Stay Out of the Shadows

It was dark, almost pitch black, and she could see nothing but the fuzzy outlines of the trees around her. All of a sudden she could hear the sound of gentle footsteps approaching from a distance, getting closer and closer until she could hear the breathing behind her.

  “Um,” voice and body shaking with fear and confusion, “hello?”

  She had no idea where she had managed to get lost, nor where her friend had gone, all she could gather was that on this silent, starless night, she was terrified. An eerie low growl came from behind her, long and rather quiet, just enough for her to think that at any moment, it could pounce. The anticipation grew inside her and just as she heard it’s feet leap off the ground behind her - she woke up from the dream.

  Salem had been having this dream a couple times a week recently. She had no clue as to why it was happening, where it took place, or what the creature behind her was. Her mother thought it was a result of late-night trips into the forest near her house with her friends. They liked to go out sometimes to stargaze, but they never felt unsafe near the woods. Salem found it especially calming. She thought her dreams may be part of something else, maybe something bigger. 

  She rolled over in her bed to check her phone clock and let out a sigh. 

“Time to get up.” she groaned. 

  She practically let herself slowly fall off her bed and into the floor, sliding ever so gently so she wouldn’t fall with a hard thump. To say the least, she was very tired. It was 4 AM, the same time she gets up every morning so she could have time to sit on her roof and study the sky with a cup of tea to get a good view of the stars before they fade, then she goes back to bed until it's really time to get up. She had built a small balcony, just big enough for herself to step out on, and a couple of steps outside her window that led to a small flat place on her roof where she could see over the trees surrounding her home.

  Every morning she went to the kitchen for her cup of tea, being carefully quiet as to not wake her parents. She would take her cup back to her room, silently closing the door behind her. She put on her favorite pale yellow cardigan and opened her window, holding her cup in one hand as she nimbly crawled through her window and stepped on to her miniature balcony, making her way up the little stairs to her roof. It was a cold morning during fall, and there was a gentle breeze fluttering the dried leaves around her yard. She sat and looked at the fading stars, admiring all that nature is. Her eyes wandered over towards the treeline of the forest surrounding her home and small-town as she sipped her tea. Something caught her attention in the treeline, a dark shadow blob that seemed to be moving. The breeze stopped at the exact moment she noticed the shape, but that only added to the chill up her spine. "What is that?" she thought to herself. She quickly blinked, and as soon as she opened her eyes again, the shadow was gone. "Some animal." she thought. 

She stood up to crawl back through her window when a raven landed next to her on the roof, holding a shiny silver necklace in his beak. She had named him Odin, and he would stop by her window frequently with gifts in exchange for seeds. Salem reached into her pockets and pulled out a couple of loose seeds and scattered them in front of the bird, and placed her hand in front of him to drop the necklace into it.

"Thank you, Odin. I'll see you later." She caressed the bird's small head and made her way into her room with the new necklace in hand, waiting until she had better light before looking at it. She sat at her bed and turned on her bedside lamp, staring at the necklace in shock. It was a small silver locket covered in dirt with the initials "M.E.M." engraved on the front. She immediately recognized it as her little sister's locket, Mary Ellen May. Mary had gone missing a few months back and would have never taken off her necklace willingly. Inside it she kept a picture of her and Salem when they were younger. Mary had just turned eleven the day before she disappeared, leaving her eighteen-year-old sister and parents devastated.

Tears began to well up in Salem's eyes as she felt a rush of emotions staring down at this little piece of forgotten jewelry. She rushed to her window and called out for her strange little bird, hoping he was still nearby.

"Where did you find this, you feathery weirdo?!" She yelled.

To this, she received a disgruntled squawk from the raven. He landed in a wing-flapping mess on her window ledge with a seed in his beak.

"Where did you find this? Look, I get you're a bird and all, and you probably don't know what I'm saying, but where did you get this?" She asked.

Odin turned his head to face the woods, then back to his strange friend and chirped.

Salem turned her back to the bird and grabbed her flashlight, phone, and notepad. She wrote a note to her parents saying she was going on a walk and taped it to her bedroom door, put on her sister's necklace, and crawled back out the window with the bird.

