Chapter Eight
Landon turned the camera on and they started down the steep hill. “And we’re off on a midnight journey into the woods,” he said dramatically behind the camera.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” Ness told him, ruining the moment. It might have been eight o’clock, but the sky was as dark as it would have been at midnight.
The hill was slippery and jagger bushes covered the ground. Ness felt one dig into her knee through her jeans, but she ignored it and kept on walking. The wind blew and trees rustled. She almost fell and tumbled down the hill twice—it would have been a painful ride.
At the bottom of the slope, there was a tarmac road right in front of the woods. “Where does this go to?” Ness asked.
“Up to my street,” Max replied.
“Then why didn’t we just follow it?” she asked.
“It takes out of the adventure,” Jonas told her, winking into camera. Landon turned so that the camera stared out into the trees. “Now comes the hard part,” Jonas said.
They walked into the trees and paraded over mud, wet leaves, branches, and fallen trees. Max was in the lead, followed by Jonas, then Ness, and then Landon with the camera.
Max walked expertly through the obstacle course, picking out the path and only cursing once when he stepped in an animal hole. Every now and then he’d say, “Let’s go this way,” or “it’s over there.”
Jonas looked around and watched for attacking animals, armed with his mop. He knew the paths just as well as Max did, and he argued some directions with Max. “No, we should take that way, it’s a lot easier. And there’s probably not as much mud.”
Ness tried to have her eyes up and constantly scanning for mad cows, but found it hard to do. She had to keep her eyes on the ground or she’d topple into Jonas. That was the last thing they needed: a domino effect down the hillside.
Landon held the camera and the flashlight, making horror-movie noises and commentating from behind the camera as if he were doing a documentary. He watched so that Ness wouldn’t fall; she didn’t know the woods like the three boys did.
“Don’t step over the ledge,” Max said after five or ten minutes of hiking.
“I hear water,” Ness remarked.
“That’s why you don’t want to step over,” Jonas told her. “It’s a long way down, plus there’s a creek that you don’t want to fall in to.”
“Do you see the bridge we built?” Max asked, and Landon zoomed the camera a little further down into the woods.
“Yeah, I do,” Jonas said, squinting in the dim light. Ness could just make out the bridge over the creek. They walked on, with Landon making noises from the movie “Friday the Thirteenth.”
“Stop that!” Ness teased, shaking a finger at the camera. Landon laughed.
It was so dark that the single bobbing beam of the flashlight didn’t help at all. Ness kept tripping over her own feet, wishing that she could just move everything out of the way with her power. But where’s the adventure in that? her mind whispered, mimicking Max’s voice.
Finally, they were at the bridge. It was just a wide board held up by things Ness couldn’t see—but she did see a few huge rocks in the middle.
“Two one-hundred-fifty pound rocks we had to move,” Max explained, pointing.
“How’d you manage to do that?” Jonas asked, following Max across the bridge.
“Hey Landon, show them how strong it is.”
Landon jumped up and landed—hard—on the wood.
After they crossed the creek, they were no longer going down, but up again. Ness noticed that the woods were shaped like a big, wide V, with the creek at the vertex.
“Here’s the outpost,” Max said in a tour-guide voice. “Well, what’s here of it, anyway.”
What looked like the beginnings of a house was perched on the hillside, with two trees leaning against one side of the floor. “That’s going to be the door,” Max told them, pointing at the opening between the two trees. The walls weren’t up yet: it was just a foundation and a floor, if that.
“Scan around with the flashlight, Landon,” Jonas said. “Make sure there’s nothing around us.”
“That’s why I want to get this finished; then we won’t have to worry about that.” The boys watched the bouncing beam of the flashlight, but Ness was looking in a different direction.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped, staring the opposite direction of the flashlight.
“What?” Jonas asked.
“Do you see that light?”
“Turn off the flashlight,” Max snapped. Landon did so.
“What is it?” she asked. The three boys shook their heads as if to say, “Who knows?”
The light came closer and closer. Landon tried to zoom in on it with the camera, but it bleached out the picture. Slowly, he put the camcorder on the wooden floor.
“Landon, try to see what it is,” Max suggested.
“No, stay here,” Ness pleaded, fear gripping her chest.
“Guys, no. I told you, I’m not doing that…”
“Alright, so you’d rather be eaten or killed by whatever’s out there?” Jonas asked. “Come on—please.”
“It’s probably nothing—” Landon began—and his voice was abruptly followed by an animal howling. He sighed and said, “Alright, fine. I’ll do it.”
“No, Landon, stay here,” Ness said again.
“I’m going to stay here,” he reassured her. “Shhh.”
Ness felt incredibly confused as she watched Landon stare at the spot, concentration tense in his features.
He felt his mind cast out, and he was suddenly rushing past the trees at a terrifying speed. The light was getting bigger, closer…but he was still far away, standing on the platform with three other people…yet he was rushing upon the light….
…It was a horrible feeling of duality, of being in two places at once. He hated it—this was the reason he never used his power! What if the light was some innocent guy walking a dog, and he ended up hurting them? What if he somehow hurt Max, Jonas, or Ness?…
…He was at the light. There was no substance to it; the Thing was just pure light without a source. There wasn’t a mind to connect to, but a presence inside of it…a presence that he could detect nothing from. He drew back.
Suddenly, with a rushing in his ears, he was back on the platform. Landon had snapped back into his own head with such a force that he had to step backwards to keep his balance. It had never been that strong before…
“What is it? What did you find?” Max was asking.
“Nothing. There was nothing to read,” he told the two boys. He was breathing hard.
“What are you talking about?” Ness whispered. She stood two steps back from the rest, her mysterious purple eyes filled with confusion. Her head pounded with a feeling of not belonging, of being out of the loop. She never felt that way around these people since the day she’d met them…but now there was something she was totally out of.
They looked back at her sympathetically, their own eyes just as strange as Ness’s.
“I’m sorry,” Landon said quietly. “You probably don’t want to hear this, but—”
He opened his mouth to explain…but the light hit.
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