Jon was older now. By his own reckoning he was probably in his mid-thirties; his hair showed touches of grey, but his body was still lean. He had long ago settled into his solitary life in the forest and the passing of time now held little meaning for him. His ordered routine was governed by the turn of each day and the rolling change of the seasons; moments slipping away imperceptibly into his past.
Today he had wandered far from the safety of his cave by the stream. He had avoided this part of the forest for many years, initially fearing discovery by the people hunting Suzie’s killer and thereafter in dread of an encounter with the shadowy figure he had seen smash the life out of her. To this day Jon remained fearful of the creeping evil that still haunted his nightmares. He wasn’t sure what had drawn him back again now but, since the dark days of this last winter, he had felt a powerful but inexplicable need to return to where he had laid Suzie to rest.
So it was that he was now crouched at the edge of the clearing, his hand firmly gripping the handle of his knife and his eyes alert for any hint of danger. He had been watching the area since early morning, but all seemed quiet. In the many years since he was last here, the clearing had become overgrown and the shack dilapidated. There was no sign of life.
Since turning his back on the farmstead pyre, Jon had lived by his skill at hunting, the keenness of his senses and his knowledge of the forest. In that time he had dealt with terrible winters, forest fire and flash floods. He had survived illness and accidents and even, on one occasion, the ferocious attack of a female bear protecting her well-hidden cubs. And yet returning here, to the edge of this pool of sunlight, Jon was uncertain and afraid. The dark, stooping insect of a man had been unlike any of the other dangers that had threatened Jon’s life down the years. There was a cruelty, a darkness about him, that was quite unlike anything else Jon had encountered. The bear would probably have killed Jon had he not managed to throw himself into the fast flowing river to escape her. But there had been no malice in her attack. Her fury had been understandable, her actions reasonable; in her eyes Jon represented a threat to her young. Suzie, however, had represented no threat whatsoever to the shadow man. He had killed her in anger, and that was beyond Jon’s comprehension. It was simply wrong. Strangely perhaps, Jon felt no remorse for having then attacked the killer when his back had been turned. The man was bad, manifestly evil, irredeemably corrupted. He had to be destroyed. And Jon had killed him; smashed his skull with a shovel. He had been dead. He must have been dead.
And he should have stayed dead, where Jon had left him, in the trench.
With a final last look around the clearing, Jon rose to a crouch and moved towards the shack. He straightened somewhat to climb the steps, then opened the door quickly, before he could change his mind. The tiny room was even more desolate than it had been years before. It was more gloomy now, as the window panes were filthy and several had been broken. The resulting holes had over time become stuffed with dried grass and dirt, tangled in a network of cobwebs. In the consequently dim light, Jon could see that there was no sign of any recent use of the hearth. The table and chair were still there, albeit dry and brittle with age, and there were thick, grubby cobwebs strung between them and the walls. The desiccated husks of long dead insects hung, cocooned, from the webs; the dusty grey pendants of macabre necklaces. The room was silent, muffled in its thick layer of dust and dirt.
The shelf was still in place. It was empty now and hung with dirt and cobwebs like the table, but Jon’s attention immediately fixed on the tools, still hanging from their hooks beneath it. He crossed the darkened room to look more closely, for, unlike everything else here, the tools were shiny, oiled and razor-sharp. Jon’s flesh began to crawl. He glanced down. There was something lying on the deep and otherwise undisturbed layer of dirt on the table.
A doll.
Jon felt an awful, sinking sense of recognition. Like the dolls he’d seen here years before, this had been roughly carved from pinewood. Jon leaned closer. There was a dreadful, disturbing familiarity in this wooden effigy. The same hand had carved this. The same blades. Jon had seen all this before. History was being repeated.
Jon was trembling, unable to stop. The tools and the doll meant that, despite the absence of any other indications of life, someone had been here, recently. Someone, or something, had carefully sharpened these blades and carved this thing. But the only footsteps in the dirt on the floor were Jon’s own and there was no sign of these boards having been trodden by anyone, or anything, in years. Jon shivered, filled with the creeping dread that he was not alone in here.
