I had forgotten how Moonlight Pines smelled. Differently than the way you might forget someone's name, or the words to an old song you haven't heard in years, the kind of lyrics that stick with you until, suddenly, they just slip away from your thoughts without rhyme or reason. It was a faint and familiar scent that came back to me all at once as soon as I crossed the town line, as though the air itself had been waiting for me all along, that smell lingering like a patient specter, tainting the atmosphere of the place with the odor of wet pavement, pine needles, woodsmoke, and cold earth.
There was something darker that I couldn't quite name buried beneath it all, something unfamiliar. Otherworldly and sinister.
With a tentative sigh, my mind racing with improbabilities and insecurities, I rolled down the window despite the rain, droplets glistening silver as the chilly autumn breeze carried them across my face.
For a moment, fleeting and distorted in the whirlpool of my thoughts, I saw myself at seventeen again. Sitting in the passenger seat beside my father, whining about school as I watched the towering pines blur past the window, my sister in the backseat, kicking at the back of my chair, laughing loudly because she knew that it annoyed me---
Lara.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter as the memory dissipated.
It had been three years since I had been home. Three grueling, miserable years since I had last driven these winding roads, slept beneath the roof of my father's house, and three years since I had shared a warm and hearty meal at the kitchen table with him or since I had listened, aggravated and silent, to Lara arguing with him about something insignificant, my sister cruel with her words and quick with her tongue. It had been three years since I had come to the conclusion that whatever happened in Moonlight Pines was something that I could leave behind. Something that was no longer worth my time or concern.
I knew now that I had been wrong.
Another mile through the thin haze of rain and the town appeared ahead of me, looking as it had always looked, as though the passage of my time away had bent around it rather than flowed through it.
The main street (aptly named Moonlight Drive) serpentined along the eastern edge of the lake, hugging it closely as it followed the shoreline, across from which stood old wooden storefronts, leaning shoulder to shoulder beneath well-weathered awnings, their faded and outdated paint peeling in places and softened by decades of rain, snow, and summer sun. Some of those old buildings leaned against one another as if time and age alike had exhausted them, unwilling to let them go.
I smiled when I saw the bakery that occupied the corner of Moonlight Drive and Hollow Road, where the only pharmacy used to be, its front windows glowing amber against the dreary, gray afternoon, with trays of fresh bread cooling behind the yellowed glass, the delectable sweetness of cinnamon oozing out onto the narrow sidewalk whenever the door opened. The hardware store a few buildings over still bore the same red awning it had most likely worn for half a century now, its windows crowded with various things nobody seemed to need anymore---rusted lanterns, irrelevant gardening tools, coils of rope that looked like waiting serpents, several jars of nails, screws, thumbtacks, loose washers and bolts, everything arranged in careful, neat rows.
Farther down the street stood the old theater where I remembered taking Lara to see all the latest releases, our shared obsession for horror making our decisions easy. Its brick facade darkened by weather, the marquee missing half its letters so that the name was impossible to read anymore.
Despite the town's dreary and unrelenting melancholy, there were signs of life everywhere.
A waitress swept the sidewalk outside the Moonlight Diner. An elderly man sat in a chair near the hardware store, thick glasses watching traffic pass by with the patient expression of someone that had nowhere else he needed to be. A woman carried a paper bag from the bakery, stopping every few steps to exchange friendly greetings with people she had probably known for most of her life. Cars rolled slowly along the street, their tires whispering over damp pavement as bicycles rested against storefronts and children wandered between the shops without anyone seeming particularly concerned about where they were going.
There was something strange about Moonlight Pines, though.
It never really seemed all that anchored to the present. The buildings here all seemed to belong to another decade; the lake glistening and wrapped in thin, ethereal fog, another century. Even the people here all seemed out of place, moving through both as though they had long ago stopped noticing the difference at all. The clocks all ticked out of rhythm from one another, hardly reluctant to keep pace at all. The old church bell rang somewhere beyond the rooftops, solemn and despairing, ringing and ringing without reason to.
Everything felt peaceful, comforting and familiar, its melancholy a soothing, hypnotic melody upon the senses, but there was something beneath that picturesque tranquility. A secret lingering within the mist, long-preserved by the otherworldly timelessness of the town.
Beyond the buildings rose the trees.
Douglas Firs that guarded each side of the winding road, tall and straight, their trunks disappearing into a dense canopy, where daylight lost its way among the branches. Hemlocks crowded beneath them, their reaching limbs hanging low with moisture, brushing against one another whenever the wind moved through the forest, whispering alien secrets to one another. Cedars stood among them like ancient giants, their enormous trunks wider than some houses, their roots gnarled and twisting through the earth like the backs of buried creatures. Moss crawled over everything, softening fallen branches and swallowing stones, suffocating exposed roots and turning the forest floor into scaly flesh of something slumbering.
