Her mind made up, she darted for the park entrance.
On either side of the street loomed tall and haughty window-faced Victorian homes. They seemed to watch her as she veered past, taking the one-way blacktop road that curved upward into the park. Soon, the houses and buildings and streetlights fell away. Her path narrowed to a single, twisting lane of asphalt. Rows of trees and thick underbrush emerged on either side of her. The farther into the park she ran, the denser the surrounding forest grew.
Overhead, the interlocking patchwork of hanging boughs worked to transform her pathway into a darkening tunnel. Through the lacework of limbs, thick clouds inched by.
Isobel ran on, listening to the soft beat of her sneakers as they pounded the blacktop. She couldn’t wait to get home and into a hot shower. She thought about making herself some peppermint tea and maybe even going to bed early, even though she couldn’t say it was because she was looking forward to tomorrow.
Darkness crept in around her, spreading its fingers through the trees, working to smear them into a single black blur.
As she approached a fork in the road, she slowed, but only long enough to decide that she should keep going straight. She’d somehow forgotten that the city didn’t keep the park roads lit, and she hoped that if a car came up it would have its lights on, that she would hear it, and that the driver would see her.
She kept running, her breath the loudest sound in her ears. The only sound.
She frowned, at last admitting to herself that something had felt funny since she’d entered the park. Only now, however, could she place her finger on what.
She slowed her run to a jog, listening to the lonely, hollow clap of her sneakers.
Quiet.
Everything around her stood really still and really . . . quiet.
The breeze that had greeted her outside the bookshop had vanished somewhere between there and here, and she looked up now to find the tree limbs motionless, their leaves immobile.
Or were those leaves at all?
A black shadow moved in one of the trees, and Isobel registered the silhouette of one huge black bird. It made no sound, though it seemed to watch her from its perch. One of the leaves at its side moved. Another bird. Soon, with a ruffle of feathers, she noticed another and, on her other side, another.
One of them broke the silence with a caw, the sound falling harsh on her ears, rasping and raw.
Spooked, Isobel picked up the pace again, glad that cheerleading had kept her in such great shape. True, she wasn’t the world’s best runner, but she could keep going if she needed to, and right now, she needed to.
She wondered, an ice-water sensation rushing through her veins with the thought, if Bess could have followed her. Could poltergusties—or whatever they were—could they follow someone? Stick to them like parasites?
Isobel shook off the convulsive shudder that rattled its way through her shoulders. Stupid idea. No such thing as ghosts. Only stupid boys with morbid fascinations and old men who liked to slam doors.
Maybe the stillness was just her imagination. After all, this was a park. Parks were supposed to be placid. Serene. Maybe she just missed the sounds of traffic and people and the glare of artificial light. Besides, everything died in the fall anyway, right? All the little crickets had chirped their last sometime back in early September.
Still, she couldn’t help feeling that there should have been some sounds. Like a dog barking. Or a foraging squirrel. A rabbit or something.
She slowed to a stop again, this time so she could catch her breath. She leaned forward, clasping her knees, her own huffing all but reverberating in the silence. She glanced over her shoulder at the darkening stretch of road behind her, black, like a ribbon of ink. She looked forward once more. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the entrance to her neighborhood lay straight ahead from where she stood right now. If she was right, she’d enter a block behind her house and be home maybe even with a few seconds to spare.
But something else felt wrong now, and it wasn’t just the stillness.
Since she had stopped running, the air around her had seemed to compress, to grow denser. She couldn’t explain it, but it felt as though the night itself, unnatural in its calmness, had begun to move in on her, to close in tight.
Her nerves prickled. Along her neck and arms, all hairs raised to stand on end.
The idea that you could feel like you were being watched had always sort of struck Isobel as being corny in a Scooby-Doo kind of way. Now, though, as she turned and looked around at all the black trees with their skeletal arms tangled in a silent fight for space, she couldn’t help the sudden feeling that, somewhere among them, something watched her, waited for her to move again.
