The Far Side of the River

“Run!”

The word shredded up through the trees, managing to rise out of the snarling, the ripping, and the scrabbling. Emily pounded her way through the brush, trying to take the word on its own. Frantically blotting out all the words that surrounded it. Willing herself to hear a plea to save herself – miles away from what Nathan was actually screaming.

“Don’t run! Help me!”

But there was no helping Nathan. The cruel truth of it stung like acid in the back of her throat. It jarred with everything she believed about herself.

There had been shared moments, perhaps most in the sweaty clutches beneath campus apartment sheets, when she had flattered herself that she would have given her life for him. Or that she couldn’t imagine what her world would be like without him. But, faced with the bald fact of his blood? The pure animal brutality that boiled into the realm beyond hatred, or even reason? Emily’s deeper self took over, and all that was left was survival.

“Please!”

His voice gurgled and ripped with the strain of terror and his fight. But, it was already so far behind her it might as well have been a dream. Doubtless, it would worm its way into her sleeping hours for the rest of her miserable life.

The whip of branches drove her on, and her aching feet thundered through the scrub and fallen pine needles. After an unimaginable night, the dim rays of morning threaded between her racking ribs with the faint, taunting sensation of hope.

Downhill, she huffed to herself over and over again. To the bottom of the valley.

That’s where the river was. If she could get to the other side, all of this would be behind her. Explaining the loss of her friends would come after that, as would the vain hope that anybody would believe her. Legends were one thing when spilled out around a boozy campfire, but they were something entirely different dictated under the fluorescent lights of a police station.

Provided she ever got to one.

Her foot caught on a stone, and a blistering stab of pain shot up the length of her leg. The full career of her flight found her midair for a single, dizzying second, before slamming her into the craggy hillside, sending her tumbling into a bruised heap.

She lay on her side for a second, assessing the damage and panting miserable breaths into a painful chest. Above her tortured gasps, the air was still. Nathan had gone silent. The realization crystalized into an icy sphere in the center of her heart. She wasn’t far enough away that his voice would have been swallowed by distance. No, if she couldn’t hear him, it was because there was nothing to hear.

The Wolf of Thacker Hollow had won. Squeezing her eyes shut, Emily ground the back of her head into the soil, working to keep a sob from breaking out into the open and giving her away. Hot tears pooled between her eyes and nose, and for a perilous moment, she almost gave over to despair.

But, a sound dragged her back to herself. The silvery burble of water resonated inside her chest like the call of a siren. Bolting upright, she looked to find the lowest point of the valley a few hundred yards ahead. In the very cleft of it ran the stream, and the other side promised freedom.

All the stories said the wolf couldn’t cross running water. It couldn’t so much as set a foot inside the stream.

If I can just reach that water, she thought, I’ll be safe.

Scrambling to her feet, she fell back into her run. Her legs screamed under the strain, but she forced herself forward. Even if her bones shattered with the effort, she was crossing that river.

And then, the air around her changed. It thickened in the way that only darkness can offer. As if the silent horror of midnight closed like a fist on every side – and she knew the beast was close.

The river itself was still a short distance off, but Emily was closing fast on a stagnant pool. Perhaps thirty feet across, it spilled from the side of the river into an eddy thick with slime, fallen branches, and bobbing pine cones caught in the lazy recesses. It wasn’t running water, but it was something.

Besides, the silence had grown so dense that her ears rang with it. The pounding of her pulse warred with the maddening grip of something beyond nature, threatening to tip her into oblivion. The pool might not offer the pure salvation of the river, but she had to risk it.

Sitting on the bank for the flash of a moment, Emily spun her gaze wildly through the trees behind her, searching for any sign of the doom hanging from every branch. Just because she didn’t see anything didn’t mean there was nothing to see.

Swallowing hard, she slipped into the brackish water.

It was deeper than she expected, and so cold that she could feel all of her bones at once. As if breathing wasn’t hard enough, the frigidity forced what little air she could swallow out of her lungs. Clenching her jaw against the cold, she forced her back against the bankside until submerged rocks and broken branches dug into her skin.

A small outcropping of stone ran along one side of the pool, and she ground herself under it as far as she could. The water was high there, and she tipped her head back, pressing her lips to the gritty underside of the stone to sneak in what air she could. Her mouth filled with the heady musk of moss and dark soil, flecks of dirt and pebbles peppering onto her tongue.

Craning until she was able to get one eye into the clear, she stared in every direction, searching for some glimpse of their midnight terror. As much as her insides burned for want of air, she forced herself to breathe narrowly. To satisfy the fullness of her need would surely have drawn the attention of her hunter.

Beneath the green scummed surface of the pool, her hands fumbled and clutched for purchase. This was not a refuge to linger in. It was an intermediate space. She still needed to close distance on the fresh, running stream. The place where the fast moving water would wash away the footing that evil hoped to find.

Slowly, she inched her way along the underside of the ridge. Being submerged slowed her progress to a debilitating degree, but she held fast. The pond offered cover, and that she desperately needed.

Within a few feet, she reached the limit of what little cover the outcropping could afford her. The rock was slightly higher, and Emily was able to tip her head until her nose remained just above the fetid surface. From there, she could see the banks around her in earnest, as well as the distance to cover until she reached the river.

It might only be half a dozen strokes away, but the exhaustion and terror in her bones were bound to make this already feeble swimmer worse. Still, with no sense of where the beast of legend was, to launch out into the open seemed an incalculable risk.

