Thomas looked up into the worried faces of both his aunt and uncle. They stood over him out on the deck, both of them trying to block out the intense cold that was nipping at their bodies. Thomas, on the other hand, had just awakened from a 7 hour sleep huddled down in the relative warmth of his leather jacket. He knew it had been a wise choice to buy the fancy Italian one, that actually buttoned up instead of having that awful zipper that is commonly seen in cheaper varieties. The leather was thicker than inferior jackets, and lining the inside was some sort of material that kept him warm if he stayed in it long enough. But the jacket was not what the two people standing over him wanted to hear about, neither did they want to know about his sleep. They wanted to know about their daughter, who was apparently still missing. Thomas could not truthfully tell them something that they wanted to hear.

“She went into the woods with Sean for a walk,” he grumbled, blinking away the sleep from his eyes, “I thought they’d be back in under an hour, but if she’s not upstairs then I dunno where they are right now. Probably still there, looking on as the pre-dawn animals come out to do whatever it is pre-dawn animals do.”

His uncle, Robert, walked away from him with his eyes focused on the deck floor. He was not a happy man. Thomas could clearly see that. But if he did not know where they were, what else was he to tell them? He looked at his aunt, Kathy. She was breathing deeply, with a faint mist coming out of her nose and mouth with each exhalation. She slowly ran her hand through her shoulder-length hair as she looked down at Thomas. He could feel her eyes staring at him intensely, and that feeling made him uneasy. He shifted a little in his seat as she spoke.

“All we asked for you to do was watch her for a few hours.” Her voice was soft but stern. She had a way of talking to you that made you feel either guilty or annoyed. At the moment, the latter was starting to build up in him. “That’s all,” she continued, “What could go wrong in that time? We come back to find the entire upstairs floor smelling of smoke and you asleep out here on the deck. What’s worse, Katie isn’t here.”

He suddenly snapped slightly and spoke to her in a gruff voice. “Look, her jersey got a little too close to the candle when the power went. You’re lucky that the whole house didn’t burn down. To add to that, she was sleepwalking again. AGAIN. You guys should really see someone about that, because it’s been happening more and more within the past year.

“Anyway, while I was on fire patrol, Sean was watching her. They went for a walk in the woods, most likely. We’ve done it so many times before. Katie has gone on similar walks too, and you know that. Now I don’t know exactly what went wrong this time for them to stay so long, but Sean knows these woods like nothing. If they’re not back by dawn then I’ll go looking for them.”

He shook his head as he panted loudly, his own breath forming mists in the atmosphere as well. They had gotten him worked up over what was really a trivial thing. Kathy seemed slightly surprised at his sudden outburst and she sat in the chair next to Thomas’.

Robert walked up to his nephew, and stood over him, glaring down. He would accept such behaviour from his aunt, but he would stand and face his uncle as two men should. He got to his feet and looked his uncle directly in the eye. Robert seemed to look at him as if he was not there, but Thomas looked right at him through narrowed eyes.

“ Now, Thomas…I’m not saying that Sean is irresponsible or that you were irresponsible, but the fact remains is that my youngest child is somewhere in those woods right now, when she should be in her bed sleeping.” He shook his head as he spoke and his upper lip curled upward slightly. “Sean is more than capable of taking care of her, and I trust him...but she isn’t home, Thomas. You want to wait until dawn? Dawn is still a couple of hours away. I want my daughter in her bed, Thomas. Now. Make that happen for me.”

The man was hopelessly inept at hiding his anger. It did not help that he was often angry, usually at Thomas. At the moment, Thomas could sense the anger in his voice, and he could see that Robert’s body was stiff with rage. Whether he was angry at the fact that Katie wasn’t home or he was angry at Thomas, it hardly mattered. He was still very angry. Thomas kept glaring at him through the narrow slits between his eyelids for what seemed like a very long time.

He eventually stepped aside and walked into the house. A minute later he walked back out. He could almost feel Robert’s stare all the way, down the deck steps to the yard, and across to the corner of the house. As he rounded the corner, he felt a sense of relief to know that nobody was staring a hole through him any longer. He opened the gate and turned onto the path into the woods. He started walking along the path, the moonlight and his immense knowledge of every bump, hole, rock, and tree along the way giving him more than enough to go by.

Many people would have been afraid of the woods late at night and early in the morning. The nocturnal animals would all be around, each of them making their distinctive noises as they carried out their survival routines. Every now and then he could hear an owl if listened closely enough, as well as a few other animals apart from insects. The insect noises were incessant and created a sort of background noise that he never really noticed unless he wanted to.