He had to get out of this place. He turned to leave.
Something stood rigid, stiffly folded, as if hanging from the hook on the back of the door.
Something sinister. Something dark.
Jon’s blood ran cold. The figure was unmoving, but Jon knew it was alive and aware of him. It was waiting, biding its time.
Jon’s heart was thumping but his body refused to move. He was frozen, wide-eyed with the same certainty of inevitable fate that he had witnessed so many times in cornered animals.
The smothering silence of the room was scratched by the slightest rustle, as of dried leaves. The shadow was waking, stirring. The tiny, rasping sound filled Jon’s head. He was paralysed with fear.
Its dark head raised and the black eyes sparkled with cold recognition. The sharp teeth parted as the pale, dry skin pulled back in a terrible smile. The figure seemed to unfold, growing larger as it slowly raised its brittle arms.
Suddenly it burst forward, lunging at him.
Jon screamed and his body finally reacted to the threat with a lightning-fast dash, past the grasping arms and out of the door.
In absolute terror, he ran, hurtling down the steps and across the clearing, plunging into the densest growth of trees, desperate to be hidden from that dark thing behind him. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. Evil was at his heels.
Jon’s headlong flight from the cabin was short; ending abruptly when he tripped and fell down a steep escarpment.
He lay gasping, trying desperately to keep his mouth closed and his breathing quiet. He expected, at any second, to be engulfed by the evil that had chased him from the cabin. But everything remained quiet. In time, his breathing calmed and he was able to lie in absolute silence, listening hard. Still nothing. He was baffled. How had he managed to lose that creature? Jon had run as far and as fast as he could and in his blind panic he had acted with uncharacteristic disregard. As his mind threw aside all his hard-learned forest sense, Jon had risked an injury, perhaps even a broken leg. Gingerly, he now felt along his legs and arms, touched his ribs and gently moved his head from side to side. Unbelievably, he had no broken bones. His fall had left him winded and his ankle was weak and painful, but nothing more. He had been incredibly lucky and, had he not still been terrified of attracting attention to himself, he would have laughed with relief, loud enough to shake the trees.
He lay there, listening, for several hours, reluctant to risk any movement. Despairing thoughts turned over and over in his mind. He had come to this terrible place seeking peace, a final closing of the door, but instead, the killer had jumped forward from its prison of the past, to loom, huge, dark and terrifying, in the here and now. No longer confined to nightmares, the insect man was still alive.
Only when dusk was falling did Jon get stiffly to his feet, brush the dead leaves from him and look around. He hadn’t been at the foot of these rocks before, but the position of the evening stars overhead gave him his direction home. He needed to go south but, in his panic, he had fled north from the cabin which now represented a terrifying obstacle between him and the distant safety of the cave. In spite of the pain in his ankle Jon decided to cross the river and make a wide detour to the east before resuming a more direct path. Cautiously and with uneven, painful steps, he set off.
After about two miles of slow movement through the trees on the far side of the river and with many stops to rest his aching ankle, Jon risked crossing back. By his reckoning he should be at least a mile south of the cabin by now. There were no easy crossings of the river here, no boulders dividing the fast-moving sheet of water. He clambered along the bank until, at a slight widening of the flow, where the speed of the water slackened, he carefully lowered himself into the river and waded across. After this, sodden and shivering, he made even slower progress, but trudged on with single-minded determination to reach the sanctuary of his cave.
Once there, Jon remained; grateful for the need to rest his ankle. What had happened in the shack had been so real and the terror so intense that, try as he might, Jon could not dismiss what he had seen. He continued to try to reassure himself, knowing that the senses could play tricks. He tried to explain the experience rationally, but he had been brought up hearing the folk myths and stories of this forest from his grandmother. Those tales had never been entirely forgotten, remaining in some corner of Jon’s adult mind, informing his view of the now.
