming from behind him. He turned and with everything he had, he shouted:
“Show yourself! If you’re going to kill me, at least let me see you!”
“You want to see me? Fine. I do love having my fun up close and personal.”
The darkness by the southernmost trees, the point where Clive was standing, started to shift and swirl, and from that space, a white pearlescent mask appeared, with two gleaming red eyes, a mass of hatred. A body emerged along with it, swathed in shadows, the black tendrils coming from its base. The head behind the mask looked like a young man with brown hair, but age was next to impossible to determine.
“Am I not what you were expecting?” the masked figure said. “I have other forms I can take if you prefer. The results will be the same no matter what.” The figure slid forward, using the tendrils to glide across the floor.
“W-What are you?”
“Bored. Killing you will put a smile back on my face. If you want a name, call me Void.”
“V-Void?”
Despite the mask, Void grinned, the fear that Clive and the others were radiating was almost subsistence enough to be a three course meal with all the trimmings. Void turned his head to look at Beth and Sandra, the former having almost retreated into the blissful release of a coma, The latter stared in horror at the being before them, having no words to fire back.
“Guess it’s time for all of you to die. You’re all broken beyond belief now,” Void laughed. His tendrils reared up to strike once more when the whole place started vibrating rhythmically, as though a pulse was being sent out from somewhere.
“Interference? Just when we were getting to the good bit as well!”
Way behind them all, an opening appeared, like a crack of light in the darkness, glinting just enough to offer a tantalising hope of escape.
Clive was the first to see it, and he swiftly realised he was the one standing in between the girls and the monster that had called itself Void.
He plucked up his courage. They were all there because of him. None of them had really wanted to be filming that night, having their own things to do. It had been him who pushed them to come to these woods, to make this video. This video was another in a long line of prospects that could have made his online venture work. It had been his selfish desire that cursed him, so now he had to set things right.
“What are you waiting for? You stupid monster! You picked on the easiest targets all night, is that because you couldn’t do anything else? You that weak!” He hurled as much abuse as he could think of, wanting to make sure that Void’s focus was nowhere else but on him. “And you two…Why are you still there? Run along. There’s nothing to see here.” Those words came out softer, the gentlest he’d had spoken to them in a long while. Sandra couldn’t understand what he was doing, why he would want to provoke such a creature with a barrage of cheap insults.
Clive motioned with his hand, a signal that he had often used when directing, indicating that she should look behind, so she did and saw the crack. Then it all became clear.
“Weak? You think I’m weak? I constructed the very world you’re walking on! I ripped that first friend of yours apart so easily! Who are you to call me, Void, first of the Shadows weak!” Void howled as the Tendrils reached out for Clive, surrounding him and offering him no chance to head for the crack with his friends. This is what he knew would happen though, Sandra had quickly made it to the shining light, and glanced back at her friend, as Void lifted him off the ground.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She threw herself and Beth through the crack and into the world beyond it.
“Well, aren’t you a hero,” Void said sarcastically. “I knew you were offering yourself up as a diversion to let them escape.”
“Then why didn’t you stop them?”
“Because my time is up, but at least I get to take away my new toy…” A portal resembling a black abyss opened up behind Void as the strange space they were in started to fall apart, the trees sinking into the ground. “Come along boy, I’ve such sights to show you!” With that, Void pulled Clive screaming through the portal, never to be seen again.
Sandra and Beth fell back into the woods, not far from where they had parked up. There was a mass of people around them, shining torches into their faces. After a call for medics had gone out, a lone woman approached them, informing them that everything would be okay from that point forward. Beth was pried from Sandra’s hands and placed on a stretcher so she could be fully examined. The only question that Sandra could bring herself to ask at that time was a simple one:
“W-Who are you?”
“We are Majestic,” came the reply, with no other accompanying detail. Not that Sandra cared too much, as she collapsed in the relief of her nightmare being over.
The woods had claimed more lives, adding to its curse.
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Hope you enjoyed that! The ending changed a bit during writing though Void was always a constant. I have to let him have some fun every once in a while!
Next week I'll begin a new tale...though I'm going to have break tradition a wee bit and have the second part drop the same time ad my usual writing report (which to be fair, will be short and sweet, as I've only had chance to write these blog stories this month! I'll dedicate November to Daemon Soul 2, hopefully get more chapters cranked out!)
Till next time,
Keep on writing!
Peter James Martin
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