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The trees scream and Travis with them, Lottie whispers him to let it feel, to be one with The Wilderness, Travis tries to escape, covers his ears, closes his eyes and counts to himself, but Lottie pushes his hands away, forces him to listen, to It, to her, its priestess, when they blur together and become one, when he sees her again with golden antlers about to sacrifice him, the stag. Before he realize it, he lunges at her neck like a cornered animal.
Natalie kisses him and he loves her, her hands slipping beneath layers of clothing, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. Travis doesn't understand it, he comes, forcing his discomfort to remain in a hidden place in his mind.
Nat taught him how to touch her, and that part is always good. He likes to feel her breath on his neck, making him sweat despite the cold that chills him to the bone, to feel her scratch his shoulders, the back of his neck, cursing when he curves his fingers inside her like that.
He tries to focus on that, on pleasing her, but Nat shrinks with every gentle refusal to satisfy him, and Travis feels her wondering if there is something wrong with him, or worse, wondering if there is something wrong with her.
The fragile layer that held them together breaks before the ice under Javi's feet, they both know it, and after the first bite of his little brother's raw heart, he offers the next one to Nat at the feast, freeing her from guilt.
The taste of blood is that hunger that no one in that cursed forest can satisfy, the taste of blood is Travis between Natalie's legs, eating her with nauseating voracity, never enough.
The trees show him frogs croaking like he never thought they could, piling on top of each other, vicious like the girls in Doomcoming on him. Travis sees himself beneath them, engulfed by that disgusting slime, his naked body stained, wrong engraved on his flesh. To this day, he still has reservations about undressing, even if summer is as suffocating in the forest as its winter was, uncomfortable in his own skin as if hands were still groping his body.
He's repeating a pattern that takes him time to identify. As a child, he wondered if he would grow up to be like his father, only to discover now that he's much worse. His father exploited the innocence of others for sex, he's exploiting it for It.
He watches Akilah enter the cave and wonders if that's how girls feel when they offer a sacrifice. Except that Van told him she wasn't ashamed of survive. The acolytes of The Wilderness may be stronger than Judas, Travis feels his Catholic upbringing weighing on him more than ever, drowning out the screams of the trees and leaving him with his guilt.
When Nat asks him if he's sure about Akilah's visions, he stutters. Everything is a stutter with Akilah.
Lottie has not hesitated to welcome her, infecting the seed of It in her heart, waiting to sow the fruits that everyone will eat despite being forbidden.
Travis wonders where his lie blurs with the truth, how plausible the relationship between frogs devouring each other like them are, with Akilah appeasing the animals like a pagan deity, the only benevolent one in those woods, as if she were the only one who could appease them once they become part of The Wilderness, if they don't already. But deep down he knows the truth: he was drugged and weak, and poor, sweet Akilah was the closest one to be his offering. Whether exists hell or It, he knows he already belongs there.
“Are you really studying?” He asked her one morning outside the cabin, rifle on his back and a couple of dead squirrels hanging from his hand, incredulous.
Before the first winter, before Javi, before everything.
He had gotten up at dawn, sneaking out with the first timid twinkle on the horizon, behind Coach and Nat's back, to hunt for himself, needing it. It seemed he wasn't the only one.
Akilah chuckled softly without looking up from the worn book on her lap, sitting on the log as if she had been waiting for the newly arrived breakfast.
“You sound like Mari,” She said with exasperated affection, a dimple appearing. “We'll get out here. I have to be ready for the SATs by then.”
She said it as if it were an irrefutable fact, as if she were as certain of it as she was that the sky was blue, and even then, it hit Travis like a ton of bricks.
When the plane exploded with Laura Lee and saw Lottie crumble in the water, he knew that even though they weren't close, he would crumble in the same way if anything happened to Akilah.
Where Lottie professed sense to The Wilderness, people like Laura Lee and Akilah brought hope to people, and It seemed to know that, rushing in to destroy them.
Farleigh only fucked around with freshman girls. Travis used to respond to his homophobic taunts with that pathetic fact, contemptuous. No girl of their age was stupid enough to give him a second glance, so he circled like a vulture around girls who were easily impressed by a senior with a motorcycle.
Disgusting, repulsive, just like his own father was with the girls on the team.
Travis feels nauseous every time he finds himself looking at Akilah a second longer than strictly necessary. I'm worried about her, he tells himself, I'm responsible for what happens to her. But beyond that, Akilah is beautiful in a sacred way, untouchable even though he can't look away.
It's not like he wants to touch her, not like that.
Akilah is a junior, she was when her plane crashed anyway, he had just graduated. Two years difference shouldn't be a big deal, but he knows, he feels deep down in his gut how he's replicating his father's pattern in some twisted way, using a fucked-up position of power that The Wilderness, Lottie, has imposed on him, poisoning her with promises that are nothing but gas.
