”You must do it if you want to play with us!” Barry taunted.
“But we’re not allowed to go there.” Simon argued back. “My dad will be mad at me.”
“Sounds like an excuse because you’re a chicken!” Barry said. His comment was followed by a mocking laughter from the other kids.
“You don’t dare go there either.” Simon defended himself. He could feel the tears pressing against the eyes.
“Of course I do. I’ve been there many times. It’s just stories. You aren’t scared of some children horror stories, are you?”
Simon was seven years old. Him and his dad had moved to the settlement Pürth shortly after his mothers death a year prior. Simon’s father hadn’t let Simon see the body, he had told Simon that his mother had been attacked by a bear and didn’t want Simon to see her after the attack.
Simon had desperately clung to the casket, crying for his mother before he was forcefully removed by his dad so that the casket could be lowered into the ground.
Dad hadn’t been the same after mothers’ death. He rarely let Simon be alone after that and he always looked nervously around. When Simon asked if he feared the bear that killed mom, he reassured Simon that he wasn’t, but to always be prepared if it showed up.
Sometimes when Simon was put to sleep, he could hear dad open a bottle of something. Simon didn’t understand why he kept drinking those bottles, they must taste awful since they always made dad cry and fall asleep.
People in their old settlement stopped buying dads’ bakery. They said cruel things about mom meddling with things she shouldn’t and that it was dads’ fault, but Simon didn’t believe any of that. A week after mothers’ funeral dad and Simon moved. Dad started working at the mill. They didn’t have a house, but Simon got to sleep in a barn near the mill.
Simon was a small boy, even for his age. Malnourishment had stunted his growth and left him so skinny that you could see his bones. His clothes were ragged and dirty. The other children tended to avoid him, but he got to play with them sometimes when dad was at work.
They would pick on him for being skinny, dirty, and not having a mother. Barry was the worst. He would stop the game they were playing and telling Simon to do something if he wanted to continue playing with them.
One time he had asked Simon to climb a tree and retrieve a birds’ nest. Simon had fallen down and broken his arm. Barry had ridiculed him for his poor climbing skills and mocked him for the other kids’ amusement.
Another time he told Simon to eat a slug, which had caused Simon to vomit in disgust as soon as the slug touched his tongue. This time they had been playing a game of shadow tag. Simon was ‘it’ and was close to capturing Barry when he called for a time-out.
“If you want to continue playing with us, you have to go into the silent forest.” He’d said. Simon been told explicitly by his dad that he was never to venture into the silent forest. Nobody ever went there.
The adults never gave an explanation as to why they couldn’t enter the forest which became an inspiration for all manners of horror stories the children told to scare each other.
One story revolved around a monster living in the forest. Another said it was a cult of witches. The one Simon found the scariest was that there is a gate to hell in the middle of the forest and as soon as you enter the forest, demons will take you and drag you through the gate.
“How deep in must I go?” Simon asked nervously.“Until we can’t see you anymore!” Barry said triumphantly. Simon didn’t want to go in there, but he wanted to keep playing with the other kids. And if he did it, maybe the other kids would think he was cool and stop picking on him so much.
But what if dad found out? He would get in so much trouble.“You promise you won’t tell my dad?” Simon asked.
“Do I look like a snitch?” Barry responded, clearly offended by the question. “I guess if you’re too scared, we can just keep playing without you.”“No no, I’ll do it.”
Barry smiled, satisfied with the outcome of the situation. The kids started walking towards the outskirts of the silent forest. The weather was mild. The sun warming their tiny bodies as they wandered across the fields towards the forest. Simon grew nervous with every passing step. He really didn’t want to enter the forest. The sun brightened the outskirts of the forest. It looked like any other forest, but something felt off about it.
No birds were chirping, no sound of leaves rustling in the wind. It was like the entire forest was asleep, untouched by the world around it. Simon could see only about twenty meters ahead till the tree-crowns choked away the sunlight, enveloping the forest in total darkness. The sight of the forest suffocating the very sunlight sent chills down Simons’ spine.
“Look at him, he’s scared!” Barry mocked.“Am not!” Simon yelled back defiantly.“Then go in there.”“How far do I have to go?” Simon asked.“Until we can’t see you anymore. Into the dark part.”
Simon looked at the kids around him who eagerly waited for him to take the first steps into the forest. He summoned his courage and started carefully walking past the first trees. The vegetation crunched under his footsteps. Simon nervously looked around, fearing that something would spring forward and attack him. His overactive imagination made the shadows dancing around him appear as menacing monsters. Simon turned around to see the kids curiously staring at him.
“Is this far enough?” Simon called.“No! We can still see you!” Barry yelled back at him. “Go further!”
Simon turned towards the darkness again and carefully took one step closer. The closer he got to the dark part of the forest, the more sinister the forest seemed to grow. Vines filled with fungus stretched across the vegetation on the ground and climbed up the trees. The way the vines wrapped themselves around everything reminded Simon of stories of constrictor snakes, squeezing and crushing the life of their prey.
Above him Simon could see how the vines tangled around the branches and connected the trees, forming a carpet of vegetation to create a thick screen from the sun.
