In the Dark

As long as I can remember, my mother warned me away from the woods, as had her mother before her, and her mother before her. I never understood why, just as I've never understood why I've felt called to them, seduced by the creeping green shadows and growing vines. Maybe it was the smell, I think, contemplating my current predicament. It surrounds me now, pressing in on me. Sly and slightly musty, full of the promise of so much life. Ironic, really. Not that it matters now; I'm still here. In the dark.

My life ended in the evening, when the sun was painting the sky red and the air was weighted with secrets. I remember my mother's voice, ordering me out to the creek to clean the laundry. The trees seemed to reach out to me with slender arms, beckoning me with the whisper of the wind in the leaves.

I don't even remember making the conscious decision to go into the woods. I felt them calling me, their branches offering to embrace me, to take me into themselves, their whispering voices promising to take care of me, to make me safe.

I wish I'd stayed. I wish I'd stayed by the creek and scrubbed at my laundry until my hands were red and aching from the cold. I'd have gone back inside and kissed my mother on the cheek, and moved to sit at our small kitchen table to watch her prepare dinner. Trout tonight, I think. And maybe even a potato or two from the harvest we picked last week.

My father would have come home smelling of pine and cedar oil, and he would have ruffled my hair before kissing my mother on her smiling lips. He would have sat next to

me and told me all of the reasons why I should marry the Bartlebee boy, and I would have laughed and said he looked like a hog.

I kick uselessly at the dark, feeling it pressing against me, cutting off my air.

At first, I'd wandered with no sense of direction, lost in the wonder of the life surrounding me; Plants I'd never seen before, enough raspberry bushes to feed my family for a week, and the constant noise, the skittering, chirping, vibrant sounds of the animals surrounded me. It was beautiful.

I couldn't understand why my mother had warned me away, why she had kept me from all of this, why anyone had. Didn't they know how much this could help us? There was enough dead wood in here to keep the entire town warm through January. Enough food, along with our harvest, to keep us fed even longer.

I started to move with more purpose, following the gnarled twists of the tree roots and the sly, green tang, thick on the air that seemed to be growing stronger with every step. The smell of overturned earth and new life, burying the sweeter smell of decaying things, dead things. It all mixed together, became intoxicating. I was drunk on it, on the wonder that surrounded me.

I didn't notice the way the trees closed behind me, the way the roots moved out of my way, the way the wind seemed to whisper in hushed voices. Can you blame me? There is a certain pull in doing forbidden things, after all. A certain magic in the rebellion.

In time, I noticed the trees thinning, opening up into a wide clearing. The noise, constant until that point, stopped as soon as I stepped past the line of the trees. The animals fell silent, and the only sound was the wind whipping through the branches. It sounded like mocking laughter.

It was then that I noticed the holes in the ground, hundreds of them, empty and waiting. Graves. Hundreds more, full. Wooden stakes, buried in the ground. Some centuries old, the scratched writing worn and illegible, others more recent. The markers look like their own forest, seeming to grow out of the earth instead of being buried in it.

Helena Prewett. I remembered her. Loud and outspoken. We all thought she ran off with the pastor's son last year.

Thomas Smith. He was a quiet boy, the son of the miller. He disappeared a few months ago. No one knew what happened to him.

Hannah Grace. Ruby Grey. George Wheatley. Hundreds and hundreds of graves, spanning miles of empty forest. I felt sick. I turned to run, to hide, to do anything other than look at these endless graves, this yawning field of death, but the forest had closed off behind me, becoming thick with brambles, impassible unless I wanted to be torn apart by thorns.

I spun in a wild circle, looking for any way out, anything to do other than stay here. I could feel the dread pressing in on me, tightening my lungs and making my skin crawl.

I suddenly felt something grab my ankle, and I looked down to see a tree root wrapping around my leg, up my calf. It moved slowly, almost tenderly. Until it yanked me down, that is, until it started to drag me, screaming, into one of the open graves. “Hungry,” it seemed to say. “So hungry”.

It felt like a shackle, binding me to the dark as I watched the sky disappear above me. It had faded into a deep lavender, the first stars splattered across the surface like a careless painter had splattered white across their canvas. It was beautiful. But I closed my eyes, and it was gone, the last thing I would ever see.

I don't know why I'm telling this story, in truth. There is no one to hear it. Maybe I'm telling it to myself. Maybe I'm telling it to Death, who waits, patient, in the dark. I can feel her watching me. Taste her in the bitter soil coating my tongue, the straining of my lungs. I can feel her circling me, closing in. It won’t be long now. Not that it matters to her, of course.

Death has infinite patience.