“During winter, I spent several days taking care of the corpse of a little mouse, convinced that it was alive.”
He had just carried her out of the cave in his arms, semi-conscious, Lottie disappearing after stroking her sweaty forehead, in search of water to revive her like a doting mother. Travis thinks she's still hallucinating, opening his mouth to calm her down Akilah interrupts him, looking at him with heavy eyelids from where he has laid her down in the grass, lucid but not quite.
“Named him Nugget. I hid him from Mari and the others, I promised to take him home with me,” She continues in a dry voice that precedes a cough, and somehow, at the same time, watery and tearful. “Tai heard me talking to him, she showed me he was dead. It was just a skeleton in my hands.”
He recognizes how Akilah's breathing begins to become ragged, forced. She's having a panic attack.
He remembers how Lot placed a hand on his chest, how she returned air to his lungs. But he can only dare to place his fingers around her shoulder, hesitant, afraid to touch her.
“I tried to gnaw on his bones, to eat the little flesh that was left.” She hyperventilates. “I spat it out, I felt nauseous.”
Akilah cries openly now, clutching his arms as if she needs Travis to hear her. As if she needs him to know the gangrene that The Wilderness has left in her.
She reminds him of Lottie, somehow. Forcing him to listen. This time he doesn't fight it (It). This time, he knows he deserves it.
“I'm sorry.” Akilah chirps, distressed, holding his gaze with an overwhelming intensity.
The cave's fumes absent or too present in her words.
Lottie reappears with a bottle of water before he can ask why she's apologizing.
As if the night knew, it prevents him from sleeping despite the berry wine.
He finds himself thanking It. His attempt to stop Natalie purely symbolic, knowing that he could do nothing except stay by her side. Accompany her in the loss of a father figure, just as she accompanied him.
He will never stop loving her, he realizes in his numbness. He will never stop trying to protect her despite the possible consequences. The Queen, the loss of Javi; the empty shell of the coach, their presumed bridge. In moments of weakness, he still believes Lottie for a second, that The Wilderness, The Darkness responds to their actions.
It doesn't matter, anyway. His feelings for Nat are stronger than his fear of God, stronger than Akilah and her prophecies. Tangible and lacerating like sex.
He circles the pot in which Mari is heating the fermented berries like a stray dog. Lottie used to bless their drinks with blood, incense, and ashes before he and Nat left at dawn in search of Javi, making sure they would return. Now, however, he feels like an altar boy trying to steal the sacramental wine.
Mari is the only one who is not softened by his loss, so she rarely indulges him in his weakness. He feels a reluctant respect for her.
They both sit silently in front of the fire, enveloped in the bittersweet steam that dries his mouth, more craving than thirst.
Mari is then distracted, cursing when her flesh brushes against the hot handle. You can almost hear everyone's stomachs in the cabin growl in unison, but she doesn't flinch, unperturbed, breaking an old abandoned shirt they use as a rag with her teeth and wrapping the fabric around her hand, stirring the liquid in the pot again while keeping an eye on Akilah.
Travis follows her gaze. Akilah leans back against Taissa, letting her braid her hair. At first, he thought that as a fellow black girl, Tai had offered to help out of kindness. After learning that Akilah wouldn't be here if it weren't for Allie's injury, he knows the truth.
Guilt was a much more powerful motivator than kindness.
“She's stopped studying.” Mari mutters, frowning at the burgundy waves she stirs with her spoon.
So what? It's on the tip of his tongue, but then he remembers that morning outside the cabin and feels another weight of grief on their shoulders.
“Why?” Asks instead, his voice quiet, turning his gaze back to the embers.
Mari shrugs with a grimace, as if she didn't expect to have this conversation with him even though she was the one who brought it up.
“She wanted to be a doctor. She told me she might specialize in pediatrics.” She murmurs distractedly.
Travis then remembers how it was Akilah who stitched Van's wounds after the wolves, who assisted Shauna's childbirth alongside Misty. She has a calling, no doubt about it.
“And?”
Mari turns her head to look at him as if he were stupid. She makes him realize.
It was Akilah who held the dead baby in her arms. She was the one who arranged the crib before their arrival, remembering her nephew.
“Oh.” That's all he can say.
Silence falls over them again, even more somber if possible.
Later that night, he sits next to Nat, counting the cartridges they have left.
“You could teach Akilah to hunt. Mari says she's dropped out of school.” He snorts, sarcasm and forced indifference in his words.
Natalie frowns, confused. He fears the possible questions: Why? Since when do you care about Akilah? He wouldn't know how to answer, but she throws one at him that he can easily address.
