*** COMING SOON ***
The Woods
One step into the woods,
‘Cross the barrier deceiving.
Two steps b’neath the trees,
Where dread goads hair to rise.
Three and score steps more,
To a tree felled long ago.
Four and five trees sway a’draught to,
Softly rots the jagged stump,
Unchanged for all time.
It was an ordinary forest, as far as spooky looking woods go, filled mostly with craggy twisted oak trees, their gnarled branches reaching like skeletal fingers and deeply wrinkled cracked bark covered trunks. The trees were clustered together, their branches twisted and tangled together, daring any to enter their midst.
1985
Two boys dared each other to enter the woods. They were never seen again.
1985
Two parents, fraught, searched in vein for their boys. It tore them and their marriage apart.
30 Years later
A man buys a house. It hasn’t been entered in 30 years. Strange things begin to happen.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
1985
The woods sat silent and brooding, an ugly tangle of dead leafless skeletal branches that belonged in a darker and more sinister world, the world of the dead. A suffocating thick blanket of grey clouds hung low in the sky to cast a pall over this small piece of the world.
Snow still lay heavy and wet in the afternoon shadows, more so within the woods where it took longer to melt away. Crystalline flakes shrunk and melded into dirty slush as the temperatures slowly warmed. In time, the snow will vanish and be replaced once again by the murky stagnant melt waters that will take their time to dry up.
Most of the rodents, birds, and other small woodland creatures were conspicuously absent on that day, having chosen to hunker down and wait out the gloomy day. Nevertheless, a few squirrels and birds still flitted about the skeletal trees. A small rabbit nervously twitched its nose as it sat motionlessly waiting to find out if that sound was a predator.
Two children playing in their backyard off the woods dared each other to go exploring into the spooky trees.
* * * * * * *
Kevin pried his eyes from the stump to look lower. He knelt and reached for what lay there.
“Don’t touch it.” Jesse’s voice was a little too shrill.
“It’s nothing.” Kevin picked it up and turned it over in his hand, examining it.
Jesse turned at the sound of a cracking branch.
The boys were never seen again.
* * * * * * *
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