THE CURSED FORESTS OF TAMASKAVILLE

Chapter II - The Inner Conflicts

-2 hours ago-

Mason just made it home. He placed the car keys in the wooden receptacle in the shelf next to the door. As he moved across the drawing room, he heard the sound of a door closing. He realized that it came from the other end of the house and he walked across the dining hall towards the back door. Through the window adjacent to the door he could see Tara sneaking out through the backyard. He stood behind the door, curled the curtain just a little so that he could see her without being noticed.

'Where is she going? And where is that she has to go without me knowing?' his worried inner voice kept asking.

'Maybe I'm going too hard on her. It is time that I realize I have to loosen up my grip. After all she is no more a child. But I can't trust this mean world to take care of her, it has to be me at the end of the day.' These conflicts became a norm to Mason and they kept growing as he watched Tara speak on the phone. He instantly turned away from the door when Tara gave the last glance towards the house before she slipped away.

Mason was always worried and scared that this world would corrupt Tara's innocent soul. The other end of that emotional cane was Tara, who always felt her dad was paranoid and his care suffocated her. Tara preferred wings of freedom and Mason feared that the higher you try to fly, the harder you hit the ground. After the death of Tara's mother, their relationship was a cycle of flowing emotions of care, arrogance and guilt. Rounding up all the complexity between them, it is still safe to say they both loved each other and valued each other more than anything in the world.

,

Mason walked back to the car to get his bag that was on the backseat. While walking in he paused and looked towards the way Tara had gone with a hope that she was still somewhere around. Disappointed, he closed the door behind him and sat on the couch in the drawing room and took out a bunch of papers from his bag. They were some sort of research papers.

Mason is an Edaphologist. He worked in the small soil research laboratory that was at the end of the town adjacent to a few acres of farmland which was unsuccessful in making any cultivation for the last few years. Maybe that was the reason Mason was transferred to Estran.

Mason had been stuck at the very first page for almost an hour now. He kept on reading the same lines numerous times but they made no sense to him as he was lost in the thoughts about Tara. He looked at his shiny gold pen gifted to him by Anna,Tara's Mother, rubbed it gently and slid it back into his shirt's pocket. He took a deep breathe of despair and left the papers on the table and leaned back and glided into sleep.

He was roused by his worries which resonated with the clock ticking off. He rubbed his watery eyes and he looked at the clock and immediately dialed Tara. There was no answer. He dialed again. This time she answered it.

"Tara, where are you? It's late" he asked fretfully.

There was no reply. He did not bother to wait for one. He continued with swelling anxiety.

"I Understand you can take care of yourself now but the least I expect from you is the concern to let me know where were you going."

He calmed himself down a bit and mumbled " OK where are you? Come back home, Tara"

His worries shot up on the spur of the moment when he heard Whispering Tara's voice that said.

"Dad please come get me"

He panicked away helplessly and kept asking relentlessly " Tara, where are you?"

"Where are you Tara? Please answer me. I'm begging you please answer me" His words turned into cries as all he could hear on the phone was his baby girl breathing heavily which slowly faded away and he was left in a shock as if his cries hit a blind end when Tara hung up the call.

It took quite a few minutes to make sense of what was happening around him. He then came to his full consciousness and ran to the door, picked up the car keys, banged the door and did not even bother to lock the house.

The next two hours Mason made futile attempts in searching Tara all across the town. He had been to her college, every public place and every home that he could go to. His search ended in despondency at the western end of the town. He stopped his car by the road side and the petrifying site of the forest beyond those wastelands caught Mason's eyes. His heartbeat amplified and echoed in his hollow chest on the thought that Tara might be lost in the forest.

'Tara might not be in the forest but what if she is? all he could think was even if there is a slightest chance she is in the forest, she needs me the most right now.' Mason did not give a second thought. Mason will stop at nothing to get to her.

He turned the car towards the forest. The dried grass being slashed by the car, slowly the dark canvas of the forest kept growing bigger and bigger. The light from the car kept spreading vast and it looked as if the forest was spreading its arms to welcome Mason. Mason was accelerating through the dried lands and just as he reached the forest, his car rammed into something and halted. Smoke started gushing out of the engine.

Mason got out of the car agitatedly. Then he noticed it was a rock but what caught his eye was a rope that was tied to the rock. He tried to look where the rope would lead him but just after his first step into the forest, the rope appeared to be buried deep into the soil. He tried pulling it but in vain. He did not waste his time on it. Like a tunnel formed by light, the light from the car was going deep into the forest.

Mason started running in the direction of the light and as it was an unintended visit, he had no torch. He sprinted his way into the woods, he felt as if the trees which looked like obstructing his way from a distance where moving aside and clearing the way for him as he ran closer. He reached the end of light in no time. He came to a standstill and screamed Tara's name for quite a few times. There was no echo. His worries kept creeping deep in and he started sprinting again. Now Mason was running blind. Instead of having so much energy fueled by all the emotions he was not able to run for long as it was getting difficult for him to breathe. Mason still managed to keep going.

Were the trees really clearing their way for him? How far can he go without running into something hard? Not very far. It was a surprise that he could fluidly run for so long, although it ended abruptly when he had a tremendous blow to his face. It was not a branch of a tree that hit him, it felt like a rigid fist. Mason fell to the ground with that single blow. Before Mason could figure out what hit him, something grabbed his head by the face and that added up to his heavy breathing. Eventually he was completely unable to breathe. He struggled to loosen the grip of the hand over his face but whilst his struggle, his head was lifted up from the ground and in the next second it was pounded back to the ground rendering him totally unconscious.

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The uneven ground moving below her, woke Tara up. Her obscure vision in total darkness made her blind. It was not the ground moving below her but she was being dragged and she could feel the same grip over her leg that she had earlier. She couldn't lift herself above the ground and reach her leg. Incapable of doing anything else, she concentrated on her aural perception to hear one more heavy breathing other than her own.

"Brad! Brad! Is that you?" she whispered, breathing heavily at the same time. There was no answer. She tried to reach out to the side from where she could hear the breathing but she couldn't. Then eventually she got hold of a chunky broken branch. With all her strength, she swirled it blindly in the air just above her leg. She had hit something and her being dragged stopped right away and her leg dropped back to the ground.

Staring clueless into the darkness, Tara could make out a head turning back by the green glowing eyes and she could feel its presence right in front of her. Those eyes bent over to her, glowing in luminescent green. This was Tara's first encounter with the demons of the forest. It glided its head from Tara's belly and reached her face. Surprisingly when it came face to face with Tara, although she was stricken with terror her breathing got dull. Tara just took one deep breathe and it grabbed Tara by her neck, lifted her up into the air.

Tara's head started clogging as its grip fastened further. The Demon held her so tight that there was no blood pumping to her head. Within a few seconds, Tara's vision got hazy and her consciousness spiked as she could feel thrown back to the ground.

The ground beneath her started moving again and Tara eventually Blacked out. Again.

TO BE CONTINUED.