Maidei

Maidei sat in her favorite chair in the corner of the living room, nursing a cup of chamomile that Huang had made her. It was her comfort place—her only comfort place, as of late. Her nightmares had been keeping her from sinking into the bed she shared with her husband.

"I will be okay here on my own," Huang said softly. He sat across from her on the sofa, reading one of those trashy men's adventure novels he loved so much. He'd been on the same page since she told him she was considering a trip south.

"I know you will, but it's still unfair to you."

He glanced up at her over his reading glasses, smiling. "You will simply owe me one."

She sipped her tea. "I never paid you back for the last time I owed you one."

The last time felt like another life, Maidei a fresh postdoc and the mother of a young child. Huang had taken care of their three-year-old son during her Deadswitch Wilderness project, which had kept her on site in a trailer for eight weeks.

Huang pretended to return to his book. "I consider your success a repayment."

He was too nice to her. He'd always been too nice to her, and she wondered if his attitude would be different if he knew she'd been keeping secrets all these years.

Her eyes flitted to a photo of their son's graduation that she'd placed in a kitschy frame on the side table. "You'll need to help Bobby move into his dorm."

"I can handle it, Mai. Promise."

Maidei heaved a sigh, something she did when her chest tightened with anxiety. It was a way to tell her body it was fine, all the oxygen she needed was right here, in this room. There was no use worrying, yet.

She had told herself many lies over the years.

Maidei stood. "I'll be in my office. Come get me when you head to bed."

He nodded absently, and she left for the basement office, sitting in the dark amid bookcases and boxes of files.

The paperwork was all from the closed Deadswitch project—the stuff she didn't keep on campus. Stuff she hadn't shown Holden yet. Just because he seemed sincere didn't mean she trusted him, yet. Much like with Huang, she wasn't sure how he would react if she told him the whole of the truth.

The project had shut down shortly after the discovery of the flourishing lodgepole pines, the final absurdity of that summer. Three weeks before, Maidei took a walk to the ranger station to make a call.

The researchers had taken up residence in a few trailers near the border of Deadswitch Wilderness, the ranger station only a two-mile walk away. The familiar trail was worn and well traveled, and Maidei walked it often to get exercise. But that morning, consumed by her thoughts on how to get the study schedule back on track, Maidei halted in front of a fork in the path she didn't remember.

Not turning around was one of the worst mistakes of her life, but then she thought nothing of it. She was walking west. With the station south of her, she followed the left fork. A couple hundred feet later, unfamiliar lichen hung from tree boughs, the air dense with mist. The spruce looked more like Sitka than Douglas, which made no sense. Sitka spruce only thrived in the wettest parts of the Pacific Northwest.

It was too late to turn around. She'd wandered from the path, and no matter the direction she went, the thicket never eased up.

Four frightful nights passed in those woods. She thought she had died and hell was this forest, shifting beneath her feet and holding her hostage. She slept in spurts beneath layers of branches, needles, and lichen, surviving off a creek and spruce tips, and took a chance on ruffled fungi sprouting from dead trunks.

In the early morning after the third night, when she woke to pee, a shadow man waited for her in the thicket near her shelter. She couldn't recall his words, only that they were nonsense, and she swore off the fungi as she continued south, following the creek. The man followed a few paces behind wordlessly, as though she was his subject and he was merely observing her.

Trauma had smothered those memories, and Maidei remembered little more about this hallucination. The fourth night she never left her shelter, and woke in the morning on the dusty ground beneath a sugar pine to a ranger shaking her. He escorted her back to the research camp after feeding her tomato soup from his thermos.

She'd never told Huang. Getting lost a few miles from camp didn't happen to trained professionals, and that level of sheer terror was something unfelt at any point in her life prior. Her research group was just happy she was alive, except for Zaid, her field partner.

Despite Maidei's protests of not wanting to relive the horror of the past four days, Zaid begged for a rehash of every moment she'd been alone in those woods. Weeks later when they found those monstrous pines that grew and stretched into the sky right before their eyes, Zaid was not awestruck like the others. He'd been afraid. What had he said? That her disappearance wasn't a fluke. And the pines weren't an isolated phenomenon.

Something is wrong with these woods.

Maidei pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled to the very bottom of her contacts, tapping his name and pressing the phone to her ear.

"Hello, old friend," Zaid said when he picked up. "It's late."

"I know, but this is important," she told him. "It's about Deadswitch. Something else has happened."