Free Made to Break by D. Foy Page B

was all, shaking in the wind. I cast about, struggling to discern a figure or shape, something squirming hogtied in a bag near the edge of the glade, I didn’t care, I only wanted the what-was-what, even if that what was drastic. But I saw nothing but the rickety tent—not a clothesline, not a fire pit, not a chair or box or ice chest or stove, just a rickety, grimy tent. It simply didn’t make sense, this scene. What was the source of this odd light’s power? And who needed light to sleep in a tent, since pretty plainly nothing else was happening here? And why even a tent, in this of all wicked places? The last thing I wanted was to look inside, but knew I couldn’t do other. That no doubt would be the test. The tent could even have been booby trapped, I thought. The freak with his bear-hide cowl and dick-chin and bones could be lurking anywhere, really, patiently waiting me out, itsy bitsy fly that I’d then be. And that was all it would take, my stepping into the creepy glade, whereon the fiend could drill anarrow through my neck or maybe just wait snaggletoothed and grinning till I stepped in the jaws of the trap he’d camo’d at the front of the tent, then rush up to hack out the pieces of me he’d forthwith set to slobbering on while writhing in eldritch pain and eldritch horror I lay by watching, pathetic. A few minutes of this whimsy later, having been struck that I could stand there forever conjuring the scene of my demise, I set toward the tent, listening through the wrack for some atypical sound, however teensy, however bright, anything to presage if only by an instant my impending harm, pressing on through the aura the hammer of my heart had generated round me, turned by now half-puke/half-stone, my legs prehistoric sarcophagi. My vision had contracted into the space of the tent itself, buffered all around by a band of quivering mist. And the closer I drew, the farther away the tent seemed to get, until in the space of a step the distance vanished, and there I stood before the tent. It seemed almost a being itself, the tent, its canvas in the wind like the skin of a creature from the sea or the north, a leviathan, suddenly, hunkered in the mud, I could easily have believed. Somehow I’d taken the zipper in hand, itself already half undone, and slid it till the entrance material had crumpled at my feet. And yet when I leaned into the tent, expecting who knows what to materialize before me—a stack of corpses, a cache of grub, magazines of ammo, maybe, tent-top high—what should I find but… nothing. The tent was as empty as a dead man’s mind, not a scrap to be found, nothing so much as a wayward battery or dented cup, nor candy bar wrapper nor length of string nor nubbins of some candle. And it was then I saw the nature of terror, because it was then the nature of my predicament, like a toxic cloud, swallowed me utterly up. Terror, I realized, had nothing to do with time and space but with the absence of them, and with the incomprehensibility of that absence. There before that rottinglittle tent empty in the night in the glade in the forest in the heart of a pulsing storm, the emptiness of my life, and of my aloneness in it, usurped my thoughts with cruelty I couldn’t fathom. A cipher just the moment before, the tent was now clothed in the powers of a totem, implausibly vicious, and I was numb head to toe, not a single atom free. I turned away in my deadness and broke through the night, blind, numb, thoughtless, empty, dead, Frodo in his fog of malice having donned that hideous Ring. I don’t know how long I ran, but only that I ran till the earth resolved to steal my feet. My face had hit the mud at the base of the trail. I’d tripped on a branch, and lay in the mud, now, gasping for breath as once again the rain came down. When finally I rolled over and planted my hand, instead of the sense of slimy mud, the crinkle of cellophane brought me to.