There was a wide stretch of woodlands located a few blocks away from my childhood home. It was wedged between a school and a private golf course which claimed ownership of the forest. As kids, we would play in the woods and make forts in the trees, going on adventures and fighting each other like pirates with stick-swords.
As we grew, the forest was always our escape, our playground, and our refuge.
When we were teenagers some of the kids would steal the flags from the golf course or would cause trouble there, until eventually a fence was erected around the woods and everyone was told to KEEP OUT.
Of course, that didn’t stop us, as we pried up the bottom of the chain link fences or climbed over the tops of them. Nothing could keep us out of that forest. No matter what anyone said, it didn’t belong to a golf course, it belonged to us. It was our home, our sanctuary.
Until one day it became our Hell.
*
When we were old enough to obtain drugs and alcohol, the forest became our place to consume them. We would go out there and make a bonfire, sitting around it and sipping from a flask or splitting up warm beers and coolers we’d gotten one of our older siblings to purchase for us.
Usually there were four of us - Teddy, Joe, and Brett would accompany me out there. But every once in a while Greg would find us in the forest. He was always upset that he’d been left out of our plans, even though he was a jerk who constantly insulted us and pretended to be better than us all.
Greg was the weirdest kid in school. He acted superior to everyone and showed no remorse for doing terrible things. I’d once seen him beat a kid up until he swallowed four of his teeth. Another boy who was new to town broke his arm trying to play tag with him in the schoolyard. No one knew how he got away with that one, or any of the other horrible things he did - it was like his parents had some magical ability to get him out of trouble. The kids he picked on always ended up leaving the school and moving away after getting no help from the teachers or principal.
Greg was one of those kids who everyone tried to steer clear of. But somehow he’d got it into his head that we were friends with him. And none of us had the backbone to tell him otherwise. We knew that would only make things much worse. He was a terrible person to have as a friend, but an even worse enemy.
One night we were out in the forest sitting around the bonfire, passing around a warm six pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, when Greg showed up out of nowhere.
“Hey, guys,” he said, appearing behind me just after we’d finished talking about him. The things we had said were not nice. We’d called him a freak, a psycho, and every other rotten thing we could think of, since we thought we were alone and we were starting to get really sick of him.
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I jumped to my feet, not wanting to expose my back to the guy, especially after the things I’d just finished saying. It felt too vulnerable.
“Oh! Hey, Greg,” I said, hearing my voice trembling. “We tried to call you but there was no answer at your place.”
He looked at me with his black eyes, the firelight dancing in them.
“No you didn’t,” he said back.
I didn’t know how to respond, since he was technically right about that.
“Want a hard lemonade?” I asked, trying to ignore the evil glare I was getting from Teddy and Joe.
“No thanks,” he said, sitting down on the log where I’d been sitting. This consequently left me nowhere to park my ass, so I just stood there awkwardly.
There was a brief silence that hung in the air as we all waited for the uncomfortable moment to pass. With Greg around, there was no guarantee that it ever would.
Finally, he was the one who spoke up.
“Hey, you guys wanna see something cool?” he asked.
There were a few tepid words of agreement. Usually “something cool” according to Greg was something horrifying or disgusting to everyone else.
“You guys are gonna freak out. This is so awesome.”
His excitement was palpable. Greg was actually shaking, his hands trembling as he removed something from his pocket. A wide grin stretched across his face, revealing his uneven, crooked teeth, stained and plaque-covered, as if he’d never brushed them before. Greg’s bad breath was legendary, and his BO was even worse. I could smell him from several yards away, despite the smoke of the fire blowing in my face.
He took out a long, snake-shaped knife. It was curved and bent at sharp angles and the hilt had the face of a serpent with slit eyes.
“Check this out,” he said, deftly spinning the knife on his finger before running his thumb down the blade’s edge. Blood bloomed on his fingertip, and then a second later he was digging the sharp point into his palm.
“What the fuck!?”
“Man, what are you DOING!?”
We were all getting to our feet, backing away, when Greg began to say some words low under his breath. Blood was pouring from the fresh wound as he spoke, the words sounding like a chanting prayer in an ancient language.
He held up his bloody hand and began to speak louder. Thunder boomed overhead, lighting up his face in strobing flashes, and dark clouds rolled in over the forest. The tree branches began to sway and the huge pines and oaks around us bent nearly in half with the frozen wind. Leaves and dirt blew in our faces and almost knocked us from our feet, making it impossible to run. The wind was coming from the way to the path, pushing us deeper into the forest, and away from safety.
Somehow the fire was blazing higher than before as Greg squeezed his fist and blood came pouring out of the wound onto the flames. This made them leap up even taller, as if his blood were made of gasoline.
The low chanting he was doing was causing a reaction from the forest all around us. The trees looked angry and malevolent, their branches reaching down for us like giant arms.
“You guys never wanted to include me,” Greg was saying, his chant apparently finished. “You always thought I was too weird to be your friend.”
The trees around us looked like faces, their features now clearly distinguishable. As the wind howled their long limbs came down and whipped the air around us. Their branches looked capable of grabbing us and lifting us from our feet, but instead they swayed and hovered in the air around us, inches from our faces, as if daring us to run.
