In the Woods

Thought I'd try my hand at horror.  Not sure if I'll finish this or not.  Maybe someday.


***

The first 100 yards or so into the Woods weren’t so bad, for the foliage was light and the trees were spaced apart with enough generosity to spare the passing deer avenues in which to wander.  Further on the sunlight began to diminish, and the large pines seemed to cling to each other.  The combination of claustrophobia and the lack of visibility to the outside world was enough to turn most away.  Yet it was into the harbor of wild undergrowth that Benjamin had fled after the war, taking his young wife, Lenore, with him.  Perhaps if she hadn’t been so meek she would have contested, but it was in her nature to follow. 

So follow she did, she followed him into the very heart of seeming darkness and rabid, untamed things.  No one in the village ever did see either of them after that.  Rumors circulated, as they will in any town where an oddity has occurred, but they were generally accepted as bits of gossip.  Children, in the years to come, would run home to their mothers after playing in the Woods, ashen faced and trembling.  They returned with stories of a boy, not so much a child as a creature.  Pale beneath a layer of grit and a dark reddish grime, creeping through the underbrush and the darker corners of isolated footpaths. 

The children’s truth held no salt with their elders.  But that was before the youth started disappearing.  And well before their carcasses began showing up. 

Yes, it was in the deep parts of the Woods that horrific and clandestine things were kept hidden, and where ordinary living took a turn towards the sinister.  Rumored mystery and loping shadows sheltered those secrets in tangled brambles.  Known yet never seen; a beast wandering into backyards past the dusk-hour.  Limping by, peering into darkened windows to watch families as they slept unaware of the cannibal voyeur spying through parted curtains.