Note to Jerry: Since the bank foreclosed on the property six months after the prior owner went MIA, I think we’re exempt from the usual requirement to hold any remaining possessions in storage for six months. Might want to run that one by Jim, though, just in case. At any rate, there wasn’t much left - just this letter, a pen and pencil, and a couple of changes of clothes. Thanks! B.
There’s something wrong with the forest behind my house. I’ve got to get this story down as quickly as possible; I’m not sure how many more times it will let me come back. If you don’t take anything else from this, then please - for the sake of yourself and everyone who cares about you – don’t get anywhere near the woods behind ________ ________ - the ones bounded to the north by ________ ________ ________ and to the east by ________ Stream.
Never trust a realtor who tells you that she’s giving you the deal of a lifetime. It’s a cute little Cape Cod: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, with cream-colored siding and forest green shutters. It was priced thirty grand below where it should’ve been, and I was a fool not to suspect something. The realtor was talking a little too fast, probably eager to get the hell off of this accursed plot of land, I realize now. The best feature of the house, she kept stressing, was that the backyard had access to this marvelous tract of wild woodland, which the state had indicated that it would neither sell nor develop.
“What a wonderful treat for your children, when they come, in time,” she promised. My fingers clenched and unclenched; I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those keys.
Toto and I took a walk in the woods during our very first afternoon in the house. It was gorgeous – acres of maple, oak, birch, pine, and spruce, with vivacious streams gurgling their way through the gentle hills and outcroppings of huge rocks like giants’ building blocks here and there. There weren’t any paths, but somehow I always knew where to go. From the first time that I entered those woods, I would walk until I found my way to a clearing surrounded by a circle of birch, which resembled bleached finger bones reaching up out of the lush, shamrock-green grass that flourished beneath them. Their white, papery bark was covered with Morse code dots and dashes, as though they carried some eldritch message from deep in the earth to the sky and the stars beyond.
Toto stuck to the backyard for the first week or so, but after that, he got more adventurous. I didn’t worry; he’d been with me for seven years, and he was a cautious and self-sufficient little guy. During the second week that the two of us were in the house, however, I noticed that he started staying out for longer – an hour, then 75 minutes, then an hour and a half. During the third week, I decided to keep him mostly inside; for a couple of hours each day, I attached his leash to a wire runner that I hooked up to the clothesline so that he could still get some exercise. I noticed great gashes where Toto had strained against this setup, digging to free himself so that he could run into the woods. Finally, Toto slipped out one afternoon while I was returning home with my arms full of groceries. Though I spent six hours wandering around the forest calling for him – and at one point, I swore I heard Toto barking back – I never saw him again. Day after day, I sat down in my circular clearing, sobbing hysterically as the time slipped away.
-–
My sister knew that I was heartbroken. She sent my seven-year-old niece, Elizabeth, to visit. That girl was a ray of sunshine as bright as her golden blonde hair. The two of us made cookies, watched movies, played hide and seek until we knew each other’s strategies so well that the game didn’t work any longer. On the third day of her visit, after relentless prodding, I agreed to take Eliza out into the woods with me.
“Only a short walk,” I told her as we headed out through the backyard.
“Check out that cloud – it looks like a hippopotamus,” Eliza noted as we sat in the circular clearing and studied the cotton candy cumulus clouds floating by.
“That one looks like Gandolph!” Eliza squealed, pointing to a face in the crook of an oak.
“This is a special place,” she proclaimed a minute later, as the two of us sprawled side by side on our bed of grass, which was so comfortable that I had begun to drift off to sleep.
On our way back, Elizabeth stopped and pointed to a tree. It was a large one, over 50 feet tall, and it was stooped and moss-covered, with countless forks and broken branches.
“That one looks like Toto!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
I followed her finger and caught my breath. There, in a fork about 10 feet up, there was the unmistakable outline of four legs, a head, and a tiny tail sprouting out from behind. It was eerie: So detailed that I could have identified it as a terrier, and – I knew it couldn’t be true, but I swear – there was a notch taken out of the right ear, just where Toto had lost a bit of flesh to an angry cat in our old neighborhood. The dog’s mouth was open, ready to issue a yap. Unsettled, I took Elizabeth’s hand and led her away.