Maybe he’s gone, she thought wildly. Maybe he loses power after sunrise. That was no part of any of the stories she had researched about this mythical terror. Lore is notoriously difficult to unpack, as sources are all unreliable and necessarily bent more on scare impact than fact. But, surely that was part of every legend? The primacy in the hours of darkness, vanquished by the morning sun. Every child knew that the sun was the enemy of nighttime evil.

A drip in plashed in front of her, reeling her back to the horror of her situation. Only a few inches from her face, something had dropped into the pool. Not the clear, moist clap of water. Something denser. Richer. She knew without knowing.

Another drop. Followed by a thread-thin rivulet of crimson.

The beast was on the crag just above her. Waiting. It knew exactly where she was.

Of course it does.

Her heart froze into a tiny stone in her chest. Emily’s whole body seemed to shrink and expand at once. Deep within her, some instinct took over. The part of her beyond where humanity passed into the primal need to survive.

Tilting her chin up, she sucked in a massive breath, and plunged under the filmy limits of the pond. Her body coiled like a spring, and she planted her feet against the mucky side of the pool. With an explosive snap, she sprang into a line as taut as an arrow, and surged out into the water.

Just as the drag threatened to slow her she gave a massive kick, forcing her arms towards her hips, and burst forward again.

Yes.

Again, the slowing of inertia, and again the furious rush forward.

More.

A crash in the water behind her detonated with devastating force. Instead of the impact pushing her further along, it seemed to create a vacuum. A dark, voided ache that pulled her backward. All the fragile victory glittering behind her breastbone soured into bile. Slashing at the water with hopeless fingers, she begged for another stroke toward the river.

Searching out a kick, she fought the backward momentum with all the strength she had left. But the beast behind her was taking no chances.

Her right foot hung on something. Wrested at the ankle by the yoke of a fallen tree, or something equally firm. Only when the pressure of it doubled to the point of pain did the truth break over her. He had her.

Opening her mouth to gasp or scream, all she managed was to suck a thick, hateful sphere of lifeless water into her lungs. It stung unimaginably, filling her with splinters of pain that ran through every fiber of her body.

Coughing it out, she kicked again, hoping at least to break the surface and find air. But the Wolf bucked backward, pulling her leg so that she could feel the tendons all the way past her knee. Which ones held, and which ones surrendered to his teeth. It was too much.

I’m not going to die, she screamed to herself, and again the animal in her rose in answer. Balling herself over into a knot, she reached back with ravening hands. The heaviness of herself in the water gave each savage move a balletic slowness, but the fury inside her boiled to the point of insanity.

Finding the head of that monster locked below her, Emily’s hands turned into claws. She snatched at the beast in every possible way, tearing at his lips and eyes. Cutting her fingers to ribbons as she tugged along his teeth in a demonic attempt to pry herself free. At last, she focused on his eye, digging at it with malicious intent.

Something gave. A soft, queasy rupture, and the pressure at her heels evaporated. It was all Emily needed, and she thrashed around. No longer intent to hide beneath the surface, she floundered upwards, howling in an almost painful heft of air when she crested.

In the midst of her submerged tangle, she had covered ground. Despite her body feeling like a bundle of ropes and sticks, she forced herself along. The pond grew shallower until pebbles and stones smacked at her knees and shins. At last, she caught grip enough to drag forward and crawl to fresher water.

The feel of it was immediately different. Gone was the murky, dismal grip of the mire. Everything was crisp, even dazzling in its clean rush. All the horror cascaded off of her and whistled away, washed downstream to be lost forever.

Every muscle released at once, and she collapsed into the cold, losing her breath for a moment as the surges dragged it away. Shaking her head, she forced herself upright on her palms. Just ahead was a water worn shaft of tree lodged against a stone. With a little scrambling, she reached it, turning around to rest her back against it. After all, she was safe now. The beast couldn’t touch her here.

The water at her hips was red, and she gingerly lifted her knee to assess the damage below. Thankfully, the icy numbness of it all kept any real pain from rising up to swallow her, and when she saw what the Wolf had done, she was grateful for it.

A healthy flap of skin pulled back, showing bone and purple flesh beneath. The shock of it was too much to register at first, and Emily probed at it as if it were a wound belonging to someone else. Some cadaver in one of the anatomy labs she hustled past when she needed to take a shortcut.

The water continued to blossom red around her, and she closed her eyes to keep from focusing on the places where the blood visibly leaked out of her. It needed to be bound. Something needed to be done, or she would never make it. Crossing the water was one thing, but it was still a steep climb back to where they had left their car the evening before.

All that made worse by the fact that she didn’t know just where she was along the trail.

Don’t, she told herself, biting back hard against despair. Don’t come this far and lose hope.

“It’s bad.” The voice shot through to her core, and she snapped her head to find a man sitting among the leaves to her left. He was naked, with high cheekbones, and deep bronze skin. His hair hung about his shoulders in a slick, black hanks, and the whole of him was glistening wet. He dabbed at his eye with his wrist, licking lightly at the blots of blood he drew away.

Emily’s lips parted in disbelief, and her eyes swelled forward in her head. He was on what should have been the safe side of the river. The man regarded her with the faintest hint of a smile, then nodded vaguely upstream.

“There’s a bridge.”

The simple statement cut through her as surely as any blade.

Of course there is.

So, they sat there. This creature out of legend sat on the hillside, between Emily and any hope of escape. She couldn’t run. And once out of the water, he wouldn’t have to become a wolf again to take her apart.

The only place in the world she was safe was exactly where she sat. In the middle of an unnamed river in the bottom of Thacker Hollow, with her own blood rushing past her. So, Emily resolved to own what little control she had.

She sat in the water, and returned to nature.