The fungi on the vines above seemed to shake, creating a thick yellow cloud which dispersed in the air as it floated downwards. Simon looked curiously at the fungi; he had never seen this type of fungus before. Nor had he ever heard of plants behaving this way. Simon turned around, looking for his friends. He couldn’t see them anymore. He carefully called out for them, his voice trembling.
“Guys? Hello? Is this far enough?”“No!” He heard Barry call back. “Further!”“I can’t see you anymore!” Simon cried.“We can still see you! We will tell you when we can’t see you anymore!”
Simon could feel the tears pressing behind his eyes. He just wanted to go back. He didn’t care about the others anymore. This was stupid, Barry was stupid, they were all stupid! But Simon was tired of being picked on. Tired of them always calling him poor and dirty, shoving him around.
He went further into the forest, now being consumed by the enveloping darkness. Simon could not see far ahead, and he started feeling a creeping dread of being watched. Surely this was far enough. Simon turned around to call for the other kids if he was far enough in but a crunching sound of vegetation being trampled made him keep quiet.
Simon looked around desperately to see where the noise was coming from, his heart pounding. He backed up against a tree listening, hearing the footsteps approaching behind him. Simon slowly peaked around the tree to see the source of the noise. What met his eyes made him scream in terror
. A hulking adult wolf was approaching the tree he hid behind, but this wolf didn’t look like anything he had seen before. Its’ fur and flesh were rotten, decomposed. It was covered in holes where the flesh and skin had been replaced with fungus, sprouting over open wounds to cover them up. One of the eyes were gone. The empty socket revealed vines created from spores which had overgrown the inside of the wolf.
Simon quickly hid behind the tree again, but the beast had heard him. He looked for the way out, but vines had formed between trees leaving Simon clueless about where he entered from. Desperate he started running but didn’t make it far till he tripped over a vine. He landed hard on his head and felt the blood flowing from his nose. Crying and screaming he stood back up and looked behind him, seeing the wolf had now started its vicious approach for him. Simon zig-zagged between the trees as fast as his tiny legs could carry him, but the wolf was closing in.
Simon screamed for help praying the kids could hear him, but he heard no response. Alone and desperate he cried out for his parents, wishing his mother would come down from heaven and save him from this misery. He ran past a tree and collided into something that suddenly stepped out in front of him. Another horrific sight met his gaze as Simon identified what had stepped out in front of him. Two men, covered in vines with fungus growing to cover the places where flesh had fallen off.
They grabbed his arms before he could make it back up on his legs, dragging him with them. Screaming he wrestled to escape their iron grasp while he was being pulled further into the forest. The deeper the got, the more nightmarish the scene around him got. Every type of animal, birds, deer, wolves, even humans, standing side by side and watching silently and dead-eyed as Simon got dragged past them.
He screamed all his small lungs could for them to release him but got no response. It was like they couldn’t even hear him. The darkness grew thicker around Simon, till the only light was from the yellow dust occasionally spewed by the fungus covering everything. Simon thrashed as he was placed underneath a massive fungus, several meters in diameter, hanging from the tree-crowns above him.
He felt as vines constricted themselves around his arms and legs, preventing him from moving. The fungus above opened in the middle, illuminating the forest in a yellow shimmer of spores, which slowly descended towards Simon.
He screamed in panic, cried in terror, fearing the uncertainty of the situation. As the spores reached him, he felt his lungs filling up with the dust-like spores. He felt like he was being choked, like tar was filling his lungs and started to desperately cough.
Pain then overtook his entire body, as the spores spread through his veins, attaching themselves to every nerve, eating at his body. The pain felt like being electrocuted, every cell attempting to fight off the alien element in the body, only to be consumed and integrated into the element itself.
Simon felt like his entire brain was being stabbed by daggers as the spores made their way to his brain. He felt his body giving up on him, like he was about to faint, but something kept him conscious. Simon observed through his own eyes as he sat up despite this not being his will.
He couldn’t recall asking his body to do the motion of sitting up. His arm moved behind him, giving him the balance to stand up. Confused, Simon trapped inside his own mind, watched as his body moved towards the wildlife. He wanted to scream but his body would not obey. His mind started to panic over the situation causing severe headaches.
He fought, struggled to overtake control of his body when his mind started slowing down, becoming dull. His vision started to blur which added to a mental panic that he was no longer able to express.
‘Calm.’ He heard the words in his mind repeating over and over again in his voice. Simon grew terrified as he knew the thought was his, but he didn’t think that word. He fought a mental struggle to remove this word from his thoughts, causing a splitting headache, as if his brain was being shattered into pieces.
‘Pain! Calm!’ He heard again in his own words. Simon concentrated on those words, calming himself which caused the headache to diminish.‘What’s going on?’ Simon kept thinking to himself. He had no clue what was going on but was hoping he would hear a response. Nothing came.
‘Am I alone?’ Simon thought to himself. This thought triggered a stream of memories. The nights Simon had spent alone after his mom died. The days he had to spend at the barn because his dad was working. His exclusion from playing with the other children.
The bullying and torment he had undergone due to his misfortune. Every painful memory of being lonely, of being an outcast was forced into his mind, making Simon relive every moment that had caused him immense emotional pain.‘Never more alone’ He heard his voice in his mind. ‘Part of us… Never more alone.’