Lizzie had been a great storyteller. If, on her return from her infrequent visits to town, she was satisfied that she had traded for a good price, she would allow herself a few deep, celebratory gulps from a large, dusty bottle of Jack Daniels. She would savour every drop, wipe her mouth dry with the back of her hand, and smile a rare, contented smile. Jon then was permitted a glimpse of a side of his grandmother that was at other times totally hidden from the world; under the loosening influence of the drink, the normally taciturn Lizzie became loquacious; an unexpectedly gifted teller of tales.
On one such evening Jon had crouched, warmed by the stove, grasping at every word, as Lizzie conjured images of the long-dead tribes: old and mysterious peoples who had once called this forest their own. Though overrun by white settlers, and succumbing to disease and starvation, they had never lost faith in the redeeming certainty that they and the spirits of their ancestors, driven from their beloved forest in life, would return here in death. This belief offered these last scattered remnants of a venerable lineage, their only comfort and, of all their rich heritage of stories and myth, this had been one of the few they had passed on to those who had displaced them. Perhaps the vanishing tribes had intended this as revenge, so the white invaders should always know that they were surrounded by the souls of those whose line in history they had ended.
Hearing this as a wide-eyed child, Jon had shivered. For some weeks after, he would dread going to sleep: his dreams being mournful with the drifting, sorrowful ghosts of exiled tribes. With the help of Jack Daniels, Lizzie undoubtedly unlocked an instinctive feel for the telling of a story but, sadly, the bottle did nothing to enhance her ability to empathise with a young boy. Jon remembered his grandmother laughing at him. The ghosts of a few Indians were nothing to fear, she’d said; in life they’d just been folks struggling to live their lives, like us. What harm would they do us in death?
Perhaps, had the old woman stopped there, Jon would have been comforted. But oblivious and insensitive as always, Lizzie had continued. She never did explain to Jon how she came to know the Indians’ stories but the fraction of their age-old folklore that had survived she retold, with spell-binding mastery. This was an ancient forest, she told him, dark and deep since the beginning of time. This vast, wild place had no need of man. It had its own untamed life and had its own ancient spirits; dark, evil shadows that had existed since long before even the Indians had come to this land.
If you want to fear something boy, she’d said, fear those dark, ancient spirits, not a few lost Indians’ souls.
Then Lizzie, seeing how Jon was hanging on her every word, suddenly laughed out loud at the foolish boy’s gullibility and cuffed his head with the palm of her hand. Jon remembered running to hide in his meagre bed, pulling the scratchy blanket tight around his ears to block out his grandmother’s scornful laughter as it filled the small house. Looking back now, he was sure that his grandmother had believed none of the old tales. To her they were just stories, elaborated and twisted over the centuries, containing no more truth for being ancient than did any modern day piece of fiction. To her they were all make-believe. Nothing more.
Now, hiding in his cave, Jon tried to force himself to think as Lizzie had, but Jon had seen too many things during his time in the forest and he had certainly seen too much back there at the shack. He couldn’t dismiss the memories. And he couldn’t shake off the fear.
He still felt that he belonged here, in the forest. He still felt at home, but he no longer felt at ease.
He belonged here, but so too did many other souls.
Several weeks passed before Jon felt able to range any distance from the cave. With time though, and with the warmth of lengthening summer days, both his strength and his confidence began to recover. By day, the terrible memories of the cabin no longer flooded into his every moment, since he had to attend to the mundane requirements of his everyday survival in the forest. Gradually the fear faded from the forefront of his imaginings.
At night however his dreams still shook him awake. Sweating in terror he would lie trembling, not daring to make a fire or any reassuring light for fear it might attract attention to his hideaway. Another month would pass before the rhythm of peaceful sleep returned and Jon no longer woke in the dreadful dark hours of the night, but with the first hopeful light of dawn warming the sky.