Free Strangewood by Christopher Golden Page A

him?"
    She cried her son's name and went to him; pulled him from
his father's grasp. Emily called to Nathan again and again, each plaintive
query more helpless than the last. After a few moments, she noticed Thomas
again, and turned to roar at him in blind panic.
    "What the fuck's the matter with you?" she cried. "Call
an ambulance for God's sake! He's gone into shock or something!"
    As he sprinted to the phone, Thomas felt numb, as if it had
been he who had gone into some kind of shock.
    After he'd hung up the phone, he could barely recall having
spoken to someone at 911. He hoped he'd said the right things, but couldn't
really remember. He couldn't get Nathan's eyes out of his mind. The look in his
eyes. Or, more accurately, the lack of any discernible consciousness there. His
eyes had looked . . . vacant. The lights were on; nobody home.
    Somehow, his son was gone.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Nathan drifted for a long time. Floated along, as though
he were lying on a raft on a gently rolling river. Several times, he heard
sounds, grunts and labored breathing and the chirping of birds. There was a
smell, too. Like smoke.
    His eyelids began to flutter.
     
     
    Nathan woke up in the dark, thrashing against rough cloth
that had been tied around his wrists and ankles. He screamed for his parents,
Mommy and Daddy both, because even though they weren't together, they'd been
together when he went in to brush his teeth. Before . . .
    Before this.
    "Mommmmaaaaaaaa!" he screamed, and tears sprang to
his eyes, sliding down his cheeks quickly to make room for more.
    He struggled against his bonds and banged his head with a
clang against the metal whatever-it-was that he was laying in. Metal, smooth
and cool. He sniffled, looked up at the dark sky where huge orange stars
glittered, at tall trees, brown and withered, stooped as if to look at him
passing beneath. They looked like they were in pain, those trees.
    Somewhere, Nathan smelled a fire burning.
    He screamed for his mother again.
    "Ssssshut up, you little brat," a low voice
growled.
    Nathan craned his neck to look behind the metal container
inside of which he was being sped along under the stars. In the dark, green
eyes twinkled. Cat eyes. Orange starlight gleamed off long, razor sharp tusks.
    "You're not real," Nathan whispered.
    Instantly, he stopped moving, and his metal carriage —
a wheelbarrow, he realized — clanked to the ground. The green eyes moved
closer, and Nathan could really see him now, the huge saber-toothed tiger man
he'd always feared in his father's stories. But not clever and soft, like in
the stories. Cruel, instead of clever. Filthy and matted, instead of soft.
    Nathan closed his eyes and began to cry harder. Trying to
push it away. It wasn't real. He knew it wasn't because his Daddy had always
told him, promised him, that the stories weren't real. Just made up for kids,
for boys and girls like him.
    "Hear that, Cragssssskull?" Bob Longtooth said in
the dark beyond Nathan's compressed eyelids. "The brat ssssays we're not
real."
    A long, warm, furry paw lay across Nathan's face, and he
whimpered and peed his pants, something he hadn't done in more than a year. A
sharp claw scratched him, quickly, in the face, and he screamed, shrieking
horribly.
    "Kid could drive Christ off the cross," a low
voice muttered nearby, the sound of thunder rumbling.
    But Nathan wasn't listening. Nathan was screaming. He opened
his eyes, breath coming in hitching gasps, as the wheelbarrow was lifted again
and started to move.
    "Boo!" Bob Longtooth roared, and Nathan's
shrieking ratcheted up another notch. "Real enough for ya, brat?"
    Then both of them were laughing again, and Nathan continued
to scream, turning in the wheelbarrow to face away from Bob Longtooth. He could
see Cragskull now, an inhumanly broad-shouldered, ugly man, shorter than
Nathan's mother. His beard and hair long and dirty, his head split above the
left eye and a foul-smelling steam coming from within.
    Cragskull was