“Why don't you teach her?”
He shrugs with careful nonchalance.
“I don't know, I thought that because of feminism, sisterhood, and all that crap, you'd be better suited for it.”
Nat snorts, smiling in that way that makes him want to kiss her like before.
“Sure, Flex.” She agrees with affectionate condescension.
His heart aches with longing, but somehow it feels lighter.
The loss of sanity had always been slow and diffuse in the forest, beliefs in The Wilderness taking root among ghost stories, feasts feverish dreams that left only vague flavors upon awakening.
Travis had never been as aware as he was at that moment of how much he had lost his mind.
He leads Lottie to the clearing with the promise of an omen, his steps heavy as if trying to slow their arrival, hers, in contrast, light as a feather, advancing calmly, skirting the pit ignorant while he watches, petrified, his throat closed with guilt, eyes stinging with unease. The Wilderness growls, surrounding them, shaking the leaves and their hairs with its whisper. Warning Lottie.
Travis breaks down.
He's seven years old again, crying to his mother, desperately asking her why she had to marry his father.
Lottie responds with the same silence she gave him then.
Because that's the way it has to be, her dark, resigned eyes seem to say. Schizophrenic or prophet, she never had a way out.
Both in the forest and in New Jersey, Lot is destined for captivity, only able to try to cling to the golden cage that reflects gold and glory in her dark penance.
All saints were martyrs, thinks, watching her lulled by its voice, one step away from his trap.
Despite having taken away his hope—everyone's—Travis is unable to push her. His own anger the only thing thrown into the pit.
With the mushrooms and berries, the wind whispers to him sometimes. Not It, others.
Sometimes it's a female voice, vaguely familiar in his dullness, praying for their souls, compassionate. Not the prayers he used to hear from his mother. Protestant, perhaps. She repeats Lottie's name, desperate and distressed, more than anyone else's.
On bad days, he hears his father, calling him colorful synonyms for wimp. He drink up to ignore him, the insults Travis used to hurl at him when he was alive now bland on his palate.
He's not one to believe that the dead should be respected regardless of how they were in life, but even he knows how to recognize a lost battle—perhaps a soul.
Javi, on the other hand, does not speak. But he feels him in the way he calmly waves his drawings, the ones he was able to rescue in time from the cabin fire, now decorating the rudimentary walls of his hut. A calm, warm breeze rocks him in his hammock on lazy afternoons with the wood-carved wolf keep close to his chest.
Although there are nights, like when they were children and Javi would wake him up by tossing and turning in the bed next to him because nightmares, when he shakes the charcoal-portrayed figure with antlers, anguished. The sound of the wind and anxious paper, Travis's sleepy eyes opening in the darkness, seeing that ominous figure swaying above him, feeling the helplessness of knowing himself unable to wake Javi anymore.
To his surprise, sometimes hears moans along with heavy, hot breathing near his ear.
He thought it was Nat for quite some time, even with the alcohol he could distinguish that feeling of dissociation that sex induced in him, particular and recognizable even how blurred time and the world was already in The Wilderness by itself.
But one night, Shauna's name fell like a sigh among the soft moans, a forbidden longing that Travis could identify in his partner and in himself.
He knows that sleeping with Jackie wasn't the work of the mushrooms or It, despite being corrupted. They brought it with them to the forest.
“The ground beneath my feet was sinking, swallowing me up.”
Akilah quietly recounts her first hallucination in the cave one night on the farm, sitting cross-legged, feeding the lamb in her lap, her gaze unfocused in the darkness of the forest in front of them, her back to the dim light of the camp.
Travis listens, silent as the snowflakes falling lazily. Winter is beginning to bury them.
“I empathized with Lottie, you know?” She confesses, turning her head to look at him. “About Shauna's baby...” She shrinks, guilty, perhaps even ashamed. “It wasn't our baby, we can't imagine how Shauna felt, but something in us died with him too. We had hope.”
She swallows, her eyes welling up with tears.
“But if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that he do not belong to The Wilderness.” Growls, low and fierce, as if the very idea were heresy.
A chill runs through him. He's never seen her like this, with anger boiling beneath her skin, welding a suit of silver armor.
It's beautiful in a terrifying, and to some extent, perverted way. A part of her dies, rots in front of him. Travis is disgusted by his own morbid, twisted wonder, seeing for a second the mark that he, not It, has left before it fades after a blink. It feels like a kiss. He thinks he understands the desire that consumed the girls that night. He is rotten too.
He knows he's not free from her anger either, even though Akilah tries to hide it. He wishes she wouldn't, he wishes she would unleash insults and blows, but there's only a slight, intangible layer of coldness when she looks at him, foreign to the usual warmth of her eyes.