“You don’t need them, Gregory. You are far too special to spend time with these ones. They are impure. Unclean. You will be baptized in their blood,” one of the nearby trees said, speaking in a man’s deep voice.
“Yes, father. I will not disappoint you,” Greg said back.
“You decide who will die first. Take the Serpent’s Blade and make the cuts, just like we taught you,” a woman’s voice said from another tree nearby. The face in the trunk looked gleeful, a wide smile growing bigger as the branches from above wrapped around Teddy’s midsection.
The thin branches stretched and grew longer as they wrapped up my friend. Like quickly growing vines they ensnared him and tightened around him until his face began to turn red and he screamed in pain.
“No, please!” he was begging as Greg came closer with the knife.
Joe had a beer bottle in his hand and suddenly came at Greg with it, smashing it over his skull just as he was raising the blade to cut my friend’s throat.
With the broken top of the beer bottle, he held it up to his neck, yelling up at the trees.
“Let go of him! Do it! I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his fucking throat!” He was holding the sharp piece of brown glass up to Greg’s head and I had no doubt he would do it at that moment.
The trees looked down at us dispassionately as Greg breathed heavily, the blade still clutched in his hand.
“If he cannot pass his trial, he is worthless to us. Do it,” the trees said, frowning.
Greg screamed and brought the knife point down into Joe’s leg, driving it in deeper and then twisting it as he howled in pain. He dropped the beer bottle in his hand which he’d been using as a weapon and fell backwards, blood jetting from his leg like a broken fire hydrant.
A second later Greg pulled the blade out of Joe’s leg and rose shakily to his feet, clutching the back of his skull where my friend had attacked him. Tears were in his eyes, either from the pain of the attack or from his mother’s words, saying she didn’t care if he died.
Brett and I stood there, too terrified to move. The tree which had wrapped up Teddy was squeezing him tighter and tighter as Greg moved toward him with the blade.
I was on the verge of running - my fight or flight instinct going into overdrive. Part of me wanted to help my friends while another part desperately wanted to sprint as far and fast from that place as I could. In the end, Brett made the decision for me.
“Fuck this,” he said, turning away from the campfire and running back towards the forest entrance, fighting desperately against the howling wind in his face.
The tree which had spoken in the voice of a man suddenly reached down and grabbed him, picking him up and carrying him through the air back to where Greg was standing with the knife. Joe was on the ground, bleeding out, looking like a fish out of water as his mouth opened and closed, his lips turning blue and his face going pale.
“You will be the one to watch. To tell the world of our power,” said the tree with the voice of a woman. “Three must die for one to live. Do not speak of this until we tell you. You will know when it is TIME.”
I couldn’t speak, all I could do was stand there silently and watch as my friends were…
There’s no point going into grim details. They died that night. They died horrifying, grisly deaths at the hands of those monsters, that’s what’s important. Obviously it was some sort of rite of passage for Greg and his evil warlock parents. I don’t know any more than that. I don’t even really know what they are or how any of it was possible.
I watched the whole thing, wishing I could turn away, but the branches held my face in place, forcing me to observe it all. It was important that I not look away, they told me. The things I witnessed out there in the forest, I’ll never forget, as much as I might want to. I see them every time I close my eyes. The pain those poor boys endured would make the tormentors of the Spanish Inquisition look soft by comparison.
They let me go from there and I never saw Greg again after that night. I’m guessing they moved on to another town and disappeared. I never tried to look them up, and I never reported what happened to anyone. I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and I was worried what might happen to me if I said something.
Greg and his parents made it very clear that I could not speak about the events until I was allowed by them. They said they would tell me when it was time.
For a long while I had nightmares about what happened. I went to therapy for years and things started to feel a little more normal but it wasn’t easy.
I met Sandy at a friend’s house, during a party. The two of us were in our early twenties, with similar interests, and we hit it off right away. We dated for three years before I finally popped the question. We settled down and had kids, and bought a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, just like the one where I grew up. We’ve lived here pleasantly for years, but now suddenly I want to move, and I wish we’d picked somewhere else - anywhere else - to start a life together.
My son is ten years old. He came home yesterday with a new friend. I tried to tell myself his face didn’t look familiar. That he didn’t remind me of anyone. The vacant look in his eyes, the nervous glances my son was giving him, as if he didn’t really want to be around him but had no choice. It was all too similar.
I heard a tapping on my window late last night. After it went on and on for several minutes, finally I went to check on it, petrified of what I would find.
The tree branch was scratching on the glass like fingernails on a chalkboard. Insistent and purposeful. It began to tap again, a gentle knocking sound.
Tap, tap, tap.
I looked at the clock above the stove and saw it read 3:30 AM - the witching hour.
My trembling hands raised the window up and I looked out into the night to see a face looking at me from the trunk of the tree in my yard. It was much closer than it had been previously, as if it had picked up its roots and walked over to the house.
The mouth on the face of the tree opened and a familiar voice spoke, laughing, and said two words.
“It’s TIME.”