“Queer?” I said.
“Strange. I suppose it’s my imagination, being a city girl, I’m not used to the proximity of so many trees.”
I didn’t know it at the time, and would probably not have appreciated it, but those trees had been there for hundreds of years. And though other areas had been logged out and replaced with “crops” of pines in long rows, this was the remains of the aboriginal forests.
Jumping ahead slightly—the trees were not only of a younger time, but they were huge, and they grew in such a way the limbs had grown together and formed a kind of canopy that didn’t allow brush and vines to grow beneath them. So when someone says there are as many trees now as there once were, you can be certain they are describing crop trees, grown close together without the variance of nature. These trees were from a time when forests were forests, so to speak.
Anyway, she said perhaps a few more words about the trees, and how she thought the whole place was odd, but I didn’t pay any real attention to her—and there was nothing in her manner that I determined to be dread or worry of any kind. So, her comments didn’t really have impact on me, and it wasn’t until later that I thought back on our conversation and realized how accurately impressionable Jane had been.
There was something strange about those woods.
After another day or so, the pool and the nighttime games lost some of their appeal. We did some night swimming, lounging around the pool; but one moonlit night one of the younger children among us—Billy, who was ten— suggested that it might be fun to play a game of tag in the woods.
Now, from an adult standpoint this seems like a bad choice, mucking about in the woods at night. But we were young and it was a very bright night, and it seemed like a wonderful idea.
We decided a game would be delicious. We chose up teams. One team constituted eight cousins, the other seven. The game was somewhere between hide-and-go-seek and tag. One team would hide, the other would seek. The trick was to chase down the hiding team and tag them, making them a member of the hunting team. In time, the idea was to tag everyone into the chasing team, and then the game would switch out.
How we started was, the chasing team was to stay at the swimming pool while the hiding team had a fifteen minute head start into the woods. It was suggested that the more open part of the woods was to be our area, but that no one should go into the thicker and darker part, because that was a lot of acreage and more difficult.
At the signal, we shot off like quail, splitting up in the woods to hide, each of us going our own route.
I went through the trees, and proceeded immediately to the back of the sparser woods and came to the edge where it thickened. The trees in the sparser area were of common variety, but of uneven shape. They didn’t grow high, but were thickly festooned with sickly widespread branches, and beneath them were plenty of shadows.
As if it were yesterday, I remember that as soon as I came to that section of trees, I was besieged by an unreasonable sensation of discomfort. The discomfort, at this point, wasn’t fear—it was more a malaise that had descended on me heavy as a wool blanket. I thought it had to do with my overextending myself while on vacation, because I was used to a much more controlled environment and an earlier bedtime.
The trees seemed far more shadowy than they had appeared from a distance, and I had the impression of being watched. No, that isn’t quite right. Not of being watched so much as of a presence in the general locale. Something so close, that I should be able to see it, but couldn’t.
I marked this down to exhaustion, and went about finding a good place to hide. I could hear the seekers beginning to run toward the woods, and then I heard someone scream, having been tagged immediately. I chose a place between two trees that had grown together high and low in such a way as to appear to be a huge letter H placed on a pedestal; the trees met in such tight formation they provided a near singular trunk and the bar of the H was an intermingled branch of both trees. I darted behind them, scooted down, and put my back against the trunk.
No sooner had I chosen my spot than it occurred to me that its unusual nature might in fact attract one of the seekers. But by then, I felt it was too late and pressed my back against the tree, awaiting whatever fate might come.
From where I sat, I could see the deeper woods, and I had an urge to run to them, away from the grove of trees where I now hid. I also disliked the idea of having my back against the tree and being discovered suddenly and frightened by the hunters. I didn’t want that surprise to cause me to squeal the way I had heard someone squeal earlier. I liked to think of myself as too mature for a child’s game to begin with, and was beginning to regret my involvement in the matter.
I sat and listened for footfalls, but the game went on below me. I could hear yelling and some words, and I was bewildered that no one had come to look for me, as my hiding place wasn’t exactly profound.
After awhile, I ceased to hear the children, and noticed that the moonlight in the grove, where the limbs were less overbearing, had grown thinner.
I stood up and turned and looked through the split in the H tree. It was very quiet now, so much in fact, I could almost hear the worms crawling inside the earth. I stood there peeking between the bars of the H, and then I saw one of the children coming toward me. I couldn’t make out who it was, as they were drenched in shadow, but they were coming up the slight rise into the ragged run of trees. At first, I felt glad to see them, as I was ready for my part in this silly game to be over, and planned to beg off being a seeker.
However, as the shape came closer, I began to have a greater feeling of unease than before. The shape came along with an unusual step that seemed somewhere between a glide and a skip. There was something disconcerting about its manner. It was turning its shadowed head left and right, as I would have expected a seeker to do, but there was a deeply ingrained part me that rejected this as its purpose.
The closer it came, the more my nervousness was compounded, for the light didn’t delineate its features in any way. In fact, the shape seemed not to be a shadow at all, but the dark caricature of a human being. I eased behind the trunk and hid.
Dread turned to fear. I was assailed with the notion that I ought to run away quickly, but to do that, I would have to step out and reveal myself, and that idea was even more frightening and oppressive. So I stayed in my place, actually shivering. Without seeing it, I could sense that it was coming closer. There was a noise associated with its approach, but to this day, I can’t identify that noise. It was not footfalls on leaves or ground, but was a strange sound that made me fearful, and at the same time, sad. It was the kind of sound that reached down into the brain and bones and gave you an influx of information that spoke not to the logical part of your being, but to some place more primal. I know that is inadequate, but I can’t explain it any better. I wish that I could, because if I could imitate that sound, most of this story would be unnecessary to tell. You would understand much of it immediately.
I spoke of shivering with fear, but until that day, I didn’t know a person’s knees could actually knock together, or that the sound of one’s heart could be so loud. I was certain both sounds would be evident to the shadow, but I held my ground. It was fear that held me there, as surely as if my body had been coated in an amazingly powerful glue and I had been fastened and dried to that tree with it.
Eventually, I steeled my courage, turned and peeked between the trunks of the H tree. Looking right at me was the shadow. Not more than a foot away. There wasn’t a face, just the shape of a head and utter blackness. The surprise caused me to let out with a shriek—just the sort I’d tried to avoid—and I leapt back, and without really considering it, I broke around the tree and tore through the woods toward the house as if my rear end were on fire.