She covered him from Shauna despite his lies, despite her mistrust. He's grateful not to see compassion in her actions, only understanding of how pathetically cowardly he has been.
Her new armor unfathomable.
They both watch as the lamb finally succumbs to the poison, falling limp in her lap.
She doesn't cry, but she continues to cradle it, reluctant to let him go. Travis finishes his drink, wishing he could take the animal's place, the first sacrifice not offered to The Wilderness.
Tomorrow there will be a hunt, and with a little luck, he will be the Queen. He prays, begs God that he will be.
Lottie turned him toward her, away from Jackie, capturing his lips, sinking her fingers into his hair, curving, securing them at the nape of his neck.
You're ours, she said, gently but not kindly, before offering him to the others.
The girls removed his shirt, careful at first, keeping him docile before pushing him against a chair in his numbness.
Shauna's eyes met his, too dark, struggling with his buckle, faces distorted with drooling fangs anticipating their prey in his peripheral vision, dozens of hands running over flesh—his and yet foreign—digging their nails into him.
He was beginning to feel dizzy, fatigued. His own rapid breathing suffocating him along with Jackie's distant screams, the urgency to flee engulfing and paralyzing him.
Akilah cradled his head, pulling him away from the beasts, appearing in his vision with her olive tiara gathering her braids, just before Travis noticed her wild eyes, drawing him into a voracious kiss.
The stag then came to life, freeing himself from those jaws and running away.
When all the animals had fallen, they both returned to their huts in complete silence, frozen with cold.
The gluttony of The Wilderness—of those who worshipped It—had to be fed before it could be fought.
Let It rest contentedly on its throne, gnawing on bones like a proud monarch after a glorious feast, delivering the final blow when it began to doze off complacently.
Travis killed the time drinking, numbing himself even more if that were possible. Even Mari had turned a blind eye when she saw him stealing their remaining alcohol reserves. Everyone was buzzing with tension about what was to come.
He didn't sleep that night, watching the sun rise lazily over the new white blanket covering the earth, but he didn't move until hours later when Akilah's rehearsed cry could be heard.
Everyone gathered on the farm, watching her sob, collapsed over the corpse of a lamb, the first she had poisoned, the one she had cradled in her lap. Travis knew how much she had been holding back those tears, far from being fake. She looks at Lottie with burning eyes, asking how It could have allowed it, betrayed though not by a mystical entity.
We have become arrogant, she says, It demands blood, as everyone knew it would. Nat tries to control the damage one last time, maybe It wants us to leave, she hisses, and as expected, her words fall on deaf ears.
Mari steps forward then, exposing her neck to It. Travis shudders; Mari has offered everyone's necks by agreeing to the hunt, but for some reason she's the one who seems most vulnerable.
He takes another drink. He should have been a man, dashed Natalie's hopes (his own) and done what Mari has done, but he's so damn tired.
Travis lets everything unfold before his eyes, passive, docile. Just as The Wilderness would want him.
The Darkness looms over them, defeat weighing heavier than the fabrics with which they adorn him.
They have stripped him of his clothes in the clearing itself, too numb to even argue.
Nat is not there to save him this time, Jackie's presence lulling him along with the cold licking at his body, but before he can follow her, he finds himself being wrapped up.
Trapped in a broken reflection of another night.
Shauna carefully places a crown of antlers on his head, her ruthless eyes satisfied when she finds no struggle in the stag, dropping a grate over his face that feels like a muzzle.
He senses the others around him dressing him in layers, the last one with long black strands decorating the white ceremonial cloak.
He thinks he sees Van and Taissa out of the corner of his eye, helping the others groom him with guilty expressions, but Travis can't take his eyes off Mari's face-down body in front of him, drained, half her hair torn out and turned into his ornament.
They prepare the feast and he doesn't move a muscle, not even managing to feel disgusted with himself when his stomach growls at the now familiar aroma of roasted meat.
Misty serves him with a bow, her surrender also noticeable. She lifts his veil benevolently so he can begin the feast, Travis in the center of the crescent surrounding the fire, Mari reduced to remains on the other side of the flames. He raises the first piece of meat and chews, the rest follow.
Lottie emerges from The Wilderness bleeding, finally joining them after God—It—knows what or where.
She stumbles but laughs like a child, singing when she sees the offering. She may have a contusion, a vermilion stream running down the side of her head, but the dried blood that covers her face and mouth is not hers.
She approaches Travis, draws him into a chaste kiss, making him taste the iron on her lips.
“Her fury was beautiful.” She murmurs. “It honors you for giving it to her, it was delicious.”
The mark that he, not It, has left. Akilah has kissed him.