But despite all of the noise surrounding him, the woods always seemed darker than they should be when he entered it. If he gave himself enough time to get his vision straight, he could see more than enough from the moonlight filtering through the tops of the trees. He is certain that if it was totally dark he could still navigate his way through these woods. He knew them that well. So did Sean, which made it a little harder to believe that they would stay in there this long.

He kept walking through the carpet dead leaves and small twigs covering the path. In a little while he would come up on the stream. After that, it was just a simple matter of taking a side path from there that followed the stream and he would get to the lake that fed it. The lake was formed from an underground water source, and the runoff from it had created the stream. He remembered asking a question about it in grade school and that was the answer he was given. It made sense to him, and at that time that was all that mattered.

As he walked, he quickly began to get bored and pulled a pair of earphones out of his inside jacket pocket. Walking alone in the woods was a peaceful experience if you needed that, but at the moment he did not require or desire that peace. He stuck the earphones into his ears and fiddled with the controls of his MP3 player. In a few seconds he had music to listen to, and loud heavy metal music at that. The stream appeared before him and he crossed over the little wooden bridge that he, Sean and Mike had made when they were younger. He turned left along a side path and followed this, all the time bobbing his head in time with the music in his head.

He suddenly stopped walking and stopped the music. It had gotten dark in the last few seconds. That was an unnatural occurrence. He looked up at the sky, which he could not distinguish from the treetops. Both were absolutely dark. He shoved his hand into another pocket and pulled out a small but powerful flashlight. He switched it on and swept the thin beam around him. This was unusual. Normally a three-quarters moon would not just disappear from the night sky. He kept walking, keeping the beam of light in front of him. Despite knowing the woods well enough to navigate it without sight, it was odd to have to actually do it. Up ahead would be the little lake. He could hear the difference in the way the stream flowed. He could not hear any of the night creatures any longer, even though he was in one of the thickest parts of the woods and the animals should have been aplenty in the environs. Only that incessant chorus of insects kept making itself heard, but even they seemed quieter than when he had first walked into the woods.

The lake opened up in front of him and he scanned the light around. The light reflected off of the water and cast shimmering points of light on the trees surrounding the small clearing in which the lake was located. He walked around the water’s edge and sat down on a log that the three of them had put there many years ago for that very purpose. He switched off his light and tried to focus on the water. Still nothing. The night was still as unusually dark as it had been for the past few minutes. He closed his eyes and lay down along the length of the log, trying to think of anything that could give him a clue as to where Katie was at the moment. He knew that Sean could handle himself and Katie, but his uncle was holding him directly responsible for Katie not being at home. He needed to return with something positive, but nothing positive came to his mind.

“Where the hell are you? I have no idea what’s riding on this but I don’t want to find out.” The water, having no light to reflect anymore, seemed to reflect his empty words back at him. It added to the sense of desolation. The place seemed to buzz, but no longer with insects. It was as if some sort of electricity was running through the air. It made his hair stand on end and the feeling unnerved him. He closed his eyes and remained that way for some time.

He opened his eyes after a few minutes and was a bit surprised to find that he could see the night sky again. The moon was apparently back, and giving off all of its light. The silvery beams filtered through the trees and cast faint shadows around him. He sat up and looked across the surface of the water again as something caught his eye. He frowned and got up and switching his flashlight on to take a closer look. There was something floating on the water in the middle of the lake.

He shined the light on it and almost jumped backwards in shock and amazement. It could not be real. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him. He turned around and walked up to the nearest tree. He started bashing the flashlight against its trunk until the light died and the body of the flashlight broke in his hands. A stab of pain shot up his left arm but he ignored it. That image needed to be burned from his mind somehow, and this unnerving feeling needed to go away.

He let his grip go limp on the broken pieces of the flashlight and they fell to the ground. He sat back down on the log and buried his head in his hands and stayed that way for a long time. Slivers of broken plastic and glass pierced his skin and he could feel his warm, sticky blood running down the length of his forearm. He was hurt, but his physical pain did little to dampen the emotional pain that had happened when he saw what he did. His head remained buried in his hands. At least he would not be able to see through his hands. The image was still burned into his mind, though.

The next time he lifted his head up, dawn was approaching and the sky was beginning to become brighter and a little pinker. He almost did not want to look back at the middle of the lake to confirm what he had suspected was really floating there, but he had to. As he looked at it for the second time, he shook his head and buried it in his hands again.

Katie’s pink nightgown was floating in the middle of the lake.

(Coming soon: Chapter four - Blood)

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