The deeper I looked between the trees, the more they seemed to be gathering amongst themselves, forming a dark communion of watching shadows.
The oldest trunks among them were scarred and blackened, their bark folded into strange, unnatural shapes that defined geometry, with hollows in some of them that looked like eldritch eyes; dark, abyssal openings leading into unfathomable depths that seemed far larger than the trees themselves. Shadows slithered between them, slipping beneath the branches like specters, vanishing whenever I tried to focus on them, giving me the uncomfortable sensation that the forest knew I was riding alongside it.
After all, the trees had all the patience in the world, and there was something deeply unsettling about the possibility that they had been standing there for generations, quietly watching people arrive, disappear, and become stories told by those who came along after them.
Behind them, standing along the horizon like sentinels, dark blue underneath a low ceiling of clouds pressing cautiously upon their jagged peaks, the mountains rose like monstrosities, high slopes vanishing into drifting mist and leaving only fragments that pierced the veil of clouds.
There was no sense of grandeur or open invitation within them.
Their ridges stretched into the distance like the backs of sleeping beasts, the deeper shadows between them forming vast corridors of labyrinthine impossibility.
I wondered what existed there beyond those slopes; what could survive the crooked endlessness of those dark valleys where no sunlight dared to touch and where the looming forest grew thick enough to hide anything that wanted to remain hidden.
There was a silence about them that was heavier than ordinary silence, and something further still, something alien that breathed within their presence, something that made Moonlight Pines feel temporary and fragile.
I shivered, peeling my eyes off those cyclopean peaks, looking back ahead of me as I drove further into the town limits.
I got the call a few nights ago.
I had been laying in bed with the lights off, staring up at the ceiling and drinking whiskey from a a glass I had been refilling without really noticing, the alcohol burning as it channeled through my system, drowning my senses and numbing my thoughts. The apartment was quiet around me except for the humming of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the occasional hiss of tires on the wet asphalt below my window.
My mind had been buzzing with things I hadn't thought about in years, things I'd tried again and again to bury in the past. Forgotten things, or those I'd failed to convince myself were forgotten---my childhood bedroom, the familiar, fleeting stench of woodsmoke in late winter, the sound of my mother's voice calling Lara and I inside before dark, my sister laughing somewhere down the hall...
The old house at the edge of the lake, its windows glowing yellow against the trees...
I hadn't meant to remember any of it though, but sometimes memories were like that. You could bury them so deeply in the past, you almost believed they were really gone, only to have one of them rise unexpectedly through the dirt, writhing like the living dead to stand there before you, scarred and ugly and more hideous than you remembered them being.
The phone rang, vibrating across the nightstand beside me, startling me out of my drunken stupor. I looked over at it, the room spinning at the edges of my vision, seeing the screen glow bright, stinging my tired eyes. It was a number I did not recognize, and for a few moments I watched it vibrate against the wood.
Then, reluctantly, forcing myself to sit upright and lean over the edge of my bed, I answered it.
"Hello?" My voice was gravelly beneath the lingering burn of the whiskey, my throat scratchy. The sound of it caused my headache to return.
There was silence on the other end.
"Hello?" I repeated, louder, throat throbbing.
"Stacey," said a man's voice, much older than I remembered it being. "It's me."
"Dad?" I croaked, uncertain it had really been him.
A long sigh flowed through the phone.
"Yeah." The voice confirmed.
I stared into the darkness in front of me. I hadn't heard his voice since I left home three years ago.
"Why are you calling me?" I snapped, the time between us unburying painful memories.
"Stacey..." A hesitant sigh. "I need for you to come back home."
His words were so simple, a moment passed where my alcohol-poisoned mind didn't understand them.
"Home?" I breathed, refusing to acknowledge the past.
"Yes," he said flatly, emotionlessly. "I need you to come back home now."
I gave a small, humorless laugh.
"Seriously?" I scoffed. "I haven't heard from you in three years, and the first thing you say to me is that you need me to come back home?" Another laugh, harsh and bitter, the sound of it grating across my headache. "What about when I needed you?"
"You were the one that left me behind," he replied, somber and deprived of energy.
I sighed.
"Please, Stacey..." I heard fraility in his tone, his plea riding the edge of breaking completely.
I said nothing.
"I didn't call to start another fight."
