Spoonerville: Page 3

In the books and the movies Quora beach was a rocky, cold mess of unfriendly land that looked nothing at all like the coast lines that had made California famous. In reality, Quora beach was the catcher’s mitt for all the rage the ocean could throw at it. Denielle pulled into the parking area which consisted of two rows of parking. A few years earlier a raging winter storm moved the beach head back a hundred feet, covering half the original parking lot with beach sand and gravel. The beach was a combination of stones, rocks, boulders, and entire ancient dead trees.

She parked the car and felt safe seeing that there were a half dozen other cars in the lot. She passed the bathrooms to walk down the trail that led her through a heavily cleared part of the forest to an open area where beach access was significantly safer than the parking area. The tide was on its way out and while she couldn’t see much in the way of waves on the water she could hear them crashing in the distance.

The books had made the cloud cover of the pacific northwest famous and she had expected clouds, what she had not been prepared for was the thick layer of formless gray that blanketed the sky without detail. Beneath the blanket of nothingness there were a few clouds here or there but with less than five minutes on the beach she fully understood why seasonal depression was a part of life for many who live in Washington.

She sloughed off the incoming blah’s and pulled her cell phone out to take pictures of the giant tower like island off to her left. It stood out of the ocean like a super villain’s lair and its creepy beauty mesmerized her. She got lost in playing with filters and angles until somewhere around her fifteenth photo the laughter of children playing on the beach somewhere behind her brought her attention back. She pocketed her phone and turned to walk further down the beach but was shocked to find herself alone.

The beach was mostly small rocks and stones so there were no footprints to hint at their location but the laughter had also gone silent.

She glanced up at down the beach and the tree line and saw no one else within eye sight. Then for the first time she noticed that for as far down the tree line that she could see every mostly ocean exposed tree had long since died and been stripped bare of all life. The forest was buffered by a barrier wall of arboreal bones. The darkness that consumed the forest not much further beyond the barrier wall was probably perfectly natural but she could no longer ignore the feelings  of dread encroaching into her conscious mind. She turned back south toward the parking lot and looked along the tree line for the sign marking the path that would lead her back to her car.

She felt the ocean air cutting at her skin like a razor and hunched her shoulders against the sea spray that had been carried by the shifting wind. Somewhere behind her there was more laughter, she ignored the instinct to flee and turned to end the game these children were playing with her.

They weren’t children.

The ocean was capable of tossing ancient trees and giant boulders on a regular basis, so by the time the group of hikers returned to their car early the next morning, there was less than nothing left of the bloody hollowed out mess that used to be Denielle.