-–
Two days later, I received a call from my sister.
“Elizabeth’s gone,” Sharon wailed. “Gone!”
I had to have her repeat the story three times before she was speaking clearly enough for me to understand it. Apparently, Elizabeth had left behind a drawing of some trees with a note that said “Gone to my special place.” Late at night, after my sister was asleep, Elizabeth had snuck out through the back door; it had been 16 hours, and the State Troopers still didn’t have a lead.
“My God, Sharon,” I sobbed, “I don’t know what to say.” I couldn’t tell her about the forest, I decided; it would sound too crazy. Besides, my sister lived 45 minutes away.
I went for a walk out back again, that day. I stayed out for longer than usual. I made my way to my clearing – Elizabeth’s “special place” – and then wandered around and around it, exploring the forest in dizzying, concentric circles until my stomach rumbled and my ankles blistered. When I finally found it, I was so startled that it nearly knocked me over. There was a hole in an ancient fir at about head height – Elizabeth’s gaping, anguished mouth – and above it two smaller blemishes that were her eyes, which bulged out as though trying to escape her rictus of terror. Around her head, rings of curls cascaded down to where her shoulders should have been; her cute, snubbed nose and the mark on her forehead where she had run into a coffee table were both there, rendered in moss and bark and leaf.
-–
At the local library, I found a book on the early history of this section of the Northeast. It was crowded with handwritten notes about the section of woodland behind my house:
Seems bounded at +________ degrees latitude; -________ degrees longitude; power wanes exponentially outside of that zone.
Local Native Americans considered this stretch of woods both holy – a place where they communed with ancestors – and profane (they refused to so much as pass through there unless as part of a ceremony). Their oral tradition mentions lukha manga, “the trapped ones,” but none of the elders who I asked about this were willing to speak on the subject.
“There was a professor of anthropology from the state college who was real interested in that book a while back,” the librarian informed me from over my shoulder.
“Do you remember his name?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“He disappeared. Never got the last set of books that he checked out back from him, either,” she shook her head and muttered angrily as she walked away.
I checked the county records for the property that I had bought. It had switched hands about 10 times as often as any of the adjacent tracts, and the numbers of deaths and disappearances around it boggled my mind.
-–
My forays into the woods grew longer. I started to wander in the forest without intending to, usually at night. I would wake up in the middle of the clearing, the birches looming out of the midnight mist like doomsday prophecies. I wouldn’t remember how I had gotten there, and installing a new doorknob so that I could lock my bedroom door from the inside did no good: I would simply unlock the door during my sleepwalking.
After a couple of weeks, I noticed a strange, grayish rash appearing on my forearms.
“Ichthyosis,” my primary care doctor confirmed as she explained that it could be inherited or caused by certain conditions such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “It’s named after the iguana-like appearance that it gives the skin in cases such as yours.”
To her, it might have looked like reptile skin, but I knew what it was: Bark, gray and cracked and spreading.
I stayed at my sister’s for a couple of nights. I refused to fall asleep for the first 24 hours, almost collapsing with relief when I realized that I had spent a night away from those woods. On the second night, however, I accepted my sister’s offer of an Ambien; when I woke up, I was in the clearing. As I stood in the middle and studied each tree in turn, I realized that each of them bore at least one face: Some old and wizened, some young and fresh. All of them had gaping mouths, forming “O’s” as they struggled to speak or scream. When I closed my eyes, I swore that I could hear them moan and whisper.
“Let us out,” I thought I heard.
“Now.”
“Go.”
“No.”
“Help.”
“Hell.”
I came back and jotted this message down, fully aware that each word could be my last. I can feel the forest inside of me – its inexorable will; its strange gravity. Strangely enough, I know which tree will become me (or I become it), and I think that it has already started to alter itself to accommodate me. My arms and legs are covered in the rash, which has spread to my chest and the bridge of my nose. I am sure that it will take me soon, now. Heed my warning or pay the price.