"Then why did you call?"
Nothing came.
I waited for something else. An overdue apology, an explanation---anything.
Another moment passed, wearing upon my patience. Finally, I pressed for more.
"Where are you?" I asked him, sighing again, rubbing at my forehead as my headache flared again, trying to move the conversation along.
"I'm at home."
"Is Mom there?"
"Yes."
"Is Mom okay?"
"Your mother's fine."
"Then what's wrong?" I felt my frustration boiling. "Why did you call me, Dad? What do you want?"
Again, he didn't answer.
I mumbled something to myself, rising up off my bed. I then crossed to the window, kicking over an empty bottle that clanked against the nightstand. I peered through the blinds, watching rain leave gleaming trails down the glass, blurring the cityscape beyond it, reflecting the mellow glow of streetlights.
"Dad," I said, the blinds snapping as I released them. "You're really starting to scare me now."
"Sorry," he murmured. "I don't mean to."
"Tell me what's going on?"
"You... need to come back, Stacey. That's all. I need you back here. Mom, too."
"Why, Dad?"
"Because it's time."
I frowned.
"Time for what?"
I started pacing, scratching at my forehead where my headache grew and grew. I heard him breathe into the phone, and I could hear something in the background around him. A low, creaking sound. Footsteps on old floorboards, most likely.
"Dad?" I urged, something like fear constricting within me. Something was obviously very wrong.
"You shouldn't have stayed away this long."
I froze mid-step, that coiling fear turning into anger.
"Seriously, Dad?!" I barked. "You and Mom wanted me gone, so I left."
"We never said that, Stacey."
I groaned.
"Maybe you didn't have to."
"You were impossible to talk to," he fired back, his voice gradually raising. "Your Mom and me tried, but you refused to listen to us. You only wanted to do whatever you were going to do, and you didn't care if the rest of us got burned."
I almost hung up on him. Then I looked over at the whiskey on the nightstand. He'd been right, after all. But that had been a long time ago, and rather than drag the two of us through unresolved trauma, I went on to a new topic.
"Is this about Mom?" I asked, sitting on the floor beneath the window with my back against the wall. "Is she sick?"
"She's fine," he said again.
"Then what, Dad?" I snapped.
"Just come home, Stacey."
I sighed, my fingers curling into a fist, my head pounding, squeezing my eyes shut tightly against the rhythm of it. Three years of silence, and he still sounded as detached and solemn as he always did, like whatever was happening belonged to someone else.
"What's happened?" I asked yet again, slouching my shoulders in defeat of my exhaustion. "Please just tell me, Dad..."
I realized how broken I sounded, pathetic, and I cringed in disgust.
"You'll understand when you get back here," he said delicately.
I don't know why, but something dark and oppressive fluttered within my chest just then, something unfamiliar and malicious, gnawing at my insides, clawing my walls of sanity and stability to ribbons. And then my sister's face flashed across the haze of my thoughts, and that cold, dark feeling intensified, tightening around my senses, squeezing them into submission.
"Is this about Lara?" I asked then, the words reluctant to climb up my throat.
Dad said nothing.
"Dad?" I pressed, swallowing a thick nervousness I hadn't realized was there.
Still, Dad said nothing, and I knew without doubt. The silence between us changed after a moment, filling with a single breath.
Something shifted on the other end of the line.
"Dad, what's happened to Lara?"
"Come home, Stacey. We need you here."
My heart began to pound, that dark feeling infecting its natural rhythm, turning it timid. Frightened.
"Where is Lara?" I asked suddenly.
No answer.
"Dad, tell me what's happened to my sister."
The line crackled softly.
"Dad?"
I heard him breathing, slow and uncertain. Then, very delicately, he said, "You never should have left us behind, Stacey."
The dark feeling within me fluttered violently. The line went dead. I stared down at the phone.
"Dad?" I called into it again, but there was nothing.
I redialed, the call going straight to voicemail. I called again, my heart racing, the rain against the window louder now, mirroring its frantic rhythm. I called again and again, but each time there was nothing.
I stood up after some time, the phone still pressed against my ear, listening to the empty silence. Something in my father's voice---along with that dark and eerie sensation still slithering through my system---told me all that I needed to know and I wasted no time in heading out, stopping only for gas as I drove for three days straight, my heart beating uneasily and my nerves frayed, all the while knowing that something had happened to my sister.
And maybe I should have turned back, leaving the past buried, but I couldn't.
I owed it to my sister, and so I drove on, those towering trees and the shifting shadows within them watching me, counting every second that passed.
Maybe I should have turned back.