"I've finally lost it, Mary. I'm following a crow into the dark woods at five in the morning to find out where you went. A bird! A dog would make more sense." She thought to herself as if she were talking to her sister as she ran behind Odin while he flew her in the direction of the necklace's origins. She got lost deeply in her thoughts as she traveled and didn't notice that her flashlight had fallen out of her pocket.

They slowed down as they reached a clearing in the woods where there were no sounds nor light. There weren't any birds or bugs chirping, or even any other animals around that make at least a little noise while they move through the brush. Salem and Odin were the only ones in this treeless circle in the woods.

"This looks familiar, O. I don't know if I like this." she paused, thinking of her sister instead and how it was more important to find her than it was to be concerned about the silence of nature. She looked up to the sky to see that all the stars had disappeared from the night.

A sudden feeling of fear and confusion settled in as she realized she had been here before. . . just never in person. Odin flew away with a loud caw, leaving her stranded there alone and worried.

"Odin?" She called. "Odin!" she began to try to look around her, but without the stars she saw nothing except the vague shadows of the trees surrounding her. "Mary? Mary!"

She fell to her knees on the damp grass taking shallow breaths as she tries to recollect and consider the fact that a bird just lead her to the literal place of her nightmares. "Okay," she thought. "I ran in a straight line to get here, I just have to run straight ba-" she sighed.

"I spun around in circles trying to see!" She groaned. "I don't know which direction I came from and my bird left me here, oh, that feathery freak! I don't know where I am or how to get back, oh, gosh, Odin!"

She dug through her pockets in a hurry to find her flashlight and sighed in defeat when she realized she must've lost it.

It was dark, almost pitch black, and she could see nothing but the fuzzy outlines of the trees around her. All of a sudden she could hear the sound of gentle footsteps approaching from a distance, getting closer and closer until she could hear the breathing behind her.

  “Um,” voice and body shaking with fear and confusion, “hello?”

An eerie low growl came from behind her, long and rather quiet, just enough for her to think that at any moment, it could pounce. The anticipation grew inside her and just as she heard it’s feet leap off the ground behind her there was a bright flash of pure white light.

"Salem?" A soft voice came from behind her. "Salem what are you doing here?"

Salem turned around to see her sister aiming a flashlight at her.

"Mary? What are YOU doing here? We've been looking for you for months! Are you crazy, where have you been?!" Salem jumped up and ran to Mary, wrapping her arms firmly around her in a tight hug.

"Salem, I've only been gone for an hour, what do you mean? Are you okay?"

Salem pulled away and stared at her beloved sibling in shock.

"Mare, it's been MONTHS. You've not been home in three months. If you've only been here for an hour, where have you been this whole time? Why didn't you come home?"

"No, no, no," Mary giggled. "You're not gonna mess with me. I left the house an hour ago, Salem, I've been here the whole time. This won't be like that time I took a nap and you tried to tell me I was asleep for a year, I learned my lesson."

Salem pulled her phone out of her pocket and showed Mary the calendar.

"Today is exactly three months since you left the house and never came back, Mare. Where have you been?"

Mary was very confused, to say the least. I mean, how do you react to finding out you've been gone for three months when you thought it's only been an hour? How does that even happen?

Mary raised her hand to her neck to twirl at her little locket, just to find that it wasn't there. Her missing necklace didn't help her situation, either, she had no idea where it went.

Salem undid it from behind her own neck and handed it to her sister without taking her eyes off her. The sun started to come up, and Salem took Mary's hand in her's as the bewildered pair turned to the direction Mary had come from and tried to find their way out.

"It was a good thing you found me, Mary, I thought there was something about to get me. It must have just been me being scared." Salem giggled. She looked over Mary and noticed that her little sister looked like she was holding in a concerning thought.

"Mary? What's wrong?" She asked.

Mary stopped in her tracks and looked at Salem in the eye.

"Stay out of the shadows, Salem. They don't like strangers. They like me, and I came out here to check on them. I guess maybe they wanted me to stay here longer than an hour and I just didn't notice. They look like dogs, but rather big ones, and you were sitting right in front of the leader. Let's keep going."

Salem and Mary kept going straight until the found their way out, and the sun had just risen. Salem felt like she had been in the woods for minutes, but the position of the sun told her it had been an hour and a half. She was happy to have her sister back, yet she was still confused and worried. How was she going to explain this to their parents? Will they ever believe her?